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Muneeb
Co-founder of Stacks, a Bitcoin layer for smart contracts. CEO of Trust Machines, building Bitcoin apps. Princeton PhD in distributed systems.
Recent Writings
Fundamentals of Decentralized Systems
Decentralized systems are currently poorly defined and often misunderstood.

Bitcoin and other crypto networks form a $1.5 trillion market currently. Usually, technology markets at that size have solid engineering foundations and clearly defined technical concepts. The crypto industry is unique in this regard, where capital markets are far ahead of engineering maturity.

In this post, I will:

  • iteratively build up a clear definition of decentralized systems,
  • take a deeper dive into a key concept of decentralized systems: globally shared state, and
  • discuss how modern decentralized systems make design tradeoffs around shared state.
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