The Blockchain Socialist

I interviewed Vitalik Buterin about his thoughts on the political aspects of crypto. It was a candid discussion about his book "Proof of Stake", the evolution of Ethereum, and the dangers of the far right.Although our discussion happened just before the current scandal with FTX, there were many relevant threads. History has shown that similar types of events can create openings for radicalization and it's important that we make the appropriate moves to tamp down the fascistic tendencies in this space. This is the second half of the full 2.5 hour long discussion we had. Although you don't have to, I'd recommend listening to the first half of the interview which you should be able to find it on whichever platform you're listening to this episode.Very big thank you to alritedi for helping produce this episode . You can hear his music throughout the episode and find his music through his linktree.If you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you find content like this important consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month. It takes quite a lot of my time and resources so any amount helps. Follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist) or Mastodon (@theblockchainsocialist@social.coop) and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit and Discord to join the discussion.Send me your questions or comments about the show and I'll read them out sometime. Support the showICYMI I've written a book about, no surprise, blockchains through a left political framework! The title is Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It and is being published through Repeater Books, the publishing house started by Mark Fisher who’s work influenced me a lot in my thinking. The book is officially published and you use this linktree to find where you can purchase the book based on your region / country.

I interviewed Vitalik Buterin about his thoughts on the political aspects of crypto. It was a candid discussion about his book "Proof of Stake", the evolution of Ethereum, and the dangers of the far right.Although our discussion happened just before the current scandal with FTX, there were many relevant threads. History has shown that similar types of events can create openings for radicalization and it's important that we make the appropriate moves to tamp down the fascistic tendencies in this space. This is just the first half of the full 2.5 hour long discussion we had. The second half of the interview will be released next week, or if you can't wait that long, you can listen to the full interview already through Patreon, or the crypto native way via Unlock Protocol on my website. To do this you will need to buy a Membership NFT with BREAD tokens on the Polygon network. You can get the tokens with DAI here and learn more about the application here. The NFT works similar to Patreon in that it allows a monthly recurring payment of 10 BREAD, but will give access to all future paid content directly on this website. You only need to pay 10 BREAD for access to this interview and continuously only if you want to support and get access to future bonus content.If in the past you have purchased an NFT on Mirror from a Breadchain Cooperative article, you've also been airdropped a membership NFT to the same wallet and should be able to access the full interview without paying. Very big thank you to alritedi for helping produce this episode . You can hear his music throughout the episode and find his music through his linktree.If you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you find content like this important consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month. It takes quite a lot of my time and resources so any amount helps. Follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist) or Mastodon (@theblockchainsocialist@social.coop) and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit and Discord to join the discussion.Send me your questions or comments about the show and I'll read them out sometime. Support the showICYMI I've written a book about, no surprise, blockchains through a left political framework! The title is Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It and is being published through Repeater Books, the publishing house started by Mark Fisher who’s work influenced me a lot in my thinking. The book is officially published and you use this linktree to find where you can purchase the book based on your region / country.

For this interview I spoke to Eli Zeger (@ezeger16), a  writer, editor, and musician. He is also a worker-owner at Ampled and a member of the Exit to Community Collective.  He recently published a piece for the Zora Zine titled Appetite for Redistribution: Budgeting for All  talking about how blockchains and quadratic funding could be used to facilitate and scale participatory budgeting .During the interview we spoke about the history of public campaign fund matching  in NYC, how the local NYC election system used to be more democratic until the Cold War, and how adding quadratic funding mechanisms could be a powerful tool for democracy.    More from EliRanked Choice Voting in NYCPublic Matching Funds in NYCHow to make voting more truly representativeIf you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you find content like this important consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month. It takes quite a lot of my time and resources so any amount helps. Follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist) and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit and Discord to join the discussion.Send me your questions or comments about the show and I'll read them out sometime. Support the showICYMI I've written a book about, no surprise, blockchains through a left political framework! The title is Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It and is being published through Repeater Books, the publishing house started by Mark Fisher who’s work influenced me a lot in my thinking. The book is officially published and you use this linktree to find where you can purchase the book based on your region / country.

