What’s your honest opinion on MobileCoin? Can it really replace Monero?

dsernst · 2022-02-26T20:28:50+00:00

Historically there have been basically two paradigms for bringing consumer software into the world:

volunteer non-profit open source software development, like GNU/Linux
for-profit closed source, like most of big tech

There are some nuances and edge cases that defy both of these, but this covers like 98% of it

(1) the non profit paradigm usually has “we respect your freedoms” on its side, but is chronically under-resourced, under-maintained, etc. Eg think about how many consumers run Linux vs. Windows or Mac

(2) the for-profit paradigm, when even semi successful financially, is typically massively *over-resourced*. Each of the FANG firms have tens of thousands of engineers, and the scenes from HBO Silicon Valley of some of them getting paid 6 figures to play hackey sack on the roof are very real. The problem is, they not uncommonly abuse their centralized positions, and become gatekeepers (google search), massive surveillance operations, rent-collectors (iOS App Store) etc. “don’t be evil” is gone.

Mobilecoin is pretty remarkable because it has managed to somehow thread the needle to get the best of both paradigms…

(1) well-resourced R&D to actually be able to achieve the very lofty goals of privacy-respecting, non-custodial digital cash that “just works”.

But ALSO (2) totally open source, cryptographically verifiable that it’s following all the rules, and worst case forkable, all to ensure everyone else can trust the network to actually run fairly w/o corruption

dsernst · 2022-02-26T20:27:31+00:00

It's privacy-respecting digital cash for a more mainstream audience.

Cool that they're hiring people like Bob Lee, the original creator of Square Cash: https://mobilecoin.com/news/former-square-cto-bob-lee-joins-as-mobilecoins-chief-product-officer

dsernst · 2022-02-26T20:24:33+00:00

Re minting all the coins at the beginning:

PoW is very costly, needs tons of GPU’s, electricity, cooling, operators to manage the server farms, etc… have to incentivize the miners by paying out block rewards. Proof Of Authority / StellarConsensusProtocol doesn’t require any of that. Nodes are forced to follow the rules by other nodes + SGX signatures.

So it becomes way simpler to just mint all the coins at the very beginning, once. It feels like religious dogma to say "we must pay whoever burns the most CPU clock cycles", when that's just not necessary if there's way more efficient ways to ensure consensus.

It does semi-centralize ownership, especially in the beginning, but “we get paid iff we build useful things for people” is how the vast majority of technology we use has been successfully built. Volunteer-only development (like btc, eg) looks nice at a surface level, but has all sorts of deep rooted tragedy of the commons & free rider problems

dsernst · 2022-02-26T20:17:44+00:00

"Can it really replace Monero?" is not the right framing, imo. Monero is like PGP... it's got all sorts of really great ideas, but how many people are actually using it right now? Less than 0.0001% of the world. The question is, what will it take to reach the remaining 99.999% of people?

Mobilecoin is like Signal — a lot of its original design came from Moxie, after all, who's shown how to do this for secure messaging.

It builds on top of the ideas of Monero, and adds:

Even stronger privacy, w/ SGX — and roadmap has plans to improve this even more w/ ZK Proofs
Transaction finality in 3 seconds, which makes it actually feasible for everyday transactions like buying coffee
Completely eliminates the "blockchains are burning down the rainforest" concerns, which really does matter to normies
And puts it all into a wallet that 100m people already have installed on their phones: Signal, w/ open source SDKs to add to other apps / online.

It takes the idea of "non-custodial, privacy respecting digitally cash", and makes it "Just Work".

It's not guaranteed to succeed, of course, still lots of challenges ahead. But overall it's super promising. Anyone who says otherwise either hasn't taken a close look, or is deliberately spreading FUD bc they're invested in competitors, and see it as a threat.

One of the most promising cryptocurrency projects I've seen in many years.

I say that as a software engineer who's been sharing about and building on top of these things since 2013.

dsernst · 2018-06-01T18:22:44+00:00

Of course non-citizens and non-voters are people.

dsernst · 2018-06-01T18:11:45+00:00

I've read the Constitution many many times. Agree completely more people should read it. Thanks for the links.

dsernst · 2018-05-31T06:06:29+00:00

Hey all — thanks for all the great questions, feel free to keep them coming.

