Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
The “customer” of crypto is the commons. Not the state, investors, or corps. The product of crypto is a hardened commons. Tokens, global distributed computers, payment rails are just intermediates. If your thing isn’t ultimately about hardening the commons, especially against trad institutional failures and capture attempts, you’re just playing at building a weird theme park out of a particular type of Lego bricks.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
You don’t “sell” to the commons. The commons does not “adopt” technologies. There is no “CIO” or “CTO” to sell site licenses to. Hardening the commons looks like, for eg, planting trees on public land, building check dams to control floods, place-making, organizing annual festivals, holding parades etc. I think the Ethereum event ecosystem, popup citues etc is in fact the main “product” so far. Transient “hardenings” of commons. Though as yet with too little local spillover and surplus. It would be nice if big Ethereum events were about more than just pumping dollars into various tourist economies. Not sure how that could be achieved, but host cities should eagerly desire an Ethereum event as commons development/hardening opportunities. Like the Olympics were once supposed to be. Though now nobody wants them. Eth events should leave behind hardened commons wherever they go.
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Macademe
@smokey-pete
I don’t understand why you call this hardening, to me that sounds more like „investing in“ or „growing“ the commons. To me hardening has connotations of defense against attack, which eg planting trees doesn’t do.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
It does… against erosion and overdevelopment risks for eg. But yeah explicit attacks are also in the picture. Nationalizing wilderness areas into national parks is one example of defense
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Macademe
@smokey-pete
Reminds me of leashless saying that the US army should run the protection of the Amazon rainforest as planetary infrastructure for o2 generation
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