For this interview I spoke to Joshua Citarella (@JoshuaCitarella on social media), an artist, researcher, and Twitch streamer who studies niche online communities. He authored the book the Politigram and the Post-Left exploring esoteric online political beliefs. He has done a lot of work exploring various "e-deologies" and the very online young people who create and subscribe to them.During the interview we discussed the pros and cons of e-deologies, how gamer guilds practice market socialism, and the need to contest spaces, even if they are aestheticized as being right wing. We also spoke about the current problems facing leftwing media and how we have so far settled with allowing platforms like Patreon to essentially be our shared infrastructure rather than creating our own.“E-deology” is an internet slang term used to describe the overuse of prefixes and suffixes to generate complex ideological labels. These hyper-specific categories serve as a gamified form of identity play and niche personal branding in the chaotic landscape of online politics.More from Joshua CitarellaDKP is Market Socialism VideoYung Chomsky on Physical Fitness and the Left PodcastJoshua Citarella's PatreonIf you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you find content like this important consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month. It takes quite a lot of my time and resources so any amount helps. Follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist) and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit and Discord to join the discussion.Send me your questions or comments about the show and I'll read them out sometime. Support the showICYMI I've written a book about, no surprise, blockchains through a left political framework! The title is Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It and is being published through Repeater Books, the publishing house started by Mark Fisher who’s work influenced me a lot in my thinking. The book is officially published and you use this linktree to find where you can purchase the book based on your region / country.

I spoke to Primavera De Filipi (@yaoeo), one of the earliest scholars on law and crypto, Internet activist, and artist. She is permanent researcher at the CNRS and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. She is author of the book Blockchain and the Law published by Harvard University Press.During the interview we spoke about some of the biggest questions facing crypto in regards to the law, her work on Extitutional Theory, and whether code is law. To understand the difference between using an institutional versus an extitutional framework, you can compare them like this: Institutions = roles and rules, membership, well-defined boundaries, procedures and outcomes, competitionExtitutions =  identities and relationships, participation, rhizomatic networks, rituals and processes, cooperationMore sources on Extitutional TheoryAcademic primer on Extitutional TheoryShorter blog post on Introduction to Extitutional TheoryLonger blog post on Extitutional TheoryVery big thank you to alritedi for helping produce this episode . You can hear his music throughout the episode and find his music through his linktree.If you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you find content like this important consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month. It takes quite a lot of my time and resources so any amount helps. Follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist) and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit and Discord to join the discussion.Send me your questions or comments about the show and I'll read them out sometime. Support the showICYMI I've written a book about, no surprise, blockchains through a left political framework! The title is Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It and is being published through Repeater Books, the publishing house started by Mark Fisher who’s work influenced me a lot in my thinking. The book is officially published and you use this linktree to find where you can purchase the book based on your region / country.

You may have heard of Maximal Extractable Value, or MEV, which refers to the extraction of value from Ethereum users by reordering, inserting, and censoring transactions within blocks by block producers. It's become a hot topic of debate on how best to deal with it, however these types of conversations can become very technical very fast. In order to break it down, for this episode I spoke to Luis Bezzenberger (@bezzenberger) who works at Shutter Network, an anti-MEV/front running solution using Distributed Key Generation and threshold encryption. During the episode we spoke about how MEV works at a high level, the different camps on the issue, and how Shutter Network is proposing to deal with MEV. More SourcesRolling Shutter: MEV protection built into Layer 2Announcing Shutter Governance - Shielded Voting for DAOsThread on a "shutterized beacon chain" for EthereumIf you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you find content like this important consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month. It takes quite a lot of my time and resources so any amount helps. Follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist) and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit and Discord to join the discussion.Send me your questions or comments about the show and I'll read them out sometime. Support the showICYMI I've written a book about, no surprise, blockchains through a left political framework! The title is Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It and is being published through Repeater Books, the publishing house started by Mark Fisher who’s work influenced me a lot in my thinking. The book is officially published and you use this linktree to find where you can purchase the book based on your region / country.

