On decentralization, servers and cryptography — Respected cryptographer Moxie Marlinspike has written up some thoughts on Ethereum and the modern ‘crypto’ ecosystem. Although I was involved in Bitcoin right at the beginning, I’ve never been involved in Ethereum or Web3, don’t currently own any cryptocurrencies and I broadly agree with a lot of what he says…

An academic conspiracy theory that went mainstream — Since 2016 automated Twitter accounts have been blamed for Donald Trump and Brexit (many times), Brazilian politics, Venezuelan politics, skepticism of climatology, cannabis misinformation, anti-immigration sentiment, vaping, and, inevitably, distrust of COVID vaccines. News articles about bots are backed by a surprisingly large amount of academic research. Google Scholar alone…

Remembering pre-Bitcoin designs for digital money — Many people think the first proposal for a radical internet money system was Bitcoin, but they’re wrong. Before Bitcoin existed there was “classic” Ripple, an open source project by a guy named Ryan Fugger. …

Photoshopping, fraud and circular logic in research — ‘It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgement of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of…

I left the Bitcoin community five years ago. My final essay explaining why — “The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment” — is to my great surprise even half a decade later still being reshared on social media every few days and gets a steady stream of visits. …

I’ve published a report prepared for Steve Baker MP into some of the issues I’ve seen in the past half year of reading papers and models from the world of epidemiology. It can be found on my website here: Summary of methodological issues in epidemiology It discusses a mix of…

This weekend I finished reading the new book Science Fictions, by Stuart Ritchie. It’s about the replication crisis in science, the underlying causes and ways to make science more reliable. In this article I’ll review it and ponder some of the issues it raises. …

A quick followup — The last post on why under current definitions COVID will never end picked up some interest. Other people have started writing articles about it too in recent days. It wasn’t the most focused writing I’ve ever done, to be honest. Here I’ll try to simply summarise the key points about…

Why COVID-19 is guaranteed to never end — (a bullet-point version of this article is also available, with additional sources) The whooping cough ripped through the hospital like wildfire. It started with an internist and spread from there, with a severe cough quickly developing in other healthcare workers. Whilst not deadly for healthy adults the disease can be…