jamespitts

A better way to look at this kind of product would be: TV with an API.

Now apply this orientation to any device which you would connect to the TV with an API. Speakers with an API. DVD player with an API. Device to interact with my Apple TV... with an API.

Imagine what wonderful things would be made possible by such a class of products. I would pay a lot more for this, and I know that many others would too.

Cryptocurrencies are a divisive issue, perhaps stemming from our overly-strong preferences, biases, and prejudices.

I have been participating in the Ethereum community for many years and I agree that there is a widespread belief that decentralized tech and economies run on smart contracts can substantively address social problems. Additionally, in the wider crypto community there is a widespread belief that these networks are a way to restore fair money.

In most cases I don't think that these beliefs are post-hoc rationalization. Rather, it is simply motivating to think this way. "woo" is a longstanding feature of any new human endeavor because most of us are psychologically wired to think that what we work on is going to be helpful, and we build a little religion with each other in order to cohere and quickly get the work done.

Regarding the question whether decentralized tech will make the world "better": it can and will in some cases -- for very specific reasons -- but IMO widespread adoption of platforms like Bitcoin and Ethereum will also lead to many new and terrible social problems.

As is the case for every major technology unleashed on our world.

Focusing on the over-positive views of enthusiasts won't stop them, and certainly won't stop the progression of the tech. People will keep building on something new when it can be built, when it is wildly interesting, and when the endeavor is sustainable.

What we need to put more attention on is what to do with the outcomes. It is our responsibility to do so! How to replace the services the tech will disrupt with options that have qualities we desire: more fair, less expensive, more secure, less arbitrarily alterable, etc.

And we need to put more attention on the ways it could all go wrong and bring widespread harm.

Here is more information about current NFT-related standardization efforts in the Ethereum community:

https://www.nftstandards.wtf/

Discussions about proposals & implementations are happening here:

https://ethereum-magicians.org/tag/nft

There will always be people who choose a field for success, and they are more likely to flee when it seems unsuccessful.

I was once connected with someone who was just getting started in his career. He was entering the tech industry as a software engineer, having graduated w/ a CS degree from a UC in 2000 or thereabouts.

This person had majored in CS because of the late 1990s tech bubble, yet felt strongly at the time that it was not a good field once the tech bubble burst. I was aghast, not only at the reason he chose his path and the waste, but also at the idea that a bubble pop would send him out of the field so easily.

He ended up going into real estate just as that field bubbled into insanity, God bless his soul.

The copy of a digital image is 1:1 with the original.

Not in the case of an NFT. Accompanying the image data is a cryptographically-enforced means to assign control to a user / key holder.

This control is either over a single, unique art piece or over a certain number in a limited set of duplicates of the art piece.

While the image data can be seen as non-unique, the user can be confident that the copy which they control represents ownership of a unique asset with the ability to trace provenance back to the artist.

I should also add two more important pieces to this:

1. In-person meetings and real-time calls have been a major part of the work. There is an agenda and very good notes are taken during these sessions (https://github.com/ethereum/pm). The calls have been essential for coordinating in a more formal setting and to get a feel for when consensus is achieved on a particular topic or proposal.

What threaded forums later added was the ability for others to get involved in the discussion, particularly those who are not core developers or not able to attend.

2. Another important medium has been GitHub issues (e.g. https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/2315). Proposals are submitted as a PR and, earlier in the evolution of the governance process, many people would comment on them. These were not ideal due the flat nature of the format.

What generally changed on GitHub issues in recent years was the encouraging of commenters to go to an external forum thread (https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/2315#issuecomment-63...), leaving editors and authors to work out structural and other basic issues about a proposal in GitHub PR comments.

You're welcome! I've only played a small part in this amazing phenomenon, mainly DevOps and community-organizing. But it has been amazing to do anything to help.

I can't agree with this essay more.

In the early days of the Ethereum community a lot of open coordination was done on reddit and a threaded forum hosted on Vanilla Forums. Initially for privacy and convenience, Skype, gitter, Discord, and Telegram began to take hold, and later became the primary place for open, public discussions and some decision-making as well.

