lavrov's comments

What do you think happened in El Salvador, Chile, Argentina, Iran, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Honduras, etc

Didn’t read the entire post but I think the characterization of PCP’s is a bit off - some SNARK constructions and STARKs both use PCP’s - using a linear PCP vs a PCP doesn’t impact transparency or proof size, that’s more a function of the commitment scheme

It seems like a VRF might be a more natural choice than a commitment scheme for verifiable randomness, since it doesn't require any honesty assumption for participants, and Keybase already manages keys (though maybe it would be a problem if participants could change keys midway through the ceremony).

I thought that the post was fairly unclear, but for me, it seems like the main argument against 538 is that it makes unfalsifiable claims about the probability of individual elections - picking a winner is a falsifiable claim, but assigning a probability always allows Silver to claim something like “even events with a 10% probability occur frequently” even if his model assigns a high likelihood of victory to the loser of an election.

My favorite Nate Bronze takedown remains Carl Diggler[1].

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/posteverything/wp/201...

Not a pilot, and not trying to be an armchair pilot, but why would he have ascended all the way to 36000 feet? Isn't there a real risk of depressurization with hull damage?

You misread my comment - I'm saying that the argument is not that the fact that this other measure of unemployment is much higher than the standard measure shows that the economy is not healthy, but that the sudden divergence over the past decade hasn't been plausibly explained by anything except an increase in disaffected working-aged males.

>Of course it has. Being a stay-at-home-dad was unthinkable in 1950. Post-graduate education is increasingly common, as is mid-life career switching. I can think of many reasons why we shouldn't expect a 98% labor force participation rate from that demographic in this century.

All of the points that you raised should not show such a sudden effect in the past < 10 years.

I don't agree that using the OECD employment rate is bullshit. The argument is not that at a single point, the fact that this other measure of unemployment is much higher than the standard measure shows that the economy is not healthy, the argument is that the divergence between the OECD employment rate and the standard measure indicates that the economy is unwell. If you deny this, then you're forced to argue that somehow the number of "disabled, stay-at-home-parents, the leisure class, those enrolled in education, and anyone else who is not working but has no desire to do so" has increased within the same demographic (25-55 males, so generally post-school), while wages have remained flat.

Why not? Determining how we measure the health of our economy, and implicitly, what we want to optimize for, is a political process, not simply an objective, scientific one.

The point that he's making is not that individual observation should trump objective measures, but the epistemic claim that if what we perceive contradicts those measures, it's worth interrogating the validity of those measures.

I don't think that the particular example that you're giving is "fraught with peril". Note the lack of an upper bound on the labor force participation rate that you cite - 16+ includes people of retirement age, whereas the measure given in the article shows that the official unemployment rate for men 25-55 is just 1/3 of the "true" unemployment rate that includes disaffected workers. This is significant.

The emphasis on humor in Mozart and Beethoven is interesting, particularly since it seems almost absent in the later Sonatas. I remember hearing Martha Argerich note that it's present in early Beethoven, and then disappears in Chopin and Liszt, and then reappears a bit in Ravel, but truly with the Russians. I would be interested in whether Brendel distinguishes between the ironic humor (Mediant vs Dominant) and any other types.

Verifiable computation is an active and developed area of research in cryptography, and the validation method of having every node run every step of every computation is the most naive approach. There are plenty of ways to prove to you that I faithfully executed a computation that don't rely on your also having performed the computation.

I don't know how active the Maker userbase is, but Augur has 700 monthly active users.

It seems like it would be possible to manipulate the validator set for a particular shard - also, isn't part of the point of ethereum to be able to access information from other contracts? How do you guarantee that that contract is on the same shard?

Sure, I'm assuming that most of the transactions are trading/speculation, given that 60% of ETH is held on exchanges, and if the question is how we should value ETH, a measure that depends on the current market value of ETH seems flawed. Plus, the base transaction amount is denominated in ETH: .00042, and is fixed (though I think that the gas conversion changes?).

That position isn't supported by volatile transaction fee data - excepting spikes for spam or high traffic, the transaction fee denominated in dollars generally tracks the price of ETH. Probably because the overwhelming majority of ETH activity is speculative (60% of ETH held on exchanges), and traders view transaction fees as simply a percentage of gains/losses and are more amenable to paying higher fees.

Forks aren't as simple as you might think - who gets to determine what the "original chain" is in the event of a fork? Suppose that ETH forked and one version changed some consensus rules to increase the supply of currency, and Vitalik, the Ethereum Foundation, all of the miners/stakers, and users moved to that chain - wouldn't that be ETH? But it would violate the principle of fixed digital scarcity.

Confiscation of assets is obviously possible via forks as well, but the fact that someone can't take your money without your private key doesn't relate to scarcity.

For example, if the market cap were 1/100 of its current value, then the transaction fees per year, denominated in dollars, would be $1800000, yielding the same "P/E" multiple, and justifying the valuation at 1/100 the current market cap.

When discussing how crypto-assets should be valued:

> In that case, you can take the simple model and say a cryptocurrency’s valuation is the net present value of the transaction fees that it’s getting. This, by itself, surprisingly does give fairly decent valuations.

> For example, Ethereum’s transaction fees tend to be about $500,000 a day recently, which is about $180 million a year. If you tried to value the ether market cap as some kind of corporation, then the “P/E ratio” is only somewhere in the low 200s, which is high for a company, but not off-the-charts absurdly high.

Isn't this completely circular? He's saying that the value of the transaction fees per year measured in dollars equates to some reasonable fraction of the market cap measured in dollars... but wouldn't this be true if the market cap were much higher or much lower? It's just a comparison of the total supply to the amount being circulated, rather than a substantive claim about how each token (or the market cap) should be valued in dollars.

Maybe I'm just being cynical (or jealous!), but when I read "Vitalik Buterin, who has managed to synthesize insights across those fields into successful, real-world applications like Ethereum", I think it's worth asking what qualifies as successful, because to me, the inflated market cap of a speculative asset isn't an objective measure.

I think that Ethereum's market cap has perhaps created an unearned reputation for solving an essential problem (running any verified, distributed computation) and being the best solution to large-scale verifiable computation, when I would argue that verifying a computation in a distributed system by having each node (or some large subset of nodes, if sharded) perform every step of every computation is not an optimal solution.

The security proof for SNARKs requires constant-depth compliance predicates, otherwise the proof doesn’t follow because the extractor size could blow up. I would have to read the coda whitepaper to see what their assumptions are for their security proof. I was just curious whether the equivalent of a birthday attack would be possible for some state transition if the depth was increased, since I’m not aware of a formal proof of soundness (and I heard in passing that recursion depth would affect security properties of nested snarks, but hearsay!)

I’m not sure why there is a misunderstanding here, especially given that you work for a wallet provider. The attack is as described: an attacker forks, mines invalid blocks, which are caught by full nodes, since they validate the contents of blocks, but not by the light client - assume for simplicity that the client connects to the malicious node and doesn’t do anything more than calculate PoW. The SPV client trusts an invalid blockchain, fault occurs. Coda is designed precisely to avoid this problem, and any solution that requires trusting full nodes, because it provides constant time verification of all of the contents of every block.

Yes, I agree that the top-level SNARK will obviously have a high level of security wrt soundness, but suppose that I have a SNARK recursively computing 2^128 SNARKs, you’re claiming that the lowest level SNARK would have the same knowledge soundness guarantees? That seems incorrect given the constant size of the top-level SNARK