Supporters and resistors of the utilitarian framing of benefits of (sub)urbanity are both being over-simplistic.
Of course we make decisions on balance of their expected outcomes. The problem is that we can't in general predict outcomes with certainty. So, intelligent decision making is not merely to pick the best expected outcome, but to factor in the range of all possible outcomes on a probabilistic basis.
In this thought experiment, it seems that city-dwelling is highly probable to benefit the disabled kid, but we have less a priori certainty that suburb life is better for the accelerated learner (it may be better for him today, but it's plausible to think that it's long-term good for a smart kid to experience some amount of adversity in a tougher environment compared to a more comfortable sheltered suburban setting, or to learn by example that it's sometimes worth risking personal optimality to serve the needs of others).
So yes, the notion that we should prioritize the needs of the bottom of social hierarchies is worth considering, but it's even more important to factor in uncertainty, to have no pretense of one's ability to predict the future.
How can you resist the dominant ideology without valuing freedom? How can you challenge the norms set by the elite without asserting your right as an individual to take a non-conforming stance? Even if you argue that society would be more harmonious if we all followed a different/better norm, how are you entitled to make a statement that contradicts the current paradigm if you don't value the ability to contradict the current paradigm of society?
I suppose that an alternative basis than freedom is faith; eg "God told me to stand up for divine principles" — but even then, why are you uniquely responsive to God's will?
Seriously, I'd love to understand how you critique the status quo/advocate for change without valuing freedom.
> Consider the average "big block chain" - very high block frequency, very high block size, many thousands of transactions per second, but also highly centralized: because the blocks are so big, only a few dozen or few hundred nodes can afford to run a fully participating node that can create blocks or verify the existing chain.
He lost me in the first paragraph. Does "highly centralized" mean a "few hundred nodes" to you?
When it comes to decentralization, is more always better? Naively, it feels like there's a threshold of decentralization that it's valuable to cross, but beyond which other problems are more worthy of allocating scarce resources towards solving.
So, what is that threshold? or more aptly, what is the purpose that decentralization serves and how can we tell that it's satisfied?
Or is decentralization really an end in and of itself? If so, can someone explain to the unenlightened why?
>Does "highly centralized" mean a "few hundred nodes" to you?
Yes and no. I think the important part here is that running a node on these networks is prohibitively expensive (costing thousands of dollars per month). The problem isn't really the number of nodes, but the barrier of entry in becoming a node.
Money spent on luxuries/social status signaling is money not given to reduce suffering. If you have any sense of empathy for the billions of people living with low incomes, it's obvious that luxury spending is resource misallocation.
The resources “misallocated” in luxury goods motivate and teach us to make better mass goods. The car industry is a great example. luxury vehicles have driven R&D that have made cars safer and cleaner (disc breaks, fuel injection). Tesla has put electric cars just within reach for all by charging rich people for what were (are?) bad cars with lots of status signing
Jewelry is a form of art and of adding beauty to our everyday life. I will not apologize for the $80 pearl studs my girls wear, or my wife’s shawl.
Nor is it tenable that money used on a luxury item represent resources taken away from the poor. The resources to make a Lexus or a Toyota are largely the same.
Sure, I could buy a Nissan (btw, I drive a six year old Kia and a used base manual 2013 Golf) and send a cheque to Africa. But I’ll raise you - you can drop every expenditure you have except basic needs and send the money to Africa. Like my ethic professor pointed out, that $5 beer is five child-days.
Unless you’re willing to live like an African, your position is hypocritical - jealousy masked with self righteousness. Philosophers who feel better than other, richer, people because they’ve explained away their own behavior.
Excuse my elitism, but its pop Buddhism with all the vulgarities of pop.
Patek Phillipe is 180 years old. “Normal” people used to need mechanical watches to get to work on time until 40 years ago.
Anyway, luxury goods don't have to justify themselves (at all) solely on their technological transfer. They are, PP in particular as opposed to mass produced Rolexes, works of human excellence.
