Inadequate OpSec

The February 8 th arrest of Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan, accused of laundering the proceeds of the August 2016 theft of nearly 120...

USA Number 1!

Early last September, before the Omicron surge, I posted Excess Deaths . It was based on The Economist 's excess death model . Back then, th...

List And Dump Schemes

Source In Alternatives To Proof-of-Work I wrote: The Chia "price" chart suggests that it might have been a "list-and-dump" scheme, in whi...

Mainstream Media Catching On

Two of the externalities of cryptocurrencies I discussed in my Talk at TTI/Vanguard Conference were the way decentralization and immutabili...

Counterpoint on Venture Capital

My personal experience working with VCs was very positive, but it was (a) a long time ago and (b) they were top-flight firms (Sutter Hill an...

Blockchain Gaslighting

In Web3/Crypto: Why Bother? Albert Wenger draws an analogy between the PC and "web3" as platforms for innovation: The late Clayton Christ...

DMCA To The Rescue!

In NFTs and Web Archiving I pointed out that the blockchain data representing an NFT of an image such as this CryptoPunk is typically a li...

Progress On DNA Storage

In 2018's DNA's Niche in the Storage Market , I addressed a hypothetical DNA storage company's engineers and posed this challenge: increas...

Blatant Self-Promotion

Liam Proven's NixOS and the changing face of Linux operating systems is a very interesting discussion of Linux distros and package manageme...

Talk at TTI/Vanguard Conference

I was invited to present to the TTI/Vanguard Conference . The abstract of my talk, entitled Can We Mitigate Cryptocurrencies' Externalities?...

The $65B Prize

Senator Everett Dirksen is famously alleged to have remarked " a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money ". Th...

NFTs and Web Archiving

One of the earliest observations of the behavior of the Web at scale was "link rot". There were a lot of 404s, broken links. Research showed...

I Confess To Right-Clicker-Mentality

"Worth $532M" Both Cory Doctorow and Matthew Gault and Jordan Pearson have fun with the latest meme about NFTs, "Right-Clicker-Mentality"...

Making Sure "Number Go Up"

Source Fake it till you make it is the way Silicon Valley works these days, as exemplified by Theranos , Uber , WeWork and many other rol...

The Great Mining Migration

China's Cryptocurrency Crackdown has been dramatically effective. The total hashrate dropped by over a half from its peak before recovering...

Cryptocurrency's Carbon Footprint Underestimated

Back in April I wrote Cryptocurrency's Carbon Footprint about the catastrophic carbon emissions of Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies such as B...