Tag: Decentralized Finance

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Community Politics

Day 1277 and Don’t Lose Your Head

Everyone has their entertainment and mine is makes me a little bit of a stereotype. I hate podcasts but do most of my chores while listening to Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast.

I was catching up today with an interview with equities analyst Tom Lee. My attention got caught and stuck on his description of Bitcoin.

“Yes, Bitcoin is unlike other asset classes because there is a cooperative value. You know, the people who contribute to the network benefit from it. And that’s different than any other asset class.”

From Odd Lots: Why Tom Lee Thinks We Could See S&P 15,000 by 2030, Jun 24, 2024

Now I don’t think this is unique to Bitcoin. Cooperative value can be found in everything from nationalist politics to luxury handbag resale pricing. But I do this it’s important to have cooperative values be baked into a network for it accrue value.

We’ve traditionally mitigated concerns about market cooperation through clear property rights and legal protections. We’d backed up those claims with things as abstract as a monarch. We’ve evolved to it to the slightly more concrete full faith of the United States and Byzantine bodies of securities law. Fiduciary duty and all that.

But as we become less inclined to trust that the buck does in fact stop “anywhere” we are looking for ways to mitigate that risk. How to operate in a world without trust? You develop trustless protocols. Humans have plenty of intuitions about trust and many these intuitions struggle without a clear person with authority to act.

So I ask if we are heading into a “headless” age?

As distrust in institutional power struggles we are seeking out new ways to continue the business of life and civilization even if a high trust society is in question.

We’ve got networks like Bitcoin that work without a head. We have new corporate structures like decentralized autonomous organization (DAOs) that can operate strictly based on cooperative rules, and indeed now entire memetic cultures (like e/-cc) which hold power while being headless.

Lest you think this is some frontier tech idea that doesn’t apply to you we’ve headless content moderation systems & headless retail platforms. Huge swathes of financial tech is living above the API.

You could even argue that we’ve got headless political parties as the Democrats and Republicans both struggle with defacto heads nobody particular trusts. I don’t know if we can live in a headless democracy. Deciding who is a citizen is a very different matter than deciding who is a shareholder.

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Startups

Day 1257 and Other People’s Labor

I am laying prone in bed hopped up on DayQuil and the good codeine cough medication. I have Covid and apparently this bout will be no picnic.

Being sick can feel vulnerable. I imagine to most eyes I am economically and socially unproductive in this condition. I am not able to labor.

When I am sick I am grateful I get to be capital. I feel capitalism should appeal anyone with a disability (as I do) simply because comparative advantage allows us to exist without being at of the mercy of the state. Illness being disabling doesn’t mean low productivity.

My ability to be capital relies on the comparative advantage of specializing in startup kinda of startups. Practically it means I got to play a part in helping further the labor of others looking build a company.

Today was a big day on that front for me. One of my investments (humble brag I was their first commitment) Squads announced their Series A today.

They have come a long way since when I wrote about them on day 301 to where they are today on day 1257. A lot happened between fall of 2021 and Summer 2024. Now they are the market leading multi-sig wallet on Solana thanks to their Squads protocol.

They began with a vision of DAO tooling and ended up simply dominating code Solana primitives. They are doing the work of developing smart account technology and products that make it easier for businesses and individuals to securely manage and own digital assets. And they continue to make crucial tooling like Fuse.

For all the mania of meme coins and tokens, we can forget it’s real companies making real infrastructure.

These things have to be built for grander vision to exist in crypto and Squads has clearly been the team to do it. They have worked relentlessly shipping tools people want to use and build with.

When first met their CEO Stepan in Twitter DMs I had the privilege of seeing their early days upfront. There was never a moment that they were not listening to the market and adapting. I spent much of the summer of 2021 on DAOs because of their influence.

Everyone on the team practically wanted to do the work of building out what was needed for us to transact and govern in a trustless environment as individuals and as groups. I was inspired by their commitment to execution.

I am just a small part of their journey. But being able to provide the kind of specialized capital that could understand what they wanted to build from the start is a huge source of pride for me. Without early stage oddity investors like me it would take just a little longer for the entrepreneurs like Stepan, Deni and Sean to get to market. And the market deserves a company like Squads. Their hard labor built something of value.

