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This reminds me of a previous job. The management—none of which were technical people—just loved the idea of investigating “the blockchain” and “IoT” and “machi
by Moodles 8y ago
This reminds me of a previous job. The management—none of which were technical people—just loved the idea of investigating “the blockchain” and “IoT” and “machine learning” and “AI”, but had no clue what it meant. I left after a couple of months.
Has anyone else read this article and had the same experience as me? I genuinely second guess myself when reading it: have I lost the ability to read? Am I stupid? I read all these words on the page yet I have absolutely no comprehension of what was said. What on Earth was written on the “formalising humans on the blockchain” section for example? There sure are a lot of words, but nothing actually got said.
What, exactly do they want to do with a blockchain and why? It’s a simple question.
Oh, they have some cryptocurrency token they want to sell. Gotcha.
- theyoungwolf 8y agoYep I closed it immediately. And this is someone who actually reads this stuff.
- Moodles 8y agoThe really baffling thing is how this made it to the front page of HN.
- BucketSort 8y agoApparently this was a Y Combinator startup launched in 2015.
- Moodles 8y agoWow
- buboard 8y agoreminds me of this (no disrespect to the owners) : http://www.demiurge.technology/culture http://www.demiurge.technology/culture
- drngdds 8y agoI sincerely thought that was promotional material for some religion or cult
- amelius 8y agoPerhaps the text was generated by AI? :)
- Moodles 8y agoAI on the blockchain.
- paula_berman 8y agoThe why blockchain question is addressed in the first sentence. Of course, it is a short answer - it's not explained further because we have an entire paper just dedicated to that which most of our readers are familiar with: check paper.democracy.earth for that. Happy to answer any specific questions regarding formalizing humans on the blockchain, it is definitely a dense subject, but a key point for expanding the positive impact of crypto (if done right!).
- Moodles 8y agoNo it isn't. There's no need for a blockchain here, and you either know it and just want to make some $$$ selling your pointless tokens, or you're clueless about the tradeoffs associated with a blockchain. You obviously won't talk about anything technical to do with the blockchain: how the consensus algorithm works and why you chose it, who sells the coins and why, why you need coins, what security guarantees it has, why having all nodes of a network sharing a copy of the same ledger and constantly engaging in a protocol to agree on the state of the ledger is at all a good idea, and so on and so on... You just want to argue with me a bit to muddle the waters so people side it's one side against another and the truth lies somewhere inbetween. Fact is, this project makes no sense.
- cypherpundit 8y agoFollowing the link in the article to the white paper "The Social Smart Contract" there is a detailed explanation of the entire project (paper.democracy.earth) - reading this, I think the answer to "what do they want to do with a blockchain and why" becomes more clear - the project is about building a digital governance platform i.e. tokenize democracy, which enables new forms of digital voter representation and participation. This article is focused on the evolution of the project's token architecture i.e. the how, vs. the what/why. Regarding the meaning of 'formalizing humans on the blockchain" - I think the point here is, social media and the nation-states (driver's licenses, passports) are the centralized entities that control formal identity - this project is layout out an approach to decentralize the ability for a person to claim a digital ID, which is a keystone challenge to be met for digital governance to not be overrun with bots and sybils like current social media platforms are. Also if you research the co-founder, he is a college drop out game developer and founder of a political party in Argentina - pretty far from an MBA type.