casi

I enjoyed this article, i still never finished infinite jest as much as id like to. but this idea of burn-in is really interesting as a way to present ideas. I guess ill try again ha

CirclesUBI and proof of humanity UBI

Both basic income projects. Proof of humanity ubi tokens are more easily tradeable and meant to provide Sybil resistance to eth projects, but circles has a nice self contained design which is probably more interesting as a form of basic income/ community currency.

You can join a staking pool with as little as you have. Just like joining a mining pool with your laptop.

And you can get eth with gasless minting of nfts. Draw a picture and sell it. Don’t have to spend any money.

I much prefer this to burning up electricity which basically hands the network to energy suppliers and asic manufacturers.

I equally find it strange that people continue to come to hackernews- the Silicon Valley VC startup land - and can’t grasp that the infrastructure for programmable money might have some value. And write off p2p communication and coordination tools as zero-sum/ fraudulent games. And then wish for the government to ban other people’s jobs and hobby’s and communities because they don’t like it.

Blows my mind that people might spend their day coding, and night playing mmorpgs, and still not understand crypto. I guess we need better UX and storytellers.

Can’t really talk beyond Europe viewpoint, so might be different elsewhere, but here in the UK the left often talks of removing Westminster central control and empowering smaller local politics. I’m left wing/labour/union/coop worker and work in crypto, same with my colleagues. I really disagree with the projection that it is right wing ultracapitalist. It’s one of the best tools I’ve seen for cooperatives and community organisations

I guess there creator of dogecoin always saw it as a joke, so this isn’t surprising.

Cryptocurrency is about choice and voice. Coordination and communication tools. There are American right wingers with their tokens and systems they’ve designed. But there is also things like CirclesUBI which is much more socialist and gaining momentum in the Berlin indie art scene.

Of course if you aren’t engaging with the space you just see speculation and hear about hacks and crime and people who became millionaires. what you will hear about is what Silicon Valley vcs pour millions of dollars into things they want you hearing about.

But actually engaging with devs in the space and the different subcultures you can find people you get along with. You can find communities and daos doing things you are interested in and share your political alignment. Most people I know working in the space have European left wing leanings.

Also a reminder. You don’t have to spend any money to be involved. Write code, join chat rooms, work on things you enjoy and want to make. That is going to obviously be much more rewarding than gambling on the back of VCs bags.

People are always surprised when I describe how bad the internet connection I have is here in the UK. 3meg down 0.2 up. If it rains or is too windy the connection dies. I’ve spoke to bt and openreach hundreds of times but it never gets any better. I’m the last house on the end of a copper line and there is no interest in fixing it. Four years ago the village was supposed to get fibre, recently “delayed” again. I rely on the 3G signal, which isn’t much better tbh.

My Starlink arrives next week :) I’m so exited to be able to finally download some photos I put on google drive a couple of years ago.

That isn’t how it works.

There isn’t a cap on validators so you can’t buy up a fixed percentage of the network. More people can always join. You will be diluted over time unless you choose to reinvest(same as mining).

As we reduce the hardware costs and energy usage costs it becomes easier to participate in the network (especially via pools, same as mining but much much cheaper).

Being able to run a validator on a solar powered raspberry pi is a great improvement to making participation in the network accessible. We should see the exact opposite of what you suggest, anyone who wants to participate not having energy or hardware restrictions should make it less Matthew-effect-like.

PoS increases both the cost of a direct attack on the network as reorganised/51s are more expensive to perform with slashing mechanisms in place, and also removes the threats of supply line disruption by either nation states or cartels forming to control the flow of the hardware.

PoS is great.

I agree, it seems like results are getting worse, a few years back I could ask a question and get an answer. Now I don't even bother and go straight to sites to search, be it wikipedia/ github/ stackoverflow/ ebay. Googling for it is just a waste of time.

Youll be happy to hear there is a hackthon going on right now testing out the move onto PoS.

https://rayonism.io/

The policy has always been “minimal viable issuance”

Worth pointing out “initial investors” is anyone who sent 1 btc to the crowdfund back in 2014. It wasnt some closed off thing for vcs, anyone could participate. People just bought their tokens before the network started.

FTX (crypto exchange) was one of Bidens biggest donors last year...

Really excited for the gnosis + radicle combination, being able to give ownership of a repo to a dao will be cool.

Also https://daohaus.club/ has made it really easy to deploy a moloch dao for $1.

