No 5. A New Season

A summary of my recent articles and some stuff I haven't written that I find super interesting. Sent as a newsletter for those who subscribe (for free).

David Bressler

Sep 23, 2022 — 6 min read

Like the photo above? It was the first fall weather in NYC today and clear as could be.

Looks like Japan is reopening (finally) and that's a big deal for me. I'm eligible for 7th dan iaido in July '23, and there's a test in August that I most certainly won't be ready for. That's not humility, that's fact. But at least it looks like I can go to Japan and start to prepare.

New seasons all around.

My Writing

I've been writing a bunch, including some posts that I think are really useful even if they're not always my best writing. Here's the list ordered by how much I like each, in descending order:

Ethereum Staking

This is a not a getting started guide.

This is a "what the hell is going on and what do all these words mean and where can I start to learn more?" guide.

In short, Ethereum has switched from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. This means that instead of mining Ethereum by running a computation, the network is secured by nodes that have 32 ETH staked to the node. Just like with mining, where miners are rewarded with fees, stakers are rewarded. Staked ETH earns yield aka passive income (a topic very close to my heart).

I had asked someone in the RocketPool community to review this post, their respose was fun:

🚀

Well I expected to have a lot of edits, but I don’t. Very nicely done.

Web3 Identity

There's a lot of noise around NFTs, but I continue to believe that there's a lot of potential for utility associated with an NFT. In this post I use Amazon's verified purchaser reviews to present a clear example of how/why.

I'm excited to be speaking at IAM Tech Day in Brazil (virtually) at the end of October. I took a short 10 minute slot, and this post will be the backbone of the ideas I share.

Web3 is not a Synonym for Crypto

I'm beta testing Moonfish, software for end-to-end encrypted email. It doesn't require any special email system or client so it's easy to use. The best thing about it is the idea that connecting a wallet to the email client can magically encrypt messages.

Why is this interesting? If you have a crypto wallet, you have a private/public key pair. Connect the wallet to your email and the end-to-end encryption just works. It's literally how crypto is designed. But, it's not crypto. It's using that infrascture for something new.

Why is this important? Well, if I have someone's (or some org's) public key it means I can tell if an email is authentic. No more spam. No more unknown senders. No more phishing.

And, of course, it doesn't take much imagination to see how this applies beyond email.

As a bonus, once we're connected, you can send me email to my ENS domain swapping the '.' for '@'. I'm bressler@eth. This is different than forwarding. If I ever change email addresses, I simply update my ENS profile, and all messages come directly to my new address (and the encryption still works).

It'll be super interesting to watch this play out over the long arc of time. Connect with me if you'd like to experiment.

Projects I'm Tracking

The title of this post says it all. I mostly wrote it so I can look back a year or more from now to see if I was right in thinking what would be important over a longer period of time.

A Question

I honestly believe watching Web3 evolve is like watching a slow moving car crash relative to corporate IT.

The Impervious browser has finally launched (into beta, I guess?) and it made me wonder how, as humans bring their Web3 software and identities to work, IT will manage and control it all.

I'm old enough to remember when the best technology we used was at work. IT would buy us software and we'd be lucky if we could figure out a way to copy it over to our home computers. That's probably hard to believe for internet-generation kids who look at corporate systems as if they're green screened monsters.