The limits of knowledge - why we don't know enough about blockchain
@jonno-katz asks why Andreas A doesn't have a reasonable opinion DPOS, which on the surface is a very reasonable question. AA is an expert on consensus, so alternates should be on the table, right? He should know!
I'm afraid not. I know why this is because I live it as my day job - The reason Andreas doesn't know about DPOS is that (a) DPOS just isn't above the radar, and (b) life's too short to know all the systems out there. Oh, and (c) people really don't want to know because their beliefs are going to be challenged.
In perspective, blockchain designs are very complicated, and to understand anything one has to work long and hard at it. Which one can do ... but there are limits. In practice it is reasonable to know a lot about one financial cryptography system if this is your day job
An absolutely excellent example of this was my conversation with Tone Vays (bitcoin or bust person) at Consensus. It was insanely embarrassing. We spoke a bit and did a lot of listening to him rant and rave about how Dan is a scammer and how all Graphene chains, especially the newest iteration EOS, are money printing scams that Dan gets rich off of and throws to the wind because he's pure evil or something I guess?
After he was finished going on his tirade, we calmly asked him "Do you know what EOS is trying to do? How it's going to try to work? What its goals are? Do you know about the underlying tech that's going into this and how it stacks up to the competition?" His answer? "No."
We walked away.
A great example of someone choosing ignorance over information in order to protect and reaffirm their personal bias.
There's this aphorism - it's impossible to explain something to someone when his job depends on him not understanding it.
We could possibly update it for Bitcoin times. Or housing market. Or the stock market or the pension funds. Or politics, internet security, weapons sales, the list goes on... :-)
We will likely see similar people attached to EOS (or Steem), who refuse to move forward to something new in the future. I just hope I won't be one of them.
Most definitely agreed on that. You'll have people like that anywhere you go. However, due to the nature of those these chains are built, they're pretty quickly flexible. That's the beauty of the witness structure, they can come to a consensus on forks pretty quickly and without much (any, really?) pain.
That, and I feel like the team(s) behind these technologies are not the type of folks who enjoy stagnation. They're innovators. I feel like they'll always gravitate toward the best tech, that's what I do anyways. Study; make best judgement; commit.
Sounds like a typical Tone interaction.
These are very difficult subject and you really need to understand it before giving an opinion. I'm not a expect, nor an cryptographer but i will say i was lucky enough to discover Bitshares earlier. With a business administration and IT background, I could undertstand the design method of Dan work and even relate it with his life vision. It really click with mine and I started going into various aspect of it and comparing it with other: governance model, accnt management, accnt authorities, security, using technologie to solve real life problem. Even in my blockchain community, people did not believe Steem was a Blockchain. It's a good thing to have Bitshares/Steem/Graphene under the radar. As with Steemit, people need to use Blockchain with out knowing it's blockchain and I think EOS will reflect this.
I think there's a lot to be said for staying under the radar. Being exposed to the various blockchain communities doesn't bring much good in and of itself. The good that is needed is hard design and hard programming not talk.
Yes. I think you are right. The guy really understands what's up. He is the guy to bring block chain to the regular consumers imo.
Now he know: +70%.
The thing is... I'm not even a coder, just a geek by osmosis, and even I know what a gem DPOS is, and I can explain it reasonably well. I couldn't explain any number of other systems out there, but once you're introduced to the Graphene toolkit family, and its super powers, then your survey of the available field of blockchain technology looks like:
Ok, so can it scale? hmmm... next
Alright! but can it scale? hmmm... guess not. next!
Ahh intriguing, but can it scale? nope.. NEXT!
This and other virtues puts DPOS and the Graphene Toolkit so far ahead that... yes, it's threatening if it's not your horse in the race, so... I guess you make like a horse and keep your blinders on. :P
lol... even worse when we bring a motor car to a horse race!
As other people have mentioned here you are spot on with the people not wanting to know because theyre beliefs will be challenged. This is theyre fear!
Looking from a personal investing perspective, I have really hit this understanding bottleneck. I don't want to invest into anything I haven't done enough research on, but that limits it to about 10 systems. If I find enough time to study 100 different systems, with whitepapers and forums, I might find 10 systems that I both understand and find promising. Even so, I get both false negatives and false positives - and it's frustrating. There's always something I miss, like the value of effective hype.
