ATOMIC HABITS - James Clear

 

The Fundamentals - Why Tiny Changes Make a Big Difference

• Four-step model of habits - cue (signal), craving (envie débordante), response and reward.
• Stimulus, response, reward.
• Cue, routine, reward.

The surprising power of Atomic Habits

• The aggregation of marginal gains.
• The effects of small habits compound over time.
• Success is the product of daily habits not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.
• You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.
• The more tasks you can handle without thinking, the more your brain is free to focus on other areas.
• The more you help others, the more others want to help you.
• Habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance.
• It is not until months or years later that we realise the true value of the previous works we have done.
• Forget about goals, focus on systems instead.
• Relaxing more and worrying less.
• Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.
• If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.
• A system of continuous small improvements.
• When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running.
• The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.
• You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

How Your Habits Shape Your Identity (and Vice Versa)

• Exercise, meditation, journaling.
• Developing a meditation practice.
• Outcomes are about what you get. Processes are about what you do.
• You have a new goal and a new plan, but you haven’t changed who you are.
• The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when habit becomes part of your identity.
• The more pride you have in a particular aspect of your identity, the more motivated you will be to maintain the habits associated with it.
• The goal is not to run a marathon, the goal is to become a runner.
• Habits are the paths to changing your identity.
• Your goal is simply to win the majority of time.
• Your habits change your identity, and your identity shapes your habits.
• The focus should always be on becoming that type of person, not getting a particular outcome.
• Are you becoming the type of person you want to become?

How to Build Better Habits in 4 Simple Steps

• Behaviours followed by satisfying consequences tend to be repeated and those that produce unpleasant consequences are less likely to be repeated.
• Building habits in the present allows you to do more of what you want in the future.
• Today, we spend most of our time learning cues that predict secondary rewards like money and fame, power and status, praise and approval, love and friendship, or a sense of personal satisfaction.
• The thoughts, feelings, and emotions of the observer are what transform a cue into a craving.
• The first purpose of rewards is to satisfy your cravings.
• As you go about your life, your sensory nervous system is continuously monitoring which actions satisfy your desires and deliver pleasure.
• All behaviour is driven by a desire to solve a problem.
• How can I make it obvious?
• How can I make it attractive?
• How can I make it easy?
• How can I make it satisfying?
• Why don’t I do what I say I’m going to do?

The 1st Law - Make it obvious

The Man Who Didn’t Look Right

• Many of our failures in performance are largely attributable to a lack of self-awareness.
• Does this behaviour help me become the type of person I wish to be?
• If you waste time online, notice that you are spending your life in a way that you do not want to.

The Best Way to Start a New Habit

• Implementation intention, which is the plan you make beforehand about when and where to act.
• People who make a specific plan for when and where they will perform a new habit are more likely to follow through.
• I will [BEHAVIOUR] at [TIME]in [LOCATION].
• Meditation: I will meditate for one minute at 7 a.m. in my kitchen.
• Exercise: I will exercise for one hour at 5 p.m. in my local gym.
• We often say yes to little requests because we are not clear enough about what we need to be doing instead.
• The tendency for one purchase to lead to another one has a name: the Diderot Effect. The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases.
• It’s a chain of purchases.
• Each action becomes a cue that triggers the next behavior.
• One of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new behavior on top. This is called habit stacking.
• Rather than pairing your new habit with a particular time and location, you pair it with a current habit.
• Strategies like implementation intentions and habit staking are among the most practical ways to create obvious cues for your habits and design a clear plan for when and where to take actions.

Motivation is overrated; Environment Often Matters More

• Environment is the invisible hands that shapes the human behaviour.
• Every habit is context dependent.
• Suggestion Impulse Buying: customers will occasionally buy products not because they want them but because of how they are presented to them.
• You don’t have to be the victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it.
• When their energy use was obvious to track, people changed their behaviour.
• Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.
• The context is the cue.
• Their brains learned that sleeping - not browsing on their phones, not watching television, not staring at the clock - was the only action that happened in that room.
• It is easier to associate a new habit with a new context than to build a new habit in the face of competing cues.
• When you can’t manage to get an entirely new environment, redefine or rearrange your current one. Create a separate space for work, study, exercise, entertainment, and cooking. The mantra I find useful is “One space, one use”.
• Whenever possible, avoid mixing the context of one habit with another. When you start mixing contexts, you’ll start mixing habits.
• Every habit should have a home.

The Secret to Self-Control

• So, yes, perseverance, grit and willpower are essential to success, but the way to improve these qualities is not by wishing you were a more disciplined person, but by creating a more disciplined environment.
• “Cue-induced-wanting”: an external trigger causes a compulsive craving to repeat a bad habit.
• You can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to forget it.
• In the long-run, we become a product of the environment that we live in.
• Remove a single cue and the entire habit often fades away.
• Your energy would be better spent optimising your environment. This is the secret to self-control. Make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible.

The 2ND Law - Make it attractive

How to Make a Habit Irresistible

• The more attractive an opportunity is, the more likely it is to become habit-forming.
• We have the brains of our ancestors but temptations they never had to face.
• Our goal is to learn how to make our habits irresistible.
• Without dopamine, desire died.
• Without desire, action stopped.
• The average slot machine player will spin the wheel six hundred times per hour.
• Every behaviour that is highly habit-forming - browsing social media - is associated with higher levels of dopamine.
• Dopamine plays a central role in many neurological processes, including motivation, learning and memory, punishment and aversion, and voluntary management.
• Desire is the engine that drives behaviour.
• Temptation bundling works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do.
• After [HABIT I NEED], I will [HABIT I WANT]

1. After I pull out my phone, I will do ten burpees (need)
2. After I do ten burpees, I will check Facebook (want)

• Temptation bundling is one way to make your habits more attractive. The strategy is to pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do.

The Role of Family and Friends in Shaping Your Habits

• Charles Darwin: “In the long history of humankind, those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed”.
• Nothing sustains motivation better than belonging to the tribe.
• Whenever we are unsure how to act, we look to the group to guide our behaviour.
• We check reviews on Amazon or Yelp or TripAdvisor because we want to imitate the “best” buying, eating and travel habits. It’s usually a smart strategy. There is evidence in numbers. But there can be a downside.
• There is tremendous internal pressure to comply with the norms of the group.
• When changing your habits means challenging the tribe, change is unattractive. When changing your habits means fitting in with the tribe, change is very attractive.
• Humans everywhere pursue power, prestige and status.

How to Find and Fix the Causes of Your Bad Habits

• A craving is just a specific manifestation of a deeper underlying motive. Your brain did not evolve with a desire to smoke cigarettes or to check Instagram or to play video games. At a deep level, you simply want to reduce uncertainty and relieve anxiety, to win social acceptance and removal, or to achieve status.
• One person might learn to reduce stress by smoking a cigarette. Another person learn to ease their anxiety by going for a run.
• Habits are all about association.
• The specific cravings you feel and habits you perform are really an attempt to address your fundamental underlying motives.
• The money you save this month increases your purchasing power next month.
• Meditation: you can transform frustration into delight when your realise that each interruption gives you a chance to practice returning to your breath.
• The key to finding and fixing the causes of your bad habits is to reframe the associations you have about them.
• How to break a bad habit: 
• Reduce exposure. Remove the cues of your bad habits from your environment.
• Make it Unattractive. Reframe your mind-set. Highlight the benefits of avoiding you bad habits.

The 3RD Law - Make it easy

Walk Slowly, but Never Backward.

