reginold

Appreciate the reply here! Your analogies are effective and point out an important difference.

It comes down to this question: "Is wrapping everything in a financial model inevitable?"

1. If yes, then let's seize the moment to figure out how to make it the best we can.

2. If no, let's create an alternative, or figure out something else that's inevitable, or perhaps at least resist #1.

I've landed on the side of #1. Therefore it becomes a matter of shaping it to be the best it can be. Same with solar power and electric cars. They are inevitable, let's make them the best they can be.

For those that land on #2, I can see the point of resisting. However, the best way to support #2 would be an alternative hypothesis "Inevitably some things will be financial and other things will not" and then building tools to support that.

Thanks for talking this through and creating this clarity about where the difference is.

Appreciate the thoughtful response. I've also found the subreddits to be echo chambers. I am looking for more curious places.

Regarding be your own bank -- agree that $25/transaction doesn't make sense, and that this a regular occurrence on bitcoin and ethereum. Does not seem like layer 1 will be in a position to solve this ever. Could take a decade for level 2 to get there. Inevitable though?

Thank you! Checking it out now. I just found it on this relevant HN thread as well for anyone else looking for curiosity driven cryptocurrency communities: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139813

Thanks to superfad for pointing out that this got major discussion here on HN a few weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139813

You need to scroll to the bottom of the thread though for links and good stuff! I've got 20+ links to explore now ^__^

Oh wow missed this! Will link to it from the thread I started as well. Thank you!

For anyone else who reads that thread -- the good links and suggestions are near the bottom of the thread.

Thanks for the suggestion! Looks like a great rec, I see he retweeted some kind of debate that looks interesting.

I'm pretty dubious of Twitter as a platform though. There's so much other stuff, and Twitter injects its own crapola into the feeds too. I've bookmarked his profile instead, look forward to checking it out.

Checking him out, thanks!

I've found the crypto discussions on HN to be pretty limited from a curiosity perspective. Not a bad thing, not everyone needs to be curious about this topic. I'm just looking for a place that is.

With "Proof of Stake" to mean a consensus system, are you saying the Ethereum Proof of Stake implementation doesn't do anything to guarantee against a cartel of bad actors?

My understanding is "slashing" may be one such mechanism. This is where staked funds are taken away from bad actors. ie if you propose a block with bad transactions, the 32 ETH you have staked will be reduced by some fraction as punishment. When your stake is slashed down to 16 ETH you are booted from the system. So that us a clear punishment against a bad actor, though I'm not sure what a cartel means i this case. Perhaps you know about this already however.

Oh appreciate your thoughts here!

I can certainly agree that it can sound dystopian. Let's talk about how to make sure it's net positive! How do we built things better, where do we improve, what are the weaknesses?

To me the rise of cryptocurrencies is a given -- so the role of being curious is about shaping what it becomes, rather than deny their impending dominance. (Not putting words in your mouth, if anything this framing comes from my own bias).

Does that come through? To use a tired analogy, pretend it's 1950: I would love to talk about the possibilities of computers, good or bad. Though nascent, I believe computers are here to stay, and will be a bigger part of our lives, like it or not. I'm curious about our role in shaping those possibilities. When people say they don't want to talk about computers or think they're stupid does nothing to change that inevitability.

There you go, well then I trust your curiosity has continued to drift in its wonderful way as it always does, defined by where it is rather than where it is not.

Agreed, there is nothing left for the HN community to discuss about cryptocurrencies. There is plenty worth discussing for others though. I posted a thread here asking where to go to find curiosity driven discussions about the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29297611

Is there a place I can go to talk to people like you? Or maybe you but before you totally disconnected?

I'm curious what your hopes were for being your own bank kinda stuff. How did you imagine it would work, what was important about that to you... and the the other side, what fell short etc. You rightfully probably don't want to answer these questions as your curiosity has moved on, but I would be curious in case you are.

This seems like such a bizarre take to me. It's like saying in 1960 that everything to discuss about computers is up to taste not novely. I see an entire world coming to life across thousands of different blockchains. So much of it is experimental, mistakes, catastrophically bad. But other parts will succeed and define the future. The recent push around DAOs is fascinating, a way to delegate voting and decision making, an experiment that will fail endlessly until it doesn't.

Edit: However, that doesn't mean this conversation should be forced on the HN community over and over again. That's not right, and that's not the nature of curiosity.

Sorry to hear it. Curiosity is a special thing. It's hard or impossible to force it. I wonder where my own curiosity about cryptocurrencies comes from.

This is an important aspect! Crypto is new in that way where everyone can have ownership. I believe everything in the future will be more like this than less. Everything will have financial incentives tied more directly to it. So if anything, the lack of crypto curiosity is a challenge to solve -- how do we get curious in a world where every article, upvote, and comment has a financial stake?

Is there a place to go where there is curiosity driven discussion of crypto technologies?

Is there a place to go to talk to other people like you? I would love to hear about your Dapps, what's working, what's not.

I'm so curious about your posts, this seems like an endless thread of gotchas. What's important to you about this topic? I have read all your posts in this thread and am puzzled. Thanks for any insights.

Just to point out, you're using a common term very differently than others in cryptocurrency who say "Proof of Stake". This will add friction to your conversations.

Is there a place for the #1 group to go for curious conversation? (Curious conversation requires subtracting out the speculation about price and money)

A way to decrease the noise would be most appreciated.

I'm confident there's lifetimes worth of signal, even in crypto developments in the last year. But there is an ungodly amount of noise over price, outrage, etc.

I asked in a new thread about where to go for curious conversations about cryptocurrencies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29297611

Why is there no curiosity here about cryptocurrencies?

Well, let's ask "what makes cryptocurrencies different from startups or programming languages?"

Crypto are financial instruments anyone can buy into. Does that explain the drought of curiosity somehow?

Startups are financial instruments but you can't buy unless you're an accredited investor -- When we talk about the latest startup, like it or hate it, close to zero of us have skin in the game. However, investors benefit from the work of curious conversations.

Articles are not financial instruments -- so when we talk about an article or topic, there's no financial aspect to it.

Driving the point home, I believe cryptocurrencies will bring that financial lens to everything, from whether an article gets read, upvoted, to whether a startup succeeds, individuals will have ownership and that will change the nature of curiosity.

Related question: Where can I go for curious conversations about cryptocurrencies?

Ah interesting hadn't realized it was a closed club. Heard it was some kind of delegate, DAO but that likely just means those with the money win right?

Oh neat, is there a name for that idea of "Tons if custom blockchains" vs "a few centralized ones like BTC and ETH"?

Today it seems like 90% of the marketcap of these things is in BTC or in ETH/tokens. But marketcap =! Value necessarily, so perhaps the future is a ton of interoperable blockchains.

Appreciate the perspective on this. When you say "ENS will never be resolvable via the global DNS namespace", is that a technical limitation or something else? I'm curious so learning about how it works (or doesn't!), sounds like you have a lot of experience.

Anyone here familiar with the newly launched Ethereum Name Service (ENS)? All the registrations are handled on the blockchain. Would this error be possible on ENS?

If these images were stored on the blockchain, would that make a difference?

Would love to see this market set the bar higher than "Linux-friendly"!

Haha yes of course, please do! The more the merrier, more of my monkey for everyone! There's always a record on the blockchain that it's indeed mine - or not if I so choose!