TheColorYellow

"It also asks the Federal Trade Commission to report on acts of political bias collected by the White House"

Is this not similar to the approach and actions of other large State actors out there that hold a lot of authoritative power?

Its an interesting thought experiment to assess in what ways Twitter is a "private website".

It really is a public web space that is operated by a private company, but I can't help but feel that the nuances and similarities of what Twitter really is and what responsibility they truly hold in society is above the courts comprehension.

To me the usage of "immutable" is to imply some element of verifiably provable data exists in the database or system. Persistence would rather imply data longevity in the face of disaster, downtime, or under load, etc.

Not the greatest use of terms but that's how I view it.

What about cyber capabilities?

For a hot war, China seems underequipped, but this doesn't seem the most relevant anyways.

Cyber and proxy war-like capabilities seem more important in this day and age. From what I can tell China leads in cyber capabilities versus the US. And they've been able to expand in the South China Sea without much retaliation so far, so maybe they're even doing alright on the other.

What's your typical strategy for parsing something like a large text file for some relevant data?

Suppose you could cat and grep, but what if you don't know what you're looking for?

I'm not super familiar with Heroku and similar platforms, but if I don't rent EC2s (which I take to mean what you meant by "VMs"), how do I host and serve bespoke backend components?

Even if all it does is suck data in, perform some computation, and send it off somewhere else - are you saying there are SAAS providers that are better equipped for this?

This feels like the best advice in this thread.

Two questions:

1. What are your refresh tactics and any advice for what makes a good refresh?

2. What strategic advice would you give for preparing for that mid-life break?

What do you think after the transition? Do you miss dev work? Has your sales role been good or worth the change?

This isn't available across most of the world.

Also would this work if you try going from say, Swedish citizen/bank to German citizen/bank?

Has the network launched? Is the community active?

Haven't heard much of anything tangible since they raised funding.

Unfortunately Ethereum is still the leading layer 0 product for a world super computer.

SEC commissioner has alluded to the idea of a three year safe harbor for crypto tokens followed by a whole lot of regulation enforcement that would greatly open the door for these types of activities.

Technically the blockchain that would be referred to in the GP is more than just a data type. It would also include the algorithm for deciding the next block of valid transactions.

I think the reference is supposed to imply that the consensus mechanism built into the system is responsible for dictating the validity of a transaction as opposed to a human.

This is a great point too. There is always two sides to this story and often the other side is the budgeting office.

Its difficult to see all perspectives in organizations and operations as complex as this.

That's generally why management gets paid what it does. Although they're not any more immune to this exact problem...

Who would you point out as a steelman? I'd love to find a proper, thorough critic of the Austrian school.

It's a fair question. The answer is that systems like this - that are real in their offering and not a pipe dream - are not promoting to replace traditional databases. Blockchain is a terrible term with tons of baggage so let me describe what I mean in more detail.

These solutions in my mind are better described as distributed systems that allow independent verification and audit of data and transactions from within the system itself.

This is useful when the data being shared involved spans multiple entities in terms of responsibility, ownership, value, and other impacts. Rather than having to rely on other mechanisms of verification the system itself is able to provide that verifiability at scale.

Essentially you're using a technology layer, which is a collection of existing concepts put together in a somewhat novel use, to disintermediate more expensive verification solutions.

I think it makes a lot of sense if you examine the value chain of securities lending (from creation of the instrument, custody, to lending, custody transfer, and finally audit and compliance).

> Can anyone explain what "blockchain" brings to the table here compared to traditional banking? If you want to distribute money to everyone, you want to verify real-world identities, which seems like the exact opposite of the typical use case blockchain is paraded around for.

Private, permissioned "blockchain"-like technologies (the kind being discussed in the enterprise market) would give you exactly the type of identity solution you need.

A shared inter-bank ledger that individuals could register accounts with, which also incotporates the appropriate level of privacy and authorization, would enable seamless verification and transfer activities at scale.

