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Musings

There’s a lot more than meets the eye

We were reviewing the Polkadot design the other day and noted that they are using libp2p for the networking layer. It fits in with the project ethos, has enabled developing the system quickly, and after all why go to the trouble of building a custom networking layer? What did Cardano do? They didn’t use libp2p.…

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Musings

Best wishes for 2021

It’s been an eventful 2020 in so many ways; from the ongoing pressures of climate change, the COVID virus that has swept across the world, the U.S. Elections, Brexit, market turmoil (new lows and new highs) and of course significant developments in the Cryptocurrency world including Cardano. Cardano has taken some really important foundational steps…

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Musings

The ‘problem’ with Altcoins

We’ve been spending some time lately looking through the Nakamoto Institute web site. You could perhaps say (unfairly?) it’s the spiritual home of the “Bitcoin Maxi”. It has a large amount of excellent references hosted that relate to the goals and design decisions that fed into Bitcoin. For example publications by Ludwig Von Mises on…

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Musings

Innovation and Governance

Economist Robin Hanson writes on his blog Overcoming Bias about the impact of the Overton Window and the art of the possible in politics. The Overton window is defined as the spectrum of ideas on public policy and social issues considered acceptable by the general public at a given time. He starts: The main thing that…

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Musings

Open Source Matters

Flicking through r/cardano and noticed this post which compares Cardano and ERC-20 (the Ethereum Standard for on-chain tokens). The comparison is interesting, although most seasoned Cardano followers will already know that the approach to native assets will be very strong compared to other implementations. What stood out more was a comment that Polkadot had reused…