>The article is frustrating because it puts the blame onto the listener
That wasn't the impression I got from the article - I think the title was a tongue in cheek way of saying quite the opposite: telling people isn't enough, it's your job as the explainer to guide people through the full path to understanding.
That's more or less what you described in the rest of your post, so I sense you're in concordance with the author
Reliability, consistency, convenience, laziness. I know by and large if something goes wrong, Galaxus will just refund me no questions asked. Having tried some other retailers (that I found on toppreise)... that was not always the case
>They don't have the scale to sway large parts of the public opinion
According to some infographic in a thread on HN yesterday, reddit is currently the most viewed site in the US, Australia and a few other countries, so it seems like it could have a sway on large parts of public opinion
Reddit's usage is heavily oriented toward silos though, being the subreddits that people subscribe to, and the most controversial are excluded from the All feed.
It doesn't have the same dynamics as Facebook and Twitter in terms of how posts/tweets/ideas get spread out all over the network.
Of course fully anecdotal, but my experiences with ryanair have been mostly fine - the planes are shit and they try and sell you bollocks on board but they run on time and it all kinda works.
Easyjet on the other hand... mamma mia, getting a refund out of them is a gauntlet, and at my local airport >50% (!!!!) of easyjet flights are delayed or cancelled.
It's not consensus per se - each node releases a share of a secret and if any node gains a threshold number of shares, they can use interpolation to generate the signature and thus the randomness. Different nodes could even collect a different set of shares to reach the threshold and they'd still generate the same signature
Round numbers are tied to a date time in a loose sense that each participant should be emitted a share for every time period since the genesis. A single node emitting its shares early or late wouldn't affect the network - only a threshold number of nodes doing so
Essentially the hash of the round number is the encryption key and the randomness that gets generated at that round number (in the future) is the decryption key
>Is this basically just putting someone on chain, presuming that there wont be a 51% attack
There is no chain or block creation. Also it's not a public permissionless network, so outside actors can't join for a sybil attack.
>I presume this timelock can be cracked early if I spend enough compute resources on it.
Sure like any cryptography, if you have more computing power than exists in the world
>Also I presume it doesn't work well for small time intervals (less than or equal to drand's block creation times)?
There is a dependence on transmitting shares between nodes in the network to gain a threshold number of share - right now each epoch is 30 seconds, but new networks could be created with down to ~1 second epochs
I used the term blockchain with liberty, it is based on a consensus mechanism so you need to assume the consensus is right which is different of timelock encryption usage in classic ways. The README was edited after the HN posts.
It's not really a consensus mechanism either really - the randomness in some sense is deterministic, it just requires participation. I'm unsure which 'classic ways' you're referring to - in principle it's not that different to having a notary, except the notary is a distributed network rather than a single entity.
> The README was edited after the HN posts.
You can see from that the tlock git history the README.md hasn't been updated in 13 days and the tlock-js one hasn't been updated in 4 days - both before the HN post. Are you talking about another README?
That wasn't the impression I got from the article - I think the title was a tongue in cheek way of saying quite the opposite: telling people isn't enough, it's your job as the explainer to guide people through the full path to understanding.
That's more or less what you described in the rest of your post, so I sense you're in concordance with the author