This is awesome content. Any chance you have a book you could recommend on this subject?

This makes no sense to me.

The clear answer is that is unfair for our system to pay critical employees so poorly.

The federal sector can't compete with the private sector on value fulfillment - and that is a major problem, not a feature.

To me, the War of Art has an interesting perspective and take on this problem. It approaches the issue of "creating art" by viewing it not as a simplistic problem, but a very deep, innate, almost spiritual issue. And thus it takes what feels to be a different approach to solving it.

This is a simple, and thus great, way of using Makers incentive structure against itself.

While specific to the MakerDAO ecosystem, it effectively highlights the complexity and challenge in adequately creating a decentralized governance structure.

Essentially, to remove centralized control, you must structure incentives such that the system ultimately acts as intended, but there is always going to be ways to subvert the incentive structure. The goal is that costs of conducting such activity are too much to be reasonably conducted.

It seems that these systems will take years and years in the wild before their incentive structures are iterated upon enough to finally get to a point where truly large business value will flow through it. Exercises like this are useful in either disproving this whole concept or incrementally improving it.

I would take it a step further. What you're talking about is incremental improvements to traditional services or products.

What the poster above you is getting at, whether they realize it or not, is that they are trying to identify markets where ML could exist solely as the service or product.

I don't think the latter is ever going to be possible for ML much like that same comment alludes too.

Maybe makes ML a bit less sexy, but also is probably true of any innovative technology.

I want to call out this attitude as incredibly entitled and related to the exact root cause of all the open-source drama we've been seeing lately.

What's happening to EOS?

They've got a gagillion dollars in funding. What's the problem they're facing.

Bitcoin maximalism is a distracting and inept attempt at making something, that is no more than a conspiracy theory, the fundamental basis of a "next-gen" financial system.

Thought this was fascinating when I read WON.

Worth mentioning, Smith was primarily concerned when anyone had an unfair market advantage that would ruin the state of equilibrium.

> Everything is HARDER TO DO when done through a blockchain

Could you explain?

PKI is solves the issue of identity. It can't solve all the issues around accuracy, consistency, and provenance when it comes to data sharing.

Ignoring the idea that you think it's a cheap endeavor, my bigger point is that putting every single bit of the responsibility on a single entity is a tough challenge.

Help me out here, I really don't see how a traditional database could solve the problem today.

If you have various different, independent actors that operate in a shared environment but with distinct roles, how does traditional DBs help you do anything that isn't already being done today?

For example, sharing data between those actors is still a heavy duty process. Trusting the data coming to you from other actors is still a high risk area, even if they aren't intentionally acting maliciously. Determining actors who have acted in poor faith without trusted and transparent data sources is incredibly difficult as well. How do you overcome these issues and come to the point of a centralized DB either? Who's going to own that central DB and pay for everything going into and out of it?

So in that way, I don't see your point about how a traditional or central DB could solve these issues. I agree with all your other points, and I certainly agree the buzzword charm is heavy as always with this topic, but I don't buy that part.

Happy to hear otherwise. Full transparency, to me, it does seem like DLT has an enterprise value so I'm a bit more of a homer than most.

"There’s nothing being done here that couldn’t or shouldn’t just be handled with a traditional database."

Okay, I'll bite. A few questions that I think lead to the idea of a DLT system being an appropriate fit:

If it's a single

Supply chains aren't really owned by a single entity, right? Walmart may be the biggest actor and driver of requirements but they don't own anything beyond the specific services they are paying for. Its a complicated system of actors - which is where something like a DLT or blockchain can help bring together in a more cohesive way.

Agree with everything else you said.

This is the biggest factor in why a "centralized" database or even a distributed one for that matter doesn't adequately provide the same value that IBM is bringing here.

This also quite obviously a DLT solution and not a blockchain...but it seems like a lot of people are missing that point in this thread.