Bitcoin discussion and news

[Storm Fox]

In related news: I'm rich!

View attachment 368135

That's 1444.75 GBP, how could I possibly miss out?

I hate to tell you NoXion but I think this might by one of those scam things that never happen in Crypto as there are all such honourable chaps and chapesses.

 

[StakerOne]

But if it's anonymous then how would anyone know? If it's not anonymous then the governance can be discriminatory. Maybe not to on this project but on others.

You don't need to know who two people are to know they are the same person.

 

[Storm Fox]

You don't need to know who two people are to know they are the same person.

How?
Buying a domain name is cheap. About a tenner a year. I own two, they are homophones of each other. I mainly use it to have a website. But if you wanted to unduly influence some crypto project then the investment would be worth it. That and using a VPN to disguise your real location noting which email address uses with vpn service and using a Virtual Machine with a randomised MAC address and you'll be pretty much untraceable. Whois records are routinely obfuscated. But with some greed driven crypto project you'll laughing all the way to Tornado Cash.

So how are the project founders going to check for this? It's either anonymous and open to fraud from sock puppetting or not anonymous and open to discrimination and undue and unregulated influence from the project founders.

 

[q_w_e_r_t_y]

But if it's anonymous then how would anyone know? If it's not anonymous then the governance can be discriminatory. Maybe not to on this project but on others.

Sybil detection. There are various methods.
There is criticism over how Arbitrum did the sybil detection in this case, but it is not that difficult to identify clustering unless people take serious (expensive) privacy measures

There was talk of governance tokens, so I thought those tokens were related to the governance of the chain
I may have misunderstood. Luckily it can be explained to a four year old so with a little luck I should be OK with the explanation.

ETA. I replied to your quote of my post without catching up on the rest of the thread and your explanation. Useless those 4 year old you speak of are the children of hyper-intelligent pan-dimentional beings with a liking for Brockian Ultra Cricket. Then I think you are out of luck getting a four year old to understand.

Did you read the bit where I explained that it was similar to getting a four year old to use a £1 coin to buy something, but that didnt mean that they were able to do options trading on derivaties futures? Optimistic roll-ups are not rocket science, but they do require a basic understanding of both crypto in general and ethereum architecture in particular.

Okay, so the more money people have the bigger say they have on the Arbitrum Foundation if I am following correctly?

No, you are not.

In the beginning there was Offchain Labs, a company established in 2018 to research optimistic rollups. In 2021, they raised $120m in seed funding from venture capitalists to build an optimistic rollup and established the Arbitrum Foundation, a not for profit subsiduary of Offchain Labs to oversee the development and governance of Arbitrum, the OR that they were building and appointed the directors.

The Arbitrum Foundation has now taken governance away from Offchain Labs and offered governance rights to approx 625k people that it believes can collectively govern the platform better than a subsiduary foundation of a company. Some of these people have sold their governance rights.

Nansen.ai has a pretty good write up on it if you'd like to know more

"All for One and One for All" - An on-chain distribution model for the Arbitrum community

Nansen aided in the development of the Arbitrum airdrop distribution, which is supported by on-chain data analyses facilitated by Nansen Query.

www.nansen.ai

Surely this is not a positive for the ones who feel Crypto offers a more equal world, it sounds just like the Fiat world. No idea if I've really understood what you've said.

Maybes do a bit of research first next time to understand first rather than starting from the premise crypto is bad, therefore a bad thing that I can think of happening in crypto must be the case?

 

[q_w_e_r_t_y]

How?
Buying a domain name is cheap. About a tenner a year. I own two, they are homophones of each other. I mainly use it to have a website. But if you wanted to unduly influence some crypto project then the investment would be worth it. That and using a VPN to disguise your real location noting which email address uses with vpn service and using a Virtual Machine with a randomised MAC address and you'll be pretty much untraceable. Whois records are routinely obfuscated. But with some greed driven crypto project you'll laughing all the way to Tornado Cash.

Literally none of this is relevant in any way.
It is based on on-chain behaviour.

So how are the project founders going to check for this? It's either anonymous and open to fraud from sock puppetting or not anonymous and open to discrimination and undue and unregulated influence from the project founders.

Here are the details of the sybil detections methods used

GitHub - ArbitrumFoundation/sybil-detection

Contribute to ArbitrumFoundation/sybil-detection development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

 

[BristolEcho]

Sybil detection. There are various methods.
There is criticism over how Arbitrum did the sybil detection in this case, but it is not that difficult to identify clustering unless people take serious (expensive) privacy measures

Did you read the bit where I explained that it was similar to getting a four year old to use a £1 coin to buy something, but that didnt mean that they were able to do options trading on derivaties futures? Optimistic roll-ups are not rocket science, but they do require a basic understanding of both crypto in general and ethereum architecture in particular.