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Startups Travel

1241 and Catching My Breath

Next week I’ll be flying to Austin for what’s become an annual crypto pilgrimage to Consensus. I am excited as it’s like summer camp.

I’ll be participating in a few private sessions but I’ll be a speaker in public town hall forums as well. If you will be in Texas for the event (or are simply in the city) drop me a note on Twitter and perhaps we can overlap.

Given the intensity of the travel I have ahead of me I’m trying to take it easy today and tomorrow. I’ve been doing laundry and organizing myself.

I am not a hot weather person so I worry about events in hot climates in the summer. Heck, I worry about hot climates even in mild seasons. Last year I found myself struggling with Frankfurt in May so summer in Texas isn’t exactly my easy season.

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Internet Culture Startups

Day 1239 and @ Consensus 2024 Next Week

I’ll be in Austin Texas next week for Consensus 2024. I’ve really enjoyed my last couple of years attending. The entire crypto industry gathers for it giving it a summer camp feel. Or as Coindesk says “10 years of decentralizing the future” which undersells their role in reporting the industry.

The conference coincided with the annual Coincenter dinner which is an industry wide non profit effort to work towards policy goals for decentralized computing like Bitcoin & Ethereum and the wider cryptocurrency.

Our mission is to defend the rights of individuals to build and use free and open cryptocurrency networks: the right to write and publish code – to read and to run it. The right to assemble into peer-to-peer networks. And the right to do all this privately.

In that vein, I’ll be discussing the intersection of artificial intelligence as the #FreedomToCompute at Consensus as this is THE issue for everyone who uses compute as a tool to solve problems.

It’s an opportunity to discuss the big public goals around the future of machine money and machine intelligence.

I’d argue this includes the entire software industry and by default anyone who is reading this post. Our most important rights will be decided by how we handle policy on these issues. Math is leverage.

One of the town halls I’ll be participating in at Consensus (a format I love to dig deep into topics) is about how artificial intelligence can be a tool for our efforts to decentralize and not end up as a master of big government or big tech.

Crypto has the basic problems facing artificial intelligence. Both spaces rely on open, available and trustless compute. Both are under intense scrutiny and face significant regulatory capture risks.

It’s never been a better time to get involved in these topics. We need open protocols and interoperability standards far more than we need fretting about safetyism and hysterics about science fiction.

Doom solves no problems but software does. We need safe harbors and policy sandboxes so we can continue to nurture algorithmic innovation for us all.

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Startups

Day 1230 and Alignment is Consensus

Over the last decade I’ve gone deeper into a set of values that guide my relationship to what we should be building and for whom.

Consensus and alignment will be the twin sisters of our shared reality.

We achieve consensus through open networked & decentralized systems of governance and value. A trustless system reaches consensus we all agree upon through the mathematical verification of compute. Decentralized collaborative approaches are the path to alignment.

The further we get from truth as a set of shared experience we agree upon as humans, the more crucial a trustless future becomes.

AI and crypto offer us transparent solutions to agreement. Machine intelligence needs machine money and machine governance.

Humans beings are not truth seeking animals. We are social animals. We decide the boundaries of culture together. Rationality is an aspiration resting atop faulty sensors and emotional baggage.

But we can reach a consensus. Mathematics gives us the tools to differentiate between thing and not thing. We can encode quite a bit into binary.

We can seek to know things impartially. From there we share our experience with others. We measure and compare. Trial and error is collaborative. To be able to come to an agreement on a shared truth is the whole goal.

To be able to collaborate widely and through shared and mutually agreed upon standards remains the ambition of civilization. Coordination unlocks progress.

With artificial intelligence we can extend out the realm of what we know. Networking together all our emotionally faulty sensors, conflicting pieces of cultural & emotional knowledge together reveals bigger things.

If, from that networked reality, we are then able to scale the abstract business of solving specific and concrete problems all the better.

Building within reality requires us to agree on an acceptable consensus. We can verify positions and align incentives together. The alignment is all of us coming to a consensus on how we allocate our attention, willpower, and resources.

We reach for technological progress through alignment which is organized through the network consensus layers of governance and value.

The freedom to compute is essential to alignment. In a trustless world, we are able to reach consensus we can all verify.

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Finance Startups

Day 1147 and Balkan Crypto

I’m in the Balkans for a few weeks doing some scouting and visiting with friends and colleagues. The western Balkans including Albania, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro are known for their occasionally colorful participation in cryptocurrencies.

The region has experienced currency volatility, struggles with central banking and even in Albania a civil war stemming from a financial crisis over government Ponzi schemes.

These negative experience with currency instability, government corruption and sociopolitical unrest has led to a desire to experiment with transparency and decentralization amongst the region’s youth.

The ecosystem is host to serious projects has a talented base of engineers. Ripple is experimenting with a national stable coin in Montenegro. Zuzalu, the two-month invite-only gathering that Ethereum blockchain co-founder Vitalik Buterin led in Montenegro has been a regional hub. And it has inspired a new grants program Zu- villages that strikes me as a cross between network state and a DAO with Gitcoin.

In an editorial in Bitcoin Magazine the founder of the Belgrade Bitcoin Hub summed up the “why”

As a result of years of unfulfilled promises from regional politicians, people of the Balkans are hard to convince about the long-term benefits that can be realized by adopting Bitcoin in one’s life. A low time preference way of life to most people in this region is associated with disappointment and the lowered standards of living that have happened many times before.

Plumski founder of the Belgrade Bitcoin Hub.

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Internet Culture Startups

Day 1036 and The Right Direction

I’ve been in Europe for the last month. My itinerary included Tallinn, Helsinki and Amsterdam. It was a personal trip with work overlayed on top as the digital nomad as become a regular part of my life.

I have said it before but I don’t take as much pleasure as you might imagine from these trips. Much of the reason I spend so much time outside of America is simply that the State department won’t let in the kind of rare weirdo digital grey tribe talent from the portions of the world the United States has labeled as “bad passports.”

I’ve written about it extensively if you are interested. We’ve reached a crisis point in the dysfunction of our immigration and travel visa system in America and it weighed heavily on me and mine. It’s the most concrete evidence I have that America simply isn’t serious about being competitive in the global economy.

As I head back home to the states, I want to be sure I’m heading in the right direction with my priorities. I’ve been committed to crypto for close to a decade now. I’ve added in more focus as it’s become clearer we can’t rely on fiat and the dollar system. I’ve become part of the artificial intelligence explosion over the last two years. Now that the Network State concept is more formalized and we have rallying movements like e/acc, I feel as if some optimism is cautiously warranted. All it will take is twenty or thirty years of work and surviving the geopolitical tumult. No big deal right?

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Finance Internet Culture Startups

Day 853 and Alignment on Our Consensus

Some narrative wars are being fought right right. Who owns the future and who gets to decide on what something is worth? That question is rippling through AI communities and crypto DAOs. And then the Federal Reserve raised another quarter point and Balaji explained probabilistic thinking and it went over everyone’s heads. And the beat goes on.

We are all looking at the consensus making in the market and applying our separate projections onto the great stage of guessing if you think you know what other people think everyone knows. What is common knowledge. Turns out calculus is useful!

You’d think the value of an honest days work would be common knowledge. But labor costs sure have gone up. Or maybe a gallon of milk. Politicians don’t know. How much do you get for a dollar? I’d like to know if you think it has changed. These are things you can evaluate yourself. You do not need a fancy expert. Though sometimes economists on Twitter will answer your questions.

But are we aligned on the measurements and valuations being used? What do you value vs Janet Yellen. I believe we have a right to ask for the people and technologies that run our lives to be accountable.

We have to agree on some collective civilization level norm on what we value and what the boundaries are on what things are worth and how we protect those valuable things.

It’s my personal opinion that we are all performing a bit of chaos magic as we ask that we align on a future that can collectively together build the most aligned consensus of agreement. Maybe it happens at the neighborhood level or maybe it’s a whole state. But we need to agree to some terms.

How gets to do that and how do we enable them? Maybe it’s humans. Maybe it’s humans guiding machines to make us more powerful. I myself believe that machines will need a valuation mechanism to sort priorities on our behalf.

People ask if I’m on team AI or team crypto. AI needs crypto to bridge the many different value sets and marketplaces together. Some of these types of value marketplaces may even be cultural values. That’s the goal of the network state. Align with the state that empowers your values. But then these states will also need to coordinate in various states of mistrust, distrust or if we dare trustlessness.

