8 ms·

SENS Research Foundation Receives $2.4M Ethereum Donation from Vitalik Buterin

108 points by KasianFranks 9y ago

megadethz 9y ago
Worlds youngest billionaire.
- icelancer 9y ago
  And to think it was rooted in the fact that he got mad that he was banned from World of Warcraft, leading him to distrust centralized authority, and the Bitcoin team blew off his smart contracts ideas, so he made Ethereum. In a parallel universe, Buterin is doing something way worse for humanity with his genius and his resolve, so I'll take the Buterin we have today.
  - pavlov 9y ago
    Ethereum is still like a tech demo though. Right now, Ethereum's promised "global supercomputer" is more like a 1960s IBM mainframe that you can access through wildly expensive dial-up links. What kind of world-changing networked software would you have built on that? It doesn't seem to actually work for any applications other than escrow (ICOs) – and even that has a strong pyramidic sniff to it, because it's used to collect investments into Ethereum-based protocols that can't really result in functional applications on Ethereum unless it's radically redesigned. Maybe they'll pull it off and Ethereum will be useful a few years from now. I'm not making any bets.
    - icelancer 9y ago
      Cryptocurrency represents billions of dollars of value exchanged every single day with the bits being the physical representation of money. Ten years ago that kind of adoption would have been considered impossible. Anything beyond that is moving the goalposts. I'm happy to be along for the ride rather than commenting about the "this is not the likely implementation of this technology" / "it's used for scams" / "it doesn't scale." I am aware of all that and I agree with most of it. But the financial adoption of this technology is itself incredibly amazing, and something I think people overlook so they can make a technically-correct point about the tech in its infancy. Which is not to say you are doing it, but it's pretty close, especially since I didn't advocate for Ethereum as genius (it's pretty interesting, if you ask me; and smart contracts do a great job of exposing how stupid people are and how terrible of developers we are).
      - knodi123 9y ago
        > Cryptocurrency represents billions of dollars of value exchanged every single day And a comparatively microscopic proportion of those billions are used to purchase goods or services.
      - pavlov 9y ago
        I agree the financial adoption is fun to watch (from the sidelines, eating popcorn), and I think there will be interesting applications for smart contracts eventually. However I'm not convinced that Ethereum's "jack of all trades" approach has long-term potential – it looks a lot like an initial vague research prototype that needs to be pared down to specific verticals before you have a product. (Exposing the stupidity of everyone who tries to use it for anything may not be the best way to build a long-term community?) Personally I like to imagine Ethereum as a 1969 mainframe occupying a giant office floor, and then ask the question: ARPANET was just around the corner in 1969, so what would that change look like this time? In other words, what's the "TCP/IP" for Ethereum's "mainframe on dial-up"?
  - AlexCoventry 9y ago
    Got a cite for the origin story? That's cool.
    - icelancer 9y ago
      From the man himself. (I seem to have gotten the banning thing wrong, but same point overall) https://about.me/vitalik_buterin https://about.me/vitalik_buterin "I was born in 1994 in Russia and moved to Canada in 2000, where I went to school. I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007-2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock's Siphon Life spell. I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit." And a brief mention on Wikipedia on the other point: "Ethereum was first described in Buterin's white paper, in late 2013. Buterin argued that bitcoin needed a scripting language for application development. But when he failed to gain agreement, he proposed development of a new platform with a more general scripting language."
      - CryptoPunk 9y ago
        >>https://about.me/vitalik_buterin https://about.me/vitalik_buterin This is satire.
  - kanzure 9y ago
    > the Bitcoin team blew off his smart contracts ideas Probably because he didn't realize bitcoin already had Bitcoin script. It's mostly ethereum people who disbelieve in the existence of bitcoin scripting... but go look at the source code, it's right there.
    - dreit1 9y ago
      This is a gross misinterpretation of what actually happened. Read up on the OP_RETURN saga. Bitcoin Core completely shitting on Counterparty is why Vitalik decided not to build on top of a system that showed that the core developers could and would pull out the rug from under him OP_RETURN is the greatest turning point in cryptocurrency history
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
matt_wulfeck 9y ago
What would you do with more years added to your life? Probably spend it glued to your phone like the years you have now.
- dawhizkid 9y ago
  Even if the price of such a drug was $0, realistically only wealthy people could afford to live significantly longer.
  - rictic 9y ago
    What? Why?
    - dawhizkid 9y ago
      People in this country can barely scrap up enough money for a 20 year retirement, if they even do that. If everyone suddenly lived on average another 40-50 years, when do you retire? How does that effect the sustainability of a pension scheme/social security?
      - pjscott 9y ago
        The answer, for people who aren't going to die soon, is "live longer, and get the money to cover it as you go." In practice that'll mean fewer people on a retirement-and-death path and more people working in their 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s and 100s and 110s and so on, if all goes well.
        dawhizkid 9y ago