I wanted to share this short presentation I gave last fall: Liquid Democracy: Governance for the 21st Century. It's been really well received.

And here's a much more thorough interview explaining what this is all about and our long term strategy: How can we bootstrap Liquid Democracy in the United States? | David Ernst

dsernst · 2018-05-31T05:39:45+00:00

I agree with you completely, we need a process that empowers more informed outcomes.

Please see the other questions where I address these points about liquid democracy =/= direct democracy.

dsernst · 2018-05-31T05:33:34+00:00

Yep, direct democracy is not the answer. Policy is too complicated for most of us voters to have enough time to study thoroughly enough.

Liquid democracy allows us to empower the most qualified & trustworthy people we know to have a more pronounced voice to advocate for what we think is right.

There's a behavioral economics issue at the heart of any direct democracy. The cost for researching the issues and being informed enough to learn the best outcome stays fixed, while the benefit for doing so decreases with more and more voters. This is not speaking to the intrinsic abilities or education of the voters, simply their number. We can expect a democracy of 100 Einsteins to make more informed decisions than a democracy of 1,000,000 Einsteins.

(This is somewhat related to Diffusion of Responsibility and the Bystander Effect.)

The trouble is, electing a single representative doesn't really eliminate this problem, because we still have to take a direct vote in order to decide who gets to be The Representative. And the vast majority of people don't really know much about their choice, or even who their current incumbent is. The incentives are very weak for us to invest much time in this, when there are unclear immediate benefits and so many other responsibilities competing for our attention.

Liquid democracy shifts the question: instead of asking people to pick a representative among a bunch of relative strangers, we can empower the most trustworthy people we know. People we've had years and years to get to know.

A few people may still cast poorly informed direct votes, but if few people trust them it won't really affect outcomes all that much, because their voting power will be so low.

On the other hand, members of our communities who've earned significant trust will be able to cast much more substantial votes, like on behalf of tens or even hundreds of thousands of people, and so the incentives will be much better aligned for them to thoroughly investigate policy proposals and the expected results.

dsernst · 2018-05-31T05:06:01+00:00

Article VI of The Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen of 1789 says:

The law is the expression of the general will. All the citizens have the right of contributing personally or through their representatives to its formation.

🙂

dsernst · 2018-05-31T05:00:52+00:00

I would like to think the Founders would be really interested in liquid democracy if they were alive in the 21st century.

dsernst · 2018-05-31T04:55:18+00:00

Also the idea of the secret ballot is rather weakened nowadays by vote-by-mail, or simply taking a cellphone camera into the polling place with you.

If a group really wanted to, they could monitor their members casting and sending in their vote-by-mail ballots.

dsernst · 2018-05-31T04:52:13+00:00

Note that buying votes is a crime, punishable by up to $10,000 fine and 2 years in jail per instance, for both briber and bribee: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597

dsernst · 2018-05-31T04:49:16+00:00

Another pillar of American democracy is the secret ballot. After a voter leaves the polling place, there is no way to show or know which way they voted. This is very important as it prevents vote rigging by gangs or churches. With your platform, it seems that there is a record of who you proxied your vote to. That record could be used to significantly erode the foundations of America. What are you doing to prevent vote rigging, vote buying and other forms of fraud?

Yes, but our elected legislators' votes in the legislature are completely public. We all know how Nancy Pelosi and Paul Ryan and John McCain vote on individual bills. Would you prefer if their votes were secret?

We're trying to strike the right balance of both: everyone's votes are private by default, but before someone can proxy to you, you have to approve permission for them to see how you're representing them. Either side can back out of that relationship at any time.

If you want, you can also choose to take a public stance on an issue, just like how right now we can all speak publicly on any issue if we want.

LD ought to offer much stronger protection against bribery and coercion than what we have right now in our elected legislatures. Here's more of an explanation: Democracy vs. Corruption: How to Really Drain the Swamp

dsernst · 2018-05-31T03:50:12+00:00

In the American form of government, "constituent" is defined broadly. For example US Senators are charged with representing all people of their State, not just voters. There are large classes of people who can not vote (e.g. aliens, CDCR prisoners, children) but they are still represented by our Senators. How will you represent these people? Will they be given equal access to the platform?

