Category movies
Category economics
Why government debt should be issued as perpetuities
Note that the following idea isn’t particularly new, economists have known this for a while. I only happen to think it ought to be better known. When it comes to...
Private arbitrage with teeth
There is a lot of value in private arbitrage, especially when dealing with emerging markets or countries where the judicial system isn’t well developed. However, a private arbitrage firm ideally...
Illegal Evidence
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court said Wednesday that evidence obtained after illegal searches or arrests based on simple police mistakes may be used to prosecute criminal defendants.
An economically sound, morally just and free fix to the subprime crisis
The subprime crisis should have been avoided rather than solved, but there was a simple way to solve it.
A hidden cost of moving to socialized healthcare
When I argue with Americans about socialized healthcare, I argue we shouldn’t move towards it, when I argue with French people, I argue we should get out of it. On...
Should I use consequentialist arguments?
I’ve been arguing with many people about politics, and over time, my persuasive power has steadily decreased. This may seem paradoxical, so here is what happened.
The moral ambiguity of default
With the subprime crisis raging, there are many stories of people walking out of their mortgage. It also seems that it is not uncommon among young people to walk out...
Radical gradualism
This is a thought experiment, but I think it gives interesting results. Assume that you gain political power in a country, and - before you become absolutely corrupted - try...
On private universities
Along with roads and defense, education often comes as a necessary output of the State. Even Hayek claims that, since we need to be educated to value education, it has...
Category math
Parallel scans
This post is inspired by the recent paper on Mamba. Mamba introduces a simplified, linear RNN and shows that it can be computed in \(\mathcal{O}(\log n)\) time using a parallel...
Why government debt should be issued as perpetuities
Note that the following idea isn’t particularly new, economists have known this for a while. I only happen to think it ought to be better known. When it comes to...
Blind experiment
Double-blind studies are the gold standard in medicine. I contend they should be triple-blind. The statistician analyzing the data should be given anonymized, whitened, normalized data from the experiment and...
Sampling & Mixing
I’m in a club, and my girlfriend asks the DJ to play music from another DJ. He refuses; he knows the other guy and thinks he’s an asshole. There is...
Perfect video compression
Video compression codecs are getting better and better at compressing video. However, they only use a very limited set of properties characteristic of videos… namely, they describe a video as...
Category philosophy
Category ai
Parallel scans
This post is inspired by the recent paper on Mamba. Mamba introduces a simplified, linear RNN and shows that it can be computed in \(\mathcal{O}(\log n)\) time using a parallel...
Category bitcoin
On Supply Caps
This blog post expands on a popular Reddit comment on the benefits and drawbacks of supply caps. This topic is particularly interesting as it touches upon many areas of crypto-economic...
Making sense of colored coins
It’s impossible to walk around the distributed ledger landscape without encountering the idea of so-called “colored coins”. The purpose of this post is to clarify their nature, the motivation behind...
A functional nomenclature of cryptographic ledgers
In the interest of bringing some much-needed sanity to the discussion surrounding “blockchain technology” I have attempted to establish a functional nomenclature of cryptographic ledgers.
“”Decentralized”, you keep using that word but I don’t think it means what you think it means…”
Written by L.M. Goodman. Hosted here as a courtesy.
Disincentive to pool mining with Fawke signatures
Written by L.M. Goodman. Hosted here as a courtesy.
Preventing Mining Pool Concentration with Lamport Signatures
Written by L.M. Goodman. Hosted here as a courtesy.
Dispelling some myths about Bitcoin, from a Bitcoin fan
Written by L.M. Goodman. Hosted here as a courtesy.
Category blockchain
Thoughts on inscriptions
“Inscriptions” became a popular way to create NFTs on Bitcoin earlier in 2023 and have picked up significantly in the past month. However, they are, in many ways, a step...
Making sense of colored coins
It’s impossible to walk around the distributed ledger landscape without encountering the idea of so-called “colored coins”. The purpose of this post is to clarify their nature, the motivation behind...
A functional nomenclature of cryptographic ledgers
In the interest of bringing some much-needed sanity to the discussion surrounding “blockchain technology” I have attempted to establish a functional nomenclature of cryptographic ledgers.
