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100 years of whatever this will be

apenwarr.ca

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Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#771

Post by Jensson »

int_19h wrote: post #656
bduerst wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but it doesn't make sense to throw out the baby with the bathwater. From what I've seen being argued about proponents of defi (or smart contracts) is they operate on the premise that the centralized authority is the bad actor. While this is true in some cases, it's not all cases, and despite it's flaws there is still a need for centralized authorities to arbitrate.

The issue with centralized authorities that has to be mitigated somehow is that, once they appear, they tend to accummulate more and more power, and inevitably become a bad actor eventually, even if originally they weren't intending to. A decentralized approach to this is to have the hierarchy of authority organized bottom-up rather than top-down. The hierarchy can then be toppled by "pulling the rug" at the bottom-m…

> The issue with centralized authorities that has to be mitigated somehow is that, once they appear, they tend to accumulate more and more power, and inevitably become a bad actor eventually, even if originally they weren't intending to.

Which is why we have a democracy so that rulers don't have to worry about getting killed in a rebellion and people can choose a new ruler when corruption gets bad enough.

This of course means that corruption tends towards the highest people can tolerate. So if you see corrupt politicians it is because people tolerate it, if they wanted they could vote them out but people as a group don't care enough to actually do the work necessary to do so. However if corruption grew large enough as you fear then people would start caring and things would change rather quickly.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#772

Post by SuoDuanDao »

sam0x17 wrote: post #60
voakbasda wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-regulation != anti-government. I am okay with regulation and being regulated, but I absolutely am not okay with any of our existing governments having any part of that process. Revolution does not require anarchy as an outcome; indeed, my preference simply would be to install better governance. Turning the law into a set of constantly shift sands would make it impossible to do business, because that could end up…

Right, but society has accelerated. 50 and 100 year precedents used to make sense. Now it seems like they need to be updated at least every 10 years, because that's how long it takes for society to fundamentally change at the current rate of progress. Regarding government, if you don't like your current government, then if you think hard about it, what you really want is either 1) additional regulations or restructur…

There is also a cultural element though. The laws and regulations may encourage corrupt behaviour, but if there was a strong cultural expectation that the most upstanding people go into government to serve their communities - and if that were actually who was attracted to the role - that wouldn't matter all that much.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#773

Post by Jensson »

goodpoint wrote: post #729
sradu wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must not be from a former communist country. The system worked for two-three decades during the initial industrialization phase. When that phase ended growth was hard to find (the whole system was based around factories and moving villagers to cities). That's when the numbers started going down and the system started faking numbers to give the appearance that all is well and nobody could disagree with them. At a…

> The system worked for two-three decades Yes, that's my whole point. > Re: Amazon - you can't compare countries with private corporations. ...and why? The similarity is more than evident.

Amazon has competitors, a central government do not. If the central planning fails to deliver a product then there is nobody there to deliver the product, if that product was food then people starve. This lack of competition is both bad for robustness as I described, and bad for efficiency since it means that people has to get their goods from the government and can't choose to get it somewhere else, so there is no selective pressure to keep the government deliver goods people want. You could say that other countries pressured them via war, but the people couldn't choose to buy American, the competition happened at a way too high level to matter.

Or rather, ultimately the people made their choice, central planning was scrapped and people could but American goods. So in a way the competition helped, people ultimately picked the superior option and the inferior option went under. But it took a very long time for that to happen, capitalism is way faster.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#774

Post by nlh »

zackmorris wrote: post #218

I've been thinking a lot lately about first principles. For example, the Golden Rule is great, but the concept of reincarnation transcends it, making it self-evident. The Book of Genesis probably started "in a beginning", not "in the beginning". And so on. When I look around at the state of the world today, it just makes me so tired. Everyone's running around on autopilot and not questioning the basic assumptions. It…

I presume you’ve read The Egg. I work with some folks who, like me, love it and we have adopted an “Eggist” mindset. Do unto others as you would (and will!) do unto your future self ;)

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#775

Post by CryptoPunk »

pjkundert wrote: post #39

This article is profoundly insightful. I have been searching for patterns and insights in this field for 25 years. What apenwarr concludes is true: All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation. The problem is, everyone wants distributed systems that require everyone else to agree (global consensus), which is literally impossible (see: CAP theor…

Enforced uniformity is the law. You cannot have discordance in law. You can choose to either institute law via centralized delegates, and make it mandatory, which is tyranny imposed by central authorities, or through a decentralized protocol that achieves uniformity through opt-in global consensus.

apenwarr prefers the status quo, and ridicules the new cryptoeconomic systems which make the latter possible.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#776

Post by beckman466 »

pjkundert wrote: post #519
davidw wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's part of the point of the article. Those rules are not some kind of distributed system. They are centralized.

