#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.
#3 Who doesn't love a good benchmarking survey? @danzuller and Vision Hill present a framework for understanding and categorizing the different dimensions of the crypto asset market.
#2 Who is supposed to pay for public infrastructure in token networks? Are ecosystem funding DAOs an emergent killer app for decentralized governance? @ameensol shows off the code going into moloch.vc
And finally #1. Clearly, people are looking to zoom out and think big, because the most clicked link this week was @jbrukh's riff on "stateless smart-nations." Honestly after this week in politics, it's not hard to understand why.
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.
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
“‘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…
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.
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.
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?
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
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”