When you have to perform the same stupid tedious complicated task every day, eventually you don't even notice how stupid, tedious, or complicated it really is. Online #security is seriously hampered by the fact that a lot of the requirements put on users seem stupid, tedious, and initially also complicated. In this article, Luis Lubeck and I look a…

☢️ 🦴 🎯 You should seriously consider if you want to be a successful #startup #founder! Going into business is not for the faint of heart, and being prepared is important. So is critically analyzing any and all advice you read or are given. Reminder: just because someone has tens of thousands of followers and lots of positive comments doesn't mean t…

Well, that didn't take long. A day after my previous video there was a Sybil attack on the XEN cryptocurrency. Except, the attack was really on an exchange - FTX, which offers free crypto withdrawals, and didn't check the maximum gas it allocates to this. As a result someone found an arbitrage opportunity. Use smart contracts to spawn off lots of E…

The last week has seen the XEN ERC20 token taking up the largest share of Ethereum transactions. So why should a humble token with no defined utility or extra whistles and bells be achieving that? The answer is that: 🆓 the token is free to mint (except for gas) 💰 there's no pre-mint, 📉 for an added dash of FOMO, the first people claiming it get the…

Investors bring in money for P2E projects, but they expect to take out more in the long run. That includes most players, who typically expect to invest time to extract money. So how is a P2E game supposed to build a proper revenue stream and become sustainable? The P2E angle may be great initially for raising capital and attracting a particular typ…

What's the most important rule for play to earn games? In the previous episode I talked about what could be called "the first law of P2E games", or perhaps "The fundamental theorem of P2E economics", but Mark Skinner pointed out to me that there is a more important one: The zeroth law of P2E games. And it doesn't just apply to P2E. What that is, is…

The problem with most P2E games is that they are not sustainable. Why would that be? It turns out that the answer is very simple: the amount of value being put in by players over time is less than the amount the players want to take out. More on that in the episode.

There are a number of myths about blockchains that keep getting repeated. For example, that proof-of-work is a "cryptographic puzzle", that blockchains "build trust", and the most insidious of all: that blockchains "are immutable". In this episode, I explain why blockchains are not immutable. With the aid of not one, not two, but three examples.…

Staking cryptocurrency assets can serve a purpose for projects - for example, raising liquidity for a decentralized exchange. And I approve of that kind of use, because it serves a purpose. Unfortunately the use of staking in many projects amounts to nothing more than a complicated Ponzi scheme (and I don't use that phrase lightly). I suspect that …

This is the sound track to a video in which I define what a metaverse is through the use of a banana. The banana is not a simile or a metaphor, it is an actually metaverse. It won't make much sense in just audio, just as the metaverse is apparently going to be about more than sound. If you are fortunate enough to have vision, you can watch the vide…

It's midsummer (or Juhannus as they call it) here in Finland at the moment, and although I enjoy the importance and the traditions of this time to the Finnish people, I am an outsider. I don't fully connect in the way they do. And so I also find myself dispassionately analyzing it every year. It makes me think about how significant culture is to al…

In this episode, I explain what the "ERC" in ERC-20 and ERC721 means, and then delve into the history of the term, all the way back to a couple of years after the summer of love, namely 1969.

Handling intellectual property rights continues to cause headaches in the NFT world - we've seen problems with the BAYC terms and conditions, Tiffany & Co.'s lawyer removing clauses from their NFTiff agreement on the fly as the community pointed out over-reaching license terms, and now upset in the Moonbirds community as the pixelated owl images ar…

When you start reading about self-sovereign identity and decentralization of credentials, and stuff like that, it starts to sound very complicated very quickly. And yet, when I got my hands dirty and implemented decentralized identity and access management in the Orthoverse, it took less than a screenful of code to get the basics working. In this e…

A few weeks ago the authorities in the US started clamping down on Tornado.Cash, a dApp for "mixing" cryptocurrency to hide its origins. Sometimes mixers are used for criminal reasons, and sometimes for personal privacy reasons, but that aside: The incident clearly reveals a well-known flaw the the whole decentralized applications stack, namely the…

Ethereum has a royalty standard for NFTs, namely ERC-2981. It's disappointingly simple. The reason for that is because at the moment, smart contracts can't enforce royalties, they can only suggest them. In this episode, I explain how ERC2981 works. Prepare to be underwhelmed.

