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i have questions about crypto, web3, and the surrounding ecosystem. i’m gonna thread these. please feel free to reply! but don’t start arguments and fights with other people who reply or i’ll use the banhammer.
1. what is bitcoin’s plan to solve its energy consumption problem? is that on the radar of the team/community? is that considered a non-problem / “worth it”? asking specifically about bitcoin
2. why is there a lot of skepticism around ethereum’s move to PoS? is it because it’s been continually pushed back, or is there skepticism that it will work at all? both?
3. would ethereum’s energy usage still be concerning after move to PoS? why or why not?
4. give me an example of an interesting smart contract that already exists today, and explain how it’s used
5. give me an interesting example of a smart contract that doesn’t exist today but that could be built in the future and represents the longer-term vision
6. why do people get .eth names? doesn’t that expose their balance and transaction history to everyone? and even if they use a private wallet, isn’t it easy to trace where they move the money to? or is being open about your balance a cultural thing?
7. how do you patch a buggy smart contract that’s already in the wild? do you just proxy to the latest deployed version? do SDKs automate this or do you write this code yourself?
8. what is the state of language evolution for writing smart contracts? are the risks associated with using a bespoke high-level language that hasn’t had the scrutiny of a general-purpose one? how do you know compiler/runtime bugs won’t screw you over?
9. what is an example web3 app that you actually want to use for non-ideological reasons? tell me what makes it special
10. aside from the constitution thing, what is an example of a DAO that is doing something interesting with its DAO-ness? (and is not a glorified discord server)
11. how do immutable blockchains protect against the transaction records being used to host e.g. child porn, and special clients being built to access and spread it? does the transaction size limit prevent sharing files? is this a consideration in the protocol design?
12. who controls ethereum? i.e. who needs to have a consensus to designate a fork as the “legitimate” ETH chain?
13. i’ve read a story that goes like “i connected my wallet to a smart contract and it quietly syphoned all my savings a few days later after the transaction”. is that possible? if yes, whose fault is this? what is the vision for how people are supposed to be protected from this?
14. when people buy hardware wallets to store private keys, they have to set up a seed phrase. if i understand correctly, seed phrase lets your recover if you lose physical wallet. does this mean private key is generated deterministically? if yes, what is hardware good for?
15. has mining actually stopped in china after the government intervention? what was the impact?
16. what are the biggest realistic legislation risks to crypto?
17. do i understand correctly that today with ethereum you have to pay £20 just to transfer money to someone
18. what exactly is L1, L2
19. why does jack support bitcoin if bitcoin community apparently has no plans to solve the energy issues?
20.
21. there seem to be so many coins. who creates them and why? are they all technically different or are most just different branding of the ssme technology? how does one create a coin and gets it listed on exchanges?
22. would it be fair to say that part of the appeal is to make things like kickstarter/opencollective/gh sponsors/gofundme with custom voting and benefit mechanisms easy to build in userland?
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Michael Nielsen @michael_nielsen
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Dec 23, 2021
A thread of very good questions.