Cooper Midroni

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on the atlas — 19

highlights — 34

Custodianship is, in reality, non–binary. What might at first appear to be non-custodial may actually involve many custodial elements whose reliability people often take for granted. The traditional dichotomy – custodial vs. non-custodial – is a false one.
Wallet Security: The 'Non-Custodial' Fallacy - a16z crypto
Value can only be added to an ecosystem if the core product being built (by core devs) has last-mile apps for users (by app devs), which users can discover and find useful (go-to-market work)
The Web3 Sustainability Loop. A system design for long-term growth of… | by Trent McConaghy | Ocean Protocol
If rates are too high, it will either get forked and re-deployed with lower rates, or it won’t get adopted because it’s seen as too extractive.
The Web3 Sustainability Loop. A system design for long-term growth of… | by Trent McConaghy | Ocean Protocol
Without measures to restore equilibrium, inflation can spiral out of control and lead to hyperinflation where money becomes essentially worthless.
The Web3 Sustainability Loop. A system design for long-term growth of… | by Trent McConaghy | Ocean Protocol
Nations take in revenue from taxes. They use that revenue to create and grow an ecosystem of laws, public infrastructure, defense, etc. so that citizens can thrive and conduct commerce. When citizen and business well-being goes up, tax revenues go up, and the nation becomes more successful. GDP measures the amount of commerce. And so the loop goes.
The Web3 Sustainability Loop. A system design for long-term growth of… | by Trent McConaghy | Ocean Protocol
Issuing stock is a superpower for businesses. It pulls capital from the future into the present, based on the premise that allocating it effectively will increase the value even more in the future.
The Web3 Sustainability Loop. A system design for long-term growth of… | by Trent McConaghy | Ocean Protocol
Putting more literal power in the hands of individuals does mean they need to do less work: We use machines and energy to do many things that were once done by hand, from washing clothes to ascending buildings.
Making energy too cheap to meter - Works in Progress
By requiring that inequalities benefit the least advantaged, Rawls builds in a natural corrective to the rampant inequality that would otherwise emerge in a system that privileges freedom above all else.
A Theory of Justice for Web3 — Li Jin
And second, any inequality that does exist should maximize the benefit of the least well off. This is a profound principle. Under this principle, it’s acceptable that doctors earn more than janitors, because that compensation differential incentivizes doctors to pursue their careers and ensures that janitors (and everyone else) will receive quality care if they fall ill.
A Theory of Justice for Web3 — Li Jin
Common among these theories of justice is a tension between two equally important yet often opposing values: freedom and equality. A society in which all actors are completely free is likely to result in a significant amount of inequality, since individuals differ in their motivation to pursue wealth and will behave in ways that advance their own interests. Conversely, a society that is completely equal inhibits freedom, since individuals cannot behave in any way that causes them to be unequal to others — even if that unequal outcome is “earned” through hard work or skill.
A Theory of Justice for Web3 — Li Jin
“The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.”
The Addiction Economy - Napkin Math - Every
The psychological (memetic) virus problem is much greater than actual code viruses. The ongoing universal exposure to alien and internally incoherent value systems has undergirded the well-documented crisis of credibility (collapse of meaning) that all Western institutions are experiencing today.
Immunology for the Internet Age • Blog • urbit.org
Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda maestro, allegedly explained his method thus: “A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.”
Are we living in a post-truth era? Yes, but that’s because we’re a post-truth species. |
A cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new. In fact, humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, who conquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions.
Are we living in a post-truth era? Yes, but that’s because we’re a post-truth species. |
But if this is the era of post-truth, when, exactly, was the halcyon age of truth?
Are we living in a post-truth era? Yes, but that’s because we’re a post-truth species. |
By re-architecturing the code into different contracts, it is possible to allow logic upgrades while keeping the storage the same.
The Basics of Upgradable Proxy Contracts in Ethereum | by Bernard Peh | Medium
In other words, the classic propensity model (and most machine learning algorithms) predict target (y) given features (x). Uplift looks to solve for the impact of treatment (t) on target (y) given features (x).
