As people rush to use their credit cards to buy bitcoin and then to transfer bitcoin to Ethereum and then to buy into the latest whizzbang must have ICO ... they hit barriers. What are these barriers?

Building on from the previous post on how complex the space of financial cryptography is, this is an informal list of the many disciplines you might need to grok so as to be able to master the Bitcoin

@jonno-katz asks why Andreas A doesn't have a reasonable opinion DPOS, which on the surface is a very reasonable question. AA is an expert on consensus, so alternates should be on the table, right? He

Laying down the rails for a high performance financial blockchain-based ecosystem is well understood if controversial because there are a number of approaches - centralised, decentralised, un-permissioned,

A Preliminary Message This post introduces what I think is a fundamental flaw in almost all blockchain designs. In brief, it is the emphasis on state as the ‘atomic element’, when we could also build using

Hi there, World of Steem, it was pointed out by @dantheman that the Identity sometimes known as Iang was opaque and mysterious to the Steemisters. Yes, and Iang likes it that way! But only a little googling

BUT! We’re still not there because any two poles governance system as described in Principles #6 and before eventually collapses. That’s because the poles eventually form a pattern where they are equal

If you saw Principle #5 - Consensors are Enforcers, you'd realise, we’re not out of the troll woods yet. Now, we have two powerful bodies. In competition. Looking for trouble... Believe me. What happens

Now, assuming I get my ruling from Principle #4 - Arbitration, and it says “off with the Troll’s head” I have another issue - how do I get it enforced? We all like a good Troll beheading, but who’s actually

Where we left off was Principle #3 - Constitution! which sets the scene. But, this only gets us to the point of writing out our position in rules. So I’m going to propose the Constitution for this blog

The previous requirement #2, Toxics not welcome! left us with a dilemma. We want a community in which we can all deal with each other in a positive fashion, but we know from bitter experience that total

So open entry it is, if we're to start from a principled position of blockchain governance. But, from that principled position of utter fairness, we hit a problem almost immediately: If we let anyone play

For the rest of the world, if you're still reading from On a Principled Approach to Blockchain Governance - 7 Requirements - the big question then is how we design a governance layer for a blockchain!

One of the things that I learnt in the CAcert adventure was that governance was critical to the safe operation of large communities. How large is large ... is a question of much debate, but to put it bluntly,

Over on R3's blog they have published a piece of mine called Identity is an Edge Protocol from which I steal this snippet: "Identity is an edge protocol, and not a nodal protocol. What is valuable

What happens when some rare emergency flairs up? In principle, we should follow the "rare emergency" procedure. For poignant example, when a US Navy Orion P3 spy plane was captured by the Chinese

It occurs to me that the time is ripe for a wholesale rethink of the system constructed from terminal-window-SSH-shell-computer. Loosely called shell or SSH but actually a different beast. Back in the

(Originally published at ) Elinor Ostrom shared the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 for her lifetime of scholarly work investigating how communities succeed or fail at managing common pool (finite) resources