Threaded forums were still used but not central. It was a difficult era (but a lot of work still moved forward)! There emerged a kind of opacity due to ability to put attention on real-time threads, and IMO sometimes key voices were missing because they could not weigh in effectively.

What changed the dynamic was the introduction of Discourse for the critical https://ethresear.ch discussions (set up by Virgil Griffith), and later https://ethereum-magicians.org (something I worked on). I was pushing for threaded at the time because of experiences I had here on Hacker News, reddit, and Slashdot. The person I collaborated with, Greg Colvin, wanted discussions like the threaded emails he was used to from the IETF and c++ communities.

We each knew from long experiences dealing with coordinating on tech issue remotely that the quality of the message is the medium.

From those successful experiments / re-introductions, many teams then began to adopt and host Discourse instances. Later, DeFi picked it up for their governance / coordination discussions. Of course, real-time never went away, with more gravitating toward Telegram and Discord. But tracing the emerging thinking, hashing out differences on what to do, and re-activating stale discussions improved a lot.

Threaded discussions are a core part of the community and work again.

Congrats1 This was always a dream of mine to get to this with raptfm.

Definitely consider creating a preset which positions the users around an object or in relation to each other when they first arrive, e.g. "conference meeting table" or "trailhead".

Another one is carefully composing the physical constraints within a space, especially when others are present. In virtual, social boundaries no longer hamper us from flying around or other behavior which can alter how a shared space feels for everyone. It may be necessary to impose rules of movement to preserve the main premise of communication.

I see a lot more housing options ahead.

Even though many of us understand the issues around pseudonymity in our various tech and gamer scenes, this is a generational flash-point in general society.

During the 2008-9 crisis I learned that the failures and responses could be understood in the context of mass computational problems.

Before a crisis, the system moves along w/o having to fully process everything; this is because a low-fidelity understanding of value and status of securities and agreements is sufficient for participants to operate. However once the crisis has begun, new dire weaknesses and new structures require much higher fidelity to guarantee safety. The participants find that there is much more to compute than can be computed in any reasonable timeframe.

This is why the monster-sized purchasing programs by lenders of last resort are somewhat effective; the are enabling everyone to function by delaying the difficult financial computations.

Perhaps one reason is competitive differentiation. When everyone is carrying the same generic items, price becomes the main factor. Liquor stores generally fight in that space. For neighborhood grocery stores, eye-catching and better quality produce and meats can be a draw for customers.

Relevant Tweet by Denis Rystsov, author of "CASPaxos: Replicated State Machines without logs": https://twitter.com/rystsov/status/1118201415577419776

It won't be the ugliest color for long. This choice will have unintended consequences.

Rather than focus on the dollar stores, the city should focus on itself and its role in the problem. The structure of the street, zoning, parking requirements, vast distances between living places and stores, etc. are key to the existence of the big box stores.

The structure chosen by the city planners years ago literally makes the big box store feasible to economically exist, and reduces the feasibility of mom and pop stores with healthier options. Besides encouraging terrible food options, this situation has generated numerous other social and health-related problems.

Take a walk in the poorest neighborhood in your region which has small-width streets, walking distance between homes and stores, stores on the sidewalk, and terrible parking options. In that neighborhood, you will find fruits and vegetables being sold by mom and pops, and far less prominence of dollar stores.

The properties of the general medium and of exchanges themselves would provide value if built upon. At the core of of the value proposition is the value derived from more efficient human coordination.

- Giving certainty about the properties of the token asset to the user. Whether trading the exchange or in use at a service which accepts the token, the user verify what the token actually does. And what might change! Reduces risk of policy-change by owners and managers of services.

- Giving control of the token asset to the users, or at least a verifiable level of control. Reduces risk of interference.

- Securing the token asset, protecting the asset and related data. Reduces risk of loss.

- Enabling easy integration or migration to other smart contract systems, due to token standards like ERC-20 and ERC-721. Reduces risk of vendor lock-in. Powers beneficial second-order effects.

