Hey friends,
I’ve started a link-aggregation site std.bz for discussing blockchain-protocol engineering. (The technology side of “cryptocurrencies” but no discussion of prices.)
My impression is that lobsters is somewhat skeptical of cryptocurrency and blockchains in general, but I believe that underneath the scammy ICOs and charlatans there is a core gem of interesting technical progress.
However, there hasn’t previously been a good place to discuss the details of this tech. HN often has a superficial understanding. Reddit devolves into shilling and tribal wars. The Ethereum research forum is great, but it’s limited to Ethereum.
The goal of std.bz is to be the central place to discuss the papers and code related to consensus algorithms, protocol economics, related cryptography, incentive mechanism design, etc. regardless of chain.
It’s invite only for now - you can apply for an invite here (or DM me, @eigenjoy on Twitter). The invite tree (along with moderation transparency) should help keep the quality of the discussion high.
Thanks so much to the lobsters contributors for making the code available!
If this sort of community interests you, apply.
Congrats on launching, I’ve added Standard to the list of sister sites. I think you’ve chosen an interesting technical focus, good luck.
Great! Applied for an invite. Excited to contribute to the conversation.
That sounds like a great idea. I was very interested in bitcoin back in 2013. Back then I feel there was more interest in the tech and while there were people in it for the money, I think most of the attention was still on the tech. These days I have next to no interest in crypto. It’s hard to tell what’s real innovation and whats a scam so I assume it’s all scams which is usually correct.
I really hope your new community is able to work on the real tech that will actually make a difference. With the continued news that Visa and Mastercard are selling our data to Google and others I think this tech is so needed but all the initial progress of bitcoin seems to be lost now. Some retailers were actually starting to accept bitcoin but then everything got really confusing with forks and random high transaction fees and now it seems we are back to the start, or even worse, people have seen crypto and are turned off from the idea now.
Do you have any plans on how you will keep the quality high? The invite system should help but once a few scam/hype users join in you will need some kind of plan to remove them.
For keeping the quality high, I’ll be moderating and watching closely (and adding moderators as necessary). The goal is information to help you build and I have no problem removing users that don’t follow that guideline.
The emphasis of the site is on the technology required to create these kinds of networks. What makes this field interesting is that it requires knowledge that slices through many layers: cryptography, incentive design, game theory, decentralized computing, networking, economics, programming, etc.
So while the appropriate list of topics is wide, the list does not include discussing prices, shilling coins, or backroom gossip about things that might affect short-term price.
I feel like I’ve been looking for a forum like this for years. My goto thus far for quality content has been the Cryptology ePrint Archive.
I applied for an invite on the form. I’ll DM you too.