Paul Frazee – Medium

May 4, 2022

Paul’s notes on how JSON-LD works

We all know what JSON-LD is: JSON with a @context field tacked on top, right? That’s pretty much all it is. Except sometimes you see an @id field, which, sure, that makes sense. And sometimes the @context field is multiple URLs, which seems odd — because how do they mix…

8 min read

8 min read

Jan 24, 2022

The rules to make the rules

My journey to understand blockchain political systems continues. Protocols as legislation Blockchains make an effort to remove operational discretion from the nodes running their networks. …

9 min read

9 min read

Jan 23, 2022

Back to basics: What is the point of decentralization?

There are two kinds of resources in a network: Individualist. The resource is owned by one stakeholder and doesn’t require cross-party coordination. Examples might include: tweets, blogposts, personal websites, likes and comments. Collectivist. The resource is owned by multiple stakeholders¹ and needs coordination between them. …

8 min read

Back to basics: What is the point of decentralization?

8 min read

Jan 21, 2022

Execution Transparency — Hosted smart contracts using secure, append-only logs

The Vitra research project now has a whitepaper¹ and I wanted to give a high level of what it’s on about, a premise I call Execution Transparency or ET. This is a personal research project and it hasn’t undergone any formal review, so bear that in mind as you read. Background …

6 min read

Execution Transparency — Hosted smart contracts using secure, append-only logs

6 min read

Jan 18, 2022

ICANNs vs Blockchains

There’s a running “joke” (using that word generously) that techies will use blockchains when they really want to make ICANNs. …

4 min read

4 min read

Jan 17, 2022

Smart contracts without blockchains

I’ll cut to the chase: this post is not about a novel breakthrough. This is existing techniques applied in a pretty straight-forward way. But it does work. There’s a v1 that you can run and even a whitepaper draft. This is about Vitra, model for hosted smart contracts. I’ve traded…

8 min read

8 min read

Aug 16, 2021

Building on Budget

What is the perfect programming language? The perfect framework? The perfect CI tool or site generator? For years my friends have been pushing me to adopt Typescript, but I resisted. It’s a great language, don’t get me wrong. I just didn’t think I needed it. So when I converted a…

4 min read

4 min read

Jul 16, 2021

Transactions: MVCC or a query language?

As I have been thinking about a database design on Hypercore, I’ve been drawing from my experience on the now-closed CTZN project. In that app, you had a simple model of the nodejs server speaking to the Hyperspace daemon. …

4 min read

4 min read

Jul 15, 2021

Data layout and schema agreement on Hypercore protocol

Lately I’ve been exploring data models on the Hypercore Protocol. In this post, I’m going to talk about approaches to schemas and semantics in a decentralized setting. If you’re not familiar with Hypercore protocol already, it’s a peer-to-peer data network that’s similar to BitTorrent. …

Hypercore

7 min read

Hypercore

7 min read

Jul 8, 2021

Thinking about Filesystems, Databases, and Hypercores

Lately I’ve been thinking about how to represent data on the Hypercore protocol. The protocol has a lot of interesting and useful primitives, and the challenge for applications is to combine them effectively — something we’re all still exploring. …

Hypercore

9 min read

Hypercore

9 min read