BlockchainGandalf

In this episode, I talk about the key mechanism whereby the move from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake is managed - the staking of ETH. Not from a technical point of view, but from a marketplace one.

Releasing a staking smart contract is a popular trick in token projects to artificially decrease the supply of the token, hence increasing its price.

In Ethereum, the staking requirement can be fully justified by the fact that proof of stake requires ... well, staking of course. And the move to proof of stake can be justified by efficiency and environmental arguments.

It is convenient though, that the move to proof of stake probably has increased the market value of ETH, and has moved "mining" profits from the Ethereum miners with their batteries of mining hardware to the owners of spare ETH that was previously just sitting there doing nothing.

The fact that these owners of spare ETH happen to be the initial project architects and early project supporters is by-the-by.

Anyone want to buy a spare graphics card? Barely used...

So many people have asked me my opinion on the use of #nfts to serve notice of #legal proceedings that I thought it was time to record an piece on it.

What the hell is #tokenomics?

If you want your company intranet checked for security, if you can afford to and if you can find them, you get a hacker to try to break in. Not a sysadmin.

If you want to determine that a psychic is a fake, you get a magician to test them, not a scientist.

But in DeFi we still hand auditing over to developers. And although a large number of problems with DeFi protocols are down to bugs, in some of the most expensive cases, there's actually a design flaw in the financial architecture.

So who should you call in to determine whether your protocol is vulnerable to arbitrage attacks, insider trading, front running, or short squeezes?

How about traders?

You would not believe how much fun I have had trawling through #NFT copyright licenses and US copyright case law this weekend!

I felt compelled to do this, because the current situation in the NFT world when it comes to ownership of the underlying art for NFTs is diabolical, and I wanted to understand what is going on, and what could be possible in a better, brighter world.

The summary of my findings is in this article.

A common technique used to overcome front-running and other malicious subversions of systems is the commit-reveal sequence.

In this episode, I explain how this works through the use of an analogy with the game "rock, paper, scissors", and then talk a bit about how it is used in the Ethereum Beacon chain and in front-running prevention systems.

In this episode, I explain what a Bitcoin node does, and what a Bitcoin miner does, and why a miner doesn't have to be a node (and why a node does not need to contain a miner).

I recently discovered a horrifying "innovation" in the computer world.

The database.

In this episode, I break down the arguments against databases, and there are many.

If the humble reliable filing cabinet can be compared to a wholesome filling cabbage (and I think it can), then the database is a tulip. Inedible, and clearly the cause of a mania.

Let's do something about these things. Whether relational, noSQL, hierarchical, or object-oriented - they have to go.

Blockchain may be fact, but Web3 is only presentation.

A while back I made a series of videos talking about the levels and layers in blockchain when it comes to web3. The point I was trying to make is that although (roughly speaking), blockchains store facts, web3 sites are presentations of those facts, and can therefore easily be subverted.

Not a lot of people seem to be aware of the distinction, or its ramifications.

But recently, an NFT token owner was scammed out of half a million dollars worth of tokens due to a lack of awareness of this distinction (and to be fair, a pretty clever if simple scam).

Listen to the episode to find out more.

What is it like to help novices in the blockchain world?

The following video is an analogy in which I try to describe what it can be like to help someone who has enough knowledge to start messing about with web3, blockchain wallets, and smart contracts, but not enough to actually understand what is going on.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but never more so than in the blockchain world.

If you want to improve your blockchain knowledge, why not pick up a copy of my book: "Move Over Brokers Here Comes The Blockchain" at https://mybook.to/moveover