tCfD

Wasn't the main character in Avatar a wheelchair user?

Were they pulling out compute resources they knew in advance were not being used or part of the active partition for that particular job? Or did they let potential customers do the pulling themselves?

This is how it's done, and has been done, with rail-shipped containers for 70-80 years. The intermodal industry already has all the complex contractual plumbing and logistical framework to handle this with ease, but it's an extremely automation-averse industry. They still use faxes extensively ffs.

The trucking industry and rail freight industry overlap extensively, in the form of intermodal freight

You could work with them the same way intermodal rail container operations function, where trains carrying hundreds of containers are last-miled by specialized drayage companies that pick the containers up at rail yards and bring them to consignees (destination customers).

Doing the same but with pools can of driverless trucks all dropping off trailers at a designated transfer yard would require very little modification to this very mature but little known niche of freight logistics. The economics would be similar.

The problem with blockchain is actually rooted in hazy, unexamined assumptions about the viability of 'decentralization' that are are used as if they are conclusions rather than premises for justifying the technology's utility.

I think ultimately the conversation will turn to discuss the cost premium entailed by a decentralized coordination problem solving system of any kind, and whether it centralization is really a problem that needs such an redundantly-expensive solution in the first place. Also whether decentralization is really sustainable indefinitely or merely a transitional phase from one centralized regime to another one.

I think this would be a truly powerful tool if the promises were only able to be removed/declared complete by someone else, who would partner with you as a kind of integrity escrow agent. You keep my future self honest to my present self, I do the same for you. Then generalize to groups with a big graph of stake holder crosslinks if you want to get enterprise-ey with it.

It's about a need to control the conversation and a corresponding fear of losing that control.

Scientology 'works' too

All this will do is encourage the proliferation of innumerable bespoke blockchains, created by parties interested in stamping legitimacy on illegitimate content. Each of these blockchains will be presented as equivalent to "the blockchain" with respect to being trustworthy proofs of original untampered content timestamps.

Yup, people who use the terms interchangeably tend to overlook to custodial and coordination problem solving paradoxes of decentralization and instead think of it only as a trendier-sounding variant of distribution.

The part that doesn't scale is not delivery (which can be parallelized independently among nodes), it is the custodial directory function -the tracking, location, identification and availability of high quality seeds and hosts. This is the function that will start out optimistically decentralized by hobbyists and enthusiasts and eventually succumb to opportunistic centralization as anything close to serious scale begins to kick in.

YouTube as a service has very different performance expectations than something like bittorrent. for one thing the directory function is built in and not externalized to another set of directory services, which are notoriously unreliable in the case of BitTorrent anyway.

And unlike BitTorrent or Mastodon I don't only want to know where I can find a given file, I want to know where I can find it delivered immediately, consistently, smoothly, without hesitation, in a variety of cross encoded formats I'm almost certain to have supported on my device, and with some sort of consensus mechanism to establish a better than chance confidence that the file I start streaming is the file I expected to stream and not something else with the same filename.

The internet is so much more than a bunch of peering agreements. You can make a peering agreement with a network that you can't get transit to all you want, but if the underlying physical layer operator says no, you are out of luck. Maybe they'll let you in if you bribe them, maybe not. And this is Geography rules above all else here, which means concentration of access occurs where advantageous locations permit, and central points of control eventually monopolize these. Fiber backbones and undersea cables and major internaps etc. cost a lot to build and maintain. The reason net neutrality is an issue at all is because the tradition of apolitical cooperative peering is under sustained attack from the natural forces of network centralization.

And you didn't address the issues I pointed out about the explicitly centralized 'land title' systems which distribute critical location identities to users. This is to say nothing of the ongoing tendency of higher layer de facto centralization of value location assets such as search and messaging.

Decentralisation isn't non-existent, it is just a temporary transition phase from one centralized hierarchy to another.

Distributed and decentralized mean different things. distributed implies a distributor, which is itself a centralized function and in fact the internet has several of these centers of decentralisation that make sure that the grand partitions of high value 'land' assets such as IP address blocks and domain names are apportioned in an explicitly centralized manner.

'Decentralized' as it is commonly understood is about eliminating such central control points and devolving those powers to the edge of the network graph - to individual nodes, or more exactly to individual people.. This never works long-term, and always collapses right back into a centralized hierarchical system.

Information wants to be free, but value wants to be centralized.

'decentralisation' should not be a design goal, or at least should not be advertised as one, because it is fundamentally unsustainable.

