riprowan

Block space is always a little bit of a bidding war, even with zero fees. That's because each additional byte added to a block increases the time it takes to propagate the block by just a little bit.

When miners find a block, they race to get it published as quickly as possible to as many nodes as possible. If A finds a block, and stuffs it full of transactions; and shortly thereafter B finds a block, and includes no transactions, B might actually "win" the race because B can propagate his tiny block much faster than A. So each txn added incurs a tiny penalty just by virtue of adding to the payload.

they decide which fork to run

In reality most hashpower is pooled and pools autoswitch between forks depending on which is more popular in the moment. So most people running miners are mining all forks.

the validation that ensures that consensus is maintained between nodes

That's a terrible misunderstanding. If nodes can reach consensus by simply agreeing on transaction validity, then what purpose do you believe miners serve?

The definition of a node is provided in Section 5 of the white paper mentioned in OP. The logic that explains "why you must mine in order to be a peer" is explained in Section 4.

Non-mining nodes are trivial to Sybil, they are "one-IP-one-vote" per Section 4. Only miners are "one-CPU-one-vote." That is why nonminers (what you call "nodes") are not peers to the system, but rather leeches / relays.

Isn't a node a process on the network that is mining blocks?

Yes, see section 5 of the white paper referenced in OP. It is quite clear what "peer" means in the context of Bitcoin. Others are mistaken here.

A peer is a node, which is a client that validates all transactions and blocks in the blockchain.

According to the white paper, Section 5, a peer is a miner. That has not changed, regardless of attempts to redefine the paper. To be a peer, you MUST contribute proof of work.

Running a non mining node gives you a copy of the blockchain data that you can trust is valid according to the rules you used to validate it. It does not make you a peer.

You're referring to isolated incidents, which is an invalid comparison.

Instead, if you have information that I have a pattern of murdering lots of women, and my friend has a pattern of murdering lots of men, and you choose to release information about me and not my friend, it immediately suggests that you support killing men but not women.

What language can be better peer-reviewed?

How can tainted evidence be used to establish guilt beyond reasonable doubt, when the entire basis of trust in the collection of the evidence is ostensibly gone.

I actually hate the sound of most of the Beatles albums. I think they sound crap by modern standards - tinny, rattly, clogged-up, mid-heavy mixes with no deep bass.

Of course the whole point of bands like the Beatles was that they stood "engineering" on its head, as it was understood at the time (actual scientists wearing actual lab coats attempting to capture sound as accurately as possible).

EMI engineers making classical records were trying to create photographic style recordings. The early Beatles records sound, mostly, like you're standing at the Cavern club in front of a late-1950s sound reinforcement system. Photographic.

The Beatles helped to change the idea of making "photographic" records into making records like painting on canvas. Together with the other influential artists of the time (Beach Boys, Pink Floyd, Mike Oldfield, etc) they transformed modern music.

When yo

Put them up against a modern trance single mixed ITB and the latter sounds huge, dynamic, cinematic, and infinitely more polished.

Which is better? It depends...

I think you make my point here.

If I were making a Crystal Method record, of course I would use a different signal chain that if I were making a Dawes record.

That's the whole point.

My view on everything related to musical art is summed up by Joe Meek:

"If it sounds good, it is good."

There is no one right way to make a record.

These are all amazing benefits, but when you're making art, you'll throw all of those out the window if doing so get you the sound you need.

The problem is thinking that this is either/or. I use a 48 channel ProTools HD system married to gear that's largely 40-70 years old. Best of both worlds.

It's just systems theory. The optimized whole is not equal to the sum of the optimized parts.

technically better system

Define "better".

"If it sounds good, it is good." - Joe Meek

all of those phenomena can be perfectly modelled in the box

Nope.