If you're more into software development than anything else then, like me, your first reaction to the word "marketing" is probably going to be "yuck". And your second to fourth words will be "Not for me." Unfortunately, you're wrong. Whether you're in a tech company, pushing an open source project out there, or presenting the world with your latest…

I continue to see a lot of confusion over the meaning of the term "decentralized" in the blockchain space. In this episode, I talk about where I think that confusion comes from, and present a simple linguistic tool that you can use to actually ask meaningful questions and get sensible answers when it comes to the underlying issues. Issues that are …

I was asked last week, "what is the difference between a CBDC and USDC?" I can see why some people might be confused - in the case of the United States' central bank, the Federal Reserve: their CBDC would be a "digital dollar", and USDC is a kind of "digital dollar" too. In this episode, I explain the different in terms of the entities involved, th…

I find the best way to understand what is going on in a given technology is to actually get my hands dirty and install, configure, and run the underlying software. Last weekend I configured an Ethereum testnet node - the Göerli testnet to be precise - to examine what is involved in running all the client software and staking some ether (göETH in th…

In this episode, I talk about the key mechanism whereby the move from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake is managed - the staking of ETH. Not from a technical point of view, but from a marketplace one. Releasing a staking smart contract is a popular trick in token projects to artificially decrease the supply of the token, hence increasing its price. I…

So many people have asked me my opinion on the use of #nfts to serve notice of #legal proceedings that I thought it was time to record an piece on it.

What the hell is #tokenomics? The answer to that question, and a lot lot more, can be found in this episode. What's more, the explanation doesn't rely on complicated mathematics applied to esoteric #defi protocols. Instead, I provide illustrative examples using #nfts. Which are a lot easier to understand.…

If you want your company intranet checked for security, if you can afford to and if you can find them, you get a hacker to try to break in. Not a sysadmin. If you want to determine that a psychic is a fake, you get a magician to test them, not a scientist. But in DeFi we still hand auditing over to developers. And although a large number of problem…

You would not believe how much fun I have had trawling through #NFT copyright licenses and US copyright case law this weekend! I felt compelled to do this, because the current situation in the NFT world when it comes to ownership of the underlying art for NFTs is diabolical, and I wanted to understand what is going on, and what could be possible in…

A common technique used to overcome front-running and other malicious subversions of systems is the commit-reveal sequence. In this episode, I explain how this works through the use of an analogy with the game "rock, paper, scissors", and then talk a bit about how it is used in the Ethereum Beacon chain and in front-running prevention systems.…

In this episode, I explain what a Bitcoin node does, and what a Bitcoin miner does, and why a miner doesn't have to be a node (and why a node does not need to contain a miner).

I recently discovered a horrifying "innovation" in the computer world. The database. In this episode, I break down the arguments against databases, and there are many. If the humble reliable filing cabinet can be compared to a wholesome filling cabbage (and I think it can), then the database is a tulip. Inedible, and clearly the cause of a mania. L…

Blockchain may be fact, but Web3 is only presentation. A while back I made a series of videos talking about the levels and layers in blockchain when it comes to web3. The point I was trying to make is that although (roughly speaking), blockchains store facts, web3 sites are presentations of those facts, and can therefore easily be subverted. Not a …

What is it like to help novices in the blockchain world? The following video is an analogy in which I try to describe what it can be like to help someone who has enough knowledge to start messing about with web3, blockchain wallets, and smart contracts, but not enough to actually understand what is going on. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,…

Sometimes in software innovation we end up with concepts that can't be summarized succinctly in the way that a simple targeted app can (think, "it's it's a fitness app for orthodontists", or "it's a dating app for pet cats", as opposed to "it's the cloud" ten years ago). Blockchain used to be like that too, but we're all starting to settle on a fai…

We are starting to see more NFT projects losing significant sums of money - this used to be the preserve of DeFi protocols. A few days ago a project called "Akutars" managed to inadvertently lock up over 11,000 ETH, worth about $34 million in fiat prices. There are plenty of analyses as to exactly what went wrong in the code to cause this, so in th…

The above title is total and utter clickbait. But it does describe what I talk about in the episode, so perhaps I'll get away with it. Go on, listen to it. You know you want to know what I think is the most surprising thing about social media marketing, don't you? In the meantime: My book: https://mybook.to/moveover T-shirts: https://www.etsy.com/s…

