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CENTRALIZATION IS A FRAGILE THING

This is the original text of a talk I wrote for the Tallinn Digital Summit 2024,
which was built around the theme of Securing the Digital Tomorrow.

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talks decentralization crypto resilience Bluesky


INTERNET SPEED

Teemu brought up on Ep. 33 of The Spelunking Podcast a gripe against crypto that
I’ve often heard myself: if crypto is so great, then why hasn’t it achieved more
penetration in a decade?

The simple answer is that people forget the speed at which the Internet truly
developed.

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decentralization innovation crypto spelunking podcast bitcoin


OUTSIDE CONTEXT PROBLEMS

> “An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations
> encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same
> way a sentence encountered a full stop.”
> 
> – Iain M. Banks, Excession

My last piece on where prediction markets break down made me realize I hadn’t
written about outside context problems here yet.

Outside Context Problems are the most interesting situation one can encounter,
when considering pure innovation.

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innovation thesis musings outside context problems


WHERE PREDICTION MARKETS BREAK DOWN

TL;DR: if you expect an embryonic prediction market to tell you the result of a
highly-politicized event when there are perverse incentives at play, and a
significant disparity between amount-at-risk and expected outcome, you are going
to have a bad time.

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musings prediction markets outside context problems


DATA OWNERSHIP AND LAYER FUNGIBILITY

Recently got into the topic of data ownership on a conversation with Carey
Lening which helped catalyze a few ideas I’ve been kicking around for a while.

In short, data ownership requires layer fungibility.

I’ll elaborate below.

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identity privacy social bluesky mastodon ssi atproto


SMALL INPUT TWEAKS GO A LONG WAY

While discussing BlueSky’s custom feeds and composable moderation with a friend,
he wondered:

> I will need to ponder whether it is viable at scale for millions of users to
> put in the effort to customize their feeds in a thoughtful way […]

They don’t have to - they only need one person they trust (or are willing to
take at face value for a test) to create a feed, or to add a feed to a starter
pack.

But more importantly, I realized, any customization someone can do, thoughtful
or not, is an improvement. It introduces some delta on the perspective, even
while they are within a group, instead of putting them into the monoculture
dictated by which news items are more clickbaity and likely to bring ad revenue.

It is the same way with genetics: even small mutations can help diversify the
perspective gene pool.

decentralization musings bluesky small world


THE SPELUNKING PODCAST - EPISODE 31

I’ve been somewhat erratic in posting these, but we have a new Spelunking
Podcast episode out!

Mika Honkasalo, partner at Equilibrium Ventures, joins us on the latest
Spelunking Podcast to discuss our hope that Futarchy can help fix token
governance by forcing participants to risk something for their decisions. The
discussion varied from liquid vs. illiquid vc investments, if we are in a bull
market or seeing bull market behavior from crypto insiders (something we
wouldn’t agree on), and wonder if the crypto market will end up dominated by
TradFi.


crypto governance futarchy arweave tradfi spelunking podcast


THE NATURE OF A SYSTEM IS WHAT IT ENABLES

There’s a discussion going on the Topology discord about what systems can be
described as peer-to-peer.

I think the whole thing is mostly academic, and too focused on implementation
details.

Sure, your particular choice of blockchain might have a peer-to-peer gossip
protocol and consensus mechanism, but that’s rather irrelevant if people are
mostly using tokens with a freeze authority, isn’t it?

And while Binance Smart Chain might have a P2P protocol for sharing information,
that’s entirely irrelevant when it’s completely proof-of-authority and a single
institution chooses who gets to validate.

If you are looking to describe a system, describe the kind of things it enables
that no other approach does.

That’s something the local-first camp does right, and something other projects
should strive for.

p2p musings local first


THE SPELUNKING PODCAST - EPISODE 29

On my latest conversation with Teemu, we warn people off the vaporware of crypto
+ AI tokens, go over how the market is changing - including how ETFs may provide
a path to something that scans like IPOs - and discuss the Eigenlayer grants to
prominent critics at the Ethereum Foundation.


ai crypto ethereum eigenlayer spelunking podcast


LIBRA, FACEBOOK, AND GREED BLINDNESS

Over at BlueSky, Dell Cameron brought up that Facebook’s involvement in crypto,
VR, and GenAI aren’t working out because they are only secondary to their main
business purpose: surveillance. (link)

I disagreed. Cameron was right in that it failed because their main business is
surveillance, but I suspect they screwed it up because it was such a great fit
that they got too greedy.





Would it have been different if they’d seen it as a technology investment?

Two projects grew on the compost of Facebook’s Diem open source dump: Sui and
Aptos. As of June 4, 2024, their combined fully-diluted valuation is about $10
billion. Facebook could have captured that value if they had spun it out from
the start, even as a subsidiary where they control most of the token supply.

But Libra was never a tech investment. You don’t get to have an arms-length
independent company and share data.

When all you have is surveillance, everything looks like a data trove.

privacy musings backlash libra sui aptos
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