miracle2k

While its worth considering the power structures behind a project, and what would happen for example if Uniswap Labs decides to put their weight behind a particular fork, or proposes a new version - the protocols can and d function without centralized leadership.

Even today, every wallet's swap feature is already an aggregator across multiple DEXes - neither theU Uniswap website nor their discord nor their leadership team are required for the protocol to continue to function.

Reminder: TornadoCash is still up and running and actively used.

> That’s how laws work.

Not really. It's entirely reasonable to expect regulatory agencies to lay out in painstaking detail and with perfect clarity the necessary criteria for anyone to know what is or isn't within bounds, and not take 10y of mixed messages to do it.

> That's exactly what happens here because new coins minted for stakers have any value only because new investors purchase the currency and prop up its price

One could design a "staking" system that is directly reliant on other people's money coming in for your payout to happen. This is not what is happening here.

Staking as done by this protocols itself never promised you anything but a yield in the crypto currency itself.

Maybe you think crypto in general is a ponzi scheme because people only want to sell to new entrants for a profit, but that's a different issue (not not necessarily true - it also works with a fixed set of people you keep wanting to gamble).

> You may (deliberately) miss the point: that people survive this way doesn’t mean it vindicates oil existing.

What does it mean to "vindicate" oil existing? It simply does. As does crypto.

Now, some people, maybe you, might ask that people who dump oil into the ocean should be physically punished, even if that is the only way for them to survive. This seems a morally absurd position to me, but so be it.

> That is not really a vindication of crypto, it’s just an extra condemnation of what is happening in Lebanon and Venezuela. And although it may help individuals it is not a sustainable solution to the issues in those countries.

Look, condemnation is not enough. First fix Lebanon and Venezuela, then outlaw Bitcoin afterwards.

Coinbase mining at a loss makes it more difficult for other miners to turn a profit?

The profits for miners = the security budget. The chain will work fine regardless, it's just less secure.

The government can also make the use of cash illegal. They can also put a huge dent into encrypted messaging by sending anyone caught using straight to the electric chair. They can drag you out of your home at night. (So can your neighbour for that matter).

The argument was never that crypto is some kind of magic shield against bullets. It's simply a tool. It raises the cost of certain kinds of abuses for the state. In the balance between the individual and the state, it shifts the power, ever so slightly, to the former.

> If it is unconstitutional to ban sales under 18 of legal material then it would be unconstitutional to ban the sale of guns to under 18 year olds as well.

Why should it be neat like this? For guns, the court might look at the second amendment, its purpose role and intention, contrast those with the dangers of guns in the hands of children, and scope out the limits to the second amendment.

For speech, the court would do this analysis for the first amendment, and the outcome might be different, maybe also depending on the type of speech in question.

This may contain some informative details about the constitutional analysis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Entertainment_Merchan...

> First, we are talking about internet porn, not porn books or magazines or whatever you seem to be talking about.

I have not, on the other hand, seen a free speech analysis hinge on the medium of delivery.

I don't really get the proposal.

Are you saying there is currently confusion as to whether a Mastodon user inadvertently issues a license for their copyrighted content to be included in full text search, simply by using Mastodon?

If not, what is preventing someone from sending a legal nastygram now, given that no such licenses currently being granted?

Or are you saying that Mastadon users are not able to legal prevent indexing based on copyright alone (i.e. fair-use, or not substantial enough to qualify for copyright protection), and thus we need to force followers into some kind of private contract that they would break?

> Except that they never actually asked the law if code can be law. They just...decided among themselves. And somehow expect the law to follow along.

The premier smart contract platform, when they had a bug in a popular dApp, summarily forked their chain to fix it. It's almost like the popular "code is not law, the law is the law" is not a serious point.

If anything, in the "crypto industry", hacks are widely considered illegal (market manipulation like in this case, less so). The ecosystem however is purpose-built on pseudonymous bearer assets, so that the law can be the law, and the code can be fact.

> So what exactly is so complex that Ethereum runs that it processes stuff so slowly?

Nothing against the talented devs working at Klarna, but if they have trouble handling the load, they can always add a couple TB of memory or a couple hundred CPU cores.

Ethereum needs to solve 100k tps while continuing to run on a Raspberry Pie on a home internet connection.

> Cause the whole NTF space is held up by a general misunderstanding of ownership and rights.

