1/ "To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated. Education discovers an increasing richness in the past, because it sees what is unfinished there. Training regards the past as finished and the future as to be finished
2/ Education leads toward a continuing self-discovery; training leads toward a final self-definition. Training repeats a completed past in the future. Education continues an unfinished past into the future."
3/ - James P. Carse
4/ We assume that what has been true in the past will be true in the future.
5/ Generally, this is a good assumption. The sun is likely to come up in the East tomorrow. If you drop a pen it's likely to fall down not up.
6/ When it comes to investing or thinking about the future of technology, this gets problematic.
7/ Almost everything that was true about doing business before the internet is the same as doing business after the internet.
8/ However, a few things are different and those things have made all the difference.
9/ The big ones with the internet were zero marginal cost and network effects.
10/ Amazon sells 488 million products. The marginal cost, the cost for them to add another product page, is near zero and you can find anything just by typing it in a search bar.
11/ Walmart sells four million products. Walmart has less than 1 percent of the products available on Amazon because shelf space and real estate has a real cost that an extra web page does not.
12/ The result is that people do more and more shopping at Amazon because it's likely that Amazon has exactly what you need whereas Walmart may not.
13/ This allows Amazon to achieve higher scale and drive down costs, making items and shipping less expensive resulting in more shoppers and more sellers on the platform - a virtuous cycle.
14/ The internet investors who understood this phenomenon early did very well.
15/ In the words of investor Howard Marks, they were "contrarian and correct."
16/ It is quite easy to be contrarian ("Apples are blue!") and quite easy to be correct ("The sun rises in the East"), but very hard to be both at the same time.
17/ I have been thinking about this as it relates to the development of blockchains. What do most people believe to be true about blockchains that is actually false? (or vice versa)
18/ One recent debate in the community has been around how public blockchains are governed.
19/ If something is truly "decentralized" who and how are decisions made about changes to the protocol?
20/ There has been a recent push towards "on-chain governance," a system for deciding on changes to public blockchain protocols using formalized governance mechanisms encoded in the blockchain, rather than informal discussions offline as protocols like Bitcoin use.
21/ Does this make sense? Or is this an example of us carrying our past into a future where the rules are different?
22/ I put together some though on blockchain governance for @Coindesk - coindesk.com/downside-democ…
