20191111 Eric Weinstein Interviewing Vitalik Buterin

Information sources recomended:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOVAbKKSH10&list=PLqWTdaOOOVSyZdR6y9Io8RDLe9WmlT8YR&index=3&t=0sBlockchain Technology Explained (2 Hour Course) @Coding TechAn educational video about blockchainhttps://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/29028693以太坊(Ethereum)创世揭秘@李明阳

Economics

Blockchain

Public Good

My opinion:Public Good are Dimensions or Directions that align with the need, or Direction, of a number of people. As for how to define the number, there might be something to do with Voting System of this society.I'd like to point out that Public Good and Voting System bith are kind of Spectrum, and Voting System is kind like Weight Matrix in Machine Learning, except that it is us rather than a mechine that set this Weight Matrix up from the very begining and keep revising the Weight Matrix over time. The structure, or I would say, Numbers, within this Weight Matrix define the Voting System.The society use this Weight Matrix to process data within the society. Maybe, with the Volume of data varying from 0 to infinite, there might be diffrent suitable Weight Matrices, or I would say, Spectrum Of Weight Matrices. And Democracy is just part of this Spectrum.Please forgive me if I used the wrong terminology. This is something still needs lots of honing.

Public Good Challange

Opensource communities acutely suffer from Public Good Challange

Opensource software, which is a very public good, often being undermaintained, like CloudFlare a couple years ago[?]

Cryptocurrency provides a funding mechanism

Massively accelerated the development of cryptocurrencies, your knowledge improves[?], peer-to-peer networking

On the other hand, also give rise to Speculation, and in many cases, fraud.

Attributes

Nonexcludibility

Inexhaustibility

Two layers of scale

Army for instance

In large-scale context: Public Bad

In small-scale context: Public Good

Good or Bad?

Good: people can cooperate on a large scale

Bad: we don't yet have good tools for handdling it.
Specifically, tools simutaneously avoid both Not Giving Good Results and Being Centralized In Dictatorship

Property Right is a social technology

for instance, Concepts or Norms mapping physical subjects to people

Property Right helps to make Private Good Economy tractable

We can consider technologies making Public Good Economy tractable

This is where Vitalik's interest in Radical Exchange comes in, about things like movements about Harberger Taxes and Quadratic Voting started by Glen Weyl

The core of those technologies: to create structures of norms and incentives that try to have the best properties we can get from the markets but do so without the existing world economically breaking down.
We know that if the existing property right systems do it once, you enter a world that everything you built just inherently affects millions of people.

Quadratic Voting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_votingA variant of Cumulative voting, which is one-person-one vote, in the class of Cardinal voting. Cardinal Methods (based on cardinal utility) and Ordinal Methods (based on ordinal preferences, also called ranked voting) are two main categories of modern voting systems, along with Plurality Voting.https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/glossary/cardinal-utility/Cardinal utility: giving different choices a specific utility value, which enables consumers to rank the magnitude of how much they prefer one good to another.Ordinal utility: ranking choices by order of preference, which doesn't try to give the magnitude of how much a consumer prefers a good.

Harberger Taxes

Aim: To strike a balance between pure private ownership & total commons ownership in order to increase general welfare of society Concept I: Citizens value their own property and pay tax on that value. A self-assessed taxConcept II: At any point in time, anyone else can buy the property from you at that price, forcing a sale.

....

Ehereum an be a test bed net for decentralized governance and decentralized public good funding infrustructure

Quadratic Funding results are pretty reasonnable

Two Voting Systems: One Dollar One Vote and One Person One Vote

Liberal Democracy does this horrible thing that these two are treated as opposite poles

Actually, (maybe in Market Democracy[?]), everything is a spectrum

Approximation

There will never be a perfect approximation

Cryptocurrency can not solve all the problems

Just find some good ones that work reasonably and make progress for us

Governance

Definition

The traditional definition is odd, which is Violence Monoply

Vitalik Buterin recovers the concept of Governance from Monoplying Violence

Cryptocurrency and Smart Contract

Deriviation

Math

Math and Technology is just the sustrate, maybe like the military, including the police force, which keeps the country together. SUBSTRATE IS NOT THE COUNTRY, COUNTRY IS THE COMMUNITY.

