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The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

mollywhite.net

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Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#321

Post by bawolff »

flaque wrote: post #307
bawolff wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's relatively obvious that the critic doesn't have the perquisite knowledge to craft a critique that can be responded to easily. Funny. My usual assumption is that if someone makes an argument that i don't have a comeback to, its that i am wrong. Typically lack of knowledge makes it easier, not harder to respond. Hell, its things like this that make crypto sound like a cult. I.e. that the primary failure of doubt…

> Genuinely curious - why not? Is it just for ideological reasons or is there an actual use case preventing you? Ownership requires decentralization. In our case, we can't make a "Steam that's owned by game developers" if the listing information (the screenshots, the titles, the descriptions, the game files, and so on) are hosted on AWS. Ownership means that, if the original creators were to walk away, the asset woul…

Thank you for replying :)

> In Strangemood's case, we make a decentralized marketplace for software licenses, that's owned primarily by the sellers (ie: decentralized Steam). If Strangemood stored files on S3, then whoever owns the the AWS account is the only operator, and so the product is a traditional service, rather than an asset.

I'm a but confused here on the ownership - if its the purchaser or the seller who is in control. Filecoin isn't free so i assume one of these groups has to be footing the bill.

Wouldn't this goal be equally served by just hosting it in the sellers s3 bucket (or webserver, or torrent, etc)? Someone still has to pay for and be in control of the filecoin "instance" (probably not the right word), what's the difference between that person doing that vs running their own server.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#322

Post by drBonkers »

dogman144 wrote: post #58

> Bitcoin, which emerged out of the ashes of the 2008 financial crisis, first caught on among libertarians and anti-establishment activists who saw it as the cornerstone of a new, incorruptible monetary system > you’ll find a bottomless well of weird, interesting and thought-provoking projects I hope comment-think pieces like this aren't a norm going forward, as that was pretty brutal to read... "Molly White: so brav…

This is off-topic for this thread, but I didn't know how else to reply— thanks for this [1] comment. I'm going to dig into McChrystal's book at your recommendation.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30599612#30602787

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#323

Post by jimmydorry »

ahtihn wrote: post #299
jimmydorry wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except in your concert example, the number of tickets is not verifiably public with a centralised entity. There is nothing that stops the organizer from printing more tickets than there exists capacity for. On the flip side, a NFT ticket can be demonstratably unique (no counterfeiting or luck of the draw from scalpers), and only a certain number can be printed (otherwise everyone will know that the organizer is not a…

> There is nothing that stops the organizer from printing more tickets than there exists capacity for. That's not a real problem.

Really? You've never booked a ticket on a flight and your seat had been sold to someone else? The same thing happens at some concerts too.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#324

Post by adbachman »

Jimmc414 wrote: post #317
Animats wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't make much sense for concert tickets, unless you want to enable scalping. The lifetime of a ticket is short.

I know several who found out at the ticket gate of the college fb national championship that they had purchased counterfeit tickets @ $800 a pop, NFTs might be able to offer increased protection against that sort of thing.

How? You just told a story about the system working without NFTs.

Your acquaintances could still be phished, scammed, funneled, whatever, into buying fake tickets and the takers at the gate would still refuse them.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#325

Post by dogman144 »

drBonkers wrote: post #322
dogman144 wrote: post #58

> Bitcoin, which emerged out of the ashes of the 2008 financial crisis, first caught on among libertarians and anti-establishment activists who saw it as the cornerstone of a new, incorruptible monetary system > you’ll find a bottomless well of weird, interesting and thought-provoking projects I hope comment-think pieces like this aren't a norm going forward, as that was pretty brutal to read... "Molly White: so brav…

This is off-topic for this thread, but I didn't know how else to reply— thanks for this [1] comment. I'm going to dig into McChrystal's book at your recommendation. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30599612#30602787

sure!

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#326

Post by flaque »

bawolff wrote: post #321
flaque wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Genuinely curious - why not? Is it just for ideological reasons or is there an actual use case preventing you? Ownership requires decentralization. In our case, we can't make a "Steam that's owned by game developers" if the listing information (the screenshots, the titles, the descriptions, the game files, and so on) are hosted on AWS. Ownership means that, if the original creators were to walk away, the asset woul…

Thank you for replying :) > In Strangemood's case, we make a decentralized marketplace for software licenses, that's owned primarily by the sellers (ie: decentralized Steam). If Strangemood stored files on S3, then whoever owns the the AWS account is the only operator, and so the product is a traditional service, rather than an asset. I'm a but confused here on the ownership - if its the purchaser or the seller who i…

> Thank you for replying :)

Of course! Feel free to send me an email if you'd like to grab virtual coffee and talk more. I'm evan [at] strangemood [dot] org.

> I'm a but confused here on the ownership - if its the purchaser or the seller who is in control. Filecoin isn't free so i assume one of these groups has to be footing the bill.

Ah! This is what DAOs are for.

A percentage of every sale goes to a community treasury (a wallet). That wallet is collectively controlled by a token. That token is minted to sellers upon purchase, so the sellers control the treasury.

