Weekend Links - Jan 8th 2022
Should we consider hydrogen? A short article on rte.ie – the Irish news channel.
As I understand, batteries are indeed very expensive on a weight basis and also on a per kWh basis for anything above 6 hours. However, (aside from solving distribution) the capital costs of making and using hydrogen are prohibitive at present and I would like to understand what might be possible on those fronts over the next decade.
2. Sybil attacks – wikipedia
It’s where you hack a system by creating lots and lots of accounts to get disproportionate control.
Some ways you can make systems sybil resistant are either by imposing a cost for each account (e.g. account creation or transaction fees) or by having identify verification.
For example, one thing that is hard about having an automated Universal Basic Income system is the question of how to stop people getting multiple payments. Worldcoin.org is looking into this by providing identity verification devices.
3. Skepticism on web3
There has been a lot of trolling of crypto, but this one here is a thoughtful article by coder and founder of the Signal messaging app, Moxie.
Moxie points out (and I tend to agree) that people don’t like decentralised services, because it creates too much work. Despite what they might say, they very much like delegating things like running servers to centralised companies like Google and Amazon. Further, centralised companies move a lot faster than open source decentralised systems.