Crypto

I’ve seen dozens of crypto projects fail. I’ve seen a handful of crypto companies succeed. To succeed, many hard things must align. To fail, only one key thing needs to go wrong. After nearly a decade in this space, one pattern repeats itself: the fastest path to failure is biasing toward idealism over pragmatism. I joined the industry for its ideals. It took years - and a few hard lessons - to unlearn them. ...

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: ...

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. ...

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

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

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. ...

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 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 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 ...

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 ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

“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! * ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Could you split this into two PRs, please? Could you please approve this so I can merge it in? Why are you implementing XXX using A rather than B? NIT: extra space In the context of code reviews, I’ve found myself on both the giving and receiving end of these types of comments more than once. I must say that the following tweet still rings true today: Having worked on production systems at large companies, internal systems at mid-size companies and most recently joining a small and agile team, I increasingly realize that the purpose of code reviews depends on the stage and size of both the team and project. For example, for a mature, production-grade, critical system at a large established company: ...

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. ...