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Blockchain newsletter

My curated recommended articles on blockchain.

Newsletter coming soon, for now enjoy the posts below, updated regularly.

Number of publishers on Brave increased 1,200% since mid-2018

from

Privacy-focused web browser Brave has seen a 1,200 percent increase in verified publishers using its Brave Rewards program since July last year. This includes sites like the Washington Post, LadBible and, of course, Decrypt.

Ethereum 2.0’s Latest Strides Forward

from

I recently re-read Eric Raymond’s classic 1997 essay on open source development, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” It’s a compelling look at what happens when you allow a broad group of “all-comers” to participate in the development of a software project.

A New York Times blockchain project aims to help convince people that a photo really is (or isn’t!) what it seems to be

from Nieman Journalism Lab

People — and by people I mean non-journalists here, normals — have some pretty wild misconceptions about how reporters and editors do their work.

How to pitch your blockchain startup to journalists

from

So you’ve spent twelve hours drafting, editing and refining your Earth-shattering press release. It’s big news: your Quorum-powered non-custodial BSV wallet has just passed muster with a top Chechnyan regulator. Wen moon? Soon, for sure.

Cloudflare's Ethereum Gateway

from

Today, as part of Crypto Week 2019, we are excited to announce Cloudflare's Ethereum Gateway, where you can interact with the Ethereum network without installing any additional software on your computer. This is another tool in Cloudflare’s Distributed Web Gateway tool set.

How The Cryptocurrency World Is Responding To Facebook's Libra

from Gizmodo India

Facebook succeeded in at least one part of its new digital currency grand plan: Get a spotlight. Regulators in both the United States and Europe are already pushing for strong oversight - in one case, Rep.

Facebook plans June 18th cryptocurrency debut. Here’s what we know

from TechCrunch

Facebook is finally ready to reveal details about its cryptocurrency codenamed Libra.

A blockchain listicle for designers

from

There are five key areas that need to be addressed to make the next generation of blockchain products and services more user friendly. By Ward Oosterlijnck, Creative Technologist, Portable.

UBIK Executes First Successful Official Blockchain Vote in Croatia

from

Croatia successfully executed the first formal blockchain-based vote during UBIK's yearly assembly. UBIK is Croatia's self regulating blockchain and cryptocurrency organization. The vote was registered on Croatia's Lisinski Testnet.

A Fight Over Specialized Chips Threatens an Ethereum Split

from WIRED

In July 2016, Ethereum endured an early test of faith. The people behind the barely year-old blockchain had taken Bitcoin’s idea of decentralized money and run with it, building a digital landscape where users, based on a mutual trust in code, could interact and create applications.

The fightback against the bitcoin energy guzzlers has begun

from WIRED UK

Plattsburgh, New York, perches on the shores of the vast Lake Champlain on the US-Canada border. It’s a small city – population less than 20,000 – with clapboard houses and an impressive city hall.

Did the Cryptocurrency Revolution Fail?

from Hacker Noon

Nothing brings change like a revolution. If successful, they disrupt the status quo and nothing is ever the same again. If they fail, they fail in catastrophe, with bodies swinging from the gallows.

Facebook and Telegram Are Hoping to Succeed Where Bitcoin Failed

from The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — Some of the world’s biggest internet messaging companies are hoping to succeed where cryptocurrency start-ups have failed by introducing mainstream consumers to the alternative world of digital coins.

Once hailed as unhackable, blockchains are now getting hacked

from MIT Technology Review

Early last month, the security team at Coinbase noticed something strange going on in Ethereum Classic, one of the cryptocurrencies people can buy and sell using Coinbase’s popular exchange platform. Its blockchain, the history of all its transactions, was under attack.

Gwei or die: Is eradicating user gas costs a dangerous move for Web3?

from Medium

During my time as a Guardian journalist, the then Readers’ Editor, Chris Elliott, told me a story. Not long after launching the paper’s website, in 1999, the office began receiving cheques.

Why your Blockchain Startup Needs UX Design

from Medium

A great user experience can make or break a business. Here are four ways to apply UX design principles to your blockchain project.

Quality Solidity Code with OpenZeppelin and Friends

from SitePoint

Given the fact that all of Ethereum’s computations need to be reproduced on all the nodes in the network, Ethereum’s computing is inherently costly and inefficient.

A gentle introduction to blockchain technology

from

Important note: If you own more than $1,000 worth of cryptocurrency then you should definitely be using a hardware wallet instead of keeping coins on exchanges. I recommend a Trezor which you can buy for €89 directly from their website.

