cocktailpeanuts

The whole article took about a minute to load because apparently it’s being loaded from some decentralized network called lbry.

I would rather be the product and get a great user experience than a shitty user experience that sells itself based on some ideal that probably will not work economically in the long run. If a decentralized network you invested a lot of your life in becomes irrelevant, it’s worse than using a centralized network that actually stays around. And most “decentralized” networks have failed to show enough traction for me to feel secure about their future.

I see the “ipfs less” terminology as similar to the term “serverless”. Just like how serverless still has servers but the point is that you don’t have to maintain your own server, ipfs less does make sense in that you don’t have to run ipfs node to use it. But also just like how many people hate the term serverless, ipfs less will be hated by many as well. I guess at the end of the day what’s important is whether something provides value, and I think this is pretty cool technology in that sense. Just my two cents…

How would you know which stock photo was used for training? Someone may take a whole bunch of images they buy on a dark market, create a huge train model, and dump it on the public internet over torrent or something. And there would be no way to know which images were used to train the model

They will have to sell if the Bitcoin price goes down enough that their measly revenue from their obscure enterprise software can't cover the loss from their Bitcoin investment.

He can keep holding, but it will lower the morale of the employees as well as himself. Unless you think Microstrategy has completely become a hedge fund, they have products to build and they will even lose what's left of their customers if things go bad. You really think the guy can keep holding when he lost hundreds of millions of dollars through BTC? (At the moment he's still in the positive even after the crash, but I'm talking about when it goes down further) Also he can and likely will get into trouble with the SEC when things get bad.

This is not the first time Saylor did stuff like this. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2589923/update--micros...

If BTC price doesn't recover soon and falls further, Microstrategy is what will kill BTC. I don't know why BTC investors are so crazy about Microstrategy buying BTC (This would have never happened back in the early days of Bitcoin), but if BTC price goes down further, Microstrategy will be forced to sell their BTC by their shareholders. Otherwise the Microstrategy stock itself will crash. Also when Microstrategy loses too much money, they may finally have to shut down because they borrowed so much money from people just to buy BTC.

When Microstrategy crashes, along with them, the public sentiment for BTC will go to shit, and that will cause the crash of BTC itself since the whole recent price climb was based on the "institutions are buying up BTC" narrative. This is the scariest scenario. Once the downward spiral happens it will be unstoppable, it will be like the crash Mt. Gox caused, but like 100 times harsher.

What an idiotic essay.

What Osaka did has nothing to do with ambition, she did it because of the changing landscape of the media. Unlike the old days where athletes had to rely on press conferences to get their story out, nowadays they can directly broadcast their messages through their social media like Twitter, Instagram, TikTok or whatever, and shape the message JUST THE WAY THEY WANT, instead of getting tricked by sketchy reporters to be quoted in uncontrollable ways.

The author starts from this completely incorrect assumption (based on her own personal bias) and then writes a whole article about how people "should not be ambitious", which is her true agenda. Osaka has nothing to do with this writer's agenda, the writer simply "used" Osaka as a tool for her own agenda.

Ironically, this kind of idiotic "journalism" is EXACTLY why people like Osaka decide to not deal with the press. There's nothing to gain by giving these people the power to put words in their mouth, just to write articles that they were already going to write, only using you as a narrative tool and often times hurting your reputation to achieve their agenda.

And no, ambition is NOT a cult. It's the main reason why the humanity was able to evolve as fast as they did, and it IS a virtue. It's not for everyone, but telling people to get rid of their professional ambition while writing that on the NYTimes to promote themselves (ambition) is the most hypocritical thing ever.

It's kinda funny how this whole drama is for copying some "intellectual property" that anyone can easily build.

If you don't want your virtual cloud sandbox app to be copied easily, build something that actually is novel. For example see Stackblitz https://stackblitz.com/ I think they're going to completely destroy all these Replit-like models.

However, decentralized immutability means that nothing can be done should an unintended action occur with your account.

All that's needed is an elegant identity system that privately ties identity with transactions so that only the stakeholders can share their transactions while the ledger itself is public.

That way "Decentralized Immutability" can co-exist with mutability through law in case something terrible happens. You don't need to change the history, you simply need to make a court order to create an additional transaction that reverts the disaster. Just like how when a hacker gets caught stealing money, they are forced to send the money back (additional transaction) instead of deleting the original stealing transaction from the bank account and rewriting as if nothing happened.

The thing is, pseudo-Turing complete blockchains like Ethereum (and all EVM-like blockchains) are not really fit for this purpose because the entire logic is on chain. UTXO based blockchains like Bitcoin is optimized for this since each transaction can act as evidence trail.

This isn’t inherent to PoW consensus. In 2010, Bitcoin was CPU mineable on any ordinary Windows PC. It wasn’t until Bitcoin commanded a significant market value — which wasn’t guaranteed in the slightest — that industrial scale mining operations came into the foray.

