New abilities offered by crypto
A blockchain is a trustworthy computing platform. That is much more important than it sounds. It's not just "we made this system 17% more secure"; it's a whole bunch of new abilities that we haven't really had before. Here are a bunch of ways of looking at it:Transparent workings: Stuff that can be trusted to work the way it says it worksLess need for large orgs Stuff that can be trusted even if there's no large organization backing itCensorship resistance: Stuff that can ...
New abilities offered by crypto
A blockchain is a trustworthy computing platform. That is much more important than it sounds. It's not just "we made this system 17% more secure"; it's a whole bunch of new abilities that we haven't really had before. Here are a bunch of ways of looking at it:Transparent workings: Stuff that can be trusted to work the way it says it worksLess need for large orgs Stuff that can be trusted even if there's no large organization backing itCensorship resistance: Stuff that can ...
Leftie-friendly crypto projects
There are things I'd like to say about how crypto has some potential for reducing the polarization between left-wing and right-wing people. I think a lot of left-leaning people find crypto distasteful because it's so tied up with currencies and finance and trading and property rights and markets. So, just to start out, here's a list of various ideas/projects from within the crypto world that strike me as having appeal for people with left-wing personalities/perspectives.Environ...
Leftie-friendly crypto projects
There are things I'd like to say about how crypto has some potential for reducing the polarization between left-wing and right-wing people. I think a lot of left-leaning people find crypto distasteful because it's so tied up with currencies and finance and trading and property rights and markets. So, just to start out, here's a list of various ideas/projects from within the crypto world that strike me as having appeal for people with left-wing personalities/perspectives.Environ...
What might a web3 social-media platform be like?
(Originally posted in January 2022, somewhere other than Mirror.) Web3 social-media platforms have the potential to be much better - better for the world, and also just more-pleasant and more-interesting places to live - than our old web2 platforms. I think that a bunch of the by-now-well-known standard themes of crypto/web3 - decentralization, censorship-resistance, openness, composability ("lego"), ownership (tokens) - might come together to produce something that can avoid the (also by-now...
What might a web3 social-media platform be like?
(Originally posted in January 2022, somewhere other than Mirror.) Web3 social-media platforms have the potential to be much better - better for the world, and also just more-pleasant and more-interesting places to live - than our old web2 platforms. I think that a bunch of the by-now-well-known standard themes of crypto/web3 - decentralization, censorship-resistance, openness, composability ("lego"), ownership (tokens) - might come together to produce something that can avoid the (also by-now...
Subjective, trust-network-based tagging and voting/rating
I don't think permissionless shared-spaces (like subreddits, or like all-of-Twitter - that is, shared spaces that may have moderation systems for kicking people out, but that are open by default) are going to be viable in web3. A general theme of crypto/blockchains/web3 is mechanism design: creating systems that have good emergent behaviour when the individual players follow their own selfish incentives. We're learning more and more about how to create decentralized systems that can...
Subjective, trust-network-based tagging and voting/rating
I don't think permissionless shared-spaces (like subreddits, or like all-of-Twitter - that is, shared spaces that may have moderation systems for kicking people out, but that are open by default) are going to be viable in web3. A general theme of crypto/blockchains/web3 is mechanism design: creating systems that have good emergent behaviour when the individual players follow their own selfish incentives. We're learning more and more about how to create decentralized systems that can...
Surprisingly-priced social-media content tokens
I think web3 content-discovery has the potential to be better than web2 content-discovery, because tokens and prices have a "put your money where your mouth is" quality that upvotes don't have. Content/creator tokens offer a way for early believers in a content item/creator can invest in it by buying up some of that content/creator's tokens. Well, just as in other kinds of markets, prices are information signals: the price of a token is useful information about the expected value of...
Surprisingly-priced social-media content tokens
I think web3 content-discovery has the potential to be better than web2 content-discovery, because tokens and prices have a "put your money where your mouth is" quality that upvotes don't have. Content/creator tokens offer a way for early believers in a content item/creator can invest in it by buying up some of that content/creator's tokens. Well, just as in other kinds of markets, prices are information signals: the price of a token is useful information about the expected value of...
