cocktailpeanuts (u/cocktailpeanuts)

cocktailpeanuts commented on Even if you’re paying, you’re still the product odysee.com/@CyberLounge:a... · Posted by u/deworms

cocktailpeanuts · 4 years ago

The whole article took about a minute to load because apparently it’s being loaded from some decentralized network called lbry.

I would rather be the product and get a great user experience than a shitty user experience that sells itself based on some ideal that probably will not work economically in the long run. If a decentralized network you invested a lot of your life in becomes irrelevant, it’s worse than using a centralized network that actually stays around. And most “decentralized” networks have failed to show enough traction for me to feel secure about their future.

cocktailpeanuts commented on Nebulus: An IPFS-Less IPFS nebulus.dev... · Posted by u/skogard

capableweb · 4 years ago

This entire project can be replaced in two different ways with just IPFS. You don't have to run IPFS to be able to add files or retrieve them (if you've added them on the same computer), so simply add the files without running the daemon and you're already "Offline and Private" and "IPFS without the Network".

If that's not enough, you can also run your IPFS daemon with `--offline` and it won't connect to any network, giving you another way of using IPFS offline and privately.

If you want to go one step further, when adding files with the IPFS CLI, you can add the flag `--only-hash` and IPFS will only hash the content without actually writing anything to disk, making it even more "offline" and "private".

All in all, this seems to be a project whose author missed to read the documentation for IPFS as everything mentioned is already supported in go-ipfs, the main IPFS implementation.

Edit: the title "IPFS-less IPFS" is fun too, since nebulus seems to include ipfs-core as a dependency, not really IPFS-less then I'd say :) https://github.com/skogard/nebulus/blob/480d43dc22ccd949c6ae...

cocktailpeanuts · 4 years ago

I see the “ipfs less” terminology as similar to the term “serverless”. Just like how serverless still has servers but the point is that you don’t have to maintain your own server, ipfs less does make sense in that you don’t have to run ipfs node to use it. But also just like how many people hate the term serverless, ipfs less will be hated by many as well. I guess at the end of the day what’s important is whether something provides value, and I think this is pretty cool technology in that sense. Just my two cents…

cocktailpeanuts commented on This beach does not exist thisbeachdoesnotexist.com... · Posted by u/vsemecky

Cthulhu_ · 4 years ago

One can hope, but I'm afraid it'll only make things more complicated.

In theory you could train a generator on stock footage. In theory the stock footage copyright holder could sue you for creating a derivative work without paying them. In theory that claim could be bunkus if the creator used a different training set - how do you prove a generated image's origins?

cocktailpeanuts · 4 years ago

How would you know which stock photo was used for training? Someone may take a whole bunch of images they buy on a dark market, create a huge train model, and dump it on the public internet over torrent or something. And there would be no way to know which images were used to train the model

cocktailpeanuts commented on Shorting Bitcoin tbray.org/ongoing/When/20... · Posted by u/zdw

anonporridge · 5 years ago

Michael Saylor, the CEO, holds 70% of the voting shares.

All the other shareholders can kick and scream all they want, but Saylor controls the ship. The only power others have is to exit the ship by selling.

Every indication is that Saylor would hold bitcoin into the ground, unless he's totally full of shit. Their main business is still generating enough cash to pay the loans, so where's the pressure to sell?

cocktailpeanuts · 4 years ago

They will have to sell if the Bitcoin price goes down enough that their measly revenue from their obscure enterprise software can't cover the loss from their Bitcoin investment.

He can keep holding, but it will lower the morale of the employees as well as himself. Unless you think Microstrategy has completely become a hedge fund, they have products to build and they will even lose what's left of their customers if things go bad. You really think the guy can keep holding when he lost hundreds of millions of dollars through BTC? (At the moment he's still in the positive even after the crash, but I'm talking about when it goes down further) Also he can and likely will get into trouble with the SEC when things get bad.

This is not the first time Saylor did stuff like this. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2589923/update--micros...

cocktailpeanuts commented on Shorting Bitcoin tbray.org/ongoing/When/20... · Posted by u/zdw

cocktailpeanuts · 5 years ago

If BTC price doesn't recover soon and falls further, Microstrategy is what will kill BTC. I don't know why BTC investors are so crazy about Microstrategy buying BTC (This would have never happened back in the early days of Bitcoin), but if BTC price goes down further, Microstrategy will be forced to sell their BTC by their shareholders. Otherwise the Microstrategy stock itself will crash. Also when Microstrategy loses too much money, they may finally have to shut down because they borrowed so much money from people just to buy BTC.

