Long-form podcasts are great, but have two problems:
high information density and
trapped value in 3 hour discussions.
My proof of work is mining hidden CryptoGems💎, and unleashing them onto the world. If you’d like to tap into the smartest minds in web3, subscribe here:
This week on CryptoGems 💎:
Non-founder led companies don’t get crypto.
Going from on-disk => online => on chain.
Speculation was installation.
Coins are the empires of web3.
Crypto is a civilizational technology.
① Mining Source ⛏
② CryptoGems 💎
#01💎
With the exception of Facebook and Twitter, Crypto is Kryptonite for large companies. They don’t understand it and are frozen by anti-trust. They can’t take on more regulatory risk.
#02💎
Twitter is the dark horse here, and the furthest ahead, specifically on Bitcoin, not Crypto generally.
#03💎
I don’t think that Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon get it, because they’re not founder-led.
#04💎
The founder has the credibility to turn the entire organization around. They can impose short-term cost for long-term benefit to cannibalize or disrupt an existing product for a new one.
Founding vs Inheriting. You can found an institution, or you can inherit it.
#05💎
If I’d rank the existing companies by their crypto-friendliness, it’s the $100Bn, $10Bn, and $1Bn companies that are much more crypto-friendly than the trillion dollar companies. Shopify gets it. Stripe is coming around.
#06💎
Change that is on par with the desktop to internet transition. We went fom on-disk to online. The move from online to on chain involves a similar number of cultural and technical changes.
#07💎
Chris Dixon observed a while ago, that many UNIX command lines became apps. For example Git became GitHub. Or the command line chat apps became Facebook, or IRC became Slack. Command line apps became full-blown UX apps. Crypto is the reverse in some ways, where every fintech app can be turned into a crypto command line. Things that are doing cash flow transformations of some kind, for example PayPal, can be written as a few lines of code in Solidity. That’s a big deal. It’s the internet of money.
#08💎
Fintech is a frontend, blockchain is a backend. Fintech is this shiny frontend, but on the backend you’re dealing with pre-internet mechanisms of settlement. It wasn’t designed for the workload we have, like the RobinHood issue with GameStop.
#09💎
Most fintech companies are aware that Crypto is a big deal. But they have a hard time wrapping their head around it, because it flips basic assumptions. The concept of Bitcoin starts with the idea that deflation is good, if it comes from productivity. The typical macro economist would say hyperinflation is bad, but deflation is bad as well.
#10💎
When you flip fundamental assumptions, you often get to a completely different worldview. It’s like land animals vs sea animals.
#11💎
Evan Williams once said – in an counterintuitive way – it’s not about doing something totally different, but to take out steps, make it faster, simpler, etc. People were blogging, then they did Medium, then Twitter. That’s one way to view technology as incremental. The other view of technology is transformative.
#12💎
Cryptocurrency and blockchain is to cryptography, what the internet is to software.
#13💎
Crypto is a financial, technological, and efficiency related movement. There’s also a very strong overlap to ethical aspects, and how it’s actually a pro freedom movement.
#14💎
In the first 10 years, Crypto benefited the power users and the marginalized. It’s the exact opposite of the bell curve. It’s not the person in the middle, it’s the person at the extremes.
#15💎
Power users are engineers and investors. Both of them are trying to move money around. Brian Armstrong saw this problem as a payment engineer at Airbnb and that it’s not solved. An investor needs to deal with an international wire, that may get lost, there are corresponding banks, etc. The whole space is bigger then people get from the outside. A metaphor is that Crypto is a country. It’s a fractal country of 100 million people who hold some Crypto, spread across countries. Crypto is like a country that is exponentially expanding. There’re a million people at the core, 10 million people around them, and so on. It’ll keep growing, and once you’re part of this economic environment, all those people accept cryptocurrency as money, all those things become possible.
#16💎
Large, small. Fast, automated. International, transparent.
#17💎
People ask, “Where are all the use cases for Crypto?” It transferred crowdfunding, international wire transfers, transformed gold, loans, derivatives. Just those applications are worth trillions of dollars, but there are more.
#18💎
Speculation was installation. Without people speculating that it could be big, it wouldn’t have had a price. Without having a price, you couldn’t have treated it as money. Without treating it as money, you couldn’t build all these apps. You’d just exchange zeros with zeros.
#19💎
Crypto has the opposite emergence mode from social networks. Social networks had all the users, but where’s the money? It’s a common model to pile up users before making money. Now people understand it so much, they think that’s the default emergence mode new technologies. But crypto flips that where it piled up money before it had the users. Just as you got used to social network model, MAUs and DAUs, there’s a totally new set of metrics that you need for crypto that are daily inactive HODLers (people holding for the long-term and are committed to it).
#20💎
Every fintech app is going to get the backend blockchainified. Unless there’s some prohibition in the country for that. If that’s the case it’s probably get outcompeted internationally even if it has a captive market at home.
#21💎
Email address is uniform across geographies. I don’t need to look up the post code or country. Just hit enter and you send it. That uniformity alone is something that blockchain address gives you. It’s way easier to do a cross-boarder deal with a smart contract, then it was ever before.
#22💎
Crypto is to America, what America was to Europe. You start getting a visual that looks a lot like the European incursion into the new world (without the native population there). It's a pure expansion into this new region where people spend more and more time. VR will make this more than a metaphor. It's actually be like physical space.
