There's a big difference between statistical models and prediction markets this US election; and it's a puzzle why this is happening.

Some guesses:
1. Bets on prediction markets correctly incorporate the possibility of heightened election meddling, voter suppression, etc affecting the outcome, but statistical models just assume the voting process is fair

(This is the pro-prediction-market explanation)
2. Prediction markets are difficult to access for statistical/politics experts, they're too small for hedge funds to hire those experts, and the people (esp wealthy people) with the most access to PMs are more optimistic about Trump

(This is the pro-stats-model explanation)
Explanation 3, that "the experts" are incorrigibly dumb and just haven't learned their lessons around detecting surprise pro-Trump voters as happened in 2016, intuitively just feels unlikely to me. Far too many people have talked about this issue.
Note that PMs are way easier to access this year (though maybe not enough people know it?):

catnip.exchange

But seriously, any ideas? @robertwiblin @technocrypto @ESYudkowsky @robinhanson
@NateSilver538 how do your models account for voter suppression?

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More from @VitalikButerin

14 Oct
This is an interesting thread worth reading, though I disagree with the implication that a global "empowered executive" is necessarily the correct solution; it feels like it ignores why people want *decentralized orgs* and not just *better orgs*. I think it's context-dependent...
One important issue is that people often want decentralization precisely because they want a system that has strong resistance to changing in controversial ways. "Empowered executives" are a perfect tool to circumvent that, so they could be counterproductive to that end...
There are different kinds of governance problems. Sometimes, the thing being governed is *meant to be* agile, other times it's meant to be a quiet quasi-automaton, more like a court than a legislature. Eg. quadratic funding is more like the latter than the former.
Read 6 tweets
5 Oct
A quick recap of the short and medium term of Ethereum scaling.

TLDR:

1. Ultra-high scaling with sharding + rollups will be possible *in phase 1*
2. Sharding is NOT "cancelled"
3. Get on a rollup asap; you get 100x scaling even without eth2
The original ETH2 roadmap was created with 3 phases:

0. PoS (this is the one that's coming very soon)
1. Sharding of data, but not of computation (that is, the sharded chain will *include* ~2 MB/sec of data, but it will just be dumb data blobs, not txs)
2. Sharded tx processing
Currently, we have ~15-45 TPS. Rollups offer a ~100x increase in throughput. Sharding offers a ~64x increase. These two stack multiplicatively; rollups *on top of* sharding offer a ~6400x (!!) increase in throughput.
Read 6 tweets
8 Sep
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. Image
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.
Read 4 tweets
2 Sep
A quick thread on supply and demand economics, and why certain "naive" solutions to high gas prices won't work.
First of all, why is the gasprice currently 465 gwei? Why isn't it 1000 gwei, or 100 gwei?

The reason is: 465 gwei happens to be the current level at which demand (the number of transactions people are willing to send) equals supply (12.5 million gas of tx space in each block).
Suppose we were in a world identical to today, but where everyone was sending transactions with 100 gwei. At the 100 gwei level, everyone who would be sending txs today would still be sending txs, but there would also be many more who are willing to send at 100, but not at 465.
Read 18 tweets
30 Aug
I actually really love this visualization of ethereum:

txstreet.com

Both because it's memorizing, but also because there's something poignant about the metaphor of ethereum as a city.
It's a bustling place where lots of things are happening, with lots of corners to explore, most of which you don't yet know about! Just lots of people quietly (and sometimes loudly) using the platform and the benefits that it provides to do their own thing.
Additionally, each individual part is voluntary. If you do not like the yield farming virtual reality game, you do not have to play! You're perfectly free to even steer clear of the "dark forest" of complex financial contraptions entirely.
Read 6 tweets
15 Aug
It's interesting how in the last few weeks I've argued with both pro-BTC *and* anti-BTC people who think BTC will utterly cripple nation state funding (pro-BTC ppl wanting to defund the militaries), while I disagree with both: I just don't think it will have that kind of effect.
My theory is more moderate. Money printing is only a small portion of governments' budgets, and furthermore it's very naive to think that if govts were forced to shrink their revenue by 10-20% it's the militaries that go first.
And there's plenty that governments can effectively tax even in a hypothetical extreme world of zero financial surveillance; property, physical sales, transactions in large organizations, natural resources, lots of urban anti-congestion regs can be turned into Pigovian taxes...
Read 5 tweets

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