Cryptocurrency
Is fiscal policy really just a byzantine fault problem? No, but that hasn't stopped us yet.
I'm really fascinated by a narrow slice of cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin + stablecoins), and I think the rest (99%) of crypto projects are straightforward ponzi schemes and should die in a fire.
Despite the noise, I'm convinced the industry is net positive if it drives more attention & resources to the 0.00001% of projects that actually create better economic tools.
The optics issue is immense, because 99.99999% of crypto projects give the 0.000001% a bad name!
Projects
Coinbase
I've worked here full-time since October 2021.
Helium
I ran 30+ Helium hotspots on my friends rooftops for a few years. It went really well for a while.
Staking
I ran nodes for a bunch of different proof-of-stake blockchains. I learned a lot about incentives and made a lot of money (almost).
StakeRiver
I helped build a POKT staking pool, and at one point we had 40 dedicated machines in Hetzner (in Germany). We were running nodes for 10+ different blockchains and serving data in real-time to end users. It was fun to game the performance using web2 hacks (Cloudflare edge workers, etc...).
But, the price of POKT crashed, and I couldn't save it in time. Also, because of how the frontend was structured for developers, POKT had to censor OFAC uncompliant transactions... which is antithetical to the point of decentralized infra.
But, I did make this video.[]