timdaub

My blog https://timdaub.github.io

I'm working on being a better (& independent) writer.

I'll attempt explaining in my own words with the risk of exposing my lack of understanding. I'm currently in the office, so I don't have the book with me. So this is from the top of my head.

In Weyl and Posner's book "Radical Markets" they motivate quadratic voting as outlined as a way of preference voting where a voter's desire intensity is represented in the vote.

Their argument is practically outlined in the pollution + city example I make in the original blog post and where, with the sloppy figure I have attached [1], they reason geometrically that "Nils" should "pay" for reducing the electricity plant's pollution. If you look closely at that figure (which is nicer in the book), you can see that the plane where the cost functions intersect is a triangle.

I can't fully reproduce the mathematical reasoning here, but how I understood it is that dependent on Nils's choice, the externality he imposes has quadratic cost given that the triangle's change is affected quadratically. In an isosceles triangle, where volume V is defined dependent on two same length sides, I can see that work out. But I've never worked through that.

More intuitively, an example, I'm just making up is if you're annoyingly snorting during a visit to the cinema.

If you're the only person snorting and you think that's OK, but nobody else can understand the dialogue - you're not only wasting your money but everybody else's. It's quadratic because of the opportunity cost of everybody wasting 2 hours but having all paid for the film. So both the cost of the cinema running the movie for two hours and everybody paying but not understanding makes your snorting square the cost. Does that make sense? Please correct me if I'm wrong.

So essentially, if Nils is picky with anti-pollution, his pickiness costs the town's society quadratically - which is why he should pay the quadratic cost of his pickiness during governance.

references:

- 1: https://timdaub.github.io/assets/images/cost-of-externality....

There's also all the academic literature of Weyl et al. that makes the basis of the book, but I've found that to be less accessible [1].

references:

- 1: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pandp.20181002

The most-comprehensive argument that motivates its existence, I've found in Glen Weyl and Eric Posner's book "Radical Markets."

I had considered doing that.

But I think it'd paint a false picture. In the half a year of developing the app, and me being mostly concerned with correctly implementing the voting algorithm and understanding the math - when reading Wikipedia and what is outlined in Weyl's book, it wasn't obvious that fractal votes can be used.

As a single tech freelancer working for a federally-funded exhibition hall, I wanted things to be correct. So I stuck to the script (aka the most credible sources accessible).

I've added the footnote in the article linking to a Reddit post where someone claims having talked to Weyl about fractal votes and that he positively reaffirmed it [1]. Anyone could comment that though.

But from a mathematical point of view, it isn't trivial (at least for me) whether fractal votes represent the same system as is currently laid as "quadratic voting".

Sure, if I end up completely understanding why fractal votes are mathematically equal to natural-numbered votes, I'll do as you suggested.

references:

- 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/radicalxchange/comments/tprsgi/the_...

thanks for sharing, I love the UI!

You're right. After publishing, someone on Reddit told me that fractional votes are technically OK.

If you look closely for it, I mention it in a footnote that I added after publishing.

Hey, despite your comment sounding mean, I want to meaningfully respond:

Where do you set the personal boundry for evaluating an experiment as a failure or success?

E.g. in the case of social networks and what consequences Facebook brought us. When is the right time for Mark Zuckerberg to announce conclusive failure or success for his actions?

Pessimists say he should have admitted it years ago.

He himself doesn't even accept the premise of the argument. Rather he sees it as his personal calling or responsibility to build (source: see Lex Friedman podcast).

Who's right here?

Anyways, it isn't my intention to negatively associate digital or quadratic voting. Rather the post is an attempt at adding to a currently inconclusive picture through critique.

Hi, OP here. I'm grateful for getting this exposure. Thank you!

I wanna give a shout out to the commentators on /r/programming and that we had a meaningful discussion that may be relevant too: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/tptbzb/the_use... <3

Youtube's frequency of ads has become so extreme that I've just yesterday opted to pay 11€/month for YT Premium.

I had tried before disabling them with a Pihole or by blocking domains. It didn't work. Also, on a Samsung TV, you can't really install another front end.

I loved his stuff and how upset people got. You could say it was performative art criticing post-modern technocratic stance on privacy: While Zuck said privacy is over: this dude got people raging. "I'm just making a video"

Legend

The ads on Youtube on my Samsung have recently become super aggressive.

- 2x 10-20sec at the beginning of every video (even e.g. 30sec clips)

- Then, usually 2mins in the Yt themselves do an ad

- After that, at around 3mins, another 2x 10-20sec ad block.

I've started to work actively against it now since my viewing experience is suffering. I have a pihole but it doesn't do much.

Writing a blog regularly has increased by compensation manifold.

- https://rugpullindex.com rates some ERC20 pools by gini index

- In the future, we want to rank all of them

- Method specification: https://rugpullindex.com/specification#CalculatingtheEqualit...

I think you should adhere to the HN guidelines and not make such unsubstantiated claims.

I'm the author of the parent comment and I haven't compared FB to e.g. a category like web3. Re-read it. I pointed out the unfairness of assuming that "everyone arguing for web3 is an investor" while simultaneously ignoring that anyone opposed to those ideas may have investment-bias too.

E.g. HN is known for being anti-crypto but suspects anyone pro crypto to be a crypto-invested shill.

But then at the same time I think it must be considered that e.g. anyone being anti-crypto also has a stake or interest in non-crypto related endeavors. I doubt there are people on here without some form of stake simply arguing for "the universal truth".

