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This is a trilobite on the left. Poor thing died out 252 million years ago. On the right is a horseshoe crab. They’re ancestral cousins of trilobites and still roam New Jersey shores:

Think of how big the world is. And how good animals are at hiding. Now think about a biologist whose job it is to determine whether a species has gone extinct.

If something is true in one field it’s probably true in others. Restricting your attention to your own field blinds you to how many important things people from other fields have figured out that are relevant to your own.

Our team at Collab Crypto spends a lot of time thinking about markets. We concur with Naval Ravikant’s statement that blockchains will replace networks with markets, so we’ve been thinking carefully about what tradable assets will look like in the future and how markets will form around them. Particularly, commoditized assets.

I’ve been visiting the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance for the past few months, which has provided the opportunity to interact with leading thinkers and builders in the blockchain ecosystem, not only here in Cambridge but throughout Europe. One trip I was particularly excited to make was a visit to our strategic partner, Bitstamp. Not only have we built a friendship with the founding team, but they are also investors in our fund. We talk regularly about what we are seeing in the exchange market and the crypto market more generally.

During the Vietnam War Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara tracked every combat statistic he could, creating a mountain of analytics and predictions to guide the war’s strategy.

This series of posts is going to be a little…different. Inspired by xkcd’s “Up-Goer Five” and the Ten Hundred Words of Science project, the goal is to explain complex and interesting technical concepts in crypto as simply but thoroughly as possible using only the one thousand (ten hundred) most frequently used words in the English language. I will aim to limit each post to around 1000 words total as well. First: Bitcoin. I hope you enjoy!

Hundreds of books and movies have depicted World War II. Eugene Sledge, a Marine who fought on Okinawa and Peleliu, says almost all of them ignore one of the most important stories of the war: how hard it was to keep soldiers stocked with ammunition.

Those who know me will tell you that I talk about boxing …a lot.

Tens of billions of individual steps have to go right in the correct order to create a human. But only one thing has to happen to cause its demise.