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I liked the idea of the moonshot bots https://decrypt.co/79606/moonshot-bots-nfts-gitcoin-ethereum... where the funds raised are used for public goods.


Ketamine should be a fairly cheap treatment, but there are lots of ways that many involved will try to extract money out of 'doing good'. Check out this take [1] by Slate star codex.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/11/ketamine-now-by-prescr...


Scott Alexander (the SSC guy) has recently said some cautiously positive things about Zembrin for depression and social anxiety. It is OTC, and apparently quite safe.


Do you have a link to this? I haven't been able to find it


Most recently at https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/nootropics-survey-2020...

Note that he's switched to a different URL for his blog; that may be why you couldn't find it -- although I'm pretty sure he mentioned it on the old site several times as well.


Important to note there has been pushback on Matthew Walker's writing. Feel free to read more from Alexey Guzey [1] or Andrew Gelman [2].

[1]https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ [2]https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/03/24/why-we-sle...


P.S. are you familiar with Walker's response as well? https://sleepdiplomat.wordpress.com/2019/12/19/why-we-sleep-... I'll familiarize myself later, and thank you again


Hey, thanks, I'll check it out! Haven't gotten around to reading critique of Walker, but I should. Thank you


i'd prefer you ban cars


or you can fork and remove the bad actors, burning all their coins. good luck with their next attack. in contrast, you can't burn an attackers fleet of miners


What do you think a PoW change does when the PoW is being done by ASICs?

Slashing stake is significantly more arbitrary. You basically need to reset the coin's ledger in order for it to make any sense.


>What do you think a PoW change does when the PoW is being done by ASICs

It's only possible once, and this move is so obviously predictable any determined attacker is going to have gpus ready.


Repeating "ultrasound money" memes. That specific meme has to do with state level attackers blowing up mining farms. It has nothing to do with changing issuance. And the entire premise is that an external force comes in and tries to co-opt it.

That isn't relevant to the conversation of stakers having misaligned incentives to change the rules. The most a state level actor can do is censor transactions if they were to take over a chain.

With PoS you'd need to slash the validators stake on a fork; which isn't going to happen because the stakers run the validators everyone is using. You already saw this with the steemit takeover.

In PoW coins, the miners and validating economic nodes are two separate groups. Watch what happens when exchanges slip over to Eth2 nodes and call it Eth.

During the BCHA/BCH split the exchanges were the ones that decided the ticker. Most users have ZERO CLUE about what happened. They went on their with their lives calling the fork the exchanges chose BCH. Once exchanges are validators there is no bulwark against changes.


>With PoS you'd need to slash the validators stake on a fork; which isn't going to happen because the stakers run the validators everyone is using.

Sorry but I don't see your point here. A fork inherently requires action, it's enough to force a node to follow a different block from some height. At that point the attacker would get penalized for being offline. Outright deletion would require code modification. It's even possible to automate a minority fork in the case of censorship, although this capability doesn't exist yet.

>You already saw this with the steemit takeover.

Steem isn't even PoS, it's dPoS. Even in this case users successfully created a fork called Hive and removed Justin Sun's coins.


> The most a state level actor can do is censor transactions if they were to take over a chain.

Which is the exact thing state level actors want to do !

What is the use of crypto if the state can ban me or my country from it ? Isn’t that exactly what decentralisation was supposed to prevent ?


those currencies already exist. people can choose to use them, while understanding the trade-offs.


I found the following article to be helpful in understanding some of these processes

https://haseebq.com/ethereum-is-now-unforkable-thanks-to-def...


This article makes a good point about the fragility of DeFi, but it fails to demonstrate that the broader Ethereum community cares enough about DeFi to let it influence their decisions. It makes a general, hand-wavey gesture to other parts of ETH ("All websites, interfaces, block explorers, and wallets ultimately point to the majority chain. Game operators like CryptoKitties lock their D-ETH contracts so as not to confuse their users."), but it fails to justify this point—it already says "a civil war is brewing" and that individual developers (presumably including CryptoKitties) would have reason to support one or the other.

So while this article is a (good?) argument for why all DeFi operators must follow USDC, it fails to make the case for why anyone else should care about the fate of centralized stablecoins. Maybe these reasons are obvious! But I don't know them.


I recently learned of zkDai[1]. Do you have any thoughts on this or the Aztec protocol?

[1] https://medium.com/aztec-protocol/introducing-zkdai-into-the...


It is just too expensive for the Ethereum network and not a large enough mixing set (haven't looked recently though) and nobody accepts it therefore requiring you to exit it if you want anything, but exiting will reveal who you are because there is nobody else it could be.

Privacy on the Ethereum network remains just Ether in Tornado Cash.

edit: oh cool Aztec actually transitioned to the Optimistic Rollup. That is different than their prior smart contract and requires new analysis. I recall their article last year or before about doing a "zk zk rollup" and I didn't keep following.


It's particularly interesting given that it followed up on earlier stories related to the waste clearance in the brain. You can read up more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glymphatic_system


That's exactly what it was. Atul Gawande wrote a column in the New Yorker [0] and was presumably offered a deal to expand it into a book.

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the-checklist


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