1/ Long Reads Sunday #9. We may not be at Burning Man, but that doesn’t mean you can’t slap on some faux fur, throw some dubstep on the headphones and enjoy this week’s micro-dose of crypto goodness. With BTC honey badgering through China bans & ETF denials, it’s a good one. 👇
2/ Within hours of last week’s LRS @Melt_Dem went and dropped what became and stayed my favorite thread of the week: Decentralization Is A Myth. TL;DR we should identify the outcomes of decentralization we’re striving for.
3/ To that end, I love Paul’s riff on how many experiences would benefit from users owning data and the elimination of having to trust the server.
4/ For those screaming that even if there are benefits, who cares because decentralization is a pipe dream, I’d point you to this piece that looks across 8 different risk factors that make centralized monopoly networks susceptible to disruption medium.com/public-market/…
5/ Speaking of disruption, as the ETF drums beat louder and the flirtation between Wall Street and Bitcoin grows stronger, there’s been a simultaneous rising..maybe not skepticism but caution, with @CaitlinLong_ providing one of the most thoughtful voices
6/ For now, it remains theoretical, as the SEC iced the full monty of derivative-backed bitcoin ETFs. @jchervinsky broke down the decision, saiying they want (i) a surveillance-sharing agreement (ii) with a regulated market (iii) of significant size.”
7/ Another big bit of news this week was a growing media ban in China on exchanges, ICOs and other un-regulated crypto activity. For the play by play - and even more importantly, the contextualization - I highly recommend following @DoveyWan
8/ @wheatpond’s attitude about the China regulatory activity is full Goldblum “life finds a way” non stress, calling the ban a “complete nothingburger”
9/ Taking it a step farther, @globalcoinrsrch argues that the ban is actually good in that it will force investors to take more sophisticated approaches and will, by pushing some talent out of mainland China, benefit other parts of the ecosystem.
10/ Another regulatory-related concept this week came from @LindsayxLin’s essay “Regulatory Tribalism” arguing that crypto needs a nimble coalition system that can organize groups w/ divergent beliefs to come together to combat regulatory threats at will tokendaily.co/blog/regulator…
11/ This point was re-iterated in this thread from @eric_lombrozo who makes the argument that we’ve barely begun to see threads from today’s centralized financial powers
12/ Coalitions, however, are unlikely to come easy. In this great piece, @tonysheng uses the psychology of mass movements as a lens to understand the tribalism that forms a central part of the crypto conversation in these early days tonysheng.com/mass-movement
13/ One of the main points of debate is which tokens can actually capture long term value? @hasufl and @alexanderliegl articulate 12 premises leading to a conclusion that value will accrue to a competitively superior non-sovereign monetary store of value: medium.com/@alexander.lie…
14/ Relatedly, @robustus and @QWQiao provide a deep dive into the first and second order properties that make a token a good SoV candidate, including immunity to theft, credibly low inflation, low cost of conversion. tokeneconomy.co/the-store-of-v…
15/ Cutting even more to the quick, @jimmysong argues that the essential characteristic for a money is trust, and an essential characteristic for trusting in a money is time medium.com/@jimmysong/why…
16/ Of course, it’s always useful that, as we debate the properties that make tokens better or worse stores of value and prohibitive contenders to become digital money, we remember why it matters. In that vein, read this essay by @sonyaellenmann coindesk.com/crypto-isnt-ju…
17/ Still with me? Hanging in there? Wishing you actually *had* gone to Burning Man because maybe there you’d be able to stop thinking about crypto for fivegoddamnminutes? Tough, cuz we ain’t done.
18/ One of the underlying concepts animating Bitcoin (and now, newer phenomenon like NFTs) is the idea of bringing scarcity from the physical world to the digital world. Check out Vijay’s historical trajectory of scarcity here:
19/ @max_bronstein had an interesting thread on the value of cross-chain relayers to the space, effectively arguing that they’re key infrastructure for open-source approximation of banks. Reminds me of a @cburniske convo on Middleware some weeks back
20/ A narrative I’m watching at the moment is the concept of crypto token buy backs - where projects use capital reserves to purchase tokens back from holders. It’s started to happen in a few places, as pointed out by @venturecoinist responding to this:
21/ For security wonks, @robbiebent1 does a cool summary of learnings from ETHSecurity interviews in the lead to an early September meet up at @ETHBerlin
22/ @danheld has been crushing the thread game, quickly becoming one of my favorite CT accounts. This one going for the throat of Lightning critiques is an incredibly useful introduction to layer 2.
23/ I would also be remiss to not flag Dan’s thread on PoW environmental impacts. The changing narrative in the convo around environmental impact probably deserves its own thread soon
24/ Those paying attention to the FOMO3D game know that it ended surprisingly and suddenly. @glyphxzero provides an overview:
25/ Turns out, it wasn’t an attack that won the game but a human outplaying the bots. Score one against the singularity!
26/ For those looking for more resources like LRS throughout the week, I continue to be impressed by the @MessariCrypto article approach. Summaries are an order of magnitude better than links alone.
27/ I’m also carefully watching to see what curation strategies @TheBlock__ experiments with. In the meantime, there researcher @Dogetoshi lifts the Komono on some curation resources.
28/ Finally, for fun, let’s leave it on a debate. Will there be millions of tokens some day? @spencernoon thinks so. Highly recommend adding to what has become a great discussion.
29/ So there it is! LRS9 in the books. As always, please tell me what great things are blowing your mind that need to be included here.
Token Economy just came out and @yanroux and @stefanobernardi went deep on Fomo3D. Check it out: tokeneconomy.co/63-how-someone…
Another really good thread - in conversation form - about decentralization:
