The software engineers who created the blockchains of today built them to be resilient under conditions of adversity, using cryptography and economic incentives to make them hard to attack. What they didn’t anticipate was how blockchains might perform under conditions of cooperation. On 11 June 2022, a group of validators…

Mid-stream reflections on what web3 means for the music industry, and why the music industry matters for web3. “[I]t’s a bit of a kick in the pants for me, having this discussion with you, because obviously metadata is being thought of in this quite professional, formal way […] as if…

A working paper on my research into Bitcoin mining and climate futures is now available on SSRN. The paper examines the ways in which Bitcoin miners are responding to external pressures associated with climate change and what this means for the legitimacy of Bitcoin. Using the experiences of four miners…

Retroactive public goods funding uses tokens and incentives to encourage developers to work on projects that benefit the ecosystem. In this post, I look back at a similar approach from the field of welfare policy called ‘social impact bonds’. …

The following post was written prior to a session at the Smart Contract Research Forum on the topic of ‘DAO theory’. Questions we were asked to consider included ‘what is governance?’, ‘what is a DAO?’, ‘how do we design for resilience?’, and ‘are plutocracies ok?’ …

This is Part 2 of a two-part series on why bitcoin is almost certainly much greener than you think. In Part 1 I outlined why I am sceptical of models that estimate the carbon footprint of Bitcoin to be the equivalent of a small country. Among other reasons, an unknown…

Recently, on two separate occasions, I was contacted by journalists asking me for comment on the environmental implications of Proof of Work blockchains. Both news outlets opted not to run the story after I pointed out flaws in the sources they were referring to. In this article I outline why…

Blockchain is often referred to as a trust machine because it minimises uncertainty. People can perform various actions online using blockchain applications, knowing that those actions will not be undermined by others. The consequence is that we do not need to rely on external agents or processes to provide us…

You can read the first part in this series here or dive straight in. When systems get too big and powerful, people have a tendency to group together and demand a stake, a say, in the decision-making of that system. Various attempts to develop ethical guidelines for automated decision-making systems…