💯 A Montage Of The First 100 — Issue No. 100
/I sent the first issue of Build Blockchain out to fifty subscribers on June 3rd, 2018. Two years and thousands of subscribers later, I get to send the 100th issue, and you're reading it now! I'm grateful for your readership, and remain surprised and humbled that each week, many folks find reading what I have to say worth their valuable time. Thank you.
Committing to putting a bit of my thoughts out in public each week has been at times scary, but has mostly proven extremely rewarding. This newsletter has forced me to dig in and learn more about many topics, and also to clarify and distill my own thinking and opinions.
The news cycle in crypto is a frenetic, never-ending rollercoaster. Stopping to reflect on the broader arc of blockchain's progression from time to time is critical to thinking clearly. To mark the 100th issue, I spent some time going back over old editions and pulling out some of the key excerpts and insights from the past two years. I've assembled them here as a bit of a "montage" of the last two years in crypto. In doing so, I've focused on four major themes which have permeated this newsletter over that time:
- Building on Blockchains
- Bitcoin and Ethereum
- Privacy on Decentralized Cryptonetworks
- Power and Decentralization
Building on Blockchains
Both ENS and Gitcoin impress me as decentralized projects that have a good chance of being viable today, despite the fact this technology is at such an early stage of adoption. ENS does so by building at the infrastructure layer, while Gitcoin does so by targeting tech-savvy developers who are capable of dealing with the significant UX barriers which still exist. If you're thinking about launching a DApp, you'd be wise to consider one of these approaches. (Issue 11, August 12th, 2018)With the rise of the internet over the past two decades, we've gotten a taste of what it's like when technologists concern themselves only with technology and profits. We're starting to realize the results aren't universally great. I still believe crypto will be as important as the internet itself. I'm hoping, this time around, those of us at the forefront will be more thoughtful and reflective about what we're building. (Issue 23, November 4th, 2018)
This week was a good microcosm of where we are in the crypto world. While serious projects announced meaningful technical progress, most attention was given to negative price action and the forking drama of a Bitcoin wanna-be. If the latter is all you're paying attention to, it might be easy to wonder if the whole crypto ecosystem is collapsing. Don't be fooled. Without attracting much attention to themselves, an army of passionate, smart folks is building the infrastructure which will enable real adoption on a long enough timeline. Do yourself a favor and tune out the nonsense. (Issue 25, November 18th, 2018)
At the end of the day, resources for developers have to come from somewhere. When the protocols being created are literally making money, it seems reasonable that some of it would be allocated for their maintenance. If some is not, then the projects will suffer as a result, or they'll simply be co-opted by whoever stands to gain the most by trading funds for influence. (Issue 36, February 3rd, 2019)
It turns out, incentives matter. Sustainability matters. Without viable, long term funding sources, most [open source] projects died. The ones that survived did so because they had large corporate sponsors who had an interest in guiding the direction of a piece of computing infrastructure. Open source today is great in many ways, but it also didn't turn out the way many of us hoped. [Protocol level] funding...creates a political attack vector for self interested actors to manipulate the community and extract wealth for themselves. The flipside, though, is that a lack of funding also opens the door for self interested actors to exert their will. (Issue 58, August 4th, 2019)
Smart contract platforms allow us to create new mechanisms for enabling human collaboration. While any smart contract platform could do this in theory, there is no denying that Ethereum is leading the way. That's because Ethereum has attracted a community of builders. This small army of tinkerers is an engine for finding new ways for humans to coordinate with one another. (Issue 84, February 23rd, 2020)
Bitcoin and Ethereum
There is much truth to the saying that your greatest strengths are also your greatest weaknesses. While Bitcoin Core's deliberate approach makes it stable and reliable, it might also impede progress much needed to enable adoption. And while Ethereum's energetic and optimistic pursuit of protocol improvement may yield grand results, there's also a non-trivial risk of the network imploding in the process. (Issue 12, August 19th, 2018)Beyond that, though, I think there's an under-appreciated possibility that both will flourish, and even end up complementing each other in a symbiotic way. For example, if Bitcoin becomes the ultimate digital gold— a scarce, hard money, transacting on an incredibly stable network, with extremely high security guarantees, and maximal censorship resistance— why couldn't Ethereum also thrive as the engine powering a decentralized financial ecosystem, fueled by ETH as a commodity money, and enabling entirely new kinds of systems powered by trust-minimized code? In such a world, Bitcoin could exist as an asset on the Ethereum network, and both would benefit for it. I see this as a very real prospect. (Issue 49, May 12th, 2019)
Bitcoin would be able to flow through the emerging decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem in a trustless and censorship resistant way. It would also be able to leverage scaling efforts on Ethereum, both at layer 1 and layer 2. These applications increase the usefulness of Bitcoin, and thus the demand for it, all without the Bitcoin network itself having to make any tradeoffs in terms of complexity or security. Meanwhile, the Ethereum ecosystem is more useful if BTC is available there, and increased usage of Ethereum (as a network) de facto increases demand for ETH (the asset). (Issue 60, August 18th, 2019)
Privacy on Public Cryptonetworks
If you could only pick one project in the space to pay attention to, outside of Bitcoin and Ethereum, Zcash would be a wise choice. Even if Zcash itself ends up failing, zk-SNARKS is an important technology to be familiar with and will undoubtedly have a big role to play in the blockchain world. (Issue 13, August 26th, 2018)Actually, as technically impressive as both [Zcash and Monero] are, it remains a very open question how big demand will be for any coin that puts privacy above all else. For one, it's honestly not clear how much most people value privacy in the first place. Venmo's global feed of who paid whom for what serves as an anecdote suggesting many users just don't care. (Issue 22, October 28, 2018)
Here’s the ground truth that we actually observe: usage of CoinJoin is minimal on Bitcoin, anonymity sets for Tornado Cash are quite modest, Zcash has absolutely languished in the market— with Monero fairing only slightly better— and an entire decentralized finance ecosystem has emerged on Ethereum, despite everything being transparent. Even amongst the small community of enthusiasts and early adopters, people seem simply not to care. I believe the technologies for strong privacy do and will exist. I’m just not convinced people will care enough to adopt them. (Issue 81, January 26th, 2020)
Yes, it's true: most normal users won't bother to use privacy enhancing solutions that require a little extra work or cost. But businesses might. For them, there's too much riding on the transactions they carry out. Full financial transparency would risk leaking business critical information, like supplier contracts or pre-announced partnerships, that could be leveraged against them by competitors. If real businesses start using these networks to conduct commerce, they'll demand privacy, and they'll have the funds and incentives to pay for it. (Issue 83, February 9th, 2020)
Power and Decentralization
With 2 billion customers, Facebook is not going to launch something that can only handle tens or hundreds of transactions per second. Thus whatever Facebook ultimately offers, it will be, at best, decentralization theater. Maybe it will have "blocks" in a "chain." Maybe there will be a block explorer to view transactions and the like. But it will be owned, operated, and controlled by Facebook-- up to and including unilateral censorship and transaction reversal. (Issue 30, December 23rd, 2018)Any reasonable person can see that enshrining the principle of free speech in a society comes with some downsides. We've decided the tradeoff is worth it, largely because the alternative— a world where a small cabal of people enforce what speech is and isn't permissible— is far worse. This, in broad strokes, is the argument we need to make a case for in the public discourse around cryptocurrencies. Yes, there are downsides to censorship resistant digital monies, but do we really want to live in the universe where they don't exist? The transition to digital-only money is inevitable. In that future, anyone who can censor the "bad" transactions necessarily has the ability to censor any transactions. Do you trust Congress, or Facebook, or any other entity to get those moral judgements right? I know I don't. (Issue 59, August 11th, 2019)
Xi Jinping is the leader-for-life of an authoritarian regime that controls the lives of 1.4 Billion people and 15% of the world's GDP. Mark Zuckerberg is the CEO-for-life of a company with 2.4 Billion users and an unprecedented influence over the global flow of information. Do you really think either of these men— two of the most powerful people in all of human history— have any genuine interest in promoting a technology whose sole noteworthy feature is the diffusion of centralized power? In case it's not clear: NO! They don't. (Issue 70, October 27th, 2019)
Even in this germinal stage, what's happening with Moloch and MetaCartel is quite remarkable when you stop to think about it. Dozens of individuals, from many different countries, are pooling millions of dollars to fund public goods in a digital community they care about. They're doing this without an official legal structure or legal documents, and without any centralized executor or escrow service. A decentralized network, and the smart contract code that runs on it, is all that is needed. (Issue 73, November 17th, 2019)
The hostile takeover of Steem network was a dramatic reminder of the real nature of decentralized governance: underneath it all, everything ultimately depends on social consensus. We forget this at our own peril. (Issue 91, April 19th, 2020)
Cryptonetworks have a huge role to play. If we don't decentralize the digital world, then that half of our lives will be lived at the pleasure of centralized pseudo-monopolies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter. That's not a future I want, and it need not be the one we accept. Nascent experiments like DAOs, decentralized social networks, censorship resistant content platforms, and protocols governed by users give us an early glimpse of another way. We should accelerate the development of these new forms of self sufficient, opt-in digital communities. (Issue 94, May 10th, 2020)