Also known as @VeeSilverball

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • My principle of “blockchain’s fundamental value” is simply this: A blockchain that secures valuable information is valuable.

    To break that down further:

    • “Valuable information” isn’t data - it’s something that you can interpret, that has meaning and power to affect your actions. So, price speculation taking place on a chain isn’t that valuable in a broad, utilitarian sense, but something like encyclopedic knowledge, historical records, and the like might be. The sense of “this is real” vs “this is Monopoly money” is related to the information quality.
    • “Secures” means that we have some idea of where the information came from, who can access it, and whether it’s been altered or tampered. Most blockchains follow the Bitcoin model and are fully public ledgers, storing everything - and just within that model(leaving aside Monero etc.) there are positive applications, but “automatically secure” is all dependent on what application you’re aiming for.

    You don’t need to include tokens, trading, finance, or the specific method of security, to arrive at this idea of what a blockchain does, but having them involved addresses - though maybe without concretely solving - the question of paying upkeep costs, a problem that has always dogged open, distributed projects in the past. If the whole chain becomes more valuable because one person contributes something to it, then you have a positive feedback loop in which a culture of remixing and tipping is good. It tends to get undercut by “what if I made scam tokens and bribed an exchange to list them”, the maxi- “we will rule the world” cultures of Bitcoin and Ethereum, or the cynical “VC-backed corporate blockchains”, but the public alt chains that are a bit out of the spotlight with longer histories, stuff like Tezos and NEM/Symbol, tend to have a more visible sense of purpose in this direction - they need to make a myth about themselves, and the myth turns into information by chance and persistence.

    What tends to break people’s brains - both the maxis, and people who are rabidly anti-crypto - is that securing on-chain value in this way also isn’t a case of “public” vs “private” goods. It’s more akin to “commons” vs “enclosed” spaces, which is an older notion that hasn’t been felt in our political lives in centuries, because the partnership of nation-states and capital has been so strong as a societal coordinating force - the state says where the capital should go, the people that follow that lead and build out an empire get rewarded. The commons is, in essence, the voice in the back of your mind asking, “Why are you in the rat race? Do you really need an empire?” And this technology is stating that, clearly and patiently: making a common space better is another way to live.

    And so there is a huge amount of spam around “ownership”, but ownership itself isn’t really a factor. That’s just another kind of information that the technology is geared towards storing. The social contract is more along the lines that if you are doing good for a chain and taking few risks, a modest, livable amount of credit is likely to flow to you in time. Everyone making “plays” and getting burned is trying to gamble with it, or to advance empire-building goals in a basically hostile environment that will patch you out of the flow of information.


  • To me, a big difference is in the lengthy prelude, which follows the model of TOS, just with an updated production. First the synths layered with strings, which are very 80’s wonder-music(it could be right out of the score for Flight of the Navigator or The Goonies) and then the french horns come in playing a round, which adds a Wagnerian element.

    The percussive “march music” elements quoting TMP are subdued in TNG’s arrangement - it’s a less compressed, “punchy” sound, and I believe the mic has been set farther back or they’ve EQ’d out some higher frequencies. Those decisions, plus a few choices of instrumentation like the harp glissandos, tone down the bombastic energy and add a gliding, romantic quality. Again, more like TOS, but updated.


  • I think it’s reasonable for some instances, where there’s good alignment. There was a thread I replied in a few days back around how/if TTRPG creators(who are mostly small enthusiasts themselves) could advertise in related magazines, and legitimizing that business wouldn’t really pose a conflict for the hobby - that’s how it was built in the first place! It’s just a matter of finding a place for it and defining the technical solutions.

    As a general “let in all the advertisers and promise riches for someone” measure, it does cause known problems. There is some freedom to figure out what works in a specific case here, it’s not defined top-down since it isn’t centralized.




  • With respect to how it works in the microblogging corner of Fedi, the tendency is to be actively collaborative, and aggregate some moderation resources, sometimes through backchannels, other times through a tag like #FediBlock - all of which have political implications that have been years-long meta discussions. The emphasis, at least among instances that want to moderate heavily, is on allowing users to feel undisturbed in their own space and not be challenged on literally everything they say, but to still expand that space where it makes sense.

    I’m not sure the exact same dynamic will take place over here. The existence of many distinct spaces on the same instance mitigates a major initial problem Mastodon faced in its early waves: when you literally put everyone leaving Twitter on the same public timeline, old grudges spark up and they start campaigns to harass each other off the platform. That’s how it came to pass that Mastodon ended up with a ton of user privacy features, and over years, instances warring over ideology and trying to colonize each other, which of course ends in mutual blocking.

    In our case I think there’s a good chance for small aggregator instances that just “do one thing well” to thrive and see a lot of external traffic, while not having to moderate their entire comments section, since you can opt to not federate that - not your site, not your concern.



  • It will never show an consistent number. The way Activitypub operates is “you see what you’re subscribed to”, and that occurs in a technical/political sense of “these instances have agreed to federate”, and in many cases they don’t federate everything that happens. So if someone on instance A upvotes something posted on instance B, but instance C is not subscribed to instance A, A and B will see the upvote, C won’t.

    You don’t have to give up on your clout-chasing dreams, but the numbers won’t tell the whole story.