vbuterin

Shameless plug of my own explanation on how binary fields work:

https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/05/12/fft.html

Ctrl+F for "binary fields".

The "14 hours" is a huge exaggeration, but that's to be expected; every advertised battery life I've ever seen is a huge exaggeration. But I have to strongly vouch for this one; it's the first laptop I've seen that actually can actually last more than seven whole hours with Linux. Every other laptop I've tried lasts under four hours, even if it advertises twenty.

Amazing work! I preordered one and am very much looking forward to trying it out.

Isn't the reason why this is typically not done that VR giving a good experience is very low-latency-dependent, and it's very hard to make wireless connections have an ultra-low latency?

When I visited this thread 2h ago, the top subthread was negative.

Definitely some kind of weird dynamic going on...

What fascinates me most is that the errors are very "human-like". If you gave me multi-digit multiplication and addition problems like that, I would frequently have similar results of getting most digits right but making a mistake on one or a few of them.

When I do mental arithmetic my brain frequently tokenizes into digit pairs or triples if I can recognize pairs and triples that have specific properties.

"224" is actually a really nice object to recognize because it's 7 * 32, and if you can recognize other multiples of 32 it frequently gives you shortcuts. It's less useful for addition because you would need to get lucky and get a multiple of 32 (or 7) on both sides, but for multiplication and division it helps a lot.

In this case it's the bridge that's fairly centralized. There wasn't any hard forks or other manipulation of the underlying blockchains (except for sending transactions on them).

I think I was referring there more to all the laws _other_ than GDPR (eg. the more data-nationalist stuff) that nevertheless end up having a similar effect.

Glen Weyl (the economist who has done a lot of work on quadratic voting, mentioned in the article) has also written and talked extensively about Harberger taxes and quadratic funding; the former is a fairly deep change to how property rights work, and the latter is a way of democratically allocating funds to public projects. I would definitely encourage reading up on both of those!

1. Has an actual path to adoption (because people have keys and have a motivation to try hard to retain their keys because they have crypto assets)

2. Once smart contract wallets properly gain adoption, you'll be able to do recovery (see: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html )

3. Lots of built-in anti-sybil techniques (eg. verifying that the address has nonzero balance is a pretty simple and effective one)

Lots of things "don't need" to be written in python, but they're written in python anyway. I expect a lot of blockchain institutional use cases will take a similar route: sure, theoretically they could use some standardized federated solution, but in practice blockchain tx fees will become low enough through layer-2s to be negligible and that's where all the infrastructure to help users verify what's going on, and use those verifications in other applications, will be built. NFTs are already an incredibly easy to use and verify type of certificate; their biggest weakness is that (because of limitations in technology that are completely temporary and will disappear soon) transaction fees are too high.

Like... why _not_ dump Merkle roots on-chain?

> Thinkpads are way cheaper(and AFAIK they also provide very good Linux support)

My own experience with thinkpads has been one of non-stop frustration with battery life. The T495 advertises something like 14h of battery life; the actual battery life I got running stock Ubuntu on it was.... less than 3 hours, and that's with power optimization packages that do things like making USB no longer work installed. I recently switched to a system76, and so far its battery lasts easily 6-9 hours depending on what I'm doing.

There have been attempts at doing this, eg. https://cointelegraph.com/news/new-analysis-of-top-10k-ether...

I imagine you would have to talk to the analytics firms to get the best-in-class attempts to figure out what the split between individual users is.

I would argue in 2021 the only thing that qualifies as "an entire society" is the whole world.

So unless you're measuring the world as a whole, you're measuring communities that have porous relationships with the outside world to some degree or other. But of course, cryptocurrencies are still much more porous than countries are.

The whole point of my post was that instead of the Gini we should use a more targeted index that specifically measures the presence of super rich that can unilaterally flood the market with their coins, and does not concern itself with whether the long tail of users has 0.03 coins each or 0.003 coins each.

Co-author here. I definitely use the phrase "public goods" in the economic sense: goods that are non-rival and non-excludable.

This post has nothing to do with assurance contracts (which that paper seems at first glance to be equivalent to). Instead, it's tackling the different problem of what if there is some established mechanism that is already collecting fee revenue, and it wants to do use that revenue to support its wider ecosystem.

Here's one example of a retroactive grant (though not by Optimism):

https://twitter.com/StatefulWorks/status/1417157834702209031

The oracle is not monolithic for information-optimization reasons. Rather, it's monolithic because there's a single project that has funds that it's willing to give out in retroactive grants, and so _some_ mechanism must decide where those funds go.

