May 8, 2019Proposal to reduce garbage political contentIn short, while there’s plenty of blame to go around for all of the political division, one thing that has driven people apart, especially over the past 15 years or so, is the click-driven political content. Tribalist rhetoric is much more satisfying for our brains than balanced, nuance discussion, and…Politics4 min readPolitics4 min read
May 1, 2019NDAs are bullshit and should be banned.OK, first of all, I don’t actually believe all NDAs should be banned. NDAs are appropriate in a number of settings, for example: intellectual property, complex good-faith litigation that is just messy, and things like divorce; you don’t need one parent bad-mouthing the other for next twenty years. So what…Rape5 min readRape5 min read
Feb 18, 2019Extortion, security budgets and inherent problems for anonymous payment systemsThe cryptocurrency ecosystem is different in ways that are often underappreciated. While some aspects of “trust-free” are celebrated, the consummately adversarial nature of such a system is rarely considered in its full extreme. Transactions and addresses are not associated with real people or real jurisdictions, meaning the ecosystem is a…Bitcoin7 min readBitcoin7 min read
Feb 18, 2019Censorship on permissionless blockchainsIt’s commonly remarked that Proof of Work consensus makes transaction censorship prohibitively expensive. In fact, this is one of the reasons often championed by proponents of Bitcoin. The game theory isn’t so clear. First of all, to point out the obvious, most of bitcoin mining happens in China. I don’t…Bitcoin3 min readBitcoin3 min read
Jul 24, 2018Is there a way to profit from the lack of meta-stability for double-spends in Avalanche?The following is an attempt to describe something that could go wrong with the Avalanche consensus protocol. Reviewing quickly: The consensus protocol (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXrrqtFlGow) deals with double spends by essentially saying “who cares?” The motivation here is clear: by not guaranteeing liveness for double spend transactions, anyone who attempts a…Bitcoin3 min readBitcoin3 min read
Jun 4, 2018The completely feasible insanity of a McAfee Presidential RunThe possibilities here are making my head spin. McAfee has a lot of money (BTC), and could potentially have more as 2020 approaches. So he could finance himself. …Bitcoin2 min readBitcoin2 min read
May 14, 2018Using blockchain to create an open process academic journalAs an academic, I’ve experienced a number of frustrations with the peer review process. What I’d like to propose is a new type of academic journal that solves a number of these problems. I’m calling this “open process.” Many of the complaints about academic publishing point to the profiteering, rent-seeking…Academia5 min readAcademia5 min read
May 14, 2018The Economics of Blockchain DestructionI’m going to offer several possible reasons why a sufficiently motivated adversary would destroy (for example, indefinitely fork) a decentralized blockchain. In a future post I hope to be collating some research on how economic incentives in the various consensus protocols could allow this. Suffice to say, a naive supply…Blockchain5 min readBlockchain5 min read
May 3, 2018White paper….Here’s a pdf. I updated it with some boldface to preclude some of the TL; clearly DR criticisms.1 min read1 min read
May 1, 2018What is Levetrage?Levetrage is illustrated by the following hypothetical game. Suppose I have a button. I can press the button at any time, or I can permanently discard the button. When I press it, it will cost me $10, but it will cost you $100. …Blockchain Technology5 min readBlockchain Technology5 min read
