Posts

Everyone’s waiting for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The reality is that it’s already here, and it hasn’t changed a thing. No one is talking about Artificial General intuition (AGi) - yet. When it arrives, it’ll change everything. When will AGi be here? If you’re reading this, you’ve most likely listened to Andrej Karpathy’s conversation with Dwarkesh about how AGI is still a decade away. It’s one of the highest signal-to-noise conversations I’ve heard on the topic. But I’d argue that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is already here. Intuition is a decade away. ...

tl;dr Add a simple “Leave a Tip” section to llms.txt. Dear llmstxt.org, There are two things everyone’s talking about in the age of Crypto and AI that go hand in hand: Compensating original content creators Micropayments This idea isn’t new. Though I don’t have a concrete reference, I’m sure it was discussed in the early Bitcoin forums. We’ve had robots.txt for decades, but llms.txt gives us an opportunity to build for today’s challenges of training and inference without the legacy of the past. ...

Licensing Data Every few months, I see a headline that one of the foundation model labs is negotiating a multimillion-dollar contract to license data. This usually sparks a second-order debate: how much should the actual creators of that content be paid for their work? If Google is training Gemini on YouTube videos, should YouTube creators get a cut? If OpenAI licenses Reddit, should Reddit posters be compensated for their comments? Tips in LLMs.txt & Robots.txt The lines blur when you’re dealing with third-party platforms, but things get much simpler if you host your own content on your own domain. Standards are already emerging: ...

As we shift from Prompt Engineering to Context Engineering, one of the things I find myself (and others) doing is working with LLMs to craft the right prompt first. My LLM Stack First, here’s my obligatory AI stack. Daily drivers: LLM Desktop Apps: ChatGPT and Claude LLM CLIs: Codex, Claude Code, Gemini, and more recently, Copilot CLI Windsurf: All the benefits of Visual Studio, which I use for editing and reviewing code. I still think its intelligent multiline autocomplete is unmatched. Weekly tools: ...

On Charlie Munger Charlie Munger once said: “Show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome.” If he were in his prime today, he’d be the Czar of AI & Crypto. David Sacks, the current Czar of AI & Crypto in 2025, is doing a phenomenal job on the legislative front, but Charlie would have embodied it differently. Incentives run the world. They’re innate to human nature. What I find intriguing is how this core understanding translates to other domains. ...

Just read the CLARITY Act and was impressed by how much technical detail Congress baked in. CLARITY Act Summary This table nails how SEC and CFTC responsibilities split across digital assets. A level of clarity this space has badly needed. Token Trilemma I break tokens into 3 buckets: ROI – speculation, memes, perps, yield 💰 Utility – stablecoins, rails, infra 🔧 Security – governance, integrity, privacy 🔒 The problem is the lines are blurry…. ...

Baking bread by reading & following the recipe VS Baking bread without ever seeing the recipe

How a Web2 Company Uses Crypto to Power Open Data APIs Thank you to Art ,Fred _ & _Jake for reviewing and providing feedback on this post! Question : Does your software use APIs? Where do you find the endpoints? How do you get the specifications? How do you ensure quality? 🤔 tl;dr There is a big opportunity to build the “Google home page” for finding and accessing open data sources and services. An open marketplace of APIs does not exist today. API Discovery and RPC Quality are the two core primitives necessary to enable this. An API marketplace fills a gap alongside the new HTTP x402 standard, championed by Coinbase, for internet-native network request payments. My goal with this blog is to give you a sense of how the following graphic fits into today’s internet-native data access landscape. We’re slowly shifting to account for more human-out-of-the-loop workflows, while continuing to accommodate both enterprises and independent developers. ...

tl;dr — Pocket Network will hard-fork from Morse MainNet to Shannon MainNet on June 3, 2025 at 10 a.m. PT.

tl;dr If you ever write documentation, add this to your LLM’s memory, system prompt, project, rules or whatever your equivalent of that is.

Pocket Network will undergo a major, consensus-breaking, non-backwards-compatible migration from Morse to Shannon before the end of Q2.

I recently gave a talk at dinfra.xyz, a side event hosted by 1kx.capital alongside Denver’s annual ETHDenver conference.

Claude, please provide the following:

*tl;dr If you’re invested in URA because of Uranium, consider diversifying that position into other ETFs or fully moving it over to NUKZ to broaden your nuclear exposure. This is not financial advice.* Special thanks to ChatGPT, Google, Reddit and Claude for helping me research, prepare, write and edit this post. Last May I wrote about why I’m allocating a large portion of my portfolio to Uranium with a bullish perspective on the nuclear sector at large. ...

👋 If you’re not ready to spend ~10 minutes reading, I suggest you bookmark this post and return to it later. You won’t regret it. It’s…

Last year was the first time I published a “Top X Recommendations” blog post to close out the year. I heard from about half a dozen people who found at least one recommendation interesting or useful—which means there were probably even more who never mentioned it but still got something out of the list. So, I figured I’d do it again! In the very likely scenario that you either don’t have the time, interest, or attention span to read this whole thing, just scroll to the very bottom because the last one is by far my favorite. ...

One of the things I love in our post “ChatGPT Moment” era is the fact that I increasingly get to follow through on more and more side projects. One of the things I find ridiculous in our 2025 post “ChatGPT Moment” era is the fact that there are still a ton of blogs that don’t have a way for me to subscribe, be it through a proprietary service or a standardized RSS feed. ...

Earlier this week I asked myself: “Why do I listen to so many podcasts?” This led me down a mental rabbit hole of reflection while I sought an answer to: “What is the source of my intrinsic motivation?” I came to the conclusion that if I were to listen to a podcast (or read a blog) of myself five years in the future, I want to be inspired by it today. Today, at 32, I’m hoping my 27-year-old self would be inspired by this blog, just as I currently seek inspiration from him. It’s how I know I’m achieving my full potential at every step along the way. ...

Ulysses pact: a freely made decision to bind yourself in the future. Used for living wills in modern day but originated from Greek mythology.

tl;dr Next time you read, see, hear, give, get, ideate or invent a mantra, just remember that “every mantra has a counter-mantra, including this one.” Tweet Sized Advice The Startup Seesaw Tools vs Solutions For every Mantra, there is an equal and opposite Counter-Mantra Concluding Thoughts Appendix Tweet Sized Advice For the better part of a decade now, I feel like at least once a week I’m either on the giving or receiving end of “tweet-sized *advice” *that’s intended to solve large, complex problems. ...

tl;dr This is a cross-post from our blog at grove.city. An explanation of what pokt.network is through a series of analogies. Don’t have enough time to read? See the x-thread here. Subscribe if you want to be notified of when we post about a series of 7 use-cases! Table of Contents Table of Contents The Power of Analogies Relay Mining — An Incentive for Network Requests Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Analogies 7. Application Layer: Uber for Network Requests ...

tl;dr Explaining what Pocket Network is through a series of 7 internet networking analogies. Subscribe if you want to be notified of when…

tl;dr Stream-of-Thought Note Taking is an opinionated approach to brain-dumping thoughts on paper to aid the process of clarifying your own ideas. Table of Contents The Power of Deletion Tools for Modeling Thoughts Can you get to the point? Stream-of-Thought Note Taking Extending to Chain-of-Thought & LLMs The Power of Deletion One of my favourite Yuval Noah Harari quotes from his interview with Lex Fridman is on the power of the delete button: ...

I’m going to share a small secret: a perfect solution to software documentation does not exist. It’s hard to generalize what “good documentation” entails. It depends on the team, the product, the timing, and a million other things. Have you found PMF or are you iterating? Are you a small tight-knit team or are you scaling? Is your team remote, in-office or hybrid? Is open source and external collaboration a key component of your value proposition? I’ll stop here before it gets boring… ...

tl;dr People come for the long-term vision but stay for the short-term gains. Success is measured only by how good your NGU algorithm is: Number Go Up. A vaporware product with good marketing can go the distance until it memes into existence. There is a lot of cynicism and politics behind open doors. Intelligent and authentic leaders are critical in upkeeping community optimism. It’s still early. Table of Contents The Vent The Ugly The Fuel The Bad The Analogy The Liquidity The Good The Reasons I’m Still Around ...