• We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action.
• “The best is the enemy of the good”.
• Motion allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure.
• Repeating a habit leads to clear physical changes in the brain.
• Both common sense and scientific evidence agree: repetition is a form of change.
• Each time you repeat an action, you are activating a particular neural circuit associated with that habit.
• Habits form based on frequency, not time.
• What matters is that you take the actions you need to make to progress.
• The most effective form of learning is practice, not planning.
• Focus on taking action, not being in motion.

The Law of the Least effort

• Conventional wisdom holds that motivation is the key to habit change. Maybe if you really want it, you’d actually do it. But the truth is, our real motivation  is to be lazy and to do what is convenient.
• It is human nature to follow the Law of Least Effort, which states that when deciding between two similar options, people will naturally gravitate toward the option that require the least amount of work.
• Meditation is an obstacle to feeling calm. Journaling is an obstacle to thinking clearly. You don’t actually want the habit itself. What you really want is the outcome the habit delivers. The greater the obstacle - that is, the more difficult the habit - the more friction there is between you and the desired state.
• One of the most effective ways to reduce the friction associated with your habits is to practice environnement design.
• Habits are easier to build when they fit in the flow of your life.
• “Addition by subtraction”.
• The central idea is to create an environment where doing the right thing is as easy as possible.
• When I walk into a room everything is at the right place.
• How can we design a world where it’s easy to do what’s right?
• Human behaviour follows the Law of Least Effort.

How to Stop Procrastinating by Using the Two-minute Rule

• I work out for two hours.
• Habits are the entry point, not the end point.
• When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.
• “If it takes less than two minutes, then do it now”. David Allen.
• Once you’ve started doing the right thing, it is much easier to continue doing it.
• Nearly everyone can benefit from getting their thoughts out of their head and onto paper.
• “He always stopped journaling before it seemed like a hassle”. Greg McKeown.
• It’s’ better to do less than you hoped than to do nothing at all.
• Standardise before you optimise.
• A shutdown ritual in which he does a last email inbox check, prepares his to-do list for the next day, and says “shutdown complet” to end the work for the day.

How to Make Good Habits Inevitable and Bad Habits Impossible

• Sometimes success is less about making good habits easy and more about making bad habits hard.
• A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future.
• Ulysse realised the benefits of locking in your future actions while your mind is in the right place rather than waiting to see where your desires take you in the moment.
• The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impractical to do.
• “Civilisation advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them” Alfred North Whitehead.
• At the slightest hint of boredom, you can get lost in the vast expanse of social media.
• We can find ourselves jumping from easy task to easy task without making time for more difficult, but ultimately more rewarding work.
• Within the first week of locking myself out of social media, I realised that I didn’t need to check it nearly as often as I had been, and I certainly didn’t need each day.
• The inversion of the 3rd Law of Behaviour Change is make it difficult.

The 4th Law - Make it Satisfying

The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Range

• The problem wasn't knowledge, the problem was consistency.
• It is a lot easier for people to adopt a product that provide a strong positive sensory signal, for example the mint taste of toothpaste, than it is to adopt a habit that does not provide pleasurable sensory feedback, like flossing one's teeth.
• The final law of Behavior Change: make it satisfying.
• We are more likely to repeat a behavior when the experience is satisfying.
• Pleasure teaches your brain that a behavior is worth remembering and repeating.
• What is rewarded is repeated. What is punished is avoided.
• But there is a trick. We are not looking for just any type of satisfaction. We are looking for immediate satisfaction.
• Animals: You live in what scientists call an immediate-return environment because your actions instantly deliver clear and immediate outcomes.
• Humans: You live in what scientists call a delayed-return environment because you can work for years before your actions deliver the intended payoff.
• You are walking around with the same hardware as your Paleolithic ancestors.
• Time inconsistency: the way your brain evaluates rewards is inconsistent across time. You value the present more than the future.
• Time inconsistency is also referred to as hyperbolic discounting.
• The French economist Frédéric Bastiat explained the problem clearly when he wrote, "It almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa...Often, the sweeter the first fruit of a habit, the more bitter are its later fruits". Put another way, the costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.
• What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided.
• As the saying goes, the last mile is always the least crowded.
• Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains a habit.

How to Stick with Good Habits Every Day

• The best way to measure your progress is with a habit tracker.
• "Don't break the chain" is a powerful mantra.
• Most of us have a distorted view of our own behavior. We think we act better than we do. Measurements offers one way to overcome our blindness to our own behavior and notice what's really going on each day.
• When you're feeling down, it's easy to forget about all the progress you have already made.
• After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [TRACK MY HABIT]
• Never miss twice.
• If I miss one day, I try to get back into it as quickly as possible.
• Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.
• "The first rule of compounding: Never interrupt it unnecessarily."
• It's easy to train when you feel good, but it's crucial to show up when you don't feel like it - even if you do less than you hope.
• We focus on working long hours instead of getting meaningful work done.
• Charles Goodhardt: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
• Each measurement provides a little bit of evidence that you're moving in the right direction and a brief moment of immediate pleasure for a job well done.
• One of the most satisfying feelings is the feeling of making progress.

How an Accountability Partner Can Change Everything

• Make it immediately unsatisfying.
• Pain is an effective teacher. If a failure is painful, it get fixed.
• Behavior only shifts if the punishment is painful enough and reliably enforced.
• You can create a habit contract to hold yourself accountable.
• To make bad habits unsatisfying, your best option is to make them painful in the moment. Creating a habit contract is a straightforward way to do exactly that.
• We care deeply about what others think of us, and we do not want others to have a lesser opinion of us.

Advanced Tactics - How to Go from Being Merely Good to Being Truly Great

The Truth About Talent (When Genes Matter and When They Don't)

• The secret to maximizing your odds of success is to choose the right field of competition.
• You want to play a game where the odds are in your favor.
• Competence is highly dependent on context.
• In short: genes do not determine your destiny. They determine your areas of opportunity.
• The key is to direct your effort toward areas that both excite you and match your natural skills, to align your ambition with your ability.
• How do I figure out where the odds are in my favor? How do I identify the opportunities and habits that are right for me?
• Personality traits is known as the "Big Five":
• Openness to experience: from curious and inventive on one end to cautious and consistent on the other.
• Conscientiousness: organized and efficient to easygoing and spontaneous.
• Extroversion: outgoing and energetic to solitary and reserved (you likely know them as extroverts vs. introverts)
• Agreeableness: friendly and compassionate to challenging and detached.
• Neuroticism: anxious and sensitive to confident, calm, and stable.
• Read whatever fascinates you.
• You don't have to build the habits everyone tells you to build.
• Choose the habit that best suits you, not the one that is the most popular.
• Learning to play a game where the odds are in your favor is critical for maintaining motivation and feeling successful.
• 3rd Law: make it easy.
• Explore/exploit trade-off.
• After this initial period of exploration, shift your focus to the best solution you've found - but keep it experimenting occasionally. The proper balance depends on whether you're winning or losing. If you are currently winning, you exploit, exploit, exploit. If you are currently losing, you continue to explore, explore, explore.
• What feels like fun to me, but work to others?
• What makes me lose track of time? Flow is the mental state you enter when you are so focused on the task at hand that the rest of the world fades away. This blend of happiness and peak performance is what athletes and performers experience when they are "in the zone".
• Where do I get greater returns than the average person?
• What comes naturally to me? Look inside yourself and ask, "What feels natural to me? When have I felt alive? When have I felt like the real me?
• Whenever you feel authentic and genuine, you are headed in the right direction.
• When you can't win by being better, you can win by being different. By combining your skills, you reduce the level of competition, which makes it easier to stand out.
• The more you master a specific skill, the harder it becomes for others to compete with you.
• If you can find a more favorable environment, you can transform the situation from one where the odds are against you to one where they are in your favor.
• Work hard on the things that come easy.

