This is a fun book, but it famously embellishes, exaggerates, and sensationalizes the tulip bubble [1]. The efficient markets people obviously don't like the story, but there doesn't seem to be much evidence that it happened on the same scale that Mackay portrays it.
Yes a lot of it was based on anti tulip propaganda pamphlets that circulated at the time, and survived more because they were more interesting due to the exaggerated stories.
>Peter Garber argues that the trade in common bulbs "was no more than a meaningless winter drinking game, played by a plague-ridden population that made use of the vibrant tulip market."
So basically, it was the GameStop of the 1630s. Humans never change.
This is where non-financial use of blockchain could really shine, IMO. Self-sovereign identity management with a smart contract-based process for recovering ids if keys get lost or hacked. Blockchains are pretty out of favor these days, but I really don't see a better solution for decentralized identity management.
If someone's account gets lost or hacked, the person with the most incentive to own that account is usually the original owner, so just give it to whoever is willing to pay the most, problem solved. We can call it "proof of stake", where you always stake a certain amount to keep owning your account, and when contested, whoever stakes the most gets it.
Poor people don't deserve rights on the blockchain anyway, it's not like they can afford the transaction fees, if they didn't want their account stolen they should have tried being rich, or buying into nearer the top of the pyramid.
Don't worry about people who pass away or lose internet for an extended period, we'll deal with that in v2, when we get "proof of death" and "proof of internet disconnectivity" on the blockchain somehow.
I think you're right that transaction fees are a key problem. It's ultimately a bandwidth problem. You're bidding for the limited vbytes, and the bidding price only increases with traffic, kicking poor users out.
I think the key thing to recognise with petname systems is that there doesn't need to be this sort of "top-level consensus" as opposed to ecash systems.
You can have two instances of namecoin, say Namecoin1 or Namecoin2. You can just have different domains like alice.nmc1 and bob.nmc2 and have them interoperate properly. You can just keep forking blockchain-based petname systems to overcome the bandwidth/fee problem.
What this means is that Namecoin1 full nodes don't need to synchronize all the domain names on Namecoin2 and vice-versa. Similar to TLDs on DNS. We can imagine that there might be different petname TLDs for different global regions, and they might be merge-mined.
This isn't true for money applications like bitcoin or eth, because by forking BTC or ETH or something, you are creating new coins.
Perhaps some sort of namecoin or ENS-like petname system with multisig or some type of scripting that enables different recovery methods.
For example, you could set your petname up so it can be controlled by a single keypair, which can be overridden after a certain time by a ring signature based on keypairs held by friends, family, peers, and trusted computing devices you leave in a safe deposit box.
Or maybe you could trust your identity with some centralized entity, but only as part of a 2-of-3 multisig with yourself and another trusted entity.
Basicially namecoin with bitcoin-like scripting controls.
Do you need a blockchain for that though? There are cryptography schemes to share a secret (e.g. the recovery keys) between multiple parties, requiring at least N of them to get together to recover the original value of the secret.
No, but you need some sort of blockchain to enforce uniqueness in petname systems due to zooko's trilemma.
If you're okay with another side of the triangle, where all of the identities are keypairs, then you don't need a petname system or any name system. the name system is an optional convenience layer on top of the web of trust.
What is the incentive for an individual to participate in a non-financial blockchain?
Bitcoin-style blockchains “work” because everyone gets the possibility of a little reward for all the hassle and non-negligible CPU time of being a node.
You get a reward for being a mining node, not just any node. Even then, do miners have much incentive to share blocks, other than the ones they mine?
I think the incentive is mutual for most nodes (aside from the mining aspect). People will set up a node to accept transactions in an automated manner, or to have higher confidence in the state of their accounts.
It's like being on the floor of the stock market. People participating want to be where all the information is (for their own benefit), and there is incentive to bring others in and share information (because it increases the amount of information you have).
