somebodythere

The censorability of rollup relayers bothers me too. As you mentioned, the fact that US persons are blocked from the protocol shows this is a real problem.

I think this is a problem with technological solutions (perhaps anonymous and redundant relayers, or private rollup transactions so that the relayer does not know the content of transactions in a block but can produce a valid output state) that will be worked on in the next couple years now that the base technology (rollups) exists.

Every time a nascent technology bubble crashes (dot com, AI winter, crypto...) speculation gets reset, scams and projects with no future get wiped out, and the space gets healthier.

Maybe check out DYDX L2.

There are plenty of people on any part of the political spectrum for whom the current money system is horribly broken.

A cryptographically signed diploma could be sufficient for this use case, no specific need to commit it to a ledger. Certainly the transferability property of NFTs is not desired in this case.

In a certain kind of environment, maybe cool tech and loyalty could have been the tiebreaker for engineers in the job market, but it's very difficult to stare a 100% raise with similar WLB in the face and not think about making a move.

I mean it's not like they were flying passengers regardless.

The site certainly helps make the case for a blockchain.

"Send an email to kick off this manual process with lots of waiting for another human to do a thing, and once he has your money, he may or may not do what he said he would, and if he does, hope he types in your information correctly, and if he does, hope that the one copy of the ledger hosted on some guy's computer doesn't go down, and if it doesn't, hope you don't have to sell because the marketplace is charging 10% rent on transactions and you have no alternatives..."

The OS should be able to distinguish between a corporate network and mobile carrier, right?

I wonder why Apple allows this. Do the carriers really have more leverage than Apple here?

> Building on the blockchain does not indemnify you from following the relevant laws.

You are right. The relevant laws apply to money service operators and blockchain software developers, in most cases, are not money service operators. Software developers, in most societies, cannot be deputized to enforce particular uses or non-uses of their software.

> have you ignored all the ways nefarious people will use your app to do things that are absolutely something that should be stopped?

I think freedom to transact is as valuable as freedom to access information (uncensored, using Tor) and freedom to communicate (securely, using E2E.) In fact, the latter two freedoms boil down to the former. If you disagree, you are correct to not like DeFi.

> And I don't feel compelled to enable that feeling you had in everyone else either.

I know you don't, but I wanted to share the first time using a blockchain tech was more pleasant than using its traditional counterpart for me. Trying to convince people that "blockchains are useful" is not very compelling either. It's not my job, but I can spend hours on it with no benefit to me.

> So folks who do not want to divulge their social contacts literally cannot participate?

You are right that Zoom verification is a low level of verification. On BrightID today, you can be verified by a friend without having to divulge the identity of yourself or your friend to any blockchain, any application, or any other person in your social network. Using zero-knowledge proofs, the entire anonymous network graph can be hidden as well.

In addition, the only apps they cannot use are those which require anti-Sybil guarantees. Is "has 3 friends who will vouch for you" too high of a bar compared to "qualifies for and has a credit card"? If it is, is it bad to have the former as an option for those who cannot reach the latter?

ETA: government/institutional ID verification is a valid BrightID graph node as well, for institutions/individuals/applications which choose to use it.

The traditional financial system is basically not available for an individual to build on without the blessing of VCs. If you do manage that, you have to come head-to-head with money transmitter licensing, collecting personal info from your customers and keeping it safe, implementing rules about who can send money to whom (that differ by country), and playing by Visa et al's rules about who isn't allowed to use your app and for what (which includes a lot of normal people doing normal things.)

It feels wrong to me that building financial apps for public good basically requires creating a capital class and handing over profits and control to them. Will VCs fund another Kickstarter or Open Collective?

I got into crypto because I realized the things I actually wanted to build I could basically only do so using crypto. (Also, watching myself earn interest every 15 seconds was just incredibly cool.) Granted, that was in 2018, and prices are a lot higher now, and so is the level of grifting and hype. A stronger layer of psychological self-defence is warranted both from people in the space and outside of it.

Anyway, the short answer to your question is that the time cost of Zoom verification will in many cases deter low-level and botting fraud, but Zoom verification overall is a stopgap to bootstrap the network, and over the long term applications will require users to be verified by a few of their IRL F&F (and Zoom parties can be used to connect their social network to the rest of the graph.)

