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 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.
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...
Traces, probability, and learning
This is a collection of thoughts I’ve had over the concept of program traces. The draft has resisted my attempts to clean it up and edit it for clarity for...
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 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...
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
Traces, probability, and learning
This is a collection of thoughts I’ve had over the concept of program traces. The draft has resisted my attempts to clean it up and edit it for clarity for...
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
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....
Category ai
