When you are given a problem, the most effective first step is to decompose the problem into sub-problems. Then, the most effective second step is to find the shortest and quickest path to completion. Most problems individuals face, especially those in technical fields, are large and complex. While it can be initially appealing to tackle the entirety of the problem at first glance, and immediately remind yourself of all the general good practices and principles to invoke while solving the problem, it is better to take a step back and ask yourself these questions: (1) How can this larger, more complex problem be divided into sub-problems, each with a distinct deliverable? (2) For each sub-problem, what is the quickest path towards success, sometimes even if it lacks correct principles and might not be the end goal of the larger problem? (3) Will the sub-problems that I created, along with their proposed solutions, be capable of reconciling with one another to solve the initial problem? After this, problems become much more digestable - and often, the quickest path to success utilizes the good practices and principles that you already know.
This can be split into two skills:
Context switching depending on the audience and purpose. Not all audiences are the same. When you are presenting on a technical project and the audience is non-technical, you must figure out a way to showcase your project without digging into the weeds too much.
Documentation writing in which the non-technical value reconciles with the technical architecture. Each project should have clearly-defined technical diagrams but sometimes even more importantly, a non-technical section that explains the business value of the project being worked on.
Partaking in different cultures is an incredible way to meet more people, have a greater sense of the world, and become more appreciative of what people have to offer. One easy way to do this is by eating and experiencing new cuisines. As Anthony Bourdain would say, “Food is everything we are.”
type Result = Success | ValidationError | Update Error | etc becomes type TwoTrack<TEntity> = Success of TEntity | Failure of ErrorMessage where type ErrorMessage = NameMustNotBeBlank | EmailMustNotBeBlank.If you want to take charge in a room, actually connect with others, or maintain relationships, you must be energetic. Compliment others, say good morning with your chest, and ask questions.
]]>It started with reselling candy and chips out of my locker in 6th grade. Then during 8th and 9th grade I changed to Funko Pops, GPUs, PS5s, shoes, and a variety of other collectibles. Eventually I got bored with that and switched to NFT trading, by far my most profitable venture. I finally “ended” (who knows if I will pick something else up!) my reselling career with vintage clothes.
All of these ventures resulted in me catching flak about something or another (like two counseling office visits in middle school for the candy reselling), but I especially was criticized for clothing reselling.
Many of my critics would claim that my process of catching early morning garage sales and picking out valuable clothing items at a discounted price was taking advantage of people trying to make a buck or two by exploiting their lack of information. This criticism, I find, is wrong on a few fronts.
The prerequisites of all human action can be described as the following:
When these prerequisites are met, man acts.
All variables of his general environment that he expects he can change or alter will be his means he uses towards his attempt at achieving his ends.
For example,
In this environment, he might have conditions that are unable to be changed (if it’s cloudy, he can’t remove the clouds from the sky to increase his UV exposure and consequently get a tan) and variables that he can change (the amount of credit line he is approved for to purchase goods and services).
The variables that are able to be changed (the means) are always scarce. In this example, the pale man’s money is limited by his credit line (and potentially money on a debit card, cash under a mattress, etc.), his time is limited by his expected age of death, and his effort is limited by his bodily health and the general laws of human beings.
Since means are scarce (and they must be scarce because if they are abundant, there is no necessity to pay any attention to these means), they must be allocated by man to serve specific and limited ends. By allocating these means, man is economizing his means: Attempting to achieve his most valued ends by forgoing his least valuable ends.
This may all seem abstract but it is consistent and fundamental to all of our lives.
When I go to a garage sale, pick out an undervalued item, and resell it a couple days later, I am not simply “exploiting the innocent neighbor.” Instead,
Moving an item from an area in which it is valued less, to an area in which it is valued more is not always a simple task. For someone who is selling primarily online, I had to do the due diligence of investing in a good camera to take photos of the item, build up a good online reputation, research how to make marketable posts (hashtags, word counts, etc. - which is not a trivial task by any means), and a plethora of other tasks that I probably don’t even realize.
What this illustrates is that the exchange at the garage sale is not zero-sum: Both parties walk away better off by their own assessment. The seller preferred the immediate cash and cleared garage space over the item; I preferred the item over the cash I paid. No one needs to lose for someone else to gain. The claim of “exploitation” smuggles in the assumption that there is some objective, correct price for the item when there isn’t.
P.S. News Flash: Everything you buy is life is “resold” one way or another - The mom-and-pop shop you insist is “fundamentally” different than the big corporation next to it is operating under the same principles that all other companies, and humans, operate under (most people would call this the “Profit Motive” but I would call it “Human Action”).
Profit and cost is not wholly monetary.
The determination of a moral system’s correctedness must never be based on “feel-good sentiment.”
]]>While the use of status quo cashless mediums introduces a unique advantage of ease, it imposes specific trade-offs.
As the Bitcoin whitepaper begins,
“Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model… The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for non-reversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need… These costs and payments uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party.”