SaaS just seemed relevant to the audience here, but there are a lot of applications which want to limit one account per natural person, not just SaaS. For example, social networks want to prevent astroturfing, and video games want to prevent cheaters from ban-evasion. Anyway, a lot of people don't want to provide their credit card info for a service they are not sure if they want to use yet (purpose of a trial), and a lot of services want to allow credit card-free trials without opening themselves up to abuse.

I think the vast majority of reflexive dismissals of crypto tech have two themes in common: "if the technology doesn't satisfy this use case, or the UX is not perfect yet, then surely there is no way to fix that and we should discard the whole idea;" and "why use this decentralized solution when we can use this centralized one which, in many cases, doesn't work as well?"

I've reached my weekly budget on the amount of time I want to spend explaining this tech online, but maybe consider if problems you see are truly insurmountable, or if you are simply uncomfortable with the idea of an economic layer that is actually open to build on.

In the crypto space I'm most excited about the ability to have open projects where anyone who contributes can have a stake in the financial rewards of the project, and there are no barriers to becoming a contributor. A lot of the time the financial benefits of open-source contributors are fully captured by a "host" corporation, and open collaboration platforms for non-software projects like textbooks and IRL shared spaces are almost nonexistent.

Proof-of-personhood a la BrightID is something that governments could theoretically provide, but most don't, and even if they did, there are serious privacy and interoperability concerns. SaaS companies trying to provide a free trial can prevent abuse by verifying unique personhood using web3 tech without needing to ask for any more information about the user. I'm sure you can think of other applications for that tech. Even if every government in the world provided this service, everyone who wants to use it either has to implement 195 different APIs or fork over money to a cottage industry whose sole job it is to unify those APIs.

Finance and commerce on blockchains has a lot of real-world benefits that traditional finance can't or refuses to provide. You can't easily set up a 3-of-5 multisig for your photography club in traditional finance. A lot of normal people have their payments blocked or funds frozen in TradFi for arbitrary reasons. Sex workers get kicked off of platforms all the time, and a friend recently had their PayPal frozen while raising funds for a school reunion party.

I'm not super into NFTs personally, but I can see them having a use case as a more consumer-friendly business model for gacha games and games with similar mechanics. There are probably other promising applications that I just don't know about because I don't follow that space very closely.

https://medium.com/@imolfar/why-and-how-zk-snark-works-1-int... this resource helped me a lot, it is somewhat technical but should be accessible to someone reading HN

When people say stuff like this, I wonder what they think the state of the art in web3 innovation is. Do people just see the monkey JPGs and write off the whole technology?

"Man, Mozilla Persona was cool, shame it got shut down. Wish someone would bring it back."

> cryptographic identity layer emerges with good UX and application support, and an optional economic layer and users aren't screwed when Mozilla inevitably drops support

"wait no not like that"

If the stock goes down, you can walk away from the arrangement without being on the hook for anything. If it goes up, you collect a salary while having exposure to the company stock without having to put up any of your own capital.

I am not seeing where the positive interest is here.

All that's missing is a reranking step that rewards incisive and non-obvious answers. Actually, some models are already implementing such a thing: LAmDA will prioritize contentful answers above statistical probability, the same way humans do.

GPT was only trained on "text" with no specific distribution, and specifically to predict a masked word from its surrounding context. As a result, the only questions you can use GPT to answer are of the form "sample from the most likely continuations of this text". It turns out a lot of problems can actually be posed in this form, if you understand the input distribution well. But the future probably looks less like models that operate directly on a distribution of language itself, and more like models that use their language knowledge to predict the volition of the person who gave it input, relate the input to their knowledge of the world (learned from corpus), and then use their language knowledge to convert an internal abstract representation of logical reasoning to something the user can read and understand.

I don't think the tech is extremely far off, it's probably a natural continuation of the current research.

It's less about getting away with not paying taxes and more about the fact that RSUs are basically a big negative-interest loan to invest in the company's stock, which can be incredibly lucrative in the growth sector.

I think that most anarcho-capitalists don't believe in a government or nation.

Terapit ber second.

I have certainly had better success pushing my sleep cycle forward over the course of days than trying to pull it back.

Metamask basically works this way and is used on thousands of apps.

These calculators never account for portfolio volatility.

That limit is probably where real harm was caused to a real child.

You are right, in tax policy "progressive" has a specific meaning, which is to increase with increasing income or consumption. Starting a tax low and increasing it over time would be considered a "phase-in".

Probably every company with credible AGI ambitions has one or more spies planted by one or more countries.

How does the scoring actually work? The explanation in FAQ was a bit too high level for me to make sense of it.

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