        So philosophically is working until you're 110 is a superior life? Assuming there will be fewer good jobs in the future due to automation, would crowding a job market with older workers in their 80s, 90s, 100s a good thing for society and young people entering the job market? The lucky few, with some in tech reading HN, work on what they're intrinsically excited by and get paid to do it. Most don't.
reasonattlm 9y ago
I think it important to note that the SENS research programs are just about 100% funded by philanthropy, with thousands of supporters over the years. This donation is a part of ~$6M from the year end fundraiser: about $500k from a lot of people in the community, Buterin's donation, $2M from the Pineapple Fund, and $1M from an anonymous donor. Needless to say everyone in the SENS community is very pleased by this unexpected generosity. These funds will go a long way towards helping to push allotopic expression of mitochondrial genes (remove the contribution of damaged mitochondria to aging) and cross-link breakers (remove stiffening of arteries and loss of elasticity in other tissues) to completion over the next couple of years, not to mention a range of other important projects in rejuvenation research. It makes us think that we're somewhere crucial in the tipping point for support and understanding of rejuvenation biotechnology as field. -------- On this topic, I have a pet theory regarding wealth and its use to change the world. Historically, people who became extraordinarily wealthy have done so only after many years of work on projects that they were deeply invested in for the sake of the work, not for the sake of financial reward. Consequently they had no real idea regarding what to do with that wealth, other than to keep on moving forward in the shape that they had carved out for their lives prior to that enrichment. They became one with the process that brought them to where they were. Further, these were usually older people by that point, come to terms with the human condition, more comfortable with the world as it is, not as a younger and more fiery individual would have it be. Not everyone is worn down to acceptance - look at the large-scale, results-oriented philanthropy of Bill Gates, for example - but I think it is definitely the case that vision is often one of the early casualties of aging, and the advent of personal wealth doesn't change that situation for any given individual. For every Bill Gates there are another twenty billionaires who fail to change the world in any significant way beyond the ventures that earned them their fortunes. Cryptocurrencies, the first application of blockchain technologies, have resulted in a sizable number of people who have become enormously wealthy in a much shorter period of time, and at younger ages, than has typically been the case in the past. Even the dotcom bubble era and its immediate sequels didn't reach these levels of youthful enrichment, and that produced a fair number of people young enough and wealthy enough to set forth to remake sections of the world in the service of loftier agendas. They escaped being shaped by the processes of their enrichment to a great enough degree to retain fire and vision. Consider the willingness to put capital towards world-changing futurist ideals exhibited by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sean Parker, to pick a few. But while that generation of high net worth individuals have certainly supported the life sciences, and in Peter Thiel's case SENS rejuvenation research, they largely haven't followed Thiel's support for the goal of treating aging as a medical condition, and Thiel himself has certainly not gone all-in. He hasn't followed the logic further towards its end, in that the only rational use for excess capital in this age is to develop viable treatments to reverse aging. When you can buy time with money, and not just for yourself, but for everyone, then that is the rational thing to do. The wealthy of the blockchain community may well proceed differently. The times are different, for one, as rejuvenation research after the SENS model of damage repair is more broadly known and accepted nowadays. The technology industry of the Bay Area, still in many ways the spiritual center of modern software engineering and invention, includes a great many supporters of SENS, the Methuselah Foundation, and the SENS Research Foundation, and that number has grown considerably over the past fifteen years. Aging is an engineering problem, SENS is a set of repairs and a set of outlines for repair technologies, and engineers grasp that readily. It isn't a coincidence that there are so many engineers, software and otherwise, to be found participating in the past fifteen years of philanthropy to support progress in rejuvenation research, work based on periodic repair of the cell and tissue damage that causes aging. Now it is the case that many of those engineers in the cryptocurrency space are both young and suddenly wealthy, people who have not been worn down to an acceptance of the world as it is, have not become one with their process of enrichment. They are still willing to consider radical change to the status quo, full of the fire of success, and equipped with sufficient resources to push forward the research and development that they would like to see happen. Exciting times.
mephitix 9y ago
I've never really understood why people consider aging to be a problem. I'm not sure if we as a civilization have been able to deal with overpopulation, at least looking at currently-overpopulated areas. Personally, I would rather have an optimal life - one where I don't have any diseases or ailments, so I can live life to the fullest, all the way up until death. So IMO, currently incurable or intractable things like cancer, Alzheimers, Parkinson's, dementia, are more important. If fixing 'aging' can fix these issues, or if an aging fix is a side-effect of these issues (please enlighten me since I know nothing about aging research) then I would be fine with that - but would still be worried about overpopulation, whether it's the rich or both the rich and poor.
