1/ Long Reads Sunday #5. Crypto was a pile of fire 🔥🔥🔥 this week. Ponzi schemes; ETF drama; skeptics-turned-Bitcoin-Maximalists (sort of); a ritualistic dance around the pyre of the firm structure; debates about VC token sale disclosures and so much more. Let’s dig in 👇
2/ First, the big industry background stuff. @AutonoFinTech produced a massive report on the state of the industry. @cburniske grabbed some of the most interesting slides, including this one on the waves of crypto funding
3/ @Coindesk also released its big Q2 report, that, alongside all the numbers you’d expect, also provides a bunch of data about the composition of the crypto community in terms of things like political affiliation coindesk.com/research/state…
4/ Kyle t̶r̶o̶l̶l̶e̶d̶ ̶e̶v̶e̶r̶y̶o̶n̶e̶ wrote this thread about the draws of Bitcoin Maximalism, ultimately still flagging some key questions about BTC as the ultimate digital global reserve asset. Say what you will, this man keeps it interesting.
5/ Murad, recognizing that the tide had shifted irrevocably to Maximalism, shared this gem of a chart of Bitcoin’s path to full global money. Expect to see this reprinted and reference 1,000,000 or so times.
6/ Seriously though, the best thread that y’all probably missed was @dhruvbansal connecting T.H. White’s “The Once & Future King” & King Arthur to Bitcoin as a way to talk about the sort of un-copyable power of Satoshi’s disappearing act.
7/ Speaking of long-horizon thinking, the OG of OG’s himself @NickSzabo4 wrote about why crypto designers shouldn't focus too much on external events: "Trust & security considerations are far more important than speculations about aggregate human behavior"
8/ Over in another section of crypto twitter, Ryan instigated this super interesting conversation about whether the community should demand that VCs who sell tokens disclose those moves publicly to reduce the ‘shitcoin waterfall’ that dumps coins on retail
9/ Then of course, there was FOMO3 and PoWH3D. These teams figured that we don’t have enough dubious shit in crypto so we should build transparent unstoppable Ponzi games. From an observation perspective, it’s hard not to be fascinated:
10/ For more good analysis of these games, I really liked @yanroux and @stefanobernardi’s write up in Token Economy. They’re hoping that the mechanics inspire other use cases for autonomous ecosystems. tokeneconomy.co/te-59-fully-di…
11/ Meanwhile, the professional crowd was eagerly speculating about the possibility of a Bitcoin ETF being approved. Jake broke hearts and broke down why it’s unlikely that the ETF proposal that everyone is stoked on will be decided on this year.
12/ On Thursday, though, the SEC did make one decision: to reject a proposal from the Winklevoss/Gemini crew. @louaboudhogben provided some good analysis & @AureliusBTC provided a great TL;DR
13/ Maybe most interestingly though, SEC Commissioner Hester Pierce wrote a strong dissent saying that by denying the request, the SEC was slowing innovation and inhibiting the institutionalization of the asset class. 🔥 Hester 🔥 sec.gov/news/public-st…
14/ While people were talking about important stuff happening right now like Ponzi games and ETFs, some of us were day dreaming about how incentive systems can be designed to allow networks to compete with firms.
15/ On this topic, Taylor wrote about how a key enabler of new forms of organization is the reduction of transaction costs
16/ @pjkershawnz connected the dots between the PoWH3D/Fomo3D games - who have created a commons predicated on greed - to other forms of digital commons that can be created without the ability to by monopolized.
17/ The conversation around decentralized organizations, commons and the potential death of the firm has gotten sustained enough to produce a countervailing opinion. Nic reminded us that the time scale is likely longer than we’re imagining.
18/ Finally, a few more threads and posts not necessarily connected to larger themes but just interesting in their own right.
19/ Jake from @coinfund_io summed up a few years of learning. I think this idea that network utilization value, transaction value, and governance value all require their own economics deserves a whole essay
20/ Chris wrote about a trend towards what hecalled “middleware protocols” that are smart contract platform agnostic and which make it easier for devs to build dapps. The Ruby for Rails, but for all the rails.
21/ @simondlr does a massive job summing up a huge amount of information about Plasma Cash. This is the best starting point for exploring Plasma that I’ve yet found: blog.ujomusic.com/a-plasma-cash-…
22/ @AriannaSimpson runs counter to the push to define cryptoasset valuations that has been getting louder and louder, suggesting not that it’s not important, but simply that the only rational position right now is to learn through uncertainty. tokendaily.co/blog/false-pre…
23/ @RicBurton explores the idea of “hashflow” (vs. cashflow…get it?) to understand degrees of economic health in protocol networks. medium.com/balance-io/has…
24/ @adamjaykaplan explores better ways to align founder incentives post ICO. h/t to Token Economy for this one. medium.com/@mtvesuvius729…
25/ Finally, for those of you hustling too hard to read the books that everyone in crypto has to read to get our membership card, Jim’s got you with this boss summary of insights from Taleb's Skin In The Game
26/ Big week, right? What did I miss? What else was great?
