syzygyhack

I echo your observations. I expect you will enjoy deepseek-v4-pro for writing code. Much closer to that Opus experience, and very cost-effective too. With 5.5 as a reviewer and specialist, all bases are covered.

"seek an eternal perspective" is such a beautifully open way to posit that concept.

There's a lot of nihilism in the world, and this is the way beyond it, whatever flavour your salvation happens to come in.

I laughed a little at calling Firedancer contributors "a team at a HFT firm".

Not that you are technically wrong, not at all, that's where Jump came from. It's just that this is all completely blockchain-driven optimization, but the b-word is so dirty now that we've gotta go back to using TradFi for the rep.

Some great resources here. One thing I want to point out: Rustlings follows the path of The Book and provides references for each section where appropriate. So I would not advise treating them as separate learning paths. They work best when used to reinforce each other.

You want to use Bitcoin to make international payments without headaches... so you open an account on a custodial service? I don't understand what you expected to happen.

All you had to do is download a wallet and transfer your Bitcoin directly.

That's news to me. Looks like the US is speaking for the world again. You have bigger problems with your food than whether or not it is plant-based, I promise you that.

In the UK and the rest of Europe, plant-based meat alternatives have been growing in popularity, quality, and variety over the last decade. It's never been easier for someone to go vegan without "giving up" their favourite foods.

Lot of nonsense in the comments, absolutely nothing wrong with the taste of Beyond. Problem is that it is outrageously expensive and the market has become saturated with plenty of more cost-effective alternatives, many of which taste even better. There was a time when Beyond was the only really "good" option, that is simply not the case anymore.

When I see those 2-packs of Beyond Burgers on the shelves in the supermarket, they are marked down 40%, and they are still more expensive than a 4 pack from other brands. Makes zero sense to buy them.

It's not a magic wand. It facilitates new decentralized systems, it doesn't somehow fix the old ones.

You're assuming a world where digital content is administrated and supported by a centralized organization. If they stop respecting the license, it becomes worthless, no one can argue otherwise and no one is trying to.

A world where digital content is administrated by anyone (including by the user themselves) and interops with other services (games, social apps, or otherwise) does not see the assets suffer or lose value when one such service shuts its doors. They can just be taken elsewhere. One game goes down, a fork goes up, etc.

Blockchain does absolutely nothing to fix what's broken with today's systems, it provides the infrastructure for the alternative.

That's not the only difference, it's not even the most significant difference. The difference is you don't own anything on Steam. Just like you don't own anything digital you buy on Amazon. If they want to revoke your ability to access content you paid for, they can and do.

In principle (not always in practice), crypto protects you from that.

You sound like you'd enjoy TypeScript with NodeJS. Low learning curve. Highly productive. Massively versatile ecosystem. You can be functional or OO. And of course, the type system, which will feel similar to C#. It's very fast and obviously JS being the language of the web is a natural benefit too.

Nim is a great language with some killer features, but if the community is growing, it's doing it very slowly.

TypeScript would have my vote. I have my eye on Deno and Bun but they aren't there yet, Node gets the job done every time.

Just the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon at work! Or perhaps a synchronicity, if you are inclined to believe in such things.

A similar thing happened to me the last time the Strid popped up on Reddit and HN. It was only a day after I had just returned from a popular walking route which passes alongside it and the Abbey.

Bitcoin absolutely has had hard forks.

There isn’t a “Bitcoin classic” chain floating around with an old set of consensus rules.

Yes, there literally is a Bitcoin Classic, and prior to that was a Bitcoin XT. There's also Bitcoin Cash, and many others.

Even excluding hard forks which were chain splits (so upgrade only), there have been several. There were two hard forks in 2010, one to add OP_NOP and one fixing a critical bug where anyone could spend any Bitcoin. There was a hard fork in 2013 (BIP-50) because a block broke a limit and at least one double spend occurred.

Why comment if you aren't educated on the topic? Or rather, why actively spread misinformation?

Ty for your service foo.

Sounds like you haven't wrapped your head around the basics of smart contracts.

