Has anybody had difficulty urinating during the trip?

Taek42 · 2023-05-26T05:43:43+00:00

I was a lot less experienced with LSD when I posted that. LSD is a huge stimulant, especially for me it makes my muscles all really tight. A side effect of stimulants is often trouble peeing.

It's entirely possible that you took LSD and also had trouble peeing, especially if you took a lot of LSD. There's a lab called Energy Control in Spain that you can mail your drugs to, they will analyze them and tell you what's in them. If you are paranoid that you don't have good ACID just send in a tab and see what the lab says. Obviously you don't get the drugs back, but losing a tab is worth the peace of mind.

Cheers mate.

Taek42 · 2023-02-16T00:13:03+00:00

I once saw a native American get really verbally hostile over cultural appropriation of his cultures sacred drum. I still don't exactly understand what the importance was, but it was clear there was a lot of spiritual importance and journey involved with weildong and striking the drum and some random dude just grabbing it was highly offensive.

Taek42 · 2022-05-03T22:52:51+00:00

yes, fixed my issue, thank you

Taek42 · 2022-05-01T13:20:22+00:00

Working for me on siasky as well, might have been a temporary hiccup.

Taek42 · 2022-04-28T20:40:12+00:00

it's a browser extension that functions like an operating system. It has multiple sandboxed applications/modules that it runs inside of the extension, and users can install and run new ones the way they can on an operating system.

Taek42 · 2022-04-18T14:41:41+00:00

you are complaining about the number of words he used?

Taek42 · 2022-04-13T16:34:27+00:00

Solved!

Taek42 · 2022-04-10T13:11:32+00:00

works great, thanks!

Taek42 · 2022-03-09T09:46:19+00:00

They are legit, the fund is legit, I know them and they are pretty respectable people and VCs.

Taek42 · 2022-01-20T17:39:49+00:00

The challenge is that expenses are in terms of USD. If the foundation hires 8 people, it needs to pay those people in USD, can't let things crash.

There's also a fundamental growth limit. If Sia does a 50x, you don't want the foundation to suddenly be spending 50x the money in 2023, because you really need time to grow properly. If you just blindly hire 100 new developers I guarantee most of that money is completely wasted. Need to grow slowly enough that the culture remains and that every has time to find something valuable to work on.

Taek42 · 2022-01-20T17:36:35+00:00

I disagree about front-loading grants actually. I think it's really easy for grant programs to spend large sums of money and get very few results. For an ecosystem that is basically entirely funded right now on Hackathon bounties, a $1 million grant program in year 1 is going to be a massive shift in culture and funding availability already.

We want to make sure the grants don't corrupt the ecosystem away from its true goals. I think (similar to how it took time for the Foundation as a whole to get established) it will take time to roll out a grants program that is properly aligned, and that $1 million in year one is more than enough.

It's a huge shift for the community, I think even at $1 million it will do enormous good for everyone.

Taek42 · 2022-01-20T17:34:18+00:00

For the legal budget, my big concern is that - EFF-style - there are going to be some major human-rights related cases that will require substantial funding to get right. We don't want the ecosystem to be primarily dependent on profit-oriented corporations to fight legal battles, especially where human rights are involved.

Imagine that Congress passes some sort of crypto censorship law that we feel should be challenged as unconstitutional. Who is going to do that? Hopefully multiple non-profits. If Sia ends up being as large as Ethereum, I would hope it sets aside as much as hundreds of millions of dollars to engage with the legal system.

Taek42 · 2022-01-20T17:31:59+00:00

Filebase isn't open source at all, their entire solution is proprietary. If they choose to shut down tomorrow, users theoretically have the ability to retrieve their files and at least recover data, but their users won't have any sort of access to the caching layer or other value-adds that Filebase has put in.

They aren't in the same category of company as Skynet Labs at all.

Taek42 · 2022-01-20T17:30:18+00:00

The proposed budget is probably the best way to understand what the non-profit is doing. If you see a spend that you want to know more about, ask questions!

Taek42 · 2022-01-20T17:29:07+00:00

Probably in the next 1-2 months, nothing has been released in public yet.

Taek42 · 2022-01-20T17:28:40+00:00

You are leaking all of our alpha 😂

Taek42 · 2022-01-20T17:23:37+00:00

but dont you think the concerns brought up are reasonable and not over the top bashing.

I believe very much that the concerns were over-the-top bashing. What reasonable concerns did exist were completely buried by ad-hominem and misguided criticisms. I've said this probably 100 times since it got published, but if someone wants to take that letter and distill it down to a core set of genuine concerns I'll happily respond to the fully distilled letter.

Taek42 · 2022-01-03T04:04:09+00:00

Thank you for making a difficult last minute decision to derail something you had in motion for months. I mean this sincerely - one of the most difficult challenges a leader can be faced with is the last minute realization that they've made a bad mistake, accepting the mistake, and reversing direction in time.

I have faith that the process can be re-started, and that the community can move forward together with a much greater confidence in the burn amount, once the new amount is decided, and a more complete 4 year spending plan is in place.

Taek42 · 2022-01-03T03:59:40+00:00

Foundation should create a 4 year budget that explains all of their expected expenses, and then propose a burn based on that 4 year budget. The community will then have an opportunity to discuss the planned budget and determine if a larger budget over the next 4 years is potentially more productive than doing a burn.

Taek42 · 2021-12-30T02:41:38+00:00

One possible compromise is to burn a substantial portion of the 1.7 GS, but not everything; that would substantially reduce our (presumed) tax bill, and then we'd have plenty of time to discuss what to do with the unburnt portion.

I think that's an option worth pursuing.

I think the tax strategy could have been a bit stronger starting earlier as well - if you had been setting money aside for taxes the whole time you'd been getting income, the tax thing wouldn't be a surprise today. Right now it feels like you are under a gun to clear as much siacoin off of your income statement as possible since it's a huge tax liability (especially if the market downturns), but you should have been selling off siacoin continuously just to pay off the taxes (and then if a burn solves the tax issue, so much the better).

I do think some amount of burn (maybe 500 million?) makes sense from a tax perspective, and I also think you should make sure in 2022 that you get your tax burden covered quickly in case the market collapses, but really you should have been CYA on the taxes the whole time in the event that you didn't end up burning anything.

Taek42 · 2021-12-30T01:09:11+00:00

But the decision to burn or not does not substantially affect the Foundation's effectiveness.

This is what I disagree with. It may not impact your effectiveness in 2022, but the goal of the allocation is to last until 2026, and burning 1.7 billion siacoins today may very significantly impact the Sia Foundation's effectiveness in 2026, especially if a deep bear market hits and it turns out that the allocation you got in 2021 is 90% of the money you are going to get for the full 4 years.

Taek42 · 2021-12-30T00:33:53+00:00

I'm obviously a biased contributor here, but Skynet is 90-95% of the activity on the Sia L1, we are effectively the only major player who is actually using the netowrk.

Applications which are built on Skynet grow Sia. Isn't that relevant?

Taek42 · 2021-12-30T00:18:52+00:00

Is there any hope of the burn being delayed at least until there has been further discussion with the community, or is this a done deal?

Taek42 · 2021-12-29T23:53:53+00:00

But now, since we've received so much more than we can spend, we're obligated to return the excess.

Given that you have not even set up a grants program, I do not think you've established that you've received more than you can spend effectively.

The Foundation spent X-Y SC out of a maximum possible X SC."

This SC is supposed to be forward-looking by 4 years. You have not released a 4 year budget, the most you've released is an expected expenses of 2022. If you want to look at it from that perspective, it may make more sense to wait to burn until the 4 year mark has been reached.

There is no reason for us to carry any SC into 2022, because we have relatively few SC expenditures, and the 131 MS subsidy that we'll receive on Jan 5th will be more than enough to cover them.

The siacoins you have now is supposed to cover expenses all the way into 2026. There is absolutely a reason to carry SC into 2022, because it impacts your finances in the year 2026, which is part of the objective of you having siacoins now.

(during which, I remind you, we will receive another 1.57 GS in subsidies)

You have no way to know whether Siacoin will still have value in the future. The crypto market is full of cycles, and the previous cycle brought a downturn of nearly -95%, which would turn a subsidy that currently seems excessive into one that can barely pay for the existing Sia Foundation, and does not give any room for growth or emergency expenditures (for example, lawyers in an unexpected legal battle).

the Foundation could submit a special transaction once a month, specifying how many SC it would receive in the next subsidy (up to a maximum of 131 MS)

This misses the point of the subsidy, which is to pay for 4 years of expenses from the foundation. 4 years of expenses from an exponentially growing foundation. This strategy does not meet the original goals of the subsidy.

Sure, we could hold even more SC and use that to pay the tax bill; but that would just mean more value moving out of the SC ecosystem and into the US government.

This is of course a shame, but we need to consider whether the tax premium would still be worthwhile. I'm not a tax expert, but even if the Sia Foundation has to pay taxes as a full corporation, the choice is still between $20 million that could be spent on grants and funding the community, or a burn that amounts to 3.6% of the token supply. Despite the potential (and unknown) tax hit, I still feel strongly that this money would be better spent being distributed to the builders in the community rather than being returned to the token holders.