It would we more correct to say that critical NFT commentary is held up by misunderstanding about what digital art collectors actually think and want.

If I want to buy rights to a JPG, I go search on Shutterstock. If I want to buy a piece of digital art (in form of a limited edition receipt), I go to a gallery.

Social consensus > blockchain consensus.

Its the job of miners/validators to pick the head of the chain.

But users have the ability to send transactions to whatever p2p network they want to send it to, even if it's a fork proposed by CurrentB on Hackernews.

The trilemma is not a law of mathematics with binary outcomes. It's an attempt to describe certain tensions inherent in building blockchains. A great deal of work as been done on Ethereum to balance these tensions. Rollups increase throughput because they move execution off L1, while requiring proof on L1 that L2 executed correctly.

https://www.paradigm.xyz/2021/01/almost-everything-you-need-...

No, the layer 2 inherits the trust-assumptions and security of the L1.

There are of course many marketplaces and interfaces that are not any harder to understand or use than OpenSea, and if someone doesn't do so yet, not being able to use OpenSea will give them plenty of reason to learn to do so.

Throughout this process, you retain possession of your token - which again, is the thing that matters.

It's not just about the jury. Public opinion motivates and incentives all actors, from prosecutors, regulators and judges.

I don't believe libertarians have a problem with punishing transgressions against sensible anti-fraud laws post-fact, which seems to be what the article is calling for.

> Not because it isn’t distributed, because as we’ve seen so much of what’s required to make it work is already not distributed.

The one thing that counts is: the ownership of the token, and your inviolable ability to decide who gets to have it next.

Gas fees have nothing to do with Proof of Stake or Work. You are not paying for the work done. They are a function of demand / availability for block space.

> You cannot divorce the technical side from the garbage crypto brings.

> Those who understand the technical features can see there is nothing there to justify the hype,

I'm confused, is it bad tech or is it undesirable effects?

Technical critics flatter themselves too much about their supposed understanding. It's political, not technical. We need crypto for the same reason why need to keep the cash economy alive.

Additionally, there are states that are partly 0 tax (Saudi Arabia I believe used to be), and they still have a functioning currency.

Conversely, declaring "this is the law" doesn't change the fact that the Bitcoin or Ethereum networks process these transactions anyway.

Aave is decentralised.

> So, what exactly have you solved?

Ownership of your funds, which is the primary requirement from which all others stem. You will still have those when you regain access to the internet, or the ability to spend them.

The reality is that a government having the ability to confiscate the funds in your bank account, and attempting to restrict you and your neighbours peer to peer actions, personal mobility or internet access are totally different things. This sort black and white thinking provides lacks a valuable analysis of actual power structures. No one claims your crypto currency will protect you from a bullet.

This is really interesting, and I'd love to learn more about it. One thing to look into is rollups - they will soon enable custom application with cheap transaction fees, but with the full security of Ethereum. See e.g.: https://docs.celestia.org/category/recipe-book/

The data that matters is all on-chain: the smart contracts and the balances. This is why what Tim talks about has actually played out, and we have seen incredible composability between different protocols.

> We've seen this play out with OpenSea and how its view of NFTs is different from what's on chain.

If anything, the NFT ecosystem proofs this point. It consists of a dizzying array of aggregators, lending platforms, fractionalization platforms, alternative marketplaces, curation tools, API providers, all interacting with another. The fact that OpenSea retains a large marketshare among marketplaces is true (though now down to 60% - https://dune.com/sealaunch/NFT), but hasn't stopped this interoperability at all. Because in fact, what matters is on-chain, not what OpenSea exposes.

> If you do not do evil, then you have nothing to fear. If you have something to fear despite doing no evil, let's fix the government.

So - if I have to fear being being shutoff from the financial system by private actors who dislike me, despite not having been convicted of a crime, a law to ensure my right to be served.

There is no reason for payment processors to be liable. If you have a problem with Bitcoin, you need to support a general, unrestricted right be all persons and orgs to be served by the financial system, except maybe for a narrow and limited set of injunctions through the courts.

No other position is cohesive.

> I have never -- never -- encountered a value-producing use case for cryptocurrency that can't be solved by either signed git commits or a SQL database.

The value is in a permissionless and censorship resistant financial network. You may not find that valuable, but that's ok.