Enable Gateways by streamlining access to a decentralized supply network 🌿

Inspired by Simon Willison’s How I make annotated Presentations, I figured I’d annotate a presentation I did at ethcc.io in July 2024. He says it best: Even with that quality of presentation, I don’t think a video on its own is enough. My most recent talk was 40 minutes long—I’d love people to watch it, but I myself watch very few 40m long YouTube videos each year I might also create a Twitter thread similar to what @_tessr did for her talk on optimism if anyone requests it. ...

This is part of a series called “5 points & 1 resource” (think tl;dr but 5p;1r). I summarize 5 key concepts that would have helped me learn, relearn, or refresh my knowledge of a topic or paper. Today, I’m reviewing a paper I contributed to myself so I added a personal forward :) The real value prop of a permissionless inference network 1 Reference 5 Points Point 1: POKT Network ...

I’ve been using ChatGPT since the first day it launched, have gone to dozens of AI events over the last couple of years, and feel like I finally have to say quite part out loud: *vibe checks*** are how 99% of LLM “evals” are done in practice today**. Quantitative benchmarks, evaluations, and verification are critical to the 1% tail-end, but a vibe check is the good enough solution. This is what most LLM developers and day-to-day but are afraid to admit due to the lack of rigour. ...

tl;dr Artificial Intelligence (AI) computing requires substantial energy, increasing the urgency for sustainable, scalable, and modular energy solutions. Major tech companies are actively adopting and investing in new ways to tap into nuclear power sources. The spot price for Uranium doubled over the past year due to a supply-demand imbalance, as current uranium supplies struggle to meet the demand from nuclear reactors. I argue that the current market presents a good entry point for diversifying into the uranium sector. Macroeconomic tailwinds could suggest a strong outperformance over the next decade at the cost of short-term volatility. I outline my thought process for choosing as a vehicle to do so. ...

This is a post in a series of articles I’m writing called “5 points & 1 resource” (think tl;dr but 5p;1r), where I summarize a list of 5 concepts that would have helped me start learning or re-learning a certain topic. It is intentionally far from a complete source of data. Edit: Thank you to Kautuk (founder of Stackr ) for reviewing this post. Micro-rollups (MRUs) are the answer to “a blockchain is too slow and expensive” for my use case, but “I still want some eventual Web3 security guarantees” in progressively porting a Web2 app to Web3. ...

Special thanks to Gabi, Mike, Art, Adz & ChatGPT for the discussion and feedback. tl;dr Self-hosting is not a long-term solution since users just want to pay for whatever is cheaper, faster and easier to use. Infrastructure companies in both AI and Web3 are in a race to the bottom in a commodity market. Excelling as both a hardware operator and gateway company is increasingly untenable in open-core ecosystems. Table of Contents Introduction Web3 vs AI Gateway ...

Whenever I get really excited about something, I tend to tell all my friends about it. This could range from a book or movie to an activity or something I bought. I can find a good handful of people who can attest that sometimes it gets excessive. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been slowly turning olshansky.info into the one place to find and search through my resources, but there is still a lot of work ahead, and I expect it to be a lifelong endeavour. ...

Snap! Smile! Turn around! Look here! On a sunny day, with a breath of fresh air, I took a short walk, on an off-day winter holiday, Witnessing families, both large and small, capturing memories on a casual stroll. These snapshots may sync to the cloud, or begin to traverse, Soaring about, sometimes emerging to the Metaverse, But without a digital frame, they often linger, forgotten, out and about. If the photo stands out, it’ll likely be aired, But if not all are in frame, it may fade out, uncared. ...