Avoiding the pointless blockchain project

from LinkedIn

Blockchains are overhyped. There, I said it. From Sibos to Money20/20 to cover stories of The Economist and Euromoney, everyone seems to be climbing aboard the blockchain wagon.

Announcing Ivy Playground

from

We are delighted to release Ivy Playground, a tool for designing, drafting, and testing smart contracts on a Chain blockchain network with Ivy, our high-level contract programming language.

Introducing Curation Markets: Trade Popularity of Memes & Information (with code)!

from Medium

Each topic/meme/idea/goal has an associated token of value that is used to curate information inside it. Using Ethereum as a programmable, distributed, shared ledger, these groups can mint a token of value according to agreed upon rules without a centralized 3rd party being involved.

Token-Curated Registries 1.0

from Medium

This blog post is also available in paper format. Token-curated registries are increasingly common cryptosystems apparently applicable to solving problems in a number of domains. In this document we will provide a more formal but less-than-mathematical view of token-curated registries.

How does Ethereum work, anyway?

from Medium

Odds are you’ve heard about the Ethereum blockchain, whether or not you know what it is. It’s been in the news a lot lately, including the cover of some major magazines, but reading those articles can be like gibberish if you don’t have a foundation for what exactly Ethereum is.

A Letter to Jamie Dimon

from

My name is Adam Ludwin and I run a company called Chain. I have been working in and around the cryptocurrency market for several years. It’s easy to believe cryptocurrencies have no inherent value. Or that governments will crush them.

Full-stack smart contract development

from Hacker Noon

This weekend I spent some time with my team looking into tooling and deployments particular to the Ethereum blockchain, and put together a little experiment: Forever on the Chain.

Solving Price Discovery Of Non-Rivalrous Goods (with Curved Bonding)

from Medium

How much should I sell my software for? How much should I sell this song for? How much is this e-book worth? This fundamental question is often asked about creators of non-rivalrous goods: goods where producing a copy of it are close to zero marginal cost.

(Conceptual) Art, Cryptocurrency and Beyond

from

1. These are the minimally reformatted and slightly expanded notes for what would have been a 15-minute presentation. 2. The presentation was meant to be followed by questions and form part of the introduction to a panel discussion.

Fundamental challenges with public blockchains

from Medium

There’s no question that blockchain technology has enormous potential. Decentralized exchanges, prediction markets, and asset management platforms are just a few of the exciting applications being explored by blockchain developers.

Diving Into The Ethereum VM

from

Solidity offers many high-level language abstractions, but these features make it hard to understand what’s really going on when my program is running. Reading the Solidity documentation still left me confused over very basic things.

Miners Aren’t Your Friends

from

As developers, we like to believe in a consensus layer that takes care of all the hard distributed systems problems and lets us write applications. Miners live in the consensus layer, doing whatever it is miners do.

Re-Fungible Token (RFT)

from Medium

The point of this writing is to explore the potential outcomes of using an ERC20 Bonded Curve Token (as per Simon de la Rouviere) or Liquid/Smart Token (as per Bancor) as the owner address of an ERC721 Non Fungible Token (NFT).

Token Lexicon

from Medium

This article is meant as a supplement to the Re-Fungible Token (RFT) article and any other writings on the topics contained here.

Behavioral Crypto-Economics: The Challenge and Promise of Blockchain Incentive Design

from Medium

Written by Elad Verbin and Al Esmail. Bitcoin-style cryptoeconomic incentive design is a new economic design paradigm, that has already achieved incredible results, creating the first widespread digital currency.

Optimizing your Solidity contract’s gas usage

from Medium

As everyone in the Ethereum community knows, Gas is a necessary evil for the execution of smart contracts. If you specify too little, your transaction may not get picked up for processing in a timely manner — or, die in the middle of processing a smart contract action.

Blockchain - Blockchain Fundamentals

from Microsoft

Back in 1999, the file-sharing network Napster made it easy to share audio files (usually containing music) on a hybrid peer-to-peer network (“hybrid” because it used a central directory server).

Fundamental challenges with public blockchains

from Medium

Ethics newsletter

My curated recommended articles on ethics and technology.

Newsletter coming soon, for now enjoy the posts below, updated regularly .

