When you create an asset that appreciates in price exponentially for a whole decade, you’re going to have plenty of charlatans, no small amount of bullshit, and swathes of market hysteria, all of which you need to cut through.

Bitcoin is no exception. It can be frustrating as a Bitcoin proponent seeing nonsensical arguments being made both for and against the Bitcoin network, every hour of every day.

This article attempts to point out some of the bullshit and the noise that you can safely ignore.

Bitcoin is complex

To understand Bitcoin beyond “we can all store value and pay each other”, you…

I figure the best way to learn about something is to try to build it from scratch and see what happens.

For this year’s JS@PayPal conference, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to live-code Bitcoin in a 30 minute talk. I’ve never attempted a live-coding talk, so I figured I would throw myself in the deep end!

Here’s the full-length video I recorded before the conference, with in-depth explanations of everything I did:

How I did it

First, I decided to cover the core Bitcoin concepts in a simplified way:

• The block chain
• The block reward, and block reward schedule
• The…

After my recent article on why you don’t need S2F to value Bitcoin, I had an interesting conversation with PlanB, and I’ve been following a lot of conversations on Twitter since then.

As a result, I’ve edited my original article to (I hope) more fairly present what S2F actually is, and make sure none of my arguments are based on setting up a straw man.

One point I made in my original article was:

What this means is, to some level, even though demand is not an explicit variable in the S2F model, the model must implicitly assume a consistent…

In 2019, PlanB published his Stock-to-Flow model for the Bitcoin price. This model essentially takes the following inputs:

• The Bitcoin supply, which overall is fixed, but is componentized into “stock”, the existing mined supply, and “flow”, the supply yet to be mined.
• The Bitcoin block reward schedule, which halves every four years, and dictates the future mining rate of Bitcoin for the next century.
• The prior Bitcoin price, in the years since its public release in 2009.

Using these inputs, S2F uses a linear regression to model the future price of Bitcoin. In a nutshell, the model essentially says:

As…

The following is a copy-paste of a message I just sent to a friend. He wanted to know the basics of the Bitcoin technology and market. Figured I’d share it here too, since it ended up being a (potentially useful) wall of text!

So, the technology aspect of Bitcoin is what really drew me in in the first place.

You can understand Bitcoin in an afternoon or so of reading; but generally speaking you can think of it as just a giant list, or ledger, of transactions. That idea is nothing new; but the crucial thing that nobody had ever…

In recent months we’ve seen many digital artworks tokenized and sold as NFTs, or “Non Fungible Tokens”. In layperson’s terms, this just means that the item is unique. Any one bitcoin is the same as any other bitcoin. But an NFT, in in theory, can not be replicated, and is not interchangeable with any other.

The NFT market rose to a crescendo this week with Beeple’s “First 5000 days” being sold for the equivalent of $69 million.

I’m in favor of any experimentation and innovation using blockchain tech. I think Bitcoin has the store-of-value problem covered, but I’m still looking…

If you’re anything like me, you spent the last few crypto bull markets trading like crazy, and the years in between forgetting all of the lessons you learned.

The biggest part of crypto trading I always forget, is the psychology of it. That’s what I want to write about today: being able to trade and actually sleep at night. That is, without waking up at 4am, checking your phone, making a stupid trading decision, and feeling like a total idiot afterwards.

Fair warning: I’m on the ‘extreme amateur’ side of crypto trading, and the chance of me offering you any…

Hi all!

BrainBlocks was incredibly fun to run, while it lasted. Ty, Angus, Andrei and I had a blast building it, working with the Nano community, seeing real merchants using Nano payments to power their businesses, and real users store their coins in the BrainBlocks Wallet.

Things didn’t work out on the business side for BrainBlocks. I still fully believe the future of crypto is in real-world payments, and I think Nano is the right technology to make that happen. At BrainBlocks we were very early, to a market that hasn’t fully emerged yet. We’re still massively bullish though!

On…