balajis

@balajis.eth

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3377 Followers

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https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-know-just-made-a-gr-1825121606/

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Whiplash is an excellent visual metaphor for this. It also likely causes price volatility in private markets, because sentiment affects the prices of rounds. So it’s not just morale.

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All captchas become crypto. It’s the only way to do provable proof-of-human.

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Great observation. A bit like using emojis to substitute for lack of facial expressions online.

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Yeah. I think it’s better to call them physical hardness, social hardness, and digital hardness. There’s memorable assonance there. And digital is intermediate between physical and social while also being its own thing.

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Anyway, with information we are now accustomed to talking about it. How many gigabytes is that file? All information is measured in bits. Can we measure everything in crypto in hashes? Like: how many hashes would it take to falsify that? What’s it’s hardness? Perhaps this is too simple.

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A related concept is 33 bits for measuring privacy and anonymity. 2^33 = 8 billion And there are about 7 billion humans. So with 33 bits of information you can figure out which human it is.

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Bitcoin difficulty is measured by how many hashes you need to solve the next block. Hashes may be the units of hardness, like bits are the units of information. Hashes also have a market rate, which can be expressed in USD…or in ounces of gold or BTC itself. So: hashes measure computational + financial hardness.

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First post. thenetworkstate.com

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One answer is to use the hardness of math (cryptography) to restore the hardness of social institutions with blockchains. I talked about this in the network state book from a different angle, in terms of technical vs political truths. https://thenetworkstate.com/political-power-and-technological-truth

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Finally, the relationship between physical hardness (atoms), social hardness (institutions), and digital hardness (blockchains) is something I’ve also thought about. Technology reduces scarcity, which means more food. But in doing so it also often erodes institutional certainty, which means more fights.

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His analogy between information theory and cryptographic hardness is also excellent. Of course many have written on this topic, but quantifying the computational *and* financial cost of falsifying something may become as important as calculating how many bits it has. “Hards” as the new bits?

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Lol, and also “cast” as in Farcaster!! 🤪 I didn’t even realize that till just now. @dwr.eth did you pick the name with that connotation? Farcaster: cast a commitment far into the future, like the blockchain.

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His word “cast” is also well chosen, as it relates the physical aspect of hardness to the temporal aspect of future reliability. - trust the forecast - cast it in stone - and cast that stone into the future Also, cast as in “cast a vote” (a binding commitment) and “cast a shadow” (a line extending out).

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Programmable hardness is a generalization of the hard money that is Bitcoin. It pulls in many adjacent words: - scarcity - difficulty - constraint - commitment - immutable - uncensorable - fixed - permanent - archival - reliable - constant - dependable - trustworthy - transparent - provable - verifiable

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However, “programmable hardness” may be a better phrase. It combines several concepts under one umbrella: - financially hard, as in hard money - computationally hard, as in NP-hard - legally hard, as in hard commitment - practically hard, as in hard to fake And the visual is “physically hard” as in gold.

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Some thoughts. First, what he calls “programmable hardness” I’ve called “programmable scarcity”, as distinct from “programmable information.” That is, the internet lets you *copy* digital objects easily, but blockchains let you also *transfer* them — by using cryptography to create digital scarcity.

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Outstanding piece by @js, one of the best I’ve read this year. https://stark.mirror.xyz/n2UpRqwdf7yjuiPKVICPpGoUNeDhlWxGqjulrlpyYi0

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Gasless compressed NFTs mean users don’t need to pay for each transaction, and the costs come way down for the sender too. Solana can currently send 1M NFTs for $10-100, I believe.

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The combination of (a) paying a little bit of money (eg $44/month) and (b) spending a little bit of time (eg dev setup) to get (c) sweat NFTs for bootstrapping a network is kind of like being a micro-investor or micro-employee, but without any promise of future return whatsoever. You get NFT tchotkes. That’s it…

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