In this article I explore…what the Metaverse is, the differences between a closed vs. open metaverse, key principles for an open metaverse, and where crypto (DAOs, NFT, DeFi) fits in
In this article to start off the year, I cover how this crypto bull run is different from the ICO boom in 2017, what I would tell myself if I was entering the market for the first time, and predictions for 2021 (with emphasis on Ethereum, NFTs, and DeFi).
I wrote the bulk of this retrospective and then fell into the limbo that are the days between Christmas and New Years Eve before I could hit publish. It usually doesn’t take long for these reviews to reach the 10000+ word range because involves turning the microscope on all the major aspects of my life: noting the highlights, lowlights, and lessons learned. This year was no different. On the other hand, the year was pivotal in such a holistic way that I can anticipate looking back on my life years from now and referring to things as being pre- and post- 2020.
In 1999, David Bowie saw the internet as an “alien life form”. He saw that humanity was on the cusp of something both exhilarating and terrifying: it was a breakdown of the barriers between creators and their communities. Instead of a piece of art or information being broadcasted one-way to an audience, it was becoming more of a dialogue, where the thing that originates from a creator isn't finished until the audience comes in and add their own interpretation. From there the piece evolves, gets sampled and remixed in ways that the creator couldn't have possibly imagined. Bowie called this area where creators and their communities meet "the gray space in the middle": a powerful new area of engagement where the most interesting things happen, and he predicted that this space is what the 21st century was going to be all about…
The recent Twitter hack is the latest reminder that even top companies with the best security teams are not immune against bad actors and data breaches, so why let them handle our sensitive data when we don’t need to? In this article I introduce concept of operational security and how you might begin to identify the information that is out there about you, analyze the risk of this exposure, and deny adversaries from exploiting this data.
Because the blockchain is decentralized and transaction data is distributed between nodes, there must be a way for the nodes to sync and agree on what transactions have already occurred. In other words, they have to be in consensus about what the blockchain looks like. This is is the first of a multi-part post on different consensus protocols: it discusses proof of work, Byzantine Fault Tolerance, mining, energy consumption, and scaling.
The blockchain is often heralded as a technology that removes the need for trust. Yet hundreds of thousands, if not the majority of cryptocurrency traders today still need to place so much trust in exchanges to operate in a responsible, secure manner. For my first post that dives into a specific use case of the blockchain, I'm excited to be writing about decentralised exchanges addressing these problems, and the projects currently being implemented. I'll do a quick overview of centralised/decentralised exchanges and then dive into the 0x project - a decentralised exchange protocol that will serve as the public dex infrastructure.
Our bitcoin transaction ledger now contains 512200+ (at the time of writing) immutable pages of history detailing nothing except who sent how much BTC to whom...
But what exactly happens during each transaction? What are public and private keys and why is it such a big deal to keep the latter a secret? What's in a wallet? What does it mean to verify or "sign" a message in this context? In this post I will walk through what happens when you send and receive bitcoin and what it means to "own" cryptocurrencies.
I went to bed with a half-finished post on record collecting and thought it would be nice if somehow, non-collectors can explore someone's collection in a simple, interactive way. While Discogs is packed with information about each release, there isn't a way for someone to peruse the records without being bombarded with details they might not care about. In addition, there may be some records that collectors forgot they even had or have not listened to in a while. Though the tactility of crate digging is part of the allure to vinyl in the first place, I thought it'd be fun to also have a tool to pick something for you at random. So I decided to do something about it...
A few weeks ago I decided it was time to revive a hobby I had begun to pursue in college: computer programming. I enrolled in a Data Structures & Algorithms course during my final semester in an attempt to fight off senioritis - and despite the allnighters spent debugging and balancing red-black trees, this decision ended up being one of the best I made at Cal....