No, you are not.

In the beginning there was Offchain Labs, a company established in 2018 to research optimistic rollups. In 2021, they raised $120m in seed funding from venture capitalists to build an optimistic rollup and established the Arbitrum Foundation, a not for profit subsiduary of Offchain Labs to oversee the development and governance of Arbitrum, the OR that they were building and appointed the directors.

The Arbitrum Foundation has now taken governance away from Offchain Labs and offered governance rights to approx 625k people that it believes can collectively govern the platform better than a subsiduary foundation of a company. Some of these people have sold their governance rights.

Nansen.ai has a pretty good write up on it if you'd like to know more

"All for One and One for All" - An on-chain distribution model for the Arbitrum community

Nansen aided in the development of the Arbitrum airdrop distribution, which is supported by on-chain data analyses facilitated by Nansen Query.

www.nansen.ai

Maybes do a bit of research first next time to understand first rather than starting from the premise crypto is bad, therefore a bad thing that I can think of happening in crypto must be the case?

I was asking you to explain as you are posting on this thread. If you look through my post history you will see I used to be interested in Crypto, and so it's not as of I'm simply closed minded - I've held some and found some of it fun to learn about, but I see it very differently from you now and even though I follow a few pages I don't really read much. I admit a lot of it goes over my head.

How did The Arbitrum Foundation take control away from Offchain labs? Did they just hand it over?

 

[Storm Fox]

Literally none of this is relevant in any way.
It is based on on-chain behaviour.

Here are the details of the sybil detections methods used

GitHub - ArbitrumFoundation/sybil-detection

Contribute to ArbitrumFoundation/sybil-detection development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

From github

We identify Sybil clusters based on known patterns, here are some examples

• Addresses transferring funds in a cluster of more than 20 addresses
• Addresses that are funded from the same source
• Addresses with similar activity

So if you trying the first two you don't use the first two or allow members of your sockpuppet/sybil group to communicate. As for the third one, people are going to be denied access, who genuinely should have it. But with no regulation for the project leaders to do anything about.

There is practically nothing crypto can offer that isn't a worse replacement for what we have now.

 

[q_w_e_r_t_y]

I was asking you to explain as you are posting on this thread. If you look through my post history you will see I used to be interested in Crypto, and so it's not as of I'm simply closed minded - I've held some and found some of it fun to learn about, but I see it very differently from you now and even though I follow a few pages I don't really read much. I admit a lot of it goes over my head.

How did The Arbitrum Foundation take control away from Offchain labs? Did they just hand it over?

Sorry, my response was a bit snippy.
Yes, basically, when offchain labs set up the Arbitrum foundation, the intention was always to DAOify it once it had been bootstrapped. This is a pretty common model in large scale Web3 development where a company will incubate, then hand over control to a foundation, who then builds the DAO.
The announcement is here.

This is the full distribution, you will see that the initial investors who provided the seed capital receive 17.5 and the team and advisors (ie Offchain Labs + advisors) have 27%, with 11% distributed to users, 1% distributed to partner DAOs and 43% retained in the treasury.

 

[Rob Ray]

So to be clear, 44.47% of the controlling interest goes to senior management and the investors, 11.62% goes mostly to a handful of whales who go in hard early on, and 42.7% is in the Treasury, presumably unused, essentially meaning 80% odd of the active vote (ie. 100% of the power) is held by or will be distributed by management?

With the remainder being a sop to the kind of dummy who thinks the very act of "a vote" immediately carries with it totemic value, or who's happy enough just to get a few quid in the bank without thinking too hard about the implications?

Seems about right from what I've seen of DAOs in practice. Absolute travesty of the words "decentralised" and "autonomous" this shit.

 

[q_w_e_r_t_y]

From github

So if you trying the first two you don't use the first two or allow members of your sockpuppet/sybil group to communicate.

That would mean initial funding for gas fees from a privacy enhanced proxy wallet for each wallet that you were using. Thats expensive - not prohibitively so, but given that the criteria for airdrop eligability, the max/min value of the airdrop and the token price are all unknown you would be gambling a fair amount of time and money.

As for the third one, people are going to be denied access, who genuinely should have it.

Sybil detection isnt an exact science. There may be such people, but tbh, it would be a very odd coincidence.

