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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3996 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 23, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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The book I'm currently into has a fictional cryptocurrency with a so-called “feedback problem” with its algorithm: it's viable to create sockpuppets and bounce transactions between them to ramp up your reputation. The resident math genius diagnoses that the protocol must be redesigned, because the problem is isomorphic with the Collatz conjecture. I can't imagine a way how it could be, but I have only a surface math knowledge and am only familiar with the conjecture from its Wikipedia article and a 4chan shitpost. Is there a plausible design where the two are similar? Or is it just used a piece of technobabble?

A nice work otherwise, judging from half of a book of a trilogy. Could possibly be a modernized Atlas Shrugged without the monologues.

This is a Sybil attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack

I don't know how, or if, it relates to the Collatz conjecture

Yes, it's the relation I'm interested in, there shouldn't be one in a general case, but can there be a specific one where it applies?

I'm no expert on cryptocurrency, but I did study math. I'd say I see no reason why the collatz conjecture should be connected to a feedback problem; Even if they for some weird reason decided to implement the reputation system similar to the collatz algorithm, the entire point of the conjecture is that all numbers degenerate into 1, no matter where you start. If it was the problem that the reputation always unintentionally decreases down it might make sense, but the other way around it sounds like technobabble to me, sorry.

GPT-4 told me much the same thing, saying it was likely technobabble back when I asked it before you replied. But I didn't post that because I don't have quite that much confidence in it just yet haha.

Good to have someone with mathematical experience say so too!

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