What decentralization is good for (part 1): resilience
Recently, Simon Morris, a long-time BitTorrent exec, wrote a provocative series of posts on the nature of decentralization, in the wake of BitTorrent Inc’s acquisition by TRON . They are relatively short and a good read: Why BitTorrent Mattered — Bittorrent Lessons [...] Read more
The Octopus Card
I am in Hong Kong this week for Blockstack ‘s Decentralizing the World Tour (more on that in a forthcoming post). I arrived yesterday and have been exploring the city a bit. The first observation is how awful the air [...] Read more
Managing digital addiction
USV’s book club book for this month is Drug Dealer, MD , by Dr. Anna Lembke , Director of Addiction Medicine at Stanford Hospital – so we have spent a bunch of time recently talking about addiction. It is not [...] Read more
Paying down debt (financial, technical, and otherwise)
Debt is a complicated subject. On the one hand, it is empowering — it lets you get a quick start on something, and lets you do things that would not be possible otherwise. There are times when it is useful, [...] Read more
Google Pixel Slate: First Impressions
For the past week or so, I have been experimenting with the Pixel Slate , Google’s new hybrid tablet/laptop. Here is me typing this blog post right now, on the train to NYC. For a longer, more technical analysis, this review [...] Read more
A Visual Guide to the Howey Test
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and I am not your lawyer. I have been in an uncountable number of conversations over the past few years discussing the question of what defines a “security” in the context of cryptocurrencies, cryptonetworks, [...] Read more
Crypto Fundamentals
Our good friend Chris Burniske was on Squawk Box this morning. I got up and watched it. You can see the video here . Of course there is interest in the crypto market right now, as it is falling hard. [...] Read more
Getting Hands-On
One of my favorite things to do is get my hands into something and figure out how it works, whether that’s an app, or a gadget, or a house. For example, over the past few months I have been renovating [...] Read more
The Dangers of Unstoppable Code
With real-time, interconnected, self-executing systems, sometimes when things wrong, they go really wrong. I wrote about this general idea previously here . Yesterday, while I was writing my post on Trusted Brands , I was doing a little searching through [...] Read more
