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Bram Cohen

3 Mar, 10 tweets, 2 min read

Came across some discussion the other day of academics talking about how hyperinflation killed Mojo Nation. Don't have a good link (maybe it was Ian Goldberg) but will reflect on Mojo Nation a bit (thread)

Mojo Nation was a glorious failure. It went down in flames, but directly lead to BitTorrent and Bitcoin. There are few failures anywhere near that successful.

I can confirm that hyperinflation did in fact happen in it, although I haven't thought about it much, and hadn't realized that that had been studied and the learnings incorporated into later projects, most notably of course Bitcoin.

My own project is of course doing the testnet/mainnet thing with preset supply, because there's no reason to mess with success. Which leads to a thought about Mojo Nation:

Mojo Nation was doomed. It was doomed for a long list of reasons, all of them related to the metaproblem that it was way too early to do such a thing.

We didn't know how to do the economics right or what they were useful for. Mining hadn't been invented yet. We didn't know how to design network protocols. We didn't know how to write software. We didn't know what the hard problems were and how to fix them.

But the experiment had to be run. Without it there simply wouldn't have been the experience to know what had failed and have some idea how to do it better, and if you're going to fail might as well cram in all the failures at once to get as much experience as possible.

Why such an experiment couldn't come out of academia I have no idea, but there should be more such things in the world, and it should in principle be easier to get them funded from sources which don't want actual returns

One of the investors in Mojo Nation up front said they didn't want to invest in 'Another @#$@#$ science fair project', which in retrospect is very funny. My new project only required inventing three new mathematical primitives, so clearly I've learned that lesson.

(To be clear I wasn't a founder of Mojo Nation but was on the team and working on the core problems)

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