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Children Playing Blockchain

jott.live

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Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#71

Post by wmf »

dgellow wrote: post #19
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.

Could you explain? Anyone can run a node for a proof-of-stake, or delegate/stake to the node they want. Why do you add the reserved seat to the story?

In the early days of Bitcoin like 2011, you could mine basically for free using a gaming PC you already owned (there are a lot of assumptions here that coiners don't want to get into). I actually did this. This has nothing to do with how PoW works today, where even obscure chains are slammed with GPU farms within minutes of mainnet launch.

With PoS you have to buy coins before you can stake. There's no way to bootstrap your stake without spending money.

Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#72

Post by atweiden »

DennisP wrote: post #43
spijdar wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In either case you can use your accumulating capital to accumulate more capital -- PoW just means consuming actual resources to do so, as you fold your earnings into more hardware and electricity to earn more.

And PoW has significant economies of scale. The big Chinese miners have special deals with power companies and ASIC manufacturers. PoS at least gives everyone an even playing field; big or small you get the same percentage return. (Of course that's pretty much the point of the analogy.)

> PoS at least gives everyone an even playing field; big or small you get the same percentage return.

Your cost basis in the underlying coin is by far the largest determinant of ROI.

It’s like the old real estate adage: “money is made on the purchase, not on the sale”.

Fairness of mining has always been virtually irrelevant to ROI.

(Except insofar as accusing competitors of shades of mining “impropriety” supports a narrative — and invariably a narrative which disproportionately benefits investors with an ultra low cost basis in a benefactor to said narrative.)

“China miners, special deals” etc — it’s a trope that’s been going around for about a decade.

Virtue signaling aside, judging by the raging bull market for ICO coins amongst cryptocurrency investors, clearly no one is concerned with fairness whatsoever. These things are majority premined by insiders and/or sold to prestigious investors in pre-pre-pre ICOs (yes, there are “levels”). What happens is the general public gets sucked into these coins then adopts narratives which suit them. That’s what you’re seeing here. Not that anyone cares.

(Disclosure: I’m invested in a true hybrid PoW/PoS coin, and I’m rather familiar with the downsides of both PoW and PoS mining.)

Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#73

Post by pcthrowaway »

wmf wrote: post #64
pcthrowaway wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Proof of stake literally makes rich richer, thats the point of it That's certainly true with a very simple PoS mechanism. I don't think that type of PoS is used in practice with any major cryptocurrency (please correct me if I'm wrong though). The one I'm most familiar with (Cardano) uses delegated proof of stake, so users delegate their stake to a stake pool and share in the rewards. The platform supports, encoura…

Delegation has nothing to do with it. If you own, say, 1% of staked coins you get 1% of the staking rewards in perpetuity in exchange for doing almost nothing. I don't consider this a problem but it's a fact that PoS works that way.

This is true (and honestly something I haven't given much thought to). It's true in any economy that the rich can leverage their wealth to get richer through investments at a higher earnings rate than the poor can.

I do like that cryptocurrency platforms can put limits on "how much" leverage they get, to significantly close gap between potential "percentage" return on investments between wealthy and 'poor', and remove the ability for third parties to operate which give preferential treatment to people with high concentration of total market cap.

If you own 1 billion USD, then sure, you're going to get a larger return on investments (when measuring in USD) than someone with 100 USD, even if the percentage RoA was the same. Because of how classical economic systems work though, these are very grossly disparate. Someone with 1 billion USD may be able to generate 5-20% return on investments in a year, whereas someone with 100 USD would be lucky to get 3% (certainly, larger returns are possible with luck and wise investments, I'm talking purely in the aggregate over low-risk investments, like holding your money in an account which pays interest).

But let's assume the person with 1 billion USD and 100 USD are both getting 1% interest annually; the person with 1 billion USD is still making more money from investments because they have 999999900 more USD which they are investing.

PoS doesn't solve that latter problem, but it can close the gap on the return expressed as a percentage of investment

Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#74

Post by jules-jules »

chrisco255 wrote: post #65
hmrtn wrote: post #48

Unfortunately this article provides almost no substance on blockchain or it's related technology. HN does not seem to mind as long as it is even remotely critical of anything crypto-related. It would be nice to discuss the actual implications of the technology, critical or not, without such strong opinions interfering.

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…

Let’s do it!

I’ve mostly been coming to HN articles on crypto for the entertainment value only but it’s getting better - slowly.

Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#75

Post by crummy »

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.

FOUC = "Flash of unstyled content"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_of_unstyled_content

Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#76

Post by [deleted] »

hmrtn wrote: post #48

Unfortunately this article provides almost no substance on blockchain or it's related technology. HN does not seem to mind as long as it is even remotely critical of anything crypto-related. It would be nice to discuss the actual implications of the technology, critical or not, without such strong opinions interfering.

[deleted]

Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#77

Post by barnabee »

chrisco255 wrote: post #65
hmrtn wrote: post #48

Unfortunately this article provides almost no substance on blockchain or it's related technology. HN does not seem to mind as long as it is even remotely critical of anything crypto-related. It would be nice to discuss the actual implications of the technology, critical or not, without such strong opinions interfering.

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…

I’d be interested in this

Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#78

Post by twiceaday »

chrisco255 wrote: post #65
hmrtn wrote: post #48

Unfortunately this article provides almost no substance on blockchain or it's related technology. HN does not seem to mind as long as it is even remotely critical of anything crypto-related. It would be nice to discuss the actual implications of the technology, critical or not, without such strong opinions interfering.

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…

You are not witnessing normal conversations. You are witnessing engagement on blockchain articles that are themselves only popular whenever the coins are skyrocketing in price. That is the context most of the time. Even though the articles often spend little time on the price. Similarly, the anti-narrative usually attempts to refute the technology but is benefiting from the "this price is nonsense don't purchase this" crowd. And for me, "I am holding coins and writing / promoting positive articles" seems like the slimier position. I love the tech and absolutely hate the profit motive. It is very easy for me to see "pro tech" arguments as just pumping. The tech has almost nothing to do with the price. The tech establishes that a non-zero price can exist, the rest is people manipulation.

Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#79

Post by verdverm »

chrisco255 wrote: post #65
hmrtn wrote: post #48

Unfortunately this article provides almost no substance on blockchain or it's related technology. HN does not seem to mind as long as it is even remotely critical of anything crypto-related. It would be nice to discuss the actual implications of the technology, critical or not, without such strong opinions interfering.

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.

Re: Children Playing Blockchain

#80

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]
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