There is nothing immoral in a watch that took a year of human hours to build that isn't immoral about Japanese artisanal charcoal.
>They are, PP in particular as opposed to mass produced Rolexes, works of human excellence.
You are getting increasingly metaphysical.
These watches are built on antiquated technology and, by design, cannot be mass-produced, so clearly they will never lead to technological innovation.
These watches are so rare that they can provide very little beauty. The vast majority of people will never lay eyes on one.
Let me ask you a question: would you support the government purchasing Patek Philippe watches and putting them in libraries for the common people to check out? This would lead to much more beauty than letting them sit in rich people's collections and would encourage even more "human excellence". But I suspect you'd find it a waste of tax money.
I dont support government support for the arts. At least not in a direct way like buying PPs for library.
Should government buildings be beautiful and be tastefully decorated? Definitely, but no art for art’s sake - it degenerates it
“ These watches are built on antiquated technology and, by design, cannot be mass-produced, so clearly they will never lead to technological innovation.”
By that criteria a Roman era neckless is worthless. Human excellence is not about technology advancement. Its about human advancement. Ill never see a PP except on a store window in NYC. I’ll probably never get around to see the Hagia Sophia either. But I’m overjoyed that humans can build the Hagia Sophia and relieved that in this era of mass produce mediocrity there still are artisans with the focus necessary to make Japanese charcoal, or PPs
Sarcasm is a perfectly valid rhetorical device. If you find it rude, I apologize.
Some luxury goods are beautiful. Some are high-performance. However, many of them are prized merely because they are exclusive.
I find very expensive jewelry, almost without exception, to be gaudy and hideous. Even if it were tasteful, it could be made with artificial or semiprecious gems and clad base metals with no change in appearance.
There is nothing from high-end jewelry that can trickle down to the mass market. The entire industry is, by design, based around the work of skilled artisans. If it were possible to mass-produce jewelry, it would no longer be exclusive and would thus be less desirable.
Luxury cars are an interesting example. They are usually prized for their technical excellence. Some of the innovations may actually make it to market. The same definitely does not apply to fashion or to the majority of other luxury goods.
“ Sarcasm is a perfectly valid rhetorical device. If you find it rude, I apologize.”
Its perfectly valid rhetorical device, a needlessly aggressive one that is good at putting down but never constructs. Worse of all, a rhetorical device that has become trite.
Im naturally very sarcastic. In my late 30s, I see it as a personal flaw that has brought me nothing but cheap dopamine hits.
Similarly to watches, jewelry techniques, styles materials have made their way far down market. Exclusivity (or a certain designer's mark) is just one buyer preference.
Take a look at the jewelry case at Walmart or Kohl's (if you're in the United States) to see what's happened.
Is Twitter a platform or a publisher? If Twitter is a platform, it might make sense to charge the most prominent users the most. But if Twitter is thought of as a publisher, it makes sense for Twitter to pay its top creators big bucks.
Free-to-use is somewhere in between: the notable users get compensated with access to attention, and Twitter benefits from the attention-time of their audience.
So, the underlying point that I think you're making -- that notable users get a fantastic deal on social media at the expense of society -- is well taken.
Let's hope that a new mass communications technology emerges to disrupt this dynamic.
Twitter's success derives from how well it serves the people who work on Twitter. Think politicians, business leaders, investors, celebrities, influencers, tech workers, journalists.
People who work on Twitter, who have built a large following, who use Twitter to propagate messages, to network with peers, and to learn facts and rumors, would pay not just $4/month but $4000. Whatever the price Twitter would charge journalists, they would gladly pay; it's a cost of doing business.
Actually, in addition to being a business expense, Twitter is a super-addictive dopamine hit ego booster, a game that makes it's high-scoring players feel important.