IBM accused of targeting older workers as 'up to 100,000' laid off

from ZDNet

The accusations figure in court documents in an age-discrimination case that IBM is facing, brought by Jonathan Langley, a former world program director and sales lead for IBM Bluemix, who filed a lawsuit last year after being laid off in 2017 when he was aged 59 years.

Why mindfulness and therapy puppies ignore what's really wrong with working life

from WIRED UK

Tech companies are known for their generous employee perks: free snacks, nap pods, the now-obligatory office ping-pong table.

Silicon Valley’s Right Wing Is Angry And Punching Back

from BuzzFeed News

How a small group of right-wing tech employees built a back channel straight to the nation’s capital. On Jan. 16, Republican lawmakers turned on one of the world’s biggest tech companies.

Atlassian ditches ‘brilliant jerks’ in performance review overhaul

from news.com.au

The $47 billion Australian software company, which was founded in Sydney in 2002 and floated on the US stock market in 2015, says two-thirds of every performance review will now have nothing to do with job skills.

'We all suffer': why San Francisco techies hate the city they transformed

from The Guardian

It was a beautiful winter day in San Francisco, and Zoe was grooving to the soundtrack of the roller-skating musical Xanadu as she rode an e-scooter to work.

Silicon Valley doesn't care about poor people: Top AI models kinda suck at ID'ing household stuff in hard-up nations

from The Register

Off-the-shelf object-recognition systems struggle, relatively speaking, to identify common items in hard-up homes in countries across Africa, Asia, and South America. The same software performs better at identifying stuff in richer households in Europe and North America.

We All Work for Facebook

from Longreads

When I was a kid, in the pre-internet days of the 1980s, my screen time was all about Nickelodeon. My favorite show was “You Can’t Do That on Television.” It was a kind of sketch show; the most common punchline was a bucket of green slime being dropped on characters’ heads.

Who’s Really Buying Property in San Francisco?

from The Atlantic

Updated on April 19 at 1:28 p.m. ET. There has never been a town like the one San Francisco is becoming, a place where a single industry composed almost entirely of rich people thoroughly dominates the local economy.

Is Software Eating the World?

from

As creators of technology, we need to ask whether our progress is antagonistic to the place that we call home.

The grim reality of life under Gangs Matrix, London's controversial predictive policing tool

from WIRED UK

The first time Bill was stopped and searched by police, he was standing outside a friend’s house in south London. “The police pulled up on us, three cars,” he says. “I asked them why they were searching us, and one said, ‘Because I want to’.” Bill was 11. That was nearly a decade ago.

The fightback against the bitcoin energy guzzlers has begun

from WIRED UK

Coders’ Primal Urge to Kill Inefficiency—Everywhere

from WIRED

Shelley Chang was working as a business analyst for a computer company in 2010 when she met Jason Ho through some mutual friends. Ho was tall and slender with a sly smile, and they hit it off right away. A computer programmer, Ho ran his own company from San Francisco. He also loved to travel.

Inmates in Finland are training AI as part of prison labor

from The Verge

“Prison labor” is usually associated with physical work, but inmates at two prisons in Finland are doing a new type of labor: classifying data to train artificial intelligence algorithms for a startup.

What Google knows about you

from Axios

For all the many controversies around Facebook's mishandling of personal data, Google actually knows way more about most of us. The bottom line: Just how much Google knows depends to some degree on your privacy settings — and to a larger degree on which devices, products and services you use.

What If Mark Zuckerberg Had Stayed in School?

from Medium

This month, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced yet another new direction for his famously bad-acting company. Now, he says, the platform once responsible for the Cambridge Analytica…

The Internet Is Not Your Friend: MySpace and the Loss of Memories

from Rolling Stone

On Monday, reports surfaced indicating what many MySpace users had long suspected: that MySpace had deleted a great deal of the content uploaded to the platform between 2003 and 2015.

Ctrl-Alt-Delete: The Planned Obsolescence of Old Coders

from

ach year, 600 coders gather to talk shop at a conference in New York called PyGotham. The organizers know how male and white the tech industry is, so they make a special effort to recruit a diverse speaker lineup. They promote the event on mailing lists for women and people of…

We Need to Save Ignorance From AI

from Pocket

In an age of all-knowing algorithms, how do we choose not to know? After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East German citizens were offered the chance to read the files kept on them by the Stasi, the much-feared Communist-era secret police service.

Google employees can’t just walk away from ethical tradeoffs like Dragonfly

from TechCrunch

Let me blunt up front: I think Google should launch a censored search engine in China (albeit with careful organizational boundaries).

