Something that comes up fairly regularly in the Synthetix discord is the concept of efficiency + openness vs fairness. If a system is designed such that it is totally open, then players (e.g. liquidation bots) with a preexisting advantage will dominate, is that fair?
The writers of these bots have a skill set and access to capital that allows them to perform a service efficiently, this is GOOD for the protocol but bad for the inefficient players. You could make it more fair by introducing some handicap, but that would reduce efficiency.
The disconnect arises because there is conflict with the fairness of a system when integrated into an “unfair" world. Many people associate fairness with equal outcomes, but efficient systems actually have a tendency to increase inequality. They favour the dominant players.
Contrast this with an unfair closed system which is also inefficient, ie a corrupt system where poor players having seized power can somehow shift the equilibrium to maintain their power.
The irony here is that if you are a poor player, you actually want the latter system, as a totally open and fair system will be dominated by more efficient players. In a corrupt system at least you have a chance of being corrupt!
Personally I am a Rawlsian when it comes to ethics, but I also accept there is a harsh trade-off when trying to achieve fairness, it comes at the expense of efficiency. This is the challenge, tempering efficient markets to achieve fairness, where do we even start?
Smart contracts are hyper-efficient but that does not make them fair.
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Man @LayerZero_Labs you’re really gonna make me write up another thread huh…
I had a call last night with one of my favourite projects, they are working on their governance framework. The word I kept coming back to was LEGITIMACY.
This is probably the single most important concept in crypto. This is one of the reasons why almost every points distribution recently has been a dumpster fire.
It’s been a while since I’ve put my theadoooooor hat on, so let’s have a little chat about capital formation incentives in crypto.
Yes there are many bad actors, but not everyone is a bad actor, never attribute to malice what can more easily be explained by misaligned incentives.
People do not realise how much pressure there is to conform to existing meta for new teams. Even, and maybe even especially, the most successful teams are constrained by the current meta if they want to raise big rounds.
This has gotten way out of hand 😂. is the new site for @KengLernitas. A 🧵 on what has happened so far.kenglernitas.wtf
I started playing around with memecoins a few weeks ago, bridged some USDC to Solana and started yoloing on @dexscreener. This was right around the launch of @bodensol. Despite what a lot of overly serious people are saying I find many of these memecoins to be utterly hilarious.
That said I am most definitely not a serious person. I’ve been a fan of @getbentsaggy for a long time, and many of the Dolan memes are incredible. There’s no accounting for taste tho…
Interesting start to the new year in @synthetix_io land. SNX stakers incurred ~$2m in losses during the TRB incident today. Not amazing but not world ending either, here are my thoughts.
What happened? TRB had a 250k USD open interest cap that ballooned to 12.5m as the price ran up the last few months. This should have been adjusted back down, but risk controls were lax, there was diffusion of responsibility. The Spartan Council is responsible for params though.
Several short positions were opened as the price spiked today and with the dislocation of spot and perp prices there was no arb to balance it. We’ve become used to the skew being ultra responsive to the funding rate mechanism but it failed here. Lesson learned.
Ok so looking at the responses here I have to conclude a couple things, I’m not very closely followed by the core solana community 😂, and it seems like solana is going through a similar phenomenon as 2017 era Ethereum. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.
Most of the activity is purely speculative the same way ICOs were, but despite the majority of ICOs going to zero, we got dozens of foundational projects funded that are still relevant in the ETH ecosystem. I’m hoping that something similar is playing out and it’s still early.
With that said I still think the eth scaling roadmap will dominate this cycle, and if most of the speculative capital flows to L2s that’s fine and will help those ecosystems scale more rapidly.
What is your threshold for considering a service custodial? Binance & Coinbase? Obviously custodial. Memorising the seed words to a cold wallet? Obviously non-custodial. Is there a continuum in between these two extremes or is there a criterion that makes custody binary?
The meme, “not your keys not your coins” has been around a long time, but what explicitly does it mean? If you don’t control your keys, then your crypto is not really yours. Ok so what does it mean to control your keys?
If you generate a new bitcoin seed by rolling dice inside a faraday cage and chisel it into stone tablet then lock it in your underground vault, clearly you are in control of the key and nothing short of gaining physical access to the vault will cause you to lose your coins.