In Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, he outlines the impact new technology has on building a non-zero sum future. While the book is focused on individuals and companies, bitcoin as a monetary system is the ultimate zero to one technology leap. For historical examples, Thiel highlights the advent of the steam engine as well as the shift from typewriters to computer processors among others. He also articulates a view that innovation has largely stagnated since the early 1970s, while noting that technological progress since then has been more 1 to n than 0 to 1. Read more...

How many times have you heard the safety instructions before a standard commercial flight? You probably know them by heart, but every time, prior to takeoff, flight attendants instruct passengers traveling with children to put their oxygen mask on first and then tend to the children. Instinctively, it’s counterintuitive. Logically, it makes all the sense in the world. Make sure you can breathe, so that the child dependent on you can breathe too. Read more...

Has anyone you respect ever told you that bitcoin doesn’t make any sense? Maybe you’ve seen the price of bitcoin rise exponentially and then seen it crash. You write it off, believe your friend was right, don’t hear about it for a while and think bitcoin must have died. But then you wake up a few years later, bitcoin hasn’t died and somehow its value is a lot higher again. Read more...

As kids, we all learn that money doesn’t grow on trees. As a society on the other hand, we have become conditioned to believe that it’s not only possible but that it’s a normal, necessary and productive function of our economy. Before bitcoin, this privilege was reserved to global central banks (see here for example). Post bitcoin, every Tom, Dick & Harry seems to think that they can create money too. Read more...

Introduction This is the first of a weekly series that I’ve decided to write on the subject of bitcoin, inspired by my friends Marty Bent and Saifedean Ammous. Education is such a critical aspect of bitcoin and I hope that, by distilling my own thoughts, I can help others accelerate their path in understanding a complex subject. I’ve titled the series Gradually, Then Suddenly. As Hemingway penned the process of going bankrupt, it’s also the way that government-backed currencies hyper-inflate and often how people come to understand bitcoin (gradually, then suddenly). Read more...

Chris Lattner #optimization , #Clang 13 minutes read In Part 1 of the series, we took a look at undefined behavior in C and showed some cases where it allows C to be more performant than "safe" languages. In Part 2, we looked at the surprising bugs this causes and some widely held misconceptions that many programmers have about C. In this article, we look at the challenges that compilers face in providing warnings about these gotchas, and talk about some of the features and tools that LLVM and Clang provide to help get the performance wins, while taking away some of the surprise. Read more...

In Part 1 of our series, we discussed what undefined behavior is, and how it allows C and C++ compilers to produce higher performance applications than "safe" languages. This post talks about how "unsafe" C really is, explaining some of the highly surprising effects that undefined behavior can cause. In Part #3, we talk about what friendly compilers can do to mitigate some of the surprise, even if they aren't required to. Read more...

People occasionally ask why LLVM-compiled code sometimes generates SIGTRAP signals when the optimizer is turned on. After digging in, they find that Clang generated a "ud2" instruction (assuming X86 code) - the same as is generated by __builtin_trap(). There are several issues at work here, all centering around undefined behavior in C code and how LLVM handles it. This blog post (the first in a series of three) tries to explain some of these issues so that you can better understand the tradeoffs and complexities involved, and perhaps learn a few more of the dark sides of C. Read more...

Get back your privacy and control over your data in just a few hours: build your own cloud for you and your friends 40'000+ searches over 8 years! That's my Google Search history. How about yours? (you can find out for yourself here) With so many data points across such a long time, Google has a very precise idea of what you've been interested in, what's been on your mind, what you are worried about, and how that all changed over the years since you first got that Google account. Read more...

In a letter written on March 19, 1944, Ayn Rand remarked: “Fascism, Nazism, Communism and Socialism are only superficial variations of the same monstrous theme—collectivism.” Rand would later expand on this insight in various articles, most notably in two of her lectures at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston: “The Fascist New Frontier” (Dec. 16, 1962, published as a booklet by the Nathaniel Branden Institute in 1963); and “The New Fascism: Rule by Consensus” (April 18, 1965, published as Chapter 20 in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal [CUI] by New American Library in 1967). Read more...