Scalar Capital

1/ I’m happy to see academics researching cryptocurrencies. I found Michael Sockin and Wei Xiong’s A Model of Cryptocurrencies paper to be a thoughtful attempt to provide a framework for market behavior. Though, I question the validity of some findings. http://wxiong.mycpanel.princeton.edu/papers/Crypto.pdf …

I just read the new Triptych paper from the Monero Research Lab. It introduces a new ring signature scheme that offers smaller proof sizes compared to RingCT 3.0 for rings up to 1024. Still preliminary but exciting to see consistent output from the team! https://eprint.iacr.org/eprint-bin/getfile.pl?entry=2020/018&version=20200107:094009&file=018.pdf …

Just registered for the 2020 Stanford Blockchain Conference https://cbr.stanford.edu/sbc20/ . Looking forward to lots of interesting talks. I'm particularly curious to hear about hardware accelerated VDFs, SNARKs, and accumulators, which may help in the quest for privacy + scale

Layering in protocol design is nothing new. Early versions of TCP/IP were trying to do too much. What appear to be stable protocols now went through many iterations in the early days.

Some crypto projects I find absolutely fascinating conceptually: - @PoolTogether_ ("no loss" lottery) - @2100hq (tokens tied to Twitter accounts) - @hivedotone (social reputation especially for use in governance) - @MolochDAO, @meta_cartel, @SAINTFAMEdao (DAOs for coordination)

1/ They say the two hardest problems in computer science are 1) cache invalidation 2) naming and 3) off-by-one errors. Cryptocurrencies face these challenges, plus they face a new level of difficulty that’s rare outside of critical applications such as aircraft autopilot.

1/ An underappreciated feature of the Lightning Network is that it is not a fixed idea, but rather can and will evolve and grow. One proposed improvement that I’ve become interested in is called Eltoo, which was outlined in a 2018 paper https://blockstream.com/eltoo.pdf .

Insurance for DeFi is going to be a popular theme going into next year with multiple teams and approaches being worked on. I'm excited to have DeFi more accessible to people who feel more comfortable using it with insurance. Note insurance can add its own complexities/risks too.

I agree w/ @jillruthcarlson that a huge value prop for crypto is censorship resistance, but I want & believe it'll go mainstream. Digital store of value, people earning interest with DeFi, marketplaces for tokenized items (e.g. video games) are just a few use cases I'm excited byhttps://twitter.com/coindesk/status/1204487621218635776 …

1/ Sharing some advice on what has worked for my team on remote work. Note we're a small team, still always trying to improve things, and your mileage may vary. Credit to @jordanwpalmer who did a ton of research to make this work for us

1/ Decentralization makes cryptocurrencies possible, yet is often ill defined or misunderstood. As the name implies, decentralization is the opposite of centralization or concentration of authority, and is chiefly defined by the lack of a power center.

1/ As you dig into cryptography, you come across many mind bending phenomena. Homomorphic encryption is one of those ideas that I can’t get out of my head. Homomorphic encryption is already employed today by popular networks, and may be the key to private smart contracts.

People often say they're concerned about Ethereum scaling. My thoughts: 1) Eth 2.0 progress is coming along nicely 2) Great teams working on other promising solutions e.g. Optimistic & ZK Rollups 3) Certain use cases can take off that don’t require significant scaling e.g. DeFi