1/ The 3Blue1Brown explainer on Bitcoin is as good as everyone says:

2/ Zark’s piece on the diminishing returns embedded into on-chain NFT games with Maximum Total Supplies and stepped ‘price' cliffs’ is good food for thought. His project - Raid Party’s - approach sounds like a good evolution of the conventional structure. As per his excellent and generous intro, the below isn’t intended to raise any suspicion about the project or its intentions - it’s just me trying to think my way through a super interesting new idea.

Raid Party will have dynamic pricing based on the proportion of ‘Active Total Supply’ relative to ‘Active Total Supply Maximum’. I think it might make more sense just to call this ‘Active Supply’ and ‘Active Supply Maximum’ - not sure the ‘Total’ is helpful there since it’s just minted coins minus burnt coins.

The closer Active Supply gets to the Active Supply Maximum, the more prices will be discounted, encouraging players to burn coins and dropping the supply ratio down from the maximum.

This sounds promising - it’s elastic, gradual, transparent, responsive - but it makes a ton of balance red lights go off in my brain and I’m struggling to figure out why. I think it’s around things like:

• Predictability. Responsive sounds good, but it also means that pricing becomes unpredictable. The NFT game space is already full of frustrating price-watching, and adding another layer doesn’t seem obviously more fun.

• Deflationary impact. Zarc notes the gameplay is heavily deflationary, but all this does is offer a discount on cost, which reduces the overall sink. It feels like either the sinks will have to be priced with this reduction in mind (in which case you might as well not bother), or all that happens is you’ve undermined your deflationary balance. Normally if I was adding a discount like this I’d be looking for a interesting source of balance elsewhere in the system.

• Perverse incentive- the thinking here is that in Raid Party, progression requires burning, and shrinking supply disincentivizes burning, which would disincentivizes progression which would kill the game. But this system might just flip the problem so that it disincentivizes burning whenever the discount isn’t in place.

I definitely need to think harder about this, and learn more about Raid Party.

3/ If you have ever been tempted to call them, note that the Mint Police do actually exist.

4/ Dror Poleg’s sausage-themed response to Moxie’s cautionary piece on Web3 was an educative read in unexpected ways, but his conclusion - that Web3 offers the possibility of more meaningful ownership, not the guarantee - does feel like the right balance of optimism and cynicism. Although this thread was a nice/sad reminder that of how much optimism around decentralization and openness was also the hallmark of early Web2. RIP del.icio.us

5/ Videos of whitepaper readings are a thing: