BlockchainGandalf

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 rela...

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,...

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. I...

Sometimes in software innovation we end up with concepts that can't be summarized succinctly in the way that a simple targeted app can (think, "it's it's a fitness app for orthodontists", or "it's a dating app for pet cats", as opposed to "it's the cloud" ten years ago). Blockchain used to be like that too, but we're all starting to settle on a fairly common view as to what it is and how it can be...

We are starting to see more NFT projects losing significant sums of money - this used to be the preserve of DeFi protocols. A few days ago a project called "Akutars" managed to inadvertently lock up over 11,000 ETH, worth about $34 million in fiat prices. There are plenty of analyses as to exactly what went wrong in the code to cause this, so in this video I take a one-level-up view and look at th...

The above title is total and utter clickbait. But it does describe what I talk about in the episode, so perhaps I'll get away with it. Go on, listen to it. You know you want to know what I think is the most surprising thing about social media marketing, don't you? In the meantime: My book: https://mybook.to/moveover T-shirts: https://www.etsy.com/shop/Thinklair The Orthoverse: https://orthoverse.i...

On Thursday 24 March someone going by the name of HashArt on OpenSea found an exploit in the Orthoverse NFT contract, allowing the crafting of transactions that allow any NFT in the contract to be moved to any address. Obviously this is not a good state of affairs. As a result, Richard and I fixed the contract, finally wrote a test suite, corrected other niggling but only cosmetic bugs we'd found,...

In a recent interview in Time Magazine Vitalik Buterin expressed disappointment in the fascination and speculation around Bored Apes and other similar projects. I understand why he feels that way, but this progression is not unexpected. In fact, if there wasn't such speculation,  it would indicate that Ethereum and other blockchain projects were rather limited in their relevance to society as...

In this epsode, I explain in less than a quarter of an hour what Ethereum is, what gas fees are, what value transfers are, how ether was converted from an inflationary to a deflationary cryptocurrency, and a bunch of other stuff. It wasn't easy. But then again, nothing in blockchain ever is. Let me know how I did.

I like collectible and art NFTs as much as the next collectible and art NFT aficionado, but it pays to remember that these tokens have a lot more possibilities than being able to flex to your buddies about the value of your PFP portfolio.  In this episode, I look at an analogy between an object described in William Golding's Lord of the Flies, and the potential that NFTs offer in providing so...

This is a bit of an odd episode, because I start off with a proof as to why measuring the "energy expenditure per transaction" does not make sense for Bitcoin, and end up talking about the tragedy of the commons, and the psychology behind deciding what it is worth spending energy on.  Nevertheless, I'm going to break the habit of a decade, and talk about blockchain and environmentalism, even...

Whenever there is a lot of competition in a given marketplace you have three obvious choices - race to the bottom on prices, differentiate on features, or convert your brand and hence your product into something aspirational. Price wars result in products with very low margins, and who voluntarily wants to become a potato farmer? Competing on features is tough in blockchain, because people are hav...

Social media existed well before the web2 sites of Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk. Not only that, but it was decentralized. In fact, it started in 1979, and was called USENET. But it was missing the one "secret spice" that modern day social media sites use to turbo-charge user engagement (and subsequently profit from data harvesting and advertising). Want to know what that secret spice is? Liste...

One of the upshots of the tendency of human beings to gravitate towards centralization for its efficiency and perceived security is the handing over of control to a popular leader.  In this episode, I talk about how some of the decentralized projects out there have coped (inadvertently or otherwise) with the centralization risks inherent in highly visible leadership and personality cults.

About a year ago I made a video explaining the differences and similarities between ERC20, ERC721 and ERC1155 from a layperson's perspective (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt5C-j2b62U). I thought it might interesting to remake the video and release the audio as a podcast, but this time explaining the differences in the standards through the differences in the data structures within each contract...

Most traditional companies are based on a hierarchical command an control structure, and as a result most people are used to functioning in such a structure. These companies are structured that way partially due to the laws that enshrine what corporations are as legal entities, partially due to conditions imposed by venture capitalists or investors, and mostly because people in companies don't kno...

Centralization around the edges can take the teeth out of decentralization in the center. Well, if that isn't a confusing sentence then I don't know what is. In this video I dig a bit deeper into two opposing tendencies within the human psyche - moving towards centralization, and moving towards decentralization. There are advantages and disadvantages to both. Furthermore, localized decentralizatio...

A week ago about 100 NFTs worth an estimated $1.4 million dollars were grabbed by someone for $0 million dollars. How did they manage to do this? There was an error in a smart contract which did not consider the result of multiplying a number by zero. The case is not just interesting from a smart contract testing perspective, but is also a clear-cut example of "code is law" diverging from the "spi...

In hindsight, the 2017 craze of handing over the digital equivalent of a suitcase of cash to a small group of project coordinators in the hope of making a financial killing was a bit stupid. The next evolution in this is to hand the suitcase of cash to a smart contract, a DAO, instead. The idea being that the investors maintain some control over the finances of the enterprise in the same way that...

Human beings are contradictory: they're remarkably good at adapting to both change, and things staying the same. In this episode, I talk about the impact this has on web design, and why you need to fix problems with your site sooner rather than later. Because within a matter of days: 🤢 the awful experience you had the first time you used the site will be forgotten, 🥴 you'll start to take it for...

Smart contract testing currently faces a problem: 👨‍💻 developers are in short supply, so 🧪 smart contract testers get asked to write code, and 🔎 code writers are too close to the code to spot the wider problems, and 📄 smart contract quality suffers, thus 💵 funds are lost I use a chess analogy to explain why developers usually only test one aspect of code.

Would you hire some random person in a different country that you found on Fiverr to look after your money? And the money of other people that trust you?  Yet that's exactly what over 30 NFT projects did.  And the backdoor to their contracts consisted of a few lines of code that are shorter than the average fortune cookie message.  There's a lot more in this episode, so go listen to...

What is the difference between on-chain and off-chain signing? Less than you'd think. Mainly because everything is signed off-chain.