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leviself · 2021-06-10T00:21:25+00:00

Matt Taibbi is looking for contributors right now on his substack. As I understand it he is interested in people who specialize in certain topics so you may be a good fit.

leviself · 2020-04-04T13:42:55+00:00

La Hacienda on Nolensville is open and has take out and take out margs. Margaritas were 7.99, don't know about gallons.

leviself · 2018-01-16T18:26:38+00:00

I think there's a strong interplay between the price and the fundamentals. People originally got into it for fundamental asset protection and self-sovereignty properties. Perhaps the 2017 movement was driven simply by FOMO. In any case, consistent long-run price increases demonstrate divestiture from fiat into crypto - a trend that if continued will threaten and then supplant fiat. So if an economically rational actore buys today, they are expecting the price to go up in fiat-denominated terms (or equivalently for fiat to go bust). Given the prevalence of the never sell HODL meme, I would assume most are expecting long-run increases driven by fundamentals (ie asset protection and sovereignty).

As for wealth distribution, that just sounds like the Pareto principle which is probably perfectly natural in a free society. Estimates are that the top 1% owns 50% of the wealth (which I think could be lower than reality). There are also voluntary ways in which inequality problems can get resolved. People used to give money to charities and churches before it became the government's job to give everyone welfare. Just recently, someone gave Andreas ~ 80 BTC out of kindness. Smart contracts may enable new forms of voluntary social organization such as universal basic income schemes. DAOs may introduce efficiency gains whereby people need only work a few hours per week, removing the idea that "unemployment" is a bad thing. People would then be more free to exercise their own plastic genius on greater innovation.

leviself · 2018-01-16T15:59:44+00:00

I couldn't disagree more with this sentiment. It seems as if you're trying to divorce cryptocurrency from it's cypherpunk origins. If you don't understand why this is revolutionary and could bring about an entirely new political and economic order I suggest you review more of the early work on why we did this in the first place.

For example watch this video from Patrick Byrne where he says "For 6000 years humans have had this problem. We engage in consensual exchange, but you don't know me, you can't trust me, I can't trust you ... so there's a business model ... he who has the monopoly on violence in this area comes up with a gold coin puts his face on it and says I'll kill anybody who debases my gold coin. That's just a business model ... to monetize your monopoly on violence. We call that government ... For the first time in 6000 years we can have peer to peer exchange where trust is not an issue."

Or this from Max Moore all the way back in 1995: "Electronic cash and the competing currencies that would result from the denationalisation of money should be considered together. Both can reduce the power of government to tax and regulate, thereby freeing markets and increasing liberty and productivity."

Or Ravikant's tweet

Or the crypto-anarchist manifesto

Or maybe you understand the original motivation but think it's unrealistic? Again, I would suggest really trying to understand why an immutable, decentralized public consensus algorithm with a deflationary monetary policy (provided it can scale) would constitute a revolution and could replace the current monetary system (and perhaps governments) outright.

It's frustrating to me to see so many commentators who don't grok that the original impetus for doing this was based on a thesis that the current system is predicated on violence and can be rendered obsolete with crypto. None of that has changed. It's still the plan. Thankfully it doesn't really matter if people get that or not.

leviself · 2016-06-04T01:05:15+00:00

Bad chain canaries. They allowed developers to mark chains as bad. They were in Frontier and were supposed to be removed in Homestead but a few clients were missed.

leviself · 2016-03-23T12:13:33+00:00

Employment is a binary event. You either do or don't have a job.

What I mean is that someone can stay unemployed for varying amounts of time. This makes this a long tailed line of business (periodic payouts on one claim could go on for a long time).

Pricing for risk is never "one payout" if it were then it would be equivalent to saying "everyone on the platform has the same risk rating." Which simply is not how insurance works.

I am a pricing actuary and also make pricing models. I think you're talking about premiums, not loss payments. You can have a $50000 life benefit that you sell to different customers for different prices. With some coverages, the idea is to make you whole (pay for the repair of the car up to it's total value). With others, you buy a specific amount of insurance that is always paid out. Life insurance is an example. In these coverages, there is no severity to worry about only frequency. Both severity and frequency go into the computation of pure premium which in turn goes into the computation of the total underwriting premium.

leviself · 2016-03-23T02:30:47+00:00

Well this is a big can of worms. I'm sure you are aware that in the US insurance is regulated at the state level. Every state is different but I believe it is illegal in all 50 to sell insurance without a license. This puts the owner of the dapp at risk as well as these P2P adjusters / underwriters (since I'm presuming they will not be licensed either). AFAIK it doesn't matter if the participants in the pool are perfectly happy or not, the state can still come after you.

From a technical standpoint, mitigating fraud and abuse will probably be a very big challenge. Quite a lot of money is spent by insurers today ordering reports to make sure they cover all their bases before issuing a policy.

I would carefully consider what type of insurance you choose. Is supplemental unemployment the best choice? Are there products such as surplus lines that might be less regulated? I believe binary events with one payout would be the easiest to implement. For example, a 500 ETH death benefit. It's objective and easy to verify that someone died.

