Internet Biophysicist. Sustainability Existentialist. Monetary Localist.
Co-founder @cosmos. CEO @informalinc.
Incubating @cyclesmoney.
3 subscribers
Nov 21 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Introducing the Cycles whitepaper!
It's the culmination of years of thinking about 2 things:
1. fundamental liquidity problems in money, finance, and payments 2. the killer use case of blockchains
If you haven’t heard me say it, *money is the killer app*. We just haven’t figured out money yet. 🧵
The Cycles paper is a major milestone in my journey to try and figure out money. It offers:
- a Critique of modern money
- a new Design that addresses the Critique
- a Protocol that implements the Design
Quartz makes it easy for CosmWasm devs to start using TEEs for private and off-chain compute on existing chains, without any need for those chains to upgrade first!
Everything you need to know about the most important three letter acronyms in crypto
Or, how you win friends and TEE-fluence people 🧵
This thread is based on the talk I gave at @modular_summit:
h/t @socrates1024 and @sufialhussaini from @cyclesmoney for help preparing the talk and associated demos.
Feb 28 • 33 tweets • 5 min read
None of your coins are money and you all have brain damage.
Also, ATOM is Interchain Capital
The long version 🧵
"Money" is a sloppy word, but generally it’s used to refer to things that are a general Unit of Account (like the USD) and/or a generally accepted Medium of Exchange (like a bank deposit).
Jan 31 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
We’ve been popularizing the CoFi meme as a vision for DeFi protocols that emphasize the inherent graph structure of payment & credit systems.
It’s time to start sharing our work on the actual product and protocols that will bring this vision to life.
Introducing @cyclesmoney:
Surfacing the payment and credit graph and executing across it is an act of collaboration that takes unique advantage of the properties of blockchains (atomic multi-lateral fault tolerant execution).
Aug 25, 2023 • 20 tweets • 4 min read
1/ It’s perhaps not well understood that for most of its life the Cosmos Hub didn’t really have anything you could call an organized Hub team. With the fallout from AiB in 2020, what might have become a Hub team split apart, staying focused on all the other parts of the stack.
2/ From time-to-time various people worked on some notionally Hub-specific things, sometimes funded by the ICF, sometimes funded by other sources, but never really considering themselves the Hub team (Stargate, Gravity Bridge, Gravity DeX, etc).
Dec 31, 2022 • 35 tweets • 7 min read
1/ Our modern monetary woes are the 5000 year consequence of the shekel. Its origin in the temple palaces of Mesopotamia is bound up in the origin of accounting, writing, and states. Money existed for over 2000 years before coinage. So, who cares? Time for a 🧵
2/ Our story begins with farming, which takes root in the Near East around 8000BC, giving rise to accumulated surpluses. Around the same time, a new kind of material culture develops: the making of small clay tokens of various simple shapes
Nov 1, 2022 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
1/ I want to talk about something that’s been troubling me. We’ve seen a stark increase in hateful, discriminatory rhetoric circulating in our community and it’s time to confront the grave risks it poses to our collective well-being.
2/ When @cosmos was founded, we grounded it in the values of sovereignty and interoperability, a promise to every community the freedom to express themselves in the way they see fit
Oct 30, 2022 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
I've been working on a series on the properties of money and the tensions between them. Here is the intro: ebuchman.github.io/posts/properti…
And a short thread on whats at stake 👇
It is practically an open secret that the monetary order is fundamentally broken and that mainstream economics operates as a kind of divination cult. We don't need to rehearse this.
Oct 8, 2022 • 29 tweets • 6 min read
So, some thoughts on the Binance hack. Binance is the largest user of the Cosmos software. They run a $multibillion platform without meaningful contributions or engagement with the core software. There’s a lot to learn from what happened here.
You’ve probably seen @samczsun’s excellent tweet thread demonstrating the issue.
. Let’s try to fill in some more details about the situation.
Sep 23, 2022 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
1/ This month marks a pivotal transition point in the history of the @cosmos project. I offer my reflection – on how we got here, where we are going, and what it’s all for: ebuchman.github.io/posts/phases-o…2/ We can consider the arc of @cosmos in 3 distinct phases – Initiation, Integration, Illumination.
