Josh Stark

Paragraph

Paragraph

Josh Stark

Popular posts New posts Trending publications

©️ 2025 Paragraph Technologies Inc

Privacy policy Terms of use Discover great writing

Subscribe to Josh Stark

Stay updated by getting the latest posts delivered directly to your inbox.

Previous
1
2
Next

Cover image

Ethereum's distinctive property is hardness

Hardness is the capability to make the future more certain. Ethereum offers us hardness. We can give Ethereum code and receive a very strong guarantee that it will run any time we call on it. We can give Ethereum data and know with certainty it will still be available in the future, unaltered and uncorrupted. These simple building blocks give rise to more complex forms of coordination. Money. Contracts. Governance. Identity. Today Ethereum is the hard foundation of a digital economy where mil...

Most popular by Josh Stark

Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains

The Year in Ethereum 2021

Ethereum's distinctive property is hardness

Making sense of Trust Experience (TX)

What was Bitcoin's total transaction volume in 2021?

Making Sense of Cryptoeconomics

Discover card cover image

Making sense of Trust Experience (TX)

The distinctive value of blockchains is that they can be reliable. Blockchains can be made consistently resistant to manipulation, censorship, or capture. Their design can make them reliably transparent and accessible. Blockchains do not merely have those properties temporarily - we value them because we have good reason to believe this characteristic hardness will persist. This deceptively simple property has enabled higher-order features. By combining this reliability with a programmable co...

What was Bitcoin's total transaction volume in 2021?

By Josh Stark & Bruno Lulinski In the Year in Ethereum 2021, we published a chart comparing the total transaction volume of the Ethereum and Bitcoin blockchains. Last year, Ethereum transferred approximately $11.6 trillion (ETH and ERC-20s), and Bitcoin transferred approximately $4.6 trillion (BTC and USDT).After publishing, we saw a graph from Galaxy Digital claiming that in 2021 Bitcoin had settled $12.41 trillion USD:Ark Invest also posted a chart with similar figures, showing Bitcoin sett...

Discover card cover image

Making sense of Trust Experience (TX)

The distinctive value of blockchains is that they can be reliable. Blockchains can be made consistently resistant to manipulation, censorship, or capture. Their design can make them reliably transparent and accessible. Blockchains do not merely have those properties temporarily - we value them because we have good reason to believe this characteristic hardness will persist. This deceptively simple property has enabled higher-order features. By combining this reliability with a programmable co...

What was Bitcoin's total transaction volume in 2021?

By Josh Stark & Bruno Lulinski In the Year in Ethereum 2021, we published a chart comparing the total transaction volume of the Ethereum and Bitcoin blockchains. Last year, Ethereum transferred approximately $11.6 trillion (ETH and ERC-20s), and Bitcoin transferred approximately $4.6 trillion (BTC and USDT).After publishing, we saw a graph from Galaxy Digital claiming that in 2021 Bitcoin had settled $12.41 trillion USD:Ark Invest also posted a chart with similar figures, showing Bitcoin sett...

Discover card cover image

The Year in Ethereum 2019

👋 Note: Originally published on Jan 22, 2020 on Medium. Ethereum began as a blank canvas. Ethereum is an open, permissionless blockchain that developers can use to create any kind of application they want. This year, the early strokes laid down on that canvas began to form into a coherent picture. You don’t have to squint so much to see the direction Ethereum is going. Protocols and applications built on Ethereum are beginning to find product-market fit, quickly building communities of thous...

Discover card cover image

The Year in Ethereum 2021

By Josh Stark & Evan Van NessEthereum is the foundation for a digital civilization. It is hardened, secure, and reliable. It is the bedrock necessary to support the digital cities being built on top of it. Those cities are growing fast. Because Ethereum is open to everyone, many different users have found reasons to build on it:Markets use it as financial infrastructureArtists use it to give permanence to their workAssets use it as a settlement layerCommunities use it to govern shared resourc...

Josh Stark

I work for Ethereum at the Ethereum Foundation.

