Thanks for the questions. I'll make sure to expand the FAQ when I get a chance.
1. The USD that you can use to unlock USDf (forked dollars/digital gold) is limited to deposits at commercial banks and credit unions. The public does not have access to electronic base money, so it's not included.
2. The quantity of USDf you can unlock is based on your historic bank balances, as verified during a defined window in the past. New credit money created after that point in time doesn't affect those past balances. To the extent that the owners of new USD wish to acquire weight for them, they'd need to purchase USDf, increasing its value. That is sort of the whole point: if governments keep inflating their money, the "forked" version with guaranteed scarcity will gradually increase in value.
3. USDf will trade at a different value than USD. At first, a much lower value. The idea is for them to be employed in a hybrid unit of account, USDw, where 1 USDw = 1 USD + 1 USDf.
A crypto-weighted dollar (i.e., USDw) will trade at a premium over a USD, since it is a USD + cryptographic weight. Think of it like a stablecoin that also comes with Bitcoin-like inflation protection. However, it's also possible to use USDf as an independent asset, and that will be convenient in use cases where transferring USD on existing payment rails isn't practical.
I would argue that smart savers at the moment are saving in cash in a safe. They would not get any USDf, right? So USDf is for the less informed. Are you expecting them to actively go through an unlocking process? Or will their banks do it based on public demand somehow? How is demand going to happen without people using it? Why would people use it if they don't have an advantage?
That is precisely the problem we're trying to solve: allowing the public to take advantage of blockchain-based digital scarcity without anyone being forced to invest in speculative assets.
I'm actually trying to convince people that, if we accept the premise that blockchain technology can create digital gold (as the market has, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars) then we should harness that digital gold to protect the value of the money that everyone already owns, rather than setting the world on fire by launching new currencies that function like pyramid schemes.
While noble, your digital gold is worse than usd not being fully backed by gold though. There is no intrinsic value in a database of hashes in the event that a currentcy fails. This solution is as much a fiat solution, if not more so than usd. The gold standard was as much if not more about securing the value of money as it was about controlling inflation as a result of over printing.
There's two nuances I would respectfully suggest that you're overlooking.
First, KRNC is designed to be employed as a supplement to USD. Most transactions would be executed with both USD and a corresponding blockchain asset. Technically, this is a digital analogue of the "symetallic standard", in which base money is comprised of both gold and silver in a specified ratio. The point is risk diversification: if fiat money implodes, or if crypto fails, you aren't wiped out.
Second, the concept of "intrinsic value" is misleading/confused when it comes to money. Things that trade at their consumption/production value are not monetized. Treating something as money involves attaching symbolic value to it: accepting it as proof of goods or services rendered in the past, and as a token that can be used to acquire goods or services in the future. Even gold would lose most of its value if it were suddenly priced based only on demand for use in industrial applications.
Money has always been valuable because everyone else treats it as money, whatever it is. It's a Schelling point that enables abstracted barter. Nothing less, nothing more.
I've been waiting for Scott Aaronson to put all of this into perspective since the first leaks about Google's quantum supremacy started appearing in popular media.
He has exceeded my expectations with this post, which cuts through all the hype to communicate exactly what the results of this experiment mean for the field. It's worth reading and sharing.
Both enormous and enormity come from the same etymological roots, enormis "irregular, huge", carrying a connotation of abnormal or irregular, in a negative or bad sense. Enormity specifically came to mean "extreme wickedness" in English, though that meaning is increasingly obscured by usage to mean simply "very big".
Most discerning usage would be that both me "very large scale", but that enormity preserves the meaning of bad at a very large scale.
That's become something of a losing battle as the synonymous usage has become an enormity.
I have no dog in the fight, and wish "enormity" had never developed a normative undertone, but I strongly disagree that said usage is anything close to archaic.
If you Google "enormity," the dictionary definitions it displays before the results are:
1.the great or extreme scale, seriousness, or extent of something perceived as bad or morally wrong.
"a thorough search disclosed the full enormity of the crime"
2.
a grave crime or sin.
"the enormities of the regime"
Merriam-Webster claims this is not the exclusive usage, and that enormity can mean "immensity" without normative implications when the size is unexpected. But the very example it cites, from Steinbeck, involves the "enormity" of a situation in which a fire was started.
