natrius

9 ms·

31.
by natrius 10y ago
In the Ethereum ecosystem, we're experimenting with a model for building decentralized foundations to fund open source software. When the Red Cross asks for your money to help disaster victims, your money doesn't actually go to th
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by natrius 10y ago
That's what people thought about sleeping in strangers' apartments, but it turns out that reputation systems do a pretty decent job of culling bad experiences. "Don't get in a car with strangers" used to be common s
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by natrius 10y ago
Stores within walking distance of lots of customers have more customers, but we made that illegal so we could stratify neighborhoods by income.
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by natrius 10y ago
Facebook isn't the problem. Advertising is. Vox can't tell you this without hurting themselves. We fund content distribution (Facebook) and content creation (actual articles) based on how many people are looking at them, so journa
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by natrius 10y ago
Name a product that is widely used as a private, shared database and isn't based on blockchains. It was possible to build these things before Bitcoin, but they were uncommon. Now they're common and people call them private blockch
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by natrius 10y ago
Thinking about some blockchain precedents can lead to some valuable insights about what we can build with them. It's effectively a scroll. Societies used scrolls to record actions so they could consult history to make decisions. Power
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by natrius 10y ago
It's important to understand that buying cryptocurrency powerfully shapes your beliefs. All incentive systems have this property, and since blockchains give us the ability to program with scarcity, most blockchain-based applications ca
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by natrius 10y ago
Every company needs a human-readable definition of what a product does. There is no way to eliminate the problem of keeping prose and code in sync. Traditionally, we just hide the problem by keeping the prose and code entirely separate. Kee
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by natrius 10y ago
Self-driving buses are coming, too. Combined with the congestion pricing that will be necessary to keep self-driving cars from circling for passengers, buses are clearly the right choice. I'd still vote yes if I lived in Seattle, but w
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by natrius 10y ago
We agree with each other. Restricting rentals reduces competition for owning homes, which lowers the price to purchase a home. You'll get more homeowners. Everyone who still rents is worse off because the supply of rental housing has b
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by natrius 10y ago
It's pretty useful to point out the contradiction between progressivism and the embrace of literal segregation laws that cause sprawl, cause traffic, and hurt our environment. The prevailing concern about property values during America
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by natrius 10y ago
Most Americans do not have the savings required to own in cities. Ownership might be a solution that works for you, but penalizing landlords penalizes renters who can't afford ownership.
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by natrius 10y ago
Cleaving off 40% of America is not a recipe for progress. When Trump shows his people how they're getting blacklisted from the economy, that isn't going to make them want to riot less . Our culture of progress has become entirely
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by natrius 10y ago
You realize that you're calling for the excommunication of 40% of America, right? That is not a productive thing. I consider Trumpism a real threat to my life, but Trump supporters are fine with me. Once a bad idea spreads too far, you
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by natrius 10y ago
Short answer: globalization hurts the developed world in the absence of real technological breakthroughs (energy too cheap to meter, something we use a lot gets can now be made for half the price, etc.). A richer world just means more compe
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by natrius 10y ago
America is not integrated. I agree culture and standards are the solution. Those do not spread easily in segregated societies.
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by natrius 10y ago
Some regulations help customers. Some regulations hurt customers by protecting incumbents in an industry.
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by natrius 10y ago
"Civility" is learned behavior, and an unending history of government-imposed racial and economic segregation is bound to result in a gap in learned behaviors. Maybe we should stop allowing our governments to create exclusive neig
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by natrius 10y ago
You're saying it's just a user experience shift, but that's exactly what the comment you're responding to is saying. User experience changes can be earth-shattering.
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by natrius 10y ago
Blockchains are like scrolls: you can write information on them that a society can use to coordinate current actions based on the past. You don't want a scroll for your medical records. You want a journal that can't lose data and
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by natrius 10y ago
Yes, zoning laws. Density restrictions were designed to segregate by income.
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by natrius 10y ago
There's clearly a correct answer here: repeal segregation laws. Why on earth is my government forcing lower income families out of neighborhoods they want to live in?
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by natrius 10y ago
Here's the big hotel operator in Austin. One operator, all of the hotel brands: http://www.whitelodging.com/portfolio/hotels
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by natrius 10y ago
I think sharing control of funds is a weakness. Not just when it comes to smart contracts that will inevitably have bugs, but for organizations in general. Instead, we can create organizations without boundaries and govern them the same way
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by natrius 10y ago
Humans are divisive. We discriminate in all sorts of ways (positive and negative), and that discrimination becomes part of our culture. It's natural. If we don't talk about how our biases affect our interactions, the kinds of peop
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by natrius 10y ago
In the author's defense, being a member of a certain identity group isn't great training for giving good advice about interacting with that group. If the prerequisite for talking about identity issues is being right all the time,
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by natrius 10y ago
Capitalism is not just people trading with each other. We invented lots of legal fictions to get where we are today, and they're pretty effective. For instance, if you contribute your capital to a corporation, you'll be rewarded w
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by natrius 10y ago
In any city with a high price-to-rent ratio, rent isn't really a factor in prices. Investors are buying homes in those places because it's really hard to make more of them, just like gold and high-end art. The price is determined
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by natrius 10y ago
Decentralized social software allows permissionless innovation on top. Anyone can add new features and release them to users. These networks are less capable and less user friendly today, but they won't stay that way, especially if we
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by natrius 10y ago
Now that people are coming up with ways to put people's real facial expressions in VR, most video calls are probably going to be replaced with avatars generated from your face that use your facial expressions captured by the front-faci

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