I stopped being interested in poker when I realized that by far the best strategy is simply to play with the worst players you can find. Everything else pales in comparison to simply playing with new players.
I understand that these are people who are willingly coming to play the game and putting up their money but I just don’t feel comfortable intentionally seeking them out to take it from them.
Pretty sure that means I’m simply not cut out to play the game but the theory is definitely interesting.
Brokers fees for the apartment in Cambridge I rent were $4k. This was in addition to first and last months’ rent. Extremely annoying but when every other apartment is doing it too, you don’t have much of a choice if you want to live in the area.
> Also, oh, man, Jazelle. I'd forgotten about that. Hardware support for Java bytecode... that did not pan out well.
As someone who was too young to be paying any attention during this time, what were some of the reasons this didn’t pan out? Java seems so dominant looking back that I’m surprised something like this wouldn’t have been a success.
The Lisp machine failed because Lisp compiler technology got better and better at targeting generic 32-bit CPU hardware, which was becoming increasingly cheap and plentiful. So the benefits of having all this custom hardware to specially execute Lisp code were nullified -- leaving only the costs.
The same thing happened to Java in hardware. It seemed like a good idea at the time because it allowed developers to target a language they were already familiar with, and present an alternative to Wintel -- especially when you realize that Java was all the rage as a sort of universal programming environment, and in particular J2ME was a big deal for proto-"smart" phones before the iPhone came along. But embedded Java didn't really pan out, memory and CPU time got cheaper, and compiler and JIT tech improved to the point where there was just no benefit to adding the hardware it took to decode Java instructions. So Jazelle was deprecated and replaced with something called ThumbEE, which was a more generic framework based on ARM's Thumb instruction set for running code for an abstract machine, providing features like automatic null-pointer checking and that. Like you could set up a ThumbEE environment for running Python or .NET code in addition to Java. Nowadays even ThumbEE is deprecated. Neither feature appears in ARMv8 processors, for instance.
I have also wondered this for years, and always was told "because JITs work better", but that felt a bit handwavy. Luckily for both of us David Chisnall just published an article on ACM about designing ISAs that properly explains the reasoning behind Jazelle and why it did not work in the long run:
> Small code is also important [for a simple single-issue in-order core]. A small microcontroller core may be as small as 10KB of SRAM (static random access memory). A small decrease in encoding efficiency can dwarf everything when considering the total area cost: If you need 20 percent more SRAM for your code, then that can be equivalent to doubling the core area. Unfortunately, this constraint almost directly contradicts the previous one [about decoder complexity]. This is why Thumb-2 and RISC-V focused on a variable length encoding that is simple to decode: They save code size without significantly increasing decoder complexity.
> This is a complex tradeoff that is made even more complicated when considering multiple languages. For example, Arm briefly supported Jazelle DBX (direct bytecode execution) on some of its mobile cores. This involved decoding Java bytecode directly, with Java VM (virtual machine) state mapped into specific registers. A Java add instruction, implemented in a software interpreter, requires at least one load to read the instruction, a conditional branch to find the right handler, and then another to perform the add. With Jazelle, the load happens via instruction fetch, and the add would add the two registers that represented the top of the Java stack. This was far more efficient than an interpreter but did not perform as well as a JIT (just-in-time) compiler, which could do a bit more analysis between Java bytecodes.
> Jazelle DBX is an interesting case study because it made sense only in the context of a specific set of source languages and microarchitectures. It provided no benefits for languages that didn't run in a Java VM. By the time devices had more than about 4MB of RAM, Jazelle was outperformed by a JIT. Within that envelope, however, it was a good design choice.
> Jazelle DBX should serve as a reminder that optimizations for one size of core can be incredibly bad choices for other cores
So: a decent JIT works better if you can afford the overhead of the JIT. Jazelle was only a good idea in a very brief period of time when this wasn't true, and even then only if you insist on running a Java VM.
