blockchain

Creators, Communities, and the Gray Space in the Middle

Creators, Communities, and the Gray Space in the Middle

In 1999, David Bowie saw the internet as an “alien life form”. He saw that humanity was on the cusp of something both exhilarating and terrifying: it was a breakdown of the barriers between creators and their communities. Instead of a piece of art or information being broadcasted one-way to an audience, it was becoming more of a dialogue, where the thing that originates from a creator isn't finished until the audience comes in and add their own interpretation. From there the piece evolves, gets sampled and remixed in ways that the creator couldn't have possibly imagined. Bowie called this area where creators and their communities meet "the gray space in the middle": a powerful new area of engagement where the most interesting things happen, and he predicted that this space is what the 21st century was going to be all about…

Privacy in Crypto: Intro to MimbleWimble & Grin

Privacy in Crypto: Intro to MimbleWimble & Grin

In late 2016, a pseudonymous character named Tom Elvis Jedusor showed up on the bitcoin developers’ chatroom and posted a tor link, which hosted a single file named MIMBLEWIMBLE, outlining a new design for a privacy-preserving, massively prunable blockchain. Tom Elvis Jedusor, as some may recognize, is the name of Voldemort’s given name in the French Harry Potter books. Tom Elvis Jedusor to this date has never logged into the chatroom again. In this article I explore how MimbleWimble works, the first live implementation of the protocol, and privacy in crypto.