Crypto and Defi Explained
Crypto and Defi Explained
11/12/22 With the recent implosion of FTX the topic of self-custody has become suddenly popular again. So, let’s review some strategies for how to self-custody your assets safely. I know some of this is intimidating. If this is your first time doing it, you have never been exposed to cryptography primitives before. It can all …
Sometimes people ask me why I’m passionate about crypto. Yes, there are fortunes to be made here but I’ve made money in stocks before with far less time and interest invested. It’s not simple curiosity. There’s endless knowledge to be gained in a variety of technical fields and I’m plenty curious about genetics and AI …
This post is targeted at more of a developer audience than my usual writings. Whatever technical jargon is here shouldn’t distract from the point too much if you just skim past it and keep reading. Whenever I see the too-often FUD about some country evicting miners, KYCing wallets, or suing some company or other I …
Prior to the beacon chain I expected that the borrow rates on money markets like Compound and Aave would normalize to something close to the staking reward rate APR. They clearly have not, and are still sitting under 1% most of the time. A surprising amount of capital has been just dumped there and left …
There’s a warning I give every newcomer to this space in my Rabbit Hole speech; this is the frontier. “There are no guard rails. There is no one you can sue to correct your mistake. There is no one the government can point a gun at to get your money back. There is no FDIC …
I have a speech I give to people I introduce to crypto. I feel it helps to prepare them for the dangers they are going to encounter when they dive deeper, to give them some guided skepticism while not deterring them from exploring, and to keep them optimistic in the face of the toxic vitriol. …
10/26/2021 Let’s start with this: why do so many platforms nowadays have Liquidity Mining programs? It wasn’t always done this way; most of the older tokens such as MKR and LINK have never done this. So why did this catch on? Let’s consider this from the perspective of a DAO. The basic answer is so …
Back in my Defi Governance Endgame post I talk about the need for a new Sybil resistance mechanism to reduce the super-linear influence of capital on governance. The first has to do with a different solution to Sybil resistance than money… In the long term I think we’ll see a bunch of Legos taking the …
Since long before NFT’s humans have been collecting silly things. We collect stamps, baseball cards, vinyl records, video games, art, and recently of course, NFT’s. I can easily enough imagine some caveman collecting rocks; heck I’ve seen it from penguins. It’s wired into us. We instinctually want to gather things, feel they belong to us, …
This is going to be a rant about the unfortunate end state of Defi if we continue along our current trajectory. The fundamental issue is that we’re using money for Sybil resistance. Simply using governance tokens as a vote count makes money correlate super-linearly to influence. Vitalk recently wrote about this problem and it has been bubbling on my …