Honest question: what do we even do? I'm not European but it seems like you can't talk about the "housing crisis" without having to specify whether you're talking about Europe, Canada, the US, etc.
I see suggestions to build more housing through taller buildings, but without any incentive to do that from people who care, what policies will realistically get passed to change anything?
Here in the Netherlands we used to have social housing built by the government and then rented out at reasonable rates, from like 50's - 90's. Now after a decade+ of right-ish government the housing associations are forced to sell off these houses and don't build a lot of new ones. But if we vote for the same parties as those who supported this policy back then, I don't see why we couldn't do it again.
I've seen Infracost around and think it looks cool, do you have any plans to add support for Pulumi? One advantage Terraform seems to have over Pulumi is the ecosystem of tools that support it.
Yep, for sure! It's on the roadmap. We are friends with the folks at Pulumi too. Love what they are building, so hopefully we will get some bandwidth and add support. And Cloud Formation too. Azure ARM ... haha there is a lot more to build :)
If you're desperate enough, you can nixtamalize corn by getting your hands on some calcium hydroxide (referrred to as cal) and giving some kernels a good overnight bath in a mixture of cal and water. The obvious downside being that it takes forever (and also the mixture is caustic so you can't touch it).
I've done this process maybe 5 times, and I live in Mexico where it's done daily. It really doesn't take that long relative to cooking a good loaf of bread. And I've never had problems touching the mixture as long as I wash my hands etc. Not trying to dismiss you, just want to share that it's really an easy process and everyone should try it!
For the record, "188,000 views on TikTok" is not that many for a single video to reach, let alone an entire search term's worth of videos.
As a zoomer reading this article I can tell you this very literally boils down to "funny voice = funny joke" and you could just as easily swap out the british accent for a Kermit impression. The popularity of british reality TV has exposed the young americans that watch it to funny sounding british slang (e.g. "fanny flutters") and now those sayings are making their way into jokes.
I promise you no one except for the Miami content creators and former reality TV cast members quoted in the article are slipping into British accents at Burger King.
If anything that data point proves that this isn't a trend. I searched "funny elbow" and saw more than 188k views. In other words "fake british accent" is less of a trend than "funny elbow," which is two random words I put together.
It's interesting how much reporting about TikTok depends completely on the audience having zero exposure to TikTok.
I’m so glad we’ve moved on from the journalism of “here’s what 3 or 4 people are talking about on Twitter” to “here are a few videos on TikTok with barely any views starting a massive trend”. Can’t wait for the journalists to fully automate this process with chatGPT.
This reminds me of those trashy articles like the ones Microsoft peddles on their Windows 11 widgets tab. They basically take a few tweets with just a handful of likes and create an entire article around them. The buzz that they are drumming up feels artificial and contrived. And if the author was really lacking in integrity, they could just set up anonymous Twitter accounts and conjure up the posts themselves.
But the data point is just wrong or poorly described. Did you really just test one side (the "funny elbow") and compare it to the possibly very different thing from the article. A search for "fake British accents" brings up multiple videos with >100000 likes each and significantly more such than for funny elbow.
True story. My daughter watched way too much Harry Potter growing up (2004-2012 ish). Some of her friends parents and teachers, etc. were surprised by my lack of a British accent. We still laugh about it.
A while back I somehow managed to watch Space Is the Place[1] without knowing anything about Sun Ra. The discovery that he was not an actor and was instead a great jazz musician was a wild one. If you haven't seen it, Space Is the Place is a super interesting look into early Afrofuturist films and Sun Ra as a character.
From looking around the internet I am starting to believe I might be the only person holding crypto strictly because I just happen to think it's neat.
I think it's interesting that via Ethereum, I can spend Ether to perform distributed computations on nodes across the globe and that this also serves as a store of value. I find Iota's Tangle interesting as an application of a DAG for financial and data transactions. I think it's interesting that I can send Nano to someone instantly and without any gas fees while still using blockchains.
