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Knowledge Protocol. Daily curated links from the space of blockchain, bitcoin, tokens, cryptocurrencies and protocols. No news, no bullshit, deep knowledge only.

intermediate

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Blockchain Governance

"In this essay, I focus on how the extent of horizontal competition and the assignment of project ownership rights affects the incentives of blockchain development teams to collaborate."

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RANDOMNESS IN BLOCKCHAINS

"Randomness exists all around us. Concepts of luck, probability and fate have all historically been intertwined with the concept of randomness. Everything that humans don’t understand or can’t predict tends to be classified as such. We’re also physically engulfed in a sea of randomness. It exists everywhere - from the movement of clouds to behaviors in particles and waves."

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What’s a Sparse Merkle Tree?

"This post will explain exactly what a sparse Merkle tree is, why they’re cool, and what they’re currently being used for."

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A Distributed Systems Primer. For People That Don't Have the Time.

"In this blog post I will try to give a brief primer into distributed systems, discussing various families of consensus protocols, the types of network models, guarantees, as well as various other pertinent ideas."

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Bitcoin & Energy

"It’s become popular today to dismiss Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work as wasteful and bad for the environment. We believe this is a narrow view that misses the forest for the trees. We wrote this paper with the intention to illustrate the other side of the story and what we believe to be the positive externalities of Proof-of-Work mining."

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Hodlers are the revolutionaries

"reflections on the important role hodlers play in developing Bitcoin’s network (and other cryptocurrency networks)."

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Layer 1 Should Be Innovative in the Short Term but Less in the Long Term

"One of the key tradeoffs in blockchain design is whether to build more functionality into base-layer blockchains themselves (“layer 1”), or to build it into protocols that live on top of the blockchain, and can be created and modified without changing the blockchain itself (“layer 2”). "

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Solving the Decentralized Credit Problem

"The goal of this article is three-fold: 1) To convince the reader that credit is a pre-condition to the efficient functioning of any financial system. 2) To shed light on why this is so challenging to achieve in the context of a decentralized financial system without sacrificing its core benefits. 3) To outline a unique mechanism for solving this problem in derivative protocols."

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Technical Analysis Using the Aroon Indicator

"The Aroon Indicator was invented by Tushar Chande. Aroon means “Dawn’s Early Light” in Sanskrit and was designed to be an indicator to identify incoming trends before they happen."

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Economics back into Cryptoeconomics

"Our objective is to show how a critical reframing of economics enables token integrity to be explained and managed."

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Emerging Scilla & Vyper Programming Languages for Smart Contracts

"Despite its success and widespread use for writing smart contracts on Ethereum, Solidity is a relatively new programming language, naturally susceptible to bugs and some high-level logical faults. Out of the demand for smart contract creation and improved security methods for writing them, programming languages Vyper and Scilla have emerged."

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Payment Systems and Privacy

The whitepaper. "Privacy in payments is desired not just for illegal transactions, but also for protection from malfeasance or negligence by counterparties or by the payments system provider itself. Proposals to abolish cash take inadequate account of these legitimate demands for privacy. While central banks can play a useful role in setting standards for payments privacy, they are unlikely to have a comparative advantage at providing privacy. Therefore the replacement of cash by central bank electronic money is likely to spur demand for alternative means of payments to solve specific privacy problems."

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Understanding Web 3 — A User Controlled Internet

"Coinbase breaks down the motivation and technology behind the development of Web 3"

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Bitcoin as a Privacycoin: This Tech is Making Bitcoin More Private

"spying on Bitcoin users is becoming increasingly difficult. Recent months in particular saw the introduction of a number of promising, privacy-enhancing technologies, and several more solutions should be released throughout the rest of the year or the next."

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Liberal Radicalism a la Buterin, Hitzig and Weyl

"Vitalik, Zoë and Glen just published a paper in which they propose a mechanism and philosophy for a self-organising decentralised ecosystem of public goods. It's a wild ride, and I'll go over the key points to encourage further discussion in Status."

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Identity and Reputation in Web 3

"Identity and reputation are important primitives in the Web 3 world. In this post, I’ll give an overview of the problem space and outline some approaches."

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Finality in Blockchain Consensus

"In the blockchain setting, finality is the affirmation that all well-formed blocks will not be revoked once committed to the blockchain. When users transact, they want to be confident that once their transactions go through, that the transactions cannot be arbitrarily changed or reversed. As such, in designing a blockchain consensus protocol, finality becomes vital."

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Digging into Browser-based Crypto Mining

The whitepaper. "In this work, we study the prevalence of this new phenomenon. We identify and classify mining websites in 138M domains and present a new fingerprinting method which finds up to a factor of 5.7"

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