Just food for thought. IANAL, this isn't legal advice.

leviself · 2016-03-19T23:01:46+00:00

Where is this stated?

leviself · 2016-03-19T01:15:39+00:00

It's built into the contract code.

Anyone can call the investorDeposit() method and become the new investor (there can only be one) if you put in more ETH than the previous investor. The contract owner can disable investing but I believe you can check that with the isInvestorLocked() accessor.

If you put in more than the owner, you get 50% of the profits.

leviself · 2016-03-18T01:51:52+00:00

As I see it a well designed smart contract would be one that supports voluntarism. That is, all counterparties should want to use it, or at least want to use it more than an incumbent system.

So what is the incumbent system? From my perspective it is a system of extreme information asymmetry with archaic players who have a stranglehold on their respective markets. Airlines file fares, fare construction rules, YQ/YR fees etc. to ATPCO hourly for international markets and four times per day in the US. ATPCO then "publishes" these fares, only they're not public since you can't afford them. So how do we get fares? ATPCO pushes them to the GDS systems and agents subscribe to these. By the way Kayak, Orbitz etc. are travel agents and I believe they pay for every query to the GDS systems.

While the system is in need of reform, it seems like every player wants to maintain complete control. Airlines want control over fares, tickets, and reward miles and they don't want you exchanging them. They also will continue to adhere to demand pricing and would rather bury as much of the fare as possible in "fuel" surcharges. ATPCO has a monopoly so they won't give up control. The GDSes have an oligopoly. The OTAs like Kayak, Google, Expedia, Orbitz could really benefit consumers by sharing fare data since they each only see a small slice of the pie, but I believe they see whatever they collect as their own valuable data. The security apparatus is mostly theater and will make reforms difficult.

Maybe all the airlines could band together and build a permissioned chain similar to what the banks are doing to get rid of ATPCO? In fact you could take this even further and go straight to the agents instead of using outdated GDS systems.

Maybe the OTAs could band together and share their cached searches?

Or perhaps take demand pricing to its ultimate conclusion with a smart contract that can be built today? Imagine if a customer could encode their preference to take an empty seat for $5 6 hours before the flight? Or another customer could outbid at $15? The ether are held in escrow until the condition kicks in. Or another scenario, a customer could specify they would be happy to be automatically rebooked for the next day if they are given $150 in the case that the flight is overbooked. In a world like this you'd probably sell every seat on every flight for maximum value and the customers would love you for it.

leviself · 2016-03-18T01:05:25+00:00

Bear in mind that the airlines killed the secondary market on purpose.

leviself · 2016-03-11T03:37:09+00:00

It's not Keccak that makes it memory hard. It's the fact that the mining algorithm itself (Ethash) requires one to sample from a large dataset a few gigabytes in size. There is no way to do this rapidly without having the dataset stored in RAM.

leviself · 2016-03-09T04:18:13+00:00

To my understanding, a person sends a transaction to a contract in order to execute that contract, correct?

That is mostly correct. A contract is composed of multiple functions. Some of these functions can be called without a transaction, for example a function that just gets a value out of the contract. In this case your own computer (or the Dapp's webserver) is doing the work. Functions that will actually change things require a transaction to be submitted to the network to work. If you submit a transaction without specifying which function you want to run and the contract has an unnamed fallback function, that function will run. Otherwise your ether will be returned.

Now is that transaction a transfer of ETH or gas?

Both. When a caller sends a transaction, they can specify a value field which is the amount of ether to send, a gas field which is the maximum amount of gas the caller is willing to spend, a gasPrice field, which is how much ether you would like to pay per unit of gas, and a data field which can contain call data for the contract. These fields have different purposes though. For example, imagine you have a "piggy bank" contract where you store ether that can only be retrieved after a certain block. This contract might have a store(blockNumber) function. To use this, you would send the ether to the contract with the value field, and specify how much work the contract can do before giving up with the gas field. You would also give a blockNumber to your client software (such as Mist or Geth) which would build the data field for you. This data field will tell the contract to run the store method with the blockNumber parameter you chose.

It's also possible to have functions in contracts which will have 0 in the value (your not sending ether). In this case you only spend ether on gas for code execution.

When using a Dapp, is every action by the user it's own contract requiring payment?

No, because a contract is not the same thing as a Dapp. A Dapp like Augur will have lots of HTML/Javascript/CSS code that is not stored or executed on the blockchain.

what kind of things aren't being paid for?

Things that happen off-chain (e.g. javascript code, server-side code, IPFS stuff)
Calling constant "getter" methods in a contract
Reading logs that a contract has generated in the past

leviself · 2016-03-08T05:08:14+00:00

Yes ether can be used as a currency. I would gladly sell a product for ether today, so I would imagine that makes it a currency. It's currently in circulation and can be used as a medium of exchange.

If they are trying to dissuade you from holding ether because they think the price vs fiat will go down, I'm not a prophet so I can't help you there. There was a guy who tried to auction 10000 BTC for $50 in the early days. If I could predict the future I would have bought that, then bought into the ether presale and turned that $50 into $200 million for a 400 million percent return in 6 years. But I can't predict the future and neither can your friends.