The Goldilocks Rule: How to Stay Motivated in Life and Work

• The human brain loves a challenge, but only if it is within an optimal zone of difficulty.
• Your focus narrows, distractions fade away, and you find yourself fully invested in the task at hand.
• The Goldilocks Rule states that human experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right.
• Yerkes-Dodson law describes the optimal level of arousal (excitation) as the midpoint between boredom and anxiety.
• A flow state is the experience of being "in the zone" and fully immersed in an activity.
• Goldilocks Rule remains: working on challenges of just manageable difficulty - something on the perimeter of your ability - seems crucial for maintaining motivation.
• At some point it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts over and over and over.
• The difference is that they still find a way to show up despite the feelings of boredom.
• Mastery requires practice. But the more you practice something, the more boring and routine it becomes.
• As Machiavelli noted "Men desire novelty to such an extent that those who are doing well wish for a change as much as those who are doing badly".
• In psychology, this is known as a variable reward. Slot machines are the most common real-world example. A gambler hits the jackpot every now and then but not at a predictable interval. The pace of rewards varies. This variance leads to the greatest spike of dopamine, enhances memory recall, and accelerates habit formation. 
• Professionals take action even when the mood isn't right.
• The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.

The Downside of Creating Good Habits

• Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery
• Although habits are powerful, what you need is a way to remain conscious of your performance over time.
• You must avoid slipping into the trap of complacency.
• Career Best Effort (CBE).
• Sought peak performance by getting slightly better each day.
• Best effort spiritually and mentally and physically.
• Sustaining an effort is the most important thing for any enterprise. The way to be successful is to learn how to do things right, then to do the same way every time.
• Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge is one of the greatest marathoners of all time and Olympic gold medalist. He still takes notes after every practice in which he reviews his training for the day and searches for areas that can be improved. Similarly, gold medal swimmer Katie Ledecky records her wellness on a scale of 1 to 10 and includes notes on her nutrition and how well she slept.
• You don't want to keep practicing a habit if it becomes ineffective.
• Annual review:
• What went well this year?
• What didn't go so well this year?
• What did I learn?
• I conduct an Integrity Report. Like everyone, I make a lot of mistakes.
• Reflection and review offers an ideal time to revisit one of the most important aspects of behavior change: identity.
• Integrity Report:
• What are the core values that drive my life and work?
• How am I living and working with integrity right now?
• How can I set a higher standard in the future?
• Reflection and review offers an ideal time to revisit one of the most important aspects of behavior change: identity.
• The more sacred an idea is to us - that is, the more deeply it is tied to our identity - the more strongly we will defend it against criticism.
• Paul Graham: "Keep your identity small".
• When you spend your whole life defining yourself in one way and that disappears, who are you now?
• The key to mitigating these losses of identity is to redefine yourself such that you get to keep important aspects of your identity even if your particular role changes.
• Everything is impermanent.
• A lack of self-awareness is poison. Reflection and review is the antidote.
• The tighter we cling to an identity, the harder it becomes to grow beyond it.

Little Lessons from the Four Laws

• A craving can only occur after you have notice the opportunity.
• Happiness is not about the achievement of pleasure (which is joy or satisfaction), but about the lack of desire.
• Happiness is the state you enter when you no longer want to change your state.
• Caed Budris: " Happiness is the space between one desire being fulfilled and a new desire forming"
• With a big enough why you can overcome any how.
• Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how"
• If your motivation and desire are great enough (that is, why are you acting), you'll take action even when it is quite difficult.
• Being curious is better than being smart.
• Emotions drive behavior.
• We can only be rational and logical after we have been emotional.
• Emotions can be a threat to wise decision making.
• If you keep saying something is a priority but you never act on it, then you don't really want it. It's time to have an honest conversation with yourself.
• The reward only comes after the energy is spent.
• Self-control requires you to release a desire rather than satisfy it.
• "Being poor is not having too little, it is wanting more" Seneque.
• Before acting, there is a feeling that motivates you to act - the craving. After acting, there is a feeling that teaches you to repeat the action in the future.
• Desire initiates. Pleasure sustains. Pleasure and satisfaction are what sustain a behavior.
• Hope declines with experience and is replaced by acceptance.
• We continually grasp for the latest get-rich-quick or weight-loss scheme.
• New strategies seem more appealing than old ones because they can have unbounded hope. As Aristotle noted "Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope".
• In the beginning, hope is all you have.
• "If you wish to persuade, appeal to interest, rather than reason" Benjamin Franklin.
• The feeling comes first (System 1). Daniel Kahneman.
• "Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as a by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself" Viktor E. Frankl.

Ethereum Whitepaper: a next generation smart contract and decentralised platform

• Satoshi Nakamoto’s development of Bitcoin in 2009 has often been hailed as a radical development in money and currency, being the first example of a digital asset which simultaneously has no backing or “intrinsic value” and no centralised issuer or controller. However, another, arguably more important, part of the Bitcoin experiment is the underlying blockchain technology as a tool of distributed consensus.
• What Ethereum intends to provide is a blockchain with a built-in fully fledged Turing-complete programming language that can be used to create “contracts” that can be used to encode arbitrary state transitions functions, allowing users to create any of the systems above, as well as many others that we have not yet imagined, simply by writing up the logic in a few lines of code.
• UTXO: Unspent Transaction Outputs
• A “full node” in the Bitcoin network, one that stores and processes the entirety of every block, takes up about 15GB of disk space in the Bitcoin network as of April 2014, and is growing by over a Gigabyte per month (100GB in 2022).
• A protocol known as “Simplified Payment Verification” (SPV) allows for another class of nodes to exist, called “light nodes”, which download the block headers, verify the proof of work on the block of headers, and then download only the “branches” associated with transactions that are relevant to them.
• Namecoin: created in 2010, Namecoin is best described as a decentralised name-registration database.
• Colored  coins: the purpose of coloured coins is to serve as a protocol to allow people to create their own digital currencies - or, in the important trivial case of a currency with one unit, digital tokens - on the Bitcoin blockchain.
• With Ethereum, we intend to build an alternative framework that provides even larger gains in ease of development as well as even stronger light client properties, while at the same time allowing applications to share an economic environment and blockchain security.
• “Contracts” in Ethereum should not be seen as something that should be “fulfilled” or “complied with”; rather, they are more like “autonomous agents” that live inside of the Ethereum execution environment, always executing a specific piece of code when “poked” by a message or transaction, and having direct controls over their own ether balance and their own key/value store to keep track of persistent variables.
• Although there are many ways to optimise Ethereum virtual-machine execution via just-in-time compilation, a basic implementation of Ethereum can be done in a few hundred lines of code.
• One of the main problems cited about cryptocurrency is the fact that it’s volatile.
• Identity and reputation systems: the contract is very simple; all it is, is a database inside the Ethereum network that can be added to, but not modified or removed from.
• Decentralised file storage: Ethereum contracts can allow for the development of a decentralised file-storage ecosystem, where individuals users can earn small quantities of money by renting out their own hard drives and unused space can be used to further drive down the costs of file storage.
• “Decentralised Dropbox contract”
• Decentralised Autonomous Organizations: The general concept of a “decentralised autonomous organisation” is that of a virtual entity that has a certain set of members or shareholders which, perhaps with a 67% majority, have the right to spend the entity’s funds and modify its code.
• ShellingCoin may prove to be the first mainstream application of futarchy as a governance protocol for decentralised applications.
• The Greedy Heaviest Observed Subtree (GHOST) protocol is an innovation. The motivation behind GHOST is that blockchains with fast confirmation times currently suffer from reduced security due to a high stale rate — because blocks take a certain time to propagate through the network, if miner A mines a block and then miner B happens to mine another block before miner’s A block propagates to miner B, miner B’s block will end up wasted and will not contribute to network security.
• Because every transaction published into the blockchain imposes on the network the cost of needing to download and verify it, there is a need for some regulatory mechanism, typically involving transaction fees to prevent abuse.
• In reality every transaction that a miner includes will need to be processed by every node in the network, so the vast majority of the cost of transaction is borne by third parties and not the miner that is making the decision of whether or not to include it. Hence the tragedy-of-the-commons problems are very likely to occur.
• There is another factor disincentivising large block sizes in Bitcoin: blocks that are large will take longer to propagate, and thus have a higher probability of becoming stales.
• An important note is that the Ethereum virtual machine is Turing complete; this means that EVM code can encode any computation that can conceivably carried out, including infinite loops.
• The Ethereum network includes its own built-in currency, ether, which serves the dual purpose of providing a primary liquidity layer to allow for exchange between various types of digital assets and, more importantly, of providing a mechanism for paying transaction fees.
• A permanently growing linear supply, as opposed to a capped supply as in Bitcoin.
• The permanent linear supply-growth model reduces the risk of what some see as excessive wealth concentration in Bitcoin, and gives individuals living in present and future eras a fair chance to acquire currency units, while at the same time retaining a strong incentive to obtain and hold ether because the “supply-growth rate” as a percentage still tends to zero over time.
• Note that in the future, it is likely that Ethereum will switch to a proof-of-stake model for security, reducing the issuance requirement to somewhere between zero and 0.05x per year.
• Bitcoin: at the time of this writing, the top three mining pools indirectly control roughly 50% of processing power in the Bitcoin network.
• One common concern about Ethereum is the issue of scalability. Like Bitcoin, Ethereum suffers from the flaw that every transaction needs to be processed by every node in the network.
• The concept of arbitrary state transition function as implemented by the Ethereum protocol provides for a platform with unique potential.
• The main difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin with regard to the blockchain architecture is that, unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum blocks contain a copy of both the transaction list and the most recent state.

