“Zero Knowledge”, contrary to what it sounds like, is actually quite interesting and fun. It might even be a solution to our long standing problem of validating the world’s transactions without a trusted third party or government or central bank. If you Google for the terms Zero Knowledge and Blockchains, you will be flooded with […]
Author: Tejaswi Nadahalli
Bitcoin’s secret sauce
Bitcoin’s secret sauce, and how it works, was on full display these last few weeks. Bitcoin was designed to work against the most powerful of adversaries, and boy – did the adversary show up! China Ban A few months ago, 45% to 75% of Bitcoin mining happened inside China. Then the Chinese government banned it. […]
Governance, Decentralized
Define Governance: the act or process of governing or overseeing the control and direction of something (such as a country or an organization). In this article, I will focus on whether any organization can have decentralized governance, and what does that even mean? And how is this related to cryptocurrencies. Let’s start with a very basic organization, and […]
Defi for the rest of us
DeFi stands for Decentralized Finance. Decentralized: Ideally, any single entity should not be able to stop the process or program or system in question. It’s running on some unstoppable system where anyone can execute operations. Finance: Savings, Loans, Exchanges, Margin Trading, Synthetic Assets (Equities, for example), Lotteries, Insurance, Collateralized Debt Obligations (why not?), and such. […]
So Doge
I will admit something first. Dogecoin is fun. Dogecoin makes you laugh out of sheer joy, despite yourself. Dogecoin sucks you down into a rabbit hole of memes, parodies, and all things not serious. But is everything a joke? Obviously not. So, in that spirit – let’s get serious. Bitcoin is an idea. A meme, […]
Bitcoin cannot be secured by public-key cryptography
Bloomberg columnist Noah Smith wrote an article[1]Bloomberg paywall link. about Bitcoin’s energy consumption. “Blogger” Nic Carter wrote a rebuttal to it. Noah Smith wrote a rebuttal to this rebuttal. Noah’s counter-rebuttal calls for its own rebuttal. Eventually, we will see why the following tweet from Nic follows quite naturally. “Proof-of-stake is just a fancy name […]
On NFT’s
In 1996, a federal mint employee was eating bananas near where US dollar bills were being printed, and a Del Monte sticker on one of the bananas fell into the printing press and got under a transparent layer of a $20 bill. The Del Monte note was created. This particular $20 note is a collectible […]
The Blocksize War (book review)
BitMEX Research has published what can be called the first history book on Bitcoin (not all of its history, but just the Blocksize War). It’s written by Jonathan Bier, who surprisingly, has no official online presence that I can find. It could as well be a pseudonym, for all I know. Either way, this book […]
Bitcoin is Forever
The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime – Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of Bitcoin This goes against the more well understood motto of technology startups: “move fast and break things.” Unlike a startup, or even a big company, Bitcoin doesn’t […]
Expense Ratios of Mutual Funds in India
It’s hard to find what Indian mutual funds charge their customers to manage their money for them. The so called “expense ratio.” Try to find it on, say, the UTI website, or SBI’s MF website. Also, since January 2013, SEBI (the market regulator) made it mandatory for all mutual fund houses (AMCs) to offer what […]