Totally agree with the article though, DAOs are starting to shine and it wouldn’t surprise me if those who went down the nft rabbit hole found their way into daos. we’re gonna see more things like community record labels running this way. There’s a ui/ux curve that needs working out (across all of crypto) but it’s really nice to be finally getting these things we imagined 5 years ago.

Similar I read a line a year or so ago (can’t remember where) that really stuck with me:

All anyone ever really says is “I love you” or “help me”.

I try remember this whenever I am frustrated with what someone is saying to me. You can’t always help them, and sometimes it’s hard to love them, but you can reframe where they are coming at as being from them not about you, and with that resist arguing and feeling insulted or threatened.

Plenty of people doing it, defi exploded in use last summer mainly driven by collateralized debt positions in combination with lending tokens.

Lock up ethereum -> borrow dai against it -> lend dai out and earn interest on it, withdraw whenever you want.

There are more complex yield farming strategies to get the best rates on your assets, leveraging them through debt positions and lending. There are pools to automate this like yearn.

There are now sites like alchemix where you can lock up your collateral into a lending pool, borrow against it, and the yield on the locked collateral pays off the borrowed debt position. Self-repaying loans!

Multiple times over the past year I have locked eth, taken $s to pay rent/buy stuff. Then come back later paid back the owed $ and get my eth back.

https://defipulse.com tracks the value locked in different protocols, it was less about $0.5 billion this time last year, now over $40 billion.

https://compound.finance/ https://oasis.app https://yearn.finance https://aave.com

This is a tired take, Vitaliks position is not any greater than anyone else and there is nothing stopping anyone who has contributions from having the same level of participation. It is much easier to participate than any other open source project i have been involved in.

Vitalik just happens to be very good at his job, consistently insightful, and a wonderful clear communicator. He contributes a lot because he has a lot to contribute.

There is a difference (with the introduction of slashing and user activated soft forks) in 51% attacks that revert finalized blocks. In PoW this type of attack would become cheaper as it persists, in PoS we have some defense that keeps making this attack expensive.

On top of that the costs of attack are much greater in PoS than PoW, making these attacks much harder to begin with.

https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html

Matic is not an L2 though, it is a side chain. The reason L2s like optimism are exciting is because they inherit the security of ethereum mainnet. (matic has its own consensus mechanisms).

The general idea is Layer 2s solve high gas. Most users will be using apps that run on a layer 2 and will make rare trips to the mainnet. The next thing being worked on is onboarding users direct to layer 2, and layer2 interoperability so you can move from one l2 to another

You can already use an L2 DEX to exchange tokens (and have been able to for about a year) https://exchange.loopring.io/

You can send L2 payments with https://zksync.io/

But those are limited to their applications. General purpose L2s arrive this month! with Optimism https://optimismpbc.medium.com/ and to be followed later this year by https://aztec.network/ and others.

With those we can redeploy code from mainnet to layer 2. With the apps on layer 2 the transaction fees will be fractions of cents and almost instant and a lot of the programs we have dreamed about but not been able to make become possible at scale.

Its an exciting time!

Most of the ethereum devs I know were bitcoin people first. Bitcoin is cool but you simply can’t do what you can do on ethereum. Remember Vitalik himself worked for bitcoin magazine and pushed hard for updates that would make his ideas possible on bitcoin, but they were repeatedly rejected. So we had to build ethereum instead. Now with ethereums success we are seeing people go back and say “bitcoin does this too” but it simply doesn’t. And a side chain, that isn’t inheriting security from layer one isn’t good enough.

There is a lot more bitcoin wrapped onto ethereum that there is on lightning. (Now 1% of total supply). Ethereum is eating bitcoin.

For sure, I completely understand the resistance a lot of people have to cryptocurrencies and blockchains, I imagine they can seem invasive or unnecessary to people who imagine them being imposed in their communities. The side people generally hear about is people speculating and making/losing money. The hyper-capitalism unregulated markets can be off putting to people because in some ways it is the worst of the society that we already have, but personally i see the tech as being very useful for social-democracy and allowing us new ways of working together and handling this money stuff that might actually help us escape that capital led world.

I'm definitely in the camp of it being up to those of us who work in the space to prove our point and deliver on what we've been saying. I really believe we are getting to at least delivering the tech that might make the ideas possible to explore at scale.

There will be waves of mania, price bubbles, bad crypto ideas, and the general internet scammers, but hopefully something good comes from it all. And I expect the space to be belittled and rejected until it is able to show its value, probably rightly so, we have big promises to live up to.