Discover card cover image

The Year in Ethereum 2018

👋 Note: Originally published on Jan 16, 2019 on Medium. Ethereum began as a bold experiment. Can we build a universal platform for digital money and assets, un-censorable applications, and decentralized organizations? We started with a slightly smaller experiment: was it possible to launch a blockchain that could execute arbitrary programs? Over time, the Ethereum community began new experiments. Would developers find it interesting? What applications are actually useful? The community learn...

Discover card cover image

The Year in Ethereum 2019

👋 Note: Originally published on Jan 22, 2020 on Medium. Ethereum began as a blank canvas. Ethereum is an open, permissionless blockchain that developers can use to create any kind of application they want. This year, the early strokes laid down on that canvas began to form into a coherent picture. You don’t have to squint so much to see the direction Ethereum is going. Protocols and applications built on Ethereum are beginning to find product-market fit, quickly building communities of thous...

Discover card cover image

The Year in Ethereum 2021

By Josh Stark & Evan Van NessEthereum is the foundation for a digital civilization. It is hardened, secure, and reliable. It is the bedrock necessary to support the digital cities being built on top of it. Those cities are growing fast. Because Ethereum is open to everyone, many different users have found reasons to build on it:Markets use it as financial infrastructureArtists use it to give permanence to their workAssets use it as a settlement layerCommunities use it to govern shared resourc...

Discover card cover image

Making Sense of Cryptoeconomics

👋 Note: Originally published in August 2017 on Coindesk and Medium. A few months ago Parker Thompson, a well known Silicon Valley VC, tweeted that “the concept of crypto-economics is stupid. It’s economics. Inventing your own word is just an excuse to ignore well-understood concepts.” The term “cryptoeconomics” causes a lot of confusion. People are often unclear on what it is supposed to mean. The word itself can be misleading, as it suggests that there is a parallel “crypto” version of the ...

Discover card cover image

The Year in Ethereum 2018

👋 Note: Originally published on Jan 16, 2019 on Medium. Ethereum began as a bold experiment. Can we build a universal platform for digital money and assets, un-censorable applications, and decentralized organizations? We started with a slightly smaller experiment: was it possible to launch a blockchain that could execute arbitrary programs? Over time, the Ethereum community began new experiments. Would developers find it interesting? What applications are actually useful? The community learn...

Discover card cover image

Making Sense of Cryptoeconomics

👋 Note: Originally published in August 2017 on Coindesk and Medium. A few months ago Parker Thompson, a well known Silicon Valley VC, tweeted that “the concept of crypto-economics is stupid. It’s economics. Inventing your own word is just an excuse to ignore well-understood concepts.” The term “cryptoeconomics” causes a lot of confusion. People are often unclear on what it is supposed to mean. The word itself can be misleading, as it suggests that there is a parallel “crypto” version of the ...

Discover card cover image

Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains

0. What do a book, a radio broadcast, and the human voice all have in common? Today the answer is easy: they all contain information. But if you asked someone the same question 100 years ago, they would struggle. They would not have easily identified that these different things all share an abstract property like “information”. The modern idea of information is a recent invention. It was not until the 1940s that new communications technologies pushed people working on the cutting edge to arti...

Discover card cover image

Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains

0. What do a book, a radio broadcast, and the human voice all have in common? Today the answer is easy: they all contain information. But if you asked someone the same question 100 years ago, they would struggle. They would not have easily identified that these different things all share an abstract property like “information”. The modern idea of information is a recent invention. It was not until the 1940s that new communications technologies pushed people working on the cutting edge to arti...

Discover card cover image

Making Sense of Web 3

👋 Note: Originally published on June 6, 2018 on Medium. The internet is changing again. Over the last decade internet-based services have trended towards centralization. Today, a handful of companies control the platforms we use to search for information, store our personal data, manage our online identities, and communicate publicly and privately. At the same time, a group of seemingly unrelated technologies are being developed on the fringes of the tech industry, ranging from encrypted mes...

Discover card cover image

Making Sense of Web 3

👋 Note: Originally published on June 6, 2018 on Medium. The internet is changing again. Over the last decade internet-based services have trended towards centralization. Today, a handful of companies control the platforms we use to search for information, store our personal data, manage our online identities, and communicate publicly and privately. At the same time, a group of seemingly unrelated technologies are being developed on the fringes of the tech industry, ranging from encrypted mes...