Twitter's problem is that it makes the low-scoring players feel bad. To use Twitter without a Blue Check is just not that valuable to most people. Just like the Twitter elites derive a sense of self-importance from their internet followers, the Twitter masses feel a sense of illegitimacy, an angst against the platform for driving the public discourse into a dumpster fire.
As long as Twitter provides news and entertainment, it'll get used. But Twitter insiders and power users (Blue Checks) would be well-served to heed the infamous advice: "Don't get high on your own supply."
> Twitter's success derives from how well it serves the people who work on Twitter.
Black Rock and Cato pushed Dorsey out. I thought this was common knowledge and a clear sign of where Twitter is headed (and indeed where some notorious Twitterers would have liked it to go a while back).
Getting high on ones own supply is precisely the point. Its meant to be addictive, for Twitterers and followers alike.
I'd assume it IS. Dorsey has recently been directly targeted by numerous Cato Institute publications and lobbying efforts [1]. Which is comical, given just a couple years ago Cato was pressing government to stay out of social network regulation [2, 3]. It was only when Twitter started penalizing disinformation/fact checking that they started changing their tune.
I’m not sure a blue check is very important for engagement. I don’t have a blue check, and easily drive more engagement than many verified accounts I follow. And I’m not the only one.
Blue checks are mostly reserved for some specific categories of users: celebrities, mainstream media journalists, and politicians. It's not absolute but my experience is that being only reasonably well known (thousands of followers) in, say, tech circles isn't enough to get a blue check. So it's not so much being liked but being in a category which Twitter has determined is important to avoid people faking identity.
I had someone spoof my profile a while back. (Chose hard to tell apart user name and used my profile pic etc. to do some crypto spamming.) Twitter promptly nuked their account but wouldn't verify me afterwards.
While there are many factors, an essential one is that someone in Twitter finds you morally acceptable.
If Twitter thinks you're not morally good, they will actually remove a blue check which they previously granted (e.g. they did this to Milo Yiannopolous). If blue checks were just about identity veritifaction, this would make no sense since Milo's account's identity was never in question. Ergo, it isn't just about identity verification.
This has been my experience as well. A perfect example is podcasters - Anna [1]
hosts a relatively popular and occasionally politically inconvenient podcast called Red Scare. No check. Alexandra [2], the host of Call Me Daddy, also a popular comedy podcast, naturally has a check. This is pretty openly discussed by e-celebs of middling fame. Until one reaches a critical mass of popularity, you won't get a check if you don't correctly toe the culture line.
Did Milo lose his verified status because someone didn't like him or was it because he broke some rule in the T&Cs? IIRC he was a big part of "gamergate", a movement that acted hostile to a subset of Twitter's user base.
If it was about identity verification, the process should certainly not be reversible for "moral" reasons. Rather, I would expect some notability cutoff as the requirement for the blue letter. As it stands now, the manner in which it is distributed better reflects if Twitter (the org) likes you. That it generally also verifies your identity is secondary.
Sure, but this is barely different than air travel. You’ve got people on the no-fly list, unverified people in standard TSA, and if the US government likes you, you can get verified with TSA PreCheck. However the moment you do something dumb (say “accidentally” bring a gun) you get stripped of PreCheck.
Sure, but it was never said to be purely an identify verification process. There have always been other requirements, some of which were not public. It's fair to assume that one requirement is to adhere to the T&Cs, although I can't confirm that.
The folks who rage against the media and political establishment (blue checkmarks are basically granted automatically to journalists at traditional media outlets and to anyone running for office.)
Blue check used to mean "identity objectively verified", useful to confirm the twiterati using the name is the actual person/group others think they are.
Then came the Great Bluecheck Purge, where anyone exhibiting opinions not preferred by Twitter management had their blue check revoked/denied - which in practice was applied generally to Republicans, who constitute about half the USA. (We're talking mainstream views, not just weirdos.)
Ergo, anyone with a blue check is, by Twitter decree, not a Republican. For Republicans, blue check now amounts to a "badge of shame" indicating Twitter-approved opposition.
