Data, Dollars, and Double Entry
Following the Flow of Money, Data, and Ideas Across Time
Beyond the tech: what crypto has taught me
I have spent the past decade plus slurping every single tidbit of startup advice, devoured the biographies of scientists, comedians, actors and leaders, intently observed reels of live interviews and jogged to 100s of hours of podcasts - everyone has a unique journey and story in their life.
Coming from a technical background in Data Infrastructure and Machine Learning, which was optimization in the name optimization, the past 4 years has been the most eye opening experience.
Taking pride as an engineer who loves to derive and understand every technical system to its core, I realized that I was severely limited in my understanding of the world beyond technical systems, and my understandings of the world is fairly limited.
Let’s learn financial systems together
My time in crypto has forced me to learn about the history of financial systems, double entry book keeping systems (thank you medici), how the world economy is intertwined (and also segregated), how good policy matters so much, how the current banking system even works and why it works.
One has to learn the history of a system to confidently say that blockchains (or unified ledgers) is a true net positive improvement to the system, I’ll admit that I am still early in the journey learning more about this world of econs, law, regulation, policy, politics, geopolitics, but I am at that stage that I know what I don’t know.
I am excited to write my thoughts and meet people to learn more about what I don’t know, so we can collaboratively move this space forward.
Crypto x Data x AI x Infra x Finance x Regulations
Those buzzwords ^ are authentic! I feel fortunate that, at Allium, we operate at the intersection of nearly everything today. We work with the builders in crypto, we work with the biggest financial giants of the world, and also folks who play an important role to craft good policy.
As the data plumbers (or Oompa Loompas) of crypto data, it has been a thrill playing our supporting role in a lot of the key developments and trends that has happened in the industry over the past 4 years, and with the GENIUS act passing, this is only getting started.
I’d love to post about various things that we see (that we can disclose) and my own thoughts on them! Please comment below on things you want to learn more about
For the Curious Engineer and the Crypto Native
For engineers who are curious about blockchains and their applications, and for crypto folks who are interested on what goes “behind the scenes” - I hope this will be a fun hub for people of all sorts of curiosities to follow along my (our) journey in learning about the world we live in today, and contribute to each other’s (mis)understandings
Let’s cross the mid curve together,
your resident data plumber,
ethan
This is a great initiative Ethan, I'd love for you to deep dive on the following (if possible):
"One has to learn the history of a system to confidently say that blockchains (or unified ledgers) is a true net positive improvement to the system."
Given your experiences and interactions, it would be great to learn more about how current systems can be positively impacted via crypto.
This is a great post. What made me fall down the rabbit hole was the interdisciplinary nature of crypto -- for one, the tech is inherently political or philosophical; and second, as one of just a few genuinely 0 to 1 industries that is also very iconoclastic, you get to see how tech, business, politics, and notions of philosophy/justice/desert intertwine to produce progress or stagnation (e.g., many feel that stablecoins *should* be embraced because payments incumbents *don't deserve* their privileged position... payments *shouldn't* take 3 days to settle cross-border... these are normative arguments, not technical, business, or political arguments).
I came from politics, philosophy, and I've been diving deeper into the tech and infra for the past four years. I'll cross the mid curve the other way :)