> I think Ethereum has some good leadership, but I think this is something that they really need to get a policy on now.
Do they? I see a brilliant 22-year old in Buterin, some respectable people like Gavin Wood and a massive crowd around them that has perverse incentives. An organization that has a massive amount of money (and people who want to make money) and with that the desire to reinvent everything (think I'm kidding, go read about dapps).
Hang around a cryptocurrency forum for awhile an you get an idea of how delusional and downright scammy the vast majority of those communities are. 18 year olds from Sweden scamming people and running pump and dump schemes and then getting doxed and threatened and people investing their life savings into stupid altcoins (yes, saw both of those, as well as much more). It's like the payday loan industry, and like that industry the people at the top have no reason to clean it up. Not only are they not cleaning it up, they are encouraging it. In the r/ethereum subreddit in the early days Youtube videos comparing Buterin and Jobs were getting voted up without even a second consideration that it might be premature.
It's easy to rant against the evil of the banks and the people in power when you don't have power, but when you have power, you do the same?
Something is wrong with Ethereum and scams like this have a chance of destroying cryptocurrency from a legal standpoint before it even gets started.
One answer is that the market forces tend to funnel all increases in income to landowners as rent.
I was not familiar with this theory until a few days ago, when someone here on HN linked to an online version (edited and abridged) of Henry George's Progress and Poverty [0]. I've been reading it since; its clarity is stunning: I feel as if a great veil has been lifted from my eyes. Whether I'll still feel that way in a few days, months, or years remains to be seen, but for the moment, Henry George has me eating out of the palm of his hand.
Whatever the general validity of his theory, it certainly seems to explain the SF Bay Area extremely well. Salaries here sound incredible to people outside the area, but then it costs so much more to live here as to deny the wage earner much of the benefit. Broadly, we can break the population into three groups. Renters, obviously, have to pay the market rents, which seem to rise inexorably. Those who bought houses here years ago, before the big increases in property values, and are still living in them, are the ones who can really enjoy the high salaries they can earn here. Those who bought property here more recently, on the other hand, have large mortgages, because someone who previously owned the property made a pile of money when they sold it. In effect, the mortgage is like rent being paid to whichever previous owner or owners saw the property appreciate.
George's theory starts with Ricardo's law of rent [1], which is a truism of classical economics (and another idea I was not aware of until just recently). One could say it takes that law to its logical conclusion.
EDITED to add: while George's theory has not been fully embraced by mainstream economics, it hasn't been completely rejected by any means. Joseph Stiglitz, Herbert Simon, and to some extent Milton Friedman are some of its adherents, and Hayek credits George with awakening his interest in economics. [2]
Just taking this quick opportunity to post a link to my favorite journal, the Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis: http://www.jasnh.com/ .
JASNH is designed to accept papers that say "we tested for X effect on Y and found no evidence that X affects Y". Traditionally instead of publishing this kind of research people would keep changing parameters around until they got some kind of positive and presumably career-advancing result.
I am a huge fan of JASNH because of the reminder that "falsifiability" can and should happen.
They seem to be mostly getting behavioral-science style submissions but I am pretty sure based on their charter they would take anything.
I know where you're coming from but I don't think this is the case. There are too many examples to give but here are some nice ones:
In 2013, there were only a small number of E2E encrypted messenger users. Now there are over a billion Signal Protocol users alone, not even including other systems. This isn't getting deployed because it's easier to develop, support, or use than plaintext.
In 2013, RC4 was widely used in TLS and random number generation (on BSD systems). It has been kicked out and now ChaCha is seeing wide deployment in the same places (although FreeBSD is lagging behind).
Let's Encrypt has substantially increased TLS availability and usage.
In 2013, the default crypto in OpenSSH was (IIRC) P-256 and AES-CTR, with ECDSA host keys. It's now X25519 and ChaCha20-Poly1305 with EdDSA host keys.
In 2013, TLS was mostly RC4 and CBC. Now (on my servers) it's mostly GCM and ChaCha. Even the IETF has said to stop using RC4.
The NaCl family, including in particular Libsodium, has a TON of users. Besides supporting only strong crypto, the high-level API has made it almost impossible to publish a successful new crypto library today that's in the style of OpenSSL where the only answer to "how to I accomplish X?" is "go fuck yourself." Good riddance to Russian roulette crypto libraries.
We're even seeing movement in pqcrypto. So while some people are being reactive and switching out bad crypto for good (as in above examples), some are being proactive. Google is experimenting with pq-safe key agreement, as just one example. Tor is working on it as well. So not only has there been a positive reaction since 2013, but people are beginning to be more proactive as well, trying to stay ahead of the curve.
The number of users of strong crypto has increased by several billion since 2013.
Do they? I see a brilliant 22-year old in Buterin, some respectable people like Gavin Wood and a massive crowd around them that has perverse incentives. An organization that has a massive amount of money (and people who want to make money) and with that the desire to reinvent everything (think I'm kidding, go read about dapps).
Hang around a cryptocurrency forum for awhile an you get an idea of how delusional and downright scammy the vast majority of those communities are. 18 year olds from Sweden scamming people and running pump and dump schemes and then getting doxed and threatened and people investing their life savings into stupid altcoins (yes, saw both of those, as well as much more). It's like the payday loan industry, and like that industry the people at the top have no reason to clean it up. Not only are they not cleaning it up, they are encouraging it. In the r/ethereum subreddit in the early days Youtube videos comparing Buterin and Jobs were getting voted up without even a second consideration that it might be premature.
It's easy to rant against the evil of the banks and the people in power when you don't have power, but when you have power, you do the same?
Something is wrong with Ethereum and scams like this have a chance of destroying cryptocurrency from a legal standpoint before it even gets started.