polynya

@polynya

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A decade ago, the Ethereum Whitepaper mentioned every usecase that has been successful - everything from stablecoins to prediction markets to name services - and some that haven't Around that time, BitShares was already live with PoS, free and fast txs, DEXs, NFTs, memecoins, algorithmic stablecoins, user-issued tokens etc. 7 years ago, the ICO mania experimented with every possible "____ but blockchain" 4 years ago, we saw our last major wave of application innovation that proved everything discussed a decade ago Crypto is a successful, mature industry, anyone who says "crypto is nothing but gambling" is delusional, as are those who say "we're soooo earlyyyy". Acknowledge reality, keep building on things that work, that may work, and abandon everything that has failed for many years (>99.99% crypto projects)

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The UX for Coinbase app/Smart Wallet + Base + USDC is great now, significantly superior to the incumbent market leaders Binance + Tron + USDT, plus a fraction of the cost. With the Stage 1 upgrade soon, technically it'll be a decisively superior solution (of course, even moreso with Stage 2). Yet, the real solution will be an international network of aggressive business development and marketing onboarding merchants and users from the countries where B/T/T alliance has significant marketshare - Turkey, Argentina, Thailand etc. Breaking these network effects is a very steep battle that requires significant local investment and must not be underestimated.

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PSA: Blockchains are *NOT* decentralized, immutable, permanent, transparent, verifiable, resilient, democratic or fair, or other misused buzzwords. Sure, they can be a couple of those things depending on the blockchain, but not a fundamental property of blockchains, even if they are these are much better accomplished by non-blockchain P2P/cryptographic systems. This is not "FUD", but to better leverage blockchains we must understand & be educated about its unique properties. Why do you think we get racist ponzis instead of useful apps? I have covered these topics at length over dozens of blog posts. The *only* unique property of blockchains is strict global consensus - a strictly ordered, objective set of txs in real-ish time. While very limited, this property is extremely valuable for extralegal financial transactions. You probably think I'm a blithering idiot, fair, but there's at least one other person who will tell you something similar: https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1743040410212053350/photo/1

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Over the 3 years I wrote blog posts, every mistake basically boils down to two things: 1) Underestimating development time 2) Overestimating demand for blockchains In both cases, I was more conservative than most - been accused of pessimism all the way, still am - but it was actually still too optimistic. Learning.

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This reply is representative of many others. AGI will not be a single entity like a human or a simple bot on a single server, but rather a set of networked intelligence(s) across millions of machines around the world. We can already see this property emerging in today's LLMs - GPT-4 was trained across 25,000 GPUs, inferencing over 128 GPUs. Side-note: blockchains are not immutable or permanent, as can be seen with Ethereum blobs that are deleted every 18 days; and the rest of Ethereum will too with EIP-4444 and other initiatives in The Purge. Indeed, blockchains will rely on non-blockchain P2P solutions like Bittorrent or Portal Network. As I've written about at length, the only unique feature of blockchains is achieving strict global consensus in realish-time. With AGI, this is no longer relevant as they can achieve strict global consensus trivially, and go far beyond that to attain more complex and subjective forms of consensus. Again, caveat for all of this - if an AGI actually happens.

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AGI will decisively obsolete blockchains, but it's likely it'll be obsolete for all but 1 or 2 usecases well before then (few years) as non-blockchain P2P, ZK, trust infrastructure develops Where blockchains are limited to only objective strict consensus, AGI(s) can achieve complex, subjective consensus - "AGI will use blockchains" is a silly, nonsensical meme not unlike "telegraphs will use internet" Valuable cryptoassets like BTC and ETH will live on after blockchains are obsolete because, as I've said a hundred times before, this is a socioeconomic movement, and tech is only means to an end. The tech will be replaced, the socioeconomics will live on. Caveat: "AGI" is in itself a meme, so I'm assuming it'll do what people popularly expect

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I quit a large audience on Twitter and joined Farcaster a year ago as a direct replacement. I didn't know Varun or Dan, and indeed, anyone else active on Farcaster at the time. While "the list" made sense early on, it should be opt-in recommendations now - the engagement inequality is very real. This is made worse by the hyperfinancialization, where a handful of those people are incentivized to be very active, while a vast majority of the rest are bots. (IMO, as a casual observer nowadays) Farcaster right now should be aggressively focused on social values over financial values (and yes, this is a very direct contradiction and trade-off) - in design, engineering, and most importantly marketing. Unless the terminal addressable market target is degens, which is fair enough.