But with no regulation for the project leaders to do anything about.

The Arbitrum foundation handed off the distribution design incl sybil detection to Nansen precisely so that they could not influence it - this was intentional.

There is practically nothing crypto can offer that isn't a worse replacement for what we have now.

Cos the fiat system is so great it cant be beaten?

 

[q_w_e_r_t_y]

So to be clear, 44.47% of the controlling interest goes to senior management and the investors, 11.62% goes mostly to a handful of whales who go in hard early on, and 42.7% is in the Treasury, presumably unused, essentially meaning 80% odd of the active vote (ie. 100% of the power) is held by or will be distributed by management?

Seems about right from what I've seen of DAOs in practice. Absolute travesty of the words "decentralised" and "autonomous" this shit.

27% goes to team - Arbitrum foundation has a couple of hundred staff.
17.5% goes to investors - that will include those who put up the $120m in the first place, Offchain Labs itself and I believe the Ethereum Foundation also received some.
The full list of holders with their respective holdings can be viewed on arbiscan

Arbitrum (ARB) Token Tracker | Arbiscan

Arbitrum (ARB) Token Tracker on Arbiscan shows the price of the Token $1.26, total supply 10,000,000,000, number of holders 252,788 and updated information of the token. The token tracker page also shows the analytics and historical data.

arbiscan.io

Arbitrum also works on a delegated voting system. You can (of course) delegate to yourself, however most people will delegate to a protocol politician, so while people can change delegator, the actual voting power tends to be in the hands of identified people with public profiles and voting track records.

 

[Storm Fox]

That would mean initial funding for gas fees from a privacy enhanced proxy wallet for each wallet that you were using. Thats expensive - not prohibitively so, but given that the criteria for airdrop eligability, the max/min value of the airdrop and the token price are all unknown you would be gambling a fair amount of time and money.

Sybil detection isnt an exact science. There may be such people, but tbh, it would be a very odd coincidence.

The Arbitrum foundation handed off the distribution design incl sybil detection to Nansen precisely so that they could not influence it - this was intentional.

Cos the fiat system is so great it cant be beaten?

The fiat system can beaten, just not by the current form of crypto.

Regarding your point about Sybil Detection not being an exact science, that the problem. It either too lack and attackers will get through or tight and innocent parties will be denied access. There is no recourse to solve that problem.

Again the point is people are putting the trust into organisations on a trustless system. The say how terrible the current system is with its trusted parties that are regulated and have methods of recourse.

 

[Rob Ray]

The full list of holders with their respective holdings can be viewed on arbiscan

But you realise this has zero in common with a reasonable democratic choice, right? That any buy-in is meaningless in terms of influencing any decisions at all unless you're a major Investor or part of the company that's actually in charge of the thing? You do understand how that works?

 

[q_w_e_r_t_y]

But you realise this has zero in common with a reasonable democratic choice, right? That any buy-in is meaningless in terms of influencing any decisions at all unless you're a major Investor or part of the company that's actually in charge of the thing? You do understand how that works?

This is why people like delegate models which Arbitrum DAO has adopted, so that small holders can delegate to those which known position and public track records on decision making, without requiring the brainspace to keep up with protocol proposals.

If you are a tokenholder, you are part of the "company" thats actually in charge of the thing, because it isnt a company, its a DAO.

Suppose there was a different distribution with 11% to investors+team and 44% airdropped to users. Do you think that would result in better governance or worse? I can tell you why I think it would result in much worse governance but I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

 

[Rob Ray]

Jesus, you really don't get it huh. All that "not your keys, not your coins" waffle but not the first idea about how power is created and maintained in major institutions. It's like you're jealously guarding the contents of your bag while your house is being robbed in front of you. Astonishing.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I got offered shares as part of the company I worked for once. I told my manager that it was fine when I came in late as I'd checked with myself and I'd said it was ok.

 

[q_w_e_r_t_y]

Regarding your point about Sybil Detection not being an exact science, that the problem. It either too lack and attackers will get through or tight and innocent parties will be denied access. There is no recourse to solve that problem.

Tbh, a lot of that is grey areas. For example, I use multiple wallets for different purposes and I had several that, in theory, should have been eligible for this airdrop, but I got sybilled, so qualified for much less than I would have received had all of my activity been in a single wallet.

What they are really trying to get rid of is airdrop farmers - people who deliberately try to game the system by making multiple wallets they control display behaviour that the Arbitrum Foundation believes is representative of someone who has the protocol's best interests at heart, collect the airdrop and then immediately sell for other tokens, extracting value from the protocol ...or worse, sell for fiat and exploit all the work that people have put into building an optimistic roll up.

