In the first post of the series, we stated the obvious: that exchange commodities form the basis of a social system of sorts, in which participants are at some base level equal in their valuing of a token, and at a base level equal in their presentation of a token. This applies to exchange commodities...
Social Media Posts Archive
The 9 headed dragon, her 38 friends, and a free ride to Satori 24
Mea Culpa: This is a long winded review of Simon Tatham's puzzle collection. I first encountered the nine headed dragon in the Alpine villiage of Lauterbrennen. It must have been 2004 or thereabouts, and I was traveling with two lovely girls I had met the day before at a hostel in Bern. The place was...
Addressing the premine
If you've been following the rise of public coins, you have probably heard the term "premine". In a public coin, the money supply is public - thus anyone can see when and how all the money was created. Traditionally, if monetary tokens were distributed before the transactions began on the network, before the transaction validation...
Spirals in Time
Mea Culpa: I don't have an electronic version to share and confirm that I read it. You'll just have to find this book on your own and confirm we read the same thing yourself. "Spirals in Time: The secret life and curious life of seashells" By Helen Scales What a great book! Helen Scales has...
Navigating the Post-Dunning-Kruger era
If you've never heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, you are in the pre-Dunning-Kruger era. Of course you probably already knew that there was a cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled persons profess superiority, but you didn't know that it was called "the Dunning-Kruger effect". Knowing the popular name for the thing, irrespective of Stigler's law...
Don't get Zhou Tonged or How to Run a Margin Shop
It's pretty simple really. People who are trading on margin are gambling. If you run a casino, you are trying to maximize your profit. If you run a margin shop, you have a list of all the current folks and their bets, including knowing various points at which they will have margin calls and liquidations. ...
Top 5 errors in bitcoin reportage - volume 2
A little over a year ago we looked at the top 5 things reporters get wrong about bitcoin. Things have improved somewhat, but not a lot. You can still find a few high profile pieces a week written about bitcoin by people who clearly never used the currency regularly or gave much thought about it...
C sharp some more
We looked at some C# code about 6 months ago. I was very happy with the way it turned out. I learned the program and I run it regularly, the thing sits nicely in permanent ROM. Turns out it isn't very difficult after all, even for an amateur noob like me. So, why not try...
Smart Contracts could save the Legal System - but not in the way you think
Smart contracts have gotten a lot of airtime lately. Ethereum-coin's ability to do interesting things with smart contracts, perhaps (but not clearly) easier to do so than with bitcoin, has been coincident with a large rise in the market cap of ethereum even though there are substantial issues with the distribution economics and a less...
What is bitcoin disrupting?
Hello everyone! Many words have been spoken of the disruptive power of public coin. Public coin cannot be counterfeit; certainly a remarkable invention and one with great power. One that enables people to escape systemic fraud and disenfranchisement of the fiat era along with various other sad practices which have plagued middle earth. A tool...