- kayhi 9y ago
  They are trying increase the optimal years let’s say 20-40 years now to 20-100 years.
- chii 9y ago
  overpopulation isn't a problem, if energy and resource extraction can continue via stella means (rather than tax the planet's environment). For example, dyson swarms for energy, and there's plenty of space on mars/titan/spaceships. If people are able to live 'forever', may be there's more incentive to invest in these technologies.
- tonygrue 9y ago
  As you speculate, some lines of research address aging by keeping you young. Your DNA is kept young, and as a side effect your muscles are kept young and the ability to quickly recover from injury is restored, like a 20 year old, instead of a 60 year old. I assume this strategy would also protect you from a number of diseases related to DNA aging. Of course, I also assume it wouldn't be a cure all, and we'd still need to address wear and tear in multiple ways. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170323141340.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170323141340.h...
- reasonattlm 9y ago
  Aging is the same cell and tissue damage that causes the age-relates diseases you mention. The only difference between aging and disease is how much damage you have, how far the cascade of cause and effect and secondary consequences has progressed. "Aging" is subclinical "age-related disease". There are few root cause forms of damage, but the cascade is as complex as our biochemistry, so there are any number of fatal endpoints and horrible declines along the way. The only plausible near-future way to remove age-related disease is to periodically repair the damage that causes aging. Nothing else is going to work. Consider this when thinking about living life to the fullest all the way up until death: if you are so healthy (meaning lacking in damage) that you don't suffer age-related disease, what are you going to die from? Your mortality risk is a function of the load of cell and tissue damage you currently bear. The only way to prevent age-related disease is to have a low load of damage, and consequently a low rate of mortality. Given today's accident and murder rates, an ageless human undergoing comprehensive damage repair every decade or so would live for 1000 years or more before encountering a fatal happenstance. If you live much past a century from now, I'd have to imagine other technological options opening up that make that number seems small. On overpopulation, it seems pretty clear from the research carried out on this topic that agelessness will not result in problematically large populations. Wealthy regions are already declining in population growth, and poor regions decline as they become wealthier. The poor are being lifted up rapidly. See, for example, Demographic Consequences of Defeating Aging: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3192186/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3192186/ It also seems fairly clear that what people call overpopulation now would be better described as some mix of kleptocracy, war, other bad governance, and endemic poverty that in many cases is being addressed at a fast rate in comparison to past history. Given the long list of regions that have lifted themselves up from peasant farming to technology industries and wealth since the 1950s, one has to look at those that haven't succeeded in this, and ask why: it certainly doesn't correlate with number of people.
np_tedious 9y ago
Good kid, that Vitalik. Why can't you be more like him, Johnny?
bloudermilk 9y ago
The idea that you can invent a crypto currency, mine the earliest (and therefore easiest-to-mine) tokens yourself, build a business/community/market, then get incredibly rich strikes me as incredibly shady. In theory it's not that different from founding a company, selling some of the shares to investors, keeping "founder shares" for yourself, then growing the company. But somehow it seems much shadier? I guess the difference is: in a company an investor can look at a cap table and say "that's a reasonable number of shares for the founders to keep" whereas the coin "investors" can't know how much of outstanding equity belongs to the founders.
- timjver 9y ago
  What makes it immoral for Buterin to have a large amount of Ether? Would it be immoral for a very early investor to buy a lot of Ether for a very low price?
  - hanniabu 9y ago
    I think what he's alluding to is just that the amount he owns it's very clear, although there are estimates out there which are close enough.
    - icelancer 9y ago
      Is Buterin supposed to invent a cryptocurrency and own none of it and not be invested in its own success? How much is acceptable? Who deems the amount acceptable?
      - bloudermilk 9y ago
        These are all very good questions! I wasn't trying to pass judgement one way or the other, I just think it's an interesting discussion point. Certainly, if crypto currency is going to stay mainstream we (the US) will be regulating a lot of this in short order.
    - bloudermilk 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
goldenkey 9y ago
The only reason he did this is because crypto has been crashing -- and public news like this will add new buyers to the crypto market. Considering his share of ethereum is worth billions -- by donating 0.01% he raises the rest by dozens of % points, effectively making him billions. Smart move.
- cyanbane 9y ago
  while I don't disagree with the outcome you stated, that doesn't mean his motive isn't legitimate generosity. I am very happy that this organization can do (as of now) $2.4m more research to benefit people.
- timjver 9y ago
  >Considering his share of ethereum is worth billions Citation needed.
- icelancer 9y ago