On Thursday 24 March someone going by the name of HashArt on OpenSea found an exploit in the Orthoverse NFT contract, allowing the crafting of transactions that allow any NFT in the contract to be moved to any address. Obviously this is not a good state of affairs. As a result, Richard and I fixed the contract, finally wrote a test suite, corrected…

In a recent interview in Time Magazine Vitalik Buterin expressed disappointment in the fascination and speculation around Bored Apes and other similar projects. I understand why he feels that way, but this progression is not unexpected. In fact, if there wasn't such speculation, it would indicate that Ethereum and other blockchain projects were rat…

In this epsode, I explain in less than a quarter of an hour what Ethereum is, what gas fees are, what value transfers are, how ether was converted from an inflationary to a deflationary cryptocurrency, and a bunch of other stuff. It wasn't easy. But then again, nothing in blockchain ever is. Let me know how I did.…

I like collectible and art NFTs as much as the next collectible and art NFT aficionado, but it pays to remember that these tokens have a lot more possibilities than being able to flex to your buddies about the value of your PFP portfolio. In this episode, I look at an analogy between an object described in William Golding's Lord of the Flies, and t…

This is a bit of an odd episode, because I start off with a proof as to why measuring the "energy expenditure per transaction" does not make sense for Bitcoin, and end up talking about the tragedy of the commons, and the psychology behind deciding what it is worth spending energy on. Nevertheless, I'm going to break the habit of a decade, and talk …

Whenever there is a lot of competition in a given marketplace you have three obvious choices - race to the bottom on prices, differentiate on features, or convert your brand and hence your product into something aspirational. Price wars result in products with very low margins, and who voluntarily wants to become a potato farmer? Competing on featu…

Social media existed well before the web2 sites of Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk. Not only that, but it was decentralized. In fact, it started in 1979, and was called USENET. But it was missing the one "secret spice" that modern day social media sites use to turbo-charge user engagement (and subsequently profit from data harvesting and advertisi…

One of the upshots of the tendency of human beings to gravitate towards centralization for its efficiency and perceived security is the handing over of control to a popular leader. In this episode, I talk about how some of the decentralized projects out there have coped (inadvertently or otherwise) with the centralization risks inherent in highly v…

About a year ago I made a video explaining the differences and similarities between ERC20, ERC721 and ERC1155 from a layperson's perspective (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt5C-j2b62U). I thought it might interesting to remake the video and release the audio as a podcast, but this time explaining the differences in the standards through the diffe…

Most traditional companies are based on a hierarchical command an control structure, and as a result most people are used to functioning in such a structure. These companies are structured that way partially due to the laws that enshrine what corporations are as legal entities, partially due to conditions imposed by venture capitalists or investors…

Centralization around the edges can take the teeth out of decentralization in the center. Well, if that isn't a confusing sentence then I don't know what is. In this video I dig a bit deeper into two opposing tendencies within the human psyche - moving towards centralization, and moving towards decentralization. There are advantages and disadvantag…

A week ago about 100 NFTs worth an estimated $1.4 million dollars were grabbed by someone for $0 million dollars. How did they manage to do this? There was an error in a smart contract which did not consider the result of multiplying a number by zero. The case is not just interesting from a smart contract testing perspective, but is also a clear-cu…

In hindsight, the 2017 craze of handing over the digital equivalent of a suitcase of cash to a small group of project coordinators in the hope of making a financial killing was a bit stupid. The next evolution in this is to hand the suitcase of cash to a smart contract, a DAO, instead. The idea being that the investors maintain some control over th…

Human beings are contradictory: they're remarkably good at adapting to both change, and things staying the same. In this episode, I talk about the impact this has on web design, and why you need to fix problems with your site sooner rather than later. Because within a matter of days: 🤢 the awful experience you had the first time you used the site w…

Smart contract testing currently faces a problem: 👨‍💻 developers are in short supply, so 🧪 smart contract testers get asked to write code, and 🔎 code writers are too close to the code to spot the wider problems, and 📄 smart contract quality suffers, thus 💵 funds are lost I use a chess analogy to explain why developers usually only test one aspect o…

Would you hire some random person in a different country that you found on Fiverr to look after your money? And the money of other people that trust you? Yet that's exactly what over 30 NFT projects did. And the backdoor to their contracts consisted of a few lines of code that are shorter than the average fortune cookie message. There's a lot more …

What is the difference between on-chain and off-chain signing? Less than you'd think. Mainly because everything is signed off-chain.