It would be nice if this technology was given a larger purpose, but I think any possibility of that quickly went out the window once someone realized they could get rich. I understand and agree with a lot of the hate crypto gets and a significant amount of the use cases are nothing more than pipe dreams (or just outright scams,) but from a theory perspective I can't help but think it's at least a little bit fascinating to see people try to apply data structures this way.
> I think it's interesting that via Ethereum, I can spend Ether to perform distributed computations on nodes across the globe and that this also serves as a store of value.
I find this "value proposition" highly dubious. You can already rent compute globally and perform computation in an environment orders of magnitude faster than on the EVM. Distributed compute on its own doesn't confer any points as a "store of value." The nature of the compute needs to be something that can be done strictly in the blockchain domain, and as we've seen, the result is a system that's easy to manipulate by spinning up new shitcoins, insider trading, wash trades, and worse - not to mention the loss of privacy given how effective on-chain analysis is. The features that make up a cryptocurrency make it decidedly unsuitable as the basis of a modern financial system. Some of the underlying principles are "neat," but that's as far as the tech goes for me.
I think it's worse. If you ask AWS for 1000 distributed machines, you can run 1000 different calculations and then somehow aggregate the results.
In the Ethereum network, if you ask for a calculation then all the miners must do it, and then all the validators must do it. So you acually have a repeated calculation, not a distributed calculation.
The only distributed part was calculating the next block with POW, but IIRC they switched to POS.
I agree it’s worse on any measure that can reduced to “distributed computation”.
But that’s not what it’s doing. Not really. The only distributed computation is the one establishing trust that there has been no Byzantine failure of consensus.
Everything else is non-distributed non-parallel computation within a framework that statistically guarantees faithful and accurate processing.
It’s a competitor to trusted computing. One specifically designed against the single entity root of trust that underpins intels offering eg.
That kinda doesn't matter when the amount of compute is trivially reproduced by '90's CPUs
You can just have a bunch of notes and vote out bad results. You can say "how do you know that 20 different machines you run that do not have hardware backdoor but how do you know software running ethereum is not backdoored ? There is no protection for the compute engine being backdoored, just the fact you'd need to get that backdoored software to most nodes.
In order to convince one honest node you’d have to backdoor every node they talk to.
Multiple independent implementations co-exist on the network including many private implementations.
Perhaps the best defense is the vigilance of the community as they regularly build consensus around the head blocks hash which is hard to forge if the ledger contains any material impacts of an exploit.
Trivial detection of malicious acts is the feature.
It’s true it’s not perfect but your analysis trivializes the effort to compromise even one honest node.
Or you can get your raspberry pi, some desktop from the 90s and random used laptop and get 1000x the "secure computing power" that couldn't be reasonably hardware-backdoored too.
This thread is the only rational, technically informed discussion of crypto I’ve ever read. Both sides being polite to each other while making technical or philosophical arguments
> You can already rent compute globally and perform computation in an environment orders of magnitude faster than on the EVM
True, but Ethereum also has the benefit of having a globally agreed upon state that is transparent and traceable when a change occurs. Not saying this setup couldn't be done any other way, but the fact that all you need to enable yourself to make those changes is a digital token is what I find interesting about it. The use of this token combined with the fact that people arguably care about the state of this system is what I feel gives it intrinsic value.
For ENS - yes, for JPEG or whatever else - definitively no. There is literally nothing stored inside the token to describe who owns a digital or physical artifact outside of blockchain and it is technically impossible to store such info in the blockchain, while keeping even a current sham of decentralization, transaction throughput and gas price.
The interface to the globally available computation is a bit different and I think novel.
In order for my application and yours to interact we had to both chose the same ecosystem and invest in it to some minimal degree.
It’s easy to frame that negatively.
But there are some positive aspects to that mutual agreement to invest. Similar to how you may deploy an open standard of authentication inside your infrastructure, the expectation is that the community will improve tools and share innovations over time even if you aren’t directly interacting with any of them. It’s not required. It’s just an expectation.
