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. The constraints aren’t total — within the margins of the constraints there are opportunities to profit — but they are significant, as they establish what kinds of state…

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. Examples might include: naming registries…

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 …

There’s a running “joke” (using that word generously) that techies will use blockchains when they really want to make ICANNs. The point being that their actual goal is to govern a shared resource, but for whatever reason — tech fascination, hype, misapprehension of their goals— they end up using a…

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…

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…

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. It was able to assume it was the only thread speaking…

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. It supports many data structures, but…

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. Depending on your application, you can end up with many tough…