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(b) is why Bitcoin core development has stagnated[*]. And that's fine if people just want it to be like gold, however Ethereum doesn't aspire to not evolve. (c

(b) is why Bitcoin core development has stagnated[*]. And that's fine if people just want it to be like gold, however Ethereum doesn't aspire to not evolve. (c) I actually disagree with. Decentralized governance is a very interesting subject, and some cryptos like Tezos are governed quite decentralized in many ways. Right now I'm really confident in how Ethereum is governed, with the "old-fashioned" open-source development model, where everyone can participate, but core devs have the final say. However, decentralized governance may be something they implement in the future. [*] Slightly harsh, see comments below.

yunohn 5y ago
> some cryptos like Tezos are governed quite decentralized in many ways. Whenever crypto enthusiasts tell me about DeFi governance, I get excited about the possibilities. Then, I actually take a look at some of the group decisions, and literally all of them are crypto/coin-related, and don’t deal with any /real/ or human problems…
- woile 5y ago
  Well you have uniswap's vote on the educational fund. Which IIRC was about allocating money to lobby for crypto. https://app.uniswap.org/#/vote/1/1 https://app.uniswap.org/#/vote/1/1
  - yunohn 5y ago
    Yes, so you’re proving my point? Sure, it’s about lobbying, but in defense of crypto (Previously known as: DeFi Political Defense Fund), to keep their crypto ball rolling.
    - woile 5y ago
      yes, indeed. I just thought this case is slightly different, they chose to go out and do politics (true, over crypto nonetheless). But I feel that normally, all the proposals are about the protocol itself, changes rates, etc and this case it's about interacting with other humans.
      - yunohn 5y ago
        Fair enough, I agree there is somewhat of a difference.
- jacoblambda 5y ago
  I'd recommend looking at Project Catalyst out of the Cardano ecosystem. Of course the proposals are still heavily focused on internal/ecosystem development but there's an increasing focus on building platforms for people in developing regions as well. There has generally been a heavy focus on improving connectivity and access to affordable financial services within the African continent however recently there's been slowly growing focus on other regions with large unbanked or under-banked populations. With the amount of money that is allotted via the treasury for the Cardano ecosystem, Catalyst (and eventually proper on-chain governance when it evolves into that) has funding to comfortably run it's 6 week cadence funding rounds indefinitely at a rate of 15 million USD per round once it finished scaling up. As the network grows the scale will likely increase but regardless I think with the focuses the community has (particularly thanks to West Africa Decentralised Alliance) we'll see increasing focus on improving infrastructure and access in developing regions. And while you could argue that many of the solutions proposed have some net positive effect flowing back to the ecosystem, generally the focus has been on connecting people rather than driving traffic to the network. --- Sorry if that got a little long winded. It's a cool project+community and we've been working really hard to avoid the toxic coin maximalist & self-centred behaviour that's become so incredibly common in the space.
  - kristofferR 5y ago
    Thanks for that comment, looks like a really interesting project, I'll read more about it!
  - iSnow 5y ago
    Come on. I wish ADA well, but Charles is one self-centered person and the community has erected a cult around him and is super toxic against other projects. After BTC maxis, ADA has the most religious maximalists I would say.
    - trts 5y ago
      As someone who started learning about Cardano recently and has listened to some of Charles' broadcasts on YouTube, I'm not really sure what you're referring to. To me he seems happy to celebrate success in other crypto platforms, has some strong opinions and a libertarian bent, but of course is building Cardano according to his own vision. BTC maximalists are quasi-religious in my experience but Cardano just seems to recognize the inevitable ascension of the blockchain and is building for that future, very similar to Ethereum. Maybe he's full of it; I've encountered other comments criticizing him but none that were deifying.
- ddeyar 5y ago
  Tezos for example has the problem of missing liquidity. So they voted for protocol level liquidity called liquidity baking. A little bit of inflation is used to incentivise liquidity providing. It's an experiment but it shows the power of governance. See https://liquidity-baking.com/ https://liquidity-baking.com/ for current liquidity. For sure it will always be voted on something that is good for the chain or for the token. When its good publicity for a chain to vote for charity-baking you could solve human problems.