This is inherent to the PoW consensus. Satoshi Nakamoto himself even said Bitcoin would end up in data centers because of this property. It's not that hard to understand why this would be the case. PoW is powered by competition, and competition begets scale, just like any other industry.

Your understanding of censorship resistance is gravely mistaken [1]:

Before making this kind of condescending comments, maybe make sure that you are not the one who's misunderstanding what I am saying? I was talking about what many PoS supporters think, not what I thought. Go ahead and re-read what I said.

Their (The PoS supporters) idea is that "because it's much more difficult to find PoS validators than PoW miners because PoW miners need to maintain a factory whereas PoS validators can just hide in their mom's basement and make money, it's more difficult for the governments to regulate PoS than PoW". And my point was that that was an incorrect belief.

My entire post was talking about this false sense of "censorship resistance", basically Pro-PoW and anti-PoS, and you didn't need to lecture me on your superior understanding of PoW. I understand everything you said, but you completely misunderstood my point. If you didn't get that by reading, maybe it's your reading comprehension problem.

"If a greedy attacker is able to assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes, he would have to choose between using it to defraud people by stealing back his payments, or using it to generate new coins. He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth."

- Section 6, Bitcoin Whitepaper

Just curious, has Anonymous ever threatened someone before attacking?

Maybe I'm wrong, I just haven't seen a top hacker who makes public threats before attacking.

Unlike Proof of Work based blockchains which require seizable factory infrastructure to break even, Proof of Stake doesn't need one.

Most Proof of Stake supporters see this as a good thing because it means there's no electricity waste and higher degree of "censorship resistance".

However what will actually happen is this "censorship resistance" is what will make the PoS blockchain as a whole get "censored", ironically.

Proof of Work blockchains, while wasting a lot of energy, can be regulated easily because the government can simply regulate the large miners in their countries. However Proof of Stake, because it can't be traced easily, the regulators will have to try to stop the entire blockchain as a whole.

Of course, it's impossible to completely stop it, but the governments can do a lot of things in their "anti-decentralized tech playbook" to make sure the adoption never goes mainstream. (See Tor, BitTorrent, etc.)

Maybe I'm missing something, but there is already the term "append only logs" which we use everywhere. How is this different from append only logs? Append only logs rely on cryptography to make the history transparent too. I skimmed through the website but couldn't find a distinction.

Also, the website format is kinda weird. As I reach the bottom of the page, it looks like this is a promotional site for Trillian. Maybe the confusion comes from here. What is this site really about?

I recently tried to sign up for Twitter API and the process is nothing like what it used to be. You have to give them a lot of information to even qualify, such as what you're going to use it for. It used to be that those were just some fields you need to fill out and you could sign up immediately. But nowadays the application process requires a direct approval from their team, which means they're monitoring every API account like Apple does with their app store. And if you like about your usage you are probably liable

Interesting that they don't do "GitHub by Microsoft", or "NPM by Microsoft". Maybe there's some insight in there somewhere...

Netlify CMS stores content on their cloud. This looks like it lets you store on your own git repository directly from the browser, avoiding potential lock-in.

Very cool. Every existing criticism about static site generators seems to be gone with this approach. Many interesting ideas in there, like the service worker instead of cloud, and an actual git flow in the browser. Looks almost like more than just a static site generator. This could get rid of the cloud itself.

I was looking to find an insightful article about the problems with Fediverse.

But I only found an article that rants about the toxic humanity.

This article has nothing to do with so called "Fediverse". It's so unrelated that the title almost reads like a click bait.

Is this a satire?

Why would anyone use this? The reason I think this sounds like satire is because the post presents the "there are NPM modules for doing iseven or isodd, but there's too much dependency" as the problem this is solving.

The ironic thing is, this service is creating a totally unnecessary "dependency" that's even worse than NPM dependency hell, basically you're relying on someone else's centralized API (which he proudly says he's planning to monetize) for something as trivial as checking even or odd, which I'm sure can be written in a single line of code with any programming language.

The "iseven", "isodd" NPM packages were ludicrous to begin with. This "solution" takes it to another level. Really, this is a satire, right?

Bitcoin needs a huge factory. ETH2 needs a billion dollars. I feel like a billion dollars could probably buy the factory you're talking about.

What you don't get is what comes after that.

In PoS, once you invest a billion dollars, you're set for life. In PoW, you invest a billion dollars but still have to keep investing more and more in order to survive. If you're complacent, a new upstart miner with innovative technology could swoop in one day with 10x more efficient mining method (it could take many forms, such as a closed source bitcoin node that does things much more efficiently yet still fully follows the Bitcoin protocol, or it could be a closed source hardware that they don't sell outside of their own mining operations, like Apple does with their own chips) This way the PoW network as a whole will keep evolving because of competition. In a PoS network there is no competition once you invest the billion dollars and it's a complacent network compared to a PoW network where everyone is constantly competing and comes and goes (those who can't keep up will get left out and leave). If you join a PoS network where someone has a huge stake collectively, you're basically joining a feudalist society where you're being ruled by a king. If you join a PoW network you're being ruled by entities that keep competing to show their competency. it's like the presidential election is going on for every block.

