We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not Forgive. We do not Forget.

EXPECT US!

  • 0 Posts
  • 17 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
Cake day: August 9th, 2023
  • anon@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Martin Hellman: We’re playing Russian rouletteEnglish
    45·
    5 months ago

    a love letter to feds.

    Tyson: Your battle with the government to make private communication available to the general public in the digital age has the status of folklore. But, in your recent book (co-authored with your wife Dorothie), you describe a meeting of minds with Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, former head of the NSA. Until I read your book, I saw the National Security Agency as bad and Diffie-Hellman as good, plain and simple. You describe how you came to see the NSA and its people as sincere actors rather than as a cynical cabal bent on repression. What changed your perspective?

    Hellman: This is a great, real-life example of how taking a holistic view in a conflict, instead of just a one-sided one, resolved an apparently intractable impasse. Those insights were part of a major change in my approach to life.  As we say in our book, “Get curious, not furious.” These ideas are effective not just in highly visible conflicts like ours with the NSA, but in every aspect of life.

    Tyson: I love the story there of how Admiral Inman kind of created the opening for bridging between you and the NSA.

    ACAB

    FUCK THE NSA

  • anon@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power — government now requiring commercial miners to report energy consumptionEnglish
    132·
    5 months ago

    I agree with you but holding ETH up as a shining example of decentralization is a bit misguided, IMO.

    Since they had to move to PoS from PoW, things have gotten SIGNIFICANTLY worse for their decentralization numbers. Another damning aspect of their staking tech is that, in order to stake to a pool, you need to lock your tokens away, making them impossible to spend for a specified time period. That directly compromises decentralization in that only those with vast amounts of wealth will want to lock their tokens away for long periods of time.

    Anyway, most of the criticisms I have of ETH are more critical of the way they went about the transition between two radically different consensus algorithms than about Proof of Stake itself.

    edit: I should have known that ETH bagholders would come out of the woodwork to present outright lies about ETH’s shoddy, compromised implementation of PoS.

  • anon@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power — government now requiring commercial miners to report energy consumptionEnglish
    91·
    5 months ago

    I agree that PoS (due to its consensus algorithm being weighted toward stake) can be compromised by billionaires…but I’d counter that it’s also the best system we currently have. Can you honestly tell me that USD has a fair allocation? With that in mind, PoS is Far better than the centralized technologies you seem to be defending by attacking the one alternative.

    If the engineers behind non-scam projects (that actually seek to revolutionize currency and wrestle control from the world bank) could accomplish one person one vote, they would…but the network game theory is run by that same principle: that it would be impossible for anyone but Jeff Bezos to compromise a sufficiently valuable cryptocurrency just as it would be cost prohibitive for Bezos to afford enough bitcoin mining rigs to give him control of the network.

    Luckily there are actual metrics that help us pinpoint those kinds of compromised technologies (especially in regards to Proof of Stake). Personally, when vetting a Proof of Stake crypto, I like to look at “initial token allocation” as well and other metrics that help to quantify how decentralized they really are. How many unique wallets are there? What does their consensus algorithm look like? How easy it is for me to run a stake pool? Do I need a super computer (Solana)? Does it prevent that sort of centralization using game theory?

    Just a small example of how you’re glossing over some fairly elegant engineering that enforces decentralization: Cardano has invented some pretty revolutionary ideas in this area. They have all kinds of added parameters that prevent one actor from controlling the network. When the algorithm is selecting the next pool to mine a block, a pool that has more than a certain amount of the token is disqualified for having TOO MUCH stake. It’s called “saturation”. I could go on and on about the technologies that aid decentralization and make it AT LEAST significantly more decentralized than any other system we currently know of but I’m sure you won’t even read it.

    Initial token allocation, for one, is such an important metric for understanding decentralization. If a small group of insiders has the most tokens, the decentralization of the network is compromised. That’s why, when I look at a cryptocurrency that uses Proof of Stake, I always look to that before doing anything. It helped me to avoid FTX, Luna, Solana, and other crypto’s where a small group of insiders was given more than 25% of the tokens in the network before the public was even allowed to receive airdrops (which are a way of making sure that that one person, one vote principle stands at that crucial stage where the tokens are dispersed into the market).

    edit: further reading about the most academically/game theoretically rigorous open source implementation of Proof of Stake called Ourobouros , created by the Cardano team but also adopted by the Polkadot team.