Blue checks were changed from "identity confirmed" to "one of us, not them".
No, you're confused. Those are suspensions. We're talking about removing the blue check mark or denying it. This happens to people who aren't morally-approved by Twitter for moral reasons.
For example, the blue check was removed from Milo Yiannopolous (the gay conservative provocateur who was canceled a few years ago), after he was previously verified.
Every "rule" on Twitter is no more than a tool used to create the appearance of left-wing consensus by suppressing alternative views through selective enforcement. Nothing is even-handed, and it's incredibly obvious when you're the target.
dirtbag leftists can't get blue checks and right wingers say "no one's being persecuted but us".
please move beyond this a bit and come to the understanding that every single thing Twitter does is arbitrary from rules enforcement, labeling, suspensions, etc. It's the nature of the service, and frankly boring at this point. We could talk more about why the business model sees this to continue (twitter can't disrupt its income stream and the rules that get enforced are those that allow Twitter to stay in business).
Interesting comparison: for the Left, you choose the qualifier “dirtbag” which presumably is a very small fraction of that faction ... while comparing that unpleasant small minority with the entire other half of the political spectrum.
I can (sort of, but would rather not) see denying authentication to problematic nutcases of any kind, and can see that edge case not pedantically covered/excluded by “nobody but us”. Sure, we can chalk up fringe cases to inconsistent boundaries of enforcement. But lumping in a plurality of users with edge cases is willful blindness to the blue check exclusion being official from-the-top policy, not mere erratic enforcement of vague rules by underpaid contractors.
Sure it’s boring if you’re not in the targeted plurality. It’s significant when Twitter is your only viable podium in the public town square, and anything you want to say that’s meaningfully & reasonably dissenting may get you kicked out because Twitter management is decidedly biased.
I’ve been blogging since before blogging was blogging. Personal blogs are now, on the whole, not viable.
Twitter is among the best platforms for being heard by the most people with the least cost/effort.
Yeah, I get your point - to wit “get your own press”, a line I’ve used long and often. Nonetheless I recognize the value of a place where a great many congregate to converse with many - and know the importance of that forum being neutral for the betterment of all, a truism Dorsey abandoned for the worse.
Wouldn't it be amusing if Twitter started doing verified red badges to signify Republicans? I guess if they really want to be all-inclusive, allow users to customize their badge colors too.
(I didn't know what a blue checkmark was until I turned off dark mode)
Amusing, but still problematic. Blue check was intended as neutral authentication. Turning it into a preferred faction indicator just serves to promote factional divisions - something Twitter could use a lot less of. …which brings us back to the OP point that blue checks have become a mark of shame, promoting division instead of objectivism.
Sure, but it wasn't so absolute. They didn't uncheck all conservatives, they just applied standards unevenly (but probably, in their minds, justifiably), which results in disproportionate results.
It's an echo chamber problem, but I'm not sure it's deliberate.
In an organization with hundreds, possibly thousands of people, how would you get human-defined standards to be applied evenly when other people are actively existing in the grey area between what is and is not okay? Eg how do you define pornography that won't also get eg breast exams for cancer blocked? Now imagine that someone stands to make tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars if they can get something past your very human operators that both is (according to viewers) and is not (according to the censors) pornography.
The problem's even harder with text - sarcasm and satire just don't come off in pure text. Emoji and "/s" helps, but they're not requisite.
The world must be so simple and straightforward to you when you can just throw millions of people in a slur-labeled category and then treat them as non-humans deserving of unlimited suffering.
Assuming that you "work on Twitter", ie, your career is in part built on Twitter, what do you think the value of a Blue Check is? I would bet it's worth more than $1000/yr to the average person in the "Twitter Middle Class" (someone using Twitter for work but not at mega scale). Even a single digit percentage point boost in engagement is worth a lot, or do you disagree?