How you gonna model the interaction between a microphone and the preamp load it's driving, and the compressor that's driving, and the EQ it's driving, and the nonlinear summing bus that's feeding, when all of these are interacting in a live signal chain, and all entering various forms of nonlinear behavior based on the age of components, their tolerances which vary from box to box, heat, etc? It might be theoretically possible, but past a certain point, to model these devices requires modeling physics at the materials level. In point of fact most digital "simulations" of these sorts of devices are not simulations at all, but approximations that impart similar EQ, dynamics, and harmonic distortion.

I'm a dev by trade, been doing audio for decades too. I used to believe this was all modellable too. I think there's a tendency for people who are strong in digital signal processing but naive to what these devices are really doing to the signal to be overconfident in our ability to simulate them in realtime.

You can definitely achieve a reasonable facsimile! But if you want the sound of this console then you're going to have to make one or buy one.

There's a reason they never use actual data and measurements to prove their points

Artists use the most advanced measurement devices in the world: a binaural listening device connected to the world's most advanced neural net. The neural net is the best part.

Sorry. There is much more to sound than frequency response, dynamic range, phase shift, and total harmonic distortion -- and moreover, the "optimum" amount of each of these is not fixed, but depends entirely on the material and the taste of the engineer & producer.

You can get great sound "in the box," don't get me wrong, but ultimately there is, as yet, no substitute for the real thing. A saturation plugin is nowhere close.

To accurately simulate this device, you would have to practically simulate at the molecular level.

The workflow makes the sound. The lack of automation forces you to make choices. Forces your hand, literally.

You raise an excellent point here. A full-blown DAW is practically without limits: hundreds of tracks, unlimited effects on every track, any signal chain is possible.

But making art is about working within constraints. Most of the best art derives from the constraints as much - or more - as the capabilities of the devices or instruments used.

However there is a technical reason why these devices do sound different, and that is that they all impart euphonic distortion. Bass sounds "bigger." Treble sounds "clearer." Mixed tracks "glue together." Vocals "pop out." A sense of "depth of field" may be imparted. Technically speaking this is all "distortion" of the original signal.

This is a profound misunderstanding.

Euphony and accuracy are quite different. Euphony derives from nonlinearity.

These are not cherished for their accuracy. They're built to sound good, For this reason most of the best sounding records still make very heavy use of analog signal path.

I've been recording since the earliest days of DAWs. Yes you can do amazingly good things with a computer, but it is still not possible to build digital devices that "sound as good" IMO. After 15 years of living "in the box" as a mix engineer, waiting for modeling to catch up to hardware, I finally broke down when I realized that the best mix engines still don't compete with the best analog devices. Since that time I've become a convert.

For editing, accuracy, durability, price/performance, and maximum dynamic range through the mix bus, digital is king. If I were recording a symphonic orchestra I would absolutely use an all-digital signal path.

But if I want to make an expressive album like Dark Side of the Moon, I want to stick as much analog in the path as I can fit.

Why try to model chaos, when there's an old box stuffed with tubes and a zillion other nonlinear components?

Nobody - almost - builds devices like these anymore. It comes from the Golden Age, when engineers had different priorities, and the difference is palpable.

I can't believe I'm the only person to ask "what bit depth?"

There is a pretty big assumption baked into the title.

Edit: hi, I see that I made a mistake, can someone correct my misunderstanding?

Let's assume that's the consumption needed to optimize the functioning of the renal system. But is that necessarily optimal consumption for the whole body?

With no offense to your sister - who I'm sure is correct - hypothetically, maybe this could result in some other condition that a urologist might know nothing about.

It's almost as if quality of life and longevity are not primarily due to having the latest, most expensive technology; but rather by having access to practical, affordable solutions.

This is all 100% true yet still quite naive.

Bad M&As happen all the time. Good ones are the exceptions not the norms.

"Companies" are groups of people, and their leadership.

What the leadership wants very often has nothing to do with the company's long-term future.

This is all observable behavior happening all around us.

I'm right there with you. Long term Google product user here (Android, Fi, Gmail, Drive, Photos, Etc) and I'm winding it all down, except gmail which will remain my spam-mailbox.

