buckie
Joined 12 years ago
Joined 12 years ago
As an example, the heat wave in the northwest of the USA and Canada this year was something I remember reading about as a problem to expect ~2050. Ditto for Siberia this year. Ditto for the snow in Sao Paolo.
I hope my concerns are misguided. I general though, short of a deus ex machina, I have no hope for the world doing anything about the climate emergency, even after it's obviously too late and even after the worlds seen a major city burned/wet bulbed/typhooned off the map.
Bitlicense isn't a disaster, but it's a huge problem if you're in the space that you really do need to be careful of crossing. Crypto has a meme factory but not a lobbying strategy, and even if it did it's up against two near immovable objects: old school finance lobbying and being an easy target/distraction in the press.
We should just be thankful that Bitlicense wasn't adopted elsewhere and give up on NYC as a hub for this stuff. Until crypto grows beyond finance AND legal combined (legal will lobby with finance if asked) in terms of who makes money in NYC -or- crypto allies itself with another major mover (maybe real estate), don't expect things to ever change for the better.
It's a shame really. NYC would be leading crypto if not for this law. But then again, NYC doesn't care because tech is probably the 5th or 6th largest revenue generator in the city and has few/no generation spanning connections to Albany.
Agreed, but I'm not pointing at the factories. Consumers _can't_ lobby congress or control the media narrative. Factories don't lobby congress nor spin a media narrative designed to distract attention from those profiting off dumping the externalities of the business models onto the world.
I'm pointing at the corporations (the sum actions of their boards & C-suites taken as a single entity) that own the factories and reap the rewards. I'm pointing at the people that have effectively "won" capitalism and then took it way too far by changing the law and controlling the narrative to make sure they stay in power no matter the costs.
I hope there's some resolution that doesn't require a revolution, though I suspect we'll just do _nothing_... then it'll be a mega-clusterfuck the likes of which we can barely imagine... and maybe after the first 10M-100M deaths due to famine/heat/fires/storms we may figure out that we need to do something... and it'll be too late and/or that something will be another major war.
But before that western society gets to decide how to handle storms/crop failures/droughts driving the largest human mass-migration EVER (Central America => USA, Africa/Middle East => Europe) during a period when resources are constraining.
[1]:https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...
Instead of having X PH of PoW difficulty for a single blockchain, you have N parallel blockchains with ~X/N PH difficulty. Same energy needs, N*single chain performance. The coolest bit being that N can increase in an upgrade w/o needing to increase energy consumption, should the network gain traction and need more throughput. It upgraded from 10 to 20 chains last summer.
Other cool bit is that each chain runs a formally verifiable LISP (Pact)... I jokingly refer to Kadena as "a multithreaded LISP machine in the sky".
Disclaimer: I designed the Chainweb consensus algorithm
Narconomics[1] has a pretty good discussion of the economics (including recruiting) of cartels.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Narconomics-How-Run-Drug-Cartel/dp/16...
In the context of how the politics of upgrading a bank's stack work, "driving" is the wrong word because in that context there are always people trying to drive "innovation". A better word is tailwind. Generally, banking tech is pretty crappy and good technologist can easily spot places where a big upgrade (aka "innovation") is warranted. The problem these people run into when lobbying for the upgrade is overcoming the hurdle of migration risk. The bigger the project, the bigger the hurdle. For JPM, I've heard this hurdle was summed up as _demonstrate a 1000x return on investment_.
Blockchain (via cryptocurrency) provides a tailwind to the people already trying to drive "innovation" in 2 ways -- it gives these people two additional angles:
1. As much as banks dislike spending money they hate losing market share. The risk blockchain poses helps in the lobbying for "innovation" without being a central point.
2. Higher ups can have the opportunity to be seen as "innovative in blockchain" by having the main "innovation" have a pet blockchain PoC on the side (similar to [1]) that's only kinda taken seriously. While the first bite at the apple (the upgrade) may not be enough this second bite (PR about them using blockchain) may satisfy them.
Does blockchain/cryptocurrency actually drive the discussion or make it into the final "innovation"? Probably not... today's gen 2 stacks just aren't good enough. Hopefully some gen 3's can change this in the next few years but that market still needs to be proven[2]. In the meantime, when dealing with a big bank's bureaucracy, every extra knot of tailwind helps.
[1]: https://www.swift.com/news-events/press-releases/22-addition...
[2]: Disclosure: I was at JPM working on blockchain back when Gemini (now called Quorum) was first purposed and when Juno was the headline JPM blockchain project. I left to co-found one of these next-gen platforms: kadena.io
The SEC has a well informed and nuanced view of crypto that underpins their restraint on the matter which, in no small part, is due to Ms. Szczepanik. If you're looking for an example of what happens when you don't have someone like her then look no further than NY. NY just jumped in and messed everything up with the Bitlicense.
FYI we're hiring haskell devs to work on our private consensus layer (based off of Juno), our public consensus protocol (http://kadena.io/docs/chainweb-v15.pdf) and our smart contract language https://github.com/kadena-io/pact + formal verification system. [email protected].
REST APIs + a DB can replace most "private blockchains as a time-stamper" usecases but here's the thing they can't do: replicate and trustlessly execute user logic. It's almost like you said _we're fixing SQL injection by making it irrelevant and making SQL into a full language_.
The blockchain itself just provides the trustless/high assurance substrate to then have trustless logic execution.
I've always been of the opinion that their sharding effort would fail, but I want to stay well informed. Sharding POS is very hard because the "trilemma" is correct for POS (kadena.io / explorer.chainweb.com being the example that the trilemma is solvable if you stick to POW).
Layer 2/zk-rollups will only help successful dapp devs lower their gas costs (see: DyDx). It doesn't relieve the pressure on layer 1 as other apps/patterns move in until a new equilibrium is reached.