Ken Thompson is a Turing Award winner and an all-around genius – gave a seminal talk during his 1984 Turing Award acceptance called “Reflections on Trusting Trust.” In this lecture, he shows how to sneak a Trojan horse into your application (in his case, the Unix operating system) while you compile the source code of the application using the C compiler. Say the C compiler has malicious code in it that patiently waits for pieces of code that look like Unix’s source code, and the moment it knows that it is compiling this particular source code, it adds the Trojan horse code into the final Unix compiled binary. This Unix binary now has a Trojan horse and is no longer secure. ...

What is power, really? Power comes about when someone has the ability to destroy someone else’s accumulated capital. What is capital, then? Capital Capital comes about as a result of raw materials, labour, and time. A healthy body, stored grains, a house to live in, a bank account with money earned through a job, or any sort of owned property – all of that is capital. Capital comes about as a combination of raw materials, labour, and time. Capital can either be consumed directly by its owner, or can be exchanged for other things like the labour of others. ...

The more I learn about Bitcoin, the more I respect gold. The more I learn about gold, the more I appreciate**** Bitcoin – Nic Carter One thing Bitcoin taught me is that goldbugs don’t truly understand why gold is valuable – Vijay Boyapati Bitcoin as Gold 2.0 is a great analogy. Both Bitcoin and gold are mined. In both, the miner spends an excessive amount of time and energy going through a large haystack looking for a shiny needle. With gold, the haystack is the entire Earth, and the needle is around 3,300 metric tons of gold per year (to put that in context, we extract around 2,500,000,000 metric tons of iron per year). ...

“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 whitepapers, articles, explainers, investment advice, and everything in between. What does Zero Knowledge (ZK) even mean? Let me start with a toy example, and then we can work our way up to world peace. ...

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. There are anecdotal accounts from people on the ground who are seeing Bitcoin mining operations being shut down by law enforcement agents. And there are similar accounts from people on the ground elsewhere in the world where they are receiving containers full of mining hardware. ...

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 see whether it can be governed in a decentralized way. What is an organization anyway? Say some people want to pool their money and use it for charity. We have ourselves a rudimentary organization. During the organization’s inception, the founders make some bylaws – for example: for any charitable donation to happen, say 2/3rd of the remaining capital in the pool has to approve it. These bylaws are written down formally in a “human language” (the language being a “human language” is important). The organization will register itself with the government of that geographical area (let’s say, a country). In case disputes arise in the future, the courts of that country will interpret the bylaws of the organization, apply the relevant common laws of that country, and with the threat of force, ask the members of the organization to abide by the court’s judgment. We kind of get how this works. ...

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. Before the advent of Bitcoin/Ethereum, financial products were run on a computer that some entity controlled. This entity had a physical address, and could be visited by law enforcement or regulators or more generally, whom I call “men with guns”. Bitcoin/Ethereum run on so many computers that it’s not possible for men with guns to stop it. Smart contracts running on Ethereum are hard to take physical control of – and stop, or modify unilaterally by men with guns. This is the decentralization that we are interested in. Because of this, we have “unstoppable programs”, at least in theory. ...

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, if you will. Like how the original Doge meme is backed by a cute Shiba Inu dog, the Bitcoin meme is based on the idea of what money is. As we know, money is just a made up thing – a meme – which people ascribe value to. Money doesn’t have to be “backed by” anything. All you need is the collective belief of people in the meme of money. To take this comparison further, on the Doge side, the meme goes a bit deeper than just the dog. We have words like: “much”, “wow”, “so”, “amaze”, “many”, etc. that can enhance the context in which the Doge meme is being used. On the Bitcoin side, you have the mythical founder, dead simple cryptography, and a few other powerful ideas that go on to implement a glorified ledger of IOU’s. That ledger is considered legit because of the meme that Bitcoin is set in stone. ...

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 for “exactly the same system that bitcoin was designed to be an alternative to”. – tweet by Nic Carter. ...

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 in some circles and has been auctioned many times before, and most recently for around $400,000. That the serial number of the note is printed over the Del Monte sticker makes this even cooler, and kind of unforgeable, and a fungible token became a non-fungible token. ...