DeFi

You may have witnessed feedback in a concert or when your speaker output in a live chat feeds back into your microphone input. A high pitched noise slowly gets louder, then raises exponentially until someone pulls the plug and suddenly a breakdown of signal strength occurs.

You have experienced a bubble.

Being a designer of digital filters, I want to raise awareness of how destructive these bubbles may be to democracy and diversity of opinions - contributing to instability and irrationality.

Stockmarkets, search ranking algos, facebook likes, reddit/mastodon upvoting, opinion polls, "news" in general - all have their respective feedback channels built in.

Feedback is established when past voting results are visible to those voting in the future.

This may seem benign. It is not. It creates a exponential response. It risks getting chaotic and tends toward bifurcations/splitting. The complexity of not one but many such feedback channels will be explored next.

For a short time period ~40% of bitcoin miners and 46% of ETH validators consored tx at the blockchain level preemtively. The authors point out that had 50% of nodes censored (permanently), the OFAC attack would have been successful. [1]

It seems Monero will not be included in the OFAC list - are there legal reasons? Whats your take? Will feds try to take over mining?

[1] Blockchain Censorship pdf (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.18545) The academics seem to advice govts to attack the consensus mechanism directly, and point to how successful this was in the case of TornadoCash and Blender.io. The presentation of data is bent toward this argument IMHO.

The combination of a strong PoW basis with p2p overlays will power DEXes, atomic swaps and many other applications.

I read the src code of some projects last week and my #1 is... tada ... OXEN. A fork of monero. Has a working app (Session). Dev does not re-use questionable code and writes C++.

Overlay Networks will have to compromise in many areas. The community may be curious and encourage experiments, so as not to stifle innovation.

Introduction to p2p design:

[1] https://cse.engineering.nyu.edu/~ross/papers/UnderstandingKaZaA.pdf (excellent black box analysis, still relevant)

[2] https://libp2p.io/ (the new standard, i.e. IPFS)

[3] Polygon Miden (shift to private accounts)

p2p overlay is used loosely here, meaning only a subset of the network forwards and stores messages and for a limited period of time. Both peers had to be online historically. This strong p2p proposal is softened in most designs today. Peers do run apps such as a messenger or a swap protocol.

The easiest way to check out Oxen is to https://getsession.org/download

If you want social change you have to speak the language Wall St. understands. Because thats where the power is. Perfectly legal, you will break a gentelman’s agreement when shorting the Dallor and thats exactly why the Liquity protocol gets attacked right now.

1.) Learn to master a DeFi protocoll and manage a trove. Gravita on Arbitrum for beginners. Look for the debt-in-front vs. total-minted ratio and keep the ratio @ ~ 50% so you dont get redeemed.

2.) Take out a Dallor dominated loan against ETH, buy more ETH with the loan - thats your short position.

3.) You’ll pay 0% interest for a life time.

4.) To spend your loan use XMR.

BTW, thats what the super rich are doing, a strategy called buy-borrow-die. Correctamundo, the rich are short on fiat thereby profiting from inflation. Now you can do it, too, and you’ll pay no taxes - legally.

If enough people are doing this it will have a psychological effect - and eventually a panic will ensue, because this racket (legacy system) is built on a house of cards. This is what we want to speed up things when the alternative system is ready to use. We are not there quite yet.