Not that we need another warning about the crypto ecosystem but:
- Keeping up with the newest developments can be exhausting
- Fashion for rich nerds
Bonded curves: The price of a token is set to a constant function; you can buy/sell tokens
- Example: To buy the 1st token, pay $1. The 100th token, pay $100
- Can imagine other curves too: x^2, or 2^x
- Cynically: Literal ponzi scheme where first arrivers gain all the benefits
Problem:
- Coins which are ponzi schemes win in the space of the crypto market; token holders have an incentive to propagate those tokens instead of ones that reward later users
What could be the fundamental value of crypto?
- Decentralization of power?
- What Vitalik believes, about moving power out of the hands of a centralized government
- Faster innovation
- Less regulation, or imposing a cultural norm of "it's okay to make new things"
- See: DeFi, Prediction Markets
- But: Where are the DeFi stories about people taking the capital to create something others want?
- Where are the better outcomes that Prediction Markets have enabled
- Betting on election prediction markets = sports, not producing ground truth
- Kickstarter-type funding? E.g. explicit coordination mechanism between individual actors
- See: Constitution DAO
- Public goods, retroactive goods funding
- "Blockchain has the ability to summon up billions of dollars of capital, now we need to direct it to useful causes"
- Curious: where are the EA coins?
- Curious: donor lotteries
- Redistribution of money?
- This would be the case if
- Maybe not that different from decentralization; money loosely equals power here