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James Burns

James Burns

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NFT's, IPFS, and FOMO

Publisher
James Burns
January 26
What a world, my dog ran across my keyboard and I can pass it off as a title for a blog post. As if Crypto wasn’t divisive enough, NFT’s have split users into two opposite camps: “NFT’s are tulip mania, 2021 edition” and “NFT’s are a revolutionary form of immutable ownership”. It feels like an important note here that google’s SUGGESTED result when I searched “tulip mania” was “tulip mania NFT”. With the least controversial take of all time, I posit that the truth lies somewhere in-between these two camps.
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Crypto Casinos and The "Surprising" Math Behind Gambling

Publisher
James Burns
December 24
I’ve been spending a bit of time thinking about this question recently, after a coin flip “double or nothing” crypto game garnered some traction and made its way across my twitter feed. How can you impose a framework to determine your best odds of making money in games where the odds are stacked against you? Is a table game with a skill component most beneficial? Would you be best served by trying your luck with a 50/50 coin flip, or something in-between? This coin flip game remained on my mind for the past week, as there are now thousands of people playing, yet the expected value of each bet made in this game is lower than the worst games in Vegas (and this ignores the fact that the Solana network TPS continues to be erratic costing players tens of thousands in lost SOL).
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Building and Deploying a Solana Smart Contract

Publisher
James Burns
December 13
Solana is an emerging high-performance, permissionless blockchain that offers fast, cheap, and scalable transactions and supports smart contracts being built with the Rust, C++, and C programming languages. One of the primary differentiators of the Solana network is its Proof of History (PoH) verification mechanism. Without getting overly technical, the most notable improvement offered by this is parallel processing of transactions. This is part of the explanation why the number of transactions per second (TPS) looks like this (source):

Creating your own (ERC-20) CryptoToken

Publisher
James Burns
November 22
Lots of results turn up when you google "how to create a cryptocurrency”, but very few detail what the specific mechanics are in implementation. Existing articles do a relatively good job outlining a basic ideological framework, but I want to take it one step further than vague jargon such as “make your cryptocurrency legal”, and “promote your project” (it is worth noting, this is the #1 indexed result in google). Both of these steps are essential, but it would require a textbook worth of information on each to produce any type of actionable insight. Most importantly, both are wholly irrelevant if you are not able to launch a coin (in this case a token) in the first place. This article details exactly what the process of creating an ERC-20 token (a token issued using Ethereum’s blockchain) looks like.