But aligning on how we govern and what rules we must abide by is a hard problem. We’ve relied on national liberty in America for a good while and it has produced many failures along the way.

But occasionally the utopians win a few rounds. Freedom does indeed reign it just takes a lot of fight. But we work to align as many of us as possible toward a consensus. Nobody said civilization was easy to maintain.

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Community Startups Travel

Day 849 and “Oh I Follow You!”

I’ve been in Austin for Coindesk’s Consensus crypto conference. I’m flying home to Montana today after five intense days of work. But if the on the ground reception is any indication, I nailed this year with my talks and vibes. I might actually be good at my job.

Conferences can be tricky if you are a speaker. You’re obligated to hold attention & entertain while also getting across complicated topics like governance contracts. It takes energy and preparation to do it well.

This year I was a bit less academic than last year as Marc Hochstein and I hosted an interactive town hall which was spicy as hell and my loud carnival barker voice carried. A bit bigger than just a talk and I think it was a hit.

By the end the room was packed with folks passing by and stopped to see what we were discussing. A bunch of smiling energetic faces and a loud lady in a full length dress is a bit eye catching out on a convention floor stage. I got so much positive feedback.

Heck, I was in a bathroom where I overhead an attendee discussing the panel the next day with a gentleman who was also panelist. The attendee raved to the panelist and said “that chick” really held everyone’s attention on topic. A good performance all around.

I called Consensus a “summer camp for adults” as it all your crypto friends get together for it. An expensive paid conference with a lot of talent and speakers makes for excellent serendipity. I felt like I made new connections and even a new friend or two.

It felt easy as in a small community someone like me gets to enjoy the benefits of niche fringe micro-celebrity. I kept hearing over and over “I follow you on Twitter” along with “she’s so funny on Twitter she says the shit you are thinking.” I’ve got to admit it feels good.

And I think it was fun for Alex who spent part of the week hearing folks tell him that while he’s great (and everyone loves his homesteading adventures) but they are really more excited to meet his wife. Dare I say I’m a trophy wife?

It’s super fun when your internet frens and parasocial relationships come together in actual reality. We were all happily saying “oh I follow you” to each other all week. I miss everyone already. But I’m happy to be home in Montana.

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Community Internet Culture Startups

Day 848 and Summer Camp

I’m not a camp kid. I’m told there exists a group of kids whose formative summer experiences are at summer camp and I’ve watched enough American television to have the gist of the genre. It looks fun.

Professional conferences appear to offer a similar experience to adults. You have a yearly event or two that gets together various sets of old colleagues and professional teams that then overlap with social and affinity groups. I’ve been at Consensus which is one of crypto’s many conferences but somehow one of its most inclusive.

It’s a bit of a crossover event where a lot of different factions put aside their differences and ask why the fuck are we here and what the fuck are we even building anyway. And the answer seems to be every kind of kid you’d expect at summer camp. We are building a pretty inclusive place with a lot of weirdos.

You’ve got the academic nuanced protocol dorks, the tradfi to defi chads, the solar punk regenerative commons open source projects, developer tool companies, analytics firms and graph data scientists, privacy and OpSec nerds, and even the baroque online misogynists. And me, who is, I guess, a chaos magic witch or a pre-seed venture investor if you are nasty.

Crypto is for everybody and sometimes we aren’t thrilled by everyone who shows up but we do our best to make sure everyone is included in the effort. Maybe we even help cool down the radicals and maximalists right? Maybe we can reach a consensus?

Everyone who is here this year is down for the fight. There are a millions reasons why skepticism of centralizing authority and panopticon states is good. Mostly it comes down to insisting on finding a trust layer that we can all agree on. Even if you are a racist weirdo online.

And I’d imagine most marginalized identities can understand the basic skepticism how big institutions. I’ve only got a few issues (disability and gender come to mind) and even I see how institutions turn a blind eye to our needs if we don’t stand up. So we’ve got to agree on a common set of civilizational rules. If a state can’t do that then we better build alternatives fast. Trust layers matter.

So I’m glad that I’m in an aligned fight for those basic ideals. We are fighting for a consensus in a pluralistic world. Because that’s one where we can all prosper. And speaking as someone at summer camp for utopians, it feels pretty good to be optimistic. Just give us a decade or two to keep fucking around and finding out. With enough of us competing we will get there.