Overview: Science&Technology

the vast majority of defi apps rely heavily on oracles, middleware entities that connect smart contracts to resources outside of their native blockchains. Without oracles, blockchains are like computers without internet access... Often referred to as hybrid smart contracts ... [oracles enable] smart contracts that can react to real-world events a…

Urbit looks like a fascinating platform to build myhub on: “an open-source decentralized internet project... [to] give control of computing back to regular people... At its most basic level, an Urbit is:A super-private (virtual) computer, combined withan ID, which isconnected peer-to-peer with other Urbit computers"Urbit user access their Ur…

Voters can either vote directly on issues, or they can delegate their voting power to delegates (i.e. representatives) who vote on their behalf. Delegation can be domain specific, which means that voters can delegate their voting power to different experts in different domains... If trust is broken ... the voter can simply revoke the delegation ..…

the future of work will rely on self-organization, enabled by collaborative software like Slack and Ethereum... Even in a self-organized, decentralized, collaborative, and high-trust future ... people will need to navigate their organization... Roles and projects will need to be created, filled, and disbanded with increasing frequency... we need …

"Get ready for companies that run themselves. But will the autonomous economy set us all free, or just make the rich richer?" Good intro, setting companies like etherum into a wider context and using a hypothetical example to show how a DAO could emerge and propagate. And then it sets alarm bells ringing. "the true economic significance of autom…

An interview with Jim Bankoff, who just raised another raised $46.5 million in funding for Vox Media ("the fastest growing Web brand of 2014"), caught my eye.

"Ethereum is a platform and a programming language that makes it possible for any developer to build and publish next-generation distributed applications.... Ethereum can be used to codify, decentralize, secure and trade just about anything: voting, domain names, financial exchanges, crowdfunding, company governance, contracts and agreements of …

The mind boggles ... "perhaps the creepiest outgrowth of cryptocurrency 2.0: distributed autonomous organizations, or DAOs. Based on charters taking the form of code on a peer-to-peer network, these are entities that could automate many of the tasks of a conventional organization with varying levels of human input. For instance, a DAO could act d…