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Three Arrows Capital co-founder Zhu arrested in Singapore airport

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Re: Three Arrows Capital co-founder Zhu arrested in Singapore airport

#51

Post by Zetobal »

nerf0 wrote: post #12
danbruc wrote: post #11

This just reminded me that cryptocurrencies is a thing, this has not been a prominent topic here for some time, I would say. Is the entire cryptocurrencies stuff eventually on the way out or would that be a misperception? Just checked Google trends, that also indicates a downward trend for terms like Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, NFT or Ethereum for the last year or two.

I work in this area and to me, the tech is still super interesting. In particular, things like zero knowledge proof and related scaling/privacy solutions are at the forefront of cryptography in my opinion.

It's a decade now and there is still no real use case for it..

Re: Three Arrows Capital co-founder Zhu arrested in Singapore airport

#52

Post by iskander »

ogogmad wrote: post #47
iskander wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be a shame if this keeps happening, like: (2013) Bitcoin and its clones failed at all their stated purposes, (2017) the ICO craze left nothing of value, (2021) the DeFi/NFT bubble also left nothing but rubble. This stuff is zero sum, shuffling money without creating new things of enduring value.

At the moment, you can buy drugs with it online. Don't know if that will last, though.

Can you still!?

It's so incredibly traceable these days and every iteration of Silk Road gets busted, no?

Re: Three Arrows Capital co-founder Zhu arrested in Singapore airport

#53

Post by ethanbond »

eftychis wrote: post #50
pavlov wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not going to just vanish because crypto has become the tool of choice for online scams and crime. Here’s just one recent example, a small Kansas bank that collapsed entirely because its CEO got involved in a crypto scam: “The chief executive officer of Heartland Tri-State Bank asked if the client would lend him $12 million so he could get his money out of a cryptocurrency investment. He promised he’d pay him bac…

History of economics disagrees with the last -- hopeful I will assume -- statement. The world was and is full of scammers and fraudsters. Also respectfully I am not sure I get the zero interest rates arguments. There seems to be a subgroup of HN community that believes low interest rates (below some arbitrary threshold?) to be immoral. Maybe there is a Crime, scams and ponzi schemes correlation study over hundreds of…

The zero interest rate comment has nothing to do with morality, it means that people were doing incredibly goofy, risky shit to get a return, which creates ripe ground for conmen and fraud.

Re: Three Arrows Capital co-founder Zhu arrested in Singapore airport

#54

Post by iskander »

danbruc wrote: post #45
iskander wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the initial impractical prototypes for the core techniques were in the literature for a while but there's really no comparison between eg interactive ZK protocols and the succinct non-interactive proofs used by the cryptocurrency folks. The latter are computationally general (you don't have to roll a new one for each program) and many orders of magnitude more efficient. I think it's important to give the cryp…

I did not want to say that they invented or improved nothing, just that a lot of the building blocks already existed. I just looked this up, non-interactive zero-knowledge proof also seem to have a history back to the late 80s, but if cryptocurrencies gave us some improvements and new ideas that made them more practical, fine, I am not going to complain about that.

Like, huge tangible improvements.

You can do general purpose programming in all kinds of DSLs and Rust libraries that compiles down to big-but-practical arithmetic circuits and then generate proofs that y=f(x) without revealing x for arbitrary f. That really wasn't possible until a few years ago and emerged almost exclusively within the sphere of cryptocurrency-adjacent research. You can also use the succinctness of SNARKs to batch these proofs and shrink the verifier costs to almost nothing

It's a cool model for asymmetric computing, with low capacity verifiers collecting results from high capacity provers. It'll probably find uses outside deranged gambling...

Re: Three Arrows Capital co-founder Zhu arrested in Singapore airport

#55

Post by Kiro »

ogogmad wrote: post #46
grotorea wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there's always the possibility that this time it will be the last. Maybe the last peak is when it reaches global awareness and there's no new people to bring into the system. And I suspect it already reached that in the last cycle with Superbowl ads and Filipinos working in Axle Infinity. Although, I feel cryptocurrency is already too big to ever end completely.

