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Children Playing Blockchain

jott.live

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Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#91

Post by atweiden »

pazimzadeh wrote: post #57
kleer001 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any discussion of 51% attacks that ignores the game theory of it I think misses the original genius of the Bitcoin white paper. If one has control of 51% of the network it's in one's best interest to keep that network going successfully. Sure, there's suicidal malcontents and those that just want chaos. But barring some brain cancer it's very difficult for individuals to throw away billions of dollars. Because if a 5…

You could say the same thing about infectious disease. The most successful diseases don't kill you, they just sap your energy a little bit at a time. What is the equivalent of parasites in blockchain-land?

> What is the equivalent of parasites in blockchain-land?

It’s the people insinuating impropriety of Proof-of-Work mining in the hopes of less than transparently promoting a competing premined/ICO’d Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrency sans any form of disclosure statement. You know, the sort of thing that’s been plaguing the cryptocurrency space for a good, solid decade now?

Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#92

Post by dang »

stevev wrote: post #11
ronsor wrote: post #2

> The first class lost the students that simply couldn't keep up with the increasingly difficult sudokus. This is the story of every proof-of-work cryptocurrency. After a certain point, they only serve to make the rich even richer. Look at Bitcoin for example, where over 50% of the hashing power is controlled by big Chinese mining operations.

Looks like someone missed the buying opportunity lol.

Can you please not post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN, regardless of how you feel about Bitcoin or whatever? It sends discussions straight to failure mode.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#93

Post by kang »

sparkie wrote: post #58
kang wrote: post #8

Funny. The first class was a public class & anybody could join in at any time. The second class had reserved early seats based on the initial supply of the dices; without investment in the initial dices the game doesnt start, whereas sudoku generation is free.

In the PoS game, the stakers must be trusted to report their dice roll accurately. To overcome this, you would need some kind of random oracle which can't be influenced by any of the participants. The best random oracle we know is of course, Proof-of-Work.

Basically this.

You, a mathematician, walk into the class to purchase a brick to label.

The first class has solved sudokus with deterministic difficulty to prove they did work to build the structure, whereas in the second class you have just dice sums & have to trust them telling you they rolled the diced only every fixed interval etc. It's distributed but not decentralized.

Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#94

Post by brrrrrm »

crazypython wrote: post #4

I found the site's architecture quite interesting: It uses inline JS to transform the Markdown in HTML. view-source: https://jott.live/markdown/elementary_blockchain Ideally it would be as a Service Worker that pulls pages and transforms them into HTML, so you could serve your Markdown directly, without a separate build step.

I'm not a web developer by profession, so I tried to keep things simple. It's just one Python process and one sqlite DB on a single cheap server.

I like to think it's fair to ask the user to donate some compute for rendering as a tradeoff for maintenance costs.

Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#95

Post by brrrrrm »

foreigner wrote: post #12
crazypython wrote: post #4

I found the site's architecture quite interesting: It uses inline JS to transform the Markdown in HTML. view-source: https://jott.live/markdown/elementary_blockchain Ideally it would be as a Service Worker that pulls pages and transforms them into HTML, so you could serve your Markdown directly, without a separate build step.

For me there was a noticeable FOUC.

I've never heard of this before. Speaking for myself, I don't mind it, but I'm curious if it tends to irk most people?

Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#97

Post by pazimzadeh »

atweiden wrote: post #91
pazimzadeh wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could say the same thing about infectious disease. The most successful diseases don't kill you, they just sap your energy a little bit at a time. What is the equivalent of parasites in blockchain-land?

> What is the equivalent of parasites in blockchain-land? It’s the people insinuating impropriety of Proof-of-Work mining in the hopes of less than transparently promoting a competing premined/ICO’d Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrency sans any form of disclosure statement. You know, the sort of thing that’s been plaguing the cryptocurrency space for a good, solid decade now?

Aw buddy. You couldn't spare putting $100 in the Ethereum pre-sale?

Anyway I'm not talking about direct competition, I'm talking about parasitism.

Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#98

Post by atweiden »

pazimzadeh wrote: post #97
atweiden wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is the equivalent of parasites in blockchain-land? It’s the people insinuating impropriety of Proof-of-Work mining in the hopes of less than transparently promoting a competing premined/ICO’d Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrency sans any form of disclosure statement. You know, the sort of thing that’s been plaguing the cryptocurrency space for a good, solid decade now?

Aw buddy. You couldn't spare putting $100 in the Ethereum pre-sale? Anyway I'm not talking about direct competition, I'm talking about parasitism.

> I'm talking about parasitism.

Much if not all of the anti–Proof-of-Work narrative and the debunking thereof can be characterized by Brandolini’s law [1]. ITT “Sure, the overwhelming majority of `$COIN` was premined by insiders or sold to prestigious investors for pennies in exclusive pre-ICOs, but look over there — Bitcoin mining is oh-so-unfair. Disclosure statement? What’s that?”

All the financially-motivated disbursal of misinformation takes a considerable amount of time to debunk, hence the parasitism component.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#99

Post by chrisco255 »

verdverm wrote: post #79
chrisco255 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I think HN's general sentiment against blockchain and crypto is completely counter to the hacker mentality that PG promoted. And it's frustrating, because this is one of the most intellectually stimulating communities on the web. And I see crypto developments rapidly becoming the most disruptive technology of this decade, if not century and we can't discuss it without bikeshedding. Seems to me like there migh…

http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html Not sure blockchain fits the way PG defined "hacker." Blockchain needs to be more rigorous in implementation due to being in finance and its target preference with malicious hackers.

From your article:

"It's called a hack when you do something in an ugly way. But when you do something so clever that you somehow beat the system, that's also called a hack. The word is used more often in the former than the latter sense, probably because ugly solutions are more common than brilliant ones.

Believe it or not, the two senses of "hack" are also connected. Ugly and imaginative solutions have something in common: they both break the rules. And there is a gradual continuum between rule breaking that's merely ugly (using duct tape to attach something to your bike) and rule breaking that is brilliantly imaginative (discarding Euclidean space)."

Cryptocurrencies and blockchain platforms are nothing if not rule-breaking and brilliantly imaginative. They're trying to rewrite the entire financial system as code on the blockchain. Can you think of a more brilliant hack than that? Satoshi created the idea of digital scarcity. And the crypto world is running with it. That's clever as hell.

Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#100

Post by Erlich_Bachman »

atweiden wrote: post #88
Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just not an accurate nor truthful account of what happens in practice. The example you gave has nothing to do with changing the PoW function to counteract ASICs. Both Bcash and bitcoin classic were forked because of completely different reasons, and had people who believed in those reasons defend the new forks and run the node software etc. For example XMR has been doing ASIC-deterrent forks for years now with…

In 2018, 50-60% of Monero hashrate was rumored to be from secret ASICs. How “successful” at warding off ASICs could hard forking a coin’s hashing algorithm really be if it doesn’t stop the ASIC manufacturers from building ASICs for any given algorithm? Also it seems clear that Monero’s purported “ASIC resistance” is very much a social contract — requiring constant vigilance to uphold — one which isn’t guaranteed to b…

> a social contract

Just like the rest of the cryptos that require all the participants to use specific protocol and software and agree on specific rules.

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