When Microstrategy crashes, along with them, the public sentiment for BTC will go to shit, and that will cause the crash of BTC itself since the whole recent price climb was based on the "institutions are buying up BTC" narrative. This is the scariest scenario. Once the downward spiral happens it will be unstoppable, it will be like the crash Mt. Gox caused, but like 100 times harsher.

cocktailpeanuts commented on We're Finally Starting to Revolt Against the Cult of Ambition nytimes.com/2021/06/06/op... · Posted by u/adam

cocktailpeanuts · 5 years ago

What an idiotic essay.

What Osaka did has nothing to do with ambition, she did it because of the changing landscape of the media. Unlike the old days where athletes had to rely on press conferences to get their story out, nowadays they can directly broadcast their messages through their social media like Twitter, Instagram, TikTok or whatever, and shape the message JUST THE WAY THEY WANT, instead of getting tricked by sketchy reporters to be quoted in uncontrollable ways.

The author starts from this completely incorrect assumption (based on her own personal bias) and then writes a whole article about how people "should not be ambitious", which is her true agenda. Osaka has nothing to do with this writer's agenda, the writer simply "used" Osaka as a tool for her own agenda.

Ironically, this kind of idiotic "journalism" is EXACTLY why people like Osaka decide to not deal with the press. There's nothing to gain by giving these people the power to put words in their mouth, just to write articles that they were already going to write, only using you as a narrative tool and often times hurting your reputation to achieve their agenda.

And no, ambition is NOT a cult. It's the main reason why the humanity was able to evolve as fast as they did, and it IS a virtue. It's not for everyone, but telling people to get rid of their professional ambition while writing that on the NYTimes to promote themselves (ambition) is the most hypocritical thing ever.

cocktailpeanuts commented on Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project intuitiveexplanations.com... · Posted by u/raxod502

cocktailpeanuts · 5 years ago

It's kinda funny how this whole drama is for copying some "intellectual property" that anyone can easily build.

If you don't want your virtual cloud sandbox app to be copied easily, build something that actually is novel. For example see Stackblitz https://stackblitz.com/ I think they're going to completely destroy all these Replit-like models.

cocktailpeanuts commented on Cryptocurrency Bear? iamunknowing.com/crypto-b... · Posted by u/carlgreene

cocktailpeanuts · 5 years ago

> However, decentralized immutability means that nothing can be done should an unintended action occur with your account.

All that's needed is an elegant identity system that privately ties identity with transactions so that only the stakeholders can share their transactions while the ledger itself is public.

That way "Decentralized Immutability" can co-exist with mutability through law in case something terrible happens. You don't need to change the history, you simply need to make a court order to create an additional transaction that reverts the disaster. Just like how when a hacker gets caught stealing money, they are forced to send the money back (additional transaction) instead of deleting the original stealing transaction from the bank account and rewriting as if nothing happened.

The thing is, pseudo-Turing complete blockchains like Ethereum (and all EVM-like blockchains) are not really fit for this purpose because the entire logic is on chain. UTXO based blockchains like Bitcoin is optimized for this since each transaction can act as evidence trail.

cocktailpeanuts commented on Unstoppable Code? blog.dshr.org/2021/06/uns... · Posted by u/EvanAnderson

atweiden · 5 years ago

> Unlike Proof of Work based blockchains which require seizable factory infrastructure to break even, Proof of Stake doesn't need one.

This isn’t inherent to PoW consensus. In 2010, Bitcoin was CPU mineable on any ordinary Windows PC. It wasn’t until Bitcoin commanded a significant market value — which wasn’t guaranteed in the slightest — that industrial scale mining operations came into the foray.

> Most Proof of Stake supporters see this as a good thing because it means there's no electricity waste and higher degree of "censorship resistance".

Your understanding of censorship resistance is gravely mistaken [1]:

    Overcoming censorship is not possible in a PoS system, as the censor
    has acquired majority stake and cannot be unseated. As such PoS
    systems are not censorship-resistant and the theory is therefore
    invalid.

