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Ethereum and Cryptocurrency with Gavin Wood

Gavin Wood joined the show to talk about Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, The DAO, Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), what could you build with Ethereum, and the future of digital currency. Gavin Wood is Founder of Ethereum, creator of the Solidity contract language, and Founder of Ethcore — the company that created Parity, an open source Ethereum client.

Matched from the episode's transcript 👇

Jerod Santo: I think that’s a pretty good explanation. Speaking of nodes in the network and financial systems, let’s dig a little bit into Ethereum, just at a top level, maybe explain some jargon… But I think what might be useful, for your sake Gavin, is to give a little bit of Adam and my background with regard to cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, Ethereum, just so you know where we stand in terms of understanding. I’ll just let you know that our audience is very technical - we’re developers, we’re hackers, some of us may be cryptocurrency day traders, but you also have those that are more like Adam and myself, casually following along, or perhaps not following along at all. But we all pretty much know what Bitcoin is, and understand how it works, maybe at a high level. Give us Ethereum, the elevator pitch in light of that level of background, and then we’ll go on to clarify a few of the terms here next.

Changelog Interviews #287

Truffle framework and decentralized Ethereum apps

We talk Tim Coulter about how Truffle (Ethereum Swiss Army knife), how he got into Ethereum and dapp development, Solidity vs JavaScript, smart contract testing, EthPM which is like npm but for Ethereum, Why decentralization? Why dapps? Basically, why rebuild the internet? And last but not least - who’s using Truffle and what have they built with it?

Matched from the episode's transcript 👇

Jerod Santo: Very cool. Well, I think it’s a very apt comparison then. Let me give you a little bit of the lay of the land from Adam and my perspective, as well as our listeners, what I would expect in terms of developer knowledge, what we’ve covered on the show, and then we’ll have you walk through – because one of the reasons why we have you on is to a) understand what Truffle offers, but also using Truffle as a lens, learning what all it takes to build these decentralized applications and what all the moving parts are, because as we’ve said, it’s all kind of new and different, and that means it’s also kind of intimidating and maybe difficult to approach.

[16:25] So we’ve covered Ethereum conceptually… Way back in the day we’ve had Gavin Wood on the show; we had shows about blockchains, and Hyperledger, Bitcoin, distributed exchanges… We had shows about the concepts around blockchains, cryptocurrencies, what have you - Ethereum specifically, we’ve covered smart contracts both generically and a little bit specifically with regard to Gitcoin, which was our most recent show. And with Gitcoin, we talked a little bit about how that application specifically works with regards to MetaMask, and Web3, and those kinds of things.

That being said, from a developer’s perspective, building an Ethereum-based application all the way through, even after myself having all these conversations, is still kind of a black box… So why don’t you give us the high level of all the parts that are involved, and then we’ll kind of dive into the specific regions?

Changelog Interviews #474

Complex systems & second-order effects

Paul Orlando joins Jerod to talk through some unintended consequences that occur when systems operate at scale. We discuss Goodhart’s Law, The Cobra Effect, how to design incentive systems, dependency management decisions, the risks of autonomous vehicles, and much more along the way.

Matched from the episode's transcript 👇

Paul Orlando: [48:10] Yeah, engagement is through the roof, so we wanna boost these posts. And of course, it was doing like the opposite of what they wanted. So in this case, it was a much more modest financial reward for whoever the scammer was. I think it was only around $100,000 in Bitcoin that they ended up getting away with… But you have scams that can scale. So you can scale through a social network, like Twitter, or you have something like the Garmin ransomware situation, where I’m dependent upon this one piece of tech, and now I cannot do the thing that I need to do at this moment. Or now navigating for me is impossible, or it’s really dangerous. So yeah, I like just bringing attention to these things.

For me, when I wrote them, I think I was calling back to some of the writing I did about autonomous vehicles, in both of these examples… If you don’t mind, I’ll loop in the thought on autonomous vehicles there.

