171–180 of 338 posts
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Turns out North Korea are using crypto! To fund missile programs https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-60281129.amp The more I think on these things, the more I think trust is a feature, not a bug
Do you extend that thought to the Internet as well? The web is undoubtedly helpful to North Korea, probably more so than crypto.
Following some links: https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/single_slot_finality > If 51% of validators start censoring, the victims and users can coordinate on a minority soft fork where they build on each other’s blocks and ignore the attacker. On the minority soft fork, the attacker’s deposits would lose millions of ETH to an inactivity leak, and after a few weeks the chain resumes finalizing. It seems that this co…
Ahh proof of stake, the nail in the coffin of decentralization. What did you say? the more you have of the capital the more you influence the system? what a novel concept! Monterey and legal systems based on structures that are at least partially built to take care of the needs of people of similar culture and geographic area? YUCK! Machine enforced plutocratic system where early adopters and syndicates have absolute…
The decentralization of PoS depends entirely on initial token distribution.
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> Nobody would be mining OldChain so it's difficulty would be irrelevantly close to zero, you'd just just drop the requirement for POW down to something effectively gone. Why would nobody be mining OldChain? You can't remove the block reward or change the difficulty without a hard fork. PoW miners would still decide which blocks are mined and reap the rewards (block reward and transaction fees). You haven't actually…
You can remove the block reward as a soft fork, the consensus rule for Bitcoin and its derivatives is a maximum. Even if it wasn't, you can soft fork in a rule that the block reward should be spent to somewhere invalid, or paid to a particular person.
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> Current Bitcoin usage is literally a rounding error of global energy usage (0.1%) and if wildly successful would still be https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/ That author doesn't seem to actually understand the scale of financial transactions in the world. Right now, there are about 300,000 Bitcoin transactions per day. The author defines Bitcoin being "wildly successful" as a 20x increase. Right now there are…
The average US adult does 2.3 financial transactions per day. The all time high number of bitcoin network transactions in a 24h period is a bit less than 500k. The busiest day for Bitcoin usage worldwide is roughly equivalent to the population of Modesto, CA. Blockchain occupies so much of the conversation and generates such incredible amounts of hype very few people truly understand just how insignificant it is in t…
…on chain aka “layer 1”
I have seen description like this so many times, but no guide seems to describe exactly how everything is done in decentralised way. "The validators for each slot are assigned to committees". By whom? Also what if there is network partition for these 12 seconds. It's not very unlikely that some country could be completely cutoff from the internet for some time due to anything from natural or political reasons. Could…
Generally we've described this sort of research as "review resistant", rather than being secure in some classical sense. How Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies actually work is often eagerly explained but completely unfathomable on closer inspection. Concerns raised are fixed with additional complexity repeatedly until the reviewer grows weary of attempting to piece it together. Consequently there's sufficient confl…
Furthermore, it's implemented and running. You could argue that someone in particular has made a poor or incomplete explanation of how it works but not that they way it works is unfathomable or being patched as your speak. It's already implemented, go look at the code if you don't want to believe what anyone says.
>Let’s walk through a couple theoretical scenarios where a subset of malicious validators wants to censor transactions, say those originating in FATF-blacklisted countries. Hang on a second. Just to be clear about this example, this example is walking through how Ethereum has been designed specifically to allow North Korea to transact Ethereum, and more than that, prevent anyone who dissents. Like, I mean ok, I get t…
You should understand that this is a very USA centred opinion. There’s a whole big world of different cultures and politics, and it is possible to believe there are other approaches where we reject violence and authority. It’s the usual “you’re helping drug dealers/terrorists/North Korea, but what about the children?!” state simping that ignores the violence of the existing systems, and ignores the billions of people…
Hmm. IMHO libertarianism (which is at the core of the crypto movement) is much more striking as a USA-centric belief system than “KYC / AML is desirable”. In fact, most developed countries seem to have anti money laundering regulations.
Your “what about the children?” is a straw man whereas “you’re helping North Korea” is a fact. See the exponential growth of the ransomware market when cryptocurrencies took of.
We all universally agree that we should build infra that helps people within oppressed regimes. The disagreement is that not only crypto fails to do so meaningfully, it empowers those oppressive regimes by providing them with ways to circumvent trade restrictions.
Ahh proof of stake, the nail in the coffin of decentralization. What did you say? the more you have of the capital the more you influence the system? what a novel concept! Monterey and legal systems based on structures that are at least partially built to take care of the needs of people of similar culture and geographic area? YUCK! Machine enforced plutocratic system where early adopters and syndicates have absolute…
Proof of Work is the same, just with more steps.
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No, the rich and poor get the same ROI, so relative wealth doesn't change.
Reminds me of: > ‘The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.’ Relative wealth changes because both parties need to eat and, assuming ETH becomes a usable currency, the poor will have to take a larger relative portion of their staked ETH and spend it to buy food. Edit: Though, to be clear, this is hardly Ethereum's fault.
The empirical evidence does not suggest that capital investment is a process that is inherently inequality generating. Capital's share of income has actually declined in the G7 when you exclude housing (see Figure 3):
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_r...
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I absolutely agree we should build infrastructure that allows people within oppressive regimes options with which they can resist, escape and co-ordinate. Which is why this infrastructure, which is clearly designed to empower those regimes, is bad. Are North Koreans using crypto-currencies? Maybe, it doesn't seem like it. Is the North Korean regime using crypto-currencies? Absolutely, we repeatedly see the North Kore…
I really don't get what the argument is here? NK and others also use Tor, Signal (Protocol), and more. Are they all bad? And why always use the most extreme examples like NK and China? If US citizens could empathize with people not only from NK, but also from places like Turkey, where the value of our currency has been demolished under the current authoritarian government (and, IMO, they aren't far away from putting…