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>99% of human coordination is subjective, which public blockchains cannot parse at all This is why "DAOs" use traditional human governance methods which have nothing to do with blockchains (except for accounting, which is the only objective thing) Ironically, if "DAOs" were autonomous, you wouldn't need "DAOs"

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Trust is infinitely more efficient, scalable, dynamic, and crucially - subjective. It defines humanity as a species. It is also more difficult, needs great coordination, empathy and belief in your fellow being. Giving up, being a misanthrope, and throwing over the chessboard for distrust tech like public blockchains is easy, and sometimes, it's the only way out. But we must do everything possible to embrace and improve trust, and avoid distrust as far as possible. This thought is inspired by Yuval Noah Harari, though I also briefly wrote about this a couple of years ago: https://polynya.medium.com/rediscovering-trust-31bc4f3c8713

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The topic I wrote about in the last few months of my crypto blogging career was "strict global consensus" A more technical term for the same idea as used by @guiltygyoza is "strict serializable consistency" (Disclaimer: I'm an investor in Topology) https://www.guiltygyoza.xyz/2024/04/topology-protocol-walkthrough

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Outside of a non-benevolent despot, plutocratic token voting is literally the worst form of "governance". So, it's the other way round, DAOs should study and adopt better forms of governance from the real world w/ a millennia of innovation. See: Optimism for some inspiration, but IMO we can go a lot further than that.

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Crypto has already achieved "mass adoption". It's an integral part of the global economy, with two established usecases: a) BTC & ETH as alt assets b) Stablecoins + several more niche usecases, more coming Desperately fawning over racist memecoins & trashy celebs is wasteful, focus on improving a) and b) instead

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IMHO, L2Beat's/Vitalik's Stages are incomplete. For Stage 2, in addition, - Alternate sequencing triggered within 1 epoch (i.e. 6.4 minutes). Currently, Optimism is 12 hours, which is not acceptable (preferably, there's real-time distributed sequencing) - Security council has pause rights only; upgrades even for onchain provable bugs must go through governance, emergency path with >X% approval Then, there should be an optional Stage 3, or Stage X, where: - Based or based-like sequencing is mandated - Security council is dissolved - Smart contracts upgrades require >Y% (80%?) approval from the protocol's full governance, in addition to >30d delay For big-tent high-value L2s like Arbitrum One, Stage 3 should be the target. For most, Stage 2 should be perfectly fine, and even Stage 1 enough for many lower-value app-specific L2s.

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Glad to see the "ZK Nation" token live up to their promises of 33% insider allocation, just as 50% or more has become the industry standard. Two things holding me back from considering delegate candidacy on day 1: - <<<50% of token supply circulating - Lacking commitment for an inclusive non-plutocratic voter base

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The key limitation of strict global consensus and hence blockchains is they will always be centralized, because you need a limited, undemocratic quorum to form consensus. Relative to non-consensus peer-to-peer solutions, which can be as free and decentralized as the internet. Only use blockchains if SGC is essential.

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PoW (or PoS) are useful for forming a status quo. But beyond that certain point, due to economies/entrenchment of scale & lack of redistributive mechanisms, they will likely only centralize things further. When the time comes, replacing them with a better mechanism will be essential for minimizing centralization.

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Today, a majority of BTC is traded and custodied on CEXs. With the advent of ETFs, in the long term BTC will effectively be controlled by a few regulated CEXs. Might as well cancel PoW and go PoA - it'll actually be more decentralized than 2 mining pools & a handful of profit-maxi centralized mining corporations.

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My first post in 2021 was pure hopium. I'm happy to see that everything I had hoped for has basically happened. However, I was then over-optimistic & wrong about applications. That's fine, I'm now content with strict global consensus being a niche. https://polynya.mirror.xyz/iujAzlqzNFjyOk6j_rcxAFTarDfOR-iBTo84Wlcu21A

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I got cancelled for complaining about racists and bigots stealing money from degens Yet, washed up celebrities are where cryptobros have chosen to draw the line 😂 Either way, I strongly stand by everything I said - crypto has an enormous scope for improvement in its culture and ethos, moreso than most communities

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