Try to learn more about industries that sound interesting to you, and meet people from those industries to learn what they do. Speaking with lots of different people and learning about what they do will probably help you figure out what excites you. Totally agree that you shouldn't work at a job that seems depressing, and we don't live in an age where you need to "pay your dues" and "work your way up" as a smart, confident young person anymore--unless you want to. It's up to you to find the right opportunities to go after, though, and that requires a lot of scouting.
Genuine question: what apps/technology is growing quickly with DeFi that can't otherwise be practically executed (for whatever reason) outside of a blockchain? I've yet to see a killer example.
Flash loans are one example. These are zero-collateral, low-fee loans that are paid back at the end of the transaction. If the loan fails to be paid back, the whole transaction that made it unwinds, which means the risk to the lender is zero despite the possibility of loans being millions of times greater than the borrower's assets.
They've been used mostly for questionable purposes (largely exploiting oracle attacks on poorly-written DEXes), but there's something very interesting about completely removing capital availability from the constraints on a market participant. It means any arbitrage opportunity can be exploited by anyone, regardless of how much it needs to be levered up to be worthwhile, and so basically democratizes financial profiteering.
A perfect killer example is globally accessible prediction markets. They always get shut down by governments. Isn’t it crazy that you currently can’t place a bet on a horse race or a presidential election in the US?
Having reliable, auditable, public protocols which can operate without the blessing of the world’s existing governments is precisely the point.
Killer examples include any products or services which would provide a net positive value to society but are currently outlawed within various geographic territories for superstitious reasons and/or to protect existing industries from competition.
Prediction markets are an excellent example here: a substantial body of research now indicates that 1) prediction markets are superior to all other strategies in predicting any quantifiable event (because they are “meta tools” which inherently incorporate the best information from all strategies) and 2) non-private markets can’t be used for manipulating elections, sponsoring assassinations, or incentivizing real-world action of any sort. (In any prediction market with a public order book, any attempted “action-incentivizing position” can be consumed by arbitrage until all that remains is a measure of the event’s real probability). For several decades, researchers from dozens of universities have lobbied for relaxing the ban on prediction markets in USA, with little progress to show. Until that ban is lifted (which could take decades longer), blockchain-based prediction markets will have no domestic competition.
Also worth noting: even in the presence of legal, centralized prediction markets, decentralized prediction market protocols may still be competitive because they require far less counterparty-risk, allowing them to safely support higher volumes and larger positions.
> non-private markets can’t be used for manipulating elections, sponsoring assassinations, or incentivizing real-world action of any sort. (In any prediction market with a public order book, any attempted “action-incentivizing position” can be consumed by arbitrage until all that remains is a measure of the event’s real probability)
Source(s) for this?
I know prediction markets will have far-reaching consequences when they aren’t or can’t be constrained anymore.
The mere presence of a payout for low-probability is a broad change. Maybe I’m not being paid to kill someone via the market directly, but I am naturally incentivized to collect information about the world, gain power, and then use my power to bet on and make low-probability events happen.
Another question - How do we solve the decentralized oracle problem without relying on decentralized votes that could be biased due to past voting behavior or their vested interest in the outcome of a truth vote?
> Some worry that censorship-resistant prediction markets will be used to encourage assassinations (and other crimes); this concern does not hold up to a sober examination. “Assassination markets” (AMs), as originally proposed by Jim Bell, are irreconcilably different from Prediction Markets (PMs). My experimental method for funding public goods with PMs has features which render it incompatible with crime. Furthermore, markets would generally present an excessively-complex, risky, and convoluted form of criminal financing. Truthcoin presents a (peaceful) alternative for accomplishing ideological goals, which features greater persuasiveness as well as lower cost. I conclude with a short discussion covering [1] recourse for those affected by AMs (of any kind), [2] features of Truthcoin designed to amplify the inherent impracticalities of AMs, and [3] the (necessarily relevant) total net effect of Truthcoin on political assassinations, general crime and general human welfare.
The linked paper does a thorough job of explaining this scenario, but to summarize: yes, in the absence of other market participants you might try to bet on low-probability events and make them happen. But because it's a public market, anyone can see the anomalous "predictions" you have made, and "free ride" on or even "front run" your position, including your accomplices (who can also sabotage you). On net, your position will be mostly consumed by arbitrage, your payout will be inconsequential compared to the capital required, and the probability "returned" by the market will remain accurate.
Decentralized prediction markets also offer global liquidity, so the counterparty can be located anywhere on earth. Also the friction and fees should be much lower. If someone in Mongolia wants to bet a million dollars against someone in Colombia today, it’s extremely hard to do without a blockchain (think about the fees and time to wire the money, who would you be wiring it to, etc). Prediction markets are not just for gambling, by the way. They could be used for earthquake insurance, for example.
Something that's helped me recently is trying out giving up on all my goals one at a time. There was one goal that I really started to miss working on once I gave it up, and that's how I knew I wanted to keep working on that goal. This exercise helped me establish my priorities.
I'm in exactly the same boat as you. I want to help build the city of the future, but as a data scientist, I have no idea where to start.
This is advice I haven't followed myself, but might start following: talk with people who are working on building megastructures--not necessarily in your city--and ask how they got started. There aren't any online bootcamps for how to build a monorail, so "tribal knowledge" is probably the only way to go.
I'll let you know if this methodology works for me!
Okay but how does a "knowledge worker" like me, and many of the other readers of HN who work in jobs with little exposure to large-scale structures, get started building the city of the future? I have no idea where to even begin.
I learned how to program by watching tutorials and doing online coding classes. This is how I am used to learning. This method of learning isn't going to work when it comes to say, starting a startup that will build a new monorail. This is such a huge blockage for me and probably others with limited exposure to industries outside of software.
Has anyone ever felt this way and how did you overcome it?
I feel the same way. Hundreds of resources for learning programming online, but little else.
I would love to take a class on "Building plant based proteins" but can't find anything online.
Thanks! The $1,095 price tag is pretty steep. It's a lot of money to part with for some data that I'm not sure I'll find valuable. I'll look into doing a free trial with them though.
Great idea! I would probably use this more if you looked at the futures performance from yesterday's market close to this morning, in addition to past 1 day. The reason why is that I don't care as much about futures specifically, as I care about what they could predict for the coming market open.
