(Part 2) Best products from r/ethereum

I just purchased the following books:

• Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1491954388/)
  
• The Internet of Money (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1537000454/)
  
• Ethereum: Blockchains, Digital Assets, Smart Contracts, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1523930470/)
  
  They have good reviews and seem nice reads for the money. However, the Ethereum book - "This text was written for people with a fast grasp, who are not programmers." Still missing a book on Solidity for programmers.

The arguments for and against can be summarized with 2 simple points:

1. In the real (developed) world, the rule of law takes strict priority over brute force. Laws are developed in such a fashion that they follow the intent of the majority so long as they do not clearly violate the rights of the minority or of individuals. There is no question of what a judge or jury in nearly any developed country would rule in this case.
   
2. In situations without trust and without a trustworthy authority, a robustly built and well-tested system will not need a justice system to enforce the rule of law. For example, vending machines are designed not to need a cashier and ATM's are designed not to need a security guard.
   
   The reality is, Ethereum is not a robustly built and well-tested system, and neither is the Dao. Yes yes yes, this wasn't ethereum's bug, blah blah blah. That's irrelevant - Robust & well designed systems prevent failures by proper and clever design.
   
   This isn't to shame or bash Ethereum. Ethereum is barely 2 years old. The internet took nearly 25 years to develop. It took 22 years to go from Unix to Linux. It took 20 years to go from public key cryptography to a usable SSL encryption system. It took 18 years to go from the development of a mouse to a widely usable graphical OS, and 5 more to reach something non-geeks could use.
   
   In conclusion, Ethereum age 2 is not a robustly built and well tested system. It does not create a bad precedent to acknowledge this reality and apply the rule of law until Ethereum grows up. When Ethereum has grown up, miners will refuse to accept arbitrary transaction controls, which is why the Blockchain innovation works so well.

The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography is excellent if you’re interested in this stuff. It takes you through the history of encryption and explains everything well.

Chichen Itza is one of the most amazing things in the world. Experience it no matter what. Also, a great time to read Breaking the Maya Code, which seems applicable to Ethereum/crypto in a lot ways. Spoiler alert: it took forever in part because each generation of archaeologists thought they had a monopoly on the truth and couldn't adapt their techniques and understanding to evidence that they were wrong.

Please take a look at this Ethereum history book. It's a great resource for anyone who wishes to catch up with what has happened so far with Ethereum since 2013.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1546544828/ref=s9u_simh_gw_i1?ie=UTF8&fpl=fresh&pd_rd_i=1546544828&pd_rd_r=H50H3KZ30K8DT7QBX6T0&pd_rd_w=6UlGI&pd_rd_wg=gkZZ5&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=&pf_rd_r=EDRPNYPEB7H6BDC7GWMP&pf_rd_t=36701&pf_rd_p=781f4767-b4d4-466b-8c26-2639359664eb&pf_rd_i=desktop

You are absolutely right! You describe the President of my country perfectly, Cristina Kirchner of Argentina. A perfect sociopath.

I read this book about this and helped me understand I guess a kind of sociopath, the Perverse Narcissist, this is the book by Marie-France Hirigoyen, Stalking The Soul:

http://www.amazon.com/Stalking-Soul-Marie-France-Hirigoyen/dp/188558699X/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

I think the bottleneck is the latency that occurs between geographically separated validators of the network. U have to give validators around 1,5-2 seconds and they also need some time to generate a block (process transactions) when they are assigned to it. Adding a small safety margin i guess 3-4 seconds is the limit and afaik Casper is aiming for exactly that.

It's a globally p2p network in the end. Thats why scaling horizontally with sharding is the right approach.

Btw: one of the fastest ledger close intervals i know can be found on the Ripple consensus ledger (~3.5 sec). I know their network topology favors centralization and currently the network is still run by 5 validators all controlled by Ripple but still: their tech is solid.

https://charts.ripple.com/#/metrics (Scroll down to "Ledger Close Interval")

Processing power only becomes important for the individual validator i think - the more ETH at stake, the more blocks will be assigned to that validator and the more processing power u will need to process all those transactions (and collect all those juicy fees...).