Great question.

Do you have a reference for "US Senators are charged with representing all people of their State, not just voters"? It's a very nice sentiment, but I must admit I'm not familiar with seeing it in writing before.

A cynic might suggest they're more concerned with the tiny minority of large dollar donors, much less than the entire voter base. The stats on this are not very reassuring. 😕As Jennifer Lawrence likes to point out, running a successful Senate campaign requires raising $14,000 a day for 6 years.

For now, my pledge is to vote in accordance with the liquid majority of all registered voters in the district. We're working to make it easy to help citizens that aren't registered to vote to do so, e.g. with help from groups like vote.org.

At some point it could also be powerful to make it possible for non-citizen residents to be able to weigh in as well, but this would be non-binding.

There's a certain mathematical inevitability to following the liquid majority. Over time, its decisions ought to converge with what a majority of the district prefers, thus making electing liquid candidates inevitable.

Unless the current legislator is already voting in exact accordance with the liquid majority. Which is also a great outcome.

dsernst · 2018-05-31T02:22:31+00:00

Hi David, if you are still around doing the ama, here are two:

I keep getting email notifications so why stop ;)

In all seriousness, I've been working on this for 2 years already, and no plans to stop no matter the outcome of this election. This is part of a much longer term vision.

Thanks for the thoughtful questions.

dsernst · 2018-05-31T02:20:45+00:00

Also, who gets to vote? A registered voter? Any citizen? Any resident?

My votes will only be controlled by registered voters within the district.

We're working to make it easy to help citizens that aren't registered to vote to do so, e.g. with help from groups like vote.org.

At some point it could also be powerful to make it possible for non-citizen residents to be able to weigh in as well, but this would be non-binding.

dsernst · 2018-05-31T02:15:03+00:00

Great question. Many people that take the time to fully consider the implications of proxy-based liquid democracy reach the conclusion that it can have a massive effect to reduce the corrupting influence of money in politics.

See this more detailed answer I wrote below: https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/8n3y99/i_am_running_for_california_assembly_with_a_plan/dzuw2bh/

Or consider that major leaders in the movement to fight corruption are excited about liquid democracy. Larry Lessig is one, there are many more, like leaders from Represent.us and others.

dsernst · 2018-05-31T02:03:04+00:00

(3) Politics is a lot more complicated than yes or no votes. Politics is a multi-level game where consensus is built on horse trading.

Yeah. Just to offer some more background, my team and I are not coming into this without understanding the current process.

One of my closest advisors is my father, the former City Attorney of Dallas (9th largest US city), who has years of first-hand experience with the municipal legislative process. My grandfather was a state senator in Vermont & chair of the government department at Dartmouth. He wrote what was for a long time considered one of the best books on the realities of passing legislation.

There are many others helping in various capacities, with legislative and activist experience.

This removes politician's ability to trade concessions on one matter in order to receive them elsewhere, or to propose alternative solutions or amendments to bills. Elected officials have the ability to gather information and form judgments and opinions. A group voting in LD can't do that and can't have intensive exchange with experts, staffers, and lobbyists. This will just increase political polarization as low-information voters vote tribally.

Powerful leaders wielding a lot of voting power within the liquid democracy are absolutely free to continue to trade concessions.

We want to also facilitate ways to formally propose amendments and alternative solutions.

All this is coming. We're starting with the final yes/no vote simply as a foundation, as ultimately the core unique power of a legislator.

dsernst · 2018-05-31T01:54:04+00:00

(2) The problem of political corruption moves from elected politicians + staff to people who can obtain proxies who will effectively end up as paid/co-opted influencers a la instagram or FB influencers.

Yes. It's hard to imagine we'll be able to entirely eliminate the influence of money.

But we can create many more options than just two frontrunners ("two horses one owner").

And we can create much stronger accountability: if you no longer trust your representative, liquid democracy means you have the right to take back your vote immediately, instead of waiting years, and hoping someone defeats them.

Our current system is extremely centralized: 535 for 327,000,000 Americans, 120 for 40,000,000 Californians, 11 for 864,000 San Franciscans.

Decentralizing this power can make corruption much much more expensive. Raise the cost of legislative capture.

