006 | Libra, crypto, and the future of humanity
Bit of a Tangent
English - July 15, 2019 14:16 - 1 hour - 67.6 MB - ★ - 1 ratingScience Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Gianluca and Jared are joined by crypto expert Thomas Tumiel in a discussion about the details of Facebook’s new Libra cryptocurrency. They give a brief primer on the fundamentals of blockchains and cryptography, examine how Libra is implemented (compared to Bitcoin and Ethereum), discuss Facebook’s strategy for rollout, consider possible failure modes, and contrast the dystopian and utopian outcomes of a truly global cryptocurrency.
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Shownotes:
Mined For Change: https://minedforchange.org/
AI and Crypto Soc: https://www.facebook.com/UCTCryptoSoc/
Libra announcement: https://libra.org/en-US/
Early rumours about Libra: https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/8/17332894/facebook-blockchain-group-employee-reshuffle-restructure-david-marcus-kevin-weil and https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-21/facebook-is-said-to-develop-stablecoin-for-whatsapp-transfers
Facebook crypto job postings: https://www.coindesk.com/facebook-is-hiring-5-new-staff-members-for-its-blockchain-team
Intro to Blockchain (from 3blue1brown): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4
“How does the blockchain work” by D’Aliessi on Medium:
Hash functions: https://medium.com/@isuruj/introduction-to-hashing-5b4daf343889 and
https://blockgeeks.com/guides/what-is-hashing/
Merkle Trees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree
Transaction times across different blockchains: https://medium.com/@johnhinkle_80891/the-fastest-cryptocurrency-transaction-speeds-for-2018-498c1baf87ef
Libra technical whitepaper: https://developers.libra.org/docs/assets/papers/the-libra-blockchain.pdf
Smart contracts (e.g. on Ethereum): https://blockgeeks.com/guides/smart-contracts/
“On the blockchain, nobody knows you’re a fridge” —Richard Gendal Brown: https://gendal.me/about/
Gas prices: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/gas-ethereum.asp
Cloud computing on the blockchain vs. with cloud service providers (AWS, Google, etc.): https://medium.com/@eternacapital/blockchain-based-decentralised-cloud-computing-277f307611e1
Facebook (instagram + whatsapp) daily active users: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/
Superforecasting by Phillip Tetlock: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23995360-superforecasting
Prediction markets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Civilisational Inadequacy: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zsG9yKcriht2doRhM/inadequacy-and-modesty
Efficient markets: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/efficientmarkethypothesis.asp
Shorting the market: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/shortselling.asp
WeChat and its ubiquity in China: https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/1/16721230/wechat-china-app-mini-programs-messaging-electronic-id-system
“Critical Vulnerability” pull request: https://cryptonews.com/news/cryptoverse-reached-level-9000-in-trolling-facebook-and-libr-4071.htm