- kebman 5y ago
  How would you change that?
- jaggs 5y ago
  Maybe take a look at Proof of Humanity? proofofhumanity.id. Real world problem (poverty) being tackled by crypto via a DAO. Very early days yet, but fascinating to watch as it evolves.
  - yunohn 5y ago
    “Proof of Humanity, a system combining webs of trust, with reverse Turing tests, and dispute resolution to create a sybil-proof list of humans.” This is their mission, and the rest of the website focuses on ID and such services. Not one mention of poverty alleviation.
    - NiloCK 5y ago
      The connection here is that sybil-proofing is a (the?) major bottleneck to cryptoeconomic UBI schemes.
      - yunohn 5y ago
        That’s like saying SSN (or other gov issued ID) solves poverty.
        NiloCK 5y ago
        Some people believe that government issued ID in conjunction with a government that implemented a UBI scheme would indeed improve poverty. Andrew Yang wrote a reasonable book about the idea. sybil-proofing in blockchain systems opens the possibility for any person or community to take a shot at implementing UBI. Could someone succeed in creating a token that retains some level of value long term and also consistently tops up at some rate in everyone's wallet? Beats me. But sybil-proofing is absolutely blocking issue on that front.
      - lottin 5y ago
        Are you serious?
        5y ago
spottybanana 5y ago
> (b) is why Bitcoin core development has stagnated. And that's fine if people just want it to be like gold, however Ethereum doesn't aspire to not evolve. How stagnated is Bitcoin development? Yeah it is not progressing super fast, but I think it is still progressing. Taproot has been accepted by miners and will be activated this year. Improvements are being done. As Bitcoin is the biggest crypto by market gap, I think risk-aversiveness is a good thing. While I was initially a big blocker, now I think that going without a hard fork was probably quite a good idea. Bitcoin still works nicely and I still use it a lot, now I just use LN transactions in addition to onchain txes.
- kristofferR 5y ago
  True, Taproot is looking promising. Yet, it's the only major change since 2017, I don't think they're moving fast enough. And what's the next major improvement on the cards for Bitcoin after Taproot? I haven't heard much, and that is worrying in and of itself IMO.
  - bluebit 5y ago
    I'm not sure we should treat the base money of the internet the same way we do tech startups - to "move fast and break things". I would like to know that my BTC is stored in a network backed by code that is secure with slow and steady progress.
    - kristofferR 5y ago
      There's certainly a good middle ground between moving slowly and moving quickly, I think Ethereum has found that middle ground. Half of this article is complaints about how Ethereum is moving too slowly with the PoS transition. They're certainly not of the "move fast and break things" mindset.
      - keymone 5y ago
        eth feels like wild west of script kiddies writing javascript to manage billions of USD. far from being middle ground, it's quite the opposite of btc's "let's not ruin the foundation even if we'll be called unnecessarily conservative" stance. in fact, i would even argue that btc's stance is closer to middle ground as they are clearly working towards making it easier to run all sorts of wild experiments in the upper layers while protecting and minimizing what's going on in the base layer.
dash2 5y ago
Decentralized governance is interesting like nuclear fusion: it's 30 years away and always will be. Real governance requires somebody to take the time and effort to think about solutions to public goods problems. In other words, governance is a public good. Decentralizing it just results in underprovision.
- namlem 5y ago
  Except nuclear fusion isn't 30 years away anymore. A ton of progress has been made in plasma physics. There's a good chance we'll see an energy-positive reactor by the end of this decade.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    HB11?
    - namlem 5y ago
      Also SPARC, ITER, whatever Lockheed is working on, and probably others.
- lottin 5y ago
  > Decentralized governance Do you mean voting? Has been around since ancient Greece.
  - dash2 5y ago
    I do not. Direct democracy, as practiced by Athens, would be a better example. Worked OK for Athens for a while. Athens had probably 30,000 citizens. No modern state has tried replacing representative democracy with direct democracy, for reasons nicely explained by Benjamin Constant (https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/constant-the-liberty-of-ancients-compared-with-that-of-moderns-1819 https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/constant-the-liberty-of-a...).

