RIN 3038-AF65 | Docket No. CFTC-2026-0024 Submitted by Micah Warren Associate Professor of Mathematics, University of Oregon | micah541@proton.me July 24, 2026 Introduction I submit this comment to address a specific and underexamined category of event contract that I believe the Commission's proposed framework should
Don't get me wrong, I think these are great tools for aggregating a weighted average of people's beliefs. This is a valuable tool. Most of the time they will provide strong signal, clearly indicating the information they are designed to indicate, that is, a conviction-weighted
There's a lot of excitement about prediction markets, a lot of weird boosterism in which folks are calling these "truth-telling machines." To begin, I have a small rant on the idea of a truth-telling machine The idea of a "truth telling machine"
By now, it's well-discussed that anyone using an older Bitcoin transaction type which exposes their public keys is the most vulnerable to a quantum attack on Bitcoin, if that ever materializes: If your public key is sitting in the open for years, the first Q-swiper can
We are now 17 years into the Bitcoin experiment; The future of 2009 is now, not just 100 years from now. This article is not going to focus on 2140 security budget concerns, rather what could happen in the next 17 years. We will leave the chart showing how exponential
The publisher has asked me to write a version 2 to my textbook "Bitcoin: A Game-Theoretic Analysis" The table of contents is here Please let me know what's important to cover! Comment below would be great, or email me at my university address or protonmail
If you've been around Bitcoin long enough, you recall that Bitcoin's breakout moment was The Silk Road. Anonymous digital cash with which one can by drugs. That was back when Bitcoin was well under $100. There was no Microstrategy, BlackRock ETF, Chainalysis or Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.
In March 2022, The What Bitcoin Did Podcast invited me down to Austin TX to record an episode. They knew just a little bit about me: they knew I was a mathematician and that I was a skeptic. When I arrived at the Airbnb in Austin to record the interview
You probably heard that Tesla shareholders approved a $1 Trillion pay package. That's not entirely correct, in fact the way that this has been reported is quite misleading; what they approved is a series of stock performance and productivity stairsteps designed to meme Tesla into the stratosphere. The
Suppose we want to keep CP out of the blockchain, and believe we can do that by capping OP_RETURN payload at 1000 bytes. (Yes, there's certainly Byzantine and tortuous methods you can invent that would allow you to, in theory, transfer information into the blockchain that could
According to my math, the difficulty adjustment that happened Sept 18, 2025 put the required number of hashes to expected to find one block to be 6.113568244e+23. Divide this by 600 (seconds per ten minutes) and we get a hashrate of 1.018928e+21 per second, that is
The latest internal controversy with Bitcoin surrounds the upcoming release of Bitcoin Core, v30, which will by default, relay transactions containing large amounts of data as OP_RETURN. For the non-experts: There's an option to put small amounts of data inside a Bitcoin transaction, using something called
Is it reasonable to revisit the relationship with athletics with more of a hardball, Art-of-the-Deal type approach? We all understand the basic surface level explanations as to why they "don't owe us anything" (athletics is self-funding, donors gave to expressly to athletics,
For the last 16 years, Bitcoin has functioned as a decentralized payment system in which transactions are verified and recorded into a canonical blockchain by miners. Miners are paid (intrinsic to the protocol) for finding a block via the block reward, and by transaction fees. Extrinsic to the protocol, mining
I find myself leaning on this thought process when reasoning about people in power. I'm writing it up here as a clean statement. The Disappointing People Trilemma: Suppose that you repeatedly observe, and are disappointed by, the actions of people holding a certain office, serially over time or
A useful statistic to keep your eye on that combines the cumulative effects of the halvings and the increase in hash rate is the miner payout per hash (this is also known a "hashprice"). "Hashprice" indicates the amount that the bitcoin network pays miners for their
Recently, we've seen a rash of US states, and a few foreign nations supposedly toying with the idea of establishing a strategic Bitcoin reserve. Up to 11 US states, according to a recent report. Bitcoin advocates are selling an arms-race-just-about-to-be-triggered narrative: many
I expect this is going to be a very fun and interesting thing to watch over the next few years. Because crypto/Bitcoin prices have long decoupled from any connection to adoption or underlying usefulness, prices are now determined by rumors about what big players (like the USG) are doing.
I made the decision to do a thing this upcoming quarter; No tech for 12 hours a day, broken up into three hour intervals. I made the decision to do this towards the end of Fall quarter, after spending entire days at the computer, and spending weeks without getting any
The United States throwing its weight behind Bitcoin would effect a massive shift in the game theory underpinning Bitcoin, but probably not in the way you think. Bitcoin's decentralized consensus mechanism works based on some cleverly crafted incentive structures. The first and fundamental rule is that the chain
By the authority vested in me as President of the United States by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 5302 of title 31, United States Code, it is hereby ordered as follows: Section 1. Purpose As global finance increasingly integrates digital assets and
Rob Warren (no relation, AFAIK) recently posted a video on Twitter responding to some of my security budget FUD. It's a good video. (Elon has been trying to play hardball with suppressing links, so I'm obviously going to do my part and not link his website.
Bitcoin price enthusiasts are often happy to tell you that the number of Bitcoins minted every year is declining exponentially, which they hope leads to a supply crunch. What they don't tell you is that this schedule also will choke the miners who provide security out of existence.
In July Senator Cynthia Lummis proposed the so-called BITCOIN Act which would establish a "Strategic Bitcoin Reserve." Shortly after, Trump promised Bitcoin enthusiasts that he would create a "strategic national stockpile." Naturally, Bitcoin holders are rapturously elated: The USG buying Bitcoin represents massive exit liquidity