https://prberg-2019.netlify.app/Recent content on @PaulRBergHugo -- gohugo.ioen-USThu, 14 May 2020 01:27:05 +0300https://prberg-2019.netlify.app/post/2020/05/14/dyi-crypto-taxes/Thu, 14 May 2020 01:27:05 +0300https://prberg-2019.netlify.app/post/2020/05/14/dyi-crypto-taxes/Context My goal with this post is to distill the complicated topic of crypto taxes into an actionable tutorial I wish I had myself. It will hopefully make things easy for you and set you on the right track. At the very least, there are many practical tips and tricks that I’m sure you’ll find useful. I’ll be using and shilling Google Sheets, which I can’t recommend enough. I began to appreciate the power of spreadsheet programs only after haplessly attempting to track my crypto portfolio with scripts written in Rust.https://prberg-2019.netlify.app/post/2019/06/16/pay-as-you-earn-tax-system/Sun, 16 Jun 2019 19:53:38 +0100https://prberg-2019.netlify.app/post/2019/06/16/pay-as-you-earn-tax-system/Context Pay As You Earn, henceforth referenced as PAYE, is a tax withholding mechanism currently implemented in the UK, the US and Australia (also called Pay As You Go). Employers are responsible to deduct tax and national insurance contributions before paying their employees. It is not a bad system. Economies of scale enabled a few payroll providers to become very efficient in dealing with the ultra-boring paperwork. Most employers don’t understand what’s happening under the hood, which is brilliant.https://prberg-2019.netlify.app/post/2019/02/15/confidential-tokens/Fri, 15 Feb 2019 19:30:41 +0000https://prberg-2019.netlify.app/post/2019/02/15/confidential-tokens/Context Ethereum is not private. Every time you transfer an ERC20 token or any other digital asset, information is leaked to third parties. They could find out your full financial history simply by heading to Etherscan, Blockscout or any other blockchain explorer out there. Fear not, there are ways to prevent this. For one, you could use multiple accounts, but you’d have to constantly remember not to cross-link these accounts. This would be a life admin nightmare.https://prberg-2019.netlify.app/post/2019/02/07/serendipity-visa/Thu, 07 Feb 2019 01:02:56 +0000https://prberg-2019.netlify.app/post/2019/02/07/serendipity-visa/Preamble Some of my recent conversations touched on the subject of geographical leverage. It might be just a statistical outlier, but the topic intrigued me, so I cut off my commute podcasts to give the issue a little bit of thought. The result is what I call a Serendipity Visa: a peculiar way to imagine immigration, where the butterfly effect becomes an indispensable feature of society. Although the discourse extends mostly to the US, the underpinning rationale can be extrapolated to any other capital-concentrated areas.https://prberg-2019.netlify.app/post/2018/12/31/critique-radical-markets/Mon, 31 Dec 2018 19:22:34 +0200https://prberg-2019.netlify.app/post/2018/12/31/critique-radical-markets/Context Even if I’m far from being qualified to review academic writings on economics, I find the world of distributed ledgers and cryptoeconomic theory a decent stepping stone for social sciences. I’ve been bashing my head against the wall with blockchains for the good part of my recent history, so I have faith that this article will be read and appreciated by someone, somewhere, sometime. I’ll further assume that you’re familiar with the social reforms presented in Radical Markets.https://prberg-2019.netlify.app/post/2018/12/30/upgradeable-smart-contracts/Sun, 30 Dec 2018 17:50:44 +0200https://prberg-2019.netlify.app/post/2018/12/30/upgradeable-smart-contracts/Context In this post, we’ll learn how to write upgradeable smart contracts with the latest versions of Truffle and ZeppelinOS. In particular, version ^5.0 of Truffle introduces a lot of updates, with the most prominent one being the integration with web3 ^1.0. Let’s unpack these updates and introduce upgradeable smart contracts with the state-of-the-art ZeppelinOS. This is not an introductory article to Ethereum development, if you want that, take a look at the following resources:https://prberg-2019.netlify.app/post/2018/12/27/static-website-aws/Thu, 27 Dec 2018 04:14:42 +0200https://prberg-2019.netlify.app/post/2018/12/27/static-website-aws/Context I recently set-up my self-hosted personal blog and I underestimated the effort I had to put in to make it exactly as I wanted to: Pay-as-you-go hosting SSL certificate Functional www subdomain Highly customizable but minimalistic design Markdown-powered articles I decided to write a tutorial to help others do it with less overhead. This article will go into fine details on how to tick all the boxes above, with a focus on the back-end components.https://prberg-2019.netlify.app/post/2018/12/24/radical-markets/Mon, 24 Dec 2018 00:19:11 +0200https://prberg-2019.netlify.app/post/2018/12/24/radical-markets/Context Although an engineer by heart, I couldn’t help but get my feet wet with economics since blockchains became part of my daily pastimes. Vitalik’s been a massive influence in this direction, as most of his writing involves subtle cryptoeconomic theory - imbued by that, the Ethereum community and countless shout outs to Radical Markets (RM), I decided to give it a go. Now, I find the policies proposed in the book exceptionally intriguing, but I do feel that the devil is in the details and there has to be a lot of experimentation before even trying to implement RM at scale.https://prberg-2019.netlify.app/post/2018/12/10/figuring-out-ethereum/Mon, 10 Dec 2018 00:22:10 +0200https://prberg-2019.netlify.app/post/2018/12/10/figuring-out-ethereum/Context This is going to be a boring article describing my journey of becoming an Ethereum developer and, as a bonus, my thoughts on the abstract parts of the blockchain movement. In mid-2017, I coded my first ever smart contract, but it took me a while to put an end to my other endeavors and fully jump on the blockchain bandwagon, with a prominent focus on Ethereum. After more than a year, I thought it’d be a good moment to log my progress.