Discover card cover image

The Year in Ethereum 2020

👋 Note: Originally published on Jan 20, 2021 on Medium. Ethereum is the digital frontier. Because it is open and programmable, Ethereum offers a vast uncharted expanse filled with opportunity. Over the last few years, this frontier has attracted its first major settlements. The freewheeling bazaar of decentralized finance (“DeFi”) has grown into a sector that is beginning to compete with Silicon Valley. This year, a second ecosystem began to put down roots: the creator economy of cryptoart, ...

Discover card cover image

The Year in Ethereum 2020

👋 Note: Originally published on Jan 20, 2021 on Medium. Ethereum is the digital frontier. Because it is open and programmable, Ethereum offers a vast uncharted expanse filled with opportunity. Over the last few years, this frontier has attracted its first major settlements. The freewheeling bazaar of decentralized finance (“DeFi”) has grown into a sector that is beginning to compete with Silicon Valley. This year, a second ecosystem began to put down roots: the creator economy of cryptoart, ...

Brief responses to two USV Ethereum Critiques

👋 Note: Originally published on Sept 9, 2019 on Medium. Two partners at Union Square Ventures recently published separate blogs critical of Ethereum: “Is Ethereum the AOL of Crypto?” by Albert Wenger, and “Some Thoughts on Crypto” by Fred Wilson. I’m fond of saying that “Ethereum needs better critics”. Hopefully Albert and Fred continue being critics, and through debate with the Ethereum community, become better ones over time. A positive trait in the Ethereum community is our interest in de...

Brief responses to two USV Ethereum Critiques

👋 Note: Originally published on Sept 9, 2019 on Medium. Two partners at Union Square Ventures recently published separate blogs critical of Ethereum: “Is Ethereum the AOL of Crypto?” by Albert Wenger, and “Some Thoughts on Crypto” by Fred Wilson. I’m fond of saying that “Ethereum needs better critics”. Hopefully Albert and Fred continue being critics, and through debate with the Ethereum community, become better ones over time. A positive trait in the Ethereum community is our interest in de...

Discover card cover image

Making Sense of Ethereum’s Layer 2 Scaling Solutions

👋 Note: Originally published on Feb 12, 2018 on Medium. For ethereum 2018 is the year of infrastructure. This is the year when early adoption will test the limits of the network, renewing focus on technologies built to scale ethereum. Ethereum is still in its infancy. Today, it isn’t safe or scalable. This is well understood by anyone who works closely with the technology. But over the last year, the ICO-driven hype has begun to far exaggerate the current capabilities of the network. The pro...

Discover card cover image

Making Sense of Ethereum’s Layer 2 Scaling Solutions

👋 Note: Originally published on Feb 12, 2018 on Medium. For ethereum 2018 is the year of infrastructure. This is the year when early adoption will test the limits of the network, renewing focus on technologies built to scale ethereum. Ethereum is still in its infancy. Today, it isn’t safe or scalable. This is well understood by anyone who works closely with the technology. But over the last year, the ICO-driven hype has begun to far exaggerate the current capabilities of the network. The pro...

The Space of Possible Economic Relationships

👋 Note: Originally published on June 7, 2017 on a now-defunct personal blog. A concept I often use to explain the potential of blockchain technology is “the space of possible economic relationships”. What do I mean by economic relationships? I mean any situation where two or more persons enter into a relationship concerned with value:A transfer of cashAn informal agreement to borrow money from a friendA legal contract to buy a houseThe relationship between all the shareholders of a corporati...

The Space of Possible Economic Relationships

👋 Note: Originally published on June 7, 2017 on a now-defunct personal blog. A concept I often use to explain the potential of blockchain technology is “the space of possible economic relationships”. What do I mean by economic relationships? I mean any situation where two or more persons enter into a relationship concerned with value:A transfer of cashAn informal agreement to borrow money from a friendA legal contract to buy a houseThe relationship between all the shareholders of a corporati...

Written by