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Web 3 is Flawed
My opinions on Web3 and why it is flawed
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 488 posts.
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Bitcoin drops below $20k, Ether cracks $1k – what this means
A huge Rube Goldberg machine slapstick custard pie clown car, where each custard pie triggers three more custard pies.
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Do Kwon in more trouble
He Sent $80 Million a Month to Secret Wallets Before Terra Luna Crashed
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Is “acceptably non-dystopian” self-sovereign identity even possible?
In the recent paper about "soulbound" tokens, Vitalik Buterin et al. write that they aim to build technology that is "acceptably non-dystopian". Do any of today's self-sovereign identity projects fit that bill?
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In defense of cryptocurrency
Last week a group of technologists, including Bruce Schneier, sent a letter to Congress outlining their concerns around cryptocurrency and urging Congress to regulate the space. Now let me be the f…
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Algorithmic stablecoins are provably impossible without continuous funding
Financial theory demonstrates that the concept is fundamentally flawed
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The Bitcoin Investment Thesis Is Broken
Informed Tip of the Week: Take a look at our recent series of posts covering Informed’s premise and our business model. We will be adding additional content over the next few weeks. At the beginning of the year, I wrote about most of the obvious bubbles out there and how Continue Reading
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Web3 is expensive P2P
Web3 claims to be the only way to save us from commercial entities defining what we can see and what not. Yet, it does exactly this: It results in commercialized entities defining what we can see and what not. More on the blockchain ecosystem in this overview and especially in the simple, hum
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The problem with Bitcoin miners
Disclosure: I hold short positions in companies mentioned in this article. This is not financial advice.
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Lets talk about blockchains
A blockchain, put simply, is a way of building distributed consensus in a trustless system. It allows multiple entities (i.e. computers) to collaborate and do computations without needing to trust in either a central authority or in each other, as every computation must be verified before it is accepted. There are…
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Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense
I’ve been concerned about the excesses of the blockchain industry and their spread into all parts of society for some time now. Here I’ve summarized my thoughts regarding the subject.
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Crypto, the Left and Technofeudalism
Rare is the person who could expertly comment – in a single interview! – on the rise of NFTs and their origins in the virtual worlds of gaming, the logic of the emerging regime of techno-feudalism, and the folly of El Salvador’s Bitcoin-heavy negotiating tactics with the IMF. Luckily, we have found this person in […]
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On anti-crypto toxicity
Crypto is known for its toxicity towards outsiders. Similar attitudes are emerging from some who oppose crypto.
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Terrible things I'd do with your money
In some of Daniel Kahnemann's books and any other business advice-type articles, you always seem to read the same argument: The thing important people all over the world would like to see is incr
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Ethereum Has Issues
I first wrote about the problem of bots front-running transactions a year and a half ago in The Order Flow , citing Dan Robinson and Georgio...
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Web3: A VC-funded gig economy of securities fraud
If you look at a “Web3” offering and just think of it as a pump-and-dump onto retail investors, everything will make much more sense.
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The user experience problems of quadratic voting
In their seminal book, "Radical Markets," Eric Posner and Glen Weyl introduce quadratic voting to improve (or radicalize) democratic preference voting. They argue that by allowing voters to
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The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto
A group of cryptocurrency researchers and critics annotate the irresponsible cryptocurrency puff piece that was originally published in the New York Times.
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Crypto is an unproductive bubble
This post sparked a great conversation on Hacker News! See the comments here.Another update: Scott Alexander just (12/8/22) wrote the best counterpoint to this that I’ve read – see it here “The four most expensive words in investing are: ‘This time it’s different.’” John Templeton I’m writing this essay not so much to…
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Just Say No to Central Bank Digital Currencies
A Central Bank Digital Currency would enable a totalitarian nightmare
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Explanation of Bitcoin’s Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) has grown to be very popular in public-key cryptographic systems, most popularly used in Bitcoin. ECC is…
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I was wrong, we need crypto
To say I've been skeptical about Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto universe would be an understatement of epic proportions. Since the early 2010s, some of my most ferocious Twitter battles have been against the HODL army with the laser eyes. There's just so much to oppose: Bitcoin's grotesque energy consumption, the…
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Plausibly deniable encryption (2020)
It is safe to assume that in any useful cryptosystem C k there exists at least one person with access to the key k . An adversary with sufficient leverage can bypass the computational cost of a conventional attack by exerting their influence on this person.
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Cryptocurrency off-ramps, and the shift towards centralization
The 'off-ramps' from crypto—that is, the firms who will exchange your cryptocurrencies back into traditional currencies—are increasingly taking the position that is so common in discussions about privacy: 'if you're not doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?'