Bitcoin’s Consensus Conundrum
Bitcoin faces a one-of-a-kind leadership problem
jamesob
Latest posts
Scaling bitcoin and covenants
Back in June, AJ published an underread blogpost about scaling. I’ll do a hasty job of paraphrasing the post – which you should read in full – by noting that it hypothesizes that the way that we might scale to 1 billion users transacting at about 1 tx/week (which is checking-account volume, my personal target) is by having about 50,000 kinda-sorted-trusted off-chain entities that bear the brunt of…
Priorities for the wilderness
Even bug aside, the last year has been pretty good dose of whiplash.
Is Bitcoin’s lack of counterparty risk just a micro-optimization?
As more and more talk grows of the dollar getting displaced as the almighty global reserve settlement asset, gold fans tend to point out that the commodity is a natural candidate for another go-round in this spot because of its lack of counterparty risk.
Meditation
For many years I’ve had anxiety. Some years it’s been crippling: hypochondria, regular panic attacks; the full nine yards. I won’t bore you with the details beyond saying the bad years were very bad; anyone who’s had a dance with panic disorder can empathize.
Bitcoin for safety
The fed funds rate (blue) vs. S&P500 (green), and chairs of the Federal Reserve.
5 day fast
Last week I did a five day “water” fast, although on some days I took black coffee in the morning. This means, maybe obviously, that I didn’t consume anything for five days other than water, coffee, some salt, and a little cocktail of 0 calorie unflavored electrolyte supplements. It wasn’t bad, and it’s something I plan on doing at least once a year.
ASICBOOST & leaving SegWit on the table
One thing that confuses me about the scaling debate happening in Bitcoin right now is that a significant number of people apparently want to leave SegWit on the table in spite of the huge benefits it offers that are unrelated to scaling.
Fasting for everything
If you believe the premise that an occasional dietary fast is healthy, consider applying the same concept to other things.
2016 in review
2016 went really fast, and a few big things happened. Some good, some bad. There were some definite themes and I learned a few things. Here’s a really long post about it.