#23💎
There is a lot of crypto tribalism. Just like there is the new world and the old world, there's a crypto world and a fiat world, and there's conflict within the crypto world.
#24💎
Satoshi Nakamoto had a very important combination of skills. First, he was a world-class programmer. In most applications – especially early in the web – security can be more of an afterthought. The thing that's different about cryptocurrency is that security is a fundamental characteristic. If it's hacked even once, the value goes away. Second, he had a deep humanity background. One person's genius shaped the world.
#25💎
Bitcoin is actually backed by cryptography/mathematics vs violence (state).
#26💎
You can use JavaScript without knowing much about history. But to understand the problem that Bitcoin solves, you really need to understand history and philosophy.
#27💎
Bitcoin has no identifiable leader, yet it has massive global adoption.
#28💎
Satoshi's absence has helped to decentralize it.
#29💎
Bitcoin is a truly decentralized technology. Every user is a root user. Nobody else can deplatform you. Nobody else can take away your funds.
#30💎
You can have parties that are highly disaligned, but are aligned on BTC.
#31💎
Where crypto is today: we have the infrastructure, we have the mining, we have the coin developers, we have the first billionaires, we have widespread awareness of it.
#32💎
Today you can still live a completely crypto-free life. I do not believe that will be true by 2030 and I believe it will be totally flipped by 2040, where it'll be crypto-first for the entire financial system.
#33💎
The reason why the public key infrastructure problem has been hard to solve is because you need people to keep their private key available and secure at all times. If you want to keep it available, you could just keep a post-it note on your computer, but it wouldn't be secure. If you want it to be secure, you can put it in a lock box, but it wouldn't be available.
#34💎
Billions of people will have private keys. That will unlock end-to-end encrypted messaging. You can see consumer demand for privacy, that people didn't think existed.
#35💎
These big companies haven't grasped how important it is to have BTC and ETH integration in their messaging and payment apps. They will not get that until too late. They will try their own in-house solution, because they understand open source, but they don't understand open state. Open state it's yet another level, it's not just the source code that's public, it's the database that's public. It's the next step after open source, they don't get that culturally.
#36💎
Verified end-to-end encryption > Trusted end-to-end encryption. Trust only if you can verify.
#37💎
What's more scarce than financial budget? Risk budget. These giant companies have cash cows and are under regulatory scrutiny. But they don't have the risk budget. They don't have the appetite for risk.
#38💎
Open-source software as intellectual property socialism. – Shai Agassi, 2005Free software developers are communists. – Bill Gates, 2005
Linux is a cancer. – Steve Ballmer, 2005
#39💎
The biggest companies – that want to be all things to all people – do inoffensive things and therefore can't focus like a start-up does.
#40💎
Every single messaging app will be rebuild with verifiable end-to-end encryption.
#41💎
A huge moat for big tech is login. Login with Apple, login with Google, login with Facebook, login with Twitter. You can conveniently log in , but they can also cut you off.
#42💎
One thing that is not very much thought about, because this battle happened 10 years ago, is how Google tried to buy Facebook. Google was annoyed with the emergence of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, because they were dark to them. These were graphs that they couldn't search. Google wasn't able to get the social networks to open their databases, because they could make more money with them being closed.
#43💎
The critical thing that decentralized social networks have solved is the alignment of interests between the developers, the users, and the platform creators. Everybody benefits from the token appreciation and now you can build on the decentralized social network. Facebook and Twitter will deplatform you when you get too successful building on their API.
#44💎
Decentralized social networks don't just enable decentralized social, they also enable decentralized search. An under appreciated aspect of Google is that a lot more search is done on Twitter these days than people realize.
#45💎
Closed social network databases are harder to index in the open web, but blockchains are easier to index in the open web.
#46💎
Most people don't realize that until 2020, blockchains were mainly used to contain financial data. Block explorers (like blockchain.com or etherscan.io) don't look like search engines to people. But these are very high volume search engines. Google hasn't even build a block explorer yet.
#47💎
Something like Bitclout or Mirror shows that you can host social networking data on a blockchain. Once it's on chain, it becomes so much easier to index for the purposes of search.
#48💎
Search will be transformed by block explorers.
#49💎
The crypto phone and crypto OS is coming.
#50💎
The operating system innovation today is happening in crypto. The operating system, the payments, the login and eventually the social network, they're all backed into one thing. That's what comes after iOS and Android.
#51💎
What would be the new empires of web3? The coins. If you think about the fiduciary duty model of a corporation, crypto answer that by making the community the shareholders.
#52💎
The internet took all these different forms of media (radio, TV, newspapers) and turned them all into packets. What crypto is doing, it's turning every single existing financial instrument into on chain debits and credits.
#53💎
Crypto scales up the basic aligning function of silicon valley. The fundamental mechanism of value creation (what's the most important data structure in Silicon Valley), one can argue that it's the cap table. The capitalization table determines who hold what equity. It aligns all these people from around the world to build. That cap table is now on chain. Now you go from 1000 people to a million people that hold a given token. (remember, crypto is not equity)
#54💎
CPA advertising will be hitting the big five, where they don't expect it.
#55💎
Crypto is a civilizational technology.
What is CPA advertising
Crypto will end up in perpetual war as each one ends up vying for world domination. Buy gold.