Again the point is people are putting the trust into organisations on a trustless system. The say how terrible the current system is with its trusted parties that are regulated and have methods of recourse.

I dont really get your point here.

These things dont just fall from the sky - people spend years building, testing, reiterating, fixing, bug-zapping and refining them. This is seriously new tech, in 2018, when Offchain Labs was founded, optimistic rollups were just a theoretical scaling solution and didnt exist in practice until 2020.

Offchain Labs is a regulated US company with all the usual methods of recourse who built a trustless optimistic rollup, then shifted the research and development into a subsidiary not-for-profit foundation 3 years later. That foundation then redistributed the governance over that foundation giving Offchain Labs a portion of the value that had been built.

The control is moving from trusted (/regulated/legal recourse) to trustless(/delegated/onchain enforcement).

 

[Rob Ray]

It's such a weird mix of personal paranoia, half-digested ideology, blind techno -fetishism and mind-blowing naivety this stuff, it's genuinely hard to understand as a mindset.

 

[q_w_e_r_t_y]

Jesus, you really don't get it huh. All that "not your keys, not your coins" waffle but not the first idea about how power is created and maintained in major institutions. It's like you're jealously guarding the contents of your bag while your house is being robbed in front of you. Astonishing.

I have no idea what you are referring to here gonna give me a clue to some of the analogies

• major institution = offchain labs? arbitrum foundation? arbitrum dao,
• contents of my bag = ?
• house = ?

I got offered shares as part of the company I worked for once. I told my manager that it was fine when I came in late as I'd checked with myself and I'd said it was ok.

Not a company, not shares.

These are governance tokens of the DAO. DAOs usually dont have working hours as they are international and operate 24/7, and employment in DAOs is usually much more weird than "9-5 and pick up your paycheck", for example most DAOs will have employees who are fully anon (ie, the DAO does not know the identity of the person/entity that it is paying compensation/a salary to) and they answer to the DAO, not a manager.

In a fully autonomous DAO, depending on the compensation set up, you may find that your streamed compensation gets slashed by the appropriate amount in the smart contract that you signed when you accepted the offer from the DAO, or immediately terminated if being present in some way during those hours was contractual

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Right, so you can be sacked or your wages slashed and you don't even get to argue with your manager first.

Who needs unions, eh?

 

[NoXion]

most DAOs will have employees who are fully anon (ie, the DAO does not know the identity of the person/entity that it is paying compensation/a salary to

You say stuff like this as if it's some kind of flex, when in actual fact it's pretty awful if you examine it more closely. This anonymity means that there could be a lot of DAOs out there unknowingly funnelling money towards all kinds of wrong 'uns.

Yeah, that kind of recklessness is pretty much par for the course from what I've seen of the crypto scene.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

It's an extreme version of sub-contracting. Not my business how the sub-contractor mistreats its workers. Now it's 'the DAO did it'. 'They signed up to the DAO, it's their fault they got screwed'. 'Kid got ill so you missed the deadline? Should have thought of that, eh?' Not our fault. Not our business.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

The strongest criticisms of fiat money systems, imo, involve the idea that they generalise, abstract, alienate and dehumanise value to a point where it becomes easier to exploit and hoard.

This doesn't solve those problems of fiat money. It makes them even worse.

 

[NoXion]

The strongest criticisms of fiat money systems, imo, involve the idea that they generalise, abstract, alienate and dehumanise value to a point where it becomes easier to exploit and hoard.

This doesn't solve those problems of fiat money. It makes them even worse.

Crypto proponents of the more utopian variety seem to think that decentralisation and anonymity are the solutions to oppression and discrimination. They don't seem to realise that oppressive systems like class society and patriarchy aren't centralised, and that one can be subject to discrimination even when you're anonymous, because discrimination can be baked into a system from the start and not require a person to make the active choice to discriminate against a particular individual.

 

[Rob Ray]

Back when I was a nipper I drew up a plan to run society better (I know, I know), which ended up taking, unbeknownst to me, a sort of haphazard, simplistic, godless Fourierist turn.

Looking back on it now, obviously the whole thing was primed for failure in large part because it, like so many ideas from the minds of children, was unaware of how good the ruling class is at remaining the ruling class. And obviously was wildly optimistic about our ability to remake society without the weight of all that came before. And didn't really get how much of a mess humanity is.

