BlockchainGandalf

Did Van Gogh die in vain? Wouldn't it be nice if non-fungible token art carried with it an automatic royalty, so that every time the artwork was sold, the artist would receive a percentage of the sale price? Kind of like what happens in some jurisdictions when artworks are sold through auction houses?  In this video, I explain why this isn't going to work, and why NFTs aren't magic bullets th...

It's a known problem in the hiring world that assessing the competence and skill of a potential candidate for a role is difficult.  It's even worse if you're hiring in a space that you're unfamiliar with, because it's easier for the candidate to pretend they know more than they do, or are less experienced than they present themselves.  And blockchain is an unfamiliar space for most recru...

The best, most experienced blockchain developers with years of experience usually have a different background to your average applicant for a software development role.  They're likely to fall into several of the categories below:   📀 they get obsessed with technology early on and like to work on new things   😠 they have strong opinions about traditional finance, and those opinion...

The blockchain space has sure hotted up since the cryptowinter of 2018.  As a result, blockchain engineers and smart contract developers are in more demand than ever.  Entrepreneurs and companies are seeing vast sums of money pouring into DeFi and payment remittance project, and want in on the action.  What they don't want to do is pay for the back-end work that needs to be done to...

If ever there was a misused word, it's the word "intrinsic". Even some of the dictionary definitions are suspect. Attach it to the word "value" and you enter a philosophical minefield. Now we have an incompletely understood word modifying another incompletely understood word. And this is all very well if we are just engaged in philosophical word games, but the problem is that the term "intrinsic v...

The final level to discuss is the presentation layer, which consists of the use of a website and web3 libraries in order to retrieve data from the blockchain to put on a web page, and in order to write data back to the blockchain in the form of transactions, usually using an integrated web browser blockchain wallet such as MetaMask.  The thing to realize here, is that the web site developer h...

This is a digression into why the layers that I am talking about in this video series are not related to "layer 2 solutions" like Polygon and Binance Smart Chain. Instead I'm talking about layers in the same manner as the upper layers of the OSI seven layer model.  I find it odd that "layer 2" solutions use the word "layer", because they don't really sit on top of the base blockchain that the...

As a developer, you have a choice as to what blockchain you use, but very little if any control over the mechanisms that power it.   It's a bit like choosing a country and a language to write your book in.  If it's a smart contract blockchain, move up a level, and you can start to exert more control - for example, you can release a centralized token on a decentralized blockchain, if...

In this video, part three of the series, I talk about how smart contract blockchains such as Ethereum allow developers to play with levels of decentralization in the smart contracts they deploy.  For example, although Ethereum is "censorship resistant" due to it's blockchain consensus system, it is perfectly possible to release smart contracts that are highly centralized, under the control of...

Having looked at what a ledger is, and why the concept of a ledger is significant within blockchain, it's time to move up a layer and consider "ledgers within ledgers".  When a smart contract instantiates a fungible or non-fungible token, what it is doing is implementing another ledger in order to keep track of the balance or ownership of the token.  So - tokens are created by building l...

In this video, I start with a recap of what a ledger is, in order to set the groundwork for later videos on the different levels that exist in blockchain.  This will help you to understand what is going on in cryptocurrencies and NFTs, and what parts are arbitrary, and which are fixed.  (Well, ultimately all of blockchain is arbitrary, because we invented it, but some parts are now fixed...