Endnotes on 2020: Crypto and Beyond

It's easy to say that any application can be done more efficiently with a centralized service, but in practice social coordination problems are very real, and unwillingness to sign onto a system that has even a perception of non-neutrality or ongoing dependence on a third party is real too. And so the centralized and even consortium-based approache... See more

What we see in 2020 is this: Big Government is as powerful as ever, but Big Business is also as powerful as ever. "Big Protest Mob" is as powerful as ever too, as is Big Tech, and soon enough perhaps Big Cryptography. It's a densely populated jungle, with an uneasy peace between many complicated actors. If you define success as the total absence of... See more

And so anything that influences the culture can have a great impact on the world and on people's financial interests, and we're going to see more and more sophisticated efforts from all kinds of actors to do so systematically and deliberately. This is the darker conclusion of the importance of non-monetary social motivations - they create the battl... See more

One important conclusion for me from this is the importance of culture (and that oh-so-important word that crypto influencers have unfortunately ruined for me, "narrative"). If a project having a high moral standing is equivalent to that project having twice as much money, or even more, then culture and narrative are extremely powerful forces that ... See more

even a billion dollars of capital cannot compete with a project having a soul.

One of the key intellectual undercurrents of the 2000s era was the recognition of the importance of non-monetary motivations. People are motivated not just by earning as much money as possible in the work and extracting enjoyment from their money in their family lives; even at work we are motivated by social status, honor, altruism, reciprocity, a ... See more

...a hybrid discipline, combining formal mathematical reasoning with the softer style of humanistic reasoning, is required.

But in the 21st century, the lines between "private" and "public" are once again rapidly blurring. Governments are behaving more like market actors, and corporations are behaving more like governments.

Many online platforms serving wide groups of people need governance, to decide on features, content moderation policies or other challenges important to their user community, though there too, the user community rarely maps cleanly to anything but itself. How is it fair for the US government to govern Twitter, when Twitter is often a platform for p... See more