This has demonstrated itself to be very unlikely to happen in large blockchains such as ETH because of cryptoeconomics - ie game theory 101 - if you do a 51% attack on a blockchain you're actually devaluing the entire chain.
It's like robbing a bank where if you take enough money you cause hyperinflation.
So it appears to become less common over time as the chain gains enormous amounts of value. Proof of Stake will also lead to this sort of attack being less likely, I'd think, since it's virtually impossible for a single individual to get 51% of a well-distributed token.
It's telling that the attack here listed happened in BSV, a sort of failed fork of BTC with relatively low adoption.
Proof-of-work consensus mechanism makes sure, as the blockchain grows, transactions become MORE expensive. Discarding PoW in favour of PoS or DPoS just makes 51% attack easier. It's far easier to control 51% of coins than to control 51% of CPU power. We are not talking about single individual but a nation state or a consortium that can control the network. They may not do it for hacking it, but to control it and enrich themselves. Essentially centralizing the token which was supposed to be decentralized and remove the middleman.
The point is that it can be highly unlikely but also within the realm of all possibilities. And let's not forget the joy someone might get from wiping out the crypto bourgeoise.
Aah your article is ok but you realise everything you want could be built - most likely by yourself - using a fork from any popular crypto token? Your dreams are in your reach.
That's the beauty of open-source blockchain. You want to fork? fork.
Not truly my dream, I just shared as I found it interesting. Forking is easy, the hard thing is to bring projects to life and implement new features. And I do think that some such decentralized projects are often under the control from some actor even if it is not clear.
Many projects are in control of some actor, but decentralization is all about diffusion of responsibility.
Right now tens of thousands of people voted on ALGO's governance trough their wallets on their phones. When did you ever get that chance for FB? For Google? Instagram?
Never. The diffusion is real, even if it's imperfect.
From experience DeepMind is the #1 goal for any AI/ML person anywhere in Europe. I know people don’t necessarily want to be googlers, but Deepmind ? Yes. If you’re brilliant in the field where else would you work? OpenAI is now completely different from where it started.
It’s also heavily based in London and I know they absorb basically all the top Europe folks who want to stay close to home. Not everyone wants to go to the US.
Demis is also a bit of a legend and I know DeepMind people teach/recruit at UCL his old university. I assume they do so everywhere in the UK but London is an easy talent pool to make and recruit talent for them. So they have a full integrated vertical stack for talent.
Afaik it’s run completely independently from London, by the original founder. Distance from the mothership + founder in charge + separate goals = independence and results
Renaissance Technologies, Jim Simons and Bob Mercer’s fund solved the market with ML techniques ages ago. Can’t remember off the tip off my head but they have consistent 60% annual returns which is unheard of. There’s a great book about it - The Man who Solved the Market
Rentech has astounding success with one of their strategies, but it's extremely capacity constrained compared to what really good global macroeconomic forecasts would provide.
Not even approximations - they use a bunch of assumptions, many of which don’t hold up over time, so they then proceed to invent new ones as to say “well these assumptions are obviously better” even though they will inevitably be falsified because they share the same conceptual origin error.
Interesting ideas - any place one could learn more on how to think like this? Ie books or ? Basically How did you manage to get it to this simple statement, which seems intuitively correct when so much macro economics I’ve tried to read seem like obvious nonsense
Start from first principles and look at the economic data directly (understanding game theory is a crucial piece of this). Make sure to ignore the narratives as these tend to obscure the understanding of the fundamentals (since most people pushing various narratives about the market are driven by vested interests rather than educational interests).
Seriously though, I am actually in the process of writing a book/blog about this sort of thing (and a whole lot more). In the meantime, you can check out my old blog. See my profile for a link. When the new blog launches I'll post an announcement on the old one, so subscribe there if you want to be notified.
It already helps A LOT if you decouple your thinking from "money". If you realize that "stuff" (tangible but also tangible) is not directly impacted, and that a crash that "destroys billons of wealth" in fact does no such thing, you can start looking at the world sans "money". You will get a much better grip on reality. Of course financials impact stuff - but why? It's all the ideas and assumptions in our heads - and they can change. In fact, they changed a lot over time, and the meaning of "money" is many things.
The second big thing is to understand that ideas for individuals (firms or people), for example "costs are bad because I lose something", have a completely different meaning for the economy. Because cost is income. Cutting costs may make sense for a company, but if you cut costs in the economy people lose jobs. You will actually have to trouble yourself and look away from the money to see what the flow of money actually achieves in the real world to make a judgement. Just looking at the money is meaningless.
The third big thing is about "pensions". While putting back money into some account makes sense individually, again it has no meaning for the economy. Because "saving money" has no useful meaning on the economy scale. Everything is produced and consumed NOW. Nobody puts back stuff into warehouses to be used decades later for the retired, especially not services. So relax when there is talk about "pension crisis" on an economic scale. Sure, who gets what is important and for any one individual the financial stuff really matters because they are bound into the system, but for the economy all that matters is what people in the future will produce.
Money "saved" for pensions does not send any products or services into the future, nor is it needed for "investment" (our finance system does not need that, money can be and is created on demand for debt). It sends information into the future, which future generations may or may not use to determine how much of what they produce then they will give to you (in retirement). However, what is available overall and what the then-society will be willing to use for pensions will be up to them. It does not matter one bit (overall!) what irrelevant virtual numbers are written in some "accounts".
Another thing is debt: For an individual it's bad unless it's debt used to produce cash flow. For an economy - it does not matter (of course the details matter, if done bad it can reduce confidence and have a big bad ripple impact). "Debt is money" is not just some phrase. Debt creates money (yes yes money is very complex - much like a quantum particle, it depends on what you look at and context). The best simple example I saw was a story where a kid wrote a promise to mow a lawn (any lawn), and that promise was handed around in the neighborhood to "pay" for neighborhood favor things. If the debt - having to mow the lawn - was actually repaid by the kid this piece of "currency" would just be gone.
I'll leave it up to the reader to think about what "saving" on the economic scale really achieves, it's a fun little exercise. Again it works best if you ignore "money", or treat is as secondary - looking at its effects instead of at it.
TL;DR I recommend not going too technical. The deeper you look the less you see of the big picture. Just start thinking about stuff - ignoring money completely or see it as the completely virtual made-up control-carrot that it is - while doing walks in the park or forest.
Debt is a very specific word. Yes you can get capital by going into debt. But just "capital" can also mean it was yours to begin with. Debt means you created an obligation to somebody else, which is additional information. You have X amount of money - capital - but there is a difference if you get it by borrowing or if it was already yours.
what i meant was, that if people dont use debt as a form of capital (investment in something to get a larger return) then it is basically bad as you say because you will be under water when paying the interest..
basically, people who go into debt need to think like a capitalist, and invest it in something (thier skills, a car to get a better job somewhere, etc)
The UK upper class is remarkably educated and unintelligent in my opinion. You meet lots of people in the UK in some strata of society who went to Oxford yet have never really been taught how to think.
UK research also appears to have largely fallen behind world leaders - see mRNA research coming from Germany/US yet the UK having no native knowledgebase of mRNA I know of and producing one of the weakest of the COVID vaccines.
It's like robbing a bank where if you take enough money you cause hyperinflation.
So it appears to become less common over time as the chain gains enormous amounts of value. Proof of Stake will also lead to this sort of attack being less likely, I'd think, since it's virtually impossible for a single individual to get 51% of a well-distributed token.
It's telling that the attack here listed happened in BSV, a sort of failed fork of BTC with relatively low adoption.