A lot of journalists are financially poor, or at least don't make much income from their jobs. $1000/yr is a lot of money for journalists, especially at local newspapers.
Quite a few accounts I follow also don't have a Blue Check. If it started to cost money, I'm sure a lot of journalists would just choose not to be verified. The reason is that I'm not convinced that a Blue Check is tied to engagement with your Tweets, but rather the quality of your work outside Twitter.
Twitter is worth about the same as say a Bloomberg News or WSJ subscription to me. Perhaps slightly more. That is to say I’d pay a few hundred bucks for it.
But there’s no way I’m spending $1,000 a year on it if I can’t expense or write it off taxes (right now my usage is a mix of personal and non-personal, so it’s hard to correctly account for it).
An issue is that for some it's not worth as much as for Twitter. If my local police department uses Twitter to send out notifications on a current event the blue check confirms authority. Without the mark one can't distinguish original from fake/parody within the platform, which hurts the platform.
But there certainly is a demography who would pay well. Question is where to draw the line.
> Twitter's problem is that it makes the low-scoring players feel bad. To use Twitter without a Blue Check is just not that valuable to most people. Just like the Twitter elites derive a sense of self-importance from their internet followers, the Twitter masses feel a sense of illegitimacy, an angst against the platform for driving the public discourse into a dumpster fire.
I don't really agree with this. In my experience as a daily Twitter user, most of the posts I see that aren't from specific sub-communnities I participate in are from low-follower accounts that had one of their tweets go viral. I think generally as long as you have some followers, you're only one timely/clever joke away from hundreds of thousands of people seeing your tweet.
Totally agree, I’ve met with people in person after hanging around and chatting with my sub community, they know what I think through my tweets and I know what they think. We share resources etc. it’s wonderful. It’s harder to join different communities where you want to say different things. I hate following people that are all over the place. Twitter works well to create a community around a cause or topic. But it’s hard as a generalist to say multiple things and think diversely.
I always found it amusing that common people who are not that interesting share the same platform with influential people / thought leaders / celebrities. The fact you can just cold tweet and @mention a famous person out of the blue is highly parasocial and strange.
I would be surprised if Twitter doesn't already have some kind of behind-the-scenes payment arrangement for these "VIP" level users to protect their accounts and do whatever other special things.
If Twitter doesn't already do this, then it's dumb, quite frankly, from a business sense due to all the extra labor (in terms of engineers, support, etc) to provide services for these VIPs compared to normal users. Like you said, if these Twitter VIPs are having their cake and eating it too with monetizing Twitter for their own benefit, why wouldn't Twitter ask for a cut.
Twitter's already done what even other major social platform has done and become dependent on advertising revenue. If Twitter becomes all paid and charges even $1/mo, that would wipe out a huge amount of "normal" users that are accustomed to paying the price of free, and then that's going to impact the ad revenue because of lesser targeted normal people to advertise to.
I think the problem Twitter is going to face is how to balance all the plates they have in the air with realistic expectations.
It's the "classic" problem that these platforms want to solve to keep up with investor expectations. So far, there's mostly a bunch of 'little' approaches to this like selling some random digital trinkets or paying for some 'meh' extra features, but these things are like side-dishes that don't reap enough benefits to compensate for appetites of continuous profit expansion.
This is sort of like being torn different ways. From one angle, if Twitter "changing the formula too much" makes the platform worse and people leave, then they don't grow and face shareholder backlash. From another angle, if Twitter hits a wall on monetization and can't figure out how to boost their cap, then Twitter becomes an unattractive investment and will just kinda flatline growth. And finally, people could still just find a new thing to go to anyways and if Twitter does not and stays Twitter, people still might get bored and move over to TikTok or Reddit or whatever.
Basically, even Twitter shows it's still hard to balance reality with desire with mission.
>If Twitter doesn't already do this, then it's dumb, quite frankly, from a business sense due to all the extra labor (in terms of engineers, support, etc) to provide services for these VIPs compared to normal users. Like you said, if these Twitter VIPs are having their cake and eating it too with monetizing Twitter for their own benefit, why wouldn't Twitter ask for a cut.