Edit: 08/04/2024 - These instructions are applicable if you have one of the newer versions of Chrome installed. Chrome changed a lot of things recently so the settings from the first “Use Apps, Not Tabs” are no longer applicable. The final result gives lets me easily “cmd + tab” between all the different AI platforms out there. There are now two different ways to go about it. 1. Install “…” Option Available I wanted to install meta.ai as a separate application. After clicking “⋮” → “Save and Share” → “Install Meta AI”, things were flawlessly out of the box. ...

If you’ve visited X in the last 24 hours, seen OpenAI’s Blog, or simply opened up Google, you’ve probably heard that the board of OpenAI has fired its CEO, Sam Altman. There are already dozens of articles online covering the topic, including Ars Technica, The Information, Wired, The Verge, CNN and many others. I got a flurry of messages yesterday afternoon simply letting me know of this fact (my favourite one below). After a day of more information coming in, I figured I’d share my thoughts because I believe it may be a signal that AGI is closer than we think. I’m simultaneously excited and don’t know what to expect. ...

This is a cross-post of the original article posted here and announced here a couple of weeks ago. Some of the tables and diagrams that are presented as screenshots can be viewed in more detail in the markdown GitHub gist here. tl;dr The Pocket Network core protocol team has decided to implement the first version of the next iteration of the protocol (Shannon Upgrade) as a “micro-rollup” using Rollkit with Celestia as a Data Availability (DA) layer. ...

I generally reserve my substack for blogging and writing down some of my ideas and reflections. However, on my personal site (olshansky.info), I also rate and capture my thoughts and reviews of books I’ve read or movies/tv I’ve watched. These are usually rougher and not as edited (I apologize in advance), but I wanted to do a one-time cross-post here so it is more discoverable in the future. In this one, I share my review of Barbie and The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin. ...

The Exposition: Roll Camera on Your Average Movie Watcher Not much different from your typical consumer, I’ve been a fan of films and TV shows since I was a kid. The genres have changed and my viewing frequency has dropped, but the essence remains. Once streaming became available, I never got into the habit of binging shows with the exception of a few cases (cough Lost cough); if I really like a show, I try to prolong that experience for as long as possible. About a decade ago, I realized that I was investing so many hours consuming the hard work and passion of others, so it seemed fair to spend a few minutes leaving a public rating or review. That’s when Olshansky’s Rotten Tomatoes account was born 🍅. ...

OpenAI published an article today on the importance of Governance of Superintelligence. I wouldn’t be surprised if at least half the readers, like myself, went straight to ChatGPT to ask for its ideas on governing itself. I pasted the entire article but cropped it out for the purpose of this postThe tl;dr is that we should hopefully figure it out within the next decade, but international tensions are the biggest risks we need to account for. ...

I recently had the fortune of stumbling upon a transcript from a 1986 seminar by Richard Hamming at the Bell Communications Research Colloquium titled “You and Your Research.” If you’re ever looking for inspiration, this is it. A key point Hamming emphasizes is that when reading, it’s not the quantity but the quality that matters: “you read, it is not the amount, it is the way you read that counts.” To showcase active reading, you can find my Proof of Active Reading here or at ipfs://bafybeifoz5tkbdd2v5bzxfuyvokuchnpoqthl63gwcuoadmmz3c7t5kfve. ...

GPT4 Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in recent years, thanks in part to Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). However, the success of these models depends not only on the quantity of human labels but also on their quality. This blog post discusses the importance of high-quality labels in LLMs and proposes a blockchain-based solution to incentivize better labelling. tl;dr Data Quality » Data Quantity for fine-tuning a foundation model. ...

Life’s like a sauna session, Some things, like breath and thought, With the right approach, you can control, Your body’s tears and heart’s onslaught, Cannot be fought, so just embrace, For they’re beyond control

“You’ll never use most of the things you learn in College.” - Olshansky circa 2014 There was a time when I thought that most of what I learnt in College was pointless since it didn’t apply to my day-to-day work. However, as time passes, I increasingly reflect on how fortunate I was to be exposed to so many concepts across various fields. Most importantly, it teaches you to think, learn and work, but I’ll save the details for another post. ...