Yes, a blockchain gives you an (ideally) immutable foundation. No, that doesn't mean that every transaction that invokes a smart contract has to be immutable. If a smart contract for a particular use case needs to have the ability to "backtrack", so it can, there's nothing stopping it.

I'm not going to be argumentative here

It does help when you check the numbers before making your assertions.

Clearly coinbase would have a bias to promote userbase

You discount the post because it is from Coinbase, yet every point made is backed up with up-to-date sources from firms you have already deemed appropriate, such as CipherTrace and Chainalysis. That's an... interesting perspective to hold. A bit of cognitive dissonance going on there, methinks?

How do you think those scams will cash out ? Next step - Places like Tornado.

From your own sources, usually exchanges which implement KYC/AML policies equivalent to traditional banks. Did you actually read them or do you just plop a few keywords in Google and hope for the best?

And the 'Facts' given ignore services like Tornado.cash. Conveniently wouldn't you agree ?

You think so, do you? Yet in your other source (https://www.unive.it/pag/fileadmin/user_upload/dipartimenti/...), we get this nugget:

However, in spite of the money laundering risk associated with cryptocurrency mixing services, tumblers are used for lawful activities more often than for illegal ones.

You don't seem interested in a rational or data-driven discussion so there's little fruit to harvest here, I'll leave you to your imaginings.

You simply can't argue that money laundering isn't rampant on cypto currencies.

Actually, I can quite easily argue that. Neither of your sources give evidence or numbers that justify your assertion.

In fact, less than 1% of transactions are shown to be illicit activity, and the majority of that is scams, not money laundering. Here's a report from your 2018 source, CipherTrace, only using more recent data: https://ciphertrace.com/2020-year-end-cryptocurrency-crime-a...

I quote:

Cryptocurrency, with its similar characteristics, may likewise struggle to ever completely shake its bad reputation, despite illicit transactions making up less than 0.5% of Bitcoin’s yearly volume in 2020.

A more important clarification, which is precisely the reason I used blockchain instead:

Crypto != cryptocurrency.

You conflate the two several times across this thread, they are not the same.

With that aside, I'll ask again. Can you show some figures that back your assertion that there is a "high rate of money laundering flowing through crypto[currency]"? I would assume not, given that the very firms actively working with regulators and monitoring this activity disagree with that assertion.

Here's a nice, sourced writeup for you so that you can spread accurate information and not assumption construed as fact in the future: https://blog.coinbase.com/fact-check-crypto-is-increasingly-...

I do however have an issue with the incredibly high rate of money laundering etc that flows through crypto.

Incredibly high relative to what exactly? The total exchange volume of the cryptocurrency industry? Can you show some figures to back that assertion? OR are you talking relative to the global economy? In that case, it's not even a drop in the bucket.

Clearly the Tornado Cash team should have simply started a bank instead, then they would only need pay a fine and carry on.

Your vitriol against Tornado is misplaced, though not surprising given the general ignorance regarding the blockchain industry on HN.

It's an interesting problem and one that many decentralized applications will be forced to contend with, beyond simple airdrops. Many on-chain protocols and primitives simply don't need to differentiate between human user and program, but the ones that do are usually crippled if they fail to adequately do so. Quadratic funding mechanisms, for example.

I believe we're still very early on this front, there's lots of opportunity for innovation in terms of Sybil defense. Dox Your Customer is the easiest and naturally the most at odds with the Web3 paradigm, but there are others that make fewer compromises which have been tried with varying levels of success. Vouch networks/social graphs, attestation or reputation systems, video identity registries, recurring cost, time-coordinated Turing tests, etc.

I am certain novel approaches will continue to emerge until we land on something robust without sacrificing decentralization or the right to privacy.

For Bitcoin, yes. For other networks, ZK and optimistic rollups are the main contenders.

The decentralization of PoS depends entirely on initial token distribution.

It may undermine why you want to use USDT. I don't see why it would affect your desire to use DAI, for example.

The point is that you can have it any way you like it. There are no hard and fast rules like "irrevocability" as described above.

