BlockchainGandalf

Blockchain projects devoted to charity have a problem, in that the underlying mechanism that drives blockchains is 'financial' incentivization. Mind you, a lot of conventionally funded charity projects suffer from similar problems.

Don't get me wrong - my preference would be for us to interact and transact as human beings and social beings, rather than as market actors using the price system, but I'm not seeing much of that in the crypto space.

Though to be fair, most of us only return empty bottles and shopping trolleys with that little extra incentive of getting some money back.

Blockchain charity projects also suffer due to the number of ineffective or even dishonest projects using the "charity" badge to try to attract more users.

More on these issues in the episode.

In simple terms, blockchain governance is the method by which a blockchain is maintained, managed, and improved.

For example, deciding to change a protocol is an act of governance. So is rolling back the chain after a hack.

Different blockchains have different governance systems, and many of them have grown and evolved in an ad-hoc manner. Some of the parties that have an influence over how the blockchain runs are: the developers, the miners, whales (people with lots of tokens), and the users.

But there is one group that I had never thought about before, and they only came to my attention following the recent Ropsten Ethereum blockchain split, where after the London upgrade there were two chains.

And the shorter chain with less mining effort was actually the "correct" chain (if the London update is considered correct).

This episode is about how I realised that there is another significant group in the blockchain governance space, one that I haven't seen identified before.

Frontrunning is a stock market term whereby you use insider knowledge about upcoming trades to get in on the action before the rest of the market can. So it's a form of insider trading.

It's been a concern in DeFi for a while. Now it turns out that there's a version potentially happening in the NFT market space - namely on OpenSea.io.

Find out how by listening to the episode.

(At the point I read the tweet, which is here - https://twitter.com/RiceFarmerNFT/status/1437956078130585611 , it was speculation, but https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/117751/opensea-confirms-executive-used-insider-knowledge-when-buying-nfts confirms it was actually happening)

I was asked if it was possible to move an NFT off one chain, and onto another.

The answer is, "yes ... sort of", but this question reveals to me that most people don't really understand what blockchains are doing.

In the meantime, in this episode I discuss the question and then get sidetracked into talking about the different values of different blockchains.

With more and more small start-up projects outsourcing software development work to contractors, especially in the blockchain space, I am sometimes asked, "How can you trust the developer you hire?"

This is especially pertinent in DeFi or cryptocurrency projects, because the software may eventually be moving around or locking up millions or even billions of dollars in crypto-assets.

Watch the video to discover the number one criterion for determining the trustworthiness of your remote developer.

In this video,  I talk about the relatively new discipline of "tokenomics", and the emergence of a new job, namely tokenomics specialist.

In conventional business, we have people who decide how much a company is going to charge for their product, how many units will be released into the market and at what rate, and so on. With the aim being to maximize company profits.

The same kind of thing is (or should be) going on in blockchain organizations, but there it's called tokenomics rather than pricing and positioning strategy.

In this episode, I talk about OAuth, or open authentication, which is the protocol and process sequence whereby you can log in to one website using your account on another website.

You know, the "Log on using Facebook" button that crops up here and there.

But the fact is, you aren't logging in. Something subtly different is actually happening.

More on that in the episode.

Incidentally, SOULS is live at https://souls.fi

The DeFi protocol Compound accidentally paid out 90 million dollars today to people who had deposited crypto-assets in their smart contract.

But what exactly went wrong under the hood?

That's the discussion in today's episode, in which I present an analogy to explain what the bug was, why it wasn't detected earlier, and why it allowed investors to withdraw astronomical sums.

I also cannot resist the temptation to comment on Compound's initial response, which was a nervous knee-jerk reaction and completely counter-productive.

Twitter has been working on integrating NFTs with their social media platform, as have I with my SOULS contract.

But it turns out we're working in different directions.

Twitter is looking to authenticate ownership of an NFT so you can use the image linked to in the NFT metadata as your avatar on Twitter, with a special check-mark to show you actually own it, rather than just making copies of the image from any NFT you fancy, and uploading it yourself.

I'm producing a token that allows you to mint an NFT from your social media profile (currently Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Github are  on the list).

And, of course, SOULS does a lot more.

https://twitter.com/af_mada/status/1443243702156206089

One of the issues that still hasn't managed to be resolved in the mainstream NFT markets is what you are actually buying other than a record of ownership in a distributed ledger of a row that contains a link to a file.

Many people still think they are "buying" the art pointed to by an NFT, but that's generally not the case.

For example, the Larva Labs CryptoPunks does have a contract of sorts, but it does things like put an upper cap of 100,000$ that can be earned using the punk that the NFT you own points to, so it's a bit unclear on reproduction and monetization rights.

People who have blatantly copied CryptoPunks, or platforms that display such copies, have received DMCA take-down notices.

And so in this episode, I talk a bit about the issue of copyright and digital art, especially when the artwork is very very small.