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These are exactly the types of things Chia is working on, and at least to some degree, are in production.


Of course, if the sender can cancel transactions at their discretion, that enables another class of frauds. The solution has to lie in some trusted centralized party outside the payment system [0]. Chia can't solve this. A banking system and legal system can.

[0] Goharshady, A. K. (2021). Irrationality, Extortion, or Trusted Third-parties: Why it is Impossible to Buy and Sell Physical Goods Securely on the Blockchain (arXiv:2110.09857). http://arxiv.org/abs/2110.09857


It’s amazing watching the crypto folks slowly reinvent the entire banking industry.

Also kinda pointless though.


Tim Ferris has a great podcast episode with Matt Pottinger that discusses this topic. https://tim.blog/2024/05/08/matt-pottinger/


These are all excellent fountain pens! I'll add the Lamy 2000 (Fine nib) to the list, as it's my personal favorite and is what I use all day every day. And I happen to also use a Pilot Custom 823 (Medium nib) for journaling every morning. Nothing beats a nice fountain pen with quality ink and paper. Speaking of inks, I've found Rohrer & Klingner's Schreibtinte Verdigris to be wonderful in the Lamy 2000, and lately I've been using Noodler's Sequoia Green for the Pilot Custom 823.


OK OK, let's get serious. My personal favorite : Lamy 2000 fine nib inked with Rohrer & Klinger Dokumentus. Most times to complement it there's at least one Parker 51 as a quick note taking pen / highlighter (puts out way more ink, so some cheaper papers don't really work with it) and one or two Montblancs (mostly inked with Rohrers Salix) just for the fun of it.

I haven't quite settled down on paper though. Rhodia wire-bound dotted A5 has the best quality paper, but I sorely miss the flexibility of free leaf notes. Latest discovery - Muji's A5 binder. It's a Japanese 20-holes-per-A5 spacing, so fairly rare in the EU. Also, the Muji's default paper isn't great for some wetter fountain pens... but hopefully I'll figure some way to make it work.


Just wanted to +1 on physical books and writing with fountain pens.

My daily routine involves journaling in the morning with a Pilot Custom 823 in a blank Midori notebook, doing all of my work planning + notes with a Lamy 2000 in a Traveler’s Company notebook built-up in a way that works for me, and reading physical books, marking them up with a Kaweco brass mechanical pencil. It’s flexible, keeps me on task, keeps me organized, and I feel like I’m getting better value for my time, if that makes sense.

I’ve tried so many different ways of trying to handle these things digitally, but have found that for me it’s best to use pen and paper for these sorts of things in conjunction with digital counterparts mainly for reminders and archives.


Yeah, it's definitely not ready. I agree with everything you are saying.

Though, the industry is aware of this and working on it. There is at least one company (Chia Network) where the on-chain language (ChiaLisp) is both capable and secure enough to allow for the sort of management needed to allow for self-custody to happen in a safe, sane manner. GUIs for this sort of thing aren't ready for the general public yet, but are definitely on the way.


Solutions have been on the way for more than five years, but literally nothing has changed and all we've gotten is pyramid schemes and gambling. Chains and protocols have exploded in complexity and technical debt to the point where nobody fully understands the attack vectors. By now I am convinced that anything beyond pyramid schemes is never going to happen.


It's frustrating, I agree. People are obviously going to continue being people with pyramid schemes and the like. At the same time, there are enough who also agree that it's a mess, have closely studied the successes and mistakes of the past, and are building a solid foundation for doing this right. I mean, what we're really talking about here is creating a fundamentally new system for which the financial system operates upon ... it's going to take time ... longer than five years. And the progress that I've seen thus far is encouraging.


> there are enough who also agree that it's a mess, have closely studied the successes and mistakes of the past, and are building a solid foundation for doing this right.

People who "closely study mistakes and successes of the past" are in a very rare supply in the crypto space, and for a good reason: because people who actually closely study mistakes and successes of the past don't want to touch that space even with a 10-yard stick.

