1/ Story time.

Exactly 2 years ago I was on a panel with @aeyakovenko at a small event at Solana HQ in SF.

Arbitrum & Optimism were live. There was no OP Stack. Base was a twinkle in Jesse's eye.

Toly kept talking about Solana's differentiator: synchronous composability. 👇 2/ It was the start of the rollup run-up. Only those who were paying attention could see that we were about to go from 5 or 6 rollup projects to hundreds.

And only those who were playing a few chess moves ahead could see the fragmentation challenges that would come with that.

If you are an app developer or working on a rollup, you’ve probably considered the technical implications of launching an Arbitrum Orbit vs an OP Superchain

But have you considered the business implications? I see OP get a lot of kudos for having such an open model — and in terms of strict licensing considerations, they are the best in the business. Everything is fully free for anyone to use under MIT.

What do rollup economics and Coachella have in common??

You should listen to this whole podcast, but you can also skip to 41:00 to find out why music festivals have everything to do with L2 incentives h/t @benafisch

https://twitter.com/0xResearch/status/1648758169554804760

If you are organizing Coachella, you've got to put together a lineup of headliners as well as smaller acts to attract an enormous crowd of consumers.

Okay but how do shared L2 sequencers help with interoperability?

In this piece we unpack a couple examples: hackmd.io/@EspressoSyste…

https://twitter.com/jillrgunter/status/1648060971397816320

A shared sequencer that supports multiple rollups introduces the possibility of having atomic transaction bundles.

The age of speculation is over.

The era of utility is dawning. 🚀 Attention, money, users, brain power, and builders have all been drawn into a sink hole of self-referential speculation over the last 3 years.

Who do I still know who works at @coinbase? Can you help?

1. I transfer funds from another platform to CB.
2. Transfer is accurate on chain in the block explorer.
3. Transfer is accurate on the other platform.
4. Coinbase UI reflects only a partial of the correct amount sent. 5. Proceed to have an extremely infuriating conversation with Coinbase support who keeps telling me I need to contact the other platform. And no, the other platform is NOT insolvent ;)

Can I speak to a real human who can help?

@vishalkgupta @ViktorBunin @brian__foster @emiliemc

Prediction: within the next 5 years, we will be talking about applications of zero-knowledge protocols the way we talk today about applications of blockchain protocols.

The potential unlocked by the breakthroughs of the last few years is going to take the mainstream by storm. A new class of application will be created around zkps akin to the emergence of dapps.

There are a lot of people putting their voices out there and their bodies on the line right now.

I am certainly no expert, but my line of work has provided me with basic knowledge about personal security. Some thoughts & an invitation to others to share more in a thread below. Most of my experience is in the digital world, for those who may be targeted online, but would love for others to share more about how to stay safe IRL (at protests, etc.)

In case you missed it, yesterday Goldman published a research piece on inflation, gold, and bitcoin.

*deep breath*

Some thoughts... When I worked at Goldman the running joke amongst those around me was that I spent more time on bitcoin than the bonds I was supposed to be trading. 7 years later I didn't expect Goldman's attitude to have changed much. Even with that mindset going in, I was disappointed.

1 like = 1 prediction for the next year and / or decade

(Until I go to dinner) There are entities that will still only accept fax in 2030

On this day in 2008 the bitcoin whitepaper was published.

We talk a lot about the technological breakthroughs of that day. But we should also pay attention to the genius of the go-to-market. None of it was accidental...

🕓 Timing
📜 Format
📢 Distribution
👥 Creator
👀 Branding In fact, as it turns out, many of the technical components of bitcoin had been around for decades. They just hadn't been assembled in quite the right way...

queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=…

I'm at a conference called #DebtCon3 today talking about the implications of state-issued tokens and how sovereign states might use cryptocurrency.

Yes you read that right... #DebtCon. Also the game theoretics and credible commitment problems and incentive designs and reputation systems that are taken for granted in the world of sovereign debt have SO MUCH to teach the world of cryptocurrency where every individual / entity is basically a sovereign actor.

Much of what cryptocurrency enables comes down to access. Being able to access markets you couldn't otherwise. Being able to access products you otherwise wouldn't have the means to purchase.

1/ In the United States we don't often stop to think about our good fortune to have access to assets that can appreciate in value. But much of the world is locked out of stock markets, bond markets, ETF markets, and the whole world of investment vehicles.

2/

With the rise of #DeFi the idea of decentralized digital credit scoring is getting more attention. The following is my 201-level reading list on decentralized ID and reputation for those interested in the idea.

Grab your Saturday morning coffee and get ready to open some tabs... Start with New Directions in Cryptography by @WhitfieldDiffie and @MartinHellman2 - at a minimum read the intro on the division of problems into those of privacy and those of authentication.

ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/publi…

Thanks to everyone who has bought a copy of The Existential Millennial! Every dollar we earn with impacts mental health research and suicide prevention. We hope you have as much fun with the book as we have had making it! 🤯🥑 From idea to shipped in 50 days! Feeling #blessed to work with @SethGRosenberg & @_amarcus

Is crypto winter the canary in the coal mine for a broader market downturn? My worst case scenario for what's around the corner... a thread. 👇 The sell off that's occurred over the last quarter has not been isolated to crypto. The S&P 500 erased a 9% YTD gain to be flat on the year. The Nasdaq index retraced 18% over the course of 3 months (before bouncing off the low).

Takeaways from Consensus: Invest... New York might as well be a different planet versus the Bay Area. People still wear suits unironically. Few use AirPods.

But more importantly conversations center much more around regulatory developments, price, and institutions than they do on innovations.

I got to speak at SFBW today about security tokens. I realized about halfway through the panel that my interpretation of what a security token might offer is very different from the common definition. 1/ A lot of people say security tokens will solve trade execution issues by adding liquidity to small or fragmented markets. 2/

We need to talk about liquidity.

I honestly can’t stop thinking about this. This checks out with so much of what I have seen of VCs, angels, and dedicated crypto investment funds over the last year. 1/

https://twitter.com/venturecoinist/status/1025058366073262080

Founders can no longer think of their investors as they traditionally would—tokens become liquid earlier in the life cycle of a project than in traditional startups so investors are not necessarily there for the long haul. 2/

I had dinner with my dad tonight who told me a crazy story about tactics governments have used to fight underground markets... 1/ 15 years ago, China economy was largely cash-based, making it easy for businesses to do a lot of transactions off-the-record. 2/

The most recent blockchain think-piece in the @nytimes has been getting a lot of props thanks to its bullish and farsighted appraisal of crypto.

But I have a few problems... 0/

nytimes.com/2018/01/16/mag… If you are writing a piece about security for a broad audience and choose, as a cute way of kicking off the post, to share a secret seed and a private key please for the love of god make it clear to your readers that _they_ should never actually reveal these things. 1/