Ethereum is like that. There is a community of developers extending the ecosystem and it’s exclusively people who invest in and use the platform.
We can mince words over the value prop of cryptocurrency and a decentralized ledger but, I don’t get the same belonging to a community on AWS or GCP.
FWIW most of the people I work with in the community dislike the same scammers that you do.
Placing control of the world’s compute under a small handful of powerful megacorps is not exactly ideal. Imagining a future where we can use and participate in (as stakers/validators) decentralized compute, storage, transactions, contracts, etc is pretty interesting.
This blog post has a bunch of citations "showing that some assertion about the cryptocurrency ecosystem that crypto-bros make can't be true". And unfortunately decentralizing away from a small handful of powerful entities is one of these things. Below is one example.
"3) Impossibility of Full Decentralization in Permissionless Blockchains by Yujin Kwon et al (1st September 2019) provides a different formalization of the idea that economies of scale drive centralization by introducing the concept of the "Sybil cost":
the blockchain system should be able to assign a positive Sybil cost, where the Sybil cost is defined as the difference between the cost for one participant running multiple nodes and the total cost for multiple participants each running one node.
...
Considering the current gap between the rich and poor, this result implies that it is almost impossible for a system without Sybil costs to achieve good decentralization. In addition, because it is yet unknown how to assign a Sybil cost without relying on a TTP [Trusted Third Party] in blockchains, it also represents that currently, a contradiction between achieving good decentralization in the consensus protocol and not relying on a TTP exists."
In the Ethereum PoS model, those with money perpetually own the network by definition.
At least with AWS, Amazon doesn’t also control the US dollar and the euro. If their service starts to suck, I can take my business elsewhere. But if Ethereum were to actually become a global standard, there would be no escape from the Ether plutocrats.
Any participation you and I can have in a system like Ethereum is table scraps from the overlords.
> If their service starts to suck, I can take my business elsewhere.
This is an extraordinarily good point.
Centralization of Etherium means a centralization of both the VM and the currency. It would be as if the Fed and US Mint also owned AWS.
If Amazon sucks, as you say, you can take your dollars elsewhere. If Ethereum sucks, your Ether is going to be worthless, even if you could bridge it to another chain.
I’ve sometimes thought that Ethereum represents the kind of computing network that 1950s Soviets would have appreciated. Massively inefficient, every operation needlessly repeated across every node only for the pretense of equality and democracy, and ideologically obsessed with a rhetorical illusion of immutability and permanence even though data can be wiped by simple agreement of the Politburo that controls the network.
“Now that the next five-year plan will be implemented as a smart contract on the Sovgosethereum, we’ll be mathematically guaranteed to meet our economic goals.” — Makes as much sense as the guaranteed crypto lending yields of 2021.
What you are describing does exist in some blockchains, like Tezos. But Ethereum's governance is social: not driven by token stake or "coin voting." In Ethereum PoS, users do not cede control of the protocol to validators - the users who run nodes and decide what software to run effectively own and control the protocol.
If the protocol starts to suck, users can change or fork the protocol (this has already happened multiple times, PoS being the latest example).
The article cites a tweet, which cites Ethernodes. According to that site, 63% of hosted nodes are run by Amazon, or about 39% of all nodes. The next largest host is Hetzner at 7% of hosted (far lower than it was a few months ago, because they announced they are no longer supporting Ethereum) which accounts for about 4% of all nodes.
Not that surprising, since Amazon runs a huge percentage of all hosted compute in the world. Luckily, Amazon owning a large share of nodes doesn’t mean they own or can control Ethereum. But they certainly do pose a risk to the overall network security and health, and validation-at-home can and should continue to be made easier.
The ethereum DAO fork showed that the moment the "big ones" are hit there is not much stopping them from violating the "immutability" promise for their own gains.