Changelog Interviews #269

Bisq, the decentralized Bitcoin exchange

Chris Beams joins the show to talk about Bisq, the P2P decentralized Bitcoin exchange and open-source desktop application that allows you to buy and sell bitcoins in exchange for national currencies, or alternative crypto currencies. We get some background on the issues faced by crypto exchanges like CoinBase, and the now defunkt Mt. Gox. We discuss whether or not Bitcoin is a censorship resistant payment system and what it means to have anonymous transaction currency options. Bisq also has an interesting white paper about its own DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) to support its contributors and we discuss that in detail at the end of the episode.

Matched from the episode's transcript 👇

Chris Beams: Yeah, certainly. If one were to ask “What’s the key limitation, what’s the downside of Bisq?”, one is hey, we’re asking you to do more and think more and care more, and the reward is privacy and security. If that’s of interest to you, then Bisq is for you; if not, then that’s okay, too. So that’s one thing.

The second thing is liquidity, volume. The likelihood at any given moment that you wanting to buy or sell, that there’s gonna be somebody right on the other side of that trade to pick it up. So the state of the situation today - we have trades happening every day, it’s a consistent, predictable number that’s actually growing over time, but we’re talking about orders of magnitude in some cases fewer trades per day (let’s say) than an exchange like Coinbase, or an exchange like Bitstamp, or Bitfinex, or really any popular centralized exchange. They’re moving thousands of Bitcoin for every one that Bisq does.

Now, in practice it seems to be the case that people can get into Bisq – just from looking at the trades statistics and so on, it seems to be the case that people can arrive at Bisq, place a trade or take somebody else’s offer, and get what it is that they were looking for. But it comes at a premium. It comes at the premium of time - you might have to wait a little while for something to show up or for someone to take your order.

[01:08:16.06] When you’re on a centralized platform - back to the convenience thing, these are automated matching, automated order book matching, where just the mere act of saying “I wanna sell at market price this much Bitcoin”, it’s instantaneously matched for you, because basically the exchange itself is accepting the order and it know that there’s gonna be enough liquidity on the other side to make the right match.

Changelog Interviews #379

Good tech debt

Jon Thornton (Engineering Manager at Squarespace) joined the show to talk about tech debt by way of his post to the Squarespace engineering blog titled “3 Kinds of Good Tech Debt”. We talked through the concept of “good tech debt,” how to leverage it, how to manage it, who’s in charge of it, how it’s similar to ways we leverage financial debt, and how Squarespace uses tech debt to drive product development.

Matched from the episode's transcript 👇

Adam Stacoviak: We forget, too. We forget often, and so I'm thinking, Jon, how do you make a log? I guess what Jerod is saying, almost a ledger. I wasn't referring to an actual Bitcoin ledger, that kind of thing. It was just more like, how do you maintain and know this debt over time so that you can not forget it once you've shipped the feature and the rewards have been paid out and everybody's deleted the code that was yucky or nasty, and you've moved on and you're on to the new feature set that the customers are demanding - how do you keep this log of debt to eventually squash? Or is it just there, looming?

JS Party #63

LIVE from JSConf Hawai'i

KBall picks the brains of 4 of the speakers at JSConf Hawai’i to investigate the future of JavaScript and Web Development.

Matched from the episode's transcript 👇

Till Schneidereit: In the talk yesterday I made this sort of off-hand joke about stealing your Bitcoin wallet, which of course is based on real world events… And it’s no joke. It’s something that has actually happened. An application that you trust, where you rightfully trust the author of that application, still going behind your back and stealing your money, literally. Well, almost; it’s blockchain. And this probably won’t go away without us doing anything about it.

The way I see it, we can do something about it in two different ways. Either by locking everything down through authority, going through app stores and letting the Apples of this world dictate what you can and cannot consume in terms of applications and media, or by going away from something that is otherwise incredibly helpful, and increases the stability of applications and productivity of developers, and that is code reuse through platforms like npm. Or for Rust we have crates.io, which is very similar.

It’s not scalable to try to review the entire code there for the hundreds of thousands of packages published there all the time and we see that it’s not scalable, because nobody is doing and nobody could possibly do it. So we can give up on this code reuse, or we can say “Well, let’s work on things such that you don’t have to trust all of this code”, and to do that we need proper sandboxing, we need to be able to say “As long as the application can only run in this directory, I don’t actually care about whether it tries to steal my Bitcoin wallet”, because it can’t, and you don’t need to trust it in this regard. For that, we need to bring a sandboxing model that is essentially similar to what the web provides to development outside the web, in a way that still allows these applications to provide the value you want from there, and we’re working on that.

