A design exploration to illuminate some of the magic behind the bitcoin seedphrase. — This design exploration was inspired by Gigi’s talk at the Baltic Honeybadger Conference in 2022 titled, Cryptography is not enough. Bitcoin finds its strength in cryptography. When you create a bitcoin wallet, a bunch of extremely large random numbers are generated. …

Oh god, not another one… — Is what I’m thinking as I scan the announcement of Sui. Sui is yet another L1 blockchain. This one created by MystenLabs, a team that previously lead Facebook’s now defunct blockchain projects, Novi and Deim, and that raised $36 million from a16z. I think it’s safe to say, alternative Layer…

1. Bitcoin Behind the Veil — For anyone who spends more than an hour or two honestly trying to understand bitcoin, it quickly becomes clear that this thing is interdisciplinary. To appreciate it fully, you need a bit of math, macroeconomics, cryptography, monetary policy, behavioral economics, programming, incentive structures, philosophy, environmental studies, law, privacy, security, and…

Traditional finance works on unfair handshake agreements, opaque business relationships, and selective enforcement. CeFi could level the playing field. — It can be painful to watch traditional finance professionals try to reason about crypto, however Bloomberg columnist and former investment banker Matt Levine pretty consistently provides analysis worth considering. In a recent column, he wrote that the fundamental difference between crypto and traditional finance comes down to the extension of…

Assuming crypto isn’t actually going to zero (🍿) there will at some point — perhaps in the very distant future, be a next wave of adoption. I have no idea when that might be or what the industry will look like by that time, but there are a few crypto…

I feel for Celsius, Three Arrows, Babel Finance and whoever the next floater happens to be. Just two months ago, taking a loan out against your crypto was “how the rich people do it.” Now, with my portfolio down 90%, my loan collateral topped up and no dry power left…

How the North Korean cartel behind the largest hack in DeFi history laundered their crypto. — It’s been about two months since the largest hack in DeFi history, where cryptocurrency worth about $625 million was drained from the Ronin Network, which is the blockchain that powers the popular play-to-earn game, Axie Infinity. Just a few months before that, $611 million was stolen from the Poly Network…

Assessing risk in the wake of the UST implosion. — I’ve been in the crypto space since 2014 and there have only been a handful of times where we had to post the suicide hotlines. Bitconnect and the 2018 collapse come to mind. And here we are once again. With a few notable exceptions here and there, very few people…

Or, how I learned to stop hating and love them all. — Haseeb Qureshi has a great thought experiment where he imagines if the entire Bitcoin network was just one giant Postgres database run by some dude in Canada. In the experiment, Bitcoin looks exactly the same as it does right now. The monetary policy, the halving of block rewards every four…