Once upon a time, I was a distributed systems researcher specializing in graph partitioning algorithms. Those were thrilling days, though I must admit I didn’t enjoy the daily commute and the time away from my family.

During that period, I delved deep into classic distributed systems conundrums like the Byzantine Generals Problem. When I discovered that Bitcoin—a peer-to-peer monetary system—offered a practical solution, I was excited.

My colleagues and I would spend hours over lunch breaks dissecting and discussing this groundbreaking resolution.

If you’re curious about this captivating problem and its ingenious solution, don’t miss today’s Finxter blog tutorial:

[Blog] How Bitcoin Solves the Byzantine Generals Problem

It’s a remarkable technical triumph that proves no challenge is insurmountable for dedicated and driven individuals. Just look at the success of Bitcoin—an anonymous coder created the 21st most capitalized currency in the world!

In the world of tech, we witness an ongoing battle between two formidable forces:

Giant 1 – Leviathan. This force represents the powerful centralization trends and winner-take-most economies in the tech and machine learning industries. Think big tech, big government, and big brother—those with the best data sets win.

Giant 2 – Atomos. This symbolizes the ever-strengthening decentralized infrastructures and systems, such as Bitcoin and decentralized social networks like PeerBrain. Atomos represents everyday coders like you and me. Derived from the ancient Greek word for “uncuttable” or “indivisible,” Atomos signifies the countless small, independent entities in a decentralized system.

I’m thankful for recent advancements in AI, as they’ll propel humanity toward hyper-efficiency and uncharted heights. Yet, I also appreciate the existence of counterbalancing forces like the indomitable Atomos, redistributing power from the few back to the many.

Decentralized money, energy production, and social networks are just the beginning of this promising trend, and its potential is immense!

If you’re eager to contribute to the growth of Atomos, consider checking out the Uniswap Automated Finance for Blockchain Engineers course. While the Ethereum ecosystem isn’t entirely decentralized yet, it could be—and that would serve as an effective countermeasure to centralized platforms.

We need more builders!

“A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the bedrock of a healthy democracy.”

The same holds true for decentralization!

To your success!
Chris

This email was part of our free email academy for exponential technologies. To stay ahead of the curve and remain on the right side of change, join our free email academy by downloading your cheat sheets for learning here:

Here’s the drumbeat they’ve been pounding in your ears 24/7:

AIs will take your job, your income, your livelihood, your purpose, and eventually your life.

I assume you belong to either Group A or Group B:

• Group A: If you’ve already made enough money to retire (unlikely), you are thinking of ways to invest to benefit from the exponential revolutions of decentralized P2P deflationary money, smart contracts, self-driving cars, precision fermentation, solar energy, humanoid robots, and ChatGPT. More on this later.
• Group B: In the more likely case that you haven’t yet made enough money to invest and ride off into the sunset with your exponentially-growing investments, you’re probably experiencing some serious existential crises these days.

And I have to say, worrying about your future is understandable because you will either become irrelevant without purpose ( Group A) or lose your livelihood and job ( Group B).

So what can you do?

First, don’t panic.

Second, take a deep breath and open your mind. Disruption means opportunity. Disruption means opportunity. (After me…) “DISRUPTION MEANS OPPORTUNITY!”

Third, it is time to be bold. Imagine you’re in the midst of the 20th-century exponential disruption moving society away from horse carriages and into cars. The number of cars on the road increased exponentially, and in 13 short years, most jobs in the horse carriage maintenance business were gone for good.

You had two sensible choices: double down on horse carriage (ALL IN!) and prepare for lean years before it may get better, or accept and move on to new ventures .

Both have a good chance of working.

But here’s what will not work for sure. Yet, it is the road most traveled:

Remain in the middle, i.e., staying in the “horse carriage business”, lukewarm, not doubling down but doing so-so work, and doubting your decision on a daily basis.

Here’s the main takeaway of today’s email: don’t be this guy.

The new Finxter motto is “Be on the Right Side of Change!” To help you with this, we create and publish these emails, blogs, and courses on the Finxter Academy.

For instance, we have courses on smart contract development (soon it’ll take off again ), ChatGPT, Python and visualization, web projects, and we add new courses every couple of weeks. All of our courses concern exponential technologies and have downloadable PDF certificates to showcase your employer or freelance client.

If you feel overwhelmed and sad, don’t be. You have full control of the trajectory of your life. You are the captain of your own ship! You can start your own business, use ChatGPT to satisfy clients’ needs in minutes, break out of the boring world your environment has put you in.

This email aims to give you hope and permission to try out new and unconventional ways to approach life. I’ve always advocated that the old ways will not work forever. Don’t take your parents’ advice (or even mine) because they would’ve told you the world market for computers is a couple of dozens, Bitcoin is stupid internet money (at $1/BTC), and solar energy cannot power the world.

Break things. You don’t want to be conventional in the exponential age!

To your success!
Chris

This email was written at 21th of March 2023 to the Finxter email academy (free newsletter). You can signup here or by downloading the cheat sheets: