Emre Surmeli

Theme of the decade: Incentive design

A few things I've noticed as all devs write code with AI. When you write foundational / architectural code of a new project by hand, you "feel" the code pushing back if your abstraction isn't right. You feel when something is harder than it should be. The code is telling you it's not in the right shape. Good engineers are sensitive to this. When you're using an LLM, you keep pushing right through this in a way that feels like you're making progress, and it may even be directionally correct in a sense, but the underlying foundation of it all is actually bad in a way that either kills progress of the LLM later as it buckles under the complexity it has created or destroys your ability to maintain the code long term. Related to this, I see a general restlessness with just sitting and thinking about a problem for a while. As I've been working on a new library here at Laravel, there have been days where it feels like I mainly just stare at my screen thinking about something. When Claude Code is at your fingertips, it's tempting to just start yapping into the terminal and watching code come out the other end. Again, directionally correct in some ways, but often doesn't land on the elegant solution that is waiting to be discovered.

On to 2.0 As of today, Parity’s Polkadot node v1.0.0 is released. We are symbolically entering a new era of development for the network. How 2.0 is built is just as important as what 2.0 consists of. This is a vast human effort which needs processes that scale with an ever-increasing technological surface area. The 1.0 era of core development was defined by delivering the 2016 whitepaper’s initial vision, mostly by the efforts of engineers from a single organization. The 2.0 era will be defined by a decentralized collective of developers designing and building in the open. This marks a transition from a few agents building software to many agents - sometimes competing, sometimes collaborating, but all working to move things forward. From now on, Parity will not maintain codebases for Polkadot or Kusama runtimes - neither relay chains or system chains. The contents of those codebases have been moved to a Fellowship repository. And as always, OpenGov has the final say on which code upgrades are actually accepted by the networks. github.com/paritytech/pol…

@ethanfr Are you accepting commits? Can't find a public repo.

After nearly six months of private access, I'm opening developers.ethanfrancis.app to the public. Across 5 blockchains, developers.ethanfrancis.app keeps live track of indexed GitHub repositories and, more importantly, the number of unique contributors within each chain 📊

Hear me out: A third required seat/party in the presidential elections. Can't dissolve it, can be empty if no one wants it. How do we solve the 2-party dilemma? Let us start by trying adding a +1. Because we know -1 doesn't work all that well :)

De-dollarization is decentralization. That is, rather than a *single* replacement reserve currency, we're entering a multipolar world with several networks that compete with both each other and the dollar for different functions. 1) Store of value → Bitcoin, gold, precious metals 2) Medium of exchange → CNY/CNH, INR, local currencies 3) Financial system → China, India, crypto, fintech, local economies Basically, if you think of the dollar as a network where the sysadmins are Fed and Treasury, key pieces of that network are getting unbundled. And this is no longer a purely market-driven phenomenon. States are now de-dollarizing for national security purposes. They don't want the Fed to have a remote kill switch for their economy. And why would they? It's not democratic for the Fed to control another country's economy. Other states want to be sovereign and want to rely on their own local currency, if they can. That is a legitimate aspiration from their perspective. Moreover, it's *much* easier to launch currencies than to scale factories. The regions that build things have a huge advantage in this regard. How hard is it really today to stand up an international payments network or digital currency, with both consumer and enterprise functionality? Way easier than it was in 2008. There are fintech and crypto founders all over the world. So, from a technical standpoint, every single function of the Fed/Treasury (and JPMC/etc) can be implemented on-chain or on a server outside Fed control. Just like everything that, say, NYT or NBC does can be done online. The only constraints now are the political support ("can you do that") and social acceptance ("is that money"). And other societies can provide that political and social support, as most of the population and GDP is now outside the G7. It's just like the fall of US corporate media. It was a huge fight, but they've now lost their stranglehold over global communications. People both inside and outside can now speak freely. Something much like that is coming for the Fed, losing control over transaction much like US media lost control over information. Indeed, it's already underway. How much transaction volume already occurs on networks where the Fed isn't the sysadmin? Think about Bitcoin, Ethereum, India's UPI, China's WeChat + digital yuan, and smaller networks like Brazil's PagSeguro and Southeast Asia's GrabPay, just to name a few. You don't have to "like" any of these to acknowledge some have 100M to 1B users already. How fast *could* they scale in exigent circumstances, to add more functionality if needed? They aren't the good guys, but Russia gives one answer. They seemingly managed to transition away many functions from the dollar to the yuan in one year, in the middle of a war, without completely wrecking their economy. So this shows that de-dollarization can happen very fast if a state decides to do it. Even countries that don't like Russia know that a playbook exists. Anyway, this is a huge topic where there are good counterarguments from left, right, and center, which I'll try to engage in a future video. I'll leave you with a few graphs.

Is possible? ChatGPT to use ZK tech to hide personal information. How much complexity and slowness would it add to the system? :thinking:

I will buckle down to work as soon as I finish reading the Internet.

@owocki PoP

what should i write/podcast about in Q1 2023

Fascinated by the repetitive centralized opaque failures' contribution to the reduction of noise in the ecosystem, as if nature is tuning the signal to the healthy frequencies.

The @Web3foundation recently released a statement saying that @Polkadot DOT token has morphed, from a Security to Software. In a follow up podcast, they go much deeper into the details. I break down everything for you in this thread, so follow along. medium.com/web3foundation…

For the first time in @Kusamanetwork history, two governance bodies voted in a simultaneous and coordinated way to approve an on-chain proposal and help improve the overall network: do you want to know what happened and how? 🧵

Gov 2 coming to @kusamanetwork

Decentralization cannot exist without centralization. When something fails due to centralization, decentralization can provide an answer. When something doesn't work because it's too decentralized. Centralization can provide an answer. But both have their own tradeoffs.

@elonmusk No one: Me using a thesaurus to sound more sophisticated: Social network = Collective, cybernetic super-intelligence

Because it consists of billions of bidirectional interactions per day, Twitter can be thought of as a collective, cybernetic super-intelligence

@crypto_fomo_247 @kusamanetwork No one has the authority to allow or not allow what you're talking about. It's all open-source code. Is there an example that you think was bad for the ecosystem?

@semres8 @kusamanetwork They shouldn’t have allowed other para chains to have publically traded canary networks. Every chain Should have first deployed on $KSM and then promoted to $DOT like $Kilt did.

Q: Is @kusamanetwork a test network? A: It is a value-bearing experimentation network. PS. This is the only way you can test out your tokenomics and assumptions about the game theoretic interactions of your participants.

The real headline: @Polkadot development shop @ParityTech appoints its co-founder & skilled business leader Bjorn Wagner (@bjornwgnr) to CEO, allowing Polkadot founder & technical leader Gavin Wood (@gavofyork) to focus efforts on technical strategy, architecture, & development.

Curious about @avalancheavax and how it compares to @Polkadot's implementation? Check out the new wiki article wiki.polkadot.network/docs/learn-com…

@Melt_Dem Just be careful, their search is misleading :D

what is the name for the mental illness where one thing you read results in needing to read 100 more things and opening more tabs until you have more questions than you did when you started and 6 hours of your life have evaporated and you're 45 pages deep in JSTOR i need help

More education for Substate & @Polkadot on its way... medium.com/web3foundation…