Recent submissions

Comment · 5 years ago
Does anyone know where the actual latest design for ETH 2.0 sharding is? Whitepaper/repo because w/o sharding you can't scale layer 1, and if you don't scale layer 1, you can't address layer 1 gas costs.

I've always been of the opinion that their sharding effort would fail, but I want to stay well informed. Sharding POS is very hard because the "trilemma" is correct for POS (kadena.io / explorer.chainweb.com being the example that the trilemma is solvable if you stick to POW).

Layer 2/zk-rollups will only help successful dapp devs lower their gas costs (see: DyDx). It doesn't relieve the pressure on layer 1 as other apps/patterns move in until a new equilibrium is reached.

Comment · 5 years ago
I can't cite that example, I just have a friend whose parents are there tell me a story about how they were saying how pretty the snow flurries were and how he had to inform them about how ominous it was for there to be snow there. It's possible that they were referring to the frost that Sao Paolo got (which is still pretty crazy), and the videos of snow from further south.
Comment · 5 years ago
One of my current concerns is that the demonization of climate scientists over the last 30 years has resulted in models that underestimate the timelines of how bad things get. Not an intentional conspiracy or anything, just a systemic natural response to the pressure of not wanting to be raked across the coals in the media as the "crazy".

As an example, the heat wave in the northwest of the USA and Canada this year was something I remember reading about as a problem to expect ~2050. Ditto for Siberia this year. Ditto for the snow in Sao Paolo.

I hope my concerns are misguided. I general though, short of a deus ex machina, I have no hope for the world doing anything about the climate emergency, even after it's obviously too late and even after the worlds seen a major city burned/wet bulbed/typhooned off the map.

Comment · 5 years ago
I looked into it. It is next to impossible to get. It doesn't take a crazy amount of money to get it, but from what I've experienced it looks like it takes a ton of wealth + the right connections + Albany politics. And that was years ago, I assume it's worse now. Moreover, there's no SLA for responding to the applications... so there are likely 500-1000 applications sitting in a box some where in Albany.

Bitlicense isn't a disaster, but it's a huge problem if you're in the space that you really do need to be careful of crossing. Crypto has a meme factory but not a lobbying strategy, and even if it did it's up against two near immovable objects: old school finance lobbying and being an easy target/distraction in the press.

We should just be thankful that Bitlicense wasn't adopted elsewhere and give up on NYC as a hub for this stuff. Until crypto grows beyond finance AND legal combined (legal will lobby with finance if asked) in terms of who makes money in NYC -or- crypto allies itself with another major mover (maybe real estate), don't expect things to ever change for the better.

It's a shame really. NYC would be leading crypto if not for this law. But then again, NYC doesn't care because tech is probably the 5th or 6th largest revenue generator in the city and has few/no generation spanning connections to Albany.

Comment · 5 years ago
> but pointing to a factory that pollutes because you buy their products and want their product cheaply is equally inane

Agreed, but I'm not pointing at the factories. Consumers _can't_ lobby congress or control the media narrative. Factories don't lobby congress nor spin a media narrative designed to distract attention from those profiting off dumping the externalities of the business models onto the world.

I'm pointing at the corporations (the sum actions of their boards & C-suites taken as a single entity) that own the factories and reap the rewards. I'm pointing at the people that have effectively "won" capitalism and then took it way too far by changing the law and controlling the narrative to make sure they stay in power no matter the costs.

I hope there's some resolution that doesn't require a revolution, though I suspect we'll just do _nothing_... then it'll be a mega-clusterfuck the likes of which we can barely imagine... and maybe after the first 10M-100M deaths due to famine/heat/fires/storms we may figure out that we need to do something... and it'll be too late and/or that something will be another major war.

But before that western society gets to decide how to handle storms/crop failures/droughts driving the largest human mass-migration EVER (Central America => USA, Africa/Middle East => Europe) during a period when resources are constraining.

Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
There is an example of directly scaling PoW that's been in prod for 1.5 years now: https://explorer.chainweb.com/mainnet

Instead of having X PH of PoW difficulty for a single blockchain, you have N parallel blockchains with ~X/N PH difficulty. Same energy needs, N*single chain performance. The coolest bit being that N can increase in an upgrade w/o needing to increase energy consumption, should the network gain traction and need more throughput. It upgraded from 10 to 20 chains last summer.

