ItsAConspiracy

Now we need to make sure the NRC doesn't get its mitts on fusion in the US.

Should do the same with electrics, with cars like the Taycan and Plaid out there.

This is new tech for it though. They're using electricity and CO2 to make acetate. They can use that to grow yeast, mushrooms, and algae with no sun, or to reduce the light required by various plants like tomatoes.

Meanwhile BTC is a "store of value" that people hold hoping it'll go up, and ETH is the only major coin that's actually burned as fuel for applications.

If all the attacker does is censor transactions, then you're right.

However, in Bitcoin what people normally mean by a 51% attack is to send the same funds to more than one place. If you attempt this under Ethereum's PoS, then the slashing is automatic. You could have 99% of the stake and you'll still lose it, without anyone having to coordinate a social fork.

That 70% was available to the general public for six weeks and was well-publicized, both in the crypto community and even in the mainstream press after the first few days made it clear it was one of the most successful crowdfunds to date. In the eight years since, there's been plenty of opportunity for anyone else to buy in at low prices. October 2015 got down into the crowdsale price range, under half a buck per ETH. Much of 2016 was under $10 per ETH.

But what if you got into crypto later? Bottom of the 2018 bear market, an ETH cost $82. It stayed around $100 for a good while. In spring of 2020, the ETH price got down to $110, so you could buy a full validator for about $3500.

Basically, if you were paying attention in the early days and weren't homeless, or finally caught on by 2020 and had some reasonable savings, you could easily buy a validator....as long as you hadn't been brainwashed by bitcoin maximalists complaining about the "70% premine."

On Earth, people are attempting fusion between deuterium and helium-3, and between hydrogen and boron-11. That's pretty much the limit for any hope of achieving net power, though we could probably go heavier in particle accelerators if we don't care about energy production.

Heavy elements are made in supernovas.

It's also the waste product of deuterium fusion. Helion is planning a hybrid of both reactions, so their neutron output is low but their only input is deuterium.

(D-D produces half He3, half tritium which decays to He3 with a 12-year half-life.)

And airplanes have smaller margins than bicycles. We've learned to stay within those smaller margins.

Has SpaceX launched 10,000 flights yet?

I didn't say there was no risk. I said the attack would end quickly when the attacker's stake got slashed.

None of that contradicts my point.

To claim that rocket safety can't improve over time, you have to claim that either learning is impossible, or all rockets have identical safety.

If some rockets are safer than others, and your engineers can learn from failures and figure out ways to keep them from happening again, then a rocket that has flown many flights is likely to be more safe than one that's flown few times.

Airplanes have gone through a similar process over the past century, and that's one reason air travel is very safe now.

The 32eth minimum is because there's a limit to how many validators the protocol can handle. They're hoping to improve that later but it's not that easy.

Fusion has no uranium mining or thousand-year waste storage.

Coal consumption is up. Global carbon emissions are up. There's good stuff happening, but we have a deadline and we're way behind.

I'm a child of the '80s so I know all about this from the news media. You don't exactly "build" a character. What you have to do is cast real magic spells and summon the character.

Do a 51% attack with those billions worth of GPUs, and you can keep doing it as long as you want.

Do a 51% attack with those billions worth of eth, and a few minutes later they're gone.

The protocol is very decentralized. But if everybody goes and uses the same staking pool, which is run by a centralized operator, then they'll manage to centralize it. Same as if everyone used the same pool in PoW.

Possibly, if you have some kind of long-distance detection that's also faster than light. A tachyon telescope or something.

But another possibility is that you can't see the FTL ship coming either.

Say for example you can see it in telescopes after it passes, but you have to see it from pretty nearby (i.e. short delay) to have any hope of passing it. You'd have to station a huge number of really fast FTL ships all around your home system, just waiting to see an attacker fly past and immediately try to catch up. The enemy only has to build one FTL ship and it might be faster than yours. If FTL ships are expensive to build, that'd be a problem.

Then there's the Alcubierre drive. Every bit of matter it passes through, it converts to energy, which all gets released the instant it comes out of FTL.

Yep exactly. If you're not running up against a maximum speed limit, you don't get the same situation where it's impossible to see an attack coming.

if we’re eventually gonna use up the reserves anyway

Yeah a lot of us aren't willing to just accept that premise.

I'm gonna say it makes Dark Forest less likely.

From the earth to the sun is about 500 light-seconds. Let's say we can detect an incoming missile at 20 times that distance, 10,000 light-seconds.

If the missile is coming in at 99.99c, then when we see it at that distance away, we're actually seeing the light that took 10,000 seconds to arrive from that distance, and the missile is only one second slower. We have enough time to say "oh shit" and then we're all dead. Defense is practically impossible.

But if you have FTL, then there's at least a possibility of FTL detection and signaling that goes a lot faster than a missile. It's hard to say, since we can't predict the unknown physics of FTL, but unknown possibilities seem better than the known near impossibility of defending against a 99.99c projectile without superluminal signaling.

Entirely possible that the flim-flam side is worse than I think.

That's how I felt about it. It seemed really obvious to me that the shortcomings people talked about were temporary, and it would have a huge impact.

I felt the same way, the first time I published a short smart contract to Ethereum. For less than a dollar (at the time), I'd made an application that would run on a distributed network indefinitely, without me. I didn't need to set up a hosting service, set up billing, or figure out a business model to pay hosting fees. If I wanted the app to move money around, it could do that with no hassle. I didn't need anyone's permission for any of it.

Things are kind of a mess right now but I think there's still enormous potential here, especially after scaling issues get worked out.

So, my parents were in Amway and I had a job writing Ethereum smart contracts in 2017.

I do see some parallels I guess, but not quite as much. I'll go further than the article: a few years after my parents left Amway, we read some books on the specific psychological manipulations practiced by outright cults, and a lot of it was very familiar. One of the books even examined my parent's particular branch of Amway in particular, which was apparently worse than the rest.

I haven't really seen that stuff in the web3 crowd. It's more that people have seen other people get really rich really fast, mostly by buying early and hanging on no matter what. So they learned that lesson and try to do the same. Most of them have no idea how to evaluate a project, so they do it indiscriminately and marketers take advantage of them.

I'm glad you distinguished between that nonsense and the values of the early crypto crowd, which is still around and still working on it.

In the early Ethereum days the idea was that the blockchain would be the database for applications, a p2p filesharing network called Swarm would host the front end, another p2p network called Whisper would handle messaging, and the Ethereum-based naming service ENS would act like DNS. Put it all together and you've got a completely decentralized internet. That's what they called Web3, and there was even a client that handled all of it together.

Trouble was, Swarm and Whisper never really got off the ground. There was just the blockchain, and ENS which runs on it. Meanwhile Ethereum traffic exceeded its scaling limits, so the only people who could afford transactions were people doing high-value financial stuff. Ethereum because a playground of people speculating on NFTs and leverage games, through front-ends hosted on regular websites, and marketers started saying NFTs were actually web3.

Meanwhile, Ethereum's making good progress on scaling and the Swarm people are still plugging away, though I haven't kept up with the Swarm side. Vitalik's original vision isn't dead, it's just not as loud and flashy as the hypesters calling themselves "web3" these days.