yunohn 5y ago

> some cryptos like Tezos are governed quite decentralized in many ways. Whenever crypto enthusiasts tell me about DeFi governance, I get excited about the possibilities. Then, I actually take a look at some of the group decisions, and literally all of them are crypto/coin-related, and don’t deal with any /real/ or human problems…

woile 5y ago
Well you have uniswap's vote on the educational fund. Which IIRC was about allocating money to lobby for crypto. https://app.uniswap.org/#/vote/1/1 https://app.uniswap.org/#/vote/1/1
- yunohn 5y ago
  Yes, so you’re proving my point? Sure, it’s about lobbying, but in defense of crypto (Previously known as: DeFi Political Defense Fund), to keep their crypto ball rolling.
  - woile 5y ago
    yes, indeed. I just thought this case is slightly different, they chose to go out and do politics (true, over crypto nonetheless). But I feel that normally, all the proposals are about the protocol itself, changes rates, etc and this case it's about interacting with other humans.
    - yunohn 5y ago
      Fair enough, I agree there is somewhat of a difference.
jacoblambda 5y ago
I'd recommend looking at Project Catalyst out of the Cardano ecosystem. Of course the proposals are still heavily focused on internal/ecosystem development but there's an increasing focus on building platforms for people in developing regions as well. There has generally been a heavy focus on improving connectivity and access to affordable financial services within the African continent however recently there's been slowly growing focus on other regions with large unbanked or under-banked populations. With the amount of money that is allotted via the treasury for the Cardano ecosystem, Catalyst (and eventually proper on-chain governance when it evolves into that) has funding to comfortably run it's 6 week cadence funding rounds indefinitely at a rate of 15 million USD per round once it finished scaling up. As the network grows the scale will likely increase but regardless I think with the focuses the community has (particularly thanks to West Africa Decentralised Alliance) we'll see increasing focus on improving infrastructure and access in developing regions. And while you could argue that many of the solutions proposed have some net positive effect flowing back to the ecosystem, generally the focus has been on connecting people rather than driving traffic to the network. --- Sorry if that got a little long winded. It's a cool project+community and we've been working really hard to avoid the toxic coin maximalist & self-centred behaviour that's become so incredibly common in the space.
- kristofferR 5y ago
  Thanks for that comment, looks like a really interesting project, I'll read more about it!
- iSnow 5y ago
  Come on. I wish ADA well, but Charles is one self-centered person and the community has erected a cult around him and is super toxic against other projects. After BTC maxis, ADA has the most religious maximalists I would say.
  - trts 5y ago
    As someone who started learning about Cardano recently and has listened to some of Charles' broadcasts on YouTube, I'm not really sure what you're referring to. To me he seems happy to celebrate success in other crypto platforms, has some strong opinions and a libertarian bent, but of course is building Cardano according to his own vision. BTC maximalists are quasi-religious in my experience but Cardano just seems to recognize the inevitable ascension of the blockchain and is building for that future, very similar to Ethereum. Maybe he's full of it; I've encountered other comments criticizing him but none that were deifying.
ddeyar 5y ago
Tezos for example has the problem of missing liquidity. So they voted for protocol level liquidity called liquidity baking. A little bit of inflation is used to incentivise liquidity providing. It's an experiment but it shows the power of governance. See https://liquidity-baking.com/ https://liquidity-baking.com/ for current liquidity. For sure it will always be voted on something that is good for the chain or for the token. When its good publicity for a chain to vote for charity-baking you could solve human problems.
kebman 5y ago
How would you change that?
jaggs 5y ago
Maybe take a look at Proof of Humanity? proofofhumanity.id. Real world problem (poverty) being tackled by crypto via a DAO. Very early days yet, but fascinating to watch as it evolves.
- yunohn 5y ago
  “Proof of Humanity, a system combining webs of trust, with reverse Turing tests, and dispute resolution to create a sybil-proof list of humans.” This is their mission, and the rest of the website focuses on ID and such services. Not one mention of poverty alleviation.
  - NiloCK 5y ago
    The connection here is that sybil-proofing is a (the?) major bottleneck to cryptoeconomic UBI schemes.
    - yunohn 5y ago
      That’s like saying SSN (or other gov issued ID) solves poverty.
      - NiloCK 5y ago
        Some people believe that government issued ID in conjunction with a government that implemented a UBI scheme would indeed improve poverty. Andrew Yang wrote a reasonable book about the idea. sybil-proofing in blockchain systems opens the possibility for any person or community to take a shot at implementing UBI. Could someone succeed in creating a token that retains some level of value long term and also consistently tops up at some rate in everyone's wallet? Beats me. But sybil-proofing is absolutely blocking issue on that front.
    - lottin 5y ago
      Are you serious?
      - 5y ago