  >> crypto has been crashing On a very short timeline, aka a few days. In the past say, oh, I dunno, 3 months (which apparently is long-term), it hasn't been at all. And do you think Buterin just donated $2.4mm fiat value overnight after it crashed this past week? It's probably been talked about for weeks if not months, or years.
joefourier 9y ago
If you believe that aging and death is a natural part of life that we should passively accept and are thus opposed to the work done by the SENS Foundation, I encourage you to read the Fable of the Dragon Tyrant by Nick Bostrom: https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html Life extension remains a currently a critically underfunded part of medical research, primarily due to the social attitudes towards it.
- tfha 9y ago
  Across almost all kingdoms of life, death is a common denominator. It is how a species is able to evolve over time and keep up with a dynamic landscape. Death is very healthy at the species level.
  - icelancer 9y ago
    This is true, no question about it. But humanity is exempt from a lot of basic ecosystem analyses given our position in the world today. People act like this isn't the case, but it very clearly is; no combination of species has the impact that we do on our environment and the other species on the planet.
    - tfha 9y ago
      How about the combination of species that created the atmosphere at all? Gave it oxygen? Enriched the soil?
  - AgentME 9y ago
    Intelligence can accomplish many things faster, better, and in less morally-horrifying ways than evolution through natural selection can. I think it's desirable for us to take over the reins. (Of course, there will still always be natural selection operating, just in a new style. People/ideas that can't participate in society, at least in a way to sexually reproduce, obtain the resources for cloning / life extension, or spread their ideas, won't be selected for.)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
dawhizkid 9y ago
It's amazing to me, despite so many reproducible studies on genetically similar animals to humans as well as human studies, that people aren't more excited by this free and unlimited resource every person on earth already has available to them to fight aging/increase longevity in fasting/calorie restriction.
- vulcanodon 9y ago
  Could you point me towards some of those studies? Just to be clear, I'm not asking in a sarcastic way; I'm genuinely curious.
  - dawhizkid 9y ago
    https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/11/intermittent-fasting-may-be-center-of-increasing-lifespan/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/11/intermittent-... https://www.nature.com/articles/473161a https://www.nature.com/articles/473161a https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3919445/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3919445/
- xexers 9y ago
  I listened to Aubrey on a podcast recently. He was saying that caloric restriction doesn't give much benefit if you start in your middle age. You need to start in your early twenties.
  - dawhizkid 9y ago
    I agree, which is why I do keto and IF and in my twenties. The majority of the world's population is in their youth, so this knowledge impacts a huge % of the world's population.
ACow_Adonis 9y ago
How can i put this delicately but openly... As an ignorant observer... is the SENS foundation viewed as alegitimate research org, or is it, to borrow a phrase coined by Djikstra..."something that could only have been invented in southern california".
- reasonattlm 9y ago
  Read their publication list. The SRF collaborates with most of the important research groups in the field: http://www.sens.org/research/publications http://www.sens.org/research/publications Also, see their research advisory board, which includes numerous respected researchers, leaders in their areas of work. http://www.sens.org/about/leadership/research-advisory-board http://www.sens.org/about/leadership/research-advisory-board You might be familiar with senolytics, the clearance of senescent cells as a way to treat aging that is presently taking off in a big way in the research and development communities. Aubrey de Grey, cofounder of the SRF, called for that back in 2002, and the SENS programs have advocated for it since then: http://www.sens.org/files/pdf/manu12.pdf http://www.sens.org/files/pdf/manu12.pdf The SRF and original parent organization Methuselah Foundation seed funded Oisin Biotechnologies to work on gene therapy for senolytics a few years ago. Other lines of development have also spun off into companies in the SRF network.
jrs95 9y ago
At first I thought this said "SNES Foundation" and I was very confused.
wallflower 9y ago
Someone on HN mentioned this paper in another thread about life extension. I find it fascinating that old age can be explained as redundant system breakdown and eventually failure. > Reliability theory is a general theory about systems failure. It allows researchers to predict the age-related failure kinetics for a system of given architecture (reliability structure) and given reliability of its components. Reliability theory predicts that even those systems that are entirely composed of non-aging elements (with a constant failure rate) will nevertheless deteriorate (fail more often) with age, if these systems are redundant in irreplaceable elements. Aging, therefore, is a direct consequence of systems redundancy. Reliability theory also predicts the late-life mortality deceleration with subsequent leveling-off, as well as the late-life mortality plateaus, as an inevitable consequence of redundancy exhaustion at extreme old ages. The theory explains why mortality rates increase exponentially with age (the Gompertz law) in many species, by taking into account the initial flaws (defects) in newly formed systems https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11742523 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11742523

