Spam attack currently happening on @ethstatus. Lots of accounts so you can't just block one to make the spam go away. Will be an interesting (and IMO important!) challenge to see how to reliably defend against this sort of thing.
Categories of solutions I see are:
* Subscribing to other people's blocklists
* Using cryptoeconomics to scale up admins ethresear.ch/t/prediction-m…
* Making it costly to have an account with posting rights (eg. sign with a key that has >100 SNT locked up, or ZK-prove a brightid)
Simple and dumb "implementable in 30 seconds" solution: a mode that just says "view only messages from accounts that have an ENS name". This way attackers can't just easily create thousands of accounts faster than you can block them.
@paulg I wasn't responding to you (I meant it when I say I don't subtweet single examples), just calling out a general pattern on CT I've found insufferable over the past week.
Sigh, I'll explain where I am coming from in more detail.
Basically, there's "a thing" that happens on here where people give out rumors, and many people retweet them, and lots of people start trading on that info...
I felt your tweet yesterday was in that direction, but there were many before, often worse; lots of engagement farmy CT hotshot types
In general, I don't think we should legitimize "trust me" rumor trading. It makes the space ripe for manipulation and may even create volatility.
Anti-malaria, pandemic response, mitigating extreme poverty, life extension research, mitigating existential risks (including AI) and thinking about the multimillion-year future of humanity are all very important and undervalued issues and will continue to be for quite a while.
I think the effective altruism community's most underrated weakness is not having a good theory of effectively allocating *social* capital.
Especially if you're well-known, you're not just giving out money, but also reallocating public attention, inspiring the next generation...
"Be willing to make big crazy bets, and keep accumulating wealth because you tell yourself you'll donate it later" convex-maxxing makes sense if you only think about the money, but it becomes a lot murkier once you take into account social capital.
Should I publicly blab my opinions about crypto regulation more? Feels unfair to let other people get attacked by CT but never actually poke my own head out.
Well actually here's my moderate take on mixers and privacy that I already gave in the @coinbase podcast two months ago:
Another maybe-controversial take of mine is that I don't think we should be enthusiastically pursuing large institutional capital at full speed. I'm actually kinda happy a lot of the ETFs are getting delayed. The ecosystem needs time to mature before we get even more attention.
The big really valuable and necessary thing that ERC-4337 provides for account abstraction is a *decentralized fee market* for user operations going into smart contract wallets.
You should be able to send an op into a public mempool, and if it pays enough fees, reliably expect it to get included. This should NOT depend on ANY:
* Centralized actors
* Reputation systems for op senders
* ETH held in a separate EOA
* External services for account creation
This is the gold standard that the existing public mempool provides. And we absolutely need to provide the same guarantees for smart contract wallets, or else we risk worsening centralization and censorship.
I've seen the full spectrum of opinions from very smart people. I'd say it's not worth overturning our lives over it, but there are plenty of signs that this thing is a tier more dangerous than the cold/flu and we should not ignore it.
The biggest reason to worry about covid is not short-term death rates, but rather long covid. A few links: