polynya
@polynya
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As some of you have noticed, a big theme on this Farcaster profile is objectivity vs. subjectivity
The human experience is extremely complex, multi-faceted, diverse, and thus deeply subjective
Financialization is an attempt to dumb some things down into objective numbers. For some things, like capital allocation, exchange of goods, it works brilliantly. Blockchains are exclusively the domain of the strictly objective.
But for almost everything else, forcing subjective matters into objective outputs leads to potentially catastrophic outcomes, and the root cause is plutocracy - determining governance by wealth, to the worst-case scenario, truth itself. I don't need to tell how that's peak dystopia and an affront to humanity.
Fuck "info finance" with a bag of stale scrotums 9 replies
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Though well-written and inspirational, I believe this post fundamentally misunderstands Ethereum and blockchains.
Ethereum's distinctive property is objective, strict global consensus, and absolutely nothing else. It's great for usecases that require strict global consensus, but it's impossible for everything else, because Ethereum cannot parse any subjectivity or rough consensus at all.
As such, while money, contracts, governance, identity, law are presented as examples, Ethereum can only parse very, very limited forms of the above, where it's objective. In some cases, like governance or law, it's almost entirely subjective with negligible scope for Ethereum to help.
99.99% of economics, institutions and the like are deeply human and subjective, which Ethereum or blockchains in general cannot interpret at all. Indeed, we've seen many a times how forcing subjectivity into objective code has led to many disastrous outcomes in crypto.
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The reason why "DAOs" require traditional governance is because blockchains can only do strict global consensus
The assumption is you need a token to organise said governance, but this is not true. Indeed, some DAOs would be much better off following the worker cooperative or consumer cooperative model, rather than the public company model, with democratic voting and vetos for checks and balances (instead of being controlled by few whales, as it is for almost all crypto projects now - not just not decentralized, but very centralized. VCAOs, if you will, pun intended)
Yeah, I get it, token gambling is crypto's big usecase, but it doesn't have to be. Building the best possible protocol to attract the most users might not be such a bad idea for the long term 11 replies
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Tangentially, all other value accrual mechanisms in crypto should be minimised to remain competitive with non-crypto solutions
Fees, commissions, margins, and yes, tokens, all of that needs to tend towards zero
Tokenless, governanceless, intermediariless, non-profit protocols are the true USP
PS: only applies for valuable 3-5 usecases where strict global consensus is useful, for everything else non-crypto is simply better 9 replies
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Half a year on from my final and most hated blog post, have things changed?
Unfortunately not, crypto remains among the most morally bankrupt industries, and far and away the worst I've personally participated in. Most people in this industry are perpetually in denial, with negligible effort to change things for a better culture.
Yes, vile degeneracy has been temporarily muted relative to March 2024, but this is only because the shitcoins are down 99% since then. I see no evidence that any lesson has been learned, and the same pandemonium is very likely to repeat.
Obviously, I still highly respect the 0.1% of this industry that's actually net positive for humanity, and needless to say, all of this is just my personal opinion. I still hope, one day, at least some of the remaining 99.9% of the industry will share those values. 10 replies
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My post from 1.5 years about "assessing demand drivers for ETH" had the line "Needless to say, we’ll need to wait for EIP-4844 to assess this."
Now that EIP-4844 is out for half a year, it's indeed time to do so. As such, I'd downgrade the significance of "L2 fee burns" from 2/10 to 1/10. While it's very likely demand for blobspace is gradually going up, supply is up even more with PeerDAS imminent, plus full sharding & Nielsen's Law making blob count up only. Cross-L2 interoperability has also been much less required than anticipated, as most users are happy to stick to their chosen L2, or bridge between only occasionally
So, why was I (mildly) wrong? I did not fully understand the concept of strict global consensus then, which I only wrote about in depth later in 2023. With a better grasp of the true demand landscape for blobspace, the 1/10 is obvious
Also, this is great for Ethereum/ETH in the same way as building public roads
https://polynya.mirror.xyz/GPC26Y_rlwCyPpj_N3HeW_izY1-pIVwKW5bjuPNrGeQ 20 replies
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Discourse is more constructive than throwing money around, which only the wealthy can afford, or dueling, which only a few are skilled at
Both plutocracy and violence are abhorrent in a modern, civilised society, except wealth often follows from privilege, while dueling is meritocratic
Not to mention, society is not about an egotist fantasy about who is "right" or "wrong" - it's about finding truth before it's too late. There's absolutely zero value to society if a billionaire swept up a prediction market for nuclear apocalypse, there's infinite value for all of us to come together and discuss how we can best prevent that outcome. (Same goes for positive outcomes.)
Betting markets aka prediction markets are useful for what they do - betting.
(Side-note: "personal consequence" would be partially true if betting markets had "wealth-adjusted risk", e.g. for a billionaire throwing $1M into a bet is nothing; for the average person, $1M is impossible.) 5 replies
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