The need for being offline. Constantly being online shatters your attention. It makes it hard to get real, creative work done. It also makes it hard to relax. Recently I've found myself glued to my screen in the morning and late at night. Usually my phone, and I'm stuck reading some inconsequential, but addictive, news. Or I'm talking with people, also usually about not very important or urgent matters. For example, yesterday evening I was having a conversation on Telegram 11pm, just before I w...

Governing the Commons, Ostrom (1990) and Incentives Build Robustness in BitTorrent, Bram Cohen (2003) Is Bittorrent solving a tragedy of the commons problems? Tragedy of the commons is a concept that was popularized by Hardin in 1968. It has been observed for thousands of years before that, e.g. by Aristotle in his Politics. The idea is that a collection of individuals acting in their best interest results in a suboptimal outcome for the collective, or the commons. As a prototypical example: h...

Nakamoto, Satoshi. "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System," (2008) https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf Why am I re-reading this? I'm looking for something I'm missing. Something essential, and obvious. Something I already "know", but seen in a new light. Vitalik calls it cryptoeconomics, Szabo trust-minimization. Whatever it is, it is what is new about Bitcoin. Many systems are copying it, but most will fail. There might be something new inspired by it that has different characteristics,...

A commonplace book is used to compile various forms of knowledge in one place. They’ve been used for hundreds if not thousands of years. People who had a commonplace book or something very similar to it: John Locke, Carl Linnaeus, Seneca (more of a journal), da Vinci, Leopardi (Zibaldone). da Vinci said the following on his notebook: A collection without order, drawn from many papers, which I have copied here, hoping to arrange them later each in its place, according to the subjects of which...