Manipulation, misdirection, the socialism of the rich, strategies of layered control both explicit and implicit - none of it really crossed my mind because, as a child, I'd not run up against the people doing it. I'd not analysed their methods or seen them freezing out/co-opting challengers. So I included a jail, because bad people exist and I'd been bullied before, but trusted in my system to be just. It would never have coped with real people.

Anyway, for some reason this thread reminded me of it.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Crypto proponents of the more utopian variety seem to think that decentralisation and anonymity are the solutions to oppression and discrimination. They don't seem to realise that oppressive systems like class society and patriarchy aren't centralised, and that one can be subject to discrimination even when you're anonymous, because discrimination can be baked into a system from the start and not require a person to make the active choice to discriminate against a particular individual.

Privilege perpetuates itself without even trying.

It's a bit like telling slaves they're free and equal because you've freed them and given them legal rights. But if they're at the bottom of the economic pile due to being ex-slaves, which they will be, that means that their children and their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren will mostly be right at the bottom as well.

 

[q_w_e_r_t_y]

Right, so you can be sacked or your wages slashed and you don't even get to argue with your manager first.

Depends on the DAO structure and the smart contract set up.

Note that people often dont work for only one DAO at a time tho. Many people will have a skill set (say design) then build a portfolio of work and compensation across different DAOs. But for those who do focus on a single DAO, the loss of a key contributor or contributory team could potentially have a major impact, so it would likely have to go through a DAO proposal (which may suggest increasing compensation if the reason that the person is not doing the thing is because they are getting better paid doing another thing somewhere else).

Who needs unions, eh?

Well exactly, unions are for employees and DAOs dont have employees in the traditional way.
Some DAOs use Gravity for conflict mediation and some Daoists use Opolis for side benefits.

You say stuff like this as if it's some kind of flex, when in actual fact it's pretty awful if you examine it more closely. This anonymity means that there could be a lot of DAOs out there unknowingly funnelling money towards all kinds of wrong 'uns.

Gasp - NO! Really?
You mean it could be going to some random Ghanian teenager who does the thing on his smart phone rather than a Yale graduate with the latest macbook that Daddy persuaded the company to hire? How awful. How will western civilisation survive this?

Yeah, that kind of recklessness is pretty much par for the course from what I've seen of the crypto scene.

It absolutely is. This kind of cryptoing isnt for the faint of heart.

It's an extreme version of sub-contracting. Not my business how the sub-contractor mistreats its workers. Now it's 'the DAO did it'. 'They signed up to the DAO, it's their fault they got screwed'. 'Kid got ill so you missed the deadline? Should have thought of that, eh?' Not our fault. Not our business.

Its not really subcontracting, more service provision.
The aim is to escape wage slavery by becoming unemployable, so that no-one is able to entrap you in salaried KYCed timebound labour.

 

[Storm Fox]

It's an extreme version of sub-contracting. Not my business how the sub-contractor mistreats its workers. Now it's 'the DAO did it'. 'They signed up to the DAO, it's their fault they got screwed'. 'Kid got ill so you missed the deadline? Should have thought of that, eh?' Not our fault. Not our business.

Plus people need to collaborate. So where does that leave anonymity?
Actually the seem quite disgusting and totally dehumanising. Humans are social creatures and taking that away and making each person just a robot in the DAO to follow rules with no creative input to the process seems wrong.
People don't have to be employed by a DAO but using it as a plus point seems odd.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Its not really subcontracting, more service provision.
The aim is to escape wage slavery by becoming unemployable, so that no-one is able to entrap you in salaried KYCed timebound labour.

That's a purely semantic distinction. You're being contracted to do work but you don't work for the entity that's paying you. They take no responsibility towards anything about you (don't even know who you are) and so any problems you have are your problems alone. But yes, I agree to an extent - it's worse than subcontracting.

What terms and conditions you agree to in your DAO is going to be dictated by your position and your level of desperation for work. Lovely and dandy for highly trained, highly paid IT experts to work via DAOs. You have privileges but you don't recognise them so you can't see the ways in which others would be exploited by this system if it were ever to be widely adopted. You become a wage slave to a smart contract, something you can't even talk to, something that is incapable of empathy or sympathy or pity.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Plus people need to collaborate. So where does that leave anonymity?
Actually the seem quite disgusting and totally dehumanising. Humans are social creatures and taking that away and making each person just a robot in the DAO to follow rules with no creative input to the process seems wrong.
People don't have to be employed by a DAO but using it as a plus point seems odd.

The whole thing is anti-human. I have some sympathy for the idea that fiat money is anti-human, but this is far, far worse.