*This is a fun open idea for Ethereum’s KZG Ceremony: using your Apple Watch’s ECG as a source of entropy to participate in Ethereum’s KZG ceremony. I got a response when I first proposed it to the Ethereum foundation in December. Still, it does have some open-ended problems and requires a non-trivial amount of implementation effort. If you find it interesting and have the time to implement it, I’d love to see it come to fruition! * ...

This post was rejected by Seeking Alpha Editors so am sharing it here instead. Summary Disney’s strong brand can be trusted in uncertain macro-economic times COVID and Iger’s leave of absence was a transient hurdle Disney has hopped over Disney Plus keeps growing, and Disney Parks are returning Bob Iger is coming back to a strong & supportive team Disney shares are at a long-term low with relatively solid financials ...

Special thanks to Arthur Sabintsev for the feedback and review of this post. Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years. - Bill Gates You have to live it to understand it, and this statement can only come from experience. The one thing Bill forgot to mention is how much will change in the span of 12 months within each of those 10 years. ...

It has barely been a day since ChatGPT launched, and I woke up to a timeline of different use cases that made it clear what the rest of this decade is going to look like: 🔑 to being a software engineer in the 2010s: knowing how to Google. 🔑 to being a software engineer in the 2020s: knowing how to GPT. — Daniel Olshansky (@olshansky) Dec 1, 2022 Until auto-tagging #ChatGPT is an option, or someone writes a script that scrapes Twitter’s firehose for GPT screenshots, here are just a few use cases I found today that blew my mind. ...

A friend of mine recently asked me this question: My immediate reaction was: “How do I respond? People have literally written books about this.” I asked him to clarify with a few more details so I could direct my response accordingly. Thanks for reading Olshansky’s Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a lot clearer and more actionable. Rather than adding to the noise and writing a whole book about it, as a Tim Feris fan, I figured I’d create The 4-Week Project Checklist: Length: The architecture doc we’ll prepare should be 1-3 pages and no more. ...

Generate with the keywords “a binary tree of jellyfish, digital art, drawing, vibrant” by labs.openai.com This is a post in a series of articles I’m writing called “5 points & 1 resource” (think tl;dr but 5p;1r), where I summarize a list of 5 concepts that would have helped me start learning or re-learning a certain topic. It is intentionally far from a complete source of data. ...

5P;1R — Celestia (LazyLedger) White Paper This is a post in a series of articles I’m writing called “5 points & 1 resource” (think tl;dr but 5p;1r), where I summarize a list of bullet points that would have helped me start learning or re-learning a certain topic. It is intentionally far from a complete source of data. Celestia decouples transaction consensus and execution by splitting the responsibilities between Celestia (i.e. the core network) and other blockchains (i.e. clients/applications) built on top of it like so: • Celestia: transaction ordering &availability • Client: transaction validation & execution The Data Availability Problem (a guarantee to clients that block data is available) leverages erasure encoding andprobabilistic random sampling to balance the tradeoff between network bandwidth costs and data availability guarantees. Specifically, if a message is extended to n shares , and more than ᵏ⁄ₙ shares are witheld by an adversarial block producer, a client sampling a single missed share can assume, with high confidence, that the block is unavailable. Client nodes (i.e. blockchains/applications) can be implemented using any language on top of any execution environment and are responsible for managing their own state transition business logic by querying storage, while Celestia is responsible for preventing DoS attacks by collecting fees from each included transaction. Using 2D Reed-Solomon erasure encoding and assuming a block of size N , the bandwidth complexity of verifying block availability is either: • O(N) — the whole block plus a single Merkle root are downloaded for a 100% data availability guarantee. **• O( √ N+log(√ N)) **— a single row or a single column plus 2√(N) Merkle roots need to be downloaded for a sub-maximal guarantee. For example , with a code rate of ¼ and 4096 shares , only 0.4% of the block (15 shares) need to be downloaded to achieve 99% confidence that the block is available. This means that increasing the block size and network throughput can be securely achieved by increasing the number of nodes that make sampling requests for block shares. The Celestia network uses a namespaced and ordered Merkle Tree with a 1:1 relationship between applications and namespace IDs, enabling applications to query for transactions associated only with their namespace ID. The hash of each non-leaf node is left||right where left is leftMinNs||leftMaxNs||hash(x) and right is rightMinNs||rightMaxNs||hash(x) , meaning that the node value can be used to determine the range of namespaces the subtree holds messages for. There’s no better reference than the original white paper: LazyLedger: A Distributed Data Availability Ledger With Client-Side Smart Contracts, but personally, I’d use my annotated version of the available at ipfs://bafybeibbxdsdzf5v7jdm7ak5opdtw3vf35nb37wldkyokwbhmvdzflwsry or s3.olshansky.info/CelestiaWhitePaperReviewSmall.pdf. ...