Proof of Stake - Vitalik Buterin

 

• Nathan Schneider: "The largely young, male, and privileged milieu of crypto culture can often seem so far removed from the kinds of problems participants purport to be trying to solve."

PART I: PREMINING

Markets, Institutions, and Currencies - a new method of social incentivization
Bitcoin Magazine - January 10, 2014

• Medium of exchange, store of value, medium of account.
• Seigniorage can be formally defined as the difference between the market value of a currency and its intrinsic value - that is, the value that the currency would have if no one used it as currency.
• In the case of Bitcoin, just like the dollar, the currency's value is 100% seigniorage; a bitcoin has no intrinsic value. But where does the seigniorage go? the answer is, some goes into the hands of miners as profit, and the rest goes to fund the miners expenses - the expenses of securing the Bitcoin network. Thus, in this case, we have a currency whose seigniorage goes directly into funding a public good, namely the security of the Bitcoin network itself.
• "Doge", a slang term for "dog"
• It is not just the technical superiority of a currency that determines its traction - ideal matter just as much.
• Cryptocurrency enthusiasts who are interested in fairness and decentralization.
• It is possible to set up currencies whose seigniorage, or issuance, goes to support certain causes, and people can vote for those causes by accepting certain currencies at their businesses. 
• Cryptocurrencies are inherently global, and benefit from an incredibly powerful digital banking system baked right into their source code.

Ethereum: a next generation cryptocurrency and decentralized application platform
Bitcoin magazine
January 23, 2014

• A cryptocurrency network that intends to be as generalized as possible, allowing anyone to create special applications on top of almost any purpose inimaginable. The project: Ethereum.
• Bitcoin is to be thought of as a sort of TCP/IP of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, and other next-generation protocols can be built on top of Bitcoin much like we have SMTP for email, HTTP for web pages, and XMPP for chat, all on top of TCP as a common underlying data layer.
• As a protocol for storing and transferring value, Bitcoin is excellent.
• Ethereum aims to be a superior foundational protocol, and allow other decentralized applications to build on top of it instead of Bitcoin, giving them more tools to work with and allowing them to gain the full benefits of Atheneum's scalability and efficiency.
• Each Ethereum contract has its own internal scripting code, and the scripting code is activated every time a transaction is sent to it.
• The financial applications, however, only scratch the surface of what Ethereum, and cryptographic protocols on top of Ethereum can do.
• Incentivized data storage
• Bitmessage and TOR: Bitmessage is a next-generation email protocol that is both decentralized and encrypted.
• Identity and Reputation systems
• Ethereum does not intend to be the end of all cryptocurrency innovation; it intends to be the beginning.
• There is an important distinction compared to Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies: here, the eventual supply is unlimited. The "permanent linear inflation" model is designed to make ether neither inflationary or deflationary; the lack of a supply cap is intended to dampen some of the speculative and wealth-inequality effects of existing currencies, but at the same time the linear, rather than traditionally exponential, inflation model will mean, that the effective inflation rate tends to zero over time.
• Ethereum offers no solution for the fundamental scalability problem in all blockchain-based cryptocurrencies - namely, the fact that every full node must store the entire balance sheet and verify every transaction. For that, technology like Eli Ben-Sasson's Secure Computational Integrity and Privacy (SCIP), now under development, will be required.
• If it turns out that proof-of-stake or some other proof-of-work algorithm is a better solution, the future cryptocurrencies may use proof-of-stake algorithms like MC2 and Slasher instead. If there is room for an Ethereum 2.0, it is in these areas that the improvements will lie.
• The only limit is our imagination.

Self-Enforcing contracts and factum law
Ethereum blog
February 24, 2014

• Nick Szabo in 2005. In essence, the definition of a smart contract is simple: a smart contract is a contract that enforces itself.
• So far, the evolution of money has followed three stages: commodity money, commodity-backed money, and fiat money:
• Commodity money is simple: it's money that is valuable because it is simultaneously a commodity that has some "intrinsic" use value. Silver and Gold are perfect examples, and in more traditional societies we also have tea, salt (etymology note: this is where the word "salary" comes from), seashells and the like.
• Commodity-backed money: banks issuing certificates that are valuable because they are redeemable for gold.
• The Fiat money: the money has value largely because the government issuing it accepts that money, and only that money, as payment for taxes and fees, alongside several other legal privileges.
• Factum money is simply a balance sheet, with a few rules on how that balance sheet can be updated, and that money is valid among that set of users which decides to accept it. Bitcoin is the first example.
• The main promise of factum money, in fact, is precisely the fact that it meshes so well with smart contracts.
• One example is a domain-name sale;  a domain, like google.com, is a factum asset, since it's backed by a abase on a server that only carries any weight because we accept it, and money can obviously be factum as well.
• Decentralized exchange is another example, and we can also do financial contracts such as hedging and leverage trading.
• Blockchains don't have any way of accessing the physical word.
• How will this be better than the current system?
• In a cryptographically enabled factum law system, being a judge simply requires having a public key and a computer with internet access.

