blog of liamz

Welcome to my new blog. You can find my old one here.

Who am I? I'm an independent consultant and researcher, specialising in crypto, product design and the forefront of new technology (zero knowledge proofs, blockchains, and a lil bit of generative AI). See my work.

Currently: consulting, building out ideas (Dappnet, Take), connecting people.

Consulting · Twitter · Github

• How I found my new house through 6 degrees of separation - a post about path dependence.
• I’m a cyborg now! (On Building My Own Artificial Pancreas).
• Empathy.
• Smoking as expressionism.
• Anti-Social Social Media.

Areas of research I’m interested in:

• Emergent value, simulacra, mimetic desire, low-fidelity. Examples: Loot, Nouns.
• Memes, remix culture.
• Attention economy.
• Mimetic gaming.
• P2P reputation, the sybil problem, social signal - PageRank, EigenTrust, Sourecred, EBSL.
• Path dependence.
• Prediction markets.
• Generative AI and societal implications for attention/content.
• Consciousness, information theory, ML theory, simulations. Examples: this, this
• Distributed systems, blockchains, VM’s.

• Second-order effects of generative AI and crypto in the next 5yrs.
• Price floor for influence.
• Derivatives reveal the power of the original.
• Stablecoins that are tied to cultural consumption
• Hardware as the nation state.
  • Every phone with STARK cryptographic coprocessor.
• Selling blockspace = bandwidth in the 2000’s.

• Dappnet: a capture-resistant application network on IPFS and ENS (2022)
• How to measure Polygon’s throughput in terms of gas, instead of an opaque metric like TPS? (2022).
• State sharding using recursive ZK proofs
• ZBTC: Zero-trust wrapped Bitcoin on Ethereum (2019).

I contributed to realising an open-source ZK-STARK prover for Cairo in April 2022. Probably one of my proudest achievements.

• A technical deep dive into STARK’s, Cairo, and StarkNet’s VM/OS/internals.
• What is the anatomy of a STARK proof?
• A dumb primer on recursive ZK proofs
• Loot Fog of War, private-information games, and ZK STARK’s.

• Aelin multichain tokenomics design - I found this cool, since it implicitly issues benefit to stakers via deflation.

• Goliath: horizontally scalable decentralized database network, based on recursive ZK proofs and Google’s Bigtable. I worked on this from Mar-Aug 2022, before Polybase was even ready.
• Gliss: An open-source algorithmic newsfeed. - aka the the Attention Market Maker.
• SugarDAO: the diabetes-collateralised stablecoin - okay this one was a bit of a joke hahaha. But I did end up implementing an on-chain SVG that renders my glucose line - aka the Daobetic.
• TradeUp contract for Loot - a mechanism from CS: Go that I thought was very interesting for on-chain items.

Psychology

• Cunningham’s Law. It worked??
• Anchoring