Vitalik Buterin

All good questions! We are discussing them regularly.

We take an adversarial approach to the protocol and constantly try to come up with ways it might be gamed. We want to design it in a way that achieves something like this: https://xkcd.com/810/

Some points regarding your questions:

The protocol will be fully open source so nobody can gain an advantage through information asymmetry.

We choose the best replies by measuring how much a reply "changes minds" (difference in voting behavior on a post given users have also voted on that reply). We adjust for biases using a technique called bridging-based ranking [1, 2]. The algorithm chooses the reply that had the highest impact on voting behavior after adjusting for biases.

We do realize that truth is a loaded term, so to elicit "truthful" posts and replies, we incentivize honesty with a technique called the Bayesian Truth Serum [3]. This will be linked with a reputation system that determines a user's impact.

If you spin up a bunch of bots, they will have low reputation in the beginning and therefore little impact. If you coordinate people (or bots) to vote manipulatively, their impact will be minimized by the bias correction because their votes are correlated. Our hope is that it would take considerable effort to build reputation on many accounts (by being honest and helpful over an extended period of time) and maintaining an attack over the lifecycle of a discussion would be infeasible because it works against the…

Vitalik Buterin, one of Ethereum’s co-founders, is credited with this trilemma, and this (AFAICT) is where he first posted about it:

The trilemma claims that blockchain systems can only at most have two of the following three properties: * Decentralization (defined as the system being able to run in a scenario where each participant only has access to O(c) resources, i.e. a regular laptop or small VPS) * Scalability (defined as being able to process O(n) > O(c) transactions) * Security (defined as being secure against attackers with up to O(n) resources) In the rest of this document, we'll continue using c to refer to the size of computational resources (including computation, bandwidth and storage) available to each node, and n to refer to the size of the ecosystem in some abstract sense; we assume that transaction load, state size, and the market cap of a cryptocurrency are all proportional to n. The key challenge of scalability is finding a way to achieve all three at the base layer. * https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2017/12/31/sharding_faq.html#this-sounds-like-theres-some-kind-of-scalability-trilemma-at-play.-what-is-this-trilemma-and-can-we-break-through-it

Zk-Snark means Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge.

It's fairly cutting edge cryptography. It is very fragmented as the industry is rapidly evolving. If I may recommend, a good article on zk Snarks from Vitalik: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/01/26/snarks.html

ZK proofs allow you to prove you know the answer to something without revealing the answer itself. You may not need to know how these things work at a low level. If you're interested, feel free to dig into zk proofs and the cryptography behind them. The subject is quite deep and rapidly evolving. Ultimately, the important thing to know at a high level is that you can post a zk proof with just a few bytes of data, and that zk proofs, while computationally expensive to generate, are computationally cheap to verify. So they are being used as a blockchain scaling technology, since data storage is expensive on blockchains.

If you're just interested in crypto as a user, I would generally recommend getting a Metamask wallet and interacting with some applications like Uniswap, Aave, or OpenSea.

1) I'm hosting a blog on my ENS domain - this cannot be censored and this exact version will always be available for anyone to access (as long as someone's pinned it on IPFS). So it solves a real problem that DNS does not. For example, you can checkout Vitalik's blog at https://vitalik.eth.limo/

2) I was in Budapest and had lost my debit card and was in need for Euros - I literally looked up the closest Bitcoin ATM, which was 10 mins walk from my hotel and instantly had access to cash (global borders, international payments can be a nightmare). On a similar note - I often make payments in crypto to international contractors.

3) I regularly use Poap (https://poap.xyz/) as proof of participation in various events like hackathons / workshops, etc and this has in turn helped me in the space.

All three of these are not speculative investments.

And as I keep repeating, this is literally the start. We're builders, we can see where the space is heading and where it will be in 5 years.

There's this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Marxism

Which I feel is the "best take"

>Karl Marx... only criticizing the freedom in the great inequality of wealth and power.[3]

Confucianism is more like CPC marketing; it's heart is more like Legalism, though some still hope for the "tail wagging the dog, peacefully", just like we'd want "civic individualism" (now represented by Mamdani) to wag the corporatist dog in the US.

I'm glad it's not tied to the DPP, because I'd rather support this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_People%27s_Party#Policy

Sorry, it's just immoral to me to sow discord against CPC in a US-based forum. If you want we can continue this on a PRC forum (where I'd think it would be immoral to cast aspersions on US :)

Anyways, regarding Taiwan and a fix for liberalism, at least Audrey Tang (and Glen Weyl are trying):

https://newpublic.substack.com/p/how-taiwan-is-leading-the-way-in

https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/08/21/plurality.html

> it is not technically decentralized, it is Twitter (a centralized platform)

Community notes are generated by users and not the platform it's not perfect but better than having a mainstream media oligopoly deciding what is truth and what isn't.

> If it were truly fully decentralized, it would be vulnerable to such attacks even more, right?

The algorithm tries to prevent this kind of abuse. "the Community Notes rating algorithm explicitly attempts to prioritize notes that receive positive ratings from people across a diverse range of perspectives". See Vitalik analysis: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/08/16/communitynotes.html. But from what you're telling it looks CCP found a way to game it.