I really do understand the tech fascination with crypto. I was at university when Netscape 1.0 came out, the birth of the web as we know it. A little while later I put together a web server on my Linux box. (1/9) This wasn’t easy. There was no google or YouTube. I scoured Usenet for instructions, it took ages but I got it to work. All it did was serve a single page, literally “hello world”, a couple of links and a gif. The only visitors were me and a friend. (2/9)

A lot of people claiming the “lightning network” will save #bitcoin are referring to two completely different ideas and networks, one decentralised, the other centralised. Neither one works, but for very different reasons. (1/17) 🧵 First, the decentralised version. This is the original layer 2, first proposed in 2015. It’s meant to solve the fact that bitcoin’s blockchain is slow, expensive and hilariously limited. It has many problems but the two most obvious are pre-funding and spanning (2/17)

The grand #Ethereum end game is to run large sections of the financial industry (insurance, real estate, banking) through decentralised smart contracts, all run on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. How feasible is this? Let's run the numbers. (1/6) The #Ethereum network currently runs around 1 Petahash, that is 1,000,000,000,000,000 hashs per second, and each hash is several thousand integer operations. However, the VAST majority of this is used to secure the network through PoW. How much is useful work? (2/6)