IntroductionThe current approach to digital land is disappointingly realistic. The digital world has no obligation to abide by the nature of the physical reality around us. Therefore, in my view, there is no reason to accept the same limitations of reality (and our ability to perceive it) as we make a transition into the digital world. Human perception is limited greatly by the brain. Our brains have developed over thousands of years to ensure our survival in a very specific set of environmen...

IntroductionThe current approach to digital land is disappointingly realistic. The digital world has no obligation to abide by the nature of the physical reality around us. Therefore, in my view, there is no reason to accept the same limitations of reality (and our ability to perceive it) as we make a transition into the digital world. Human perception is limited greatly by the brain. Our brains have developed over thousands of years to ensure our survival in a very specific set of environmen...

IntroductionNFTs have thus far been valued mostly for their aesthetics. “We like the art”. Certainly original artworks, generative collections, photography and other forms of purely visual art will remain a core usecase of NFTs far into the future. However, with the growth of the metaverse and blockchain-based gaming ecosystems like DeFi Kingdoms, Crabada, Axie Infinity and others, it is increasingly clear that in-game items are likely to become even more important. I believe that the most po...

IntroductionNFTs have thus far been valued mostly for their aesthetics. “We like the art”. Certainly original artworks, generative collections, photography and other forms of purely visual art will remain a core usecase of NFTs far into the future. However, with the growth of the metaverse and blockchain-based gaming ecosystems like DeFi Kingdoms, Crabada, Axie Infinity and others, it is increasingly clear that in-game items are likely to become even more important. I believe that the most po...

IntroductionLiquidity pools are a basic primitive of DeFi protocols and their respective tokens. Choosing to bootstrap initial liquidity via automated market makers rather than going through exchanges democratizes access to initial liquidity and saves money. Additionally it creates the opportunity to offer liquidity mining rewards (to varying degrees of effectiveness) to participants in order to incentivize locking liquidity in pools and incurring risk of impermanent loss. Liquidity bootstrap...

IntroductionLiquidity pools are a basic primitive of DeFi protocols and their respective tokens. Choosing to bootstrap initial liquidity via automated market makers rather than going through exchanges democratizes access to initial liquidity and saves money. Additionally it creates the opportunity to offer liquidity mining rewards (to varying degrees of effectiveness) to participants in order to incentivize locking liquidity in pools and incurring risk of impermanent loss. Liquidity bootstrap...

AbstractGlobal operations in the context of smart contracts tend to have costs that prohibit their effectiveness. Every mutation of a variable within a smart contract costs transaction senders native tokens. If we desire to construct a system in which the actions of one user affect the state of all other users, is it reasonable to expect that user to pay on behalf of all other users of the system? This expectation is generally unreasonable for most implementations of smart contracts. In order...

AbstractGlobal operations in the context of smart contracts tend to have costs that prohibit their effectiveness. Every mutation of a variable within a smart contract costs transaction senders native tokens. If we desire to construct a system in which the actions of one user affect the state of all other users, is it reasonable to expect that user to pay on behalf of all other users of the system? This expectation is generally unreasonable for most implementations of smart contracts. In order...

One the apps that I built to interface with a cryptocurrency or blockchain and have since lost access to was a tool that could take any arbitrary text input and push the results of it to the Bitcoin blockchain by way of the OP_RETURN opcode. This was a college school side project that I built during a time when my interest in cryptocurrency was still primarily centered around Bitcoin and what could be done with it. At that time I was also interested in building desktop applications and decide...

One the apps that I built to interface with a cryptocurrency or blockchain and have since lost access to was a tool that could take any arbitrary text input and push the results of it to the Bitcoin blockchain by way of the OP_RETURN opcode. This was a college school side project that I built during a time when my interest in cryptocurrency was still primarily centered around Bitcoin and what could be done with it. At that time I was also interested in building desktop applications and decide...

IntroductionProgramming a smart contract is one of many distinct programming paradigms one must adapt to in order to succeed. Similarly to MVC architecture for apps, Object-oriented programming, or any other design pattern, one must learn the individual quirks of creating a smart contract as a part of the learning process. At a fundamental level smart contracts work quite differently from other programs for one primary reason: smart contracts run on a global state machine. There are many impl...

IntroductionProgramming a smart contract is one of many distinct programming paradigms one must adapt to in order to succeed. Similarly to MVC architecture for apps, Object-oriented programming, or any other design pattern, one must learn the individual quirks of creating a smart contract as a part of the learning process. At a fundamental level smart contracts work quite differently from other programs for one primary reason: smart contracts run on a global state machine. There are many impl...

IntroductionOver the last three decades of popular internet adoption, control over key internet infrastructure has followed a trend of steadily centralizing into the hands of a small number of infrastructure providers. Today, most of the internet is hosted by a combination of Google, IBM, Amazon and Microsoft; Facebook and Twitter control the vast majority of our once peer-to-peer online communication; and small online stores have been replaced by Amazon accounts. At an ideological level, tod...

IntroductionOver the last three decades of popular internet adoption, control over key internet infrastructure has followed a trend of steadily centralizing into the hands of a small number of infrastructure providers. Today, most of the internet is hosted by a combination of Google, IBM, Amazon and Microsoft; Facebook and Twitter control the vast majority of our once peer-to-peer online communication; and small online stores have been replaced by Amazon accounts. At an ideological level, tod...

IntroductionI am not a sever management professional. But I’ve managed to teach myself a few things over the years. When running nodes there’s a lot of system management that needs to be accounted for, because 100% uptime is the goal of the clients of any protocol. There are highly advanced process management tools provided by AWS and others that allow you to look directly at the system and decide whether it is behaving the way you desire or not. But, for a quick and dirty solution, I’ll use ...

IntroductionI am not a sever management professional. But I’ve managed to teach myself a few things over the years. When running nodes there’s a lot of system management that needs to be accounted for, because 100% uptime is the goal of the clients of any protocol. There are highly advanced process management tools provided by AWS and others that allow you to look directly at the system and decide whether it is behaving the way you desire or not. But, for a quick and dirty solution, I’ll use ...