This article veers between erroneous sensationalism and strategic deception.

I will attempt to debunk a few of the most important errors in this article.

In short, the author takes the position that the promise of blockchains is immutability; and that by hardforking, Ethereum proves that "immutability" requires trust:

We aren’t actually trusting the blockchain technology; we are trusting the people that support the blockchain.

We should start by observing that un-mutated Ethereum - Ethereum Classic - still exists. You can mine its blockchain and run contracts on its virtual machine. So whatever point there was to be made about the untrustworthiness of "immutability" seems false, since the "immutable chain" is still there chugging along. The only problem is that nobody actually wants immutability, once they really think through its permutations.

---

I will posit that "immutability" is a red herring. While some people did promise immutability, this was a false promise made by some people. Other people have instead said for years that consensus blockchains like Bitcoin are not - and don't need to be - in fact shouldn't be - "immutable." I will further posit that this is in fact the majority view.

In fact there is a perfectly clear reason why a blockchain might "mutate" and fail to honor the contract as it is written in code: the contract sufficiently harms the economic majority of miners and holders.

And that is why such "mutability" is not bad, but in fact desirable. Otherwise, all that is needed is the invention of some sort of poison contract, and then the network would be unable to administer its own antidote.

This is in fact what happened when someone mined some 90M Bitcoin in 2010 while everyone else was running code that considered these to be valid coins. Obviously, there was a fork, and the perpetrator's 90M Bitcoin were taken out of the ledger. And a good thing, too: if "the code was really the law" then those would still be 90M valid Bitcoin and the whole project likely would have been dead some time ago as the malactor would own something like 90% of the money supply.

The code was supposed to be the law. If you didn’t see the weakness in the software, that was your problem

Ironically, because this is in fact a true statement, the author's point is exactly wrong.

The code is the law - not just The DAO's code, but also Ethereum's code, on which The DAO depends. Ethereum code is not only also "law", but in this sense, it's the "highest law in the land" with respect to contracts executed on its virtual machine.

It should be patently obvious that Ethereum's code permits forks, "soft" and "hard." It should therefore be patently obvious that any promise of "unstoppable contracts" is simply overpromise. The Ethereum global VM came to consensus that The DAO was not just a failed contract (buggy Ethereum contracts happen all the time) but a failed contract so toxic as to be a threat to consensus.

So, by following one chain, a group of users may declare its will that The DAO contract be "held invalid." By following another chain, a different group may declare its will that the DAO contract be held "valid." Each group actually got its will.

---

Consensus blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin are not "immutable" and never were, in the sense that all it takes is someone to mine a fork, and the chain "mutates." This is the "permissionless innovation" aspect of blockchains: anyone can create a fork - though it takes a lot of hashpower to protect a fork from hashpower attack.

But on the other hand, consensus blockchains are immutable in the sense that nobody can compel you to follow a "mutated" chain and you are always free to continue to mine on the original chain. Moreover you can hold coins on either - or both - chains. This is the non-compulsory nature of blockchains: nobody is forced to hold coins on anyone's fork - though it takes a lot of money to protect the value of a forked coin.

Since anyone can create a fork, but it takes a lot of hashpower and coin holdings to sustain a fork, the system on the whole is highly resistant to - but fortunately not completely immune from - hardforks.

Even "contentious" hardforks. Like the DAO rollback.

The beauty is that hardforks provide automatic market choice. One day there's only one Ethereum, and the DAO attacker who holds a not-insubstantial percentage of the entire money supply. Then there's a fork, and everyone who held Ethereum now holds coins on two chains - Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, and can signal to the market by holding coins on one chain and selling them on the other - or hedge by holding coins on both chains.

Do we really want true "immutability?" In the case of Ethereum, the market of Ethereum users was offered a choice of either "mutated Ethereum" and "non-mutated Ethereum." Since the split, the market has fairly consistently valued "mutated Ethereum" over "non-mutated Ethereum" roughly 10:1 - and as the article points out, even "non mutated" Ethereum Classic found itself facing a hardfork. Uh oh.

