It sparked an explosive growth of a new industry marketing chemical substances as cognitive enhancers or smartdrugs, promising an unfair advantage.

Where's the catch?

Romanian psychologist and chemist Corneliu E. Giurgea coined the term “nootropic” in 1972

It is derived from the Ancient Greek words νόος, meaning “mind”, and τροπή, meaning “a turning”.

Giurgea synthesized piracetam in the 1950ies, one of the first putative nootropics:

While piracetam's potential for cognitive enhancement seems very limited, it's only one of hundreds of substances vendors sell on the internet. Many of these novel substances have only been tested on rats.

Some of them are as obscure as they come and without *any* safety data.

This is where biohackers come into play.

They experiment with untested combinations (so-called stacks) of up to ~20 substances and post their real-life experiences as “anecdotal evidence” on @reddit boards like /r/Nootropics or /r/Biohackers/. Don't try that at home, kids!

Some vendors circumvent national regulations by hosting their webshops on offshore-servers or declaring their products as #researchchemicals for legitimate medical facilities—without actually checking who's buying.

When someone gets hurt, there's no accountability whatsoever.

The global nootropics market size is projected to reach $5-25 billion in a few years. It's a money printing machine with high margins. I spent some time online chatting with different vendors to gain their trust. Most of them openly admitted to not having any quality checks.

Most stuff is ordered in bulk from labs in China. A vendor I talked to claimed he could buy fake “Certificates of Authenticity” (CoA) for a little extra – attesting a chemical purity of over 99%. You shouldn't put your health in the hands of some shady backyard lab in China.

Vendors and niche blogs (using affiliate links) seem to control the narrative when it comes to claimed benefits of nootropics. You'll find heaps of “broscience” on how #modafinil will help you pass your next exam with flying colors, but a lot less on side effects. #redflag 🚩

It turns out, when it comes to drugs, there's no free lunch

Like many medications, nootropics can cause downregulation of a variety of receptors, leading to tolerance development, diminishing returns and ultimately dependence. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Sources and further reading:

https://lexico.com/en/definition/nootropic

https://books.google.de/books?id=upjSDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA68#v=onepage&q&f=false

https://webmd.com/vitamins-and-supplements/features/nootropics-smart-drugs-overview

https://psychologytoday.com/us/blog/engineering-cognitive-experience/201911/the-risks-nootropic-use

https://thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(01)06890-8/fulltext

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/global-nootropics-market-distribution-channel-160900058.html

https://bbc.com/news/magazine-35091574

https://addcounsel.com/the-dangers-of-smart-drugs/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4756795/

Now Ethereum is gearing up for arguably the biggest event in crypto history – #TheMerge – reducing its energy consumption by 99.95%.

But how? ⚡

Until now, “miners” have utilized an energy-intensive Proof-of-Work (#PoW) consensus protocol to add blocks of transactions to the Ethereum #blockchain and thus earn rewards. Ethereum's PoW consumes 73.2 TWh annually, the energy equivalent of a medium-sized country like Austria. 🤯

The Ethereum Foundation claims “The Merge” will usher in a new era for Bitcoin's biggest rival.

Ethereum's network is set to merge with the “Beacon Chain”, running an energy-efficient Proof-of-Stake (#PoS) consensus protocol. So why Proof-of-Stake?

With #PoS, miners become obsolete and get replaced by so-called “validators”. In contrast to a wasteful “mining rig”, you can run a validator node on a lightweight @Raspberry_Pi or @OdroidH.

To run a validator node, you will need to “#stake” at least 32 ETH.

At the time of writing, this equals an investment of $63,000. 💰

By requiring #validators to stake their precious $ETH, the consensus protocol incentivizes good behavior.

Compliant validators get ETH-denominated rewards for running the network and lose a portion of their stake for being offline or their entire stake for deliberate collusion. 🚨

The migration to #PoS is an enormous but crucial undertaking.

With billions of 💵 at stake, the developers need to ensure backward-compatibility and an incentive structure promoting security, partly based on game theory.

At the same time, Ethereum needs to be able to accommodate future updates like #sharding.

Sharding is a future update promising to drastically reduce the time and fees needed to finalize transactions on the blockchain. It’s the next big change coming to the network after the merge is tried and tested.

Sources and further reading:

Twitter:

@tothepoles @thedailygwei @trent_vanepps @ethereum

Web:

https://ethereum.org/en/what-is-ethereum/

https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/

https://notes.ethereum.org/@MarioHavel/merge-resources

https://ethmerge.com/

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9236965

https://docs.ethhub.io/using-ethereum/running-an-ethereum-node/

https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/

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Their nature is one of the reasons why each one of us is stuck in his/her own reality. Knowing your biases could help you get unstuck and make better decisions.

Let's dive in! 🤿

Biases can stem from the brain's preference for lower energy expenditure, missing information and evolutionary pressures. While they enable quick decisions, they also introduce a flurry of errors, clouding our judgement. 🧠

1. Dunning-Kruger effect

You may underestimate your expertise in a field you naturally excel at because you think anyone must be good at it, or overestimate your knowledge when in fact you know little about a subject.

Antidote: Ask your peers about your superpower.

2. Confirmation bias

We tend to value information confirming our own beliefs more than information contradicting them. It takes conscious effort to take new evidence into consideration and to tolerate the uneasy feeling of cognitive dissonance.

3. Gambler's fallacy

Let's say a gambler plays coin flipping – he sees “heads” 9 times in a row and decides “tails” is long overdue. He goes all in.

Unfortunately, the odds did not change based on past results. They are statistically independent.

Heads!

4. Barnum effect

What do psychics and salesmen have in common?

They employ statements vague enough to trick you into believing they are specifically tailored to you.

Example:

“At times you have serious doubts whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.”

5. The sunk cost fallacy

You buy a used car.

A week later, it breaks down. You pay the repair shop to fix it. Days later, you need to get the brakes fixed. And a door. The repairs cost you more than the car.

You know you should sell it at a loss, but you keep throwing cash at it.

6. Halo effect

I make my friends mad each time I shrug off @elonmusk's bad decisions and Ambien-fueled tweets because I admire his ingenuity and First Principles thinking in @lexfridman's podcasts.

Maybe I'm just prone to the halo effect?

Another good example is the neurosurgeon, whose perceived amazing abilities in the field of medicine seemingly spill over into other domains, like politics: Chances are he has no clue about political affairs, but you are more likely to take his takes serious because of the halo effect.

7. Planning fallacy

I totally underestimated the time it would take to create this thread, though it was a rewarding experience.

It turns out I'm in good company: Scientists found out most humans are way too optimistic when it comes to setting realistic deadlines for tasks. This is especially true the more complex a task gets.

Sources and further reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias

https://thedecisionlab.com/biases

https://answerthepublic.com/reports/4c0a8384-e3bd-4648-81aa-194e1d49dee6

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01561/full

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/every-single-cognitive-bias/

https://fs.blog/first-principles/

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