From Controversy to Catalyst: The Positive Impact of NFTs

Throughout 2021, NFTs in the shape of zoo animals wearing gaudy jewelry took hold of Internet culture. Despite the excitement, worries about the environmental impact, the ponzi-esque nature of many NFT projects, and the growing culture of profiteering in the NFT space started to spread like wildfire.  This relatively mundane technology, pierced through society, economics, … Read more

Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications

I first got to know Discrete Mathematics and Its Application as a freshman—it was the main textbook in our “Discrete Mathematics 101” course, part of the standard computer science curriculum. The book is widely used in academic courses worldwide, with many elite universities such as UC Berkley recommending it. Although it was first published in … Read more

A beginner’s introduction to databases, indexes and transactions

The term “database” is widely used in different contexts in the digital world. Since I started my career, I’ve seen this term referring to different things: Excel spreadsheets, tables on websites, text files, and other formats. Indeed, all these things can be considered databases, at least according to Wikipedia’s definition: …a database is an organized … Read more

Scaling Bitcoin

My previous post described different ways blockchains built for decentralized applications could scale without significantly increasing block size. Such blockchains differ from those that only handle simple money transfers in that they have unlimited demand, and feature transactions that take up more space on the blockchain. These two differences impact the necessity for complex scaling … Read more