File sharing was once huge, and may become huge again.
The fundamental new primitive that blockchains offer for protocol design is tamper-resistant global shared state.
With this, someone could do a crypto Napster, KaZaa, or PirateBay. Probably pseudonymously, or in a country like Denmark with a "Pirate Party". Maybe not in music…
P2P, MVC, CBC
Blockchains allow us to combine the decentralization and programmability of the P2P era with the global state and monetizability of the MVC era.
For protocols with global state, the new architecture is then client-blockchain-client, or CBC.
From seeing like a state to learning like a machine.
A state can only make rectilinear decisions based on paper forms. Scalable but binary.
A machine can make curvilinear decisions based on digital data. Scalable and statistical.
Of course, some states have partially adapted & have some of their data online (albeit in often insecure databases).
But it’s just a retrofit. It’s not like the leaders are looking at metrics on the health and wealth of their constituents. Nor are they making decisions via code.
The creator economy is becoming part of the cryptoeconomy. Because legacy social media platforms have no real concept of digital property rights.
Substack, Twitter Revue, and Facebook Bulletin are all great. But they are in a sense intermediate steps.
Ghost goes further. You can run it at a domain you control.
Decentralized social media platforms go further still. You hold the private keys.
Under communism, there was no such thing as personal property. Everything that transpired in the PRC & USSR was downstream of that economic illogic, the root cause.
The restoration of private property was one of the keys to unlocking the Chinese economy. npr.org/sections/money…
Longevity has the potential to be to traditional medicine what crypto is to traditional finance. It changes the terms of the debate.
Starting with Bitcoin's rejection of central banking & endless inflation, the cryptoeconomy has challenged virtually every premise of the state-controlled, paper-based financial system that we've inherited.
So far? Plenty of risks, plenty of loss — and undeniable progress.
The conventional macroeconomic wisdom is that high inflation is bad, but that deflation is also bad, so a little inflation is good.
But there's bad deflation, often due to contraction of money supply. And then there's good deflation, due to genuine productivity increases.
1) One day charts are highly volatile and we need to see where everything averages out. Some kind of drop looks real, but capacity may come online in other places.
2) The first chart (hashrate) is over years, the second is over months - otherwise you can't see the blip.
One somewhat vexing thing:
(a) when hashrate drops a lot, you want a quick difficulty adjustment
(b) but when hashrate drops a lot, blocks take longer to mine, so difficulty adjustment takes longer to come