They probably drive a ton of engagement, which benefits twitter.
> behind-the-scenes payment arrangement for these "VIP" level users
Twitter licenses premium data APIs. Twitter's "VIP level" users are those that pay significant amounts of money to consume these data APIs to extrapolate whatever sort of information the data can provide.
You can research and confirm this yourself but sources for my assertion:
You could offset the costs of building "customer" filters for super users as well -- ones that do a lot of work to ensure certain people never comment or their comments are downweighted.
> People who work on Twitter, who have built a large following, who use Twitter to propagate messages, to network with peers, and to learn facts and rumors, would pay not just $4/month but $4000. Whatever the price Twitter would charge journalists, they would gladly pay; it's a cost of doing business.
No they wouldn't pay $4000 a month, you vastly over-estimate the willingness of users to pay for social media. Any paid social media was a complete failure. Twitter customers are the advertisers and data hoarders, not the people who tweet.
I've felt for a while that a pay-to-post model with a straight chronological feed would solve a lot of the problems of today's social media. I toy with the idea of building it myself.
Twitter offers a chronological feed, the little star thing on the upper right. Works well to get rid of endless scrolling if you don't follow hundreds of people.
This would be the usual rent seek if news publishers had to pay and would also consolidate the richest media houses. Not really a good idea for anyone aside from Twitter of course.
I would monetize the reach of a post if i were Twitter CEO. Today leaders politicians, celebrities, corps etc have such a wider reach through Twitter due to their following, so Twitter can set a default max threshold on the how many audience the post will reach to and allow users to pay for boost their reach.
I like this because "reach" scales with "moral hazard" and so adding default network decay would help dampen the outragememes. But if you pay to take the dampening off you can be accurately judged for paying to propagate helpful or harmful things.
You're right, but you may want to consider that highly monotone communicators may not actually notice most of the non-literal signals that get passed in typical social situations.
Models be built from something, something related to the modeler's interpretation of their own interface into reality.
That said, it's nice that such a model was made; it's a nice reference / jumping off point. Someone more sensitive to their percepts and the nuances of life would be hard pressed to formalize any model at all; they'd be hard pressed to unfocus from the complexities and responsibilities of social life to do the abstract work of modeling.
Sure. There's also the converse situation where people who speak in tonal languages might not develop associations with melodic patterns in speech and any strong meta-meaning, since in those languages, pitch is actually carrying top-level meaning.
People who have congenital amusia, iirc, also tend to struggle with understanding tone languages. It seems true that if you aren't able to distinguish pitch well, you aren't good at encoding/decoding messages that are present through the medium of pitch differences.
I didn't mean to suggest above that this is a general thing for all humans. Like every other recreational stimulate-the-senses activity, some people don't actually care for it/aren't affected by it anyway.
I'm using that to group all the things that are communicated through the musicality of the voice in addition to the words themselves. Like if a person is happy, upset, or surprised, in a way you can pick up from the tone of their voice.
Here's a small example, about how the minor third interval between two notes which is perceived as "sad" in Western music, is also present in English speech that sounds "sad" to the listener: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/44642274_The_Minor_...
This thread, and the author's blog which I've but skimmed, are to me a microcosm of the clash between 2 archetypes that roughly correspond to Science and the Liberal Arts; let's call them Type 1 and Type 2.
Type 1 aims to formally represent the world in patterns of symbols, with maximal simplicity. Type 2 aims to explore the complexity of the world, with maximal nuance. Type 1 finds value in constructing reductive models that are wrong but maybe useful to influence life in the world. Type 2 seeks freedom from models that reduce life into forms that can be easily influenced. To Type 1, the discovery of a computational model or equation or diagram that explains art or mysticism is a Holy Grail to pursue at all cost. To Type 2, art and mysticism are effectively defined as that which is inherently beyond the grasp of a formal model.