I remember Vitalik taking i wild guess that, depending on network usage, anything under 10k ETH could be staked with regular consumer hardware. My guess is that not only u will need a strong CPU but also quite a bit of RAM (which has become very cheap) and a fast storage medium ( NVMe SSDs are awesomely fast, around 3-5 times faster than regular SSDs)

I have not personally used any of these products but a quick search showed some with really good reviews. As a rule I typically don't advise people on how to spend their money, but if I were looking for risers I'd go with these:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01EQIN2QK/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1498340896&sr=8-1-spons&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=riser&psc=1

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01A6JLVDE/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1498340896&sr=8-2-spons&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=riser&psc=1

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01CKYYH4S/ref=mp_s_a_1_26?ie=UTF8&qid=1498341045&sr=8-26&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=riser

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B009ZY0OKI/ref=mp_s_a_1_35?ie=UTF8&qid=1498341086&sr=8-35&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=riser&dpPl=1&dpID=21aeQDX6n7L&ref=plSrch

Amazon links from our internal policies document. We opt for more reputable flash drives over the cheap megapacks. If you do opt for a megapack, get 2 or 3 different brands. Getting an 8 pack of the same brand means if 1 fails, they will all fail (within similar timelines, especially since they are likely from same batch):

• https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Cruzer-Low-Profile-Drive-SDCZ33-008G-B35/dp/B005FYNSUA
  
  
• https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Cruzer-Frustration-Free-Packaging-SDCZ36-008G-AFFP2/dp/B00E9W1UKY
  
  Or, of course there's the whole no-wifi printer for $30 route that we prefer:
  
  
• Printer: (0.075 ETH) https://www.amazon.com/HP-DeskJet-Compact-Printer-F5S23A/dp/B013SKI4QA
  
  
• Cable: (0.012 ETH) https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-USB-2-0-Certified-Cable/dp/B000067SPP
  
  
• Paper: (0.016 ETH) https://www.amazon.com/HP-Office-Letter-Bright-172160R/dp/B0090YJBYS/
  
  Fun Fact: We gave away 0.01 ETH for gas like it was candy to help facilitate DAO withdrawals. The amount of oldschool printer cables we could have bought today instead! 😂

There's a science fiction book about your first idea, called The Unincorporated Man. A guy gets himself frozen and wakes up in the future, and everybody has shareholders who get part of their personal income.

The protagonist is the only one who doesn't have shareholders, and he doesn't want them. It's a good story but also has a lot of interesting debate on the pros and cons of the system.

We all make mistakes, I'm sorry to hear that. This advice has helped me immensely; you might be surprised how quickly it can rebuild trust and improve your relationship.

My own quick partial list:

• http://www.amazon.com/Theory-Applied-Economists-Robert-Gibbons/dp/0691003955
  
• Everything on http://lesswrong.com and http://overcomingbias.com ; keep reading until you understand what "acausal trade" is
  
• David Friedman's Future Imperfect (some economics of futurism, also deals with many of our issues); his "Legal Systems Very Different from Ours" is also very relevant and his Price Theory is good for intro economics
  
• Technical intro to signalling and countersignalling theory: http://ideas.repec.org/p/iuk/wpaper/2005-05.html
  
• Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, also Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational in the same vein (and Bryan Caplan's Myth of the Rational Voter for another set of fun consequences of irrationality :) )

Good luck...
Or wait a little and copy/past the best...
https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Ethereum-Building-Smart-Contracts/dp/1491971940

Ethereum, tokens & smart contracts: Notes on getting started.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1973442558

Mastering Ethereum: Building Smart Contracts and Dapps https://www.amazon.com/dp/1491971940/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_KRNFzbGY7ZMN7

Not out yet but figured I'd let you know.

Here is the mobile version of your link