FaceDeer

Do you really leave Windows with default-everything whenever you deploy a Windows machine?

Even 1970s D&D wasn't Gygax. D&D is a game, Gygax is a person. They're very different things.

One may ask whether 1970s D&D was sexist, of course. And perhaps it was to some degree, but not fundamentally so.

Which has waaaaaay more features than Notepad does.

If only you were allowed to install your own text editor.

So turn those features off. I just checked, there's a setting for both spellcheck and autocorrect.

Here's DAI's peg over time. Over the past year it's had a high point of $1.0012 and a low of $0.9979, neither extreme lasting more than a brief spike. Seems like a pretty good peg to me. The mechanism by which it maintains its peg is complex, but fully transparent since it happens entirely on-chain.

Here's LUSD, another similarly algorithmically-pegged stabletoken. It's smaller than DAI so it's a bit less stable, it had one spike this year where it went all the way up to $1.029. But the mechanism is much simpler so if you're having trouble understanding DAI it might be an easier place to start.

No, I am rejecting the notion of stable coins, which are by their own definition literal scams.

By what definition is that?

So basically you only "believe in" off-chain assets? That's fine, but it kind of removes you from any discussion of the details of blockchains. You've rejected their entire premise so why bother?

All you're saying here is "nuh-uh! I don't believe you!" Which isn't particularly useful.

I could dig up the addresses of MakerDAO or Liquity vaults, you could examine them directly using Etherscan and see which tokens back them. But I somehow get the impression that that would be a waste of my time. Is there literally anything that could convince you, before I go running around doing any further work trying?

You can examine the MakerDAO contract, for example, and see all of the assets they claim to have sitting right there under its control on the blockchain. You can see the contract logic behind how those assets enter and exit its control.

They call it proof of stake, but it's proof of ownership. It's proving you own coins. That's it. Edit: I think you thought I was talking about proof of authority?

No, there is a distinction here, and it's a very important one.

If you're using proof of ownership then there's no way of penalizing the owners who are validating the chain if they misbehave. That's somewhat more like what Bitcoin uses, actually - proof of ownership of mining rigs, in a sense. If a Bitcoin miner 51% attacks the chain then after the attack is done they still have their mining rigs and can continue to attempt to attack it if they want.

With proof of stake, the resource in question - the tokens, in Ethereum's case - are put up as a stake. Ie, they are placed under the control of the blockchain's validation system, so if the validator tries pulling some kind of funny business their stake can be slashed. Someone who attacks Ethereum has to burn their stake in the process, which would cost them tens of billions of dollars and prevent them from attempting future attacks.

You can own millions of Ether and that's meaningless as far as validation goes. It's only once you put them up as a stake do you get "skin in the game."

You're right, it was not designed to support an idea that didn't exist when it was designed. But upgrades to improve lightning have been proposed and made it into protocol

You were earlier touting Bitcoin's lack of protocol upgrades as a key feature. Now it's performing upgrades?

The problem with Bitcoin's upgrades is that they've made "no hard forks" into a religious tenant, so whenever they try to do anything new they have to squish it in as a soft fork somehow built on top of the existing foundations. The existing foundations aren't well suited to this kind of thing, though, since they were designed 15 years ago. So it makes for some very labored and inefficient design, like in the case with Lightning.

Layer 2s on something like Ethereum, which was designed from the ground up to support them and which continues to add new features making them more efficient and feature-rich, are far easier and cheaper to work with.

I don't know about Eth's long-term future as a decentralized platform when centralization continues to increase and a conspiracy, hack, or government pressure on Hetzner and Amazon could impact over half the nodes on the network.

It's important to call out that nodes in general are not important for validating the chain, it doesn't matter who's controlling them. You can run your own node and there's nothing those other non-validating nodes can do to tamper with your view of the network, the worst they could do is stop sending you updates (which would be obvious and you could then go hunting for replacement feeds).

Indeed, let's not make that confusion. Like possiblylinux127 did.