Larceny (small- or industrial-scale) can only exist if counterparties are kept ignorant of previous larceny on the part of the bad actor. It takes centralized systems to keep people ignorant. In good, decentralized systems which demand long-term public track records of agent behaviour, with decentralized memory of these records, malevolent behaviour by an agent would rapidly make that agent incapable of future larcen…

> This requires centralized RULES (ie. widely agreed-upon standards of behaviour)

yes, or even clearer: the rules for any holochain app are visible/public.

whereas today we meet in Zuck's living room and he dictates what we can speak/do, using the holochain framework (an end-to-end, open source, P2P app framework) everyone holds a copy of the rules themselves and everyone does their own computing and storage. no more black-boxing of the rules/functions. no more straightjacketed client-server relationships.

wanna set up an app with your friends where you can tweet with 500 characters instead of 240? holochain has you covered. the magic of holochain is it's inbuilt forking functionality which makes repurposing and remixing (evolving) any kind of networked app super easy.

one more example to drive this home:

"What I want is to see Uber’s technology become a protocol. Same with Airbnb, same with Postmates, same with other companies in the gig and sharing economies. Same with lots of other important technology companies, while we’re at it. Obviously this can’t happen overnight, but if the technology is useful enough to provide real value, then it’s too useful to be subjugated to the whims of profit forever. I would love to see these technology platforms either fully decentralised, or centralised in such a way that the entity running it is not-for-profit and, ideally, accountable to all stakeholders. The actual mechanisms for making this work are beyond the scope of this post, but I want to throw this idea out there and get people thinking about it, because it’s the only way of making the future work for all of us.

I suspect — and feel free to call me naive, but I don’t think I’m wrong— that the majority of people working on Uber’s technology would prefer to build a system whose social impact they could be proud of. Based on my admittedly limited sample size of people I know in the tech industry, I feel like lots of people working at companies like Uber are there because they want to solve interesting technical challenges and deploy useful innovations in the world. I believe that if given the choice, most would prefer to build a system that makes the world a fairer and more equitable place. The problem is that this choice is, for the most part, withheld from them, and whatever individual intentions they may have are inevitably co-opted by the [current economic structure] in which they make their living. By working together to counteract these prevailing systematic forces, though, they may be able to open up a space in which to envision alternatives."

-- Wendy Liu, https://medium.com/@dellsystem/dont-put-your-faith-in-uber-7...

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#777

Post by CryptoPunk »

sva_ wrote: post #346
pjkundert wrote: post #39

This article is profoundly insightful. I have been searching for patterns and insights in this field for 25 years. What apenwarr concludes is true: All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation. The problem is, everyone wants distributed systems that require everyone else to agree (global consensus), which is literally impossible (see: CAP theor…

> https://holo.host > HoloToken (HOT) is an ERC-20 token I'm not sure a hierarchy in which the Ethereum Foundation, who gave themselves the absolute majority of Ether currency, is at the top, is the answer to the struggles/issues postulated in the essay.

Ethereum Foundation had at most 6 percent of tokens, and today has less than 0.3 percent, because it liquidated the vast majority to fund various software projects that made the Ethereum network possible.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#778

Post by int_19h »

Jensson wrote: post #771
int_19h wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with centralized authorities that has to be mitigated somehow is that, once they appear, they tend to accummulate more and more power, and inevitably become a bad actor eventually, even if originally they weren't intending to. A decentralized approach to this is to have the hierarchy of authority organized bottom-up rather than top-down. The hierarchy can then be toppled by "pulling the rug" at the bottom-m…

> The issue with centralized authorities that has to be mitigated somehow is that, once they appear, they tend to accumulate more and more power, and inevitably become a bad actor eventually, even if originally they weren't intending to. Which is why we have a democracy so that rulers don't have to worry about getting killed in a rebellion and people can choose a new ruler when corruption gets bad enough. This of cou…

What we actually have is representative democracy, where the choice is often nominal, and leaders generally come from the same class in practice (and represent the interests of that class). So the fact that people don't "vote them out" is not an indication that they don't care enough - they might care but not have the choice that would reflect it.

It is also susceptible to "don't let the other guy win!" type of propaganda, especially in FPTP electoral systems like the American one. So long as you can find enough emotional wedge issues to ensure that your base will never even contemplate voting for "the other", you can basically do whatever the hell you want.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#779

Post by beckman466 »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #752
nouveaux wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There's another word for "require everyone else to agree": Tyranny." I think this is often thrown out there to push back on liberals and socialism but this is the wrong point. We as a global society _need_ to agree to be productive. We need to work together to find the best solutions for as many people as possible. Everyone needs to agree that starting a nuclear war is bad. You would likely want to stop China from s…

Regarding specifically socialism, there was something about this article that immediately jumped out at me from being familiar with online leftist spaces. Each of the first six bullet points, as well as the last one, sound exactly like the kinds of things that I see leftists bringing up as the inevitable result of "late stage capitalism". The author even sort of admits this: > Capitalism has become a "success disaste…

what's wrong with socialism? in the early days the internet was mostly a fully distributed communist space. the physical internet structure itself is still distributed/communist. it was the Silicon Valley venture capitalist client-server model that enclosed the web and killed it's potential (until now).

i love the Telekommunist Manifesto by Dmytri Kleiner for it's fantastic and concise material analysis of the web, specifically the chapter Peer-to-Peer Communism vs. the Client Server State: http://media.telekommunisten.net/manifesto.pdf

video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YEzHDxn5nY

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#780

Post by CryptoPunk »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #760
sva_ wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://etherscan.io/stat/supply 72 million Ether were premined

Out of which 12 millions went to the Ethereum foundation. The other 60 millions were given to people who crowdfunded the project (and they did it using BTC). The ETH supply has more or less doubled since now. The Ethereum foundation holds today about 10% of all Ethereum and as far as I know they are "locked" in a smart contract. One can criticize Ethereum and crypto as much as he wants, Vitalik Buterin (the creator o…

The EF only received 3.5 million ETH initially:

https://i.ibb.co/54sS0NY/FFi-K9m-CVg-AETZNA-format-png-name-...

It holds 350K ETH at this point, or 0.3% of the ETH supply:

https://etherscan.io/address/0xde0b295669a9fd93d5f28d9ec85e4...

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