Forks are good, because they allow markets to place bets on which outcomes they prefer. It's also good that it's really, really hard to create economically-viable fork.

Getting back to the first paragraph of the article:

on that day, after much deliberation and hand-wringing, in the aftermath of a multimillion-dollar swindle from his automated, algorithm-driven, supposedly foolproof corporation, Vitalik Buterin, then 22 years old, announced the ‘hard fork’ of the cryptocurrency Ethereum.

Vitalik is a respected developer. I think there's a valid argument to be made that certain high-profile devs carry more influence than is their due - but no developer controls any consensus blockchain - not Ethereum, not Bitcoin. Ethereum, like all consensus blockchains, is "controlled" by its ecosystem of miners and users.

"Devs propose, the market disposes." And we have seen - the market preferred the forked Ethereum.

By making that announcement, Buterin shattered certain tightly held assumptions about the future of trust and the nature of many vital institutions that make modern life possible.

I hope by now we see that the only thing that Ethereum shattered is the overpromise and undesirability of "immutability."

---

I hold in each hand a cryptocurrency.

In the left hand, I offer a truly immutable cryptocurrency. The economic fundamentals of this currency cannot be changed by the will of man even if things start going wrong with the initial assumptions upon which the money was based.

In the right hand, I offer a self-improving consensus blockchain-based cryptocurrency. This currency cannot be easily forked, but when it does, two things will be true: the market must value the change quite badly to stimulate a fork, and you will be permitted to hold coins on either side of the fork as you see fit.

Take your pick.

[edits: a lot of stuff - I got onto a bit of a long topic and realized it needed some editing. It still does.]

Also, when you buy a coffee you don't have to worry that it might contain spyware or malware.

The coffee also has, at best case, a one-use max.

this is the sad truth.

Twitter is a perfect example of something that could have worked as a small company with moderate expectations and a tight budget. Instead they presumed that "eventually" the money would catch up to their Fortune 500 ambitions, if they could just get enough eyeballs.

Welcome to the new "real world" of the "Long Tail," Twitter. Turns out that being the #2 social network, just like being the #2 music streaming service, the #2 ride-sharing network, or the #2 search result means a big step down in importance, reach, and profit potential in the Long Tail world (and being #50 puts you in a completely different zip code altogether).

Twitter created expectations that it cannot meet.

Can confirm: ~100M Americans run A/C all summer, and also in spring and fall, too. Most American homes have central A/C, so you cannot easily "enable" it only for the room you're in. The typical supermarket or office is ~20C in summer, many homes are kept 20-22C.

I never realized how much I hated this until I started spending a lot of time in a warm country that uses AC sparingly.

However in the hottest parts of Texas the summers are brutally hot and humid even at night, and the insects are a force of nature. AC is kind of a requirement. I would imagine that if AC were magically outlawed tomorrow, 90% of the population or more of most of the South would pack up and leave by the end of August.

given the rate at which people typically move, it's normally a wash

Right, the trick is to not move, but buy and hold.

You've hit the nail on the head.

The trick is to discover and curate small city life so that one can live in a small city without feeling like one went back in time. Then you get to have your cake and eat it too.

I'd be curious what is the source of the claim that "most cities have a class of elderly landowners..."

I suspect these are cities which employ controls to cap the taxes on the property owned by elderly people.

If the city employs an age-blind property tax, then elderly people on fixed incomes get taxed out of their residences, which is an equally problematic phenomenon.

If you subject you thoughts to strict formal rules of rational thinking, than it would be hard to manipulate you.

If the brain was fundamentally a linear processor, you might have a chance. But the brain is almost entirely a pattern-machine, and linear, logical thought is mostly an artifact.

Humans can be programmed like any AI. It just requires the correct stimulus.