5 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2020
  2. Jan 2019
    1. Grin is easily the most technologically advanced and fascinating cryptocurrency to be released since Bitcoin. It'll be interesting seeing Bitcoin maximalists come up with logic to convince themselves to be OK with shilling it. Personally, I'm a big fan, will be buying lots of it!

      <big>评:</big><br/><br/> 2018 年的冬天对于加密货币市场来说无疑是寒冷的,但仍然阻挡不住投资机构们对新一代隐私币 Grin 的兴趣。没有 ICO,没有预挖,开发团队不接受投资只接受捐赠——所有这些都让这张「咧嘴笑脸」带上了谜一般的独特气质。 <br/><br/> 值得提出的是,在 Grin 最初的挖矿设计中,团队采取的是 Cuckoo Cycle 算法,这是完全抗 ASIC 的算法。团队每 6 个月会调整一次算法参数,来保持抗 ASIC 的特性,并希望凭此做到真正的去中心化挖矿——用团队自己的话来说就是 “specifically designed to be resistant to Bitcoin style hardware arms-races”。 <br/><br/> 看起来很酷吧?更酷的是,这份「螳臂当车式」勇气背后的社会意义。这话听来不免有点末世英雄的悲壮,但对于那些在面对疯狂通胀不惜冒险自行挖矿的委内瑞拉民众来说,何尝不是雪中送炭?Medium 上 @kovalskee 的一篇文章亦呼应了这一点: <br/><br/>

      In the first years it is mass distribution and adoption by merchants and services will be the key over time to realizing Grin’s vision, and over a long time horizon Grin can likely become a store of value. Perhaps that which will drive demand will be a single privacy- or micropayment-focused service “killer app” (the holy grail so highly sought out in the “crypto” space) that will propel usage of Grin. Perhaps it’ll be an array of applications or use-cases focused on privacy. It might be in the developing world, in some authoritarian regime, in emerging markets, or in the West.

      <br/><br/>以为故事说到这儿就完了?并非如此。Cuckoo Cycle 算法的精心设计无法阻止一些公司秘密研究 ASIC,故而仍不能做到完全抵抗中心化的算力聚集。因此 Grin 团队规划了一个限定期,预计之后的新算法将对「抗 ASIC」特性进行改进,从「完全抗 ASIC」逐渐过渡到「对 ASIC 友好」——即在两年的时间里,从最初的「90% GPU + 10% ASIC」转为「100% ASIC」。这样的妥协之举使得算力不会在项目初始阶段过分集中,甚至能让个人 computing devices 也得以参与到挖矿中来。 <br/><br/> 说到底,算力的中心化趋势是任何 PoW 算法区块链都不可避免的问题。在萎靡熊市里半路杀出的 Grin,为这群急需新鲜感的玩家示范了如何在腹背受敌的牢笼里自娱自乐般带着镣铐起舞。而这支舞留给人们的思考,却已然超出了资本博弈的范畴,触及到了更广的社会维度。

  3. Apr 2016
    1. The Franklin Library is bringing out a deluxe edition of Slaughterhouse Five, I believe. VONNEGUT Yes. I was required to write a new introduction for it. INTERVIEWER Did you have any new thoughts? VONNEGUT I said that only one person on the entire planet benefited from the raid, which must have cost tens of millions of dollars. The raid didn’t shorten the war by half a second, didn’t weaken a German defense or attack anywhere, didn’t free a single person from a death camp. Only one person benefited—not two or five or ten. Just one. INTERVIEWER And who was that? VONNEGUT Me. I got three dollars for each person killed. Imagine that.

      the raid of dresden

    2. I adopted my sister’s sons after she died, and it’s spooky to watch them try to make her impossible dreams come true. INTERVIEWER What were your sister’s dreams like? VONNEGUT She wanted to live like a member of The Swiss Family Robinson, with impossibly friendly animals in impossibly congenial isolation. Her oldest son, Jim, has been a goat farmer on a mountaintop in Jamaica for the past eight years. No telephone. No electricity.

      wtf lol

    3. INTERVIEWER What did the Germans say? VONNEGUT They said the war was all over for us, that we were lucky, that we could now be sure we would live through the war, which was more than they could be sure of. As a matter of fact, they were probably killed or captured by Patton’s Third Army within the next few days. Wheels within wheels. INTERVIEWER Did you speak any German? VONNEGUT I had heard my parents speak it a lot. They hadn’t taught me how to do it, since there had been such bitterness in America against all things German during the First World War. I tried a few words I knew on our captors, and they asked me if I was of German ancestry, and I said, “Yes.” They wanted to know why I was making war against my brothers. INTERVIEWER And you said—? VONNEGUT I honestly found the question ignorant and comical. My parents had separated me so thoroughly from my Germanic past that my captors might as well have been Bolivians or Tibetans, for all they meant to me. INTERVIEWER After you were captured, you were shipped to Dresden? VONNEGUT In the same boxcars that had brought up the troops that captured us—probably in the same boxcars that had delivered Jews and Gypsies and Jehovah’s Witnesses and so on to the extermination camps. Rolling stock is rolling stock.

      lol