Changelog Interviews #323

The road to Brave 1.0 and BAT

This week Adam and Jerod talk with Brian Bondy, Co-founder and CTO of Brave. They talked through the beginnings of Brave and how BAT (Basic Attention Token) could be driving the future of how we offer funding and tips to our favorite websites and content creators. Of course, they go deep into the historical and the technical details of the Brave browser and their march to Brave 1.0. The last segment of the show covers how BAT works, how it’s being used, and also their interesting spin on an ad model that respects the user’s privacy.

Matched from the episode's transcript 👇

Jerod Santo: From the Bitcoin price, yeah. So I alluded to Coinbase being in on it - I was joking; I wasn’t alluding to insider trading or anything, but I was saying that Coinbase people know what to do with regard to ICOs; they get it, because they’re inside that world… But related to that is that you guys have recently been listed on Coinbase with a USD – I think it’s their Tether, their USD token…

JS Party #53

VisBug is like DevTools for designers

Google UX Engineer Adam Argyle joins Jerod and KBall to share all the details on VisBug, his just-released Chrome Extension that “makes any webpage feel like an artboard.” Adam is passionate about doing for designers what Firebug (and later DevTools) did for developers. In this episode, he shares that passion and how it’s driven him to create and open source VisBug.

Matched from the episode's transcript 👇

Adam Argyle: Yeah, I’d love to. That demo - I got asked to do that demo last week, and that was crazy. The demo gods blessed me; I was practicing… That was crazy; that wasn’t supposed to happen. The talk was supposed to happen with Jason Miller, and that was going great. Then I was supposed to have a booth in the forum, and that went great. And honestly, this tool is so weird… I mean, I call it Designer Vim sometimes; it’s not as complex as Vim, but it has the same mentality. It’s modal. You switch to a different tool and your home row changes. In this case it’s not exactly your home row, it’s kind of the arrows in your manipulator commands… But it’s really similar that way. So I was like, there’s no way people are just gonna be like “Yeah! Keyboard!” I thought for sure there was just gonna be tons of like “Okay, where’s the panels? Where’s everything that I’m used to? Where’s the GUI that I can click up and down on an arrow?” If I had built that stuff, I would have never had this tool done in like five months.

So I’ve only been working on this tool for like 5-6 months, started out tiny… Anyway, I ended up pitching it to some people on the Chrome team, I was like “Where’s the designer tools?” and they were like, “Yeah, we’ve been there. We tried that.” I was like, “Okay, can you send me what you did?” And they were like, “Okay…” And they sent me all these old files and all these old videos and all these old design sprints… Brilliant work. They were doing exactly what they were supposed to do, but they failed in a couple of really interesting ways, and they sent this email like “Hey, yo, if you can solve this, we’re interested.” I was like “Whoa…! I have an opportunity. People have tried something and they failed…”

Anyway, so I was driving home one day, and basically the massive problem was – among other issues, the biggest one was the documents in flow. If you’re grabbing corners of things and moving them around, it’s unpredictable; you don’t know what could happen. So you’d have a user experience moment where it just went instant jink… And it was like turbo-jink; it would add a 250 margin to something, and that was just like, “Well, okay. That’s not gonna work.” And I was just driving home and I was like, “Man, the arrow keys are each side of a node. Why don’t I just start there? Up adds margin to top, down adds margin to the bottom. How far can I run with this keyboard thing…?” And it turns out that little keyboard scenario - there’s a matrix of possibilities, and it turns out each tool that it’s geared towards, the matrix is fitting really well. So I pitched higher and higher up at Google, and I eventually pitched to Dion Almaer who was the first person to recognize what I was going for, which was a simple tool.