It is best understood as a transitional phase between centralized regimes, not an end in and of itself.

It's somewhat important to note that this is the only Maya city with an urban grid. The city of Teotihuacan, as pointed out in the article, was much bigger and also had a planned urban grid system. It also was founded several centuries later.

Sounds like he's still fine tuning his acceptance speech for the lifetime achievement award from The Center For Decentralization

If these coins are so straightforward to attack, then what's stopping people? What's defending rational actors from doing the rational thing and squeezing their networks for all the guaranteed real returns of real money they supposedly protect with such brittle defenses? Either the operative definition of attack is too rather shallow to explain this inexplicable lack of attacking (i.e. something other than hashrate/stake is a major factor in the defense of these coins), or the expectation of return from said attack is rather too high.

Not suppressing inertia is indeed a problem, unless the message the kind you intend to be understood primarily by virtue of its infinitely inverse ratio of complexity to fidelity.

Presumably you would just load up the your Alcubierre station wagon with a bunch of backup tapes and send it down the interstellar highway. You could restore your backups before the original data is written!

> Ask HN: How to challenge trends without appearing like a luddite?

Wherever possible try to have ready an alternative answer to the need, niche or opportunity vacuum into which the trend is growing.

It's very difficult to get people to drop a habit- that they have already invested time, reputation and personal capital (let alone money), into. At best you may be able to entertain some of the more patient victims with articulate and substantive criticisms of the trend that hooked them, but if you don't have an alternative ready to redirect their sunk experience cost into, they will in all likelihood promptly forget any persuasive arguments you made and go right back their trusty pint of (say) blockchainism they've been refilling down the blockchain pub with their new blockchain friends.

why wouldn't a private cohort of unelected and in most cases anonymous individuals with significant and arbitrary leverage over the value of the Bitcoins in your possession be effectively the same (worse, because there is no accountability or out of band feedback control whatsoever to stabilize their behavior in the direction of good faith) trap as you fear with central banks who can arbitrarily control inflation?

It does help that when you are one of the first to latch on to a trending research area, there is relatively little in the way of competition for attention, funding and publishing priority. Also, in such scenarios domain specific standards and expectations have yet to be set and thus are not something that your research will be held to, at least not until the field begins to mature. In fact your research may form the basis for some of those conventions. This does not necessarily mean that the research was particularly noteworthy, thorough, or inherently outstanding.

Any blockchain scaling problem can be solved by creating a blockchain centralization problem.

It is not clear that the Teotihuacanos had no writing system despite the lack of durable preserved forms (Stelae, etc) that other contemporary cultures used. In fact, the city of Copan was a client state of Teotihuacan and Copan had ample evidence of a writing system in common use. There's also clear indications of extended contact with Maya, who likewise possessed writing systems. So certainly teotihuacan was exposed to writing systems for centuries, and the contact was with peer or subject states with whom teotihuacan typically if not exclusively held the dominant power position.

The absence of evidence for Teo possessing its own writing system could be due to a number of factors. For example, there may have been a rule against engraving it on anyting durable, and it was only used on material that preserved poorly or not at all in the 15 centuries between the collapse of the city and the onset of archaeological investigation at the site. It may be that all evidence of it had been looted ORD effaced deliberately bye an internal change of power hierarchy, or by subsequent incursions into the abandoned city by successor powers. It's worth considering that the name Teotihuacan is not even the name that the original inhabitants used for the city (which is unknown to us except indirectly through Copan's reference to it in the Altar Q origin story) , but a moniker given to the site by the Aztecs nearly a thousand years later, who knew little to nothing about the original inhabitants.

Around the same time there was also Flooz, famously promoted on national TV by Whoopi Goldberg, backed by proof of celebrity endorsement

I would say it's impossible to know unless you actually run and operate the exchange(s) through which they ran all of their 'sales'. The exchanges are often complicit in listing these coins and make money from a fee which they demand in order to list and promote them. the exchanges hold all of the real power in cryptocurrency, and there are only a handful of them.

I suspect it may apply torque from the drivetrain to the mechanism with the most optimal geometric leverage against both the mechanisms internal frame and the contact patch on the ground during transition into and out of tread mode.

IIRC Scott Adams intended (and accordingly named) the Dilbert Principle to be understood as a kind of Peter Principle 2.0

'everything is legal if you scale it up'

Wish I could recall the months old thread I found that in. I believe it was also blockchain-related