iskander

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There are a few counter-examples and Czechoslovakia is definitely one of them.

The Catalan and Basque independence movements, however, have been successfully contained by Spain. They lacked external support and could not compete with the strength of state suppression. If a neighbor ever chooses to get involved we might see independent Basque and Catalan countries.

My parents have gone to watching Fox News regularly and my in-laws are MSNBC junkies.

It's brain rotting and emotional content that should be socially treated like a drug, keeping viewers addicted to drama and outage.

Every country has regions with distinct cultural and linguistic identities. It often takes an outside power to enable them to split away.

Like with Ossetia, Abkhazia, Transnistria, &c the central actor is Russia, not the regions themselves.

Diverse L2 layers sounds like hell.

Where's your ETH?

Evenly sprinkled between StarkNet, zkSync, Arbitrum, and the thirty competitors that will pop up in the next few years.

These all seem different though.

None function with anonymity by default and you can't sell or even transfer most of these memberships.

I wonder if part of the divide on the "utility" of NFTs involves "internet native" culture (assuming the reality of pseudonyms without need to pierce the veil and use a real name).

> if youre not extracting a profit from people enjoying the art, why are you advocating for it? what is your skin in the game? if youre only advocating it to get rid of it by selling it, i dont think thats a genuine advocacy for the piece.

There's an emotional state associated with having paid money, sometimes a lot of money, for something which makes you want to get something in return. That something can be as simple as collective discussion of the art you bought, or propagation of its image into the real world through murals and commissioned derivatives.

It doesn't have to be a speculative interest in re-selling, though I agree that most people entering the space are exclusively interested in the latter.

Is there a non-blockchain equivalent of gated access to resources based on ownership of a token? People do this a lot in the NFT space (access to certain chat channels based on owning an NFT), is anything like that happening (rather than theoretically possible) outside of crypto?

Re: #3, there isn't really a meaningful oracle problem now that there are reliable oracles.

You can make synthetic assets which track prices of e.g. stocks. There are a few different protocols in this space, such as https://synthetix.io/. The biggest hurdle, I think, is regulatory -- is it legal to make and trade derivatives of $synthIBM and trade it like derivatives of $IBM?

>The limited edition art is really just tracking receipts - you can do that over email if you want and it really doesn't have to be public. Non digital art does fine with private receipt tracking. You can also have a dedicated database that charges art owners a maintenance fee, and tracks who the current owner of each art piece. Basically free tier AWS.

I think this is a misunderstanding of what happens when a collection is created through a platform like Art Blocks. The generative code is frozen on chain, every minted image has a verifiably random initial seed, and each image is generated from the composition of these two elements. The number of random seeds which can occupy an "official" slot is preconfigured and cannot be later increased.

I promise you that this has significant impact on the feeling of working on generative art and what you think of as the final outcome of an art project. It cannot be replicated through some kind of ad-hoc receipt system that lacks algorithmic guarantees and is subject to modification or increase at any later point.

Re: limited editions, I'm not talking about monetization. As someone currently working on a big generative art collaboration, I think knowing that the output will have a finite set that is considered canonical is an essential artistic constraint.

No problem!

After a year of playing around with crypto I think I'm appropriately both skeptical and excited, which is hopefully a good starting point for non-trolling conversations.

Infura is a single RPC endpoint, the underlying network it talks with has 5k-6k clients: https://www.ethernodes.org/?synced=1

You can choose one of ~20 different free RPC endpoints: https://ethereumnodes.com/

This doesn't include private or paid RPCs or just running your own.

I'll try to engage without pulling us into familiar debates.

I have found, in a year of intensive use and research around the Ethereum ecosystem, here are a few things I like that wouldn't really work without an underlying immutable distributed ledger:

1) Creating limited editions of generative art.

2) "Forever" art like on-chain pixel and ASCII art.

3) Frankenstein-like adaptations of traditional fintech constructs into a decentralized implementation, such as AMMs.

Also, the more I learn about the zk-rollup space (STARKs and SNARKs) the more curious I get about the possibilities there. You can, for example, have digital treasure hunts where whoever finds the treasure can generate a proof without revealing the location. So far this is just cool without having an obvious killer app, but more than anything else in the crypto space I think there will be killer apps emerging from this technology.

By volume, I agree with critics that it's mostly bubble-chasing, gambling, and scams. It might be healthier for everyone if the tech & art experimentation were walled off from investments. At the very least, we probably shouldn't have crypto exchanges advertising -- really nothing interesting comes from luring Main Street to buy and store Doge on a centralized exchange.

>In an instance where an L2 is compromised, the potential impact is limited to the integrity of data that individual L2 was contributing to the overall platform.