[08:07] Many engineers who’d see my tool, they’d go “Well, why not make a design tool?” or “How do I get the code out?”, which is – not that these aren’t valid questions, but they’re basically like… In our industry, we reward complexity more than we reward simplicity. And I get it, because complexity is really fun. It’s shiny. We’re like moths to complexity, I feel like, as engineers. So what I wanted to do is – I’ve been a design lead before, I’ve been a product lead, I’ve been a front-end lead… I make a lot of decisions as a front-end designer; I want designers to make them. I feel like they’re the better team to be making these decisions anyway.

I’d seen these patterns where I’d sit down with a designer, and I love this, because they always bowed to me like I’m some magician… But they’d be like, “Can you increase the font size on that thing two pixels?” And I’d go over to my code and be like “BAM!” and then Browsersync would live reload it on their page, and they’d be like “This is crazy.” And so I’d always be like this translator and at the end of the day, I was like “After all these years, I’ve pretty much only translated font size and padding and margin.” I was like, “How do I just get this into their hands…?” Because obviously, the dev tools – apparently it is too much; if it’s your first time popping that open, it does look like under the hood of a car. That’s really overwhelming, and I just wanted to abstract a lot of those implementation details away, and let people fiddle.

I feel like I took that question and ran with it a little bit… [laughter] So yeah, Chrome Dev Summit, the report - so far I’ve been so pleasantly surprised because of how weird this thing is I built. I think people understand its value more than they care about the interface, and the interface is – there is a small learning curve, but I’m telling you, 30 minutes into it, you’re done. And at that point, you’re sort of flexing its really powerful skills that it has, which are like this multi-select – there’s some multidimensional array operations that you can do with it that are super-cool, and I’m just waiting for YouTube videos to come out where people are like “Watch this!” then 30 seconds of what I could do with VisBug, and they’re gonna be like “Multi-select over here, select this thing, do a couple commands, and BAM!” They’re gonna have rearranged this page, and restyled it… And you’re gonna be like, “What just happened?” So my tool basically still is surprising me with what it can do, but its original goal was simplicity. That’s why you double-click to change text, that’s why you can drag an image in, and it just swaps… That stuff should have been available a long time ago, and I don’t know why it wasn’t.

It’s also kind of funny - a lot of the tool’s functions are literally like the querySelectorAll.style.whatever that we write every day… It’s so simple the way that it’s built under the hood. Anyway…

waxy.org

The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every modern copy of macOS

Andy Baio with the eagle eyes 🦅

While trying to fix my printer today, I discovered that a PDF copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper apparently shipped with every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018.

I’ve asked over a dozen Mac-using friends to confirm, and it was there for every one of them. The file is found in every version of macOS from Mojave (10.14.0) to the current version, Ventura (13.3), but isn’t in High Sierra (10.13) or earlier.

Well that’s a fun bit of trivia! But why?

Is there a secret Bitcoin maxi working at Apple? The filename is “simpledoc.pdf” and it’s only 184 KB. Maybe it was just a convenient, lightweight multipage PDF for testing purposes, never meant to be seen by end users.

karpathy.github.io

A from-scratch tour of bitcoin in Python

Andrej Karpathy, Sr. Director of AI at Tesla:

We are going to create, digitally sign, and broadcast a Bitcoin transaction in pure Python, from scratch, and with zero dependencies. In the process we’re going to learn quite a bit about how Bitcoin represents value. Let’s get it.

This post is a technical deep-dive. At the end he posted a reader exercise which was to steal some bitcoins his wallet. The challenge, of course, was completed within 45 minutes of publishing. 😁

cryptomaton.org

How to create a trading bot that buys Bitcoin when Elon Musk tweets about it

Why do something like this? For the fun of it, mostly. Definitely not for this reason:

By creating a crypto trading bot that buys bitcoin every time the Tesla boss tweets about it you can rest assured that you are going to catch a VIP seat on the rocket that will slingshot right past the moon and make its way directly to Mars, where Elon spends most of the summer months due to its cold weather and dry climate.

Lulz aside, I love posts like this because they demonstrate how someone tied together a bunch of disparate things (Twitter API, trading API, regular expressions, etc.) to accomplish a real thing, no matter how silly/foolish that real thing is.

