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Christian

Christian

I write code, do research and think about web3
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Wallet Recovery With No Seed Phrase (but with a wallet password)

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Christian
July 05
Note: this is heavily based off of Ruben from Coinmonk’s 2021 article here. I do not mean to steal credit from a very obviously smart person. However, I am still doing this for 3 reasons. 1, my goal here is for this to be as simple as possible, leave out the complicated disk recovery stuff, and make it more non-tech friendly, 2, the more this info is out there online, the more likely someone is to find it and get use out of it, and 3, there were some details not in that article I found elsewhere, which I included here. In any other case I would not mirror (pun intended) someone else’s article so closely. Thank you Ruben!
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Provenance: The real BTC usecase

Publisher
Christian
February 10
Recently Bitcoin has caught a second wind of activity after the viral success of Ordinals NFTs that make use of bitcoin block space to store their metadata. After a few weeks ordinals have appreciated massively in value and also now consume about 50% of all bitcoin blockspace.
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Selling your soul(bound token)

Publisher
Christian
October 17
Today in crypto there are a number of novel technologies quickly advancing and gaining public interest. ZK technology and its applications, decentralized networks offering services such as compute, data storage and indexing, modular blockchains and many more. These technologies are exciting and often monopolize the attention of the crypto-aware public. One among these trends to briefly take hold of the prevailing narrative were soulbound tokens; developers, twitter threadoors and crypto experts have been dreaming up numerous applications for these tokens since Vitalik published a short report on them in January. Soulbound technology, however, despite sounding shiny and new, is not a novel concept. In fact, the ‘soulbondedness’ of tokens has always been possible (and used many times in the past). The main difference between then and now is the attractive marketing language that shrouds it. In fact, soulbound tokens highlight an important crypto-axiom that will be soon invalidated.
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Decentralization and PoS ETH

Publisher
Christian
September 14
Ethereum after the merge won't be as centralized as you think.
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Realtokenomik: Bear Market Whitepill

Publisher
Christian
July 24
Let’s play a game. Look at the chart below, and guess what the token in question is (pair is against USDT).
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Digital Phoenicians

Publisher
Christian
July 11
From the coast of Canaan, a great many longships cast off towards the Western waters of the Mediterranean. Eventually, they would pass the pillars of Hercules and venture into the waters of the Atlantic, conducting trade and settlement with the West African coast as well as the North of Europe. Their ships had mechanisms not seen before; battering ram bows and reinforced hulls. The adventures these ships undertook brought unthinkable wealth to their captains and owners, placing the unconventional societies they served on par with the mighty empires of their day. Many centuries later, a great army of the descendants of these people would march over the alps and be the only ones to seriously challenge Roman hegemony before the Empire’s eventual collapse.
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Weakest Link

Publisher
Christian
July 01
Recently there has been a wave of DNS hijacking attempts across multiple dApps and public RPC endpoints for entire blockchains. The financial consequences of these events has been nearly zero and they certainly do not compare to some of the recent high profile exploits that have taken place within DeFi and beyond. Exploits of the traditional variety (bridge hacks, flash loan and other economic attacks, social engineering and theft, etc) have been taking place since the dawn of crypto and any rational participant will tell you that they expect these occurrences to both continue and increase in severity. The more capital that’s locked up in a smart contract, the more incentive bad actors have to attack it. But exploits of the traditional variety are not what is most concerning to me. The wave of DNS exploits reveal a playbook for our adversaries that could effectively stop some projects in their tracks if not avoided.
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Avoiding Governance Hell - Finding Governance Heaven

Publisher
Christian
June 14
Crypto and the dweb hold the promise of dragging governance and decision making processes out of boardrooms and out from behind closed doors, thrusting them into the open for all to see, comment on and participate in. The crypto-deam is sometimes portrayed as an egalitarian future in which everyone has a voice and is able to express their concerns and needs to the fullest extent possible. In this hypothetical future, society has been transformed into a kind of digital labor union, with mobs of the common man replacing the committees, boards, bureaus and c-suites that currently run our everyday lives. However in the trajectory of history up until the invention of the internet, there are few instances of true direct democracy being granted to citizens at scales beyond a few dozen people. Handing over control of everything (not just government, but also infrastructure and public goods, private companies, land, etc) to an interconnected web of individual voters could be disastrous without proper precautions being taken beforehand.
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The Real 3pool

Publisher
Christian
May 16
I am a visual learner. Especially when it comes to data. Seeing shapes and colors helps me understand what is going on with a dataset as mathematics are being applied to it. I wanted to apply this to liquidity pools on Uniswap as a way of understanding how the liquidity in these pools behave at a fundamental level and to eventually test a hypothesis that I cannot answer without a visual aid. Uniswap pool visualizations are nothing new; graphs like the below are quite common: