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Today we discussed the largest storm in the history of Nicaragua, the National Flood Insurance Program’s debt, RChain’s Casper as permissioned or permissionless, Facebook’s systemic problem, and data and communication of Covid-19.
0:00:00 – Intro
0:01:11 – Largest storm in Nicaragua’s history https://news.yahoo.com/amphtml/iota-w…
0:07:07 – National Flood Insurance Program https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/11/18/f… nfip program https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natio…
0:21:38 – Ian and Greg conversation – proof of stake – interpretation of permissionless – RChain spans the gamut – It falls under permissionless – anyone can join the shard, but only if they know about the shard. If someone launches a private shard, then other people can’t join that shard. Anyone can submit a request to stake. The only criteria for being let in is if there is a slot, and they get randomly chosen. Limitations are built into a protocol. If a validator can’t keep up with the load, then the protocol is allowed to eject them.
0:25:25 – Q: The POS requirements for each shard – how is this set up? A: only on the back end. It is very difficult to produce forward proof of some kind of SLA agreement.
0:25:59 Q: but for the root shard, we’d have to start with some requirements that have to be enforced and couldn’t those requirements be different on other shards? A: The requirements are different. We leave open the possibility that that can be done as part of the bonding request, but in the current implementation of the protocol, the bonding request contains no information about a proof of capability. It’s only enforced on the back end. If you can’t keep up then you are kicked out.
0:26:41 – Q – What are the steps that RChain needs, to get to the point where we can accept permissionless staking? A: It is permissionless. The staking is permissionless. Q: But we don’t have independent validator hardware. A: The protocol is permissionless. The Co-op has not been letting other validators in until we have 3 things: 1) Last Finalized State – and that is being released even as we speak. 2) Block Merge – the PR’s for the block merge are coming in even as we speak 3) an upgrade to the POS – so there’s some things that we want to fix in the POS and that should happen, with luck, by the end of the year.
0:28:00 – So in January, if all goes well and we don’t run into any major issues, we will potentially open it up to allow external validators.
0:28:29 – Hopefully by January anyone who wants to run hardware can issue a bonding request – no KYC, no ID requirement – nothing. But if they get ejected, that means their stake is frozen until the next epoch.
0:29:13 – Ian Q: – on chain vs off chain storage. If you are storing large files on chain, doesn’t that become untenable with bloating? It’s just too big? A: No it doesn’t. First of all we have Last Finalized State, so you only download up to the last finalized state, so if large media is stored and removed, garbage collected, then you only download what you download. 2nd point: typically you arrange large repositories in their own shards. You’ll have storage shards, you’ll have compute shards, and a range of other special purpose shards.
0:30:27 – Ian – right so I have a data centre that’s loaded with hard drives, I can become a validator, offering basically storage but not a whole lot of compute.
0:30:54 – Excerpt from “The Four” by Scott Galloway https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/bo… Summary: If you drill for oil in Saudi Arabia, you get easily obtained, pure stuff that doesn’t need much refining. It costs them 3 bucks / barrel and sells for 50 bucks / barrel. In Pennsylvania, it involves the cumbersome fracking process. This costs more than the oil equivalent of 30 bucks / barrel. Would it make sense for Saudi Arabia to divert some of it’s resources to the fields of Pennsylvania? Of course not!
0:32:21 – Facebook faces a similar question.The prime material, the oil, for Facebook, is our metadata.
0:37:17 – The easy money is on the sure things in it’s people portfolio. Extreme views are emphasized and in turn changes us as people. Facebook makes WAY more money by plundering, shaping and extracting this easy resource. Moderate, balanced thinking make them way less money, so their algorithms are optimized to turn us into extremists, drive us deeper into our bubbles, divides our worlds into us vs them, so that they can extract more profit. Shoshana Zuboff calls it engineered behaviour modification. This engineered polarization via social media is possibly the biggest problem in the world. Because if we don’t solve the Facebook problem, we don’t solve the climate change problem.
0:32:21 – Facebook faces a similar question.The prime material, the oil, for Facebook, is our metadata.
0:37:17 – The easy money is on the sure things in it’s people portfolio. Extreme views are emphasized and in turn changes us as people. This engineered polarization via social media is possibly the biggest problem in the world. Because if we don’t solve the Facebook problem, we don’t solve the climate change problem.
0:39:10 – Ian – interview between Tristan Harris of the Centre for Humane Technology https://www.humanetech.com/ and Joe Rogan. Tristan is talking about Facebook insiders joking about what country’s governance is going to fail next correlated with which country gets free facebook data plans on their cell phone plans. The Joe Rogan Experience: #1558 – Tristan Harris
0:43:30 – Steve Ross Talbot joins the call from the “Covid-19 Known Unknowns” conference and gives a recap. https://www.bmj.com/sites/default/fil… Asked a question: The need for some kind of global platform to enable global collaboration.