Instead of few big banks there are few big mining pools deciding the fate, distinction almost without difference. And in both cases you need money to get in to the inner circle
There are no mining pools in Ethereum today. The chain is "immutable" only up to the point that the social layer wants it to be; majority users can change the protocol as they see fit (see EIP 1559, PoS, and other forks).
There are innumerable companies you can rent cloud resources from - bare metal to “serverless”. Ethereum, on the other hand, is severely limited in what you can achieve for any amount of rent.
It brings a tear to my eye when i read through well crafted ERC proposals [0] and then remember these developers are awash in a sea of scammers, blind hatred, vitriolic ignorance, and of course the traditional systems that fight against any sort of distributed ecosystem that they cannot control.
It bring more of a tear to my eye when hard earned dollars are lost by incompetence or mismanagement -- crypto or otherwise.
> blind hatred
I assure you -- The hatred you see is not blind -- especially not after the collapse of FTX. Most of it has cause. And there are vitriolic ignoramuses on both sides.
I'm in the same camp. I think a bunch of distributed technologies (like Ethereum) are really neat from a technical perspective and fun to tinker with, but I don't live under any delusion that the global financial system will ever build itself on top of anything that even somewhat resembles the cryptocurrencies we see today. I remember years ago it felt like the community was mostly comprised of people with our perspective, but that feeling has basically disappeared.
We need to continue to seek each other out. Finance people swarmed this space like locusts but they aren't who makes it special. It's the p2p ethos that makes it special.
That was my view on it back in the early 2010's when Bitcoin was just taking off. Back then, the only people interested in it were either geeks looking at this new weird thing, or drug dealers. And frankly, the drug dealing was "healthy" for the ecosystem as whole: because people were actually using it as a medium of exchange, there was a dampening force opposing changes in value, and so while it was volatile compared to real currency, it was nothing like it is today.
Frankly, the fact that the takedown of the Silk Road didn't kill the entire market is still surprising to me. I'm not sure at what point the speculation bubble started, because I had well and proper lost interest at that point, but the idea that people willingly were/are pouring money into an system that has fundamentally broken its own economics is baffling to me. Transactions take too long and cost too much for it to be useful as a means of exchange, and if everybody is going through big exchanges than the anonymity factor doesn't exist either.
Long story short, it was an interesting experiment while it lasted. If we could stop wasting the carbon footprint of a mid-sized country now to prop up an ecosystem of scams and baseless speculation now, that would be great.
So many good points made in your post. It makes me think of what could have been if bitcoin remained a layer of exchange. I had high hopes for bitcoin cash, but even that has had it's own challenges. (although it does work pretty well)
> Instead [of miner fees], participants on the nano network are driven by external incentives, such as helping maintain an instant payment network they can use without fees.
100% agree. I was a big believer in the usefulness of crypto before all the "HODL" and "investment" mentality took over. Its value as a currency is eroded with the dramatic price fluctuations.
Well yeah, the US government couldn't stand having an actual currency to compete with so they relabeled all of crypto as investements. Suddenly all of those rules, tax implications, etc are more important than the tech itself.
We just watched FTX implode and fleece thousands of people, including many of their own investors. Plenty of other exchanges and currencies tanking hard the last few months, too.
These regulations exist for a reason, and it's why actual investments work.
If you think they're a bad idea then I have a bridge in the Bahamas to sell you...
> From looking around the internet I am starting to believe I might be the only person holding crypto strictly because I just happen to think it's neat.
I also think a lot of the distributed systems work and technological achievements are neat.
But I don't have to hold crypto to appreciate it, or even to use it. It's trivially easy to log in to an exchange and buy crypto whenever I might need it to do something.
The concept of holding (or HODLing) isn't related to the underlying technology. It's a speculative investment.
I also hold a token amount of crypto from back when I was playing around with the neatness of it, but it's just that: A token amount. You don't need to invest in it or make the number in your wallet go to an arbitrarily high number to experiment with the technology.