The treasury acts as a "payer of last resort". It pays for Filecoin deals basically. It also can pay maintainers of open source tooling through decentralized Quadratic funding grants (see https://wtfisqf.com/).

Rebase (the company that makes Strangemood) peer's the store's small-file metadata (titles, descriptions, etc) as an additional backup. We don't have to do this, but it costs us about $0.15 per year to do so, and it makes the network faster and safer.

Realistically, DAOs might be a janky solution. I'd love to see payment of file store be included within the protocol itself.

But there's a few quirks of Solana that made this difficult. Specifically, you can't use more than 1024 bytes in a single instruction, which limits the scope of the program. This might be fixed in the future though.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#327

Post by dan-robertson »

I don’t really understand what this document is for. Or rather, I would have guessed it would be an attempt to respond to the NYT article and to convince readers to come to their point of view, but I think it totally fails at that.

The format is difficult to read, and the phrase-by-phrase analysis leaves it incohesive, scattershot and makes it feel nitpicky.

Lots of the arguments are fundamentally ideological (basically ‘crypto is libertarian but libertarianism is bad compared to my preferred ideology so crypto is bad’) and I think most people will recognise an ideological argument and decide the merits of the thing based on their own ideology. I think these arguments don’t do much to convince or inform.

It’s largely appealing to the in-group of crypto-skeptics with commenters riffing off each other or referring to unmentioned but agreed-upon facts.

I think a better argument could be made with a more cohesive narrative sticking to the most defensible points.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#328

Post by billywhizz »

fizzyfizz wrote: post #53
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hasn't been my experience at all. I feel like this is just pandering to group sentiment. My work (household name so we work with a lot of companies) has been seeing increased spend from crypto companies and so we've talked with a few folks from these companies and they've been hiring headcount like crazy. We've had lots of our own engineers churn to crypto companies also. Yeah they won't get the anti-crypto-bubb…

I was surprised by the claim about Stephen Diehl so I did a little googling. I don't think it's correct to say he "works on his own blockchain company". However, relatively recently he was working on smart contracts with a company called Adjoint. https://web.archive.org/web/20180220171955/https://www.steph... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFlu61wJe2Y He seems to have been interested in smart contracts but found the…

just to clarify this a little, stephen is/was (the status of adjoint is unclear but from what i can see it is now defunct) the CTO and co-founder of adjoint and he blocks anyone who raises this in public. https://twitter.com/billywhizz1970/status/146927786616050074...

he now seems to be a full-time anti-crypto propagandist. i'm not sure how he makes a living from that, but he seems to spend all day every day talking about it for at least the last 6 months and has gained a large following on twitter due to it. personally, i find it hard to trust anyone on either side of the debate who is this invested in their extreme position and unwilling to engage in any meaningful debate with anyone who critiques their positions.

here are some more links about adjoint for anyone interested in some more background.

http://internetofagreements.com/2017/12/18/stephen-diehl-adj...

https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/adjoint-distri...

https://web.archive.org/web/20190513032812/https://www.adjoi... "Adjoint empowers enterprises to achieve new levels of efficiency and control by delivering blockchain technology built specifically for the needs of the financial industry"

https://medium.com/b2b-buzz/adjoints-interconnections-dd619e...

http://web.archive.org/web/20210316021048/https://www.forbes...

https://www.finextra.com/pressarticle/79619/tech-mahindra-pa...

https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/adjoint-distri...

https://www.pymnts.com/news/b2b-payments/2019/treasury-manag...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFlu61wJe2Y

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#329

Post by dogman144 »

Animats wrote: post #211
twox2 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are financial mechanics that exist only in the scope of DeFi and not in traditional finance. It actually IS new in a lot of ways and skilled folks are teaming up to make a killing, not just experienced traders. Take a look at what's happening in the "MEV" space. None of this existed in traditional finance.

Sure it does. Front-running is not new. Payment for order flow is not new. Altering the recent transaction history (the thing blockchains are supposed to prevent) is a criminal offense in other markets.

you're mistaking the mempool with tx history unless you believe they're essentially the same? Issue there if so is the mempool isn't consistent from node-to-node so can't call it a tx history.

It's more like pending TXs which end up landing in a certain order that's possibly different once confirmed (which current banks do with checking/debit TXs and isn't a criminal offense).

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#330

Post by datagram »

dan-robertson wrote: post #327

I don’t really understand what this document is for. Or rather, I would have guessed it would be an attempt to respond to the NYT article and to convince readers to come to their point of view, but I think it totally fails at that. The format is difficult to read, and the phrase-by-phrase analysis leaves it incohesive, scattershot and makes it feel nitpicky. Lots of the arguments are fundamentally ideological (basica…

I think the article is mainly for a bunch of skeptics to dunk on both the author for writing the piece and the NYT for publishing it.

As the introduction says: > Here, a group of around fifteen cryptocurrency researchers and critics have done what the New York Times apparently won't. Between this and the title, I assume they're mainly referring to the perceived lack of editing that went in to the original.

I think it's pretty safe to say that this was mainly written for the amusement of crypto skeptics (which it does a good job of, imo) and to serve as an example of how to identify irresponsible crypto reporting, rather than to actually convince anyone.

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