Created: March 13, 2021
Modified: March 28, 2021
Modified: March 28, 2021
Ethereum
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- Notes on understanding modern innovations in blockchains:
- smart contracts
- proof of stake
- What are the advantages of blockchains?
- They provide a baseline level of institution. If you don't trust your central bank, there's Bitcoin.
- I still don't know how much to believe in Ethereum for this, but I'm really excited about the possibility of people learning finance by building it. We all know that you learn something the best when you invent it for yourself. It really is turning finance into coding.
- The case for crypto doesn't have to be that it will let us do illegal things, even, necessarily; it means that crypto is just going to lead to a level of sophistication in finance that we wouldn't otherwise be able to have, because so many more people will be learning finance in a really fundamental and abstract way. And then they'll have the tools to start putting pieces together, and this may be good, this may be bad, but it's going to be incredibly sophisticated.
- So that's exciting, and I want to test this by teaching myself crypto finance. I think this has a double pay off because I learn about crypto---an up and coming new area perhaps---and I learn about finance, and the crypto may turn out to be unimportant, but understanding finance at a structural abstract level would be really satisfying.
- Videos to watch:
- Gensler blockchain letters: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/15-s12-blockchain-and-money-fall-2018/video-lectures/
- Papers to read:
- Smart contract use cases (forward by Szabo): https://digitalchamber.org/smart-contract-use-cases/
- Ethereum whitepaper: https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/