On Silos
Ethereum blog
December 31, 2014

• Not only is fragmentation not bad at all, but rather it's inevitable, and arguably the only way that this space can reasonably prosper.
• Agree to disagree
• We fragment because we disagree.
• I consider Bitcoin's $600 million/year wasted electricity on proof of work to be an utter environmental and economic tragedy.
• I believe ASICs are a serious problem, and that as a result of them Bitcoin has become qualitatively less secure over the past two years.
• Some people see cryptocurrency as a capitalist revolution, others seee it as an egalitarian revolution, and others see everything in between.
• It will turn out that the properties of some systems are better suited for some applications, and other systems better suited for other applications, and everything will naturally specialize into those use cases where it works best.
• Cryptocurrency projects generally all build a blockchain, a currency, and a client of their own, although forking a simple client is common for the less innovative cases. Name-registration and identity-management systems are now a dime a dozen.
• Imagine identities being automatically transferrable across any crypto-networks, as long as they use the same underlying cryptographic algorithms (e.g., ECDSA + SHA3)

Superrationality and DAOs
Ethereum blog
January 23, 2015

• Given the established result from Machine Learning that much larger performance gains can be made by increasing the data size than by tweaking the algorithm.
• In the real world, many two-party prisoner's dilemmas on the small scale are resolved through the mechanism of trade and the ability of a legal system to enforce contracts and laws.
• Essentially, it is cognitively hard to convincingly fake being virtuous while being greedy whenever you can get away with it, and so it makes more sense for you to actually be virtuous.
• A virtuous strategy:
• 1. Try to determine if the other party is virtuous.
• 2. If the other party is virtuous, cooperate.
• 3. If the other party is not virtuous, defect.
• The common adage that you should never trust someone who doesn't drink.
• The internet does a great job of reducing information asymmetries and offering transparency.
• Online, we are much less "leaky" even as individuals, and so once again it is easier to appear virtuous while intending to cheat.
• Futarchy: various forms of democracy.
• The reason why organizations make themselves decentralized/leaky is so that others will trust them more, and so organizations that fail to do this will be excluded from the economic benefits of this "circle of trust".
• Anything related to information asymmetries falls squarely within the scope, and this scope is large indeed; as society becomes more and more complex, cheating will in many ways become progressively easier and easier to do and harder to police or even understand; the modern financial system is just one example. Perhaps the true promise of DAOs, if there is any promise at all, is precisely to help with this.

The value of Blockchain Technology
Ethereum blog
April 13, 2015

• Silk Road, the online anonymous drug marketplace that was shut down by law enforcement in late 2013, processed over $1 billion in sales during its two and a half years of operations, and while the payment-system-orchestrated blockade against WikiLeaks was in progress, Bitcoin and Litecoin donations were responsible for the bulk of its revenue.
• 
  
  
  In the long tail, blockchains are not necessary; they are convenient 
  
  
• A blockchain is a magic computer that anyone can upload programs to and leave the programs to self-execute, where the current and all previous states of every program are always publicly visible, and which carries a very strong crypto economically secured guarantee that programs running on the chain will continue to execute in exactly the way that the blockchain protocol specifies.
• Malboge : langage le plus difficile et le plus exotique
• Blockchains: they're about creating the freedom to create a new mechanism with a new ruleset extremely quickly and pushing it out.
• The currency is there simply as economic plumbing to incentivize consensus participation, hold deposits, and pay transaction fees, not as the center-stage point of speculative mania, consumer interest and excitement.
• Requiring a software update to pass through a public one-month waiting period.
• You can build applications that very easily and efficiently take advantage of the data produced by others applications. (Combining payments and reputation systems is perhaps the largest gain here)
• Blockchains are obviously valuable in finance, as finance is perhaps the most simultaneously computationally and trust-intensive industry in the world.
• ...making sure that these services are built correctly and that their governance process does not put a few private entities in position of extreme power is of utmost importance. Right now, many of these systems are built in a highly centralized fashion, and this is part simply due to the fact that the original design of the World Wide Web failed to realize the importance of these services and include defaults - and so, even today, most websites ask you to "sign in with Google" or "sign in with Facebook", and certificate authorities run into problems.
• An M-of-N system is one in which, for instance, ether are some number N keys to a lock and, of those, M keys are needed to unlock it.
• This concept of social multisignature backup is perhaps one of the most powerful mechanisms to use in any kind of decentralized system design, and provides a very high amount of security very cheaply and without relying on centralized trust.
• Identity is not the only problem that blockchains can alleviate. Another component, intimately tied up with identity, is reputation.
• A decentralized reputation system would ideally consist of two separate layers: data and evaluation.
• "Zero-knowledge" reputation systems that allow a user to provide some kind of cryptographic certificate proving that they have at least x reputation points according to a particular metric without revealing anything else are promising.
• The last forty years of software development has been a history of moving to progressively less and less efficient programming languages and paradigms solely because they allow developers to be less experienced and lazier.

PART 2: PROOF OF WORK

Why Cryptoeconomics and X-Risk researchers should listen to each other more
medium.com/atVitalikButerin
July 4, 2016

• Ralph Merkle, inventor of the now famous crytographic technology which undermines Etheneum's light-client protocol.
• Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn
• The core problem of consensus asks how to incentivize validators to continue supporting and growing a coherent history using a simple algorithm that is set in stone, when the validators themselves are highly complex economic agents that are free to interact in arbitrary ways.
• Quadratic voting is a mechanism in which voters can vote with multiple tokens, but the more tokens one votes with, the less power each token has. It is a system that seeks to account for intensity of preference while counteracting a plutocracy by those who simply hold the most tokens.
• The biggest lesson to learn from the crypto community is that of decentralization itself: have different teams implement different pieces redundantly, so as to minimize the chance that an oversight from one system will pass through the other systems undetected.

A Proof-of-Stake design Philosophy 
medium.com/atVitalikButerin
December 30, 2016

• Systems like Ethereum, (and Bitcoin, and NXT, and BitShares etc...) are a fundamentally new class of crypto economic organisms- decentralized, juridiction-less entities that exist entirely in cyberspace, maintained by a combination of cryptography, economics and social consensus. They are kind of like BitTorrent, but they are also not like BitTorrent, as BitTorrent has no concept of state - a distinction that turns out to be crucially important. They are sometimes described as decentralized autonomous corporations, but they are also not quite corporations - you can't hard fork  Microsoft. They are kind of like open-source software projects, but they are not quite that either - you can fork a blockchain, but not quite as easily as you can fork OpenOffice.
• One well-known example is the maximalist vision of proof of work, where "the" correct blockchain, singular, is defined as the chain that miners have burned the largest amount of economic capital to create.
• BitShares' delegated proof of stake presents another coherent philosophy, where everything once again flows from one single tenet, but one that can be described even more simply: shareholders vote.
• Casper PoS is the algorithm designed to support Atheneum's conversion to proof of stake, using a betting system to prevent malicious actors.
• Cypherpunk philosophy is fundamentally about leveraging this precious asymmetry to create a world that better preserves the autonomy of the individual, and crypto economics is to some extent an extension of that, except this time protecting the safety and liveness of complex systems of coordination and collaboration, rather than simply the integrity and confidentiality of private messages. Systems that consider themselves ideological heirs to the cypherpunk spirit should maintain this basic property, and be much more expensive to destroy or disrupt than they are to use and maintain.
• The "cypherpunk" spirit" isn't just about idealism; making systems that are easier to defend than they are to attack is also simply sound engineering.
• On medium-to-long time scales, humans are quite good at consensus.
• Proof-of-work necessarily operates on a logic of massive power incentivized into existence by massive rewards.
• The "one-sentence philosophy" of proof of stake is thus not "security comes from burning energy", but rather "security comes from putting up economic value-at-loss".
• Economics is not everything.
• In Ethereum, "uncle blocks" are incomplete blocks not ultimately added to the main chain. Miners receive a reward for producing these, however - a kind of consolation prize for how their failed efforts contribute to the security of the system as a whole.