This month, September, 2022, marks the critical transition point from Initiation to Integration. Illumination remains to come.
Aug 29, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
In @drumm_colin's Political Theology course we're thinking about Euthyphro and the different positions taken by Abrahamic religions (including Modernity) on a basic problem: Does God define Good or does Good define God?
Perhaps we are oscillating:
Consider this profoundly simplistic caricature:
- Judaism: God defines Good
- Christianity: Good defines God
- Islam: God defines Good
- Modernity: Good defines God
- Post-Modernity: God defines Good
Aug 14, 2022 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
Not sure if a macro thesis, but heres a short thread on money, payments, and sustainable economics. I don't manage other ppl's money, so this isn't "how to bet money on what probably happens", but rather "how to reform the monetary system so we don't destroy ourselves". LFG!🚀👇
Money is where the payments are. Payments encode the structure of a settlement graph that describes how we organize ourselves and who has power over who. The structure of that payments graph is the critical thing to study. Notably, it has cycles.
Aug 13, 2022 • 36 tweets • 7 min read
This is a wonderful little paper on the origins of LIBOR and the eurodollar system. LIBOR today prices >$200T in derivatives and the eurodollar is the world reserve currency. Most people have no idea about either. Here's a short summary of the paper:
Most ppl think the global reserve currency is the USD, defined as liabilities of the Federal Reserve, who set interest rates. But reality is that most of the world's USD is outside the US, in form of liabilities of international commercial banks. this is the "eurodollar" system
May 29, 2022 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Great book (just finished) but at least a few things I struggled with @stefeich 👇
the chapter on marx was awesome, and I get the critique that changing money without changing patterns of production is insufficient to transform capitalism. but 2 things. (1) weren't the early socialists (at least owen, if not proudhon) proposing cooperative ownership of
May 13, 2022 • 19 tweets • 7 min read
A few thoughts on Terra and what it all means for @cosmos 🧵
@cosmos prioritizes the values of sovereignty and interoperability. It gives communities the tools to be sovereign over their infrastructure and applications - to determine their own political economy - and yet still be interoperable with others.
Mar 3, 2022 • 22 tweets • 6 min read
This @rhipod episode is probably the best podcast about money I have yet listened to. But @drumm_colin I think you're missing the role that Bitcoin and blockchains play in your story. A thread 🧵:
Your story seems to be one about power over real resources. About the king issuing an option for rebellion in the metallic content of money, and about the settlement between the king and the lords playing out in the spreads between the nominal and commodity values of coins.
Jan 5, 2022 • 25 tweets • 7 min read
1/There are people who are genuinely trying to talk intelligently about cryptocurrencies, but can’t because they can only see a contrived side of history. This thread tries to correct that.
2/ The obsession with sound money is not 100 years old. It's at least a few hundred, if not a few thousand. For as long as we've used money, we've been concerned about its properties, about what makes it fair. Money is at the heart of the power struggle that defines sovereignty
Sep 24, 2021 • 24 tweets • 5 min read
Allow me to attempt a more nuanced story of where the Austrians actually did go "wrong" and how they wound up so vilified. I'm still learning the history and formulating my thoughts, but here's a humble attempt 👇
1/ A good deal of original Austrian thought was incorporated into the mainstream. Though it had Austrian origins, it became no longer "Austrian" in spirit. The ideas were so good, they had to be appropriated.
Aug 15, 2021 • 14 tweets • 4 min read
Lot of folks commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Nixon Shock today as the death of Bretton Woods (#wtfhappenedin1971). While indeed it was the formal announcement of the death of that regime, in practice Bretton Woods had failed much sooner. A short thread 🧵
Arguably the Bretton Woods regime was doomed to fail from the start. It was much inferior to the Bancor proposal from Keynes and Schumacher for a supranational unit of account to facilitate multilateral clearing. But it won out due to American political might
Jun 26, 2021 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
I'm starting to think the Store of Value func of money is a hedge for the failure of sustainable credit networks. Like maybe the best Medium of Exchange money is that which doesn't even materialize - it's just clearing (why checks took off!). Cue rough train of thought 🧵👇
Money should probably be understood as an externalization of the cognitive processes behind tit-for-tat social dynamics. It allows us to represent and track more than we can do with our Dunbar limited monkey brains