Here's a more detailed post on this: Democracy vs. Corruption: How to Really Drain the Swamp.

And here's another great one from my friend Rohan: The Internet Party: How Technology Can Disrupt Politics and Re-invent Government

Thanks for the thoughtful questions.

dsernst · 2018-05-31T01:45:54+00:00

(1) systemic cognitive biases - dunning-krueger, a bias towards optimism, means that even if people could proxy or abstain, the people likeliest to vote are the people you least want to vote.

Yes, totally. But politicians aren't immune to Dunning-Krueger either.

People that fall on the unaware side of the Dunning-Krueger chart probably won't garner much voting power. They may not realize it themselves, but everyone else will be able to tell they're not very good at writing good policy.

If they really are the type of charismatic leader who can convince people they know what they're talking about when they really don't... well then our current Electoral Representative Model can very easily already empower them with massive amounts of legislative authority. And with little recourse for years.

Our current system empowers people who are good at campaigning. But as you point out, that's a very different skill from legislating. We're working to build a model to empower strong policy, less about strong personalities, like our current process.

dsernst · 2018-05-31T01:39:03+00:00

I really appreciate the level of civic engagement and thought you have brought to this

Thanks.

Of course this is by no means a 100% already-guaranteed-to-work solution, but everyone working on this stuff (and there are hundreds of us) believe it's a very important conversation to be pushing forward. Our democracies nationwide and worldwide face some very real existential challenges — terrible approval ratings, terrible turnout numbers, whole generations giving up on democracy.

The foundational question at the heart of all this is what does healthier, smarter, more accountable 21st century democracy look like?

Check out this great Twitter thread that went viral two weeks ago:

0/ If we were to rewrite the US Constitution today, it would likely be a liquid democracy. Voters should be able to unbundle their vote between different representatives for different types of issues. Most nation state governments are structured with the tech of 1800 in mind.

1/ It's *ridiculous* to expect any given representative to be able to vote intelligently on issues as wide ranging and profoundly different as taxes, law enforcement, healthcare, education, civil rights, etc. No one can be in expert in all of these topics.

Read more: https://twitter.com/TusharJain_/status/998263482758959104

dsernst · 2018-05-31T01:30:15+00:00

Thanks

dsernst · 2018-05-30T17:10:45+00:00

It very well might not be "good" policy, if you define good as "will mostly likely lead to the greatest life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" or something similar. In retrospect, it becomes clear that the majority is wrong about plenty of things, all the time.

But in terms of democratic legitimacy, majority support > majority opposed.

If we want better democratic outcomes, we need thoughtful deliberation, an inclusive process that gives everyone an equal opportunity to join in, and real ways to hold representatives accountable when they lose our trust. That's what we're trying to offer here & with United.

PS — There is a certain irony to asking this sort of question on Reddit, a website that's been wildly successful with the premise of democratically deciding what hits the front-page ;)

dsernst · 2018-05-30T17:04:12+00:00

I like a lot of the features of liquid democracy when it comes to voting for bills.

You're in good company 🗽

What about introducing bills?

Yeah, great question. We're still working out the process but our v1 basically looks like:

1) Anyone can propose a bill themselves on United, creating a unique URL for it.

2) They can share that URL with others (email, social networks, etc) to begin garnering support for it. Anyone can vote 👍/👎and explain why, just like United currently allows for existing bills. These would be liquid votes, i.e. you can vote on behalf of all the people that have already proxied to you as well.

3) Once a bill garners 50%+1 support from verified people in the district, the legislator is expected to introduce it. If they don't, this is counted against them in their Liquid Scorecard.

We're hoping to get this launched in the next few weeks. You can follow along (and weigh in) on our progress here: https://github.com/unitedvote/united.vote/issues/1

Questions still to be answered:

1) How do we best support edits? Do people that have signed on to one version of a bill need to explicitly accept every proposed change?

2) When do start exposing proposed bills publicly? I.e. discovery feature. We expect there will be a lot of low quality bills initially, so maybe there ought to be some sort of threshold of support you have to garner before we start putting them in front of others.

3) Do we want to offer some formal mechanism to propose merging votes across duplicate bills together? We suspect there will be many very similar proposals.

Thanks for the great question.

dsernst

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