On the other hand, this understanding-bottleneck creates some nice information asymmetry, which often turns into good profits. People who are familiar with DPOS and Graphene will find it easy to understand EOS, and are at an advantage compared to those who are not. Another time it will be the opposite again...
Hi Idealist, it looks like this is kind of a case of meta curation or delegation.
You'd have to go on what someone or something, who you trust, tells you about one of those systems and participate in it.
From a risk perspective, participating in things you don't understand could make you vulnerable but not participating in enough things lowers the chances that you will be invested a successful exponential technology before it goes exponential.
Kind of looks like an opportunity for a kind of hedge fund solution but for cryptographic financial products.
Absolutely. Choosing someone to trust is a good shortcut to assessing opportunities.
At the moment my strategy is not to care about false negatives (being wrong about thinking a project was shit), but trying to avoid false positives (being wrong in thinking a project is a good one). There's so many successful projects out there that I don't have to know them all. I just need a handful to be able to diversify, and then successfully avoid putting money into wrong places.
It is basically a venture capital approach but on a smaller scale. Question is can you as an individual sustain several failures before the winners come up. Which can take several years to realize full potential value. So you suffer the losses inmediately and only enjoy the upside in several years... getting out too soon on the winners to cover losses of the losers can really cost you. So you'd have to fire and forget almost and come back in a few years to see what panned out...
Great post. It's ironic that the revolution of blockchain is trustlessness but what we're finding is that that's impossible for most if not all people. Even if the tech is there, most people will still have to trust the tech. Which means we come back to putting our trust in people and/or institutions. I think Andreas has an excellent point: at the moment Bitcoin has a trust value of 20 billion dollars (or whatever it's market cap is) times its time in existence. Other consensus systems are younger and less valued at the moment but they'll grow. Some will lose our trust (the DAO fiasco) and some will gain. But in the end there is no such thing as a trustless society, just degrees of trust.
This is a great point.
We saw this emerge with the so-called digital signatures and PKI which purported to allow humans to sign contracts digitally. But nobody could do RSA maths in their heads, so we ended up having to trust the tech. Which led us down the garden path building more and more complicated trusted thingummybobs. Until ... we discovered that they were too complicated to use and users just ignored them.
So I like to ground such discussions in real users, not to fall in that trap again.
I also really look forward to seeing the results of EOS rise, it is exciting times and, aster are so many cryptos around, debunking and understanding the processes takes more than an expert on how to make money out of the inventions.
An excellent read and information, even the comments are enlightening for a newbie like me. Thanks a bunch! All for one and one for all! Namaste :)
Speaking of pundits: Just listening to a podcast of Nick Szabo with Tim Ferriss. http://tim.blog/2017/06/04/nick-szabo/
Very interesting for me as a total newbie in this whole world.
I don't know Nick but trust Tim as an excellent curator.
It is interesting to see that even a very tech savvy guy like Tim doesn't know all that much. (the difference is that he is not afraid to admit it, makes me feel better that even he has trouble with it) .
The problem with an ever more complex world, is that you are going to be more and more in the position of an incompetent newbie because things are developing much faster than anyone can learn.
That's hard to accept for some people, their self image is that they are competent persons.
The problem I think is that competence is field-specific.
I found it fascinating that you pointed out there are at least 7 disciplines involved in financial cryptography, looking at them you might be competent in 2 at a time and have working knowledge of a couple more but almost impossible to know and understand them all fully.
That almost guarantees that statistically almost EVERYONE is incompetent in the whole field of financial cryptography (defining competence as having the skill, knowledge and attitude to be effective in a field).
Few people like to admit to the limits of their expertise, because they admit to being incompetent in THAT discipline Ego wise that kind of equates to making you incompetent as a PERSON.
Like Scott Adams (Dilbert) says:
"Everyone is an idiot, not just the people with low SAT scores. The only differences among us is that we're idiots about different things at different times. No matter how smart you are, you spend much of your day being an idiot."