You can have a contract be not updateable, final, and verify its source code to know there are no malicious functions. Or you can have one that is updateable by its developer. Or one that is updateable by an elected authority. Or updateable by a DAO of the contract's users. There's no single way to do it or perfect solution.

Like most software development, it is the understanding of application requirements and selection of tradeoffs.

But what if that system is now affecting many other people, or the entire planet in a significant way? Should they have some voice over that?

This is an important point you are making. What you must recognize is that they absolutely can have some voice over that.

Just as we can write software (or smart contracts) that allow no one to update and fix such issues. We can write software that allows one person to do it. Or we can lock the ability behind a multisig, requiring a majority of the software's developers to do so. Still not good enough for the use case due to far-reaching trust ramifications? Then we write code that delegates the ability to trigger such an update to the entire userbase of the application.

In the world of contract platforms, you have to keep in mind that contracts and the tools that you can build with them are primitives. They are composable. There is no problem in building a DAO to control the ability to update a contract (or trigger arbitrary functions to remedy critical situations caused by unexpected and undesired state changes). This is already done in practice in various applications--and sometimes with undesirable outcomes! Of course, these are still experimental times and lessons are still being learned.

Weight by wealth? You are failing to understand the basic concept of a hard fork. Social consensus doesn't care what your number on the blockchain says.

Case in point, the Hive hard fork.

One very prominent and widely unliked individual purchased majority ownership of the STEEM token. Weighted by wealth, they could now control the chain, its governance, and most notably unlock tokens (20% of the supply) that were (per social consensus between Steem and its community) not supposed to be unlocked.

So, what did the Steem community do in response? They hard forked the platform, launching Hive. All STEEM holders could migrate their assets to Hive, except the individual in question who attempted to takeover Steem via wealth. The malicious elite was cut off entirely. Today, two years on, Hive is still gaining in activity and has more than twice the market cap of STEEM. Comparatively, Steem has become a ghost town.

You're missing the point. You don't need to rollback past transactions that make unwanted changes to the contract state. If you have the ability to update a contract, you can add whatever functionality you need to undo a given state transition. You invoke the new function with a new transaction. The old transactions don't suddenly not happen. Your new transaction simply reverses the state changes, making it as if they hadn't affected the state at all.

It's likely that you aren't considering this possibility because, of course, the average token contract does not do this. It would be a significant trust violation if a contract controller circumnavigated the need for signature checking or allowance setting in order to perform arbitrary token transfers. That does *not* mean the possibility for it to be done does not exist.

At the end of the day, token balances are just key-values in the contract storage, and how those values are changed is enforced at the contract code level. That code can say whatever its controller wants it to say, and if they deploy with the ability to update, they can alter the code as necessary in the future. Token contracts are extremely simply, easy to audit, and so are seldom deployed to be updateable.

To summarize, "irrevocable outcome" is not a fundamental trait of a smart contract application. It is a choice at the code level, with tradeoffs, which can be adapted to suit the application.

Wrong. Smart contracts can be updated. If they are deployed with the ability to update, any outcome can be revoked. It is as simple as adding a new function.

Not at all. If a self-interested minority emerges, the majority can fork away anew (see: Steem & Hive).

But the same irrevocability is now what makes me deeply concerned.

Strange hang-up to have. Irrevocability is not a trait that is fundamental to blockchain applications.

If the application is smart-contract based, irrevocability is a choice at the source code level. Just because one transaction in a block is irrevocable doesn't mean that another transaction in a future block can't undo whatever arbitrary state change was committed in the first. It depends entirely on what you make possible in the contract code.

Neither does the claim hold water for L1s that are the application (e.g. Bitcoin, Monero, etc.). If the entire Bitcoin core development team turned rogue, social consensus from the broader Bitcoin community would soon establish a new canonical chain. Hard forks can be and have been used. This is blockchain 101. Cryptographic and economic guarantees are not fundamental; the social layer is.

The way it has supported the development of practical zero-knowledge proof-based applications alone is worth the weight of the blockchain industry in full, and then some.

Not sure it has made it worth wading through the 2017 hot takes that HN continues to insist on upvoting though.