108 points by KasianFranks 9y ago

megadethz 9y ago

Worlds youngest billionaire.

icelancer 9y ago
And to think it was rooted in the fact that he got mad that he was banned from World of Warcraft, leading him to distrust centralized authority, and the Bitcoin team blew off his smart contracts ideas, so he made Ethereum. In a parallel universe, Buterin is doing something way worse for humanity with his genius and his resolve, so I'll take the Buterin we have today.
- pavlov 9y ago
  Ethereum is still like a tech demo though. Right now, Ethereum's promised "global supercomputer" is more like a 1960s IBM mainframe that you can access through wildly expensive dial-up links. What kind of world-changing networked software would you have built on that? It doesn't seem to actually work for any applications other than escrow (ICOs) – and even that has a strong pyramidic sniff to it, because it's used to collect investments into Ethereum-based protocols that can't really result in functional applications on Ethereum unless it's radically redesigned. Maybe they'll pull it off and Ethereum will be useful a few years from now. I'm not making any bets.
  - icelancer 9y ago
    Cryptocurrency represents billions of dollars of value exchanged every single day with the bits being the physical representation of money. Ten years ago that kind of adoption would have been considered impossible. Anything beyond that is moving the goalposts. I'm happy to be along for the ride rather than commenting about the "this is not the likely implementation of this technology" / "it's used for scams" / "it doesn't scale." I am aware of all that and I agree with most of it. But the financial adoption of this technology is itself incredibly amazing, and something I think people overlook so they can make a technically-correct point about the tech in its infancy. Which is not to say you are doing it, but it's pretty close, especially since I didn't advocate for Ethereum as genius (it's pretty interesting, if you ask me; and smart contracts do a great job of exposing how stupid people are and how terrible of developers we are).
    - knodi123 9y ago
      > Cryptocurrency represents billions of dollars of value exchanged every single day And a comparatively microscopic proportion of those billions are used to purchase goods or services.
    - pavlov 9y ago
      I agree the financial adoption is fun to watch (from the sidelines, eating popcorn), and I think there will be interesting applications for smart contracts eventually. However I'm not convinced that Ethereum's "jack of all trades" approach has long-term potential – it looks a lot like an initial vague research prototype that needs to be pared down to specific verticals before you have a product. (Exposing the stupidity of everyone who tries to use it for anything may not be the best way to build a long-term community?) Personally I like to imagine Ethereum as a 1969 mainframe occupying a giant office floor, and then ask the question: ARPANET was just around the corner in 1969, so what would that change look like this time? In other words, what's the "TCP/IP" for Ethereum's "mainframe on dial-up"?
- AlexCoventry 9y ago
  Got a cite for the origin story? That's cool.
  - icelancer 9y ago
    From the man himself. (I seem to have gotten the banning thing wrong, but same point overall) https://about.me/vitalik_buterin https://about.me/vitalik_buterin "I was born in 1994 in Russia and moved to Canada in 2000, where I went to school. I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007-2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock's Siphon Life spell. I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit." And a brief mention on Wikipedia on the other point: "Ethereum was first described in Buterin's white paper, in late 2013. Buterin argued that bitcoin needed a scripting language for application development. But when he failed to gain agreement, he proposed development of a new platform with a more general scripting language."
    - CryptoPunk 9y ago
      >>https://about.me/vitalik_buterin https://about.me/vitalik_buterin This is satire.
- kanzure 9y ago
  > the Bitcoin team blew off his smart contracts ideas Probably because he didn't realize bitcoin already had Bitcoin script. It's mostly ethereum people who disbelieve in the existence of bitcoin scripting... but go look at the source code, it's right there.
  - dreit1 9y ago
    This is a gross misinterpretation of what actually happened. Read up on the OP_RETURN saga. Bitcoin Core completely shitting on Counterparty is why Vitalik decided not to build on top of a system that showed that the core developers could and would pull out the rug from under him OP_RETURN is the greatest turning point in cryptocurrency history
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]

matt_wulfeck 9y ago

What would you do with more years added to your life? Probably spend it glued to your phone like the years you have now.