Also check out part 2 where he adds sentiment analysis. (Although, it’s hard for me –a human– to decipher Elon Musk’s tweets, so the results of said analysis are probably no better than flipping a coin.)

Twitter

Square is hiring 4 engineers + a designer to work full-time on Bitcoin Core

After announcing the program in a tweet, Jack Dorsey followed up with some details:

This will be Square’s first open source initiative independent of our business objectives. These folks will focus entirely on what’s best for the crypto community and individual economic empowerment, not on Square’s commercial interests. All resulting work will be open and free.

Followed by:

Square has taken a lot from the open source community to get us here. We haven’t given enough back. This is a small way to give back, and one that’s aligned with our broader interests: a more accessible global financial system for the internet.

Whether you’re a devout Bitcoin hodler or an avid nocoiner, you have to admit this a great way (the greatest?) for corporate entities to support the open source community. Full-time salaries. Not focused on commercial interests.

Let’s hope it plays out that way! 🙏

Bloomberg

A big crypto sell-off is happening for Bitcoin and Ether

Bloomberg is citing a sell-off of Bitcoin, Ether, and dozens of smaller digital tokens. The “crypto exodus” is happening due to a “sense of panic” hitting crypto investors. It’s been a brutal August for Bitcoin and Ether, with Bitcoin touching below $6,000.

“The big story in the market today is the huge weakness in Ethereum,” Timothy Tam, chief executive officer of CoinFi said in a phone interview — “Bitcoin has held up relatively well versus Ethereum. It’s still quite weak versus the U.S. dollar.”

While cryptocurrencies rallied in July on hopes that a Bitcoin-backed exchange-traded fund would attract new investors, U.S. regulators have yet to sign off on multiple proposals for such a product. The letdown has coincided with growing concern that entrepreneurs who raised crypto-denominated funds via initial coin offerings (ICO) are now cashing out of holdings such as Ether, the token for the Ethereum blockchain that is a popular platform for crypto projects.

What do you think? Are you selling, buying, or holding?

Recode

Is Bitcoin the greatest scam in history?

Scam shouldn’t be used as a label for Bitcoin at large, but the hype machine and pump-and-dump schemes around Bitcoin are most certainly teetering on the lines of being a scam.

Bill Harris, former CEO of Intuit and founding CEO of PayPal and Personal Capital, writes:

Promoters claim cryptocurrency is valuable as (1) a means of payment, (2) a store of value and/or (3) a thing in itself. None of these claims are true.

Means of Payment. Bitcoins are accepted almost nowhere, and some cryptocurrencies nowhere at all. Even where accepted, a currency whose value can swing 10 percent or more in a single day is useless as a means of payment.

Store of Value. Extreme price volatility also makes bitcoin undesirable as a store of value. And the storehouses — the cryptocurrency trading exchanges — are far less reliable and trustworthy than ordinary banks and brokers.

Thing in Itself. A bitcoin has no intrinsic value. It only has value if people think other people will buy it for a higher price — the Greater Fool theory.

Stripe

Stripe is ending their Bitcoin support

For Stripe, Bitcoin isn’t scaling well to make it “useful for payments,” and it’s expensive in both time and money to process transactions. However, Tom Karlo said “Bitcoin has evolved to become better-suited as an asset rather than a means of exchange.”

A line in the sand has been drawn for Bitcoin as a useful payment currency.

Therefore, starting today, we are winding down support for Bitcoin payments. Over the next three months we will work with affected Stripe users to ensure a smooth transition before we stop processing Bitcoin transactions on April 23, 2018.

Clearly the value of Bitcoin is still there as an asset. It’s just not working out (for Stripe) as a means of exchange for payments. Though they remain optimistic.

Despite this, we remain very optimistic about cryptocurrencies overall.

Tom also provided some insights to where things are heading for crypto and payments.

We may add support for Stellar (to which we provided seed funding) if substantive use continues to grow. It’s possible that Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, or another Bitcoin variant, will find a way to achieve significant popularity while keeping settlement times and transaction fees very low.

blog.chain.com

Ivy for Bitcoin

Old dogs really can learn new tricks:

a smart contract language that compiles to Bitcoin Script

Bitcoin Script is not Turing complete, so this isn’t a true competitor to smart contract platforms such as Ethereum and Cardano, but you can still do some cool stuff with it.

