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Richard Sutton’s weariness was palpable in his conversation with Dwarkesh Patel. After fifty years in AI, the lesson he delivered was a “bitter” one: intelligence built on human intuition consistently fails, while systems that learn from experience ultimately prevail. Computation and feedback win; imitation and intuition lose. Aristotle, who gr...

Overview Monad’s base-fee controller, inspired by adaptive optimizers like RMSprop, aims for responsiveness without twitchiness by making the fee step size inversely proportional to short-horizon variance in gas usage. However, in a permissionless blockchain, block producers control the very signal, gas usage $g_k$, that drives this variance es...

One-round confirmation (speculative finality) in MonadBFT is only honest if equivocation is economically self-defeating. If a client can act after a single QC (Quorum Certificate), then any attempt to sign two conflicting histories must be so expensive that no rational validator tries. That’s a mechanism-design statement, not just a protocol cla...

Overview Consensus protocols live inside economies. Validators carry stake, pay operating costs, chase or defend against MEV, and sometimes collude. If we describe MonadBFT as only a message-passing algorithm, we miss the forces that drive real outcomes. In this series we treat MonadBFT as a mechanism: a rule system played by strategic agents. O...

Overview This is a short presentation that explains the journey of a message using LayerZero’s cross-chain messaging protocol. It’s structured like a presentation with accompanying notes. Learning Intentions & Success Criteria Learning Intentions Understand how LayerZero V2 moves a message across chains—securely and reliably Trace th...

The CORE Pipeline In Part 1 we showed why a forged cross-chain message is unprofitable when the cost of corruption (stake at risk, reputation at risk, and chance of being caught) dominates the value at risk. Part 2 turns that idea into a working system that a protocol can run on a schedule: it sets stakes, fees, and watcher bounties; it proves ...

A practical deep dive into game theory, correlation, and mechanism design for LayerZero (split), CCIP (quorums), and Across (optimistic) Most bridges don’t fail because the cryptography breaks—they fail because the economics make cheating profitable for a small, correlated group at the same time. If we want to reason clearly about LayerZero’s s...

Introduction In my previous article on game-theoretic vulnerabilities in shMONAD bandwidth allocation, I showed how bandwidth staking can create a high-stakes, non-cooperative congestion game where strategic timing (e.g., flash-commit bursts) distorts access to RPC throughput. This follow-up blog on Monad looks at a different chokepoint—price d...