dawhizkid 9y ago
Even if the price of such a drug was $0, realistically only wealthy people could afford to live significantly longer.
- rictic 9y ago
  What? Why?
  - dawhizkid 9y ago
    People in this country can barely scrap up enough money for a 20 year retirement, if they even do that. If everyone suddenly lived on average another 40-50 years, when do you retire? How does that effect the sustainability of a pension scheme/social security?
    - pjscott 9y ago
      The answer, for people who aren't going to die soon, is "live longer, and get the money to cover it as you go." In practice that'll mean fewer people on a retirement-and-death path and more people working in their 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s and 100s and 110s and so on, if all goes well.
      - dawhizkid 9y ago
        So philosophically is working until you're 110 is a superior life? Assuming there will be fewer good jobs in the future due to automation, would crowding a job market with older workers in their 80s, 90s, 100s a good thing for society and young people entering the job market? The lucky few, with some in tech reading HN, work on what they're intrinsically excited by and get paid to do it. Most don't.

reasonattlm 9y ago

I think it important to note that the SENS research programs are just about 100% funded by philanthropy, with thousands of supporters over the years. This donation is a part of ~$6M from the year end fundraiser: about $500k from a lot of people in the community, Buterin's donation, $2M from the Pineapple Fund, and $1M from an anonymous donor. Needless to say everyone in the SENS community is very pleased by this unexpected generosity. These funds will go a long way towards helping to push allotopic expression of mitochondrial genes (remove the contribution of damaged mitochondria to aging) and cross-link breakers (remove stiffening of arteries and loss of elasticity in other tissues) to completion over the next couple of years, not to mention a range of other important projects in rejuvenation research. It makes us think that we're somewhere crucial in the tipping point for support and understanding of rejuvenation biotechnology as field. -------- On this topic, I have a pet theory regarding wealth and its use to change the world. Historically, people who became extraordinarily wealthy have done so only after many years of work on projects that they were deeply invested in for the sake of the work, not for the sake of financial reward. Consequently they had no real idea regarding what to do with that wealth, other than to keep on moving forward in the shape that they had carved out for their lives prior to that enrichment. They became one with the process that brought them to where they were. Further, these were usually older people by that point, come to terms with the human condition, more comfortable with the world as it is, not as a younger and more fiery individual would have it be. Not everyone is worn down to acceptance - look at the large-scale, results-oriented philanthropy of Bill Gates, for example - but I think it is definitely the case that vision is often one of the early casualties of aging, and the advent of personal wealth doesn't change that situation for any given individual. For every Bill Gates there are another twenty billionaires who fail to change the world in any significant way beyond the ventures that earned them their fortunes. Cryptocurrencies, the first application of blockchain technologies, have resulted in a sizable number of people who have become enormously wealthy in a much shorter period of time, and at younger ages, than has typically been the case in the past. Even the dotcom bubble era and its immediate sequels didn't reach these levels of youthful enrichment, and that produced a fair number of people young enough and wealthy enough to set forth to remake sections of the world in the service of loftier agendas. They escaped being shaped by the processes of their enrichment to a great enough degree to retain fire and vision. Consider the willingness to put capital towards world-changing futurist ideals exhibited by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sean Parker, to pick a few. But while that generation of high net worth individuals have certainly supported the life sciences, and in Peter Thiel's case SENS rejuvenation research, they largely haven't followed Thiel's support for the goal of treating aging as a medical condition, and Thiel himself has certainly not gone all-in. He hasn't followed the logic further towards its end, in that the only rational use for excess capital in this age is to develop viable treatments to reverse aging. When you can buy time with money, and not just for yourself, but for everyone, then that is the rational thing to do. The wealthy of the blockchain community may well proceed differently. The times are different, for one, as rejuvenation research after the SENS model of damage repair is more broadly known and accepted nowadays. The technology industry of the Bay Area, still in many ways the spiritual center of modern software engineering and invention, includes a great many supporters of SENS, the Methuselah Foundation, and the SENS Research Foundation, and that number has grown considerably over the past fifteen years. Aging is an engineering problem, SENS is a set of repairs and a set of outlines for repair technologies, and engineers grasp that readily. It isn't a coincidence that there are so many engineers, software and otherwise, to be found participating in the past fifteen years of philanthropy to support progress in rejuvenation research, work based on periodic repair of the cell and tissue damage that causes aging. Now it is the case that many of those engineers in the cryptocurrency space are both young and suddenly wealthy, people who have not been worn down to an acceptance of the world as it is, have not become one with their process of enrichment. They are still willing to consider radical change to the status quo, full of the fire of success, and equipped with sufficient resources to push forward the research and development that they would like to see happen. Exciting times.

mephitix 9y ago

I've never really understood why people consider aging to be a problem. I'm not sure if we as a civilization have been able to deal with overpopulation, at least looking at currently-overpopulated areas. Personally, I would rather have an optimal life - one where I don't have any diseases or ailments, so I can live life to the fullest, all the way up until death. So IMO, currently incurable or intractable things like cancer, Alzheimers, Parkinson's, dementia, are more important. If fixing 'aging' can fix these issues, or if an aging fix is a side-effect of these issues (please enlighten me since I know nothing about aging research) then I would be fine with that - but would still be worried about overpopulation, whether it's the rich or both the rich and poor.

