cocktailpeanuts
cocktailpeanuts on Hacker News
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.
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...
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 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.
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.
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 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.
- Section 6, Bitcoin Whitepaper
Maybe I'm wrong, I just haven't seen a top hacker who makes public threats before attacking.
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.)
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.