I think distinction is only meaningful as long as L2s remain a niche curiosity while the majority of transaction volume resides on L1. If the L2 plan succeeds and almost all volume passes through an L2 and one of the major L2s has a bug like in this post, then a large fraction of all ETH could end in the hands of hackers.

The ledger would accurately reflect the moment that a bad actor lifted e.g. 5-10% of the ETH supply off an Arbitrum or StarkNet bridge. Technically the L1 is uncompromised but a lot of money would be "redistributed".

This is a concerning aspect of Ethereum's strategy to push scaling to layer-2 networks: Ethereum is a heavily audited and tested protocol that runs an extremely decentralized network of diverse clients. L2s can be...an AWS instance running arbitrary buggy code. Much of the confidence in the "base layer" that people using Ethereum currently experience will be significantly undermined if mundane transactions wend in and out of different L2s.

There are very few exchanges left which don't require KYC and even then the real final step is cashing to some kind of bank account. I don't think crypto->fiat privacy is possible beyond a certain level of wealth.

They mention chain hopping and privacy chains. Maybe they slipped up using ZEC and made some of their transactions public?

It's not just the voting mechanism, it's also the crowd-raised treasury and culture of dev-centric leadership and internet community governance. People seem to like pooling money in this way, even if it seems silly you probably can't stop them from wedding this model to LLCs and stepping more solidly into the legal framework of corporations.

I think a few DAOs are so divorced from physical concerns that they can remain on the internet and direct resources there without needing a corporate shell.

But, as soon as money flows into the real world, they will need to figure out how to create and interface with traditional entities, or...like you said, it's very ICO-like.

DAOs are a bit fluid, even evasive, in definition but there are plenty out there (e.g. VitaDAO) which essentially function as an alternative organizational structure to traditional corporations. To function outside the crypto space (or really legally at all), they have to at least create shell LLCs which are governed by DAO decisions. Very few DAOs seem to get that far and instead choose to operate in the greyzone. As the space matures, I think we'll start to see a few large corporations which use on-chain voting in place of shareholding meetings. Whether this will otherwise cause any meaningful differences in how companies operate remains to be seen.

Similar experience in my family, father-in-law spent 18 hours waiting in a ER. Needs a biopsy and imaging which are taking weeks to get done because, as several doctors have admitted, the hospital is both overwhelmed with Covid patients and short-staffed due to infections among doctors and nurses.

Wallets != people. Without proof of personhood, you never know the distribution.

I went to UIUC and paid ~$6k / year in-state (not including living costs). That has now increased dramatically to ~$20k/year. And, obviously, you still have to pay for living costs while you're a student and the part-time jobs typically available to you don't pay very much.

That's not quite right. The JS source code is committed on chain via a contract interaction and every minted token gets a token hash which, when run through the JS source, can recreate the art.

But...the execution environment is still your web browser and non-animated Art Blocks NFTs still have a "preview" stored off-chain like most other. Neither running the code in your browser or retrieving the preview is an on-chain operation.

Some NFTs are stored this way (e.g. Blitmaps, Terraforms, Corruption(*s), &c); it's a more restrictive artistic medium since storage costs are high and technical limits feel like a trip back to the 80s. If you can fit nice art into the constraints then it can become quite popular/valuable since fully on-chain NFTs are actually decentralized (rather than the more common practice of linking to an external image).

Are there any chains whose clients can run successfully on a cell phone, avoiding the need for intermediaries like Infura?

Does a recursive zero-knowledge rollup like Mina create a sufficiently small state to remove the need for client/server distinction?

This is the most thoughtful critique I've seen of the web3 space because it engaged meaningfully with the stated intent of web3 as a movement (and found it somewhat lacking on its own terms).

Speculation generates 99% of the noise in crypto but technology does keep moving forward. L2s were just whitepapers a few years ago, now there are multiple full featured optimistic rollup L2s (e.g. Arbitrum); zkRs, which are much more complex, are getting close. Lots of complex applications are now running on single-app StarkNet (e.g. derivatives platforms like dydx) and like you mentioned, the multi-app network is in alpha.

There are tons of them, looking at the top 20 coins here: https://coinmarketcap.com/

- Solana - Cardano - XRP - Terra - Polkadot - Avalanche - Polygon

That's the majority of actual chains in the top 20, since many of the rest are tokens running on top of other chains (USDT, USDC, SHIB, BUSD, &c)

In general, starting a clone of proof-of-stake Ethereum is a very popular way to make a new chain.

As for the philosophical point, PoW isn't really different. It takes tremendous capital investment to produce enough hash rate to ever mine a BTC. These are all more or less systems in which the rich get richer and the not-rich get to gamble.