Give Ivy a test drive in the Ivy Playground for Bitcoin.

grist.org

Bitcoin Could Cost Us Our Clean-Energy Future

If you’re like me…

…you’ve probably been ignoring the bitcoin phenomenon for years — because it seemed too complex, far-fetched, or maybe even too libertarian. But if you have any interest in a future where the world moves beyond fossil fuels, you and I should both start paying attention now.

We should be paying attention because the energy usage behind Bitcoin is astounding.

What they might not have accounted for is how much of an energy suck the computer network behind bitcoin could one day become. Simply put, bitcoin is slowing the effort to achieve a rapid transition away from fossil fuels. What’s more, this is just the beginning. Given its rapidly growing climate footprint, bitcoin is a malignant development, and it’s getting worse.

Today, each bitcoin transaction requires the same amount of energy used to power nine homes in the U.S. for one day. The aggregate computing power of the bitcoin network is nearly 100,000 times larger than the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers combined. The total energy use of this web of hardware is huge — an estimated 31 terawatt-hours per year.

changelog.com/posts

Git meets Bitcoin

Still early days, but pretty cool tech coming from the team at Gitchain:

Gitchain is an application of the exciting ideas behind Bitcoin, Namecoin and DHT applied to Git hosting. Once you install it, it acts as a local proxy to the entire Gitchain P2P network.

I love seeing the Bitcoin protocol (perhaps the crypto-currency's greatest virtue) applied to different domains.

Looks like the project has been Kickstarted as well. It should be fun to follow along and see where the community takes it.

maraoz.com

"OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin"

I predict that, unlike its two predecessors (PTB and OpenAI GPT-2), OpenAI GPT-3 will eventually be widely used to pretend the author of a text is a person of interest, with unpredictable and amusing effects on various communities.

If you’re going to read this post, make sure you stick around until the end.

github.com

Square's Bitcoin cold storage solution

Why cold storage? Because security:

For security purposes, Square stores a reserve of Bitcoins in an offline setting. By having these funds offline, we reduce attack surface and hence risk of theft.

Square can move the funds offline at any time, but moving them back online requires a multi-party signing ceremony. They can also embed programming logic into the cold storage modules, so that only Square-owned addresses can receive the funds. That’s defense-in-depth, right there.

Bitcoin’s latest bull run is over, but those who believe in decentralized money continue to toil away… building the future they want to exist.

github.com

BitcoinKit – Bitcoin protocol toolkit for Swift

Adding Bitcoin-related functions to your iOS/macOS apps has never been easier.

Changelog Interviews #502

Fireside chat with Jack Dorsey ♻️

This week we’re re-broadcasting a very special episode of Founders Talk. Adam was invited by our friends at Square to host a fireside chat with Jack Dorsey as the featured finale of their annual developer conference called Square Unboxed. Jack is one of the most prolific CEOs out there. He’s a hacker turned CEO, often working at the very edge of what’s to come. He’s focused on what the future has to offer and an innovator at scale. He’s also a Bitcoin maximalist and has positioned himself and Block long on Bitcoin.

Founders Talk #91

Fireside chat with Jack Dorsey

Adam was invited by our friends at Square to interview Jack Dorsey as part of their annual developer conference called Square Unboxed. Jack Dorsey is one of the most prolific CEOs out there — he’s a hacker turned CEO and is often working at the very edge of what’s to come (at scale). Jack is focused on what the future has to offer, he’s considered an innovator by many. He’s also a Bitcoin maximalist and has positioned himself and Block long on Bitcoin.

What you’re about to hear is the fireside chat Adam had with Jack at Square Unboxed 2022. Jack and Adam discuss the vision Square has for the developer platform and why it’s so central to the company’s strategy.

Changelog Interviews #490

Schneier on security for tomorrow’s software

This week we’re talking with Bruce Schneier — cryptographer, computer security professional, privacy specialist, and writer (of many books). He calls himself a “public-interest technologist”, a term he coined himself, and works at the intersection of security, technology, and people.

