spir

Are you suggesting that YC's success is because of the long-term US monetary policy climate?

That's a very incorrect suggestion. It reminds one of how people like to pretend that Elon's money is because his family had an emerald mine. Do you think that a significant percentage of wealth inheritors go on to immigrate across the world and invent electric cars and reusable rockets? Same thing with YC and the investment climate.

Finally some sense-talking. The growing culture of paternalism in the employer-employee relationship is toxic to the foundations of our societal wealth.

Personal responsibility and equal opportunity are how we got to iPhones, toothpaste in every corner store, and a store on every corner.

"And above all things, a prince ought to live amongst his people in such a way that no unexpected circumstances, whether of good or evil, shall make him change; because if the necessity for this comes in troubled times, you are too late for harsh measures; and mild ones will not help you, for they will be considered as forced from you, and no one will be under any obligation to you for them."

Sundar is the Ballmer of Google, and maybe the Jassy of Amazon.

Many crypto companies might have no use case, but ipfs and filecoin (built by protocol labs) are not among them. Content-addressed data distribution is an excellent idea that has proven to be valuable and pragmatic. And a public network to sell storage that's served over the content-addressed network has proven useful and valuable.

ipfs and filecoin are extremely successful. I am surprised they can't fund the team from filecoin treasury. Maybe they overhired and used the downturn as a reason to correct? This might also be an example of how many orgs in and around web3 have trouble monetizing because they end up building public goods. Which is ironic given the glut of money in web3.

Today, we know KFC as Kentucky Fried Chicken, a pretty decent restaurant as far as fast food goes.

But back in the day, Colonel Sanders didn't actually start what became KFC until he was 62 years old. His career was haphazard and beset by setbacks until he was almost a senior citizen.

You got this!

There's a lot to like about Solana, but one thing to dislike is the ongoing claim by the Solana community that Solana is actually fairly decentralized.

In reality, Solana is a highly centralized blockchain. Solana has zero protocol specs (the code is the spec), one production client, one main development organization (Solana Labs), limited exposure to the academic research community, and the entire network only runs in data centers due to extreme hardware & bandwidth requirements.

If we wanted to boil down decentralization into a narrow metric (we shouldn't want this, but if we did), that metric might be "how many guns to how many heads to force an invalid state transition?" And Solana scores very poorly on this metric.

this is true. Augur is not a success story. It's a story of mismanagement, legal "embezzlement" of tens of millions of dollars due to lack of legal safeguards, and squandering of the opportunity to build a truly great prediction market platform.

The argument that use cases aren't developing is quite brittle when you dig into it a bit.

Take the use case of global stablecoin transfers. The ability to send cash point-to-point anywhere in the world is obviously valuable and novel.

But for global stablecoin transfers to be generally useful 1) everybody needs crypto wallets, 2) crypto wallets need to be increasingly safe and easy to use, 3) transaction fees need to be sufficiently low, 4) stablecoin on/off-ramps to integration with the traditional financial system must be widely available, and 5) stablecoins in a variety of popular global currencies must be available and liquid.

The industry has made progress in all five of the above areas in the past few years, and so good progress has been made on the greater goal of generally available point-to-point global cash transfers. Saying crypto "has no use cases" is lazy, uncurious, and intellectually bankrupt.

Let me gently point out the irony of you acknowledging Vitalik's intellect while simultaneously assuming that Vitalik, as such a smart person, hasn't puzzled through why the crypto industry will end up being obviously useful for humanity.

Do you think it's more likely that Vitalik is mistaken that crypto is obviously useful for humanity, or that he knows it isn't and doesn't care, or that your assessment of crypto being useless is incorrect?

There are politicians and media publications protecting Sam Bankman-Fried's criminality, but these congressmen aren't among them.

The letter in this article was written in March. FTX's long-term fraud has only been known since early November.

The part of GitHub Copilot to which I object is that it's trained on private repos. Where does GitHub get off consuming explicitly private intellectual property for their own purposes?