Uplift Modeling: A Quick Introduction | Towards Data Science
The mobile era led to two main strategies: advertising, and, most contentiously, microtransactions—which involved charging people for perks, and advantages within those games: convenience, time… and power relative to other players.
The Future of (Crypto) Gaming - Delphi Digital
The core idea is that in the early days, games offered true risk. Having made your way to the front of the line in the arcade, your quarter would buy you one go with three lives. If you lost them all, you were out. There was a real incentive to ‘git gud’, as dollar value became intertwined with skill. The better players literally got more value for their money as they were able to survive longer. The greatest players had the highest order incentive in the form of the high scores, where their achievements could be immortalized
The Future of (Crypto) Gaming - Delphi Digital
These early games oozed soul, as the public spectacle of the arcade unlocked deep competitive forces for the first time. The pursuit of a highscore slot and the ensuing glory that could be flaunted at both friend and foe was infectious. These games were skillful, fun, and followed the age-old adage that great games should be easy to learn and hard to master.
The Future of (Crypto) Gaming - Delphi Digital
In many cases, play is not unhindered by external interference. In fact, it has become entangled with arguably the biggest constraint that reality imposes on people—money.
The Future of (Crypto) Gaming - Delphi Digital
An abstract coordination game. You benefit heavily from making the same move as everyone else.
Notes on Blockchain Governance
The decision function view treats governance as a function f(x1,x2...xn)→y, where the inputs are the wishes of various legitimate stakeholders (senators, the president, property owners, shareholders, voters, etc) and the output is the decision.
Notes on Blockchain Governance
The coordination model of governance, in contrast, sees governance as something that exists in layers. The bottom layer is, in the real world, the laws of physics themselves (as a geopolitical realist would say, guns and bombs), and in the blockchain space we can abstract a bit further and say that it is each individual's ability to run whatever software they want in their capacity as a user, miner, stakeholder, validator or whatever other kind of agent a blockchain protocol allows them to be.
Notes on Blockchain Governance
Statelessness allows for a class of nodes that verify the chain without maintaining permanent storage. State expiry pushes out state that has not been recently accessed, forcing users to manually provide proofs to renew it.
The Limits to Blockchain Scalability
Additionally, there are interaction effects between these three types of costs.
The Limits to Blockchain Scalability
p2p networks inevitably introduce their own overhead: nodes often end up downloading and re-uploading the same block multiple times (not to mention transactions being broadcasted through the mempool before being included in a block).
The Limits to Blockchain Scalability
Another important distinction is: how does the system fail if your trust assumption is violated? In blockchains, two most common types of failure are liveness failure and safety failure.
Trust Models
For the purposes of analyzing blockchain protocols, I tend to break down trust into four dimensions: How many people do you need to behave as you expect? Out of how many? What kinds of motivations are needed for those people to behave? Do they need to be altruistic, or just profit seeking? Do they need to be uncoordinated? How badly will the system fail if the assumptions are violated?
Trust Models
Blockchain applications are never fully trustless, but some applications are much closer to being trustless than others. If we want to make practical moves toward trust minimization, we want to have the ability to compare different degrees of trust.
Trust Models
First, my simple one-sentence definition of trust: trust is the use of any assumptions about the behavior of other people.
Trust Models
Ethereum envisions a Rollup centric future. Rollups tend to be expensive and less flexible than L1s, but they can share security with each other. In contrast, Cosmos is an ecosystem of interoperable sovereign L1s known as Zones. While Zones can be cheaper and more flexible than Rollups, they can’t share full security with each other.
Pay Attention To Celestia - Delphi Digital
Ethereum research is a lot to keep track of, but everything ultimately weaves into one overarching goal – scale computation without sacrificing decentralized validation.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Ethereum - Delphi Digital
Optimism and Arbitrum frequently provide fees that are ~3-8x lower than the Ethereum base layer itself, and ZK rollups, which have better data compression and can avoid including signatures, have fees ~40-100x lower than the base layer.
EIP-4844: Shard Blob Transactions