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What Hacker News says
- It’s a long discussion.
Unfortunately in order to learn about crypto you have to ignore virtually everything that exists in the space right now, since white collar criminals have realised this is a free for all space where they can commit fraud at will and never get charged (with some exceptions).
Really there is only one interesting thing you need to study. And that’s Ethereum. Bitcoin is pretty much stuck in the past and it’s a mummified open source project imo. And all the other interesting chains are just Ethereum clones with some changes - Polkadot, Algorand, Tezos are perhaps the very few that matter. But everything comes from Ethereum, and if you study and earn about ETH you will understand the whole space.
So look at the interesting ideas and read the books from the good people who’ve done their research - Cryptopians came out recently and that’s a good one even though I haven’t read it I trust Laura Shin (her podcast is also excellent ). Out of the Ether is also good.
But here are some thoughts:
- DAOs are already working in making fully decentralized open source dev collectives and rewarding them for work done. See MakerDAO
- dapps running in cryptoVMs can be made to run at no cost to the developer. That’s pretty cool, since a lot of the “moat” that Uber, FB and Twitter build is two-fold - first they own your data, then they build giant infrastructure to serve you the app. With crypto VMs you don’t need this - people pay for usage. If you could figure out an algorithm that’s better than Uber’s at allocating people who want to drive point to point, you don’t need to go “oh well I guess I go fund raising to build the infra”. Crypto VMs give you that for free, since the user pays for the usage of the application in the transaction.
- decentralised applications can be made safely, even though again they are hard to make and lots of them are just copy paste by fraudsters and schemers (and inevitably get hacked). Uniswap, Compound, Lido, Curve Finance. There are multiple dapps that have never been hacked as far as I know.
- Gitcoin is already quite an incredible little way to fund projects, I believe it’s implemented some form of Quadratic Voting, which Vitalik Buterin has talked about
- NFTs actually work - in the sense that there are real artists building communities and selling their digital art (not monkey pictures) I know of multiple artists who quit mind numbing work at big Corp and became quite successful in NFTs. Again 99% of the space is money laundering, fraud, wash trading - but so is real art (the idea that NFTs are special in that regard is a fiction only someone who hasn’t interacted with the “art world” can hold).
I can go on but illl have to think. But DAOs, NFTs, decentralised VMs with immutable data are pretty cool already. The reason I say I can’t predict what’s going to happen is because even being a digital artist myself, I had no idea about NFTs. And when I discovered them I was blown away. The possibilities that NFTs open up as a digital artist are pretty incredible - you could in theory make “designer levels” for Mario Maker and sell only 7 copies of the map! Making it a collector’s item. And you would colect royalties forever on chain if people sold your map to each other. That’s pretty cool and just couldn’t be done before.
So I have no faith in my ability to predict the future, but I like the internet better with DAOs and NFTs, instead of likes and digital feudal lords who own all your data.
https://overcast.fm/+YVsUUTgOg - the Blockchain Socialist’s interview with Buterin is really interesting, giving you a nice overview of Vitalik’s thinking about the space atm.
- Vitalik was not part of the DAO, and the Ethereum Foundation took an extremely hands-off approach to the DAO hack.
This is pretty well documented in the Cryptopians book; the DAO hard fork was driven almost exclusively by people outside the EF.
- The books reviewed are
"The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze" by Laura Shin
"DeFi and the Future of Finance" by Campbell Harvey et al.
"The Infinite Machine : How an Army of Crypto-hackers Is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum" by Camila Russo
- I just finished reading The Cryptopians by Laura Shin. I am 100% convinced that this will be the rule of smart contracts (where a certain percentage will always be "hacked").
Structurally, smart contracts are very complex vehicles - and the financial reward to hack them is always higher than being a good player.