That said, I agree that "enormousness" is an awkward word, which I do not use. I'm left to ponder the enormity of my own pedantry.
As a native English speaker, I can't say I've found this to be the case. "Enormity" does tend to be used for dramatic effect, most often on moral issues, but I don't think that makes Scott wrong to use it here.
I don't know if I've seen "enormousness" before this thread.
Since enormous is from Latin, stems tend to be Latin. `ness` generally only is morphologically productive with Germanic roots, kindness, happiness, etc.
When I visited Iceland, I remember a sign in English that said a cliff was insafe [sic]. `in` being a Latin morpheme, and safe being Germanic.
Lead author here. This paper does a few things that HN may consider interesting.
1. It formalizes new security vulnerabilities in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Notably, it shows that all of these protocols repeat a simple statistical error that was introduced to the literature in the early 2000s.
2. It demonstrates how "honest majority" axioms can be replaced with a more rigorous formal method, which incorporates techniques from game theory and microeconomics to prove security from first principles.
3. It applies biological models to trust-minimized networking. By replacing handicap-authenticated signaling with cue-authenticated signaling, it obtains an exponential improvement in security and performance.
4. It proposes a cryptographic twist on the gold standard, which can deliver all the advantages of cryptocurrencies (inflation protection, smart contracts) without forcing society to abandon the existing monetary system.
In a sense, it's an alternate form of Proof-of-Stake. As Section 8.4 explains, the conventional wisdom is that Proof-of-Stake's flaw is that it's circular. We've proved that actually it's not circular enough, i.e., the stakes it assigns are different than the stakes in society's existing monetary game.
Proof-of-Balance allows "stakes" (what we call "weight") to be issued in proportion to monetary balances. Once those stakes are in users' hands, the protocol can run using the algorithms designed for PoS, including all of their reward and governance mechanisms.
It turns out that to fully unleash the power of those algorithms, you need a verifiably secure stake-distribution mechanism. That's what we've invented. (It's harder than it sounds, of course...)
Lead author here. The mods have graciously given me permission to announce some computer science work as a Show HN. It concerns permissionless Byzantine consensus – the notoriously difficult problem of how to securely replicate a state machine in the absence of a reliable identity system, which is the underpinning of Bitcoin and other decentralized ledgers.
By copying the signaling techniques used by animals, my co-author and I have achieved a 40,000x improvement in security and performance over the prior state of the art. This vindicates a prediction made 10 years ago by a Chinese researcher, one of the world's rare dual-PhDs in biology and computer science, who believed that reverse-engineering animal-communication networks could produce a consensus-protocol breakthrough similar to the invention of public-key cryptography.
The parallel between asymmetric encryption and our discovery goes beyond the scale of the advancement. It actually concerns the mechanism that our protocol uses to protect itself from pseudo-spoofing or "Sybil" attacks, in which an entity uses sockpuppets to hijack consensus by casting extra votes. Existing technologies, like Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake, are symmetric in the sense that they require correct agents to "outbid" the adversary by verifiably expending more money or computing power. If the adversary's budget for an attack is greater than the security budget of honest protocol participants, then the entire system collapses.
Our paper introduces the first asymmetric system, Proof-of-Balance. It guarantees that honest protocol participants will remain in control of the consensus protocol, even if their security budget is many times smaller than the adversary's budget for an attack. This verifiable asymmetry yields not only an exponential improvement in security, but also a corollary increase in performance: because the adversary's maximum fraction of total voting power is tightly constrained, transactions can be processed on the open internet using speeds that were previously possible only on permissioned networks.
Asymmetry is nothing new in access control – e.g., a lock increases the security of a house by more than its purchase price, so homeowners aren't forced to "outbid" burglars to keep their families safe. However, it has been ignored in resource-weighted consensus, because the field has been guided by the "handicap principle" – which claims that the reliability of a signal depends on its verifiable cost to the signaler. Bitcoin enthusiasts often expressly invoke this principle to justify the waste inherent in Proof-of-Work, claiming that it is a universal law of nature, which applies with equal force to biology and computer science.