Satoshi (the author of the Bitcoin whitepaper) sums up the issue perfectly: the current system works well for most transactions types but is overly limited in other areas of exchange. For example, not all transaction types are generally accepted, such as micropayments, cross-border payments, or privacy-sensitive purchases. Moreover, while most consumers value the security of consumer protection services (the system is by no means purely extractive) higher than the cost required to fund these services, the trust needed by the third-party entity can become burdensome to the consumer.
Cryptocurrency technologies aim to resolve this dispute: to accept all transaction types while dramatically reducing transaction costs alongside. The alternative architecture of cryptocurrency is by no means a perfect solution——introducing trade-offs that would otherwise not have been of concern in the current model——but effectively functions as a genuine solution to particular issues.
Cryptocurrency technologies, such as Bitcoin, are aimed at, ultimately, fixing the problem that Satoshi and his predecessors laid out: the problem that is commonly referred to as the third-party problem.
The third-party problem asks, “how does an agent perform a digital transaction without the use of a third-party entity?”
In a physical, cash-based setting, transactions occur peer-to-peer without third-party mediation: there is no need to transmit identifying information and no intermediary fees. However, as global economic patterns have evolved, purely physical exchange mechanisms have become impractical for many transaction types.
To combat the costs of a physical settings, digital mechanisms have been developed to aid in the evergrowing globalization. However, in contrast to the physical setting, the digital setting is entirely based on mediation via a third-party. For example, any payment made through the medium of a credit card must be authorized by a bank. While the physical setting relied solely on the ‘consumer’ and the ‘producer,’ the digital setting requires a bookkeeper to ensure double-spending is not of concern, transactions are ordered correctly, and so forth. To successfully do this, the mediator must collect consumer information, potentially incur payment fees, and exclude certain transaction types.
For most consumers, the costs of the current digital system——information disclosure, transaction fees, and limited transaction types——are acceptable given the value of fraud protection, dispute resolution, and infrastructure reliability. Nonetheless, this cost-benefit analysis doesn’t hold for all use cases or all users, creating demand for an alternative architecture.
The traditional system’s cost-benefit analysis fails for several distinct user groups: the unbanked, cross-border remittance users, agents in unstable monetary systems, and micropayment use cases.
By far one of the most misunderstood concepts of cryptocurrency technology is trustlessness. Rather than trusting a bank to maintain accurate records, not freeze one’s account, and so forth, trustlessness represents a shift from trust in institutions to trust in cryptographic math. Trustlessness is not saying ‘no trust required’ but understanding that trust in math is foundationally more stable.
Institutional failure is not uncommon: bank runs occur, denial of service is common, and institutions can be coerced via government pressure and sanctions.
Trust in institutions is purely discretionary, while trust in math is verifiable. Anyone is able to audit blockchain code, verify transactions on the blockchain, and confirm the overall network’s state. Unlike institutional trust, which requires believing an authority will act correctly, cryptographic trust is based on mathematical proofs that can be independently verified.
The failure of discretionary trust can be illustrated by a couple examples:
Cyprus 2013 Bank Deposit Confiscation: In March 2013, Cyprus faced a severe banking crisis. Two of the country’s largest banks (Bank of Cyprus and Laiki Bank) were on the verge of collapse due to debt crisis. The Cypriot government,along with the European Union and IMF, decided to implement a ‘bail-in’ rather than a traditional bailout. This meant forcing depositors to bear some of the losses. Banks were closed for nearly two weeks to prevent bank runs, capital controls were imposed (limits on withdrawals and restrictions on moving money out of Cyprus), and many individuals with large savings accounts lost up to half of their money overnight. In Cyprus, the traditional architecture of banking and digital transactions failed: bank deposits were not as safe as some people thought.
WikiLeaks: WikiLeaks is an organization that publishes leaked documents, often revealing government and corporate misconduct. In 2010, they published a massive trove of U.S. diplomatic cables and military documents. Following United States government pressure, many of the major payment processors (Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Bank of America, and Western Union) cut off WikiLeaks. This financial blockade lasted for 4 years, resulting in WikiLeaks losing approximately 95% of its revenue.
Financial regulators might argue the Cyprus bail-in prevented total economic collapse, and payment processors might claim they were managing legal risk in the WikiLeaks case. These defenses may have merit, but they reinforce the fundamental point: when relying on institutional intermediaries, users are subject to decisions about risk and appropriateness made without their input. Whether these institutional decisions are justified or not, they demonstrate the discretionary nature of institutional trust.
Cryptocurrency technology addresses a fundamental market failure: the monopolistic provision of payment infrastructure by institutions that extract economic rents while excluding marginal users. The third-party problem is not merely philosophical——it represents billions of dollars in deadweight loss from transaction costs.
For many consumers, though, cryptocurrency technology is still heavily limited and overly not practical. Citizens in stable countries with above-average institutional practices may not find advancements in cryptocurrency necessary. But cryptocurrency represents more than technological novelty—it’s competitive market entry into a previously monopolized sector.
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