BlockchainGandalf

It's midsummer (or Juhannus as they call it) here in Finland at the moment, and although I enjoy the importance and the traditions of this time to the Finnish people, I am an outsider. I don't fully connect in the way they do.

And so I also find myself dispassionately analyzing it every year. It makes me think about how significant culture is to all the societies out there.

But the great thing about traditions and culture is that they can be changed for the better, because they're arbitrary.

The bad thing about them is that they can be abused to manipulate people.

And the amusing thing about them is ... well: 🧄

In this episode, I explain what the "ERC" in ERC-20 and ERC721 means, and then delve into the history of the term, all the way back to a couple of years after the summer of love, namely 1969.

Handling intellectual property rights continues to cause headaches in the NFT world - we've seen problems with the BAYC terms and conditions, Tiffany & Co.'s lawyer removing clauses from their NFTiff agreement on the fly as the community pointed out over-reaching license terms, and now upset in the Moonbirds community as the pixelated owl images are licensed under the CC0 license.

In this episode, I talk about the latter, and discuss why I think we're having problems.

It really boils down to two things:

- lack of understanding of intellectual property law by ordinary buyers of NFTs, and

- lawyers and the legal framework failing to catch up with a shift in the intellectual property landscape

The latter is more important, in my opinion.

Edited boiler-plate license agreements don't cut it in the NFT world, but that's what we're seeing.

When you start reading about self-sovereign identity and decentralization of credentials, and stuff like that, it starts to sound very complicated very quickly.

And yet, when I got my hands dirty and implemented decentralized identity and access management in the Orthoverse, it took less than a screenful of code to get the basics working.

In this episode, I talk about how IAM works in the centralized, the federated (i.e. outsourced centralized) and decentralized worlds, and as an added bonus, I talk about how NFTs could tie into this.

Which they already do in the Orthoverse.

If you want to join me in this metaverse/NFT experiment, get your Orthoverse land token at https://orthoverse.io for a few US dollars worth of ETH.

A few weeks ago the authorities in the US started clamping down on Tornado.Cash, a dApp for "mixing" cryptocurrency to hide its origins. Sometimes mixers are used for criminal reasons, and sometimes for personal privacy reasons, but that aside:

The incident clearly reveals a well-known flaw the the whole decentralized applications stack, namely the user interface in the form of websites.

In this episode I talk about how the underlying smart contract still works, but inexperience users (i.e. most of them) can't use it without that interface, and how decentralized websites may emerge to prevent interface censorship.

Ethereum has a royalty standard for NFTs, namely ERC-2981.

It's disappointingly simple.

The reason for that is because at the moment, smart contracts can't enforce royalties, they can only suggest them.

In this episode, I explain how ERC2981 works. Prepare to be underwhelmed.

If you're more into software development than anything else then, like me, your first reaction to the word "marketing" is probably going to be "yuck". 

And your second to fourth words will be "Not for me."

Unfortunately, you're wrong.

Whether you're in a tech company, pushing an open source project out there, or presenting the world with your latest hobby activity, if you actually want people to pay attention, you're going to have to do some marketing.

In this episode, I explain why, and point out that it's not that hard to go from "rubbish marketing" to "kind of acceptable marketing".  Because it takes very little to make the transition.

I continue to see a lot of confusion over the meaning of the term "decentralized" in the blockchain space.

In this episode, I talk about where I think that confusion comes from, and present a simple linguistic tool that you can use to actually ask meaningful questions and get sensible answers when it comes to the underlying issues.

Issues that are being badly addressed due to the inadequacies of language and a failure to dig deeper and actually understand what it is that you are asking when you say, "Is this blockchain project decentralized?"

I was asked last week, "what is the difference between a CBDC and USDC?"

I can see why some people might be confused - in the case of the United States' central bank, the Federal Reserve: their CBDC would be a "digital dollar", and USDC is a kind of "digital dollar" too. 

In this episode, I explain the different in terms of the entities involved, their aims, and the potential impact on our lives.

I find the best way to understand what is going on in a given technology is to actually get my hands dirty and install, configure, and run the underlying software.

Last weekend I configured an Ethereum testnet node - the Göerli testnet to be precise - to examine what is involved in running all the client software and staking some ether (göETH in this case - I don't have $64000 dollars spare to try the mainnet). 

In this episode, I talk about the various components required, and a bit about how they work and what they do:  - the execution node, - the beacon chain node, and - the validator