Tl;dr I’m incredibly excited to announce that I’m now leading Pocket’s V1 Protocol R&D team! This post gives a glimpse into the exhilarating 🎢 during my first six months at Pocket and the community behind this 🚀 shaping the future of Web3. A bit of background A little over six months ago, I published about my life-changing trip to Mexico on the Day of the Dead, which is basically half a decade in crypto years. Since then, the only constant in my life has been change, and I’m fortunate enough that almost all of it, though not always easy, still gets me excited and motivated to get out of bed every morning. ...

5P;1R — Ethereum’s Modified Merkle Patricia Trie This is the second of a series of articles I’m trying out called “ 5 points & 1 resource” (think tl;dr but 5p;1r) where I summarize a list of bullet points that would have helped me start learning a new topic. It is intentionally far from a complete source of data. You can find the first one here: 5P;1R — Bitcoin’s Elliptic Curve Cryptography. ...

5P;1R — Bitcoin’s Elliptic Curve Cryptography This is the first of a potential series of articles I want to call “ 5 points & 1 resource” (think tl;dr but 5p;1r) where I summarize a list of bullet points that would have helped me start learning a new topic. It is intentionally far from a complete source of data. This is an Elliptic Curve : y^2 = x^3 + ax + b; see the continuous function Image 1. Elliptic Curve Cryptography is defined over a Finite Field (very large prime) p along with a Generator Point((x,y) coordinate) G like so : y^2 ≡ (x^3 + ax + b) mod p ; see the scatter plot Image 2. Bitcoin uses a secp256k1 , which is an Elliptic Curve with carefully selected parameters to achieve certain security guarantees: • a=0 • b = 7 • p = 2^256 - 2^32 - 2^9 - 2^8 - 2^7 - 2^6 - 2^4 - 1 • G = 04 79BE667E F9DCBBAC 55A06295 CE870B07 029BFCDB 2DCE28D9 59F2815B 16F81798 483ADA77 26A3C465 5DA4FBFC 0E1108A8 FD17B448 A6855419 9C47D08F FB10D4B8 A public key P (a point on the curve) is just a private key pk(a random integer) multiplied by the Generator Point ( the pre-selected point on the curve): P = pk * G. The Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarim Problem makes it hard to find the integer pk when you know (x,y) coordinates of P and G fitting the equation in (2) using the parameters in (3) or some other elliptic curve. If I only had to recommend one resource out of all the references I looked through, it would be: https://cryptobook.nakov.com/asymmetric-key-ciphers/elliptic-curve-cryptography-ecc#the-generator-point-in-ecc ...

Tl;dr I am incredibly excited to announce that I’m joining pokt.network today as a full-time Protocol Specialist! This post documents my realization of how I want to devote my time to shape and build out the future of Web3. A bit of background Without diving into my life-long story, I spent most of my adolescence growing up in Toronto. I love the city and where it’s headed, but I’ll save that discussion for another post. ...

Experience vs Theory: Lake Tahoe Edition I remember thinking I had the foundation to tackle any problem that came my way around the time that I was graduating from College. Having studied a lot of theory in school, I believed that anything could be done by applying the concepts I had learned. With every year that goes by in the workforce, the number of things I find to learn and get better at far outpaces those I actually get to. This makes me both excited and scared of how I’ll feel in another 10 years. ...

