cryptOwOcurrency

(part 2 of 2)

This kind of direct community intervention is completely unprecedented in Reddit's 18 years of operation. Reddit has historically had a very laissez-faire approach to their communities, letting their communities themselves - represented by their community moderators - dictate what they want the content of their communities to be, and how they want their communities to be run. They've held this laissez-faire attitude even to a fault, letting the top mod of each subreddit unilaterally dictate subreddit rules and unilaterally add and remove other moderators, even at the protest of their community. A great example of this was when the /r/bitcoin community wanted to remove theymos as a top moderator due to his wildly unpopular community policies - Reddit Inc did nothing. Of course, that's all flipped on its head now. Reddit is no longer a host for independent communities run by individuals - it's a host for one big community run under the discretion of Reddit Inc, where ownership of "your community" is a privilege that can be taken away unilaterally at the whims of Reddit Inc without recourse.

I foresee a time before too long, perhaps within the next few years, where the /r/ethfinance moderators will have to face a similar choice - whether to side with the desires of Reddit corporate, or whether to stand by the desires of the community, be permanently banned from Reddit, and be replaced with Reddit's own hand-selected moderators.

With ethfinance, of course, the divide between the community and Reddit Inc will not be a divide of SFW/NSFW, because that's not this community's style. It will be a divide over the heart of what ethfinance means to us. Perhaps it will be the inability for communities to opt out of Reddit community points, causing ethfinance to drop in quality due to points-chasing in the same way ethtrader did. Perhaps it will be the discontinuation of old.reddit.com along with the incessant enshittification of new.reddit.com and the official app. Maybe it will be site-wide automod deletion of external links (in the style of YouTube comment automoderation), removing a crucial information-sharing tool from this community.

Whatever the divide is between ethfinance and Reddit Inc, it will stem from this community's desire to just be left alone to do our own thing, in conflict with Reddit's desire to step in to make changes to the community to increase their own ad profits (because shortly, they'll have public shareholders to answer to!) And Reddit Inc is the one with the keys to the server rack, so ultimately, whatever they want to do, they will do. Just one of the perks of running permissioned forum software on top of a permissioned database.

I share this because I truly believe that at some critical mass of platform enshittification, the "magic" of this community will leave /r/ethfinance and go somewhere else, just as it left /r/ethtrader to go to /r/ethfinance all those years ago. And it's important to keep your eyes and ears open, because wherever the magic goes, so will follow the alpha, the good friends, the counterculture that makes ethfinance such a fulfilling and worthwhile place to visit.

Finally, a parting meme to make light of Reddit admin logic:

https://i.imgflip.com/7sz8kv.jpg

(Accidentally cross-posted in the previous weekly. Here's my re-crosspost from ethfinance.)

This post is relevant to ethfinance, as it really underscores that we don't own our community here, Reddit does. If as a moderator your community's desires are at odds with Reddit's desires (not rules, mind you - desires), they will permanently ban you if you choose to stand with your community instead of siding with them.

As we know, a few weeks ago Reddit cut off access to the API. Many subreddits went dark for a couple days to protest. Some subreddits rightly realized that a protest with a defined end date ultimately doesn't make their voice heard, and they wanted to make their voice heard. The /r/dndmemes subreddit was one such subreddit.

Now, one of the rules made clear by the Reddit admins is that you're not allowed to label harmless posts as NSFW to try to harm Reddit's ad revenue. In my opinion, that's fair enough. Content should be properly labeled.

The members of the /r/dndmemes community, however, wanted to continue making a point without violating this rule. So in protest of the API changes, the community decided to changed their meme subreddit into a pornography subreddit. Full-on, D&D-style NSFW content. Every post was tagged NSFW, because every post was NSFW.

The problem came when Reddit simultaneously announced a new rule, retroactively banned moderators who violated that new rule, and then started manually removing content from the subreddit. Here is a post from one of the remaining moderators that explains.

This afternoon, r/dndmemes received the following message from the Mod Code of Conduct account:

If you suddenly begin to post, or approve content that features sexually explicit content to your community in order to justify the NSFW label, we will immediately remove and permanently suspend moderators who have participated in this action. 3 moderators have been permanently suspended and removed from the mod team for participating in this activity already. They are not to be added back to the team under any account.

