anonisko
Joined 5 years ago
Karma
210
Submissions
72
Member since
Jan 1
Recent submissions
Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
Node centralization is a lot less concerning for monero because the privacy by default nature of it makes it very difficult if not impossible to censor transactions. Even if stupid large blocksizes results in only a handful of datacenter sized nodes running the network, there's not much they could do to try to denylist particular coins.
However, node centralization does still carry the concerns about powerful actors being able to arbitrarily change the supply issuance and debase holders without explicit taxation or seizure.
Comment · 5 years ago
Megacorps are starting to think about creating their own currencies (FB diem).
We stumbled into accepting dictatorships in the emerging virtual realms without even realizing it.
Comment · 5 years ago
I thought "blocklist" was the replacement for "blacklist".
Comment · 5 years ago
Too many people support the development of powerful weapons without considering what happens when their enemies get a hold of them.
Comment · 5 years ago
Depends on whether you agree with what the people in charge define as a 'good thing'.
In a democratic government, you might like how a powerful tool is being wielded when your people are in charge, and be terrified when the 'other' is in charge.
Comment · 5 years ago
Yup. That's why I say generally.
Even if the paper is correct it seems to fall into the 'moving down the continuum' category.
Comment · 5 years ago
Dear lord no. I can see how it might come across like that.
More drawing attention to the wider theme that we generally should not take people at their word when we have the option to demand proof of work that can't be faked or mistaken.
Don't trust. Verify.
Comment · 5 years ago
Basically, the tax code is used by governments as an incentive mechanism to manipulate entities into behaving in ways they want.
Comment · 5 years ago
"Broken" generally isn't a binary event in cryptography.
It's a continuum from "impossible to do with all the time and energy of the universe and the most advanced computers we have" to "my commodity hardware can crack it in a few minutes".
The same goes for fears of quantum computing breaking current cryptography. It goes from effectively impossible to "yeah, we could break it with a few years of constant computation, which is plenty of time to switch to quantum resistant schemes".
Comment · 5 years ago
Reminiscent of Craig Wright's claim to be Satoshi.
It doesn't matter what you claim with words if you can't back it up with cryptographic evidence.
Shut up and prove you've done (or can do) the work.
Comment · 5 years ago
The whole paper is linked, https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/232.pdf
Comment · 5 years ago
I've got a feeling that Elon is the kind of person who would only be happy with death on a battlefield, bested by a worthy opponent.
Comment · 5 years ago
A farm is an income generating asset. Farmland is a commodity that does nothing on its own.
An electronics manufacturer that uses gold is an income generating asset. Gold is a commodity that does nothing on its own.
Comment · 5 years ago
The problem with Facebook is that it's not exclusive - there are tons of alternatives.
Some even have better features (think Twitter or TikTok or Discord).
Nothing is stopping people from launching Facebook2, Facebook3, etc and having the same technology available - yet Facebook is the major player skyrocketing.
This is an example of the market being irrational longer than expected, in my book.
In fact, it's so absurd that it was literally the first public comment Satoshi received. https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/th...
> We very, very much need such a system, but the way I understand your proposal, it does not seem to scale to the required size.
As a simple example, suppose every one of the 7 billion people on the planet make only 1 transaction per day. With a basic transaction size of ~250 bytes, this would require a blocksize of ~12GB per 10 minute block. (check my math)
"But storage is cheap!" I hear some say. Even if you could dismiss the cost of storing an aggregating ~600TB/year, that's not the real bottleneck. Bandwidth and processing power are. You have to broadcast that 12GB block to the entire global bitcoin network as fast as possible to beat other miners to the award. Then all the world's full nodes have to do the work of processing that 12GB of data to validate it. All within an average 10 minute window.
And this is all based on the absurdly conservative assumption that every person only makes 1 transaction per day. It's not even considering the use case that billions of machines might want to transact with each other billions of times a day. Or that you might want to build micropayment systems for metering. e.g. http://andyschroder.com/DistributedCharge/ or https://twitter.com/JackMallers/status/1346869624789463040
And even if you could solve all these problems, it doesn't get around the fact that blockchains as a payment system are a really shitty experience compared to existing solutions. You have to wait an unknown amount of time for your transaction to make it into a block before you're safe from a double spend. That time is 10 minutes on average, but in reality, it could be anywhere from a few seconds to over an hour because mining a valid block is a random search that averages out to 10 minutes based on an ever changing balance of real world hash power and mining difficulty value.
The only way blockchains were ever going to be interesting at scale is as a rock solid, incorruptible settlement layer. Decentralized layer two networks like Lightning are exciting because they have the potential to create a trustless payment network that directly settles to the blockchain. Even more exciting is that lightning can span separate blockchains and sidechains, e.g. BTC<->LTC, BTC<->USDT (and future CBDCs?), or BTC<->lBTC/rBTC. And they can actually scale to an arbitrary number of transactions that don't need to all get recorded forever in the base chain immutable ledger.