kayhi 9y ago
They are trying increase the optimal years let’s say 20-40 years now to 20-100 years.
chii 9y ago
overpopulation isn't a problem, if energy and resource extraction can continue via stella means (rather than tax the planet's environment). For example, dyson swarms for energy, and there's plenty of space on mars/titan/spaceships. If people are able to live 'forever', may be there's more incentive to invest in these technologies.
tonygrue 9y ago
As you speculate, some lines of research address aging by keeping you young. Your DNA is kept young, and as a side effect your muscles are kept young and the ability to quickly recover from injury is restored, like a 20 year old, instead of a 60 year old. I assume this strategy would also protect you from a number of diseases related to DNA aging. Of course, I also assume it wouldn't be a cure all, and we'd still need to address wear and tear in multiple ways. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170323141340.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170323141340.h...
reasonattlm 9y ago
Aging is the same cell and tissue damage that causes the age-relates diseases you mention. The only difference between aging and disease is how much damage you have, how far the cascade of cause and effect and secondary consequences has progressed. "Aging" is subclinical "age-related disease". There are few root cause forms of damage, but the cascade is as complex as our biochemistry, so there are any number of fatal endpoints and horrible declines along the way. The only plausible near-future way to remove age-related disease is to periodically repair the damage that causes aging. Nothing else is going to work. Consider this when thinking about living life to the fullest all the way up until death: if you are so healthy (meaning lacking in damage) that you don't suffer age-related disease, what are you going to die from? Your mortality risk is a function of the load of cell and tissue damage you currently bear. The only way to prevent age-related disease is to have a low load of damage, and consequently a low rate of mortality. Given today's accident and murder rates, an ageless human undergoing comprehensive damage repair every decade or so would live for 1000 years or more before encountering a fatal happenstance. If you live much past a century from now, I'd have to imagine other technological options opening up that make that number seems small. On overpopulation, it seems pretty clear from the research carried out on this topic that agelessness will not result in problematically large populations. Wealthy regions are already declining in population growth, and poor regions decline as they become wealthier. The poor are being lifted up rapidly. See, for example, Demographic Consequences of Defeating Aging: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3192186/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3192186/ It also seems fairly clear that what people call overpopulation now would be better described as some mix of kleptocracy, war, other bad governance, and endemic poverty that in many cases is being addressed at a fast rate in comparison to past history. Given the long list of regions that have lifted themselves up from peasant farming to technology industries and wealth since the 1950s, one has to look at those that haven't succeeded in this, and ask why: it certainly doesn't correlate with number of people.

np_tedious 9y ago

Good kid, that Vitalik. Why can't you be more like him, Johnny?

bloudermilk 9y ago

The idea that you can invent a crypto currency, mine the earliest (and therefore easiest-to-mine) tokens yourself, build a business/community/market, then get incredibly rich strikes me as incredibly shady. In theory it's not that different from founding a company, selling some of the shares to investors, keeping "founder shares" for yourself, then growing the company. But somehow it seems much shadier? I guess the difference is: in a company an investor can look at a cap table and say "that's a reasonable number of shares for the founders to keep" whereas the coin "investors" can't know how much of outstanding equity belongs to the founders.

timjver 9y ago
What makes it immoral for Buterin to have a large amount of Ether? Would it be immoral for a very early investor to buy a lot of Ether for a very low price?
- hanniabu 9y ago
  I think what he's alluding to is just that the amount he owns it's very clear, although there are estimates out there which are close enough.
  - icelancer 9y ago
    Is Buterin supposed to invent a cryptocurrency and own none of it and not be invested in its own success? How much is acceptable? Who deems the amount acceptable?
    - bloudermilk 9y ago
      These are all very good questions! I wasn't trying to pass judgement one way or the other, I just think it's an interesting discussion point. Certainly, if crypto currency is going to stay mainstream we (the US) will be regulating a lot of this in short order.
  - bloudermilk 9y ago

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goldenkey 9y ago

The only reason he did this is because crypto has been crashing -- and public news like this will add new buyers to the crypto market. Considering his share of ethereum is worth billions -- by donating 0.01% he raises the rest by dozens of % points, effectively making him billions. Smart move.

