Trust Models • Hacker News Board

Re: Trust Models

#31

Post by wonder_er » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 4:06 PM UTC

brian_cloutier wrote: post #13

wonder_er wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not OP, and the books that jumped to my mind when I read this are not blockchain-related. They are related by questions of society, trust, and incentive design. They seem largely aligned with Vitalik's assessment of the `0 of N`/`1 of N` assessment Before clicking through to Goodreads, though, check out this book review of Seeing like a State by Scott Alexander: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-s…

I heartily recommend Seeing Like a State to anyone interested in the development of the modern state, some of the largest misteps made by a slew of modernist authoritarian regimes (such as the Soviet Union), and an introduction to some very legitimate criticisms of modernism which postmodernism makes. However, I want to caution anyone from thinking that this book says anything about Game Theory. I'm not sure why it's…

You pointed out exactly why I mentioned it:

> except in that it often points out that authoritarian governments are free to ignore any feedback, feedback of the kind that incentive schemes are usually designed to generate.

A view of the modern state is made more accurate if one views the state as an entity desirous to ignore feedback from citizens, rather than actively responsive to citizen opinion.

Robert Caro has written amazing books. I'm half-way through this two-hour dialog titled "On Power"[0].

He says he essentially stumbled into writing The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York[1] after observing how Robert Moses (an unelected bureaucrat) completely controlled huge "democratic" institutions.

I mention the books because they highlight some of the means and ways in which the state encourages it's people to think it is responsive to them, but this responsiveness is a slight of hand, even as plenty of participants in the system (both as citizens and as representatives of the state) earnestly believe that the state is responsive to public input.

[0]: https://www.audible.com/pd/On-Power-Audiobook/B06XNKVH16

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1111.The_Power_Broker

Re: Trust Models

#32

Post by cutemonster » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

INGELRII wrote: post #29

cosmojg wrote: post #4

Whenever I read Vitalik's work, I find myself convinced that all of society and its various problems can be boiled down to incentives and their alignment or misalignment.

“Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.” — Charlie Munger, https://fs.blog/2017/10/bias-incentives-reinforcement/ Mechanism design is a subfield of game theory and economics called mechanism design that tackles this directly. Instead of having a game and figuring out how it works and what is the outcome is when agents play it, the problem is to design a game…

> design a game that creates desired outcomes when selfish agents play it.

Curious about if these ideas have been applied to constructing healthy effective companies? With happy employees

Or maybe one could say everyone that comes up with some KPI are doing this?

Re: Trust Models

#33

Post by brian_cloutier » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 4:08 PM UTC

centimeter wrote: post #27

brian_cloutier wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all cool technologies which raise the bar an attacker must meet in order to disrupt Bitcoin, but it's worth noting that at very least America and China could absolutely overwhelm those defenses. The security of nakamoto consensus (Bitcoin and co) relies on a level of broadcast which is pretty incompatible with a world where the network is hostile and looking to disrupt your traffic.

> relies on a level of broadcast which is pretty incompatible with a world where the network is hostile and looking to disrupt your traffic. It would be prohibitively expensive and difficult to disrupt point-to-point radio (e.g. ham) and satellite communications enough to cripple Bitcoin.

The satellite doesn't help very much. It doesn't help at all if you want to send a transaction or Mike your own blocks. It's also very easy to know whether it's broadcasting. So if the mechanism by which Bitcoin is banned is legal, it's easy to find the owner and prosecute them for breaking the law.

I'm not incredibly familiar with ham, but if you ever broadcast then you're inviting the authorities to find you, and shut you down. If you strictly communicate point-to-point it doesn't seem likely that you'd be able to tell the entire world about new blocks within a reasonable about of time. If you keep the 10 minute block interval then delays longer than, say, 1 minute, would be extremely problematic. I'm not sure how a Ham radio network could reliably tell the world about new blocks within 60 seconds without alerting the authorities.