The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to car crashes

from The Guardian

When broadcaster Sandi Toksvig was studying anthropology at university, one of her female professors held up a photograph of an antler bone with 28 markings on it. “This,” said the professor, “is alleged to be man’s first attempt at a calendar.

AI Safety Needs Social Scientists

from

We've written a paper arguing that long-term AI safety research needs social scientists to ensure AI alignment algorithms succeed when actual humans are involved.

Robot Love: Why romance with machines is a foregone conclusion

from ZDNet

One of the big robotics storylines of 2018, at least in the mainstream press, was the arrival of multiple sex robots on the market.

Margaret Atwood on How She Came to Write The Handmaid’s Tale

from Literary Hub

Some books haunt the reader. Others haunt the writer. The Handmaid’s Tale has done both. The Handmaid’s Tale has not been out of print since it was first published, back in 1985. It has sold millions of copies worldwide and has appeared in a bewildering number of translations and editions.

“What Have We Done?”: Silicon Valley Engineers Fear They've Created a Monster

from Vanity Fair

Those of us on the front lines of the gig economy were the first to spot and expose its flaws—two months after leaving Uber, I wrote a highly publicized account of my time there, describing the company’s toxic work environment in detail.

The Ethics Of Persuasion

from Smashing Magazine

Nowadays, users are increasingly cautious of online and email scams, phishing attacks, and data breaches. This article provides food for thought for designers and developers to avoid crossing the ethical line to the dark side of persuasion. (This article is kindly sponsored by Adobe.

Language newsletter

My curated recommended articles on linguistics, natural language processing and interactive fiction.

Newsletter coming soon, for now enjoy the posts below, updated regularly .

The joy of text – the fall and rise of interactive fiction

from The Guardian

The annual Interactive Fiction Competition is an institution that has endured for almost 20 years, with the goal of discovering each year’s best and brightest works in the world of text-based gaming.

Ampersand Usage — “&” or “And”?

from

Writers in business contexts often appear clueless when using ampersands, and they frequently get ampersand usage wrong. I see it every day in my commercial copy editing work. But & and and have distinct functions, meanings, and uses.

Twine, the Video-Game Technology for All

from The New York Times

Perhaps the most surprising thing about “GamerGate,” the culture war that continues to rage within the world of video games, is the game that touched it off.

The most important tech boom designers are ignoring

from Fast Company

Voice assistants are a part of everyday life, and they’re here to stay. Juniper Research recently released a report predicting that by 2023 there will be 8 billion digital voice assistants in use, tripling the estimated 2.5 billion voice assistants in use at the end of 2018.

Smart speakers: Why your voice is a major battle in music

from BBC

Smart speakers, those voice-activated devices that allow you to check the weather, play podcasts or order food delivery, are becoming more and more common in our homes.

Notes on Writing Weird Fiction By H. P. Lovecraft

from

My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.

A Harvard Linguist's (and Bill Gates's Favorite Author) 13 Simple Tips for Becoming a Great Writer

from Inc. Magazine

If you were looking for someone to teach you how to become a better writer, you probably couldn't do any better than Steven Pinker. The famed Harvard linguist is the author of several bestsellers, and Bill Gates even called one of them his favorite book of all time.

12 open source tools for natural language processing

from Opensource.com

Natural language processing (NLP), the technology that powers all the chatbots, voice assistants, predictive text, and other speech/text applications that permeate our lives, has evolved significantly in the last few years.

All you need to know about hyphenation in CSS

from

Earlier this month I was invited to give an evening lecture at the Typography Society of Austria (tga) in Vienna.

from

Sharing our Common Voices – Mozilla releases the largest to-date public domain transcribed voice dataset

from Mozilla

Mozilla crowdsources the largest dataset of human voices available for use, including 18 different languages, adding up to almost 1,400 hours of recorded voice data from more than 42,000 contributors.

What Makes a Sentence a Masterpiece?

from Pocket

A great sentence makes you want to chew it over slowly in your mouth the first time you read it. A great sentence compels you to rehearse it again in your mind’s ear, and then again later on.

How a new technology is changing the lives of people who cannot speak

from The Guardian

Millions are robbed of the power of speech by illness, injury or lifelong conditions. Can the creation of bespoke digital voices transform their ability to communicate? By Last November, Joe Morris, a 31-year-old film-maker from London, noticed a sore spot on his tongue.