Greetings, old friends in the Steem community! For those who don't remember me, I'm Dr. Philip N. Brown, professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. I'm also the creator

One of the central research themes in my study of theory for Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT, or blockchains and cryptocurrencies and the like) is that of Ledger Architecture. But what do I mean by

In the past months, I have been thinking casually about working to establish an overarching theory of distributed ledger technology (DLT). This is the basic term I use to describe cryptocurrencies,

Happy news! As some of you know, I've been hard at work on my PhD for the past 5-6 years, and last week all that work paid off. On May 10th, 2018, I undertook the age-old tradition known as the "PhD

I've been researching IOTA lately, and I've developed a list of 3 core questions that I'd like to have answered about IOTA. IOTA is a cryptocurrency that was founded a few years ago and rose to prominence

I've been slightly out of the loop for a while on this one, as my last two months were essentially swallowed by my (successful!) job search. In the time since I last paid attention to the crypto world,

I'm interested in studying cryptocurrencies and decentralized database systems in a more rigorous, analytical capacity. Toward that end, I've decided to spend the next several months reading up on the

It's been nearly a month since the Ardor blockchain launched, and I'm sad to say that I just don't get it. Years ago I was very interested in Nxt, which was one of the very first pure Proof-of-Stake

Yesterday, SpaceX stuck their uber-rocket Falcon Heavy on pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and turned it on! They had some massive clamps on it to make sure it didn't go anywhere, but I

(If you are not running a confirmer bot, feel free to ignore this message! Keep using Pocket as you always have!) Today Pocket gave me a chance to prove that I'm still around and still paying attention

I live in a very strange place. We call it California's "Central Coast," but geographically it's really more southern than central. It's about a 2 hours' drive north of Los Angeles. If you measure

As I was writing my piece on cryptocurrency pricing, I realized that ICOs have a surprising and peculiar effect on the market capitalization of cryptocurrencies. Let's say Alice has 1 Ether, and Bob has

Lately, I've been having conversation after conversation with friends and family about whether people should buy into cryptocurrency right now. There's such a wild sense in the crypto world of the money-making

Attention space and rocketry fans! SpaceX, Elon Musk's now-famous rocket company, finally appears ready to test-launch its new massive rocket, the Falcon Heavy. This rocket is (on the surface, anyway)

Quick note here about a new coin distribution happening over on bitcointalk: It's a "smart chain" (blockchain system with scripting, a la Ethereum or EOS). It's a fork of QTUM and the devs have

Last week, I wrote this article about trying to catch witnesses doing bad things. In it, I analyzed all the blocks produced by the top-producing witnesses over a long range of block production. During

A couple days ago I wrote a post about various ways in which witnesses could abuse (use?) their positions to extract more profit from the system than they're typically meant to. How would we know if a

My article is completely and deliberately terrible, but I did sneak in a reference to Pocket. Here's a screenshot from the Lunyr Private Alpha: The alpha platform is quite rough, and it's taken me all

The incredible speeds and low costs of using Steem are due to the fact that it uses a consensus mechanism called Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS), which was invented by Dan Larimer (@dan) a few years back

Image courtesy of Ventura Country Fire Department PIO For those who haven't heard, there's a massive devastating wildfire burning right now in Ventura Country, California. I live about 40 minutes downwind