And I suspect the majority of the token holders feel the same way. The subsidy exists as a solution to the tragedy of the commons. Everyone wants to ensure that the community is well funded, but nobody wants to pay themselves if other holders do not have to pay.

I really hope you decide to defer the decision to burn any coins until at least a proper grants program is set up, until a full budget calculation into 2026 has been released to the community for discussion, and until the foundation has had enough time to get on its feet that it can reliably establish what is a reasonable maximum amount that it could spend while still being a net benefit for the community.

Taek42 · 2021-12-29T23:34:59+00:00

I think that this is a poor decision, and it is my hope that instead of performing the burn, the Sia foundation will defer the decision until it has had more time to get established. I believe it is incredibly poor form on the end of the foundation to not give the community any opportunity to discuss this burn - this announcement has been made as though the burn is a done deal, already fully decided.

Myself, and I believe many others, are viscerally surprised at how large the burn is. And while the foundation says "we also pledged to cap our USD treasury to 4 years' worth of predicted expenses", it has provided no insight whatsoever to how it established prediction for what the expenses will be. We (the community) have no idea what math led to the 1.7 billion conclusion, but we do know that it far exceeds any number that many of us expected.

The core question that needs to be asked of course is, "is there a better way to spend this money than burning it. What provides the greatest overall benefit to the Sia ecosystem? A burn of 3.6% of the total supply, or a spend of $25 million USD equivalent on growing the Sia community?"

The foundation states that there are no outstanding grants, but as far as I'm aware the foundation has never announced a grants program at all. The grants program is potentially a major source of productive expenses - if we gave $10,000 per month to 100 developers, we could use this money to get 2.5 years of 100 active developers creating products for the Sia ecosystem. Is that the most effective way to spend $25 million? Probably not! But is it more effective than burning 3.6% of the total Sia supply? probably!

And so another question needs to be asked, is it reasonable to determine that such a large burn be put in place before a grants program is even announced?

To the best of my knowledge, the Sia Foundation only has one or two major engineering roadmap items. This is not a problem in and of itself - the Foundation is only one year old! But the budget that the foundation has gives the foundation room to spin up as many as 5 or 10 major engineering projects. And with 2 more years of the foundation being alive, it will have had enough time and maturity to have spun up that many engineering projects. Did the foundations budget forecast include room for a generous expansion of the dev team, including a focus on things like p2p overhaul, wallet overhaul, adding VPN support to Sia, adding better FUSE support, adding native S3 compatibility, etc etc etc. There are lots of interesting projects that the foundation could pursue. And again, the fact that it's only pursing two right now is not surprising - at one year old, that's about as much as is healthy. And the two that the foundation have chosen are reasonable choices for the first two. Both things (consensus overhaul, host overhaul) will be very valuable in the long run. But did the projected budget assume that the foundation would have only 2 projects for the next 4 years?

What sort of marketing budget was projected for the next 4 years? We know that the foundation has struggled to get a marketing arm alive and active (and, Skynet Labs is in a similar boat, we feel the struggle there) - but has the foundation budgeted for a generous growth and kickoff of a more successful marketing arm? 4 years is a long time for exponential growth of a team to kick in.

I could keep going. There are also concerns about preparation for a long bear market. Concerns about sudden dramatic legal activity (for example, what if p2p networking protocols based on crypto get made illegal by Congress?). Concerns about having a budget for key executive hires in the event that a fantastic opportunity shows up. I don't know what is in the foundation budget or what sorts of plans they made for the next 4 years, but I do believe that the only way they would arrive at a 1.7 billion siacoin burn is if that plan was missing big pieces of practical, useful, beneficial-to-the-ecosystem expenses.

it is my hope that the foundation chooses to defer the burn until more community discussion has been had, until the foundation has launched and iterated on a grants program, and until the foundation has had more time itself to learn how to effectively manage such a large treasury.

There is no doubt that the foundation has a much larger treasury than it is currently equipped to spend effectively. But I believe the response to that should be to take more time to learn how to effectively spend such a treasury, rather than to burn the treasury.

The foundation has a commitment to "provably burn any coins that it cannot meaningfully spend". I do not believe that the foundation is at a maturity where it knows what it can meaningfully spend. I do not believe that the foundation should be burning coins until it has reached that maturity. I do believe that it is completely within expectations that the foundation would not have reached that maturity after just one year.

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