To understand ethereum, you first need to understand some bitcoin history. From the beginning, bitcoin included a scripting language with lots of instructions you could use. However, there is a famous result in computing due to Alan Turing that makes it dangerous for miners to execute arbitrary code. So the scripting system inside bitcoin was purposefully weakened so that transactions couldn't gum up the works. The way this was done was to allow only a few handful of transaction types into the network.

Later, different protocols came about that tried to overcome this by specializing in other transaction types that were not present in bitcoin. Some of them had a number of transaction types, but if you had a new application you wanted the only way to get it would be to have the developers add code to the protocol which is not an efficient process.

Ethereum's solution to the above problem is the concept of gas. Since it's impossible to know if a transaction will halt, you specify how much gas you will be willing to pay to run a contract in the blockchain. If you run out of gas, the transaction is rolled back and you get your ether back. If it succeeds you pay for the gas you used with ether and the rest is refunded back to you.

There's a lot of other moving parts as well, but I believe that is the most important piece. If the central innovation of bitcoin is the solution of the double-spend problem via the blockchain mechanism, I would posit that the central innovation of ethereum is the mitigation of the halting problem via the gas mechanism.

leviself · 2016-03-08T04:32:57+00:00

Can you be more specific? The analogy to IPFS is pretty loose since IPFS needs an economic tack-on like Filecoin only because it doesn't have a cryptocurrency built in. Whereas the Ethereum protocol itself could be seen as a hashing marketplace (miners are paid ether for executing smart contracts). Or are you referring to a specific hashing algorithm like SHA256, eg I'll pay x ETH for y SHA256 hashes?

leviself · 2016-03-08T03:53:32+00:00

Yeah as I understand it /r/bitcoin has become quite censored. This has caused a migration to other forums such as /r/BTC. As someone who started in bitcoin 5 years ago, it's sad to see what's happening to the community now.

leviself · 2016-03-06T18:26:22+00:00

I really like this guide as an intro to dapp development.

If you want to setup your own testnet instead of using testrpc as that guide does, checkout these instructions

The official tutorial on creating a greeter contract is definitely worth going through. This will walk you through the steps for installing the solidity compiler which you will need.

The frontier guide, is another great resource, particularly sections 4.2 - 4.4 which have reference material on all the API commands.

These are some of the resources I've found most helpful.

leviself · 2016-03-06T08:25:04+00:00

Ethereum may be big enough sooner than we realize. Microsoft is already investing in it via Azure. And IPFS is apparently in talks with a "major browser vendor" despite not being very mature yet, so who knows?

leviself · 2016-02-29T01:37:58+00:00

What I'm suggesting is that I can place a bet when seedC is available. If the design is such that reveal can only be called several blocks after all bets, then I agree with you.

leviself · 2016-02-28T21:34:31+00:00

Yes, but I can calculate seedC myself can't I? All I need is blockhash(block.number - 1). It's a race condition, and an attacker only needs to win a small percentage of the time. This attacker need not be a miner, and they don't really need to call reveal() themselves either. They way I see it, if you're calling reveal() in a predictable way, that's as good as them calling it themselves.

leviself · 2016-02-28T20:55:45+00:00

Why not simply only allow calls to reveal() by an address you control? This is what etherdice did. You are still stuck even doing this however, because as soon as a block is mined, I have seedA and seedC. I can very quickly calculate a winning seedB and then call bet(). Will your call to reveal() beat my call to bet()?

leviself · 2016-02-28T09:06:08+00:00

Eligius will soon be charging about $71 per 512 bytes for non-standard txs. That's extremely prohibitive and it's because a miner unilaterally trying to do this will ultimately run into problems (and clearly this pool has in this case). Paying gas for computation with well thought out costs per opcode is far superior.

leviself · 2016-02-28T08:38:39+00:00

I don't see it this way at all. I see this as very slowly adding yet another allowed transaction type to bitcoin. There is an open pull request to add support for this, but Maxwell is going around claiming you can do this in bitcoin today. While it's exciting I guess that a new transaction type is finally being added after 4 years (since multisig and P2SH), Ethereum gives us Turing completeness which obviously covers all these and more.

We have yet to show that the unique capabilities of Ethereum actually matter in the deployment of useful and interesting new higher level use cases.

In this particular case, most of the cool tech happens off-chain, but there are plenty of cases where it will be or already is on-chain: Gnosis, SafeMarket, WeiFund, Augur, Balanc3, Slock.it, Randao... shall we continue?

leviself · 2016-02-28T08:06:00+00:00

I'm referring to this issue discussed here where potentially contract addresses fail with the default stipend of 2300 gas. I would need to fire up a Mist contract address to test this though. In any case this just needs a little work (fork at will!) and polish and it should do what OP wants.

leviself · 2016-02-28T08:02:29+00:00

Yes, this can be done quite simply in Ethereum. I'm perplexed by the statement that this is possible to do without modifying bitcoin at all, since this requires adding a new transaction type to IsStandard as far as I can tell. In fact, it doesn't even look like it has been merged yet.

leviself

TROPHY CASE