You're not the only one. It's just that's i recognized this "neat" feeling for what it was: the same one I got when I went to Vegas and won actual cash from the games.
I didn't truly know that seductive feeling until then, the feeling that will ruin you.
I didn't like that I liked it.
And that feeling i got LARPing with cryptocurrencies too.
because i don't know you, is that the part that makes you say you think it's neat?
i personally resonate with your last paragraph: i also feel that it's definitely interesting exploring the possibilities of the ideas, with reserved contemplative enthusiasm.
In my haste I guess I didn't make this clear enough, sorry. By "blockchains" I was trying to emphasize the fact in Nano that we are talking about many blockchains as opposed to one main chain. Every account has its own blockchain which all get connected via a DAG that they call a block lattice.
The interesting part of this to me back when I was investing in 2017 was that I previously didn't think it was possible to get instant, feeless transactions on a blockchain due to the fact that transactions on the chain still had to be verified somehow.
There's definitely a lot that's interesting to me in it. It's a tricky programming environment, which I find personally fun, but it's an entirely public global database with stored procedures and custom row level security. Every stored procedure can call others written by anyone and there's a strong direct push towards open interfaces and interoperability.
Unfortunately one of the easiest things to make with it is a new "currency" because it fits so well with the security model.
I’m genuinely curious to hear this from someone who’s clearly more in that world than I am - is anyone at all using Ethereum’s distributed nodes to do calculations for anything that isn’t some sort of abstract financial instrument? I ask because people constantly seem to tout the fact you can build anything with blockchains, and they’ll change the world, but I’ve never seen anything actually useful made with it beyond the dubiously valuable ability to transfer currency around the place.
I'm with you on this. The overfinancialization of this tech bums me out hard. I stay away from conversations where people use words like bearish and bullish or talk about prices and gains and losses. That shit is so boring and uncreative I want to cry.
I like peer to peer tech with no gatekeepers and no intermediaries. I like encryption and the ability to control how my data is used. I don't like the corporate cloud and I don't like gambling.
Yeah, I get where you're coming from. I agree that this technology is really neat. I love the creative computer science.
I think this may be the ultimate driving force behind krypto. It's inspiring. It has poetry and romance. It's weird and intriguing. Those are not pointless things!
The money of course resonates a lot more for most people, which is why all that weirdness has mainly been applied to fleecing suckers.
>> I am starting to believe I might be the only person holding crypto strictly because I just happen to think it's neat.
I'm here with you. Put $100 bucks in last year and have been tinkering here and there. Unfortunately my $100 is now worth $23, but I'm going to hold it and keep tinkering and wait for everything to sort of pan out.
I still see the potential, but am exploring what else I can do with it.
"From looking around the internet I am starting to believe I might be the only person holding crypto strictly because I just happen to think it's neat."
I'm holding crypto because I think it's neat, but I'm also holding it because there's little I can do with it... i.e., lack of general utility, yet.
You're definitely not alone. Despite costing me more thanks to binance's ridiculous "fees", I go out of my way to buy crypto to just to spend on services and charities that accept it - thanks mullvad, gandi*, fsf, and many more! I plan to continue doing this as long as even a single org continues to accept it.
Payments don't need to go through a centralized and unaccountable processor anymore and, given the track records of the likes of visa and paypal, I argue they shouldn't. It's one thing for them to follow the law, but to destroy livelihoods of many people or to deny transferring money when both the sender and the receiver are in agreement for arbitrary subjective reasons is simply unacceptable.
May those who accept crypto continue to prosper.
* I haven't been able to pay gandi yet because they require me to use their weird payments platform, but I'd happily start paying them in crypto once they drop this silly requirement.
Give it a few years, the scammers will move on to greener pastures and the nerds will keep tinkering. I remember people acting the same way about ecommerce in the early 00s.
