I am participating in a DeFi workshop this week. I have been involved in crypto for a long time and I have a lot of crypto posts here. I am also collaborating with artist Mary Ellen Carroll on a quadratic voting project related to crypto. It is four sessions. There are a bunch of developments in DeFi that I have not been following and really do not want to have to poke around to curate myself. Also I like learning in small groups like this. The first workshop session was a bunch of review but it filled in a lot of blanks that I had forgotten or – gasp- never knew.

The two big ones are:

Nakamoto’s consensus:

This is the practice in bitcoin of defaulting to the longest blockchain. The idea is that most of the compute power went into the longest chain so we can trust it.

Unpacking the Nonce:

It means “the one” but in cryptography it means the “number used once”. When we are “solving problems” to verify a block in the blockchain. We are calculating the nonce. There is also there great book that was referenced in the class on a minimum viable blockchain.

Thats all I got for today. I am tired.