I'm not much of an art NFT collector myself, but I do dabble in at least appreciating some NFT art that I find to be interesting in one way or another. So for this episode I spoke to Chainleft, my potential anon online doppelganger, who has recently started a new NFT collection he calls ART PONZI. Having been involved in the NFT space quite early, he is using this collection as a critique of many NFT projects while also testing out very novel mechanisms that few others have dared to try.In the interview we spoke about how he uses his data science skills to help other NFT projects,  why he calls this collection ART PONZI, and why he loves SVG file types for 100% on-chain art. Towards the end we also spoke about the research he calculating the inequality created through Proof of Work versus Proof of Stake consensus mechanisms. His published work  on Mirror showed that Proof of Stake creates less inequality than Proof of Work.If you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you find content like this important consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month. It takes quite a lot of my time and resources so any amount helps. Follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist) and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit and Discord to join the discussion.Send me your questions or comments about the show and I'll read them out sometime. Support the showICYMI I've written a book about, no surprise, blockchains through a left political framework! The title is Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It and is being published through Repeater Books, the publishing house started by Mark Fisher who’s work influenced me a lot in my thinking. The book is officially published and you use this linktree to find where you can purchase the book based on your region / country.

In this bonus episode I give my review of the recent article published titled Decentralized Society: Finding Web3's Soul written by Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, Glen Weyl, and Puja Ohlhaver. The paper received a bit of attention as it goes into some high level details about how the authors view a potential future with the use of blockchains for more non-financial uses. This includes in particular leveraging what Vitalik termed as "soulbound" tokens, or largely non-transferrable NFTs which has been controversial for many.  Instead of taking pundits for their word I took a deep dive into the paper myself and share some of my thoughts on what is being presented in it. This is a teaser of a Patreon bonus episode. Get the full version on Patreon. If you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you find content like this important consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month. It takes quite a lot of my time and resources so any amount helps. Follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist) and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit and Discord to join the discussion.Send me your questions or comments about the show and I'll read them out sometime. Support the showICYMI I've written a book about, no surprise, blockchains through a left political framework! The title is Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It and is being published through Repeater Books, the publishing house started by Mark Fisher who’s work influenced me a lot in my thinking. The book is officially published and you use this linktree to find where you can purchase the book based on your region / country.

For this episode I spoke to Kelsie Nabben (@kelsiemvn), a qualitative researcher on resilience in decentralised technologies and governance at RMIT in Australia. She recently co-wrote a piece titled Aligning the concept of ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organization’ to Precedents in Cybernetics with Michael Zargham whom you may know from a previous episode. Kelsie also publishes on her Substack about  decentralised digital infrastructure, security, and society.During the interview we spoke about her previous work in one of the first crypto applications to do an ICO in Australia, her switch to academia to study decentralised systems more closely, and how cybernetics can be used as a framework for understanding and designing DAOs. The article she co-wrote is probably one of the most interesting pieces I've read on DAOs and highly encourage people to check it out!If you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you find content like this important consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month. It takes quite a lot of my time and resources so any amount helps. Follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist) and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit and Discord to join the discussion.Send me your questions or comments about the show and I'll read them out sometime. Support the showICYMI I've written a book about, no surprise, blockchains through a left political framework! The title is Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It and is being published through Repeater Books, the publishing house started by Mark Fisher who’s work influenced me a lot in my thinking. The book is officially published and you use this linktree to find where you can purchase the book based on your region / country.

About a month ago I did the first live podcast interview in Paris at an event hosted by EBB with two members of Black Swan DAO, a Berlin-based collective pursuing horizontal and decentralised approaches to art-making. Penny Rafferty (@pennny_rafferty) and Calum Bowden (@calsbot) are both artists and the members of the DAO who came to speak with me in Paris. We spoke about the need for collective approaches, their quadratic voting tool, Cygnet, and much more.If you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you find content like this important consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month. It takes quite a lot of my time and resources so any amount helps. Follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist) and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit and Discord to join the discussion.Send me your questions or comments about the show and I'll read them out sometime. Support the showICYMI I've written a book about, no surprise, blockchains through a left political framework! The title is Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It and is being published through Repeater Books, the publishing house started by Mark Fisher who’s work influenced me a lot in my thinking. The book is officially published and you use this linktree to find where you can purchase the book based on your region / country.