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And then another time my statistical mechanics prof informed me that "physics is just drawing cartoons of reality with math." That came as a huge existential relief by the way.
One of the most formative and sublimely influential 'aha' remarks I've ever encountered was a line in a Willam Goldman book about screenwriting which simply read, in the manner of a final summation to a chapter: "POETRY IS COMPRESSION." Caps in the original. I had the same sense of instant resolution, like wearing glasses for the first time, that you seem to have had with your prof's insight.
This could also be phrased '[...] are increasingly reduced to numbers', in order to be rationalized by algorithms. How much wealth is counted multiple times by multiple models all recognizing the same qualities under different enumeration schemes?
I expect to see more and more references to Goodhart's Law as this increasing bias in favor of numerically digestible value amplifies the (often unacknowledged) premise that 'that which cannot be counted, doesn't count'
Good luck to this guy, but it seems every solution to a blockchain scaling problem is ultimately the creation of a blockchain decentralization problem, and vice versa.
I suspect that sentence would remain true even if you took the word blockchain out of it and replaced it with any network paradigm that is intended to operate on a global scale. The speed of light becomes a hard ceiling very quickly, and the only ways to get around this are to have a non global network, submit to the realpolitik of limited domain centralization (sharding) and the risk of unaccountable subjective influence it brings, or settle for a glacial transaction rate.
Here's kind of how they deal with it from their FAQ
>To allow high scalability a Tempo ledger is split into a very large shard space, allowing a huge degree of concurrency. To avoid a double spend across any of the shards, the shard a wallet lives on is determined by its public key. This makes sure that any spend from a wallet will always start on the same shard. When combined with the logical clocks and gossip, this Tempo to always find the total ordering of related events, allowing double spends to be quickly detected and ignored.
I don't think this actually addresses the problem at all unfortunately, as a gossip protocol that has to flood a global network is going to require, sooner or later the affirmation or rejection of a truth value from all nodes in that network, and it is the accumulation of latency between all of those nodes that becomes the upper bound on transaction frequency.
To have full decentralization you must not bypass, obscure or exclude any cohort of nodes from having a proportionally fair influence over the settlement of a common shared truth value, and this means you run smack into hard limit of geography-scoped cumulative latency as a scalability dead end in one direction, and decentralization dead end in the other.
There's a reason why high frequency trading shops have all settled on the same solution to their own (far simpler) latency-scaling network dilemma, which is to house their nodes as close as geometrically possible to the settlement forum. This is the terminal stability state toward which any purportedly decentralized truth settlement network will progress given enough time, as the people, er, "actors" with the best geography are fated to win the latency leverage race and with this advantage, come to control the definition of in-network truth values.
Essentially. While major settlements might happen on a global blockchain, you have to federate smaller settlements for it to scale. Cheapest is using a trusted third party. Curious to see nonprofit credit unions start rolling out blockchain accounts.
Unfortunately it's a misunderstanding of alchemy and it's role in the development of modern science that causes these knee-jerk negative responses to what is in fact a useful and non-pejorative comparison. I suppose next time I'll make my case in more detail.
Blockchain was the first serious attempt at solving the problem of distributed concensus without centralisation. One application of this outside of cryptocurrency is to DNS (see Namecoin).
Cryptocurrencies at the very least make black market trading more efficient. See Silk Road.
Also, the analogy to alchemy needs a lot more explaining. I don't see any connections.
Well there are several from the 'get rich quick scheme' aspect vs lead into gold aspects to the fact it is trying to get what they want by properties of analogy. That they can turn processing power into the new gold. Then there is the literal magical thinking like the sun and gold must be connected because of the same color therefor if we create a scarce currency it will be a useful commodity and gold shares properties of the sun, also the sun's rays created gold. Alchemists pursue the same goal obsessively trying to get what they want despite the mechanism for it just plain /not being there/. Similarly Cryptocurrency even if it perfect in security and privacy would run into interchange issues. You would need teleportation to bring commerce beyond government control.
Gold is a very apt comparison given the gold-bug rhetoric they were in pushing deflationary currency despite its history of failures resulting in fiat currency. The gold standard resulted in /many/ wars for the sake of gold just so that they wouldn't have their economy size capped by lack of currency - leading to considerable loss of /real/ value and massive suffering. Ironically having too much gold also created inflation issue. Having currency that can inflate with the economy instead of something else arbitrary is what the strength of fiat currency is.
"Blockchain was the first serious attempt at solving the problem of distributed concensus without centralisation."
Wow, this is such a wrong statement.
Consensus in general has been in CS since its dawn... How childish a person would think CS scientists wont consider this problem without centralization...
I would like to better understand your but about blockchain being the first serious attempt at consensus without decentralization.
The internet itself is a big movement toward consensus. Just look at tcp/ip and Ethernet and dns and lots of other protocols that reach consensus without centralization. But it’s more of a wet consensus than a dry consensus because the negotiation over routing tables happens between users and admins.
DNS and IP have roots, but there are multiple roots and methods for negotiating.
None are perfect, as blockchain isn’t perfect, but are certainly serious attempts.
Maybe the most successful is the IETF RFC process for decentralized consensus.
There are also good examples like the Apache Foundation for distributed consensus.
In most if not all cases the answer is: they can't. The price of crypto, especially that of the ICO era, is propped up by the same individuals that would most want to sell it. It's their HODLing of the coin that keeps it illiquid enough to allow them to drive the price up to the ico target and beyond. By casing out they'd be selling largely to themselves + the thin wisp of actual rubes they've duped into believing there's any substantial buy support under the listed market price.
A centralized cryptocurrency is just digital currency. It may be cryptographically secured against unauthorized transfers/access, but if it doesn't employ some sort of game-theory based custodial sharing scheme which is intended to incentivize decentralization of control (successfully our not), it's not using the 'crypto' protection in the special sense that cryptocurrency implies.
The misguided belief that "if it can't be counted, it doesn't count" lies at the heart of all structural social conflicts. When complex reality is overcompressed into digestible, uniform units of account, whatever values fall outside the perception model is discounted to zero and lost.
Expect to see this, and/or its close cousin the McNamara Fallacy, among the top blogpunditry memes of the next few years. If only it were possible to buy stock in these phrases...
One of the most formative and sublimely influential 'aha' remarks I've ever encountered was a line in a Willam Goldman book about screenwriting which simply read, in the manner of a final summation to a chapter: "POETRY IS COMPRESSION." Caps in the original. I had the same sense of instant resolution, like wearing glasses for the first time, that you seem to have had with your prof's insight.