BlockchainGandalf

Today I have a brief introduction to the InterPlanetary File System for you, from a browser user's perspective. People are now familiar with typing HTTPS:// into the address bar of a browser (even though most don't know what it means), and the idea of domains (you know, things like www.thinklair.com), and that web pages are tacked on to the end of domains. But we're now seing the IPFS making an ap...

Bryan Sanya Mondoh pointed me at yet another nine-figure loss in the cryptocurrency and DeFi space - trading platform BXH lost $130 million. And an accompanying offer from the exploited exchange to the hackers offering a bonus and wiping the slate clean if they returned the funds. There's a $1 million bounty on offer. This is seriously broken. The message that is being sent out goes against all th...

There are three problems with artwork NFTs at the moment: the buyer isn't getting much more than a row in a database, sales are linear and infrequent, so there is no liquidity, and hence price discovery is speculative rather than investment or trade-driven, and ongoing royalties are difficult to implement Through the use of capped Automated Market Makers and an interesting token-to-license path, V...

I'm not the only inventor on the block. I've had quite a few conversations with Vitomir Jevremovic recently about a new concept he's come up with - the capped AMM. It's an interesting DeFi concept that he's built a prototype for, which places an upper limit on how much of one of the tokens in the token pair the contract can hold. In this video, I briefly explain how AMMs work, and then cover what...

Milly Perry asked me, "I wonder if you could go beyond the 'usual suspects' (digital assets) to the physical assets or into the future?" And so in this episode, I start from basic building blocks, talk about the meaning of ownership, what a cryptocurrency represents, what a fungible token could, and then with that foundation I move on to non-fungible tokens. Physical assets are reached about a thi...

In the late eighties the World Wide Web was invented, and has since proved to be one of the most transformative recent technologies. One of the reasons for this is that it has developed to become ubiquitous and highly useable. With Web 2.0, interactiveness was introduced, allowing anyone with a mobile phone or desktop to create and disseminate content. In this episode, as part of the Unit Masters...

I was watching a video by John Oliver, in which he quotes a shocking statistic. 85% of hospitals do not have an onsite computer security professional. We all understand why physical guards are needed at hospitals, airports, and places like that. Why don't we have the same attitude towards protecting the virtual world in which all our essential data lives? In fifty years (or if we're lucky, perhaps...

You've planned your DeFi or smart contract project, advertised it, and there's interest in it. What do you do next? Issue a token, of course! But is that always the right thing to do? Are the better (and possibly more ethical) choices? More about that in this episode.

Today I am talking about standards - which are good things to have, but as is always the case with good things, they also have their downside. In the episode, I look at the ERC20, ERC721 and ERC1155 standards in the world of smart contracts, and discuss why the latter isn't winning out over the other two yet.

Capitalism is all about turning a profit from the wealth that you have, without having to do any work. And crypto assets are capital, but how can you use those assets to your advantage without lifting a finger? After all, that's what "passive income" is all about. In this episode, I talk about some of the DeFi protocols out there that allow you to deposit your virtual wealth and then see it increa...

Blockchain projects devoted to charity have a problem, in that the underlying mechanism that drives blockchains is 'financial' incentivization. Mind you, a lot of conventionally funded charity projects suffer from similar problems. Don't get me wrong - my preference would be for us to interact and transact as human beings and social beings, rather than as market actors using the price system, but...

In simple terms, blockchain governance is the method by which a blockchain is maintained, managed, and improved. For example, deciding to change a protocol is an act of governance. So is rolling back the chain after a hack. Different blockchains have different governance systems, and many of them have grown and evolved in an ad-hoc manner. Some of the parties that have an influence over how the bl...

Frontrunning is a stock market term whereby you use insider knowledge about upcoming trades to get in on the action before the rest of the market can. So it's a form of insider trading. It's been a concern in DeFi for a while. Now it turns out that there's a version potentially happening in the NFT market space - namely on OpenSea.io. Find out how by listening to the episode. (At the point I read...

I was asked if it was possible to move an NFT off one chain, and onto another. The answer is, "yes ... sort of", but this question reveals to me that most people don't really understand what blockchains are doing. In the meantime, in this episode I discuss the question and then get sidetracked into talking about the different values of different blockchains.

With more and more small start-up projects outsourcing software development work to contractors, especially in the blockchain space, I am sometimes asked, "How can you trust the developer you hire?" This is especially pertinent in DeFi or cryptocurrency projects, because the software may eventually be moving around or locking up millions or even billions of dollars in crypto-assets. Watch the vide...

In this video,  I talk about the relatively new discipline of "tokenomics", and the emergence of a new job, namely tokenomics specialist. In conventional business, we have people who decide how much a company is going to charge for their product, how many units will be released into the market and at what rate, and so on. With the aim being to maximize company profits. The same kind of thing...

In this episode, I talk about OAuth, or open authentication, which is the protocol and process sequence whereby you can log in to one website using your account on another website. You know, the "Log on using Facebook" button that crops up here and there. But the fact is, you aren't logging in. Something subtly different is actually happening. More on that in the episode. Incidentally, SOULS is li...

The DeFi protocol Compound accidentally paid out 90 million dollars today to people who had deposited crypto-assets in their smart contract. But what exactly went wrong under the hood? That's the discussion in today's episode, in which I present an analogy to explain what the bug was, why it wasn't detected earlier, and why it allowed investors to withdraw astronomical sums. I also cannot resist t...

Twitter has been working on integrating NFTs with their social media platform, as have I with my SOULS contract. But it turns out we're working in different directions. Twitter is looking to authenticate ownership of an NFT so you can use the image linked to in the NFT metadata as your avatar on Twitter, with a special check-mark to show you actually own it, rather than just making copies of the i...

One of the issues that still hasn't managed to be resolved in the mainstream NFT markets is what you are actually buying other than a record of ownership in a distributed ledger of a row that contains a link to a file. Many people still think they are "buying" the art pointed to by an NFT, but that's generally not the case. For example, the Larva Labs CryptoPunks does have a contract of sorts, but...

A couple of years ago I released a short episode on how to get into blockchain programming, covering a few general points that needed to be considered. In this post, I talk more specifically about how to get into Ethereum programming, which splits into two categories - writing and deploying (and testing!) smart contracts, and producing websites that interface with such contracts (also known as web...

Jamie Dimon asked the question the other day, "How do you know it ends at 21 million?" followed with a few questions that had a scornful tone about the reading of code.  It's understandable that he doesn't read code - most people don't know where to begin.  I don't know if viruses, DNA, or black holes actually exist. So I rely on biologists or physicists to confirm or deny their existenc...

The reason for web 3.0 is so obvious to people working in the space that they often forget to draw attention to it when explaining it to other people.  I failed to mention it explicitly in my video series on the topic of Web 3.0.  And it's the number one user error that I encountered after launching my SOULS.fi NFT token website.  Fortunately, Thomas Lukasik pointed out to me that I...

In trading, a blow-up describes the "complete and abject failure" of an individual, company, or hedge fund. When an individual trader "blows up", it's game over for them, and they move on to being an Uber driver or something like that.  But banks are bailed out when they manage to work around the regulations designed to protect them and then trigger a financial crisis.  This is because t...

Saying you're looking to recruit a blockchain developer is like saying you're looking for a lawyer. Specifics matter - just as you don't want a patent attorney defending you against criminal charges, you don't want a web3 interface designer writing smart contract implementations of financial instruments.  You need to be specific. Mind you, traditional software developer recruiting agencies ar...