In any voluntary transaction, both sides gain. How to quantify this?
The seller of a good measures their marginal profit: the price-per-unit minus the cost of production.
The buyer could measure *their* marginal profit by subtracting the price-per-unit from their reserve price.
At first this is just standard consumer surplus. Gains from trade and all that.
But the interesting point is that the reserve price is usually an unobserved variable in most transactions, while the unit cost-of-production is usually known.
Could we measure more reserve prices?
For every transaction where we can measure the reserve price *and* the cost-of-production, we can prove that it was wealth creating.
Because at least at that moment, both buyer & seller profited from the trade to a *quantifiable* extent.
For every government form in every country, autosuggest inputs. Or at least show worked examples. Crowdsource new forms from users, SEO for the form name, and make it one-click to submit.
Start with the most popular, then work your way down.
This is a classic schlep business (paulgraham.com/schlep.html). Pieces of this already exist, but no one to my knowledge has done this for all forms across all countries.
It's immediately monetizable, and at scale it's a kind of API to governments. DM me with a link if you do it.
Thoughts:
1) this has broad appeal to many demographics 2) you'll attract many professionals too 3) once you put data into one form, the service can autopopulate other forms 4) once you get N submissions on one form, some basic stats will reveal common errors and best practices
Current social networks don't have great tools for dispute resolution. They're a combination of anarchy (people yelling) and tyranny (arbitrary deplatforming).
An alternative approach is a global moderator hierarchy. In the event of dispute, the lowest common ancestor mediates.
The moderator hierarchy: a possible implementation
- founder is moderator 0
- founder sets up initial hierarchy, appoints mods 1-N
- mods recruit new users
- new users choose a mod upon signup
- new users can be promoted to mod
- mods are comp'd via token 1729.com/network-union
Choosing a mod has aspects of both friending & following.
Like following, it's asymmetric: when A moderates B, A has privileges that B does not.
But like friending, it's symmetric: you may require both A *and* B to opt in for A to take on the responsibility of moderating B.
Divide & choose is a procedure for fair division of a continuous resource between two parties. The protocol proceeds as follows: one person cuts the cake into two pieces; the other person selects one of the pieces; the cutter receives the remaining piece. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_an…
The veil of ignorance concept: choose a rule as if you had no knowledge ahead of time as to whether you'd be ruler or ruled. Ideally, this would incentivize participants to select rules impartially and rationally. fs.blog/2017/10/veil-i…
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.
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.
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
Proof-of-work is absolute truth, proof-of-stake is relative truth. Both have their role. But for the most important transactions it's better to produce more clean energy than to give up on the undeletable history that accumulated work provides.
It's hard to express this compactly to a non-technical person, but basically: it's harder to fake the results of a massive calculation done over ten years with datacenters full of hardware than it is to convince a fixed set of humans to change their minds and rewrite history.
This is what we get when there is no absolute truth.
Using Merkle trees, we can prove the existence of arbitrary amounts of data using just one tx on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Data availability is nontrivial (IPFS?) but proof that the original photo existed would be feasible.
Google didn't *initially* compete with other companies *primarily* on its stock price but on its product.
Assets should likewise have unique features. Good example: Zcash's privacy sets & shielded transactions. electriccoin.co/zcash-metrics/
> Google didn't *initially* compete with other companies *primarily* on its stock price but on its product
Note: yes, when raising capital you're competing with other companies based on your stock. But the customer for your stock isn't identical to the customer for your product.
Now, it's true that customers of product (users) are increasingly becoming customers of stock (shareholders). Robinhood makes it possible to buy stock in products you use. Crypto makes this default.
That's powerful, but also turns many off. More product culture will be helpful.
An important question when thinking about the El Salvador bill is what counts as receiving BTC.
On-chain? Sure.
Lightning? Ok.
Off-chain? Probably, or else popular wallets from exchanges wouldn’t count.
But if off-chain counts, then the $8B of wrapped BTC will count... 🤔
If off-chain BTC transactions count, such as Coinbase-to-Coinbase or Binance-to-Binance, then wrapped BTC transactions will count.
If wrapped BTC counts, then you can wrap BTC on Ethereum — or any of the new chains. Just like USDC is now present on four chains, including Solana.
If wrapped BTC counts, which it likely will, then every wallet for every chain which wraps BTC is a candidate for satisfying the law — so long as it also has L1 (and perhaps L2) interoperability.
So Polygon & Solana could be handling millions of wrapped BTC transactions.
As the rising third power in the world, India has the potential to be the center of a new Aligned Movement — an upgrade to the Non-Aligned Movement that aligns every neutral country behind Bitcoin and decentralized crypto protocols. balajis.com/add-crypto-to-…
Crucially, Crypto Capital isn't anti-American or anti-Chinese for that matter.
There are Woke Americans & Crypto Americans, Crypto Chinese & Communist Chinese.
The Crypto American is much closer to the average Chinese hodler than to Warren, Trump, or Xi Jinping.
N custodial wallets are hubs and the M citizens are spokes.
If a user of wallet 1 sends a transaction to a user of wallet 2, then the transfer looks instant on their screens.
Bulk settlement happens later on-chain between wallet 1 and 2.
Let’s say there are N=10 popular custodial wallets & they all do bulk settlement with each other every 24 hours. That’s N*(N-1)/2 = 45 pairwise on-chain Bitcoin L1 transactions per day, which is feasible.
Also, add in N daily on-chain transactions with the state’s Bitcoin fund.
If I’m reading this right, all economic agents that are technologically capable of receiving BTC as payment *must* accept it as payment — though instant conversion to USD is made available to anyone who doesn’t want to take price risk.
The state of El Salvador has just mandated that all merchants in a country of 6.4M people accept BTC (with instant conversion for those who don’t want price risk).
This is a legal flippening. From “banning” Bitcoin to mandating it.
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