A Bitcoin miner that can 51% attack the network will need a huge factory full of mining rigs. A proof of stake miner who wants to 51% attack doesn't need that.

People are asking you why this counts as "on Bitcoin", and you've been saying throughout this thread it's because it has access to the Bitcoin ledger data. My point is that it pretty much sounds like you're using BTC as an "oracle" (and of course, you're using BTC as settlement, but that's a given, and also doesn't qualify as being "on bitcoin"). Stacks is a separate ledger that pegs itself to Bitcoin, not "on". "Smart contracts on Bitcoin" would be something that's entirely built on the Bitcoin ledger and every smart contract transaction is a Bitcoin transaction that settles.

see my comment in sibling thread. with proof of work, it's not just about money. proof of work mining forces miners to invest through future commitment, which means you can't just bring some one time money and gain influence. For proof of stake it's only about the present.

so it results in rich get richer In PoW, the same 'rich get richer' applies - miners can buy more mining rigs and thus it compounds the same?

In theory, if and when proof of mining actually becomes the mainstream vehicle for global financial transactions, simply buying more mining rigs won't be enough. They will need to institutionalize and reinvest heavily into their infra. The mining rig that could find ten blocks yesterday may only be able to find one block tomorrow if the competition becomes fierce. Since it's a permissionless system, if one miner starts doing it and makes a lot of money AND Bitcoin gets accepted as a legitimate payment network, other companies will enter the space and the competition will accelerate. That can't happen with PoS.

miners invest heavily in constantly innovating and investing back into the network In PoS, is this not exactly the same, if not even more true? Stakers are by definition highly invested into the network

The difference is in continuous investment vs. one time investment. With proof of work (again, assuming when these models actually work as designed), you will need to invest more and more into the infrastructure as a miner to stay profitable. As a result the entire network becomes more and more secure. But with proof of stake, the stakers do not have incentive to compete in this manner. With proof of stake, you can literally throw around money to gain influence over a network. With Proof of Work that's not enough because you have to "keep investing", so you need actual commitment to the future. That's much stronger security than a network made up of people who only care about the present.

PoW had decreased decentralization substantially to only happen in regions where electricity is the cheapest. PoS prevents this problem.

This is like saying "Riding car is dangerous because people can get hit by a car and die. Walking prevents this problem." There's always a solution for every problem. Even the decentralization. The only reason why that hasn't happened is because the Bitcoin network is not worth that much when it comes to its value as a payment system. That doesn't mean there is no solution. For example, using certain clever hashing algorithm, multiple miners can specialize and only do things that each location is optimized for. Mining doesn't just involve hashing. You can generate revenue through including more transactions in a block, for example.

having a lot of money staked doesn't mean it's secure. The security model of Bitcoin comes from proof of work, which most people complain as being waste. But it's not actually waste. It's secure because miners have to keep working hard and "wasting energy" because the network is worth protecting (and only if the network is worth protecting). With proof of stake, the stakers only need to make an investment once in the beginning, so it results in rich get richer, and the network is essentially "protected" by those who do not keep working hard to protect the ledger. This suffers from the same flaw that exists in the real world financial system. The whole system could collapse overnight like a domino if something goes wrong. It's much more unlikely for something like that to happen for Proof of Work because miners invest heavily in constantly innovating and investing back into the network. To summarize, in theory Bitcoin is secure exactly because miners "waste" energy. Without wasting energy, all the protection is just a mirage.

This is basically a bespoke blockchain that uses BTC as oracle. It's not a smart contracts "on Bitcoin". By this logic, I could write an ERC20 token on ETH and use some BTC state, and call it "smart contracts on Bitcoin".

What we need in 2021 is not this site, it's a youmightnotneedreact.com

You said these things were easy. My point is that it will be increasingly difficult to do so. Your comment about "If there's a will there may be a way" is not the answer because having a "way" doesn't mean it's easy, and that was exactly my point. Tor exists, but that doesn't mean it's easy to do Tor, nor do regular people use Tor.

unexpectedly to me suddenly puts the Hyper protocol's ecosystem possibly ahead of IPFS in user-friendliness and fun-factor at this moment

Actually it's been ahead of the IPFS community for a long time even when IPFS was all the hype. IPFS kind of stopped meaningful developments when they started doing ICO and focused on Filecoin. I know the founders of the DAT community have been very skeptical of ICOs and instead quietly focused on actually building the system and the community. Also the fact that this exists without any money incentive by default makes it a superior decentralized technology IMO.

These things don't work anymore. They recently passed a law that says all exchanges must report everything that flows through them, and that's just the beginning. If you think those cute stories like selling virtual cats to an anon will work in the future, you're being naive. The government has made it clear what their intent is. They will be regulating crypto circulation through on/off ramps, and every user of those exchanges must do KYC and report where they spent their money. If they do things like what you said, it will now legally be classified as money laundering.