I suppose you could be a "selfish" node. The bitcoin-equivalent of someone who leeches and never seeds. But the advantage is low relative to the amount of money moving around. Most people don't care about the bandwidth of running a bitcoin node, they care about latency. Unlike bittorrent, there isn't a de-facto finished version of the file being synced: it's a constantly-updating list that everyone wants to have the latest version of. I can't find the words, but this seems to be the fundamental difference.
What's the incentive for people to participate in file sharing networks? To some degree it's access to a world of free media (same as access to a world of decentralized identities), but to a large degree it's an interesting hobby/excuse to be interested in tech. Some people have racks of hard drives dedicated to hobbies like this, just because it's interesting and is worthy.
For me the incentive is being able to own an identity that nobody can take away from me. And the assumption is that services will support this type of identity, so I don't have to make accounts on other systems that people can take away and now I've lost all access to any data I had.
I think what you are looking for is something like Mastodon or related activity-pub service. You can run your own instance and nobody can take that away from you. No need to drag a blockchain into it - just host whatever services you need.
Interesting. Prices, as they say, are set at the margins - so given that, what kind of liquidity is there? How many are transacting? If the price hasn't shifted from $16k, it could mean that everyone thinks they are worth $16k, OR it could mean that no one has bought one in years and the last transaction was $16k. Those are big differences.
No, people are still trading them for some reason, and there's pretty good liquidity. The highest offer right now is $15.2k, which someone can dump any of the 10k apes for that. And there were 16 sales (totaling $271K) in the last 24 hours.
yea, that’s my thing agains the whole “nft’s are worthless” thing, clearly there is a market for it. whether that’s a mechanism of or priced off of crypto trading or whatever i dont know, but it’s never been a thing in this market that they are “worthless,” they are still traded, and it’s been very stable
As an American, I can conclusively say that we absolutely have no moral high ground whatsoever. But bringing the topic back to LLMs, I don't feel great about using an LLM that has a panic attack any time I ask about Tiananmen Square or Taiwanese sovereignty.
I don't know what American LLMs you're using. Just asked Claude, which gives nuanced answers on both, but amounts to "It's contested, but numerous authoritative bodies say yes" and "it depends on your definition of gender".
when it comes to topics like genders, "it depends on your definition"
when it comes to topics like democracy and freedom, western definition is all you must depend on
I agree as it relates to bitcoin: It's positioning itself as a store of value... and it kind of works as long as the collective delusion that it _is_ a store of value holds up. But that sort of self-fulfilling prophecy is kind of flimsy. Governments get to decide what money is based on charging taxes and demand how it gets paid.
Legal contracts are similar. They 100% are reliant on social and institutional forces for enforcement and meaning. But I think smart contracts are different because they are self-enforcing. It would be very difficult to use a smart contracts as a replacement for legal contracts in most circumstances. But when the contract relates to state and digital assets on the network then it's a great tool. And if you end up with a network that hosts a lot of these important contracts, then the native crypto asset (which is used as gas to power said contracts) has value as a commodity. And if that commodity also shares all the properties of good money (fungibility, durability, portability, etc.) then all of a sudden you have money.
Author here. Gas costs have actually come down a lot over the past few years. It only costs me a few dollars to run the transaction. It's more that scheduling, setting up, conducting, and tearing down each burn session is a huge pain in the ass. So if I can burn 10 bills an hour, then I'd clear maybe $450 an hour after gas, which doesn't feel crazy for providing boutique financial services.
Hinges on you definition on truly decentralized. ETH is not truly decentralized (and never will be since their shift to proof-of-stake) as there is no way of not-knowing that the majority stake is not in a single force (or a conspiring group) - which in theory could already be the case. Absence of the counterproof and presence of a case where it would be centralized can never make it truly decentralized.
That's not really a valid criticism. You can say that same thing about any protocol. Who's to say that the majority of btc hashing power isn't single force or conspiring group?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania#Modern_views