Taek

44 ms·

631.
by Taek 6y ago
There's no social validation in throwing $2.5 million into a furnace. Spending $2.5 million on a tweet means you are validating everyone who believes that NFT's are real and an industry with a promising future. Especially in an en
632.
by Taek 6y ago
Blockchains are a shortcut to social consensus, not the final word. There is substantial value in the state giving credibility to a blockchain, allowing an NFT title for a house to be transferred digitally. That value does not disappear if
633.
by Taek 6y ago
The entire point of NFTs is that you can attach a verifiably limited supply to a set of collectables. Just like with their real world counterparts, you can have knock-offs and reproductions that people collect, but the owner of the actual o
634.
by Taek 6y ago
You should also account for how early NFTs are. If you've been following blockchains for a while, you may recall that in 2012 and 2013 there were an ocean of Bitcoin knock offs that distinguished themselves by changing things like the
635.
by Taek 6y ago
Bitcoin is also not zero sum, it's a monetary system with unique properties (particularly censorship resistance and resistance to seizure) that can't be found in any other monetary system. Those qualities add value in a way that m
636.
by Taek 6y ago
The financial system literally gives you no guarantees about the supply. We just inflated the USD by trillions of dollars. USD cash is the number one asset used in criminal finance (from slavery to drugs to terrorism).
637.
by Taek 6y ago
I don't think Grin does this but you can adjust the emission schedule based on the clock time (Sia does) so that the number of total coins produced on a given date is within a very tight bound of its expected amount, regardless of how
638.
by Taek 6y ago
If you go with copy-left you automatically disqualify some major institutions from using your software. Especially for a community based project, there may be institutions that want to make proprietary extensions so it can integrate better
639.
by Taek 6y ago
You'll be back. The fundamentals are strong and the technology is genuinely interesting, and real world use cases like Sia's Skynet are starting to finally hit stride. The get rich quick crowd overwhelmed everything else but didn&
640.
by Taek 6y ago
I firmly believe that raw intelligence has little to do with our lead as a species, and it may even be the case that there are numerous animals with more raw intelligence than humans, especially predators. Our advantage comes from our abili
641.
by Taek 6y ago
If the reward is being able to print money for yourself (that's what a double spend does), there will be very strong incentives to research a way to taper with a FIDO device and keep the results private. This threat model would not sur
642.
by Taek 6y ago
This would make an amazing blog post.
643.
Mark Rober on Thurday's NASA Rover Landing [video](youtube.com)
1 points by Taek 6y ago|0 comments
644.
by Taek 6y ago
This is a pretty classic HN take. "It's really easy... just do X". This is a multi-trillion dollar opportunity, if it's that easy, then just do it!
645.
by Taek 6y ago
Bitcoin only produces about 100 kilobytes of new data every minute, and only the consensus builders (the miners) need to have any sort of real time access to that data stream. Participants can have latencies of days or even months and still
646.
by Taek 6y ago
You've left out a whole bunch of key ideas in proof of stake, for example the idea that the amount of voting power you have is proportional to the percentage of the money supply that you own. Which in turn means that your consensus sys
647.
by Taek 6y ago
But it is true, about 75% of all electricity used in bitcoin mining is sourced from renewables. And the vast majority of bitcoin mining is large professional farms, not people using free electricity in their dorms. Bitcoin has been dominate
648.
by Taek 6y ago
I'm of the mind that the government shouldn't be regulating how resources are used. It makes sense to me to regulate the manufacturing of resources - for example regulating pollution levels, dumping, etc. - but once you have a res
649.
by Taek 6y ago
Just because Tesla doesn't have the ability to sell cars in Elbonia doesn't mean they don't have some form of commerce requirement with Elbonia. Maybe they are paying devs to work on the UI, or paying a computing company to r
650.
by Taek 6y ago
Bitcoin also spends about as much money as a fly landing on an aircraft carrier. Sorry Argentina, but you just don't use that much electricity in the context of the global economy. Companies like Tesla are buying Bitcoin, not because t
651.
by Taek 6y ago
Nothing about Proof of Stake is relatively simple lol. Not the incentives, not the threat model, not the trust model, not the impact on the economics, not the implementation, not the scalable byzantine fault tolerate research. There are ple
652.
by Taek 6y ago
I believe it's fairly well established that Joe Lubin holds somewhere around 10% of the Eth supply. Anyone with large holdings is incentivized to spread those holdings across many accounts to avoid scrutiny. Pretty much every coin has
653.
by Taek 6y ago
Government regulation should focus on how electricity is produced, not how electricity is used. If Bitcoin created pollution or dumped toxic chemicals, I would agree with you. But Bitcoin doesn't do either of those things, the power pl
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by Taek 6y ago
Bitcoin makes sense as a store of value because it is likely to survive dramatic global economic failure. The short term volatility is higher, but it's counter-correlated with almost everything else and is a great hedge against societa
655.
by Taek 6y ago
Even as just ASICs there's something of a drain, Bitcoin ASICs consume fab production which means less remaining production capacity for GPUs. This is an equilibrium that should eventually fix itself, but while Bitcoin and crypto minin
656.
by Taek 6y ago
The energy that goes into a Bitcoin transaction doesn't just pay for the one transaction. It also pays for the security of all the value stored in the rest of the system, and that's actually where most of the revenue for mining co
657.
by Taek 6y ago
Kind of but not really. People aren't upset at _how_ bitcoin is using electricity, they are upset at how much bitcoin is using electricity. If you want to save the environment, regulate the production of electricity irrespective of how
658.
by Taek 6y ago
Spending material wealth on mining is what makes it secure. We work on improving the per-hash cost because it makes it more difficult for someone with a brilliant technological innovation to compromise the security of the system. And there
659.
by Taek 6y ago
Bitcoin is valuable even if adoption never does pick up. It's a money system with certain properties that can't be found anywhere else, and it's a money system that's that's half decent. The existence of Bitcoin for
660.
by Taek 6y ago
"for very little added value" That's an awfully subjective claim and one I find to be contentious. I think even today Bitcoin's impact on global politics has already provided massively more value to global society than a

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