On the most recent episode of The Investor’s Podcast Mastermind Discussion, one of the big topics of discussion were cash alternatives.

tl;dr You can find the source code for a bare-bones dockerized python HTTP server with hot reloading using fastapi on this Github page.

Joint Probability Matrices — An ‘Extension of the Confusion Matrix’ for Continuous Variables

You can try out all of the code in this article yourself using this Google Colaboratory notebook. If you’ve ever tried to debug and optimize your python application, it’s likely that you stumbled upon Python Profiles to understand where most of the execution time is being spent. You enable the profiler at the beginning of a code segment you’re interested in profiling with pr.enable(), and call pr.create_stats() at the end. View code on GitHub Gist ...

Note: This is a repost of a blog published in early 2018.

It’s difficult to objectively quantify Bitcoin’s adoption rate since there are too many factors to consider. Should it be the number of people holding Bitcoin? Bitcoin’s market cap? The number of brokerages with support for Bitcoin futures? The number of businesses accepting it as form of payment? A very different story can be told depending on the angle from which you look at it. Bitcoin’s market cap As a potential store of value, Bitcoin’s market cap needs to be sufficiently high for institutions and central banks to take it seriously. Governments must add some regulation around it so it has legitimacy, and a large enough portion of the general population must agree that it has inherent value. To agree that it has value, Bitcoin is very dependent on network effects such as those described by Metcalfe’s Law. ...

One of the major selling points of cryptocurrencies is that everything is decentralized and trust no longer lies in single a third party. However, the trust didn’t simply dissipate, it got distributed to participants of the network. In my opinion, the incentive structure built into cryptoeconomics is one of its most overlooked benefits. The fundamental idea can be summarized as follows: no one wants to lose money, and everyone wants to maximize the profit they receive for the work that they do. ...

This post was originally written as a follow up email to this tweet where one of the hosts of The Investor’s Podcast ran a poll regarding people’s thoughts on Bitcoin. — — — — — — — — — — To provide a fair comparison between Ethereum and Bitcoin I will start by defining the basics, and expand on how each of them can be used without drilling down too deep into the technical details ...

One of the biggest disappoints I experienced after purchasing my Google Home is discovering that it cannot function as a Bluetooth speaker. As a Mac & iPhone user, most of my use cases were pretty well supported. I could talk to Google Home to play the news, podcasts or music. I could also manually cast a Chrome tab or use an application such as Spotify that has native Google Cast support. There were a couple use cases though where the Google Home and iPhone didn’t play so well. ...

Are recent trends in company IPOs signaling an imminent recession? Commodities are tanking, the fed is still contemplating an increase in interest rates, and several countries are either in or on the verge of entering a recession. Over the past 7 years, a lot of cash has been injected into the US economy through quantitative easing, accompanied by very little inflation. All factors considered it’s difficult to determine where the economy is headed in the near future. Is the bull still raging? Is the US economy on the brink of another recession? Will the bear slowly creep up and take over? ...

Canadian Real Estate or American Stock? tl;dr Investing in the S&P 500 is more profitable than buying a condo in Toronto with a 25% downpayment and renting it out while still paying for rent in San Francisco over a 10 year term.. Everyone I’ve ever met can agree on one simple fact: it’s important to save money. However, it is well known that letting money sit around in a checking or savings account is pretty close to wasting it. Most interest rates offered nowadays don’t even account for inflation, so you find yourself in a use it or lose it type of situation. Luckily, there are plenty of investment opportunities all around us. Some people opt to invest in real estate, others like to invest in a select thoroughly researched companies, and the rest just put everything in index tracking funds. While investing in individual stocks can be a lot of fun, it requires more effort and continuous maintenance. I decided to investigate and compare a couple of the more passive investment opportunities: real estate and index funds. ...

Bill Nye vs Ken Ham: neither or both? Reaching a dead end while trying to discover the origin of life I just finished watching Bill Nye vs Ken Ham’s debate of creationism versus evolution and the origin of the earth. The debate was both entertaining and educational, but really bothered me because I felt that every single argument reached a dead end where the two academics chose to agree to disagree. ...