Fred Ehrsam, Vitalik Buterin and Chris Dixon recently discussed Ethereum on an episode of the a16z podcast. They covered a few different topics, primary among which was the relative easy of building Ethereum apps as compared to Bitcoin apps. …

Any non-trivial project, be it a startup, a political organization or a civil society initiative, will most likely fail. Whatever idea you have for how the world can be improved has to stand up to the fact that its feasibility and/or desirability has been continually refuted up to this point. Most founders cannot address this fact, and this is why the primary cause of startup failure is: no one needed what you made. One can offer a plausible rebuttal to this…

The InterPlanetary File System, or IPFS, is a new peer-to-peer protocol which has a lot of people excited these days. It is a content addressed distribution system which aims to replace HTTP and CDNs. However, I currently haven’t been able to join the bandwagon due to the following unresolved question: What is the protocol level benefit of IPFS over the BitTorrent stack? …

A prediction market enables betting on the probabilities of real world outcomes, e.g. who will win the next US presidential election. When such markets function well, the prices associated with outcomes will represent the most reliable estimate of how likely the given outcome is. A number of projects are trying…

Let me preface this by saying, no one would be more happy if decentralized storage projects were very successful, I’m just skeptical that they will. There are a number of projects which are working, either entirely or in part, on decentralized storage: Storj, MaidSafe, Filecoin, Sia. This means that data…

Over the past year, interest among major financial institutions has shifted away from Bitcoin and towards trusted blockchains more generally. This typically involves some sort of state history encoded as a secure hash chain, which is extended by the agreement of a trusted set of signers. …