So it becomes a recipe for a lot of faked expertise. The blind leading the blind...
The counterargument to that is: you don't need to understand everything about how your car works to drive it...
I really want to develop my mental model around this blockchain thingy, I have an inkling it can be massively disruptive, but can't express coherently why yet. Still building my case in my own head... would be great if you can point to some other sources to learn about it.
Let me specify "it":
I am looking for explanations and mental models that are "good enough" for me to use and participate in blockchain concepts, not explanations to become a "blockchain" designer, mechanic or director which is what I guess your post is about.
Great reply! Yes, the thing I discovered way back when was that all of these startups hit the same problems, over and over again. And eventually it dawned on me that it was for the same reason: they were seeing the field as being only from their one or sometimes two disciplines. Over and over, cryptographers were employing computers cientists but knowing nothing about rights or accounting; others who were accountants knew about governance but were completely at sea with software; and practically everyone was in handwavy mode when it came to a serious business model (I include myself in that, else I'd be a squillionaire by now...).
The model of financial cryptography in 7 layers has stood the test of time at least from my perspective - there's nothing seriously wrong with it although I'd possibly have to modify it just to be polite to blockchain maximalists.
Having said that, the model received no particular popularity. I have no idea why. Maybe it just makes people feel like Scott Adams says, and part of entrepreneurship is convincing people you're the smartest person in the room? Oh well, we persevere on. I don't mind if I'm wrong, I'd just be happy to be told what the missing 8th layer is ;-)
ps; if you want blog posts on financial cryptography, there are over a thousand at my old blog at ... of course: financialcryptography.com ! Or just ask, I write too much anyway...
another very useful concept of Scott Adams is that of the talent stack .
I think that is going to be really crucial to succeed in complex fields.
The idea is that up until recently specialisation was seen as the way to succeed. That is how you could define an expert: "someone who has made all possible mistakes in a very narrow field"
The problem is that in a rapidly changing environment, the field which might have been useful might become either commoditized or obsolete. So you wasted your time to learn about something that after a while ceases to be valuable.
The idea of the talent stack is to develop a combination of skills, and in each skill get "good enough" or say about better than 90% of the population. That is actually not so difficult.
Now the trick is to combine these skills with other skills so their sum becomes more valuable than the skills would be apart.
Say you know about youtube.com and have been using it with moderate success (a couple of thousand subscriptions). You are better than 90 % of the youtube population (easily). But given that Youtube is unbelievably competitive, making a living off it purely through views requires you to be better than about 99.99% of the population (being charitable and saying 1/10000 is making a living of Youtube) @allasyummyfood posted about working 4 years to get 67k followers on youtube and 400 videos and making 100 USD/ a month from them).
But what if you also have some moderate programming skills? What if you are one of the few on Steemit.com already and are decent at posting? What if you know the basics of video editing? What if you start to take a writing class and hone your editing? What if you start to practice public speaking (say go to toastmasters meetings). What if you simply love talking about investing in cryptocurrency and are obsessed with it?
In the first option, trying to beat Youtube, (be better than say 99.999% of the population) is not that promising.
In the second option, through combining all these mediocre skills you become someone unique, that might be uniquely suited to explain others how to make simple bots on Steemit.com (just a random example) and market that!
Every skill you can add to that stack (that combines with it not just any random skill) will set you further apart and make you uniquely qualified not because you are the expert or the best but because of your unique talent stack.
As a risk management strategy that is interesting too because it allows you to adapt. If you are investing all your time in honing one particular skill, the risk is that there is too much competition or that this skill loses value. (look at website design or something 15 years ago and now...)
for Financial Cryptography I think you have to accept that being the absolute expert in one discipline is not as useful as having a more versatile talentstack.
Of course already being an expert in one valuable field and then building useful skills around that is really promising...
We really need a bookmarking feature on steemit
That's a great response - you should make it a blog post!
That thought occurred to me :)
It is in my cue! Currently developing several ideas about how to adapt to the future idea economy as a "standard knowledge economy professional" There is a lot and I need to clarify my messages! Will reply here when it is finished!
if cannot understand it....just used it.....and utilized it....nice post....give u resteem and upvote...dude...