The Control - Issue #40
An unappreciated benefit of falling cryptocurrency prices this year may be that original thinking and creativity can be appropriately rewarded again. The last price boom saw an unhealthy amount of regurgitated ideas rewarded, and the aftermath of that is now being felt by a lot of projects and funds not being able to deliver on their promises.
The good news is that there continues to be lots of new ideas being experimented and tested. Just like Ethereum and ERC20 came out of nowhere to lead the last bull market in the space, it's likely that some other new idea comes out of nowhere to lead the next bull run.
Required reading this week
Introduction to Privacy-Preserving Smart Contracts — medium.com
A great overview of different approaches to privacy in smart contracts such as trusted execution environments, secure multi-party computation, and zero-knowledge proofs.
What is Identity? Self-sovereign Identity and the Blockchain — medium.com
An explanation of the concept of identity through a philosophical lens, followed by the application of identity to blockchains and the idea of self-sovereign identity.
Layer 1 Should Be Innovative in the Short Term but Less in the Long Term — vitalik.ca
Vitalik talks about the tradeoffs between building more functionality into the base-layer blockchains themselves (Layer 1) vs. protocols that live on top of blockchains (Layer 2).
Why is EVM-on-Plasma hard? — medium.com
An outline for why full EVM support on Plasma is non-trivial and some suggestions for what could be done to create a Plasma chain capable of running more general smart contracts.
Gambling Can Save Science — marginalrevolution.com
The idea of using prediction markets like Augur to gauge the quality of scientific theories has been validated in a new study.
1confirmation portfolio reading this week
AMA recap: bloXroute CTO on Its Tech and Future Applications — medium.com
A recap of bloXroute CTO Soumya Basu's AMA from Reddit and Telegram.
Foundation Proposal v2 — medium.com
Based on community feedback, the Maker Foundation has updated its governance proposal in the lead up to the first-ever MKR vote on September 12.