Not so. That is close to what biologists believed in the 1990s, when formal game-theoretic modeling first substantiated the concept of handicap-authenticated signaling. However, subsequent work revealed that it is actually the verifiable cost of faking a signal that determines whether information can be transmitted reliably. If the cost for a dishonest entity to spoof a signal is sufficiently high, then honest agents can transmit reliable signals at zero cost. This is known as cue-authenticated signaling, and it is the key to our protocol, KRNC ("Key Retroactivity Network Consensus").
An intuitive example of the difference between handicap-authenticated signaling and cue-authenticated signaling is how male peacocks and tigers signal their fitness to potential mates. Male peacocks waste resources growing oversized tails, a handicap that proves their fitness based on the amount of self-inflicted punishment they can endure. Male tigers compete with one another to grow as large as possible to gain an edge in lethality, and their size happens to have the added bonus of providing a cue of their fitness.
We adapt the "cue principle" to obtain a novel solution to Goodhart's Law, the adage that a measure ceases to be accurate once it becomes a target. Our rejoinder: if whatever you measure will become a target, measure the thing that is already a target. (The math confirms this.)
For human agents, the universal economic target is money, so that is what Proof-of-Balance uses to assign weights in a consensus protocol. Specifically, it uses mean bank-account balances during a specified window of time in the past – analogous to a "hard fork" of the data in the commercial banking system onto a new cryptographic protocol. Everyone with online banking can unlock their pro rata share of voting power for free. No buying stake, no wasting computing power.
The other major upside to this approach is that it eliminates the need to introduce a new currency, like Bitcoin. Instead, cryptographic weight functions in a similar way to a "symmetallic standard," in which the base money is a meta-resource derived from gold and silver in a specified ratio. In KRNC, base money is a combination of an original fiat unit of account like a U.S. Dollar, plus the corresponding quantity of cryptographic "weight" needed to "back" that dollar.
The difference from the gold standard is that the "backing" isn't entrusted to a Central Bank, which can renege on its word. It's held by the actual users of the money, who transfer both the original dollar and its backing to one another in each transaction. This provides inflation-protection like Bitcoin, but it's added to the world's existing money. No pyramid-scheme like distribution, no risk of technological disruption destroying innocent people's savings.
Formalizing the discoveries in this paper has been, by far, the hardest thing I've ever done. I'm nervous but excited to share the results with the world. I believe they can be used, not just to build faster distributed ledgers, but to protect humanity from the risk of a global monetary crisis. If anyone would like to get in touch, I'll be around to answer questions in the comments, and my email is footnoted on the first page of the paper.
p.s. I'm patenting the technology as part of getting the protocol off the ground, but it's not my goal to be the next Mark Zuckerburg or Larry Ellison. I got involved in this because I freed an innocent man from prison and wanted to see how much more good I could do in the world. If KRNC succeeds on the scale I think it could, I want to use the money for effective altruism and existential-risk reduction. It's the right thing to do.
> An intuitive example of the difference between handicap-authenticated signaling and cue-authenticated signaling is how male peacocks and tigers signal their fitness to potential mates. Male peacocks waste resources growing oversized tails, a handicap that proves their fitness based on the amount of self-inflicted punishment they can endure. Male tigers compete with one another to grow as large as possible to gain an edge in lethality, and their size happens to have the added bonus of providing a cue of their fitness.
Sounds like r/K selection theory in evolutionary biology.
Sherdog has suffered a lot from losing traffic to Reddit. The main forum still has enough users that it superficially seems similar to how it was 10+ years ago, but the subforums are dying.
F12, the grappling forum, used to be one of my favorite places on the internet. It barely has new content anymore. There has, for reasons I don't fully understand, been a mass exodus to r/BJJ.
I can't overstate the loss of community that occurred as a result. On reddit, the fact that usernames aren't prominent and there are no avatars makes it impossible to build "characters" in your mind. People are friendly, but they are perpetual strangers.
Previously, I thought the upvoting and downvoting structure of Reddit was great. But, when applied to a hobby I love, the results were soulless and depressing. Opinions seem to be tailored to the crowd in a way they never were on the F12 forum.
A lot of that may be that Reddit attracts younger people who are newer to the sport. Whatever the reason, it's sad to see a great forum whither away.
Don't take online communities for granted. They seem immortal until they die.
Groupthink in popular tech forums is horrible, if someone experiences an issue, the rest of the people reply "I Dont have that issue", and minimize the person's interaction. Too much absolutism in tech being pushed, you can do the same thing multiple ways, depending on the scenario, people need to think in degrees not binary reactions.
I've been on forums for a few decades, and the interaction has gone to downright militant in responses as fact. I've seen so many truths about tech that simply isnt remotely true, but a big tech company says it, so their fanboi's repeat is as fact.
Common knowledge for an enthusiast vs production is another issue. The proper way of doing something might not be the way an end power user uses it, and their usage scenario can lead to all kinds of issues. So downvoting is way too common to exclude/discredit these people.
> I can't overstate the loss of community that occurred as a result. On reddit, the fact that usernames aren't prominent and there are no avatars makes it impossible to build "characters" in your mind. People are friendly, but they are perpetual strangers.
It's funny, I've had the exact same thought more than once.
If you asked me "Should comments be judged by their content and not the person making them", I would say absolutely. But then you get Reddit. I do miss the characters from various online forums in the 90s-00s.
It's a little ironic posting this reply on HN though :)
I've got some people tagged by companies, or their interests, or names if I happen to learn them randomly (like spotting John Nagle!) It definitely makes the experience more interesting.
Thanks for the update; I no longer roll and don't follow the sport very much, but it makes me sad to hear that all-devouring reddit is eating Sherdog.
I suspect the future of forums is going to be stuff which is kicked off of platforms. For example: right wing people kicked out of reddit, or nude enthusiast types formerly of Tumblr or whatever. There's probably a r/bodybuilding reddit, but I bet it's tame and lame compared to the forum.
There've been a few guys discussing judo and jiu jitsu on here ... I dunno maybe you were one of them. My own BJJ dojo contained very few people over 30 who weren't Ph.D. in math/science types. Someone's probably giggling at this but they were all 220+lbs and lean; overachievers, goldman trader types - they all went to the best local dojo. We did have one Brazilian waiter guy (one of the best in the dojo), but I really felt like an underachiever in general when I'd enter their doors.
Come to think of it, many of the high ranking dudes in my Karate dojo also had Ph.D. type education (LBNL Arnis club didn't count). Martial arts seems to loan itself to personalities who can grind out difficult things.
where do you go on sherdog to find good content? My experience with sherdog has always been constant shitposting and inflammatory posts. Of course, my only window into sherdog is browsing the highlighted forum threads on the front page for the past decade, which is probably exacerbating the problem.
As an American who spent a year as a visiting researcher inside Russia's Foreign Ministry, I can confirm that these differences in decorum are very real.
They are common knowledge in Russian society, and Russian diplomats are trained to take them into account when emulating Western social graces.
Broadly speaking, in my experience Russians conceive of smiling as something precious, to be shared with friends or family, not wasted on strangers crossing your path. However, if you have occasion to interact with someone (e.g., asking for directions), they may smile, particularly if something about the conversation generates a feeling of closeness. I got a lot of smiles and handshakes in Moscow from strangers when they found out I was studying at MGIMO, since they (incorrectly) assumed it meant I'd snubbed Harvard or Yale.
1. The USD that you can use to unlock USDf (forked dollars/digital gold) is limited to deposits at commercial banks and credit unions. The public does not have access to electronic base money, so it's not included.
2. The quantity of USDf you can unlock is based on your historic bank balances, as verified during a defined window in the past. New credit money created after that point in time doesn't affect those past balances. To the extent that the owners of new USD wish to acquire weight for them, they'd need to purchase USDf, increasing its value. That is sort of the whole point: if governments keep inflating their money, the "forked" version with guaranteed scarcity will gradually increase in value.
3. USDf will trade at a different value than USD. At first, a much lower value. The idea is for them to be employed in a hybrid unit of account, USDw, where 1 USDw = 1 USD + 1 USDf.
A crypto-weighted dollar (i.e., USDw) will trade at a premium over a USD, since it is a USD + cryptographic weight. Think of it like a stablecoin that also comes with Bitcoin-like inflation protection. However, it's also possible to use USDf as an independent asset, and that will be convenient in use cases where transferring USD on existing payment rails isn't practical.