With such a gap in outlook and purpose, it's hard to communicate, to convey information that can be integrated across perspectives. Indeed, the gap is so large that the meanings and connotations of words like "reductive" and "wrong" are only worth quoting from a particular frame of reference.
I really enjoy the chicken-and-egg-esque meta implications of this comment, that you are of the Type 1 persuasion and therefore find value in this reductive model of human thought. I instinctually grasp for nuance away from these two modes, which ironically seems to put me squarely in Type 2 (even though I often find value in reductive models). Trying to dig deeper into this just feels like zooming in on a fractal.
The two outlooks can hardly be said to be mutually exclusive. You can absolutely cultivate both sides of yourself, learn to appreciate both logic and poetry. Doing so leaves you a much more well rounded person than either Spock or Bones.
There is still some mysticism that exists embedded in a type 1 world. Nursing literature sometimes refers to nurses’ intuition, which is an indescribable feeling that something is wrong with a patient but you can’t quite describe what it is.
Otherwise, nursing is very much a type 1 world of models that describe how nurses interact with the world around them.
There's a stereotype that art is the domain of the anti-reductionist, but I don't think that's a historical constant. Would anyone say that mathematically-accurate linear perspective had no artistic merit when it was invented? How about techniques like the rule of thirds? What would you call abstract art, if not an attempt to reduce art to its true fundamentals?
I would say this "divide" in thought started a couple of centuries ago(at it was very noticeable in recorded history).Even among "type 1", let's take an example: math: you had the so-called fundamentalists that believed in power of measurements and the other who believed in the power of abstract,imaginary,etc.
This also applies to computing later (and still to this day) and pretty much everything else under the sun, including arts/liberal arts, for example: people who believed in the fundamental of beauty, complexity, hand-made craft, and some who would believe in the abstract notions, conveyed messages,etc.(you definitely see this throughout "modern art")
To me,making this distinction seems like the wrong approach.It's good and healthy for this divide to exist (because it's the premise of making something better, advancing a thought, otherwise you stagnate in one worldview) but it's wrong to assume one is better than the other, therefore everyone should adhere to this framework and abandon criticism).Moreover than that, people seem to be afraid to say: "I don't believe that, i think i can do better" when it comes to certain frameworks of thought.You definitely see stagnation on this kind in physics for example.
Gas fees have been too high since Cryptokitties in 2017. Actually, even before Ethereum launched, anyone with a calculator could have predicted the scaling issues. After all, bitcoin was never built for millions of consumers to transact onchain.
And yet, Ethereum and Bitcoin have succeeded despite design flaws. It goes to show that you can do much better by serving a niche with massive demand (speculators, darknet users) than trying to build a Product for Everyone.
I don't expect a Product for Everyone to come from the Ethereum or Bitcoin communities, communities rife with tribalism and whose insiders are billionaire ideological extremists, totally out of touch with normies. That much of the media coverage of crypto, such as this article, is inaccurate doesn't help matters; insiders increase their tribalism and anti-establishment angst, and outsiders increase their confusion.
So I do hope that R&D into layer 1 and consensus tech doesn't relent. As it stands, the highest bandwidth chain (Solana) makes significant sacrifices in decentralization -- SOL is hyper concentrated in VC/whale/Core Team hands, and the Core Team plays a huge role as Kingmaker, picking winning projects to signal-boost -- and there is not yet a chain with reasonable bandwidth and PRIVACY.
In the people's imagination, blockchain is a privacy technology. But in actuality, it's a panopticon. Until the gap from perception to reality closes, this market is ripe for disruption.
This eip goes against everything you are claiming. It is pro-user and pro-scaling. The current eth mainnet was always essentially a proof of concept. Everyone knows the goal has been to find a scaling solution. L2s and rollups are that solution. Sustainable scaling was never guaranteed and yet now, due to some incredible brains, we have the technical roadmap worked out and coming to fruition. This eip lowers costs for L2/roll-up users it is completely pro-user and not to just make existing eth holders richer.