Not everyone is focused on "number go up". Some teams actually care about making distributed systems that serve communities around the world, and prefer to see people not have to trust centralized middlemen. Blockchains are not the best infrastructure for this, but they're good enough (Polygon Edge for instance), for many applications:
Having said that, blockchains are going to go the way of mainframes and vacuum tubes eventually. Here is the roadmap of what has to happen for Web3 (smart contracts) to go mainstream:
I see a lot of use cases for it. Unfortunately many activists on HN love to comment how useless smart contracts are, while also silently downvoting any comments that disagree with that position.
I think the profit motive really did derail a lot of Web3 -- but also the same can be said for Web2, it's just that VCs were the only ones who could invest (until the JOBS act, at least). So Web2 got stuck in near-monopolies, buying up competition, and extracting rents, while completely dominating our public forums.
It didn't have to be this way. Mark Z was an open source bro who turned down Microsoft's $1M offer in high school, and put his software online for free. Even after he coded facemash and facebook, he was going to build a decentralized, open source file sharing system called Wirehog -- but then Sean Parker and Peter Thiel "put a bullet in that thing"[1]. They killed Mark Z's decentralized visions and turned him from an open source bro who loves hacking things together into a corporate golden boy who loves acqui-hiring competition (WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus[2] etc.) and then trying to turn them into corporate teams, until they bounce when their golden handcuffs vest (founders of those companies).
The people who did this to Zuck were themselves peculiar. Sean Parker himself used to be for open sharing (Napster) but rentseeking corporations in that sphere (RIAA, MPAA) sued and destroyed it. He learned a lesson and started Plaxo, and other VC-backed companies to basically lock up people's data in giant centralized server farms. It was he who told Zuck to basically cut out the decentralized open nonsense. And Peter Thiel with Clarion Capital had a far more radical vision: Competition is for losers! Build a monopoly.[3].
The result in our society is that Big Tech oligopolies have totally captured Web2 and own all our public forums. Elon and Zuck own our largest public forums and messengers. TikTok, WeChat and others have had a meteoric rise but they are even more closely tied with the government of China than FB and Twitter are with the US government. You'd think We the People should have an open source alternative. But HN loves Web2 and hates Web3.
The problem with "serving communities around the world" with radically de-centralized systems is that in order to interact with the real world you need to have trusted parties. And with blockchain, once you have a trusted party, you might as well have them host a database. So you get to choose: either you have your trustless, radically-decentralizable system that only is relevant in its own small ecosystem (like cryptocurrency) or you have trusted parties and thus have no need for the trustless, decentralized system, and would be better served with a federated system of trusted parties (like "real" money).
A lot of the software we need to transact, to self-organize as a community etc. can have its business logic on a smart contract. Voting. Governance. Contests. Investments. Enforce the decision making with rules that no one can violate.
You can run an election like stackexchange sites - trusting that the admins don't mess with the votes - or you can do it with a blockchain. (You don't need blockchains, you can use Merkle trees etc. but the point is, people should be able to check the Merkle branch and know their vote is counted properly)
And that's just one example of many. Just like HTTP, the network is global. You could say in the real world you need magazines, newspapers, radio to get the word out -- or a closed network like AOL or MSN, but then the open, permissionless Web put the lie to all that. It was an open protocol, whether it's Web with HTTP and Email with SMTP etc. Open beats closed. People just need the software and the protocols.
I didn't exactly understand this feature. Usually when I'm opening a file, the chances that my cursor is already where I want it and I can just start typing is next to zero.
Really? When I open a file, nine times out of ten I'm modifying it in some specific location that's definitely not the start of the file, and the first thing I need to do is navigate, which is what Normal mode is for (among other things).
About the only time I fire up an editor and face a blank file is when I'm writing prose, which is definitely not the majority of time I'm spending in Vi/Vim.
I understand that these are people who are willingly coming to play the game and putting up their money but I just don’t feel comfortable intentionally seeking them out to take it from them.
Pretty sure that means I’m simply not cut out to play the game but the theory is definitely interesting.