The parent is a highly misinformative comment.

Three things are true here

1) If you dig into the details, the actual censorship is so weak in practice that calling it "censored ethereum blocks" is mostly false.

2) There are great reasons to think that the weak form of censorship this does in fact comprise is an inherently temporary problem with ethereum. And pretty much no good reasons to think it'll end up being a long-term state of affairs.

3) Nobody informed was surprised by this. It became an outcome whose high likelihood became generally known within industry shortly after the tornado contracts were added to the OFAC sanctions list.

source: I'm a low-grade ethereum insider.

If you would like to know (much) more, this recent podcast episode with a top ethereum researcher explains the past, present, and future of this issue in great detail

- video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azjpYTB7PVE

- podcast: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/134-ethereum-unsensored-with-j...

I believe in the right to suicide, and I also think transaction costs matter. What if we had 25-cent suicide booths a la Futurama on every street corner? Sometimes people are going through hard times, and it needs to be easier to seek help and connect with other humans who care than it is to off yourself.

I was a happy Stadia customer for a while. And then an unhappy customer. And now I own relics of history (Stadia controller+purchased games).

In my view, the root problem here may be that Google is too accustomed to having a monopoly position in the market and not actually treating customers that well, whereas gaming is hypercompetitive and Google doesn't have the customer centricity in their DNA to compete successfully.

Hyperion Cantos is extraordinary. Well worth finishing the four books

If you are interested in this topic, you may like my recent essay in Bankless:

https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/why-the-flippening-is-go...

Among most crypto insiders, Terra was long known as an unstable ponzi destined for a sudden collapse. As a result, most insiders stayed far away from Terra, Luna, and UST.

However, there is a significant contingent of machiavellian sociopathic insiders that are highly informed, famous, and well-capitalized, and they heavily promoted and pushed Terra despite knowing it was flawed because they made lots of money on the Luna token.

The problem is that the famous sociopaths that promoted Luna were successful in attracting many uninformed retail investors into the Terra ecosystem. The result was a fractured crypto community, where most insiders knew that this small-but-famous contingent of sociopaths was setting up a large segment of retail to get burned when Terra failed.

In short, most crypto insiders are really sad and dismayed by Terra. But, we aren't exactly sure how to help prevent future Terras, because the massive influx of retail investors is extremely hard to convince when the sociopaths are successfully marketing to them, and retail lacks the technical or economic know-how to spot the difference.

This isn't intended as an apology or justification of Terra. I just thought you may be interested to hear an insider's perspective. Source: I'm a low-to-mid-grade ethereum insider

I am addicted to twitter and reddit. Especially reddit. It often takes the place of reading, hobbies, quiet moments, improving my home, talking with my spouse, and playing with my baby.

When reddit records a click or an upvote, it thinks it has been a Good Product, and created Engagement. Reddit then takes those feedback loops and tunes the algorithm and feedback loops to create further engagement.

But in reality, there's almost no positive relationship between my engagement with social media and my personal human flourishing. I think these products are mostly poison for my soul.

I remember how slowly high school math moved. How uninspired English class was. The poor curriculum and tools in programming class. imo, there is definitely a primary and secondary education problem vs. the early-life academic environments that helped to produce yesteryear's great thinkers.

https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-we-stopped-making-einste...

> Because now people have to spend their 20s learning about the discoveries that others made during their miracle years (the so-called “burden of knowledge”).

Maybe now people have to spend their 20s learning about the discoveries because our modern pre-post-secondary education has become so watered down and unambitious.

Personally, I get the sense that could have learned 5x to 20x as much in my teenage years if I hadn't been in an excessively mediocre public education system. And I'm not a genius :)

You're right that ethereum transaction fees are very high (https://cryptofees.info/). imo, total gas fees seem likely to continue to hyper-grow. Yet, per-transaction or per-user gas fees may be expected to plummet due to scaling technologies, especially https://arbitrum.io, https://optimism.io, and https://starknet.io (they do like those io's)

I think it's fair to say that most tokens are effectively trash, and there are many scams in crypto.

