wyas

Original Hackernews article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17090733

If properly designed, the main net should really just be the test net. Any small issues should have been ratified on the test, and the chain should move to production without any issues. However, Tezos basically released a whole new product, without proper prior testing.

Worth pointing out: these guys worked for a long time off a very large capital-raise round to implement and run a test net, only to just replace it at the very last moment with a completely new main net.

The way they self amend is that they literally will just vote to replace a particular file in their implementation with a new one.

This is awesome. How can we access the code to play around with?

Cursory reading, they do seem to discuss limitations. They say that the system is not guaranteed to provide liveness for double-spends.

Seems like ambiguous wording on that part. However, they do not seem to require single-UTXO-inputs, but can consume multiple.

This seems closely related to the work on proving the Riemann hypothesis, where there has been work on attempting to show some quasi-crystalline structure of the zeta function zeros (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_hypothesis#Quasicrysta...). The Riemann hypothesis itself has deep consequences for the theory of primes. Cool stuff.

Very cool. Could standard Latex mathmode be used here?

Looks like the logo for a stop-n-shop-style grocery store.

There's a bunch of attack vectors, but most fall on the trusted publisher and client itself. IPFS and Ethereum are, by assumption (difficulty wise), ``secure''.

Assuming both client and publisher's internal systems are intact, then you have two attack vectors:

There's the false positive attack vector, where you can shut down the client's network access and force the secret to be prematurely leaked.

There's the false negative attack vector, where you can shut down the trusted publisher's network access, and indefinitely keep the secret ``safe''.

However, in general, the first attack is not as worrisome as the second for these kinds of application. The second is more worrisome, and there's many ways to distribute the trusted published using some crypto threshold scheme such that as long as no more than some threshold of the trusted publishers are shut down, the secret will be released in case of client shutdown.

Quick browse seems to be like so:

1. Client generates necessary files (including keys and payloads).

2. Encrypted payload is placed on IPFS.

3. Keys are placed on a trusted published (potentially single point of failure).

4. A smart contract running on the EVM continuously checks for pings from clients. If client doesn't check in over some pre-defined policy, then trusted published will be aware and publish keys to the smart contract, visible to everyone.

Preston has some beliefs that don't make a lot of sense, I agree. But his ability to reason about technical facts is not impeded.

There is no fundamental argument he makes that can be refuted soundly, besides just disagreements in opinion.

Attacks on the author aren't the best thing in general (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/Graham%2...)

Stablecoins are fundamentally broken and unsound. Ignoring the tech-stack that achieves price stability, and looking at them purely economically, the math simply breaks down.

This is a great writeup on Basecoin, but there's another player in town called Carbon (https://www.carbon.money/). Directly from their whitepaper:

"Carbon utilizes a decentralized schelling point scheme to achieve distributed con- sensus on Carbon’s exchange rate. Every 24 hours, also known as the rebasement period, a schelling point scheme is initiated where nodes submit bids for what they believe the true exchange rate of Carbon to be. Each bid is weighted by a collateral, denominated in Carbon. At the end of the 24 hours, bids are to- taled and the protocol takes a weighted average of the bids. Anyone who bids outside the 25th and 75th percentiles will have their balances slashed. Anyone within the 25th and 75th percentiles receive a normal distribution of the loser’s balances, with the highest reward distribution at 50% and normally diminishing on the right and left respectively"

This has security issues. Unless they own all the participating nodes, then -- as written -- this protocol has several ways that it can be gamed with enough Byzantine players so that the Byzantine parties are w.h.p. in between the 25-75 range and correct nodes are at the edges, which then get their funds slashed. They use several (also broken) mechanisms for contraction and expansion depending on the agreed-upon exchange rate, but supposing they are not broken, the true value of the coin can be gamed which then invalidates these mechanisms. We are truly so deep in mania.

EDIT: Also to add a bit more to Carbon: Hashgraph is also simply a BFT protocol that requires a permissioned setup. If we are going to deploy a smart-contract-enabled stable cryptocurrency on a permissioned network, then it is unclear why this complicated and unproven stack is even needed.

This is surely not true. They say they have 4 treadmill desks, and I suspect their conference room can fit more than 4 people.

I'm sorry, I don't follow. They are just saying they have treadmill desks that you can use. Not that all desks are treadmill desks.

> Our conference room is made up of 4 treadmill desks that face each other so you can do a walking meeting while seeing a presentation, rain or shine.

First time I'm hearing of these guys, however I'm not sure where -- if anywhere -- it says that only fit able-bodied should apply. In fact, the words "fit" and "able" aren't even anywhere in the page. The title of this post is incredibly misleading.

The company seems to have a culture of being incredibly health conscious. I'm very health conscious myself, but yes, to be honest, their method turns me off. However, I'm sure there's people out there that share the culture and values of this startup, and would work well here.

This post just seems to be meant at instigating online fights.

Unproven tech. There's nothing but a whitepaper to analyze its claims.

> Most academic CS literature is complete BS

Thats complete BS. Certain journals are complete BS, and certain subfields of CS are superfluous and often times lack substance in publications. But CS literature, from top tier journals, has vast merits.

Care to elaborate why HBR is awful? Article needs to provide more evidence that political regulation from rent-seekers is higher than ever before, but ultimately there's nothing that I would consider "clickbait" here.