The reasons were spelled out in no uncertain terms 7 years ago in https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-c... and followup here https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle... 17 years in, all those reasons remain the same.


> People who "closely study mistakes and successes of the past" are in a very rare supply in the crypto space

Unless you're talking about people who are studying the mistakes and successes of crypto scams, and are working to refine them (the scams), then you can find a few.


Do you also consider Bitcoin a pyramid scheme?


No, I don't. But Bitcoin also isn't particularly interesting because it's not (very) programmable and not useful for mainstream use anyway. I don't consider Ethereum itself a pyramid scheme, just useless. The protocols on top of these chains though, nearly all pyramid schemes. The best way to describe Ethereum is that it provides a platform for pyramid schemes.


The base of the pyramid, if you will. I wouldn’t lump all contracts in with this but it does describe a vast majority of them.


Hahaha, accurate.


What's the name of the function in ChiaLisp that returns true if this is an illegitimate transaction initiated by a hacker and false if it's being done by the real owner of the funds?


> where the on-chain language (ChiaLisp)

So all you need to do then is learn a Lisp? That sounds worth the effort for most non-tech people...


It isn't a software problem.


What is it?


The same problem as with passwords that has been plagging the security industry for decades.

Passwords, credentials and other high-risk high value intangible data are not associated with high-risk high-value AND our memory is not designed for random junk.

Maybe an anthropologist can study this phenomenon further.

We already have hints of that: our memory has evolved for thousands year to easily memorize places and spatial navigation, in thr past for food, water and danger. Today you go in a foreign place, just one visit and you know where everything is. At the same time, people can usually hold only ~7 concepts/numbers/objects in their head.

In memory competitions people leverage our spatial prowess with a technique called the memory palace, that was already used in ancient Greece and Roman Empire to recall anything, from bard tales to the Iliad and Odysseus.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci


Josh Kaufman did a lot of work in this area for years, maybe still does -- Personal MBA. https://personalmba.com


A friend bought this as a gift for me 10+ years ago: The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business by Josh Kaufman [0].

I've given it as a gift to other friends.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Personal-MBA-Master-Art-Business/dp/B...


PersonalMBA really is a my go-to reference because it is very comprehensive and extremely accessible online. First 5 chapters tackle the strategy behind the '5 parts of every business'

1) Value Creation 2) Marketing 3) Sales 4) Value Delivery 5) Finance

The next 6 Chapters deal with the tactics involved in executing that strategy. 6) The human mind 7) Working With Yourself 8) Working With Others 9) Understanding Systems 10) Analyzing Systems 11) Improving Systems

Then If you REALLY wanted to dive deeper, you can read the 99 business books he built the personalmba from: https://personalmba.com/best-business-books/

Josh Kaufman created something great here.


I'm currently following the marketing section of this one and it's been really helpful to compensate for my huge gaps in knowledge


Glad this is posted here - rare for a single amazon product to have so many high views from people with so many backgrounds.


The designs of most cities in the U.S. absolutely treat pedestrians as second class citizens compared to automobile traffic. I'm currently working on a project that demonstrates exactly this (among other things) in Dallas. It's both sad and amusing how true it is.


Is there any example? It seem a hard argument to make when pedestrians have the priority as soon as they step into the crosswalk.


The best example is that even your curious question comes with a car-minded implicit assumption that it's the pedestrian who is crossing, not the car. In a pedestrian-centric design, cars are the ones who cross. See https://youtu.be/_ByEBjf9ktY?t=690.


Yes, and the highway system was originally intended as defense infrastructure to more easily move equipment across the country. A great idea, but a design that was not originally intended to plow right through cities. This has been a big contributor to the mess that we are in when it comes to urban / suburban design and the extreme lack of walkability.


Not true. They were definitely intended to plow right through cities. That’s why they built highways/freeways right through urban cores, or planned entire metro regions around them.


Specifically, right through minority neighborhoods in cities. You can't ignore the explicitly racist history of urban "renewal" when discussing freeway planning.


This statement on using more energy than proof of work is ... incorrect. How did you come to this conclusion?


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