Category finance
Why government debt should be issued as perpetuities
Note that the following idea isn’t particularly new, economists have known this for a while. I only happen to think it ought to be better known. When it comes to...
Category probability
Category tezos
Thoughts on inscriptions
“Inscriptions” became a popular way to create NFTs on Bitcoin earlier in 2023 and have picked up significantly in the past month. However, they are, in many ways, a step...
Decentralization, what is it good for?
Decentralization is a means to an end. In the case of blockchains, decentralization typically achieves two ends: double spending prevention and censorship resistance — these map, respectively, to the properties...
Why I am joining the Tezos Foundation council
Seven years ago, I embarked on a mission to bring about a new form of money: bound by algorithmic rules, and yet capable of evolution; decentralized, and yet capable of...
Protocol-level transaction fees?
The following is a collection of thoughts around fee markets in general and mechanism to fold in transaction fees in a protocol, such as the one outlined in EIP 1559....
On Supply Caps
This blog post expands on a popular Reddit comment on the benefits and drawbacks of supply caps. This topic is particularly interesting as it touches upon many areas of crypto-economic...
Potential design for a simple, and evolvable, on-chain treasury.
I have been compiling some thought from various community members regarding the design of an on-chain treasury for Tezos chains, and what that might look like. Of course, there is...
A few directions to improve Tezos
In which I outline, for different categories, what seems to me as reasonable, immediate, directions for improving Tezos. The emphasis is on relatively low hanging fruits, nothing earth shattering, just...
Towards Futarchy in Tezos
Futarchy, in a nutshell, is the governance technique of evaluating policies ex post while relying on a prediction market to determine the best policy ex ante.
It’s a baker’s life for me: being a Tezos validator
What is baking? Bitcoin has mining, Tezos has baking. In Bitcoin, miners compete to publish blocks containing a proof-of-work stamp by repeatedly hashing block headers. In Tezos, block creation is...
Hash-Consing in Tezos
I’ve spoken several times of hash-consing as a way to store contract data efficiently for the Tezos blockchain. Here’s why it’s useful, how it works, and what its limitations are....
Delegation upon launch
Tezos is a proof-of-stake blockchain with a delegation mechanism. How delegation is handled at the launch of the network could have enduring consequences for the network.
Optimizing Stack manipulation in Michelson
This post describes a light compilation step to help stack manipulation in Michelson. It’s not critical for the launch, so we aren’t focusing on it in the near term, but...
Dev update 10/19/2017
Here is a short video update on Tezos development in the past week. Beware, this was largely improvised and the sound quality is not good. Please bear with us, we...
A quick tour of the Tezos code base, and the state of its development
This post is an attempt to give a tour of the Tezos code base and its state of development. All of the functionality described in the whitepaper has been implemented...
diff 2014/tezos 2017/tezos
tl;dr: * We made a some tweaks to the three year old white paper. Scroll to the bottom of this post for a list
Tezos: Philosophy and Values
This is meant to be a concise guide to the principles and values we hope to see embodied by the Tezos network. A longer, more detailed version of this list...
Hard-Fork Politics
Like an idol with feet of clay, the oft-touted mathematical immutability of blockchains stands on a weak foundation so long as hard forks remain a possibility. Indeed, the rules of...
Smart contracts: Turing completeness & reality
The meltdown of “The DAO” and, more recently DDOS attacks on Ethereum have spurred a debate on the wisdom of “Turing completeness” in smart contract languages. Tezos, a cryptographic ledger...
Category michelson
Optimizing Stack manipulation in Michelson
This post describes a light compilation step to help stack manipulation in Michelson. It’s not critical for the launch, so we aren’t focusing on it in the near term, but...
Category baking
It’s a baker’s life for me: being a Tezos validator
What is baking? Bitcoin has mining, Tezos has baking. In Bitcoin, miners compete to publish blocks containing a proof-of-work stamp by repeatedly hashing block headers. In Tezos, block creation is...
Delegation upon launch
Tezos is a proof-of-stake blockchain with a delegation mechanism. How delegation is handled at the launch of the network could have enduring consequences for the network.
Category ethereum