Social Consensus

Libertarian

Two of all kinds of Libertarian

leave-me-alone type

conquer-the-world type

Virtual Country

Vitalik Buterin can be treated as creating a rival Virtual Country

Legal System

Protocols

Smart Contracts

There are lots of virtual countries
You do think they are virtual countries
Well, all models are bullshit, but some are useful

Both Vitalik Buterin and Eric Weinstein said that blockchain should be an Intermediate State and should not be the permanent version of decentralized computing

What you are doing is porting Conservation Laws from the Physical Layer to the Logical Layer

reflects very deeply enough Austarian Economics Libertarian origins from between 2009 and 2013 creating digital gold

The apps coming now are basically financial, in part because the existing financial system is so ready and waiting there to be disrupted

Eric Weinstein is such an amazing host! This is the most in-depth interview I've ever seen about blockchain. Vitalik Buterin is so cool!

Please forgive me for my misusing of concepts and terminology. I've got so much to learn and to sort out, including my English.

Overall Opinion:

Blockchain and cryptocurrency are more like tools, which help to decentralize. The essence of them might be the Accuracy Of Information, which makes it easier to achieve collaboration, and then Entropy Reduction.[correct me if I'm wrong] Entropy Reduction might be very closely related to Accuracy Of Information according to the equation that Entropy is the natural logarithm of the number of Microstates multiplied by the Boltzmann constant.

About Accuracy Of Information, there might be two aspects of blockchain and cryptocurrency: temper proofness and capability to collect microvalues[or so].

About the relationship between decentralization and information and entropy reduction, with the development of a system, say, a society, the infomation within this system will eventually go beyond control if the society sticks to the upside-down mechanism thus result in chaos. The reason for this might be that the diversity of this society within the information can not be processed in the old way, i.e. the upside-down way. Self-governance (or something else I should call this) is unavoidable, or maybe, there might be a proper mechanism that upside-down approach and bottom-up approach can work together properly.

This might be explained by matrix in linear algebra, that is, the dimension of governance and institution is always less than the dimension of the whole system.

Opinion about Public Good:

Public Good are Dimensions or Directions that align with the need, or Direction, of a number of people. As for how to define the number, there might be something to do with Voting System of this society.

I'd like to point out that Public Good and Voting System bith are kind of Spectrum, and Voting System is kind like Weight Matrix in Machine Learning, except that it is us rather than a mechine that set this Weight Matrix up from the very begining and keep revising the Weight Matrix over time. The structure, or I would say, Numbers, within this Weight Matrix define the Voting System.

The society use this Weight Matrix to process data within the society. Maybe, with the Volume of data varying from 0 to infinite, there might be diffrent suitable Weight Matrices, or I would say, Spectrum Of Weight Matrices. And Democracy is just part of this Spectrum.

I learned a little bit from the Information Theory, and according to the Shannon Theory of Information Theory, there is some kind of boundary of data processing. This might be somthing worthy of concern in the future.

If there is anything inappropriate in this mindmap, please let me know, and I'll revise or stop sharing the link.

cullleglee@gmail.com
@CulllegLee on Twitter

Subtopic

Markets

Eric Weinstein points out that Vitalik Buterin's adult life has post the crash, thus he doesn't have the association with markets when they were claimed to be working well.

3 tribes about Markets

tribes saying markets are great

tribes saying markets are bad and we should move to more like political mechnisms

zeitgeist in the cryptocurrency space: markets are great, but the things existed and exists aren't markets

Efficiency of the existing Markets needs a dramatic improvement

Eric Weinstein says that he has grown up in a 50-Year Bubble

the Silent Generation and then the Boomers presided over this 50-Year Bubble

They saw the rise and fall of National Socialism and the catastrophic devastation capable of the Nuclear bomb. When the Silent Generation began coming of age after World War II, they were faced with a devastated social order within which they would spend their early adulthood and a new enemy in Communism via the betrayal of post-war agreements and rise of the Soviet Union. Unlike the previous generation whom had fought for “changing the system,” the Silent Generation were about “working within the system.” They did this by keeping their heads down and working hard, thus earning themselves the "Silent" label. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Generation

those people didn't have the ability to figure out sufficient innovation to take over from the previous innovative system

that the world of human expertise has been almost contaminated by Special Pleading and Political Economy

so that many of us who don't have a particularly Austrian or Libertarian bent are just sick to death. The doctors/lawyers/accountants/extraction companies are lying.

Reason: Growth ran out and our whole society is predicated on a need for ecnomic growth.

Out-Of-Control Probability (of this new app or rules or protocols)

You may star a process by which you write down rules. But once those rules are written down, you may discover all unintended properties of that rule set.

Before we get to Computer Protocols, there're sort of legal and structural protocols that we impose upon ourselves in the form of Goverment and Markets that are subordinate to Government.

Computer Protocols

The Initial coin offering boom in 2017 and 2018

My Opinion:

Accuracy Of Information may be a fundamental value in this world, or the very concept of value is acrually Accuracy Of Information, the term "value" is a rather ambiguous concept.[I personally prefer to use the word "vectors"]

Accuracy Of Information is the precondition of a more elaborated Data Processing Mechanism, i.e. the system of society.