Moments later, and without further warning, the following mods were removed from the team and permanently suspended from Reddit:

• u/Dalimey100

• u/4cheese

• u/EquivalentInflation

As part of their community action, the Reddit admins also removed two of the NSFW flairs that the community had begun using, so it was no longer possible to properly categorize or filter new posts to the subreddit. In the aftermath, due to these sudden changes the Reddit admins made against the community's will, the remaining mods have marked new submissions to the subreddit manual approval to stem the tide of now-banned NSFW content. They're now swimming in a sea of posts that follow the mods' own rules, but don't follow the new rules Reddit Inc has decided to impose on their community, and they're expected to moderate their subreddit according to Reddit Inc's imposed /r/dndmemes rules.

(part 1 of 2)

Don't forget, the Ethereum Foundation is doing an AMA! Here is my favorite comment in the thread, by Justin Drake, pasted (mostly) in its entirety so that you don't have to jump over to Reddit to read it (the technical stuff at the end got cut off cause kbin has a 5000 character limit).

What are one-shot signatures

One-shot signatures are magical cryptographic signatures where the private key can only sign a single message. One-shot signatures exist (so far only in theory, here) thanks to quantum physics. The private key is a quantum superposition which cannot be copied (see quantum no-cloning) and which must be measured (and therefore destroyed) to produce a signature.

Importantly, the signatures themselves are normal bits and bytes and one-shot signatures do not require quantum communication between parties.

why are they so special?

One-shot signatures are exciting because they significantly open up the cryptographic design space, even beyond indistinguishability obfuscation which is commonly (and incorrectly!) seen as the pinnacle of cryptography. For blockchains specifically, they are a tool to tackle long-standing problems. Specifically, one-shot signatures give us:

• slashing removal: The double vote and surround vote slashing conditions can be removed.
• perfect finality: Instead of relying on economic finality we can have perfect finality that is guaranteed by cryptography and the laws of physics.
• 51% finality threshold: The threshold for finality can be reduced from 66% to 51%.
• instant queue clearing: The activation and exit queues can be instantly cleared whenever finality is reached without inactivity leaking (the default case).
• weak subjectivity: Weak subjectivity no longer applies, at least in the default case where finality is reached without the need for inactivity leaking.
• trustless liquid staking: It becomes possible to build staking delegation protocols like Lido or RocketPool that don't require trusted or bonded operators.
• restaking-free PoS: It becomes possible to design PoS where restaking is neutered.
• routing-free Lightning: One can design a version of the Lightning network without any of the routing and liquidity issues.
• proof of location: One can design proof-of-geographical-location which use network latencies to triangulate the position of an entity, without the possibility for that entity to cheat by having multiple copies of the private key.

(technical) How can one-shot signatures be used in consensus?

Going from one-shot signatures to removing slashing conditions and getting perfect finality is relatively easy. The key idea is to create append-only chains of one-shot signatures where every signature signs over the public key for the next one-shot signature. These signature chains can be made stateful, i.e. they can be assigned a state that must evolve according to a specific state transition function for the signatures to be valid.

To illustrate, imagine that every signature signs over a counter representing the epoch number, and that the state transition function requires the epoch number to be strictly increasing for the signature to be valid. By construction it's impossible to have a valid signature chain with the same epoch number, thereby preventing the possibility to equivocate by signing two messages with the same epoch number.

In order to prevent both double votes and surround votes it suffices for the signature chain to hold source and target counters in its state, and for the state transition function to enforce the following two conditions:

• previous_source <= current_source
• previous_target < current_target

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/14vpyb3/ama_we_are_ef_research_pt_10_12_july_2023/jrnyxa8/

https://etherscan.io/gastracker

Most people are in crypto for the money, and when a different asset goes up relative to ETH, they care about how much money they would have made if they had been long the other asset. It's really that simple.

In my opinion, 10 years is definitely fine, 15 years is probably fine, 20 years would start making me a bit nervous that nation-states might have access to maturing quantum cryptography tech. But I know nothing about quantum tech other than they've been able to work with only a few qubits and that it's really, really hard to add more qubits to the action.

What’s the plan to neuter?

Well 00:00:00 UTC July 1st just rolled around, and it looks like the third party reddit apps were just cut off.

Reddit is entering a new era, I guess.

Welcome!

yes