Then using the platform becomes work. People realise it's not worth the effort and everyone apart from the nutjobs quit.
It does not need to be more work. There is a default algo. Users can also opt for alternatives.
Readit Newscslarson commented on Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources reuters.com/technology/ex... · Posted by u/thm
cslarson commented on Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources reuters.com/technology/ex... · Posted by u/thm
“Everything that isn’t illegal is allowed” sounds great until you see what that actually means on the internet.
Anyone who has ever worked in content moderation / trust & safety knows what kind of unrelenting deluge of obnoxious / disturbing / spam-filled / miserable race to the bottom of the lizard brain stuff that is constantly being pushed back on any moderately popular social media site.
It seems so easy from a distance. Just let people say what they want to say, right? Unfortunately the result of that is a place that very few want to spend time in.
let people filter for themselves. someone is offended by pornography so chooses an algo that accounts for that, another is offended by anti-trans sentiment and another algo accounts for that. everyone should be more broadly free to speak but we are not all forced to listen.
cslarson commented on Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources reuters.com/technology/ex... · Posted by u/thm
Looking at the problems Twitter has, why does anyone think Musk can even solve one?
If one believes Twitter has a free speech problem: Musk shouts about free speech but shut down Teslas PR department, lashes out against any criticism against him, canceled a preorder because he didn't like a journalists' article etc.
Musk is great at self-promotion and this often helps his companies in some sense, but what else does he bring to the table?
I don't think these anti free speech "examples" have the effect that people who cite them expect. Yet they are used a lot which points to a striking disconnect in communication.
cslarson commented on Web3: A VC-funded gig economy of securities fraud davidgerard.co.uk/blockch... · Posted by u/mhoad
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.
Ha this is so well put, thank you.
But it does surprise that so many technologists are falling into this trap (disregarding the innovation because of the plethora of junk it enables). The value of permission-less platforms and protocols should no be assessed absent of curation. Google, email spam filtering, wikipedia, the web abounds with examples and without curation we would be in a sea of shit.
cslarson commented on Twitter accounts dropping “.eth” from usernames gist.github.com/travisbro... · Posted by u/ilamont
I think adding .eth fell out of favor after Brantly Milligan was fired from his job and banned from Twitter.
cslarson commented on Twitter accounts dropping “.eth” from usernames gist.github.com/travisbro... · Posted by u/ilamont
For anyone curious, there was a trend where people were changing their display name on Twitter to their Ethereum Name Service (ENS). It's not a URL (even though it looks like it); the concept was similar to URLs though. You'd point a friendly name to your ETH wallet.
The implication of this post is that ETH/ENS is dying or people are caring less. In think in reality, it's probably less exciting... it was just a fad.
Many of these may have been dropped as a response to Brantly Milligan being fired/canceled/banned from Twitter. At least that's why mine is up there. Could do some analysis on dates to confirm/disprove.
cslarson commented on Cronje Quits Crypto, Abandons Fantom, Yearn Finance thismorningonchain.com/ar... · Posted by u/nscalf
Decentralized systems are more powerful if governed properly, absolutely. But they won’t attract hacker types because they require ongoing maintenance and community consensus. When was the last email upgrade? HTTP and HTML have remained essentially the same their entire lives. Most of the people on the W3C are veterans, not “builders.”
Also Signal is open source, unless you have a different meaning of “closed video chat.”
they don't necessarily require ongoing maintenance, it depends how they are coded. some might even say the "correct" way is a non-upgradeable back-end (on-chain solidity contracts) and hash-addressed, ipfs hosted front-end. anyone can then pin the front-end themselves to ensure access or just run the code locally. dapps should rely on centralised, server based components as that mostly defeats the purpose.
uniswap is a good example. when they release an upgrade users must explicitly adopt the new version. in fact uniswap v1 and v2 still see usage despite the release of uniswap v3.
cslarson commented on Cronje Quits Crypto, Abandons Fantom, Yearn Finance thismorningonchain.com/ar... · Posted by u/nscalf
crypto must certainly be the worlds biggest wealth generating machine if people are borrowing at 30%. that or its a pyramid scheme
just curious where you get the 30% figure. usdc borrowing on aave is 2.83% right now, which is practically reduced a further 0.97% by the AAVE incentives. most other stablecoins are in the same region.
cslarson commented on Cronje Quits Crypto, Abandons Fantom, Yearn Finance thismorningonchain.com/ar... · Posted by u/nscalf
Andre is an innovator, both of protocols and token distribution methods. He invented the notion of a "fair launch" with YFI. Nobody was ever forced to interact with the contracts he published, they chose to. But of course he became a big figure and then got untold amounts of shit dumped on him.
Anyway, here's hoping he continues as an anon. That's really the only way. People are ridiculous.
cslarson commented on Did I just lose half a million dollars? reddit.com/r/ethereum/com... · Posted by u/olegious
This is what stresses me out the most about crypto. The supposed gold standard is a hardware wallet and access is done via 12-word recovery phrase but even that is sketchy. If I'm not wrong all an attack has to do is get recovery phrase and load it into another hardware wallet if they don't have mine, this is functionality is there if the hardware wallet fails. If I've been doxxed and have several mil in crypto, thieves can break into my house steal and crack my safe or hold me at knifepoint and ask me to open it.
I'd want to keep it on in encrypted file but even that is sketchy if I have to have in on multiple clouds.
Don't keep your backup fully available at your house for this reason. Figure out we way to split it up and distribute it, but with redundancy.