- Enabling composability. With primitives like various kinds of tokens and "exchange" addressed and standardized, new layers can be built, new configurations found. Creates value by reducing steps for users as they engage with each other within token-based smart-contract systems.

Answering why is up to you, the builder; differentiation is key to why 0x has created this protocol.

"Tokens" can be a special kind of object which can be "exchanged" for other kinds of objects. It is not always about purchasing or swapping; this interaction can solve many different kinds of coordination problems.

The exchange can create a context around users interacting via various types of tokens, enabling new kinds of services and communities to form. This could lead to enormous value for users.

This is why I love Taiwan, so many interesting shops.

Small store size, walkable streets and alleyways, cheap rent, not many rules about what you can do. People will take care of the rest.

This is a classic case of what happens when key parts of doing business have a low-cost and low barrier to entry. Diversity and interestingness take hold.

Comparing Electron to Flash in this way brings in the reader's mind other considerations than performance, primarily closed source and security vulnerabilities. It is a misrepresentation, perhaps unintentional. The article should be entitled: "Electron has performance issues".

I respect this perspective about non-military origins of the internet, and perhaps it is true in the context of "ARPANET as a separate effort than the Internet".

However, the motivations driving the development of this technology are more diverse than scientific and engineering. There is clear-as-day evidence of military and military-related conceptualization and funding in computer networking going all the way back to defense initiatives in the 1950s.

An early 1960s Baran paper needs to be cited when discussing the origins of the Internet: "Reliable Digitial Communications Systems Using Unreliable Network Repeater Nodes".

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2008/P1995...

This paper clearly extends computing and communications work done at RAND and the Air Force on SAGE, and it is likely that this strongly influenced what ARPANET became. Reliable Using Unreliable would at the very least drive or be used to support funding of ARPANET.

The "military origins" perspective is elaborated on in Ronda Hauben's "The Birth and Development of the ARPANET".

http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/ch106.x08

The author of the article mis-represents a goal or rationale behind reducing the block reward:

This new update reduces the mining reward from 3 ETH to 2 ETH which will reduce the yearly inflation of the coin. The goal of this is ultimately to drive the price higher, as we know that when there is less of something it becomes worth more.

This is a common point of view, but not universal and the effect on price has not been brought up in deliberations amongst the core devs AFAICT.

The rationale for lowering the block reward is described in EIP-1234 as:

In order to maintain stability of the system, a block reward reduction that offsets the ice age delay would leave the system in the same general state as before. Reducing the reward also decreases the likelihood of a miner driven chain split as Ethereum approaches proof-of-stake.

https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-1234.m...

Board members have a different level of culpability than the management at the firms which they help govern, due to the kinds of decisions they are commissioned to make and the information they have access to. Board members may also find themselves misled by management.

As part of the governance process, Walt Mossberg does bear a certain amount of responsibility for what Facebook management has allowed to happen on their network, and I interpret his action here is part of his taking that responsibility.

The author decries that governance and tragedies of the commons are for inert resources. This is not the case, but perhaps this thinking pervades software projects. We can learn from Elinor Ostrom's economics work, as well as from Christopher Allen's thinking/writing about the commons of open source projects in particular.

Ostrom’s Design Principles for Collective Governance of the Commons

http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2015/11/a-revised-ostroms-de...

This is thorough and useful research, thanks for posting it here. Too often people weigh in without reviewing the relevant material.

I have X-Posted it to https://www.reddit.com/r/ethlaw/comments/8hpjbx/if_eth_isnt_... for feedback.

(I started this subreddit last year to encourage those who have a legal education or experience to comment on issues emerging in the community.)

A classic read! With smart contracts and other decentralized tech, the nature of the firm and it relationship with stakeholders is about to be utterly transformed.

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

I see it in effect there now already; people are buying and carrying around these collapsable silicone cups and cute cloth cup-holder things. Like a lot of things in Taiwan (particularly if related to food), it seems to have gotten trendy.

Swarm is another overly-common one :)

But really, what does any brand name have to do with what its product actually does? Microsoft might be the most important exception LOL.