There were only a few days in the history of the Ethereum blockchain when user activity filled it to capacity. Most took place in November and December 2017 and coincided with the release of CryptoKitties — the game of collecting and breeding digital cats. The success of CryptoKitties was a demonstration of the power and appeal of digital collectables. In the words of David Pakman, “Blockchains, for the first time, let digital goods become scarce and allow anyone to verify ownership without a central authority […] this will unlock digital collecting, allowing scarce digital goods to be created, sold, auctioned…

TL;DR

1. In order to enable fair use of data on the internet, the architecture of how data is stored and used online has to change dramatically
2. This post introduces the algorithm-visits-data paradigm that prevents data from traveling around the network unencrypted
3. This new architecture is enabled via broad use of secure enclave processors

I’ve previously written about the potential of secure enclave hardware to redefine the way critical data is stored and managed within a variety of online services. This post expands on the topic, specifically addressing issues of fair data use and privacy. …

Since the inception of bitcoin in 2008, blockchain technology has been described as anything from “snake oil” to “the solution to humanity’s biggest problems”. This post attempts to summarize and condense my answer to the question of “why blockchain?”, and explain it in a way that is both clear, practical, and accurate. In order to do so, we must clarify what we mean by “blockchain”. We then need to recognize that we are talking about a universe of technologies that is both broader and more general than blockchain proper.

So what is blockchain? Wikipedia defines blockchain as “a growing list…

TL;DR

1. Secure hardware protects data and software from tampering by the owner or operator of the device where it resides. This includes CPUs, GPUs, embedded chips (such as in cameras, keyboards, and computer screens), and IoT devices.
2. In the future, much of the IT infrastructure will run on secure hardware. Humans will never come into direct contact with some of the data protected by secure hardware.
3. It is not possible to manufacture secure hardware within the traditional corporate frameworks of secrecy and intellectual property protection. …

I am proud to announce that CoinFund has led the seed round of GEO Protocol — an open source overlay protocol that enables creation and interoperability of value transfer networks in a lightweight, cost-efficient, and scalable way.

GEO was first conceived in 2013 and the early development efforts were bootstrapped by its founder, Max Demyan, from 2015 until the fall of 2018, when several local partners joined forces to bring the project to the global market. I met Max in the fall of 2017 and was immediately taken by the strength and precision of his vision for democratized and accessible…

Thanks to Alex Felix and Oleg Golubov for challenging me in the process of writing this post and providing comments both useful and difficult.

Picture this: you are having a romantic evening with your lover, but there is one extra person present, and he is in charge of you being able to interact with your date. What’s even worse, you can’t have a date at all unless such a person is present, and you even have to pay him for the “service”. Am I describing some crazy dystopian world that has nothing to do with how we live today? On…

You invest in a project proposing a solid and inventive solution to a known technical problem. Six months later, long before launch, a much better solution to the same problem is unveiled by someone else, destroying the chances of broad adoption for the original idea and killing your investment. This is obsolescence risk, and it is especially pertinent to cryptoinvesting because of how fast this space tends to move.

How can one manage this risk? Obviously, it is completely impossible to predict whether a better solution exists before it is actually found. …

The decentralization space is a train quickly approaching a precipice. The reason: an imaginary and faulty sense that we know how things should be done. The solution is to understand that we have no clue.

The context

Decentralization is not about computer technology, despite of what some think. Decentralized systems are computer-assisted social systems, social being the keyword. A decentralized computer network has to be a functional, useful, and sustainable component in an incredibly complex environment that the global society is. It must also weather extreme adversity from incredibly inventive participants that will test its every weakness. This on top of the…