Helpful feedback on the $100k prize for a decentralized inflation dashboard at 1729.com/inflation. His points are: (a) too much reliance on scraping, (b) no business model, & (c) too labor-intensive to replicate.
I disagree that these are show-stoppers, but go read first:
All that said, I want to thank @jp_koning for taking the time to provide helpful & constructive feedback. One of the best interactions between the "crypto & fiat communities" as @TheStalwart would put it. We're focusing on concrete proposals for better versions of public goods.
See also this related thread.
The reflexive response is "you're reinventing the wheel"! But the wheel has been reinvented many times over the years. A modern tire is not quite the same as the chariot wheel of antiquity.
Here's how flatcoins are the ultimate unlock. An asset that could maintain price flatness across a basket of goods would make the cryptoeconomy independent of *all* legacy states.
- India and Japan from the Quad excluded
- Canada and New Zealand from Five Eyes not included
- France snubbed by Australia
- NATO not in the picture
- UK not what it once was in Asia
- Yet joint address by US, UK, AU heads of state?
As I acknowledged at the time, I am by no means an expert on military hardware. But it strained credulity to imagine that billions of dollars of equipment captured without warning wouldn't give intelligence on US capabilities.
Victory leads to risk aversion leads to defeat. Defeat unlocks risk tolerance unlocks victory.
Not deterministic, of course. Sometimes those who are defeated stay down and never get up. And sometimes those who have won don't even recognize they've won, and keep pushing for the next peak.
But it's a common dynamic. Winning can become easier when you have nothing to lose.
Question: is privilege then always a privilege? Or can it be more of a curse, like civilizational diabetes?
Because the richer something is, the less upside it may have, and the more capital seeks other opportunities.
Yes, capital compounds — but it also decentralizes.
Proof of concept I want to see: a DAO that crowdfunds some land, buys a robot, then executes a collective decision to send that robot for a lap around the land.
Why? Show that a community organization can combine on-chain decision making and robotics to do things in the physical world. Proof-of-concept.
If you want a land robot, Double Robotics is $4k and works in office-ish environments. It can be controlled via telepresence. Good product, it's been around since ~2014. doublerobotics.com
By the time the decline is undeniable, it's not easily reversible.
In other words, by the time the bien pensants start thinking everything is not going so well after all, you're really in trouble.
When someone's fundamental worldview is "it'll be fine, someone will take care of it", you can be assured that they themselves will not be taking care of any problems.
Everything that was once founded can be founded anew.
There is no irreplaceable institution. That's a mental trap. Human beings with far less resources than us managed to level their way up from the Wild West to lunar landers in one long human lifetime.
We can certainly build better bureaucracies.
Be realistic! OK, well, if we're realistic, then building better systems in parallel will take years, likely decades. But it's not impossible.
Civilization decline is after all inversely correlated with civilizational dominance. There is always an exit.