Just to expand on a few points:

Transactions getting stuck because of gas prices spiking: This was one of the main drivers of the 1559 improvement proposal which was recently accepted for the summer upgrade. Hopefully it fixes the UX around transactions and estimating gas fees.

On demand for blockspace: as the linked interview goes into, scalability has been the main point of research for the past 5 years and has come on remarkably, we should hopefully see improvements over the next few months and the rest of the year leading up to pos.

On making things more expensive than they should be: the goal is always make it as cheap as possible whilst maintaining security. Now, you may not value that security of the ledger, but others do. It will be cheaper than it is use right now, but it will always cost more than mysql. Some people value that, others don't. I would argue the constant demand for blockspace (and so the high prices) show pretty clearly there is significant demand for that security.

The decentralisation is about resilience of the system, security of the information, and transparency (but not surveillance). We cant fix money and centralised forces of money and power overnight (through id argue theres a decent number of ethereum devs working on projects around UBI etc) but we can try create systems that allow people to work together with infrastructure they know wont be pulled out from under them when they need it. There are payment networks for sex workers who get relentlessly hassled and accounts blocked by banks, there are ubi scripts that you can adapt for your own community, there are quadratic funding mechanisms that can help us fund public goods. Beyond the stigma of the hype-moon-kids hustling money and crypto-scammers that seems to get most of the media attention, there is good work being done to actually help people. CryptoKitties is silly, but it proved something. the nft hype is a bit silly now, but it is creating interesting royalty and distribution ideas that allow me to e.g. sell my music without needing a stripe account and a bank account either of which could decide they dont want we anymore and screw me over. That is valuable to me.

The monetary policy is becoming much clearer with proposals like EIP-1559 which has been approved for the summer upgrade.

But beside that, I can buy things with it, and I regularly do buy things with it. I pay people with it, and get paid with it. So that makes it money to me. Peoples experience with it make it something else to them. ether is more useful to me than $ (as a european).

There are services like Lido which is live, and RocketPool which is launching soon. You can essentially just buy lido staked ether (steth) on uniswap, steth is a token which represents staked ethereum and accrues interest via rebasing.

RocketPool would be the preferred method once it is live as it maintains the decentralised ethos letting people run rocketpool nodes and anyone pool any amount they want, like how mining pools work today (except running on a raspberry pi, rather than maxing out gpus).

Full nodes are around 500GB, so they do fill up faster than bitcoin does. Archive nodes are bigger, but you can get everything in an archive node from a full node as it contains all the proofs. There are other data pruning techniques, and lots of work being done on light clients for eth2 (so you could connect via a light client running inside an app on your phone, rather than the app connecting to infura/alchemy).

Though contrary to what people think about this being a weakness for ethereum, there are still ~10000 nodes running, so pretty close to the amount bitcoin has.

Its an area under active research though.

Vitalik actually has an excellent blog post on rollups. [1] As well as the Rollup Centric Roadmap posted last year which is a little more technically specific[2]. All the evidence/math is there to read, or in the developer forums.

Currently Ethereum has 15 transactions per second. Optimistic rollups can rollup 200 or so transactions per second into each ethereum transaction. Optimistic rollups are launching onto mainnet this month after successful testing for the past few months[3]. So straight away with ORs we can hit 3000tps. Then on top of that general purpose zk-rollups aren't far behind [4][5] and they can get into the thousands of tsp themselves.

Once we get data sharding on layer 1 this amplifies the number of rollup transactions we can handle pushing us up to ~100000tps (a combination of increasing how much the main layer 1 chain can handle, and this multiplying with the rollups). And then there is computation sharding further down the line which will push it up again.

This has taken so long and hasn't been seen before simply because nobody knew how to do it! The researchers have spent the past 5 years intensely working on it. But its actually starting to happen, and this month too! Which is pretty wild for those of use who've been working on it along the way, lots of previously unfeasible and expensive applications are suddenly going to be possible and cheap.

We scale up with rollups this year, then move onto a full Proof of Stake network (not DelegatedPos)early next year, finally ditching energy inefficient PoW to everyones relief, and we have a much greener, better distributed, easy to participate in, scaleable for mainstream use, beautiful ledger.

[1] https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html [2] https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-r... [3] https://optimismpbc.medium.com/ [4] https://aztec.network/ [5] https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/layer-2-scaling/

yeah backups are a case of "don't trust, verify"

Highly recommend https://www.rekt.news/ for reports on crypto hacks and rugs.