Allacation of resource can not be complished without information. Plan is a kind of information which can be recorded be individuals or groups. And there might be deviation between Plan and Result. However, both Plan and Result belong to a general concept of Information which can spread out along the dimension of Time or so.

Money/Bonds/Debts and Prediction Of Economic Growth or so can also be regarded as Information, and deviation of such Information between diffrent timepoints may occur because of incapability of humanbeing or fraud or just beyond the limitation of the system, like against this nature.[connected with Credit]

Committed Crime

2 kinds of Voilence in Committed Crime

Violence is a Contract Enforcement Mechanism, to run illegal businesses for which there is a demand

Violence is the product, Extortion for instance

any worry about indroducing a parralel (to Violence) structure both in the form of currency and contracts (smart contracts) while the technology nowadays is still clunky?

if you create a group that goes fundamentally against the vast majority, it will be hard to find volunteers for that kind of thing

There is definetely a barrier between things are edgy versus things are so far over the edge. Even with Smart Contract and so, it is still hard to coordinate those structures.

The blockchains' inability to directly read facts about the real world could be a saving grace.

Things that are very perceptable to us may be surprisingly difficult for computers to understand.[Digitalization and Machine Learning? ]

My Opinion: Letting the computers know what the "real world" is can be pretty tricky, cuz that may be just from the perspective of human-being, or the majority of human being or so. These are mostly very Subjective values or judgments or vectors[I personally prefer to use the term "vectors"], or the standards can not be rigid.

As long as a Third-Party Source is used to deal with the interface between the digital world and the "real world", this smart contract or application is no longer fully Trustless.

ELI5: What do we mean by “blockchains are trustless”?

https://medium.com/@HenriKoppen/i-think-you-are-overstretching-what-a-blockchain-is-and-the-models-in-the-pictures-are-highly-4cda8529be6bBe aware of this comment by Henri Koppen:I think you are overstretching what a blockchain is and the models in the pictures are highly inaccurate. Never is there a transaction of $10 in one direction, it only applies when you give money to a beggar. In all other cases something must flow back which is very relevant in described scenarios.I don’t think a blockchain is what you think it is. A blockchain is a way to add data to a dataset in a immutable way. You can trust the data is immutable because when you change something it will break the chain in a verifiable way. It is that way because of some mathematical one-way functions.Your piece about trust and transactions is built upon a blockchain. These are extra models built upon a blockchain baseline.We know all models are wrong and some maybe useful.I really like your style of thinking and writing, so apologies if I am a bit rude. But let’s be careful to be precise.When we speak about trust-less it’s the same as when we talk about server-less. Server-less doesn’t mean there are no servers involved.Just wanted to add this nuance.

A net reduction of harm because you replace violence with math[?]

Accessibility of information about the technology is a precondition for even the decentralization of the space

My Opinion:
Is it just about technology? Or the fundamental reason is about Accuracy Of Information, and technology is a tool to achieve this.

Political Economy

Solution: Removing the human ability to act badly

My Opinion:
Accuracy Of Information underpins more advanced systems, and it can be carried out only in nonhuman ways.

Wikipedia

2 fields Wikipedia can't explain to normal human being: Theorematical Maths and Physics

Incident about leadership of Etherium[?] in 2016

Either allowed to follow the rules that have been previously specified

Or could inject a certain amount of Human Intervention

A portion of the community did not download the upgrade and kept running the old chain thus giving birth to the Eherium Classic.

Eric Weinstein: people attached to ideologies then come to understand why the simplistic version of that ideology can't work in this warm humman system. [He calls the action and procedure the Etherium community taken as being "warm".]

My Opinion:

The outcome of this incident may be regarded as taking human intervention with public consent, and also with the "help" of a vital child-contract-delay mechanism.

I would call this as a respect to the Accuracy Of Information which these actions should be handled very cautiously and, most importantly, publicly, like a vote. So in some sense, there might not be this Absolute Objective.

What's more, there are circumstances that libertarians have to come up with some kind of governance, which may be called self-governance since it's more bottom-up, to deal with some problem. Here I'd like to introduce the idea I learned from Michael J. Sandel
, that says freedom is "I will my own law".[https://online-learning.harvard.edu/course/justice]

Absolute Objectiveness is neither the goal nor realistic. Vitalik Buterin said, "it depends on which version of the dream you subscribe to ... have simplistic notion of digital property rights as the only thing that governs behavior, then that's something that like you can try for but you're not going to succeed".