I'm reminded of this scene from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. In theory, the goal of the airdrop is to create new users, but in practice the airdrop receivers just cash out their chips and go home.
Why use a mixer at all? The technology is fundamentally centralized/trust-based, and even assuming a perfectly trustworthy mixer, vulnerable to many forms of analysis (the list of which will only grow as time passes). If you want privacy, use something that actually gives it to you, like Monero.
I think at this stage it's impossible to fairly distribute a coin to new users.
Bitcoin was born into a unique environment. The world did not know what to think, and largely ignored it, so it was able to spread organically for years, detached from any notion it would ever be worth anything. Because it had no value, it could grow without having to worry about these kinds of attacks. Only once it spread far enough did it begin to take on economic value and an exchange rate, reaching one penny and beyond.
Airdrops these days do the exact opposite. They're premined, listed day 1 on exchanges, and the creators try to pump the exchange rate in order to finance later development. The entire process is corrupted by users viewing projects through an economic lens, and creators trying to extract value before delivering value. Now that the cat is out of the bag, it's likely the conditions of bitcoin's creation will never happen again.
grin started a couple years ago same as bitcoin, the day of the v1.0 release the devs hardcoded the latest bitcoin block hash in the genesis block (to prove there was no premine) and as soon as they pushed the commit people were able to build the code and start mining
Grin wasnt instamined or premined. One new coin per second is mined forever starting day one. So it is pretty interesting and very high inflation and widely considered to be the most fair distribution to date.
Seems like if protocols don't provide any liquidity for their tokens, but the tokens can be used to have access to a protocol revenue, I don't see the problem.
Except for most tokens/protocols don't have any revenue they can share with token holders…
It's an interesting problem and one that many decentralized applications will be forced to contend with, beyond simple airdrops. Many on-chain protocols and primitives simply don't need to differentiate between human user and program, but the ones that do are usually crippled if they fail to adequately do so. Quadratic funding mechanisms, for example.
I believe we're still very early on this front, there's lots of opportunity for innovation in terms of Sybil defense. Dox Your Customer is the easiest and naturally the most at odds with the Web3 paradigm, but there are others that make fewer compromises which have been tried with varying levels of success. Vouch networks/social graphs, attestation or reputation systems, video identity registries, recurring cost, time-coordinated Turing tests, etc.
I am certain novel approaches will continue to emerge until we land on something robust without sacrificing decentralization or the right to privacy.
Another funny example is the one of Juno: a whale Sybil-ed the airdrop, and gathered 10% of the tokens. Then, the community voted to strip the whale of most of their tokens.
I find the example interesting because it shows that Layer 2 protocols can very much strip you away from your coins, just like banks/governments can.
I am a research engineer at a Defi company and we wrote this script. That being said we don't intend on an airdrop at this point in time. But it's an easy to use to tool to quantify sybil interactions if anyone is curious.
https://github.com/primitivefinance/sybil-detection
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 74.2 ms ] threadhttps://youtu.be/cyxxE1AcUSM
That was the Divergence Ventures/Bridget Harris play listed in the article. To their credit, they returned the money when called out on it.
you don't have to use an actual mixer. just set up 1000s of addresses and just cycle many tiny transactions
Alphabay2 is the only market left and it's monero-only.
Bitcoin was born into a unique environment. The world did not know what to think, and largely ignored it, so it was able to spread organically for years, detached from any notion it would ever be worth anything. Because it had no value, it could grow without having to worry about these kinds of attacks. Only once it spread far enough did it begin to take on economic value and an exchange rate, reaching one penny and beyond.
Airdrops these days do the exact opposite. They're premined, listed day 1 on exchanges, and the creators try to pump the exchange rate in order to finance later development. The entire process is corrupted by users viewing projects through an economic lens, and creators trying to extract value before delivering value. Now that the cat is out of the bag, it's likely the conditions of bitcoin's creation will never happen again.
there is zero consensus on fair and therefore it is impossible to have a fair launch
all outcomes result in consolidation unless inflation/dilution is extremely high and uninteresting
Cryptocurrency airdrops [1]. Not Apple’s AirDrop feature.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/airdrop-cryptocurrency....
Except for most tokens/protocols don't have any revenue they can share with token holders…
I believe we're still very early on this front, there's lots of opportunity for innovation in terms of Sybil defense. Dox Your Customer is the easiest and naturally the most at odds with the Web3 paradigm, but there are others that make fewer compromises which have been tried with varying levels of success. Vouch networks/social graphs, attestation or reputation systems, video identity registries, recurring cost, time-coordinated Turing tests, etc.
I am certain novel approaches will continue to emerge until we land on something robust without sacrificing decentralization or the right to privacy.
I find the example interesting because it shows that Layer 2 protocols can very much strip you away from your coins, just like banks/governments can.
(https://beincrypto.com/juno-community-votes-to-reject-tokens...)