Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
DRAM prices are the ZIRP of this decade. The entire future currently seems to hinge on when DRAM prices will come back down and supply become unconstrained
Weirdly specific bottleneck.
The fates of a lot of highly overleveraged capital, weird debt formations, big datacenter plans, lots of companies, the geopolitics o...
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If you use AI to manage cryptographic keys, that’s basically regulatory capture at this point. The primary use of cryptography going forward is to regulate AI.
Stark choice: move at the speed of AI and maintain an illusion of cryptographic security, or slow AI down to the speed of significantly manual key management.
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Finally reading about the coldcard hack
This is some real spooky action at a distance shit. Feel bad for the people affected but also kinda amazed at how the math works allowing this exploit. Literally nothing you could do to prevent funds just teleporting away.
wizardsardine.com/blog/coldcar...
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Looked through the AI 2040 Plan A thing. It is bad, but I don’t think it is disingenuous. So I’m willing to give them the benefit of doubt and assume sincerity. I think the badness comes from this group being immersed in a subculture that has metabolized regional subcultural success and local influence into unwarranted...
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On the one hand I’m glad Ethereum isn’t mentioned as part of this bleak scene
On the other hand, why isn’t there a different sort of article about a non-bleak scene that does?
Ethereum-vibes popup cities don’t make the news the way lurid billionaire brainrot fantasies do
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Capture resistance is upstream of censorship right?
I think capture resistance is 2d: aggregation resistance and enclosure resistance. There’s a 2x2 there.
Many decentralized protocols are aggregation resistant but not enclosure resistant.
Aggregation resistance is about plurality and multiplicity but enclosure r...
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Increasingly convinced protocolization *is* decentralization. So this actually maps to “centralize till it hurts, decentralize till it works”
It’s a radical thought, but what after all is a protocol, ontologically? You take a gestalt flow-like behavior (or zen ideal of such a behavior) and break it up into hard and so...
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This is just so extraordinarily dumb. IMO getting in bed with trump will cause more net damage long term than FTX and the excesses of the NFT wave combined.
They also messed up the good parts of prediction markets with all the insider trading. Sure the tech had exploitable vulnerabilities but in a better environment i...
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Thought: there are two ways to get to decentralization — start with a center and fragment it (eg through forking or sharding or replication), or start with an atomized set and connect it up, being careful to avoid mechanisms like preferential attachment that cause hubs to emerge. Most decentralization is of the first t...
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