I get what you mean, but I do see a difference between scaling strategies. Imagine if Facebook adopted multi-layer scaling, like Bitcoin and Ethereum are doing. Students and alumni of elite universities would have access to Facebook Layer 1, but non-elites would be stuck on Layer 2. Does that sound awesome to you?
To be more charitable to Bitcoin and Ethereum, they are attempting to be global internet protocols, not companies. From the get go, Bitcoin supporters like Hal Finney envisioned "Bitcoin Banks" that provided access to the Bitcoin blockchain to the masses who can't afford to use it directly, much like ISPs connect non-institutional users to the internet.
> From the get go, Bitcoin supporters like Hal Finney envisioned "Bitcoin Banks" that provided access to the Bitcoin blockchain to the masses who can't afford to use it directly.
So we replace a (in-theory democratically accountable) central bank with a cabal of banks?
How is this better? This is like replacing the Federal reserve with the agreements of LIBOR traders.
Probably more nuanced than “destroyed.” The entire value of the coin didn’t exist like 6 years ago and is now $500B. The burned coins are just going to be factored into the price in some way.
It was first proposed by Vitalik in 2018 but lay dormant for a while before being picked up by community members and being prepared for inclusion. IIRC it took about 2 years to get it into production.
Besides the technical changes it's interesting as the most vocal proponents weren't developers and as such its inclusion was truly driven by the community.
> As it stands, the highest bandwidth chain (Solana) makes significant sacrifices in decentralization -- SOL is hyper concentrated in VC/whale/Core Team hands, and the Core Team plays a huge role as Kingmaker, picking winning projects to signal-boost -- and there is not yet a chain with reasonable bandwidth and PRIVACY.
Solana is open source. What is stopping a community, perhaps even a DAO, from forking all the hard work those VCs so generously open sourced?
(side note - I fuckin love open source for this reason)
Afaik solana full nodes require basically datacenter level networking (unless you have like gigabit fiber at home) while more people could run an Eth full node at home on cable internet. That's one aspect of a sacrifice in decentralization in the Eth vs Solana debate.
Good question. I don't have the answer, but maybe it has to do with the market game theory? I mean, there's easier ways to make money. Like, copypasta smart contracts from Ethereum to EVM-compatible chains. But, to fork Solana or another distributed state machine that's currently in beta and quite unstable (and has an unintuitive programming model) is to take on immense complexity, and therefore liability.
If you have the skills to maintain a Solana fork, how much harder is it to make your own chain? If the difficulty gap isn't immense, it's more upside to build a new Solana-esque chain from scratch than fork Solana, since you can't easily fork the Solana community/brand/legitimacy.
If and when Solana and other fast L1s have stabilized to the point of being simple plug-and-play software appliances, I do expect a host of forks to appear, but to succeed they will need to do more than reset the cap table and get rid of the leaders.
Totally agree. I use a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB ram daily. CPU is only a bottleneck when compiling, but with just browser and terminal I regularly break 4GB ram usage.
Of course we make decisions on balance of their expected outcomes. The problem is that we can't in general predict outcomes with certainty. So, intelligent decision making is not merely to pick the best expected outcome, but to factor in the range of all possible outcomes on a probabilistic basis.
In this thought experiment, it seems that city-dwelling is highly probable to benefit the disabled kid, but we have less a priori certainty that suburb life is better for the accelerated learner (it may be better for him today, but it's plausible to think that it's long-term good for a smart kid to experience some amount of adversity in a tougher environment compared to a more comfortable sheltered suburban setting, or to learn by example that it's sometimes worth risking personal optimality to serve the needs of others).
So yes, the notion that we should prioritize the needs of the bottom of social hierarchies is worth considering, but it's even more important to factor in uncertainty, to have no pretense of one's ability to predict the future.