yeah, there's a lot more to it than just "the blockchain says you have influence over it", sure it's a self-referential system, but so is just standard PoW so it's not really a good argument in my opinion.

The author is right about one thing, though: Conflicts of consensus will absolutely test blockchains of any type or flavor, and doubly so when Dear Leader is gone. Ethereum does have the most prominent leader of any chain I can really think of, and that changes how the community and the chain at large reacts to external stimuli.

PoW is not self-referential. If someone shows you three blockchains, say pow1, pow2, pow3 you can roughly calculate the amount of real-world resources that were required to create each chain based on the hash difficulty. That work/effort cannot be faked. If the difficulty is high enough, you can be certain that this chain was not just generated in someone's basement last night.

With PoS, if someone shows you pos1, pos2, pos3, you have no idea which to trust without external information/trust. They all could have been generated the night before in someone's basement.

If it was discovered tomorrow that there was a massive secret bitcoin mine in a cave in Siberia that produced a chain 2x as long as the main chain and we didn’t know about it, and this miner also gave themselves all the coins, the community would choose to ignore that and use the shorter one we have built consensus around.

Note that this weakness was discovered early on. Bitcoin actually uses a sum of difficulty, not longest chain. You can't just mine more 1 difficulty blocks. But your point stands, if the US Government is mining bitcoin it is plausible that they could invalidate the entire chain.

I don't see everyone going with that chain.

Whats a community? How can it ignore the longest technically valid chain if people come and go, centalized "reference" websites change hands? The Bitcoin is the longest chain, most work burned, it's the definition and trivially verifiable by anyone now or 1000 years from now (if it retains the majority of humanity hashrate)

This doesn't mean that bitcoin is self-referential. It means the consensus model encompasses more information than purely the length of the chain. But that should be obviously true; there have been countless hard forks like BCH and yet we still follow the chain we all call BTC.

The problem with hard forks in the PoS world is that you cannot judge the health of each chain by some external factor.

How do you hide that much power consumption?

You are government. Interesting to consider that governments could even collude.

Imagine that for a chain to be acceptable, it must chain back to a known genesis block, and that that genesis block distributed stakes to 100+ people of whom you trust at least half.

That's more equivalent to the PoS system Ethereum is using, and has much stronger guarantees.

Whats a "known" genesis block?

Getting agreement on a genesis block is a theoretically difficult problem... But practically it's as hard as agreeing if it was George Washington who was the first president of the USA or Bill Gates.

Well it's not and been solved for the first time by Satoshi Nakamoto. You pick the first block of the most worked chain. Any other thing is no better than WebMoney.

The author addresses this and I think is right about it. It doesn’t at all really matter about what happens in step 2 and what weird complex rules you put in place because fundamentally votes on the network are now coin instead of compute power. It’s the same with PoW chains. How you turn “I have some compute” into votes doesn’t change that the fact that compute is the thing that produces votes.

That's a good point but it seems like fiat currency has similar snake-eats-tail flaws (he who has the gold makes the rules), but somehow the global economy hasn't completely collapsed, yet.

Fiat currency is backed by something like “proof of military,” or “proof of governmental power.”

I think you're looking for "proof of gun" by either the military in a macro sense or the police in a more micro sense.

Proof of gun happens to be the ultimate answer in real life, though.

I’m bullish on blockchain and cryptocurrency in general, but eventually it’s going to have to be backed up with guns. In that respect every currency is a fiat currency.

The rationale is obvious. Ultimately, the ability to exercise physical force decides every dispute. Before you can even have such a thing as currency to exchange for goods and services, you need to have enough rule of law to prevent people with guns from just taking whatever goods and services they want without your consent. So how do you maintain rule of law? Government—which is defined as a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

Right now, legal tender laws rely on proof of gun. If you owe me a debt and I try to collect on that debt by showing up at your house with a gun to take your gold or bitcoins or whatever, that’s not going to work. More men with more guns will show up and throw me in a cage. So instead of using my gun, I ask the government to use their guns. I sue you, and if I win, the court decides you should pay me, and through a complicated process they end up helping me to your money that you owe me. But the government has a condition: all debts can be paid in USD. I can’t take your gold or bitcoins, unless I have more guns than the government, which kind of makes me the government in the long run.

Are you implying fiat can't coexist with Bitcoin? Why does it have to be one or the other?

The way I see it, Bitcoin's mission is to simply hold the fiat currencies of this world in check. Nothing less, nothing more.

If all of the sudden we stop debasing, Bitcoin's raison d'être is largely gone.

I don’t disagree with any of that.

My only point is that if enough men with guns want to shut down cryptocurrency, they can. If enough men with guns want to do anything, they can. The only thing that can stop them is even more men with even more guns.

Individual fiat currencies have collapsed in eg Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and Weimar Germany. However, their currencies were not the reserve currencies of global trade. Historically, the international reserve currency was gold, but now it’s just other fiat currencies. So we have to trust that the ECB and FED won’t repeat the mistakes of other fiat currencies.

The FED seems like a trustworthy bunch who know what they’re doing. But then again, so did the CDC two years ago. So, hmm.

I picked up the habit of capitalizing FED from my Econ 102 professor.

Fuck you for assuming I’m an “alt-right nutjob” because I’m disappointed in the CDC’s handling of the pandemic. The CDC had a reputation as a world-class institution before they made several well-publicized mistakes (e.g. https://www.npr.org/2021/05/21/999194177/early-cdc-coronavir... I personally had a much higher opinion of them two years ago than I do now. How am I an “alt-right nutjob” for remembering high profile mistakes like that?

1) I can't help that your professor was an idiot.

2) OK, maybe you aren't actually an alt-right nutjob... But:

a) They're in the habit of spreading conspiracy theories about the CDC, and

b) They also often write "FED" like that.

You can blame your professor, not me, for making you look like one. (And yourself: How many years have you had to notice that his spelling is wrong?)

So there’s a few attestations for the all-caps FED listed here, including some from such sources as the IMF: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/FED

I guess you’re going to say the IMF are also idiots, and it’s the IMF’s fault that I “look like an alt-right nutjob”? In any case, it’s a hard question to research, especially since queries like “Fed capitalization” are ambiguous.

In any case, I’m not really inclined to take seriously the opinions of internet trolls whose only contribution is to call me an “alt-right nutjob” for criticizing the CDC and capitalizing FED. Your bizarre paranoia is not my responsibility and I’m frankly still not convinced that it’s actually wrong to capitalize FED. In my experience, people who issue bizarre and unsubstantiated insults to complete strangers over the internet are usually neither intelligent nor well-informed, and so you’ll understand if I don’t take your advice, or you, seriously.

Sure, except that with fiat there is more accountability.

It's not like ethereum, zcash or even bitcoin blockchains are essence of simplicity in the first place. They are quite math hardcore anyway.