The Meaning of Decentralization
medium.com/atVitalikButerin
February 6, 2017

• Blockchains are politically decentralized (no one controls them) and architecturally decentralized (no infrastructural central point of failure) but they are logically centralized (there is one commonly agreed state and the system behaves like a single computer)
• Juan Bent from IPFS
• "Collusion" is coordination that we don't like.
• Can we really say that the uncoordinated-choice model is realistic when 90% of the Bitcoin network's mining power is well -coordinated enough to show up together at the same conference?

Scaling Bitcoin Conference

• Bitcoin's core developers generally speak English but miners generally speak Chinese can be viewed as a happy accident, as it creates a kind of "bicameral" governance that makes coordination more difficult.
• Decentralization as undesired-coordination avoidance, is thus perhaps the most difficult to achieve, and tradeoffs are unavoidable. Perhaps the best solution may be to rely heavily on the one group that is guaranteed to be fairly decentralized: the protocol's users.

Notes on Blockchain governance
vitalik.ca
December 17, 2017

• Explicit on-chain governance is typically touted as having several major advantages. First, unlike the highly conservative philosophy espoused by Bitcoin, it can evolve rapidly and accept needed technical improvements.
• While all blockchains offer financial incentives for maintaining consensus on their ledgers, no blockchain has a robust on-chain mechanism that seamlessly amends the rule governing its protocol and rewards protocol development. As a result, first-generation blockchains empower de facto, centralized core development teams or miners to formulate design choices.
• Generally speaking, there are two informal models of governance, that I will call the "decision function" view of the governance and the "coordination" view of the governance.
• The decision function view is often useful as an approximation.
• The coordination model of the governance, in contrast, see governance as something that exist in layers. The bottom layer is, in the real world, the laws of physics themselves (as a geopolitical realist would say, guns and bombs), and in the blockchain space we can abstract a bit further and say that it is each individual's ability to run whatever software they want in their capacity as a user, miner, stakeholder, validator, or whatever other kind of agent a blockchain protocol allows them to be. The bottom layer is always the ultimate deciding layer.

A Byzantine general rallying his troop forward. The purpose of this ins't just to make the soldiers feel brave and excited, but also to reassure them that everyone else feels brave and excited and will charge forward as well, so an individual soldier is not just committing suicide by charging forward alone.

• The use of this example is an ode to the Byzantine generals problem in game theory: A circle of armies surround Byzantium, and they all need to attack at the same time to win. If they lack a secure means of communicating with each other, how can they coordinate a simultaneous attack?
• Tightly coupled voting and loosely coupled voting are competitors in the governance-mechanism space.
• Low voter participation: One of the main criticisms of coin-voting mechanisms so that is that, no matter where they are tried, they end to have very low voter participation.
• Low voter participation means two things. First, the vote has a harder time achieving a perception of legitimacy, because it only reflects the views of a small percentage of people. Second, an attacker with only a small percentage of all. coins can sway the vote.
• All of these projects have founders or foundations with large premises, and these act as a large centralized actors that are interested in their platforms' success that are not vulnerable to bribes, and hold enough coins to outweigh most bribes attacks.
• Bitcoin, store-of-value ("holding") and medium-of-exchange use ("buying coffees") are naturally in conflict, as the store-of-value use case prizes security much more than the medium-of-exchange use case, which more strongly values usability;
• "" is a term of art in crypto lexicon that refers to someone furiously trying to type "hold" to keep others from selling when a token's price drops. It is a rallying cry most associated with price-focused traders; in the culture of Ethereum, the corresponding meme is "BUIDL", a call to respond to setbacks by building better, more usable tools.
• The leading alternative seems to be core-developer consensus, however the failure mode of a system being controlled by "ivory tower intellectuals" who care more about abstract philosophies and solutions that sound technically impressive over and above real day-t-day concerns like user experience and transactions fees is , in my view, also a real threat to be taken seriously.
• The approach for blockchain governance that I advocate is "multifactorial consensus", where different coordination flags and different mechanisms and groups are polled, and the ultimate decision depends on the collective results of all these mechanisms together.

On Collusion
vitalik.ca
April 3, 2019

• Incentivizing online content creation is something that very many people care about.
• Bribing attacks may sound farfetched (who here has ever accepted a bribe in real life?), but in a mature ecosystem they are much more realistic than they seem. In most contexts where bribing has taken place in the blockchain space, the operators use a euphemistic new name to give the concept a friendly face; : it's not a bribe, it's a "staking pool" that shares dividends".
• There is the possibility of a "negative bribe" (i.e., blackmail or correction)
• Gitcoin is a funding platform for building open-source software, particularly in the Ethereum ecosystem.
• Cooperative game theory.
• Majority games, formally described as game of n agents where any subset of more than half of them can capture a fixed reward and split it among themselves, a set eerily similar to many situations in corporate governance, politics, and other situations in human life, are part of that set of inherently unstable game.
• Identity-free and Collusion-safe game design.

On Free Speech
vitalik.ca
April 16, 2019

• Bitcoin is not a democracy. Not of miners, not of nodes. One of the greta things about Bitcoin is its lack of democracy.
• Governmental power is not the only kind of power that we need protection from.
• We have the Bitcoin community block-size schism, a highly acrimonious fork and chain split, and now a cold peace between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.
• Craig Wright, a scammer claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto.
• Online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube already engage in active selection through algorithms that influence what people are more likely to be recommended. Typically, they do this for selfish reasons, setting up their algorithms to maximize "engagement" with their platform.

Control as Liability
vitalik.ca
May 9, 2019

• Control over users' data and digital possessions and activity is rapidly moving from an asset to a liability.
• If you exhibit control over your users' cryptocurrency, you are a money transmitter.
• If you build a wallet where the user holds their private keys, you really are still "just a software provider".
• We're definitely very far from having explored the full range of possibilities that more decentralized approaches offer.
• What this trend in regulation does, however, is to give a big nudge in favor of those applications that are willing to take the centralization-minimizing, user-sovereignty-maximizing "can't be evil" route.
• The movement for minimizing needed centralization and maximizing users' control of their own assets, private keys, and data a surprisingly strong hand to execute on its vision.

PART 3: PROOF OF STAKE

• Crypto communities were experimenting with new kinds of governance and decision-making processes - voting systems that balance the power of tokens and people, identity systems based on relationships among users rather than their relationship to the state.

Credible neutrality as a guiding principle
NakamotoJanuary 3, 2020

• We are entering a hyper-networked, hyper-intermediated, and rapidly evolving Information Age, in which centralized institutions are losing public trust and people are searching for alternatives.
• "Credible neutrality": Essentially, a mechanism is credibly neutral if just by looking at the mechanisms design, it is easy to see that the mechanism does not discriminate for or against any specific people.
• Capitalism discriminates in favor of concentrated interests and the wealthy, and against the poor and those who rely heavily on public goods.
• Mechanisms such as blockchains, political systems, and social media are designed to facilitate cooperation across large, and diverse, groups of people.
• Most bits of information in the output should come from the participants' inputs, not from hard-coded rules inside the mechanism itself.

