Nathaniel Whittemore Profile picture
Sep 18, 2018 12 tweets 4 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
1/ What do memes, shitposting, #NO2X and “community” have to do with one another? Riffing on @spencernoon’s community thread from yesterday a little.
2/ If blockchains are network organization tools, one of the most important answers to “why decentralize” is to eliminate the distinction between network owners and network participants.
3/ When networks have owners who are separate from participants, at some point incentives diverge. In the case of network businesses like Amazon or Facebook, this manifests as higher fees or more data capture to satisfy shareholders. @Kjer called this the “Extraction Imperative”
4/ When the network we’re talking about is money, the “owner” is the entity with the ability to print money. In an ideal world, government and citizen interests are aligned, but, weirdly, we don’t always live in an ideal world. #SaltBae
5/ Whether the network is money or something else, a big part of the goal of decentralization is distribute value across the network in such a way that their ceases to be a distinction between owners and participants. The participants are the owners.
6/ Of course, different classes of participants may have different interests that they advocate vociferously for, but in the absence of a single entity with fundamental decision making power, this is just the natural push and pull of governance.
7/ In the context of 2017’s ICO craze, the important network participation concept that is “community” became associated with a stupid heuristic of Telegram group size. To be clear, a big Telegram group was never a community.
8/ Interestingly, we *did* have some amazing examples of what real community in crypto networks looks like last year - with the #NO2X movement being one of if not the best example.
9/ In short, ignore the marketing implications of the word community itself for a minute, and the underlying concept that is important is a new form of distributed network participatory governance.
10/ This governance includes both formal systems, but - just like traditional politics - also includes a huge array of organizing and mobilizing tactics, from the high falutin right on down to the memes and shitposts that are the new broadsides and political cartoons of today.
11/ To me, “community” right now is about learning to adapt an old & integrate a new set of strategies to getting a group you care about to orient in the direction you want. It’s the new politics of networks. When the first & most important network is money, the stakes are high.
juuuust in case this was unclear about the division of interest between govt's and citizens..

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More from @nlw

Oct 7, 2018
1/ Long Reads Sunday #15. Queue the “Bitcoin-as-stablecoin” jokes. As BTC hovers at ~$6600, this week was most definitely not about price action. Instead, the story is a bubbling undercurrent of institutional activity setting the stage for what comes next.
2/ On Friday, news broke that Yale’s endowment, led by David Swensen, inventor of the swap (hi Bitmex), had invested in Paradigm, a $400m crypto fund led by @matthuang, @FEhrsam, @_charlienoyes. @APompliano summarized in Off The Stack offthechain.substack.com/p/yale-has-inv…
3/ While some tried to suggest the deal was being overhyped, @cryptorae, with a background in endowment investing, articulated just how influential top endowments and Swensen in particular are to other institutionals
Read 30 tweets
Oct 4, 2018
“‘Centralization' gets used as a four-letter word..”

On Monday I was joined by @travis_kling, @katherineykwu @myles_snider for the first ever Long Reads Live and riffing on market manipulation, regulatory uncertainty and weaponizing narratives. /1
2/ Of course, ain’t nobody got an hour to kill, so on this Medium post I’ve captured the key time stamps so you can go straight to the parts that are actually interesting to you. I also posted some shorter clips on specific topics. medium.com/@nlw/weaponize…
3/ The motivation for LRL is: 1) I think people might be into hearing not about what smart crypto people do for work, but what they think about the right then issues that impact all of our work; and 2) conversations are more fun than interviews. See: avc.com/2018/09/conver…
Read 6 tweets
Sep 30, 2018
1/ Long Reads Sunday #14. Daaaamn crypto, you really went for it. This was a week full of big announcements, market manipulation, regulatory enforcement, and a dash of various other assorted intrigue. Strap in, folks, it’s long reads time.
2/ One LRS note. Last week I announced that we’re taking this conversation off Twitter and into the realm of live. Well, it’s happening this MONDAY ~7pm EST. My first guest co-host will be @Travis_Kling and I couldn’t be more excited. More guests TBA soon. youtube.com/channel/UCMKxY…
3/ Little has gotten our big-little industry yapping like the Bitmain IPO. For weeks, the convo has been intrigue w BCH, but with the IPO filing, @katherineykwu @MessariCrypto hulked out & summarized all the numbers.
Read 31 tweets
Sep 28, 2018
Drumroll please 🥁....here are the most clicked links from last week's Long Reads Sunday.

getrevue.co/profile/nlw/is…
#5 One of the godfathers of the crypto space (as in, inventor of things like blind signatures OG) has a new blockchain project. @Adam_Tache recaps a recent presentation, summarizing everything shared so far
#4 At last weeks #bh2018, @brucefenton delivered this presentation arguing about how distributed ledgers will change traditional securities systems and, importantly, why the cypherpunk set should care.
Read 7 tweets
Sep 23, 2018
1/ Long Reads Sunday #13. What a week it was. We saw: XRP surge and (momentarily) flip ETH; a massive ratchet up in scrutiny around exchanges; a significant Bitcoin bug and so much more. Get your coffee black and steaming, it’s long reads time.
2/ Firstly, damn XRP. Ripple went crazy this week, doubling its market cap Thursday-Friday and bringing back echoes of 2017. @crypto_macro pointed to a couple of the better attempts at explanation.
3/ One part of the XRP surge story seems to have been significant volumes on BitMEX. If 2017 was the year of altcoins buying on Binance et al, 2018 has been all about leveraged trading, shorts, and perpetual swaps on BitMEX.
Read 34 tweets
Sep 20, 2018
1/ One of the most fascinating conversations happening on crypto twitter right now: on a global scale, what matters more - anti-inflationary crypto-fiat stability, or cryptocurrencies that are truly immune to seizure by hostile forces?

cfr.org/interactives/g…
2/ The conversation was prompted by the @multicoincap boys who, whether you agree with them or not, can spark a debate like pretty much no one else. In short, they argued that crypto-fiat like Gemini Dollar will suck a huge amount of oxygen out of the room
3/ Unsurprisingly, more than a few people were like “WTF Mate?”
Read 13 tweets

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