Relative to other speculative manias in history, crypto is a mechanism for mania and speculation. You can't trade tulips on tulips. But you can trade crypto on crypto.

For example, in the British railway mania of the 1840s, many patterns occurred similar to today's crypto frenzy, such as stock exchanges created expressly for the purpose of trading railway stocks and publications to talk about and advertise railway stocks. But railways lack crypto's reflexivity because you can't trade railway stocks on railways. Crypto mechanizes its own speculative mania.

But what's the other side here? Does it even exist? I think it does exist. In my view, a balanced discussion of the pros and cons of crypto often seems to elude the HN community.

HN is a community of technologists, right? So what's the actual technology here? At the root of crypto are two technologies, 1) programmatic public chains that are inexpensive to run and 2) zero-knowledge proofs.

By combining public chains and zero-knowledge proofs, we get an inherently global market, with p2p transactions that scale to all of humanity, where you can send money digitally, similar to handing a $20 bill to a friend. And the transfers can include rigid, sophisticated logic that offers the potential to reduce transaction costs for many kinds of routine economic activity.

So, while it's fair to say that most crypto tokens are effectively trash and crypto mechanizes scams and speculation, it's also unfair to omit discussion of the fundamental innovation, and those who do so will end up on the wrong side of history.

At a high level, reduced transaction costs (paradoxically, given Ethereum's reputation for high fees), an inherently global market, and state-of-the-art financial services and property rights management, especially because of the rapid pace of permissionless innovation.

As somebody who has studied crypto full-time for years, here's an opinionated list of things that I wish was more widely understood about crypto

- BTC is a trash-grade asset because it's practically useless and proof of work is extremely expensive for BTC holders (and environmentally damaging)

- programmatic public chains, especially Ethereum, are cost-efficient and extremely useful. They will become one of the foundations of the global economy

- proof of stake is more egalitarian than proof of work because while the rich get richer in both, only in PoS do the rich get richer at the same rate as everybody else, whereas in PoW there are significant mining economies of scale

- ETH and other programmatic public chain tokens are more like Amazon or Apple stock than like Bitcoin because programmatic public chains have significant fee revenues that accumulate to token holders, and these fees are defended by public chain network effects from accumulated apps, tokens, and protocols

Mostly True: "planet incinerating, fraud enabling, money laundering, rogue regime financing"

Totally False: "fake tech breakthrough called "crypto""

Thanks, I hadn't seen that site.

In my view, this site is strong evidence for the thesis that demand for GPUs will plummet, here's why:

1) If we tweak your link to sort by Market Cap, we can see the next biggest coin to mine after ETH is has only 1% of ETH's market cap https://shorturl.at/lxLS5

2) These smaller coins do not have the capability to automatically or naturally grow bigger market caps, trading volumes, and buy-side demand just because ETH switches to PoS. Mining profitability ultimately comes from a coin's buy-side demand, which is proportional to many things-- fame, developer activity, etc.-- and none of the PoW chains in that list are anywhere remotely close to "breaking out" and growing proportionally with Ethereum, or, say, Solana. How do I know this? Well, I'm an insider that focuses all of his time on ethereum and web3, you'll have to take my word for it :)

I will be one of them :)

Absolutely! Please see this Polymarket prediction market on "When will Ethereum switch to proof of stake?"

https://polymarket.com/market-group/ethereum-merge-pos

That's fair, what if another PoW coin gets really popular?

The good news here may be two-fold

1) the existing group of public chains have matured greatly and their network effects are quite strong now. It is no longer so easy to start a new chain

2) virtually all new chains are PoS because it's understood to be significantly more secure and less expensive vs. PoW

3) public chains take years to grow, and right now, there is no PoW public chain on my radar that has a chance of generating nearly as much mining demand as Ethereum (and Bitcoin but ASICs)

For those reasons, the idea of a new public chain appearing from nowhere and impacting GPU demand seems in practice unlikely to occur.