spottybanana 5y ago

> (b) is why Bitcoin core development has stagnated. And that's fine if people just want it to be like gold, however Ethereum doesn't aspire to not evolve. How stagnated is Bitcoin development? Yeah it is not progressing super fast, but I think it is still progressing. Taproot has been accepted by miners and will be activated this year. Improvements are being done. As Bitcoin is the biggest crypto by market gap, I think risk-aversiveness is a good thing. While I was initially a big blocker, now I think that going without a hard fork was probably quite a good idea. Bitcoin still works nicely and I still use it a lot, now I just use LN transactions in addition to onchain txes.

kristofferR 5y ago
True, Taproot is looking promising. Yet, it's the only major change since 2017, I don't think they're moving fast enough. And what's the next major improvement on the cards for Bitcoin after Taproot? I haven't heard much, and that is worrying in and of itself IMO.
- bluebit 5y ago
  I'm not sure we should treat the base money of the internet the same way we do tech startups - to "move fast and break things". I would like to know that my BTC is stored in a network backed by code that is secure with slow and steady progress.
  - kristofferR 5y ago
    There's certainly a good middle ground between moving slowly and moving quickly, I think Ethereum has found that middle ground. Half of this article is complaints about how Ethereum is moving too slowly with the PoS transition. They're certainly not of the "move fast and break things" mindset.
    - keymone 5y ago
      eth feels like wild west of script kiddies writing javascript to manage billions of USD. far from being middle ground, it's quite the opposite of btc's "let's not ruin the foundation even if we'll be called unnecessarily conservative" stance. in fact, i would even argue that btc's stance is closer to middle ground as they are clearly working towards making it easier to run all sorts of wild experiments in the upper layers while protecting and minimizing what's going on in the base layer.

dash2 5y ago

Decentralized governance is interesting like nuclear fusion: it's 30 years away and always will be. Real governance requires somebody to take the time and effort to think about solutions to public goods problems. In other words, governance is a public good. Decentralizing it just results in underprovision.

namlem 5y ago
Except nuclear fusion isn't 30 years away anymore. A ton of progress has been made in plasma physics. There's a good chance we'll see an energy-positive reactor by the end of this decade.
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  HB11?
  - namlem 5y ago
    Also SPARC, ITER, whatever Lockheed is working on, and probably others.
lottin 5y ago
> Decentralized governance Do you mean voting? Has been around since ancient Greece.
- dash2 5y ago
  I do not. Direct democracy, as practiced by Athens, would be a better example. Worked OK for Athens for a while. Athens had probably 30,000 citizens. No modern state has tried replacing representative democracy with direct democracy, for reasons nicely explained by Benjamin Constant (https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/constant-the-liberty-of-ancients-compared-with-that-of-moderns-1819 https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/constant-the-liberty-of-a...).