If you've been following crypto currencies' history, you'll be aware that weakly decentralized (read: centralized) attempts always fall prey to decentralized protocols. The underlying principle is that a process controlled by nobody is more anti-fragile than one directly controlled by a few. Control is a liability.

Over the long term, protocols outcompete hosted services. E.g. Automated market makers will be much longer around than any centralized exchange like e.g. Coinbase.

It's because you're comparing a company to a category.

If I were to say that Coinbase and Uniswap have a clear value prop but AI doesn't, it also wouldn't make much sense as I'm not comparing apples to apples.

Yeah. But I also think that e.g. ex-addicts like Mike from The Nightshift or the German equivalent Montana Black: They have an energy that others on these platforms don't have. They're street smart and probably less constraint in what they can do and say. They aren't perceived as ex-addicts, but it seems their mentality is promoted through algorithms.

Dunno, it's a small sample size but anyways a fun prediction.

For me it's just cringe. Imagine a VC would start selling hash trees to programmers. That's the feeling that his blog post invokes.

- After the second winter with covid, countries successfully implement a playbook that restricts freedom as little as possible while containting the virus. Some cultural habbits die off (huge events inside in winter), while new events emerge (a culture of doing things outside with others)

- Elon says something so incredibily stupid that this time it affects his company's performance.

- The social media attention contest continues to be won by fakers, ex-addicts and felons. More non-family friendly content is being accepted from the overlords at FAANG. This has profound effects on society.

- More people from the left start identifying as intellectual right. There's a phaseshift happening and one day it's woke to be right and reactionary to be left.

For fairness then I think we should consider that everyone that is anti web3 and has no crypto might have too much Google and FB stock according to your logic?

> A blockchain is a worse database. It is slower, requires way more storage and compute, doesn’t have customer support, etc.

Please Mr Albert Wenger. You are a VC and not a technical expert on what is a database or a blockchain.

It makes absolutely no sense to compare a database to a blockchain. These things are completely different and have entirely nothing in common except that they persist data. You wouldn't compare a file to a database to make a point, would you? Also, you don't have the authority anyways to make that comparison as I doubt you know the technical details that differentiate a database from a blockchain.

Databases aren't blockchains and blockchains aren't databases. Stop comparing them for your ignorance's sake.

I registered neoactuary.com one day as I wanted to start this weird mixture of HN + finance/math etc.

At least for money transmission use cases that's a rather weak argument considering that my local bank calls me in person to confirm transactions above 2k EUR.

In the merkle tree committment example, I don't think it allows identifiying e.g. a fraudulent rollback just from looking at the hash.

If you wanted to identify a fraudulent rollback, I think you had to constantly replicate all transitions and recompute the on-chain merkle hash. If you found discrepancies in the on-chain hash and yours, it'd mean that either node ran out of synch for some unknown reason.

Then, if e.g. other nodes too replicated your state, you may be able to conclude that the wrong-hash node had a (byzantine) fault etc.

But I think that at least in the case of the Ethereum Plasma architecture, just committing a state aggregate in form of a hash wasn't enough because of some block withholding attack. From my understanding, hoytech's quadrable is just a chain committment. Similar to Plasma.

Modern rollup architectures end up storing all transition state in Ethereum calldata state. This way proving fraudulent validation is possible and things become conceptually simpler as you can rely on the strong guarantees of e.g. data availability of the PoW chain.

it's way too many...

I went on their website and tried to understand how immutability is enforced but I couldn't find anything.

I'm sceptical, but particularly because they make a deliberate comparison to blockchain that I doubt they'll be able to deliver.

The PoW immutability of e.g. BTC and ETH is strong as it yields the following guarantees for stored data:

- Immutability of the BTC blockchain is protected through all cummulative work that has happened on a specific branch of the chain. Even if someone replayed BTC, it'd take millenias to recompute the work on an average machine

- The immutability isn't enforced on a file level, as I suspect it is with immudb. Immutability is enforced through the network that has additionally shown to have conservative political views too. You can go, sync a BTC node and change the underlying level db. Still that won't change the network state. Immutability on a single system is physically impossible if e.g you consider deleting the file as mutation.

- immudb says "it's immutable like a blockchain but less complicated", but Bitcoin isn't more complicated than some sophisticated enterprise db solution.

- I think immudb should be maximally upfront what they mean by immutability: It seems they want to communicate that they're doing event sourcing - that's different from immutability

Finally there's a rather esotheric argument. If you run an immutable database as an organizatiom where one individual node cannot alter the network state but you have (in)direct control over all nodes: Isn't it always mutable as you could e.g. choose to swap out consensus?

So from a philosophical perspective, then immutability can truly only occur if mutability is out of an individual's control.

Why do I have the authority to say this? Because I too have once worked for a database with blockchain characteristics called https://www.bigchaindb.com

Edit: The best solution that also has a theoretically unlimited throughput is this toy project: https://github.com/hoytech/quadrable

Conceptually, it computes a merkle tree over all data and regularly commits to Ethereum. Through this commitment the data may still change locally: But then at least would be provably tampered. So I guess for databases, the artibute we can really implement is "tamper-proof".

I loved Lex Friedman and Brandon Eich this year.

I was astonished by the intellect and wisdom of Eich. I always understood him to be rather smart inventing JS in a matter of days, but his insight in the history of the web paint an even more impressive picture.

He's been much more influential to our lives than many might guess and it's shocking to hear it from himself and his authority.

yeah agreed. The disco areas they had in 2019, the sound was so super crisp. I wish I could reproduce the high fidelity clicking they played in some tracks