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Building Permanent and Censorship-Resistant Blog with Ethereum ENS and IPFS
The internet nowadays is ephemeral. Layers upon layers of trusted 3rd parties are necessary to distribute content online. It requires ongoing maintenance and is susceptible to censorship or hostile takedowns. In this blog post, I describe the steps I took to host my blog in a trustless, permanent, and…
Shorting Bitcoin
I just bought put options on MicroStrategy ($MSTR) , Coinbase ($COIN) , and Purpose Bitcoin ETF ($BTCC-B.TO) , all at a strike price not far off the current (late June) price, expiring around Christmas. Here’s the thinking.
A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
Stonks Are What You Can Get Away With: NFTs and Financial Nihilism
Eric Jang, "Ten Apes", Jun 19 2021. NFT "drop" coming soon. Andy Warhol once said, “Art is what you can get away with.” I interpret the qu...
The collapse of the IRON stable coin
How Polygon’s first billion-dollar protocol unraveled.
Why I have zero faith in crypto venture capitalists
Mostly the reason I have zero faith in crypto venture capitalists as an institution is that their primary value add is marketing, their due diligence is a joke, and they are functionally equivalent…
Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
This has been on my mind for a while, and with a couple of things lately stoking my ire (the NFT resurgence, and Signal integrating MobileCoin), I’ve finally pushed myself to put it into words.
The Tether Ponzi Scheme
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Filecoin, StorJ and the problem with decentralized storage (2019)
Blockchains for everything Decentralized storage services such as Filecoin and StorJ seek to disrupt the data-storage industry, using blockchain tokens to create a competitive marketplace that can …
Non-Fungible Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift, like Dave Chappelle, is leveraging the power of the Internet to take control of their art.
Signal Adds Cryptocurrency Support
According to Wired, Signal is adding support for the cryptocurrency MobileCoin, “a form of digital cash designed to work efficiently on mobile devices while protecting users’ privacy and even their anonymity.” Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of Signal and CEO of the nonprofit that runs it, describes the new payments…
Bitcoin as a Battery
One of my favorite things about crypto is that, every so often, your conception of what it is changes. Bitcoin at first was “weird internet money” and then it was “a protocol” and then it was “digital gold”. Ethereum is “ICOs”, or maybe “DeFi”, or maybe “Web3”, or maybe all three, or maybe something...
Cryptography behind the top cryptocurrencies
This table is based on research at Nash for work expanding our MPC protocol to secure wallets on new blockchains. We took a snapshot of rankings by market cap in early February 2021. In summary, 74 coins use ECDSA and the secp256k1 curve, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and 48 ERC20 tokens. 10 coins use EdDSA and…
Metakovan, the mystery Beeple art buyer, and his NFT/DeFi scheme
At the end of the day, this is a straight-up ICO-style index fund to speculate on NFTs.
Interview with Vitalik Buterin on ETH2, Scaling Plans, NFTs, etc.
Please enjoy this transcript of my conversation with Vitalik Buterin and Naval Ravikant. Vitalik Buterin (@VitalikButerin) is the creator of Ethereum. He first discovered blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies through Bitcoin in 2011 and was immediately excited by the technology and its potential. He co-founded…
NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap
Like most traps, they’re mysterious and then appealing and then it’s too late. An NFT is digital treasure chest, a status symbol and an apparent item of value. Like a Pokemon card, or a…
Bitcoin Is Time
Keeping track of things in the informational realm requires keeping track of time.
Mining Ethereum on M1 Mac GPU
I’ve had my M1 MacBook Air for a bit of time now, and I also recently started mining Ethereum. I can’t help asking myself: What’s Ethereum mining performance like on a M1 Mac?