Coordination, Good and Bad
vitalik.ca
September 11, 2021

• Coordination can be improved in many ways: faster spread of information, better norms that identify what behaviors are classified as cheating along with more effective punishments, stronger and more powerful organizations, tools like smart contracts that allow interactions with reduced level of trust, governance technologies (voting, shares, decisions markets...)
• "collusion" to refer "undesired coordination"
• Evaluate intentions, not actions (!!)
• Decentralization as anti-collusion
• The blockchain experience shows how designing protocols is institutionally decentralized architectures can often be a very valuable thing.
• Forking as counter-coordination.
• There are two core operating principles that we can use to achieve this end: (1) supporting counter-coordination and (2) skin in the game.
• In digital systems such as blockchains (this could also be applied to more mainstream systems - e.g. DNS), a major and crucially important form of counter-coordination is forking.
• The domain name system is one component of the internet, which is otherwise quite decentralized, that is centralized. The early blockchain project Namecoin sought to provide a decentralized replacement. The Ethereum Name Service does this within the Ethereum ecosystem, using domain that end in .eth.
• Another class of collusion-resistance strategy is the idea of skin in the game.
• Markets are in general very powerful tools precisely because they maximize skin in the game.

Prediction markets: Tales from the election
vitalik.ca
February 18, 2021

• Futarchy: la futarchie est une forme de gouvernement dans laquelle les élus définissent les mesures du bien-être national et les marchés de prédiction sont utilisés pour déterminer quelles politiques auront l'effet le plus positif.
• And as Augur and Omen, and more recently Polymarket, have shown, prediction markets are a fascinating application of blockchains.
• I saw more and more arguments from Very Smart People whom I respected arguing that the markets were in fact irrational and I should participate and bet against them if I can.
• The heuristic that if a viewpoint seems clever and contrarian then it is likely to be correct.
• I decided to keep my ETH price exposure the same by opening up a Collateralized Debt Position (CDP, now also called a "vault") on MakerDAO.
• A CDP is how all the DAI is generated: users deposits their ETH into a smart contract, and are allowed to withdraw an amount of newly-generated DAI up to two-thirds of the value of ETH that they put in. They can get their ETH back by sending back the same amount of DAI that they withdrew plus an extra interest fee (currently 3,5%). If the value of the ETH collateral that you deposited drops to less than 150% the value of the DAI you withdrew, anyone can come in and "liquidate" the value, forcibly selling the ETH to buy back the DAI and charging you a high penalty. Hence, it's a good idea to have a high collateralization ration in case of sudden price movements.
• Capital costs: the inconvenience and opportunity cost of locking up large amounts of money.
• Many people (and smart people in particular) have a pathology that they suffer from excessive humility, and too easily conclude that if no one else has taken some action, then there must therefore be a good reason why the action is not worth taking.
• We should be much more willing to act on the results of our reasoning, even when the result suggests that the great majority of the population is irrational or lazy or wrong about something.
• When I had originally started working on Ethereum, I was at first beset by fear that there must be some very good reason the project was doomed to fail.
• "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity" Yeats.
• It seems clear to me that spreading a society-wide message that the solution is to simply trust the existing outputs of the society, wether those come in the form of academic institutions, media, governments, or markets, is not the solution. All of these institutions can only work precisely because of the presence of the individuals who think that they do not work, or who think that they can be wrong some of the time.
• The conclusion is clear: when decisions are close and when there is a lot of noise, it turns out that it only makes sense to invest a small portion your money in a market.
• We should be wary of assuming that futarchy will propel us to new heights of decision-making accuracy.
• Crypto is a young ecosystem. It is an ecosystem that is still quite disconnected from the mainstream.

Over time, participants that are good at making correct guesses will come to dominate the ecosystem.

• Trial-by-first-test.

The most important scarce resource is legitimacy
vitalik.ca
March 23, 2021

• Bitcoin-ecosystem R&D is largely funded by companies (with $250 million raised so far), and about fifty-seven employees.
• The organisms that are the Bitcoin and Ethereum ecosystems are capable of summoning up billions of dollars of capital, but have strange and hard-to-understand restrictions on where the capital can go.
• Ethereum Classic is the branch of the Ethereum blockchain that did not adopt the "hard fork" and erase the 2016 hack of The DAO. Before that event it is the same as Ethereum; after the event it diverges.
• ENS is the Ethereum Name Service, the registrar for .eth domains widely used in the Ethereum ecosystem. A "root multisig" is an Ethereum wallet that controls a particular contract, in this case the contract governing the ENS system.
• The two largest parts of an NFT's value are (i) pride in holding the NFT and ability to show off your ownership, and (ii) the possibility of selling it in the future. It's really important that whatever NFT you buy is recognized as legitimate by everyone else.
• There is little appetite in the Ethereum community for enriching a small group of early adopters.
• An interesting case study is the case of Tether vs. DAI. Tether has many scandals, but despite this, traders use Tether to hold and move around dollars all the time. The more decentralized and transparent DAI excels is applications: Augur uses DAI, xDAI uses DAI, PoolTogether uses DAI, zk.money plans to use DAI, and the list goes on. What dapps use USDT? Far fewer.

Against overuse of the Gini coefficient
vitalik.ca
July 29, 2021

• The Gini coefficient (also called the Gini index) is by far the most popular and widely known measure of inequality, typically used to measure inequality of income or wealth in some country, territory or other community.
• Wealth concentration within the blockchain space in particular is an important problem, and it's a problem worth measuring and understanding. It's important fro the blockchain space as a whole as many people (and US Senate hearings) are trying to figure out to what extent crypto is truly anti-elitist and to what extent it's just replacing old elites with new ones.
  
  Share of coins explicitly allocated to specific insiders in a cryptocurrency's initial supply is one type of inequality
  
  
• An internet community measured inequality can come from two sources: (i) inequality in total resources available to different participants, and (ii) inequality in level of interest in participating in the community.
• log(x) is popular because it captures the intuitively appealing approximation that doubling one's income is about as useful at any level: going from $10,000 to $20,000 adds the same utility as going from $5,000 to $10,000 or from $40,000 to $80,000.
• For cryptocurrency communities - where concentration of the resources is one of the biggest risk to the system, but someone having only 0.00013 coins is not any kind of evidence that they're actually starving - adopting indices like this is the obvious approach.

Moving beyond coin-voting governance
vitalik.ca
August 16, 2021

• Ethereum continued developing harmoniously because of strong legitimacy of its pre-existing road map (basically: "proof of stake and sharing"), and sophisticated application-layer projects that required anything more did not yet exist.
• Daily mining issuance rewards from Ethereum are about 13,500 ETH, or about $40million, per day.
• Was Bitcoin really a fair launch considering how few people had a chance to even hear about it by the time one-fourth of the supply had already been handed out by the end of 2010?
• RAI is stable coin (unlike DAI and USDT) is not pegged to a "fiat" currency like the US dollar. It seeks greater stability while still being reflective of changes in the underlying crypto markets.
• They are two primary types of issues with coin voting that I worry about: (i) inequalities and incentive misalignments even in the absence of attackers, and (ii) outright attacks through various forms of (often obfuscated) vote buying.
• Small group of wealthy participants ("whales") are better at successfully executing decisions than large groups of small-holders: this is because of the tragedy of the commons among small-holders: each small-holder has only an insignificant influence on the outcome, and so they have little incentive to not be lazy and actually vote.
• Can crypto protocols be considered public goods if ownership is concentrated in the hands of a few whales?
• A token in a protocol with coin voting is a bundle of two rights that recombined into a single asset: (i) some kind of economic interest in the protocol's revenue and (ii) the right to participate in governance. This combination is deliberate: the goal is to align power and responsibility. But in fact, these two rights are very easy to unbundle from each other.
  