Other cool bit is that each chain runs a formally verifiable LISP (Pact)... I jokingly refer to Kadena as "a multithreaded LISP machine in the sky".

Disclaimer: I designed the Chainweb consensus algorithm

Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 8 years ago
The problem with Proof of Work is that it is too inefficient and not that it consumes too much energy. If bitcoin could do 100k transactions per second globally, no one would be talking about Proof of Stake. We'd be talking about: how do we make mining green?
Comment · 8 years ago
SWITH gpi was announced in 2015, piloted in 2016, and incorporated a blockchain PoC in 2017[1]. While only SWIFT knows if cryptocurrency was part of the conversation at the start, I'd be surprised if it didn't at least come up very early on.

In the context of how the politics of upgrading a bank's stack work, "driving" is the wrong word because in that context there are always people trying to drive "innovation". A better word is tailwind. Generally, banking tech is pretty crappy and good technologist can easily spot places where a big upgrade (aka "innovation") is warranted. The problem these people run into when lobbying for the upgrade is overcoming the hurdle of migration risk. The bigger the project, the bigger the hurdle. For JPM, I've heard this hurdle was summed up as _demonstrate a 1000x return on investment_.

Blockchain (via cryptocurrency) provides a tailwind to the people already trying to drive "innovation" in 2 ways -- it gives these people two additional angles:

1. As much as banks dislike spending money they hate losing market share. The risk blockchain poses helps in the lobbying for "innovation" without being a central point.

2. Higher ups can have the opportunity to be seen as "innovative in blockchain" by having the main "innovation" have a pet blockchain PoC on the side (similar to [1]) that's only kinda taken seriously. While the first bite at the apple (the upgrade) may not be enough this second bite (PR about them using blockchain) may satisfy them.

Does blockchain/cryptocurrency actually drive the discussion or make it into the final "innovation"? Probably not... today's gen 2 stacks just aren't good enough. Hopefully some gen 3's can change this in the next few years but that market still needs to be proven[2]. In the meantime, when dealing with a big bank's bureaucracy, every extra knot of tailwind helps.

[1]: https://www.swift.com/news-events/press-releases/22-addition...

[2]: Disclosure: I was at JPM working on blockchain back when Gemini (now called Quorum) was first purposed and when Juno was the headline JPM blockchain project. I left to co-found one of these next-gen platforms: kadena.io

Comment · 8 years ago
She is. I had the pleasure of working with her on in the distributed ledger tech working group (back when it was still the cryptocurrency working group) when she founded it in 2013. At the time, I was the lead eng for one of the SEC's quant groups and they needed a coder who understood the tech and didn't own any coin (exams/enf actions in crypto are tech-heavy). I raised my hand to be the founding tech lead specifically so I could be in the room to represent the "omg don't ban it, we don't know where this is going" position. Turned out that voice not needed at all.

The SEC has a well informed and nuanced view of crypto that underpins their restraint on the matter which, in no small part, is due to Ms. Szczepanik. If you're looking for an example of what happens when you don't have someone like her then look no further than NY. NY just jumped in and messed everything up with the Bitlicense.

Comment · 8 years ago
Comment · 8 years ago
Is one of them Juno? https://github.com/kadena-io/juno. If so, I was lead eng on it so let me know if you have any questions.

FYI we're hiring haskell devs to work on our private consensus layer (based off of Juno), our public consensus protocol (http://kadena.io/docs/chainweb-v15.pdf) and our smart contract language https://github.com/kadena-io/pact + formal verification system. [email protected].

Comment · 8 years ago
It's a fair read, the private blockchain market is underserved/misserved by the "widely" used platforms (IBM Fabric/R3 Corda). The thing that most everyone misses (including IBM and R3) is that the point of a private blockchain isn't the blockchain... it's smart contracts.

REST APIs + a DB can replace most "private blockchains as a time-stamper" usecases but here's the thing they can't do: replicate and trustlessly execute user logic. It's almost like you said _we're fixing SQL injection by making it irrelevant and making SQL into a full language_.

The blockchain itself just provides the trustless/high assurance substrate to then have trustless logic execution.

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