(This is perhaps what's not clear to readers from outside the crypto space: all of these discussions are assuming that this is being implemented by some project that has network effects and can extract fees that are necessary anyway for congestion-control reasons, where the only remaining question is where those funds go)

The closest thing to those concepts in crypto would be multisig wallets, including more advanced ones that enforce a "daylimit" where a single key can withdraw a small amount but larger amounts require confirmations from multiple keys or a delay during which another key can cancel the transfer.

See also this piece by me on social recovery (a related but not quite the same concept): https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html

But this is all not quite the same as reversal and makes different tradeoffs.

Thanks! I actually wasn't aware of the intellectual history. I added a link to your paper at the start of my post.

Blockchain base layers have a stronger need to be close to absolutely decentralized than most other things. This is because base layers aren't applications, they're _the places where all the applications talk to each other_. So if a base layer has a trust dependency, that requires the entire ecosystem to be willing to agree on the same trust dependency.

Applications can be partially decentralized and that's often the best approach, sure.

When I talk to people in the world about what about blockchains they find exciting, the aspect of permanence really is one of the things that people find attractive. I agree it's use-case dependent, but the problem is that once you go down the use-case-dependence rabbit hole, developers and users have to really think "am I creating something permanent or not"? And once you have to think even a little bit, you lose 50%+ of the magic. Having properties that you just get by default that you don't even have to think to obtain is quite important.

The good news though is that you don't need permanent storage of history to be supported by the base protocol itself. Consensus nodes don't need to know about history to verify the current chain. There are plenty of other mechanisms for storing historical data: bittorrent, centralized archives, Filecoin-style networks, etc etc. You just need the blockchain's throughput to be not _too_ high, so that it's actually possible for these protocols to store what comes out.

Definitely nothing is permanent, but you can get pretty close to "permanent unless civilization collapses", and that's much better than "data could drop at any time if a few people just forget"!

> In PoS, once you lose BFT quorum (1/3 of all votes), it's game over.

This is not how the Ethereum PoS chain's LMD GHOST fork choice works. If >1/3 drop offline, you stop finalizing, but the chain keeps growing.

What kind of "influence in the network" do you gain by staking?

(Keep in mind that in present-day Ethereum, the influence that PoW miners have in protocol governance is pretty minimal)

If hacking billions of dollars of cryptocurrency was actually easy, plenty of people who are not rich right now would be very very rich. Alternatively, if PoS chains are vulnerable because you can hack exchanges and use their coins to attack, then PoW chains are vulnerable because you can hack exchanges, sell the proceeds to buy ASICs (or just buy the ASIC company), and use those ASICs to attack the PoW network.

Hacking billions of dollars of cryptocurrency is NOT easy, and it gets harder with every passing month, because validators and hodlers have billions of dollars of incentive to protect themselves.

How does this view of PoS governance explain how Ethereum protocol governance has operated in reality for the past five years?

As far as I can tell, the power held by miners has been minimal; if miners had any significant power at all then the various issuance reductions and now EIP 1559 would not have been accepted nearly so smoothly. So when miners are replaced by PoS validators, the power that PoS validators will be inheriting is not that much...

> Yes there will be a number of custodians "competing" with each other, but they will all largely operate under the same regulatory jurisdiction (or at least cooperating jurisdictions)

Even if this is true (given all the decentralized staking pools coming out, and the still really large number of solo stakers, I really doubt it!), I don't see how that state of affairs would survive any attempt by governments to actually use their jurisdictional power. It's very easy to move stake around (or at least it will be very easy post-merge), so once a single pool does anything disagreeable people can just move their ETH to other pools. And staking infrastructure can live in any country; there aren't even constraints around needing to have cheap electricity there.

> This is external to the system and can be done without paying off any existing Bitcoin actor

I've heard this argument many times, but.... why does that even matter? Making a PoW farm requires paying off a hardware provider. Hardware providers are far more centralized than cryptocurrency hodlers, of which there are millions and you just need to find one willing to sell to you. "I want to buy coins but the existing hodlers are all colluding to not let me" is not a problem that anyone in the cryptocurrency space actually worries about in real life. Specialized hardware manufacturers, on the other hand, are few enough that such a thing is at least actually plausible....

There's definitely ETH holders who have more ETH than I do, including those who did _not_ benefit from the premine.

(And there's BTC holders with more than 0.3% of all BTC)

Isn't this just saying "the Ethereum proof of stake transition benefits ETH holders"?

That was about users' nodes being able to validate blocks; that's an orthogonal issue from PoW vs PoS.