  
  
  
  
• Proof of Personhood: see Proof of Humanity and BrightID.
• Proof of Participation: see POAP. There are also two hybrid possibilities: one example is quadratic voting, which makes the power of a single voter proportional to the square root of the economic resources that they commit to a decision.
• Skin in the Game: Coin voting fails because while voters are collectively accountable for their decisions (if everyone votes for a terrible decision, everyone's coins drop to zero), each voter is not individually accountable (if a terrible decision happens, those who supported it suffer no more than those who opposed it). Can we make a voting system that changes this dynamic, and makes voters individually, and not just collectively, responsible for their decisions?
• The most important thing that can be done today is moving away from the idea that coin voting is the only legitimate form of governance decentralization.

Trust models

vitalik.ca

August 20, 2021

• One of the most valuable properties of many blockchain applications is trustlessness: the ability of the application to continue operating in an expected way without needing to rely on a specific actor to behave in a specific way even when their interests might change and push them to act in some different, unexpected way in the future.
• A blockchain with a few miners or validators dominating the network is much less interesting than a blockchain with its miners or validators widely distributed.
• Trusting that one particular person (or organization) will work as expected is very different from trusting that some single person anywhere will do what you expect them to do.
• In blockchains, the two most common types of failure are liveness failure and safety failure. A liveness failure is an event in which you are temporarily unable to do something you want to do. A safety failure is an event in which something actively happens that the system was meant to prevent (e.g., an invalid block gets included in a blockchain)
• ZK Rollup: no safety-failure risks.
• ZK Rollup (with light-withdrawal enhancement): no liveness-failure risks; no safety-failure risks.

Crypto cities
vitalik.ca
October 31, 2021

• Many national governments around the world are showing themselves to be inefficient and slow-moving in response to long-running problems and rapid changes in people's underlying needs. In short, many national governments are missing live players.
• Using blockchains to create more trusted, transparent, and verifiable versions of existing processes.
• Using blockchains to implement new and experimental forms of ownership for land and other scarce assets, as well as new and experimental forms of democratic governance.
• Blockchain-based systems are efficient in a way that paper is not, and publicly verifiable in a way that centralized computing systems are not - a necessary combination if you want to make a new form of voting that allows citizens to give high-volume real-time feedback on hundreds or thousands of different issues.
• The idea of governments creating a white-listed internal-use only stable coin for tracking internal government payments.
• Voting could be done on-chain: sophisticated solution combining blockchains, zero-knowledge proofs, and other cryptography is needed to achieve all the desired privacy and security properties.
• There is an inevitable political tension between a home as a place to live and a home as an investment asset.
• Twenty-first-century digital democracy through real-time online quadratic voting and funding could plausibly do a much better job than twentieth-century democracy, which seems in practice to have been largely characterized by rigid building codes and obstruction at planning and permitting hearings.
• Transactions fees are expected to quickly decrease very soon from rollups and sharding.
• If strong privacy is required, blockchains can be combined with zero-knowledge cryptography to give privacy and security at the same time.

Soulbound
Vitalik.ca
January 26, 2022

• A soulbound item, once picked up, cannot be transferred or sold to another player.
• NFTs in their current form have many of the same properties as rare and epic items in a massively multiplayer online game. They have social signaling value: people who have them can show them off, and there are more and more tools precisely to help users to do that. Very recently, Twitter started rolling out an integration that allows users to show off their NFTs on their picture profile.
• But what exactly are these NFTs signaling? Certainly, one part of the answer is some kind of skill in acquiring NFTs and knowing which NFTs to acquire. But because NFTs are tradable items, another big part of the answer inevitably becomes that NFTs are about signaling wealth.
• But what if we want to create NFTs that are not just about who has the most money, and that actually try to signal something else?
• Perhaps the best example of a project trying to do this is POAP, the “proof of attendance protocol”. POAP is a standard by which projects can send NFTs that represent the idea that the recipient personally participated in some event.
• They are interested in whether or not you personally attended that event.
• There is a large and under-explored design space of what non-transferable NFTs could become.
• There are very bad things that can easily happen to governance mechanisms if governance is easily transferable.
• Proverb: “Those who most want to rule people are those least suited to do it”.
• So what if we try to make governance rights non-transferable?
• What if DAO governance of blockchain protocols could somehow make governance power conditional on participation?
• Perhaps the one NFT that is the most non-transferable today is Proof of Humanity attestation.
• Proof of Humanity is a project designed to establish unique human identities on a blockchain without relying on central authorities such as governments or corporations. It is used by other crypto projects that need to confirm the personhood of participants.
• Proof of Humanity profiles are de facto soulbound, and infrastructure built on top of them could allow for on-chain items in general to be soulbound to particular humans.
• Cryptographically strong privacy for transferable items is fairly easy to understand: you take your coins, put them into tornado.cash or a similar platform, and withdraw them into a fresh account.
• Whereas normally a blockchain like Ethereum publishes the senders and recipients of all transactions, Tornado Cash is a protocol that enables private transactions by masking the link between sender and receiver.
• Merkle trees are a cryptographic technique, central to the design of Ethereum, used to verify that a set of data has not been tampered with. A Merkle branch is part of such a tree. 
• ZK-SNARK stands for “Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge”. It is a technique for providing cryptographic evidence that a party holds certain information without revealing what that information is.
• A common criticism of the “web3” space as it exists today is how money-oriented everything is.
• Making more items in the crypto space “soulbound” can be one path toward an alternative, where NFTs can represent much more of who you are and not just what you can afford.
• However, there are technical challenges to doing this, and an “uneasy interface” between the desire to limit or prevent transfers and a blockchain ecosystem where so far all the standards are designed around maximum transferability. Attaching items to “identity objects” that users are either unable (as with Proof of Humanity profiles) or unwilling (as with ENS names) to trade away seems like the most promising path, but challenges remain in making this easy to use, private and secure. We need more effort on thinking through and solving these challenges. If we can, this open a much wider door to blockchains being at the center of ecosystems that are collaborative and fun, and not just about money.

Mon vingtième marathon

Beaucoup de difficultés pour finir ce vingtième marathon. Autant le départ a été facile jusqu'au vingt troisième kilomètre, mais après le trentième, la course a été très difficile. 

Les temps de passage sont :

• Km 10 : 51'
• Km 21 : 1h 51'
• Km 30 : 2h 45'
• Km 42,195 : 4h26'

Les douze derniers kilomètres sont les plus durs et c'est là qu'on se paye le mur du marathon !

Plusieurs explications sont possibles pour ce mur du marathon : soit un manque d'entrainements sur des distances longues (supérieur ou égal à 32 km), un départ trop rapide (semi-marathon en 1h51), soit le fait que je n'ai pris aucun ravitaillement solide sur la course hormis la barre de céréale au kilomètre 15, soit le fait que mes intestins n'étaient pas vidés :=(

En arrière plan : Fourvière 

Les supporters étaient présents et cela s'est terminé dans un bouchon lyonnais.

Le principal étant quand même de finir en 4h26 minutes. Toujours une très grande satisfaction de passer la ligne d'arrivée, récupérer la médaille et le T-Shirt finisher !

Les résultats officiels