I’m incredibly excited to share what we’ve been working on at Origin Protocol for the last few months. I’ve worked on many audacious ideas over my career, but Origin Dollar (OUSD) might be the biggest one yet.
OUSD is a new kind of stablecoin that earns a yield while it’s still sitting in your wallet.
Here’s our announcement post and resulting coverage from Coindesk.
I’m incredibly proud to announce that Origin is now live on the Ethereum mainnet. For the first time in history, buyers and sellers can find each other and transact directly without any intermediaries.
Read more about our launch on our blog or head straight to the Marketplace DApp and experience the future for yourself.
This was a big week for my latest startup, Origin Protocol. It’s exciting to feel the momentum building as more people start realizing how revolutionary this new decentralized web and cryptocurrency is going to be.
We started the week by announcing the funding we received from Pantera Capital. Coindesk wrote a really nice article about us:
Pantera Invests $3 Million in Sharing Economy Token Origin
We also announced two new hires that I couldn’t be more excited about. Both Stan James and Andrew Hyde are old friends from my TechStars days and I feel incredibly lucky to get to work with them. I wrote a few words welcoming each of them to the team:
Welcoming our newest team member, Stan James
Welcoming Andrew Hyde! It’s all about community.
If you’re interested in following along on our progress more closely, you can find us at the following links. We’d love to have you join us in building the sharing economy of tomorrow.
Origin Protocol on Telegram
Origin Protocol on Discord
Origin Protocol on Medium
Origin Protocol on Twitter
Origin Protocol on Facebook
Origin Protocol on Github
Thank you for your support. Can’t wait to see what next week has in store for us!
I’m excited to be working on a new project with Matthew Liu called Origin Protocol.
Origin is a series of protocols to enable the sharing economy without intermediaries. The technology is built on top of IPFS and the Ethereum network. I’ve complained for years about the growing centralization on the web, without having a good answer to how we fight back against having the internet controlled by a handful of companies.
Origin is the most audacious project I’ve ever worked on. We’re asking questions like, “What if open-source protocols could replace entire companies?”
Matt and I have built several cash flow businesses together but this project is far more important and meaningful than anything we’ve tackled before. We’ve been doing a lot of writing lately to put our ideas into the world. I hope you’ll check out our product brief and technical whitepaper. Jump into our slack channel and join us in decentralizing the web again.
I’ve been fascinated with the topic of online voting for a long time, so I was interested, but not terribly surprised to read that the FBI claims foreign hackers penetrated state election systems.
My thoughts on online voting have changed as I’ve grown older.
In high school and college I said technology is the future! It’s insane that we’re still using paper and pencil for something so important. Computers are better at counting than humans. Yay e-voting!
Then I realized that you can’t trust individual company or organization with that much power & any trusted online voting software would have to be open source so that it could be independently verified by security experts everywhere.
Then I learned more about how many 0-day vulnerabilities exist and are being stock-piled by state actors for every layer of the stack. Our routers, firmware, operating systems, browsers, popular code libraries, etc. It’s all been compromised. You can’t trust any of it. So you’d have to open-source the hardware too & probably keep the whole thing air-gapped from the internet. And still that might not be enough!
Today, I believe there’s no way to secure a system (electronic or not) without publishing a log of every vote cast. This gets tricky when you have secret ballots, but there are a couple ways to handle it. The first way would to be to allow people to choose whether they want their ballot to be public or private. That way you’d end up with enough public votes that you should be able to tell whether the election was massively rigged or not (assuming you expect the private votes to follow the same distribution as the public ones). The second option would be to assign everyone a private one-time key when they vote — a receipt they can look up later. Everyone can then look up the key from their voting receipt on the public log and make sure their vote was tallied correctly. The second option has the benefit of keeping secret ballots, but you’d need a separate way to verify that the number of lines in the public log is the same as the number of people who showed up to vote. That can be solved by publishing a list of who showed up to vote.
Of course, we can’t know for sure that we’ve had a fair election while the NSA dragnet continues to exist. We would never know which candidates were forced to drop out from those in power using their access to surveillance intel to blackmail a candidate or leak their dirty secrets to the press.
Looking for an easy way to work with location data or make a map from a spreadsheet? My latest project, GeoSheets is a free Google Spreadsheets add-on that I built with a couple friends.
Geosheets lets you quickly and easily work with location data in a spreadsheet and do things like:
We spent a lot of time making sure it was simple to use and creating your first map is as easy as:
=GEO_MAP(A1:A5, “map”)
Check out some examples or documentation and try it out for yourself.
I recently discovered Robinhood. It’s a mobile trading platform that let’s you invest in the stock market without paying any trading fees. I can’t shake the feeling that 0-fee trading is going to be one of those game-changes that creates a whole range of new applications that weren’t possible before. Quantopian is an early example, but I bet there will be more.
If you’re new to Robinhood, feel free to use my Robinhood referral link when you sign up to get a free share of a randomly selected stock when you fund your account.
Robinhood is currently only available on mobile and it doesn’t have any of the charts and graphs you would find on any other trading platform. Here’s a little python script I cooked up that will let you export your Robinhood trades to a .csv file you can import into Google Finance or whatever tool you use to track your investments.
Before running this code, make sure you have python & pip installed on your computer. You can either view the code on Github or if you trust me, open your terminal and run the following commands. If you have git installed, you can fetch the files you need using:
Otherwise, manually download the files. Then:
The script will request your credentials then prompt you for a filename like this:
Once upon a time we used usernames and passwords to sign into websites. Unless you used multiple email addresses, your password was the single piece of information you had to remember. With password services like LastPass and 1Password, you didn’t have to remember anything.
But then sites started offering social login via Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Amazon, Github, Yahoo, Instagram and a whole host of other authentication options. Oops, you have accounts on all of those services. You can’t remember which one you used to sign up. Maybe you guess wrong and end up with two separate accounts that you can’t figure out how to merge. Ever been there? You’re not alone.
I dug into some real data from a company I worked with that offers multiple login options. For each 1,000 legitimate login attempts, there were 531 successful logins and 112 password resets. In other words, people were having a far harder time signing in than I would have imagined. If you run your own site, I recommend you look at your own data. My guess is you’ll be as surprised as I was at how few login attempts are successful.
If your site offers multiple login options, there’s an easy way you can remove this pain and increase your site usage. Set a cookie that remembers which authentication method was used to create their account along with any services that have been linked. Then use that data to highlight the options that can actually be used to sign in and hide everything else.
I just pushed a new design for this site. Despite my infrequent posting, I’m still getting decent traffic every day from Google. The makeover was long overdue as the previous design from 2007 was starting to feel quite dated.
My goal was to design something that felt more modern and works better on mobile. Clean and simple. Focus on the content. I’m still running on WordPress, but I hacked up a new theme that uses Twitter Bootstrap to make it responsive and the Lato font to make it pretty.
I’ve switched the comments over to Facebook. Requiring commenters to use their real identity is the best way I know to deal with spam. I can’t import old comments into Facebook, so I’ll be using Disqus for historical posts.
Enjoy.
I love this quote from the founder of Dropbox, Drew Houston:
The hardest-working people don’t work hard because they’re disciplined. They work hard because working on an exciting problem is fun.
Want to be more disciplined? How about finding something you truly care about instead?
