Continuations

During the initial growth of the Internet, the United States enacted a variety of Safe Harbors, such as the DMCA, that allowed new innovation to unfold. We now need a similar approach to crypto tokens in order to help build the blockchain infrastructure. Blockchains allow the creation of data stores and applications that have network effects but are not controlled by a central player. This helps address the key issue of centralization and monopoly like positions currently observed in the digi...

There was an interesting post on the YCombinator blog by Ramon Recuero about the evolution of blockchain protocols through forking and copying. The post does not mention the alternative possibility of binding voting as a mechanism for the evolution of blockchains. There are several projects, including the troubled Tezos, where the blockchain protocol will be able to evolve via on-chain voting. Voting is an important mechanism to be explored as an alternative to forking. In his famous treatise...

Both individually and collectively we learn more from our failures than from our successes. Failures make us question our assumptions, successes generally don’t. I therefore welcome the hack of the DAO (even if I wind up losing the 0.5 BTC I had converted to Ether and invested). It is exposing a lot of assumptions and that is the path to learning. The hack will not be the end of smart contracts or blockchains. Instead it will be more like the early failures in aviation. They are what gave us ...

Today Algorand and Blockstack are announcing that they are collaborating on the Clarity smart contract language. Clarity is a decidable (i.e. non-Turing complete) language inspired by lisp. I am extremely excited about this development and have spent a few hours this week writing a smart contract in Clarity. I have long argued that Turing complete smart contract languages are problematic because the only way to really understand the system as a whole is to run it and see what happens. Still t...

I became interested in Bitcoin reasonably early and was fortunate to invest in some early mining (although as with all good investments in retrospect not nearly enough). There is currently a fight brewing in Bitcoin world with the possibility of a hardfork a la Ethereum into two different currencies. Much like the Ethereum fight and resulting hardfork, emotions among the people close to it are running high. If you are inside this community, the stakes seem incredibly high. But it is moments l...

One key lesson from COVID19 is that we need a lot more decentralization. This is especially true when the center is as inept at managing the crisis as the US federal government has proven to be. For example, the power of agencies such as the CDC and the FDA has turned out to be problematic, e.g. in giving guidance on mask wearing or trying to increase the availability of testing (both central to the road back). This is not just a critique of current leadership but rather of the accretion of e...

Having recently started to read “Willpower” by Roy Baumeister, I am fascinated with the controversy over the reproducibility of his experiments on ego depletion. This is just the latest example in a longstanding historic problem with reproducibility that impacts the progress of science in many fields including medicine. This is an area where blockchain technology may be able to help. How so? We need to switch the academic standard for publishing to include raw data from experiments. Often thi...

One of the key criteria for the longterm success of any computer system would seem to be stability. For instance, if there is an app that crashes your phone you will use it less or even uninstall it. While it is frustrating when this happens, it is quite amazing that computer systems have any stability at all given their complexity. Compared to most systems that humans had previously created, computers are by far the most complex, especially once you factor in the software that runs on them. ...