It needs energy to be expended continuously in mining it, if it uses PoW. So it might end one day.

The difficulty is adjusted automatically depending on how many miners there are, so it can go down.

Re: Three Arrows Capital co-founder Zhu arrested in Singapore airport

#56

Post by cesarb »

ogogmad wrote: post #46
grotorea wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there's always the possibility that this time it will be the last. Maybe the last peak is when it reaches global awareness and there's no new people to bring into the system. And I suspect it already reached that in the last cycle with Superbowl ads and Filipinos working in Axle Infinity. Although, I feel cryptocurrency is already too big to ever end completely.

It needs energy to be expended continuously in mining it, if it uses PoW. So it might end one day.

> So it might end one day.

Only if the mining stops abruptly. Otherwise, the automatic difficulty adjustment allows it to keep working even with a reduced energy expenditure. In the extreme, a single computer running in a museum could be enough to keep the blockchain working forever.

Re: Three Arrows Capital co-founder Zhu arrested in Singapore airport

#57

Post by ogogmad »

Kiro wrote: post #55
ogogmad wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It needs energy to be expended continuously in mining it, if it uses PoW. So it might end one day.

The difficulty is adjusted automatically depending on how many miners there are, so it can go down.

That might be one of those things that works well in the short term but may also have severe tail risks.

I heard a similar story about an algorithmic stablecoin called Luna (I think). The analogue of difficulty adjustments there worked fine until one day it didn't.

Re: Three Arrows Capital co-founder Zhu arrested in Singapore airport

#58

Post by pavlov »

eftychis wrote: post #50
pavlov wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not going to just vanish because crypto has become the tool of choice for online scams and crime. Here’s just one recent example, a small Kansas bank that collapsed entirely because its CEO got involved in a crypto scam: “The chief executive officer of Heartland Tri-State Bank asked if the client would lend him $12 million so he could get his money out of a cryptocurrency investment. He promised he’d pay him bac…

History of economics disagrees with the last -- hopeful I will assume -- statement. The world was and is full of scammers and fraudsters. Also respectfully I am not sure I get the zero interest rates arguments. There seems to be a subgroup of HN community that believes low interest rates (below some arbitrary threshold?) to be immoral. Maybe there is a Crime, scams and ponzi schemes correlation study over hundreds of…

Zero interest rates will most likely return one day, but crypto will be heavily regulated by then. That’s what I meant — the combo isn’t coming back where crypto is an unregulated sink for ZIRP speculation money.

Re: Three Arrows Capital co-founder Zhu arrested in Singapore airport

#59

Post by ohdannyboy »

dheera wrote: post #26
gottorf wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. "Egregious" in the court of public opinion isn't the same thing as a legal case put together rigorously by prosecutors arguing against the finest defense lawyers that scammers' money can buy.

Here's a rebel idea: In court cases, have the scoreboard weighted by the AGI of the lawyers. define pro = accuser, con = accused If the "pro" side has 10 points and the "con" side has 5 points, and the con side's lawyer makes 1/3 the salary of the pro side's lawyer, the con side wins the case. Another rebel idea: If either side chooses to not use lawyers, the other side is also not allowed to use lawyers. If either s…

Let's say I have something like $1M to my name (total assets) and I'm accused of a serious crime. I'm ready to spend it all to not go to prison for decades, but the AGI of the prosecutor is like 1/3 of my respectable private attorney. State prosecutors make garbage so this isn't far fetched. I now have to fund the government and give a significant percent of my assets just to defend myself?

Making somebody fund their own prosecution during trial is probably the least rebel thing I've ever heard.

Re: Three Arrows Capital co-founder Zhu arrested in Singapore airport

#60

Post by grotorea »

ogogmad wrote: post #57
Kiro wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difficulty is adjusted automatically depending on how many miners there are, so it can go down.

That might be one of those things that works well in the short term but may also have severe tail risks. I heard a similar story about an algorithmic stablecoin called Luna (I think). The analogue of difficulty adjustments there worked fine until one day it didn't.

They can ultimately change the code if needed. Luna also tried that IIRC.
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