BlockchainGandalf

When you have to perform the same stupid tedious complicated task every day, eventually you don't even notice how stupid, tedious, or complicated it really is. Online  #security  is seriously hampered by the fact that a lot of the requirements put on users seem stupid, tedious, and initially also complicated. In this article,  Luis Lubeck  and I look at ways in which security for users can be...

☢️ 🦴 🎯 You should seriously consider if you want to be a successful #startup #founder! Going into business is not for the faint of heart, and being prepared is important. So is critically analyzing any and all advice you read or are given. Reminder: just because someone has tens of thousands of followers and lots of positive comments doesn't mean they are automatically right or an expert. An...

Well, that didn't take long. A day after my previous video there was a Sybil attack on the XEN cryptocurrency. Except, the attack was really on an exchange - FTX, which offers free crypto withdrawals, and didn't check the maximum gas it allocates to this. As a result someone found an arbitrage opportunity. Use smart contracts to spawn off lots of Ethereum addresses, deposit small amounts of ETH in...

The last week has seen the XEN ERC20 token taking up the largest share of Ethereum transactions. So why should a humble token with no defined utility or extra whistles and bells be achieving that? The answer is that: 🆓 the token is free to mint (except for gas) 💰 there's no pre-mint, 📉 for an added dash of FOMO, the first people claiming it get the most, 🏦 it has staking (🚩), with a lot of pr...

Investors bring in money for P2E projects, but they expect to take out more in the long run. That includes most players, who typically expect to invest time to extract money. So how is a P2E game supposed to build a proper revenue stream and become sustainable? The P2E angle may be great initially for raising capital and attracting a particular type of user base, but in the long run you need more....

What's the most important rule for play to earn games?  In the previous episode I talked about what could be called "the first law of P2E games", or perhaps "The fundamental theorem of P2E economics", but Mark Skinner pointed out to me that there is a more important one:  The zeroth law of P2E games. And it doesn't just apply to P2E.  What that is, is revealed in the episode. It's s...

The problem with most P2E games is that they are not sustainable. Why would that be? It turns out that the answer is very simple: the amount of value being put in by players over time is less than the amount the players want to take out. More on that in the episode.

There are a number of myths about blockchains that keep getting repeated. For example, that proof-of-work is a "cryptographic puzzle", that blockchains "build trust", and the most insidious of all: that blockchains "are immutable". In this episode, I explain why blockchains are not immutable. With the aid of not one, not two, but three examples.

Staking cryptocurrency assets can serve a purpose for projects - for example, raising liquidity for a decentralized exchange. And I approve of that kind of use, because it serves a purpose. Unfortunately the use of staking in many projects amounts to nothing more than a complicated Ponzi scheme (and I don't use that phrase lightly). I suspect that it is a decision that is often just not thought th...

This is the sound track to a video in which I define what a metaverse is through the use of a banana. The banana is not a simile or a metaphor, it is an actually metaverse.  It won't make much sense in just audio, just as the metaverse is apparently going to be about more than sound. If you are fortunate enough to have vision, you can watch the video at https://youtu.be/PE5uE-gfxRQ

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 abo...

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 epis...

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 centrali...

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...

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...

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 l...

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 li...

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...

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 j...

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 ? The answer to that question, and a lot lot more, can be found in this episode. What's more, the explanation doesn't rely on complicated mathematics applied to esoteric #defi protocols. Instead, I provide illustrative examples using #nfts . Which are a lot easier to understand.

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...

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 findi...