Bruce has been writing about security issues on his blog since 2004, his monthly newsletter has been going since 1998, he’s a fellow and lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, a board member of the EFF, and the Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt. Long story short, Bruce has credentials to back up his opinions and on today’s show we dig into the state of cyber-security, security and privacy best practices, his thoughts on Bitcoin (and other crypto-currencies), Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid project, and of course we asked Bruce to share his advice for today’s developers building the software systems of tomorrow.

Ars Technica

The best part of Windows 11 is basically Linux

Jim Salter writing for Ars Technica:

In our main Windows 11 review posted earlier this week, we covered the majority of new features and design decisions in Microsoft’s newest consumer OS—and it feels reasonable to characterize the overall impression given there as “lukewarm.” The good news is that we still hadn’t covered the best part of Windows 11: Linux.

If you could travel back in time and read this headline to college-me… I would’ve laughed you out of the room. Also, why didn’t you tell me about Bitcoin, ya jerk?! 😆

forbes.com

Shell invests in Ethereum

This is a really interesting usage of blockchain technology to ensure you are really getting what you think you bought. Michael del Castillo writes on Forbes.com:

The fifth-largest oil and gas company in the world, valued at $262 billion, is investing an undisclosed amount in LO3, a New York startup using a modified version of the ethereum blockchain to make it easier for individuals to buy and sell locally produced energy using the existing network of power cables.

While the bitcoin blockchain lets users track the flow of value without the need of banks to audit the system, LO3’s platform, called Exergy, is designed to track the flow of energy as it is added to a shared, local energy network, giving the neighbors who purchase the energy absolute certainty it really came from a windmill, a solar panel or a gerbil running on a treadmill.

Changelog Interviews #326

The insider perspective on the event-stream compromise

Adam and Jerod talk with Dominic Tarr, creator of event-stream, the IO library that made recent news as the latest malicious package in the npm registry. event-stream was turned malware, designed to target a very specific development environment and harvest account details and private keys from Bitcoin accounts.

They talk through Dominic’s backstory as a prolific contributor to open source, his stance on this package, his work in open source, the sequence of events around the hack, how we can and should handle maintainer-ship of open source infrastructure over the full life-cycle of the code’s usefulness, and what some best practices are for moving forward from this kind of attack.

Bloomberg

Crypto’s 80% plunge is now worse than stocks' dot-com crash

This news is a few weeks old now, but I’ve been tracking the ups and downs of the crypto markets for a while now — especially after we had those crazy highs in Q4 2017. Everyone was rushing to get theirs and loose it — after-all, it’s so simple to get in, right?!

Of course, putting some effort into mining Bitcoin or Ethereum isn’t a bad thing, but c’mon, dropping all of your savings into the Bitcoin bucket is not a smart move. Tread carefully.

Crypto’s 80% plunge is now worse than stocks' dot-com crash

grist.org

Bitcoin’s energy use got studied (wow)

Eric Holthaus writes for Grist:

Bitcoin’s energy footprint has more than doubled since Grist first wrote about it six months ago. It’s expected to double again by the end of the year… And if that happens, Bitcoin would be gobbling up 0.5 percent of the world’s electricity, about as much as the Netherlands.

I can’t be the only one paying attention to Bitcoin’s rise in energy usage…

That’s a troubling trajectory, especially for a world that should be working overtime to root out energy waste and fight climate change. By late next year, Bitcoin could be consuming more electricity than all the world’s solar panels currently produce — about 1.8 percent of global electricity… That would effectively erase decades of progress on renewable energy.

changelog.com/posts

App.net Launches Backer (No fees for open source)

Over the weekend App.net announced a new service called Backer.

Here’s the good news for open source software makers wanting to poll their community and raise funds for a new project or feature. App.net has commited to not charge any fees on funds raised by credit card or bitcoin. Credit card processing costs still apply.

There’s an application process:

Projects will be vetted to ensure your Backer project runs alongside other high-quality, legitimate projects.

We think this could be a pretty cool way to fund open source projects. Not only can you put money into the hands of open source developers, but they will also know they’re working on something that people want.

Submit your application – applications for the first round of projects are open now.