cyanbane 9y ago
while I don't disagree with the outcome you stated, that doesn't mean his motive isn't legitimate generosity. I am very happy that this organization can do (as of now) $2.4m more research to benefit people.
timjver 9y ago
>Considering his share of ethereum is worth billions Citation needed.
icelancer 9y ago
>> crypto has been crashing On a very short timeline, aka a few days. In the past say, oh, I dunno, 3 months (which apparently is long-term), it hasn't been at all. And do you think Buterin just donated $2.4mm fiat value overnight after it crashed this past week? It's probably been talked about for weeks if not months, or years.

joefourier 9y ago

If you believe that aging and death is a natural part of life that we should passively accept and are thus opposed to the work done by the SENS Foundation, I encourage you to read the Fable of the Dragon Tyrant by Nick Bostrom: https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html Life extension remains a currently a critically underfunded part of medical research, primarily due to the social attitudes towards it.

tfha 9y ago
Across almost all kingdoms of life, death is a common denominator. It is how a species is able to evolve over time and keep up with a dynamic landscape. Death is very healthy at the species level.
- icelancer 9y ago
  This is true, no question about it. But humanity is exempt from a lot of basic ecosystem analyses given our position in the world today. People act like this isn't the case, but it very clearly is; no combination of species has the impact that we do on our environment and the other species on the planet.
  - tfha 9y ago
    How about the combination of species that created the atmosphere at all? Gave it oxygen? Enriched the soil?
- AgentME 9y ago
  Intelligence can accomplish many things faster, better, and in less morally-horrifying ways than evolution through natural selection can. I think it's desirable for us to take over the reins. (Of course, there will still always be natural selection operating, just in a new style. People/ideas that can't participate in society, at least in a way to sexually reproduce, obtain the resources for cloning / life extension, or spread their ideas, won't be selected for.)
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dawhizkid 9y ago

It's amazing to me, despite so many reproducible studies on genetically similar animals to humans as well as human studies, that people aren't more excited by this free and unlimited resource every person on earth already has available to them to fight aging/increase longevity in fasting/calorie restriction.

vulcanodon 9y ago
Could you point me towards some of those studies? Just to be clear, I'm not asking in a sarcastic way; I'm genuinely curious.
- dawhizkid 9y ago
  https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/11/intermittent-fasting-may-be-center-of-increasing-lifespan/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/11/intermittent-... https://www.nature.com/articles/473161a https://www.nature.com/articles/473161a https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3919445/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3919445/
xexers 9y ago
I listened to Aubrey on a podcast recently. He was saying that caloric restriction doesn't give much benefit if you start in your middle age. You need to start in your early twenties.
- dawhizkid 9y ago
  I agree, which is why I do keto and IF and in my twenties. The majority of the world's population is in their youth, so this knowledge impacts a huge % of the world's population.

ACow_Adonis 9y ago

How can i put this delicately but openly... As an ignorant observer... is the SENS foundation viewed as alegitimate research org, or is it, to borrow a phrase coined by Djikstra..."something that could only have been invented in southern california".

reasonattlm 9y ago
Read their publication list. The SRF collaborates with most of the important research groups in the field: http://www.sens.org/research/publications http://www.sens.org/research/publications Also, see their research advisory board, which includes numerous respected researchers, leaders in their areas of work. http://www.sens.org/about/leadership/research-advisory-board http://www.sens.org/about/leadership/research-advisory-board You might be familiar with senolytics, the clearance of senescent cells as a way to treat aging that is presently taking off in a big way in the research and development communities. Aubrey de Grey, cofounder of the SRF, called for that back in 2002, and the SENS programs have advocated for it since then: http://www.sens.org/files/pdf/manu12.pdf http://www.sens.org/files/pdf/manu12.pdf The SRF and original parent organization Methuselah Foundation seed funded Oisin Biotechnologies to work on gene therapy for senolytics a few years ago. Other lines of development have also spun off into companies in the SRF network.

jrs95 9y ago

At first I thought this said "SNES Foundation" and I was very confused.

wallflower 9y ago

Someone on HN mentioned this paper in another thread about life extension. I find it fascinating that old age can be explained as redundant system breakdown and eventually failure. > Reliability theory is a general theory about systems failure. It allows researchers to predict the age-related failure kinetics for a system of given architecture (reliability structure) and given reliability of its components. Reliability theory predicts that even those systems that are entirely composed of non-aging elements (with a constant failure rate) will nevertheless deteriorate (fail more often) with age, if these systems are redundant in irreplaceable elements. Aging, therefore, is a direct consequence of systems redundancy. Reliability theory also predicts the late-life mortality deceleration with subsequent leveling-off, as well as the late-life mortality plateaus, as an inevitable consequence of redundancy exhaustion at extreme old ages. The theory explains why mortality rates increase exponentially with age (the Gompertz law) in many species, by taking into account the initial flaws (defects) in newly formed systems https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11742523 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11742523