zk-SNARKs are beautiful constructions shrouded in mystery. They open new horizons in private and scalable compute. They are essential to privacy-preserving digital transactions and to the scalability roadmap of all blockchains. But the basics can actually be relatively easily understood by someone with no more than high school math (basic familiarity with polynomials and exponent rules). Perhaps you could have even invented them yourself, if you had tried. So let's try.| ebuchman.github.io
A history of metals and coinage in Europe, based on Spufford's Money and its use in Medieval Europe.| ebuchman.github.io
Part of our series on the Properties of Money. This post explores the Unit of Account, its origins, and the basic idea of inside and outside money.| ebuchman.github.io
This is the introductory post in a series on the properties of money and the tensions between them.| ebuchman.github.io
This month, September 2022, marks a critical transition point in the history of the Cosmos project. Let this post serve as a guide, both a history and a preview of what’s to come. September 2022 effectively marks the end of the first major phase of Cosmos development and the dawn of a new one. I will call this first phase Initiation. We could say it began with the Cosmos Whitepaper in the summer of 2016.| ebuchman.github.io
A response to Brett Scott's fantastic post, 'The Hole in Bitcoin's Heart'| ebuchman.github.io
A new look at the Velocity of Money, what it can tell us about the structure of the payment system, and what it might mean for a more sustainable approach to economic growth.| ebuchman.github.io
Last year I read F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation back to back. Both published in 1944, these great works of political economics were attempts by their authors to grapple with the collapse of western civilization into the fascist totalitarianism of the Second World War. For Hayek, a classical liberal, totalitarian tragedy follows inevitably from the authoritarianism of State Socialism. For Polanyi, who was more of an economic sociologist, the fa...| ebuchman.github.io
An exploration of why Bitcoin is better for the world than Tesla. Contents include: The Problem with Tesla; the Promise of Bitcoin; Monetary Institutions and Political Economy; Proof of Work and International Trust; Mining is Not as Bad As You Think; What About Proof of Stake?| ebuchman.github.io
A review of the miserable state of socially responsible investing, and what to potentially do about it| ebuchman.github.io
An approach to synthesizing the heterdox schools of economics via a more comprehensive sociological theory of the factors of production, including energy and money.| ebuchman.github.io
A short review of some types of local money systems, with a focus on their potential as liquidity saving mechanisms via credit clearing.| ebuchman.github.io
Modern Monetary Theory is refocusing economics on an important set of ideas: monetary sovereignty, the resource constraint, and a basic jobs program. There are curious parallels to cryptocurrencies. But MMT still has some ways to go to become the ecologically and socially sound theory of money we so desperately need| ebuchman.github.io
I wrote an op-ed in Coindesk, called Crypto Needs to Engage With the World. It’s basically an unrolled version of my crypto thesis tweet thread.| ebuchman.github.io
If Alexander The Great brought a few hundred years of early European cultural evolution to the East, it wasn't until the empire of Genghis Khan, the Modest Mongolian, that a *millenium* of Chinese cultural evolution was brought back West, effectively ending the Middle Ages and laying the foundation for the Enlightenment in Europe. This is the story of how Genghis Khan conquered the world.| ebuchman.github.io
One whole year ago today, the Cosmos community made history with the successful decentralized launch of the Gaia blockchain, also known as the Cosmos Hub. After being “two months away” from launch for about 16 months, I couldn’t even begin to describe the joy of seeing our incredible community of validators launch Gaia into the world. I checked block explorers many times each day, in complete awe that this software we had spent years building was actually running in a production economi...| ebuchman.github.io
This is an ode to the Guelph Center for Urban Organic Farming, an organic farm located on the University of Guelph campus, where I fell in love with gardening and discovered that permaculture can feed the world. The Guelph Center for Urban Organic Farming is a sanctuary. A botanical paradise. A fantasy realm in our own backyard. It is a stunning beacon of productivity; a shining ray of sustainable capacity; a testament to the permacultural principles.| ebuchman.github.io
Modern distributed software development marks the pinacle of text-based collaboration. A global web of internet connected humans, of varying geopolitical and educational background, working for different companies or none at all, composing tapestries of textual repositories that give rise to our entire digital society. The essential feature of software development today is distributed version control, or, the “management of changes across agents”. This is an apt description of what societ...| ebuchman.github.io
Socioeconomic systems may be conceived in the same vein as organisms: driven, replicated, non-equilibrium systems in a landscape of steady-states. Lifetimes and sustainability in such systems are parameterized by the capacity to represent and predict driving signals, and to use the energy contained in such signals to replicate successfully. Driving signals are the cycles of availability of input energy that drive systems out of equilibrium. Driven systems favour the formation of well-organize...| ebuchman.github.io
On January 3rd, 2009, the great mother Goddess of cryptoeconomics, Satoshi Nakamoto, birthed her baby Bitcoin into the world. 10 years later, Bitcoin is booming, awakening cavalries of latent innovative energy and catalyzing radical new approaches to socioeconomic systems. Bitcoin and its ilk are pushing the boundaries of critical fields of study, from fault tolerant distributed computing, to cryptography, mechanism design, and formal verification. The impact of these developments will be fel...| ebuchman.github.io
I love writing, and I want to commit to doing more of it. Once upon a time I had a good cadence going on Blogspot, and when that dropped off, I eventually picked up again on Wordpress. But it’s been a while. Now I plan to write in Vim and publish on Github while letting Hugo do the hard work of beautifying, unless you can convince me of something better.| ebuchman.github.io
I often speak on podcasts and at conferences. Some of my favorites, which tend to focus more on larger vision and political economy, include: 2022-11: The Ownership Economy Podcast - The Cosmos Network, Collaborative Finance (Co-Fi), and the Empowerment of Monetary Localism 2022-05: Bankless - Why Bankless Is Wrong 2021-10: The Blockchain Socialist - The heterodox politics of the internet of blockchains and sustainability existentialism 2020-11: CSCON[0] - Free as in Banking 2019-05-06: Rebui...| ebuchman.github.io
Subscribe below and I’ll email you every time I put out a new post. You can also use the rss feed.| ebuchman.github.io
Hi! I’m Ethan Buchman. I grew up in Toronto, Canada, but spent many years in lovely Guelph. I co-founded the Cosmos and Tendermint projects, which I still work on, as CEO of Informal Systems and President of the Interchain Foundation. Cosmos is a political economic philosophy emphasizing sovereignty and interoperability for the world’s communities. I care a lot about the structure of organizations and the power dynamics between capital and labour.| ebuchman.github.io