Sanity checks are usually pretty easy to do, but if you can’t do them, then this strategy just won’t work.
I concede that Bitcoin is pretty easy to understand and sanity check (merkle trees aren’t that hard to wrap your head around ― I would have invested in Bitcoin in 2012 when I heard about it, but I was in high school and had no disposable income). But sanity checking Tezos is much harder:
It turns out that a silver bullet for chain validation is right on the horizon and under active research: recursive SNARKs. SNARKs, which stands for succinct non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge are the technology used in Zcash for protecting the privacy of transactions (if you’re already objecting that SNARKs require a trusted setup, please bear with us, we have good news for you).
… This very counter intuitive possibility is a consequence of the PCP theorem. Rather than try to engage in economic “bets” that the transaction has been properly validated we can obtain true cryptographic assurance.
I don’t know enough to sanity check their scaling strategy or what makes Tezos unique in this respect. Even Ethereum itself is experimenting with zk-SNARKS and Vitalik Buterin wrote a series of articles explaning SNARKS on his medium blog which starts off with an article that says:
You’re not expected to understand everything here the first time you read it, or even the tenth time; this stuff is genuinely hard. But hopefully this article will give you at least a bit of an idea as to what is going on under the hood.
― Exploring Elliptic Curve Pairings
So far Tezos’ Unique Selling Point seems to be that they’ve used OCaml to implement some way of doing formal verification on smart contracts. But this alone seems like insufficient evidence to conclude that Tezos is shiny. To make matters worse, there seems to be some internal conflict between the co-founders of Tezos.
I don’t know how I could possibly successfully sanity check Tezos without understanding SNARKS and reading their whitepaper (both of which require non-trivial prerequisites).
Perhaps you have the background or access to people who have the background to evaluate Tezos properly. But I certainly do not and I would argue the cost is high enough.
I think you’re underestimating the amount of insider knowledge you’ve gained and the cost of attaining that insider knowledge. Eliezer is certainly surrounded by smart people and MIRI received half of its donations in crypto. Yet, they still did not invest in crypto. I think this is because they lacked deep insider knowledge about cryptocurrencies.
I think what usually happens is ― a rationalist hears about shiny thing X, investigates it thoroughly, concludes that in fact X is shiny, then takes action. There are a lot of things worth investigating at any given point ― VR, homotopy type theory, blockchain based technologies, genetics, deep learning, functional programming and so on. Unfortunately, you have to invest a lot of time to gain insider knowledge in any of these things.
I think people get stuck in the investigation process and don’t proceed further due to the temporal cost of attaining that knowledge.
To a crypto outsider like myself, Tezos still feels like another ICO scam. I googled Tezos for a while and still do not have any idea why this has a strong “signal”. I believe you’re advocating investing some money in Tezos since smart people think it’s cool and skip the investigation step.
I’m still confused about whether it is rational to skip the investigation step and blindly invest in Tezos without understanding how it is different.