Mike Fluff Press · 28 experiments
Experiments from the books
Each one runs in the browser and comes from a chapter. Mine a Hashcash stamp, race a double spend against Satoshi’s chain, run the MMM cash desk until it freezes, watch an agent fit the result to the test. Under every experiment is the chapter it belongs to.
Nobody Writes Code Anymore
10 experiments
- 01Borel’s monkey at the keyboardThe monkey types twelve-character lines and waits for one short line of code to come up among them. Below is the chapter’s sum: how many lines an army would get through if every atom in the universe were a monkey.
- 02Writing a line and keeping itWriting prices from the chapter, autumn 2026. The upkeep price from Charles Fishman’s 1996 article on the group that wrote the shuttle’s software. Dijkstra said lines should be booked as spent, and this scale shows why.
- 03Seven links behind one phone numberThe salon administrator’s request against the chapter’s chain: data schema, migration, logic, links to other programs, permissions, screens, checks. The agent changed two links; the other five made themselves known within three weeks.
- 04Knight Capital’s forty-five minutesThe eighth server the technician never reached, and the server comparison the firm did not have. The totals are from the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s findings.
- 05One chair and a double tapTwo of the chapter’s scenes that no screen shows: two clients racing for one slot with Kristina, and a payment repeated from the metro. The steps run slowly so they can be followed; in life it all takes a fraction of a second.
- 06Eight mistakes, seven layersThe chapter’s layers of checks, stacked as in James Reason’s model. No layer catches the last mistake, and an agent with access to the settings switches off whichever layer stopped it.
- 07The agent moves the thermometerThe chapter’s test: a client with three numbers, the second one main. After three failures the agent fits the result to the test. The defences from the end of the chapter switch on one at a time.
- 08All at once, or a canaryEight and a half million computers, as on the morning of 19 July 2024, and the same faulty update. The rollout steps are the chapter’s: 1, 10, 50 and 100 per cent.
- 09The night shift and Goodhart’s lawSaturday, three in the morning: the SMS service has changed its number format. The agent has two ways to bring errors to zero, and only measuring whether reminders arrived tells them apart.
- 10Five copies or one stateThe chapter’s formula sets the website, the agent, the CRM, the memory of the client and the sales desk equal to one another. The same three events pass through a company built two ways.
Nobody Owns Money
18 experiments
- 01The stones of Yap: money that never movesHand a stone to another family, the one on the sea floor included. Paint the German marks and call in O’Keefe’s ship. The stones will not move.
- 02The double spending problem: one coin, two sellersPay both sellers with the same coin, first as a file, then through a bookkeeper who keeps the shared list.
- 03SHA-256 in your browser: mine a Hashcash stampAdam Back’s puzzle in the browser. The browser itself computes the letter’s SHA-256. Mining runs through counters until the hash starts with enough zeros. Checking the stamp takes one hash.
- 04What Satoshi Nakamoto solved: a double spend against the longest chainThe merchant waits a few blocks on top of the payment while the cheat quietly builds his own chain in which the coins never left him. The figure under the sliders comes from the formula in section 11 of Satoshi’s whitepaper; the button runs the race block by block.
- 05184 billion out of nothingThe transaction from block 74,638 and two checks, before the fix and after. The sums are exact, in whole satoshis, as in the 2010 program.
- 06What the pizza costTen thousand bitcoins at the prices this book mentions, from May 2010 to autumn 2026. You can type in today’s price yourself.
- 07The queue behind the fenceA model of the fee market: a block every ten minutes, a megabyte for roughly seven transactions a second, and the places go to whoever pays more. Try the two and eight megabytes people fought over for seven years.
- 08Guess whose coinA mixer’s pool in miniature. A coin is fished out and you have to guess who threw it in. Your odds depend on how many people are in the pool and what sets them apart.
- 09How a Ponzi scheme collapses: the MMM cash desk, month by monthA toy pyramid, month by month. Old members are paid with new members’ money, and the fund lives while enough new ones arrive. Nigeria was promised thirty percent a month, MMM Global up to a hundred.
- 10Wrong numberThe conversation from the start of the chapter, one message at a time. On the side, two numbers: the balance the platform draws for you, and the money you actually got back.
- 11The cash machine that forgets to debitTwo lines of code in two orders. Send the money first and record it after, and the recipient has time to call withdraw again, and again. Record first, and the second call finds an empty account.
- 12A hundred to oneA hundred dollars of collateral and leverage of your choosing. The night of prices here is made up, a random walk of about one percent an hour, but the distance to liquidation is real arithmetic.
- 13The sandwichA pool on the Uniswap formula, x·y = k, and your purchase. Turn on the bot in the mempool: it buys just before you and sells right after, and you pay the difference.
- 14Fourteen cents on the dollarThe arithmetic of a run on a stablecoin. According to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in the summer of 2017 the reserve behind 442 million USDT in circulation never exceeded $61.5 million. As long as nobody asks for the dollar back, the token is worth a dollar.
- 15The LUNA spiralA toy model of the mechanism that held UST at a dollar: burn a UST, get a dollar’s worth of LUNA, sell it. With few people running, it works. With many, each further UST costs ever more new LUNA.
- 16Build the boxA box that does nothing and a token it hands out. The token’s price comes only from how much money sits in the box. A toy model with imaginary money.
- 17A coin in two minutesA memecoin on a curve: a formula sets the price, every purchase pushes it up, every sale knocks it down. The creator, the bots and the people from the chat come in the order the chapter describes.
- 18Tap to earnA coin to tap and a counter for your pace. Below it, the airdrop arithmetic: what an hour of tapping was worth if half a year paid ten dollars.