If 51% of the stake — even if owned by separate entities — were to deliberately engage in censorship, the general public would have absolutely no recourse. Conversely, in Proof of Work systems, new miners could join the network at any time to challenge the majority miner censor. That is simply impossible under a Proof of Stake model with network censors.

In addition to being vulnerable to total censorship, Proof of Stake consensus suffers from the misfeature of not even having a quantitative fork ranking protocol — i.e. it lacks a way to objectively compare the truthfulness of divergent blockchains. Under adversarial conditions, the PoS chains pos1, pos2, and pos3 cannot be quantitatively ranked by hashing power the way the PoW chains pow1, pow2 and po3 could be, as there is no hashing power in PoS. Instead, there is only “phone-a-friend” consensus, which Vitalik Buterin has euphemistically referred to as “weak subjectivity”.

Jude C. Nelson, who has a PhD in distributed systems from Princeston, critiques PoS better than anyone [2]:

    PoW requires less proactive trust and coordination between
    community members than PoS -- and thus is better able to recover
    from both liveness and safety failures -- precisely because
    it both (1) provides a computational method for ranking fork
    quality, and (2) allows anyone to participate in producing
    a fork at any time. If the canonical chain is 51%-attacked,
    and the attack eventually subsides, then the canonical chain
    can eventually be re-established in-band by honest miners
    simply continuing to work on the non-attacker chain. In PoS,
    block-producers have no such protocol -- such a protocol
    cannot exist because to the rest of the network, it looks like
    the honest nodes have been slashed for being dishonest. Any
    recovery procedure necessarily includes block-producers having
    to go around and convince people out-of-band that they were
    totally not dishonest, and were slashed due to a "hack" (and,
    since there's lots of money on the line, who knows if they're
    being honest about this?).

> Proof of Work blockchains, while wasting a lot of energy, can be regulated easily because the government can simply regulate the large miners in their countries.

Because Proof of Stake blockchains can’t even come to consensus under adversarial conditions without human intervention (per JCN), these “blockchains” can actually be understood as distributed append-only ledgers managed by trusted central organizations the membership to which is gated by wealth. It’s highly misleading — even outright deceptive — to promote such systems as being more permissionless than PoW-powered systems like Bitcoin.

“Green-friendliness” was never a design goal of cryptocurrency: creating a lasting store of value sans institutions, exchangeable pseudonymously over the internet, was.

[1]: https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Proof-o...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26810619

cocktailpeanuts · 5 years ago

> This isn’t inherent to PoW consensus. In 2010, Bitcoin was CPU mineable on any ordinary Windows PC. It wasn’t until Bitcoin commanded a significant market value — which wasn’t guaranteed in the slightest — that industrial scale mining operations came into the foray.

This is inherent to the PoW consensus. Satoshi Nakamoto himself even said Bitcoin would end up in data centers because of this property. It's not that hard to understand why this would be the case. PoW is powered by competition, and competition begets scale, just like any other industry.

> Your understanding of censorship resistance is gravely mistaken [1]:

Before making this kind of condescending comments, maybe make sure that you are not the one who's misunderstanding what I am saying? I was talking about what many PoS supporters think, not what I thought. Go ahead and re-read what I said.

Their (The PoS supporters) idea is that "because it's much more difficult to find PoS validators than PoW miners because PoW miners need to maintain a factory whereas PoS validators can just hide in their mom's basement and make money, it's more difficult for the governments to regulate PoS than PoW". And my point was that that was an incorrect belief.

My entire post was talking about this false sense of "censorship resistance", basically Pro-PoW and anti-PoS, and you didn't need to lecture me on your superior understanding of PoW. I understand everything you said, but you completely misunderstood my point. If you didn't get that by reading, maybe it's your reading comprehension problem.

cocktailpeanuts commented on Unstoppable Code? blog.dshr.org/2021/06/uns... · Posted by u/EvanAnderson

smackeyacky · 5 years ago

Would it be possible to set up a network like folding@home designed to destroy bitcoin? It would be an interesting state sponsored exercise.

cocktailpeanuts · 5 years ago

"If a greedy attacker is able to assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes, he would have to choose between using it to defraud people by stealing back his payments, or using it to generate new coins. He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth."

- Section 6, Bitcoin Whitepaper