(Thread.) Some learnings in blockchain over the years, in no particular order. . .
You can emerge completely new technologies by correctly combining existing technologies. (2009)
Holders of particular valuable assets are financially incentivized to be biased toward the assets they hold and against other assets. From the perspective of other asset holders, those holders may behave irrationally. (2014)
When your tool is a hammer, everything is a nail. When your tool is equity analysis, then everything is an equity deal. But in decentralized value networks, value seldom accrues to equity. (2016)
The correct skillset for blockchain investing is not investing. It is engineering, economics, finance, mathematics, and behavioral psychology. (2013)
Decentralized governance is a thing. (2014)
Decentralized governance is an important thing. (2016)
Decentralized governance is a valuable thing. (2018)
Decentralized governance is an important thing. (2016)
Decentralized governance is a valuable thing. (2018)
Global communications technology may not need to be run by central authorities, it can be run by users. By removing central authorities, you solve the agency problem and presumably make the world a better place. (2014)
Digital companies are possible. Digital companies can raise $150m. Baby steps, when launching digital companies. (2016)
An uncapped token sale may not be ethical: it may create a game-theoretic equilibrium where investors have short-term incentives to overvaluate an offering until they cannot make themselves a long-term return. (2016)
Cryptoeconomics where asset price is a KPI of the economy generally make for suboptimal user engagement dynamics. (2017)
You can build formidable market capitalizations by compounding epsilons of value of novel freely distributed (airdropped) tokens. (2017)
Financial applications are the most boring applications of blockchains. Currency is the most basic digital application. The design space of digital economics is infinite and varied. (2017)
It’s prospectively hard to extract value into equity from a network which accrues value to a token. It is equally hard to extract value into tokens or equity from a technology that doesn’t require tokens or equity. (2014-2018)
Investing in a large number of competing and overlapping protocols is not unlike investing in competing and overlapping applications. (2017)
Capturing the transaction value vs. the network utilization value vs. the governance value of an app-protocol in general require three different economics. (2017)
The Custodian’s Dilemma: You need custodians to get the mainstream’s money, but locking assets into custody prevents one from utilizing them for voting, staking, and validating. (2018)
Generalized mining, or providing services for decentralized networks in exchange for their digital assets, is going to be a big business three years from now. (2015)
The present number of all the digital cats multiplied by their average sale price is called the kittycap. (2017)
Stateless smart contracts are ingenious. (2017)
You can completely solve off-chain micropayments and utterly minimize transaction fees to amortized 0 using generalized state channels. Layer 2 is inevitable and vital technology. (2018)
