TL;DR: if you expect an embryonic prediction market to tell you the result of a highly-politicized event when there are perverse incentives at play, and a significant disparity between amount-at-risk and expected outcome, you are going to have a bad time.
Recently got into the topic of data ownership on a conversation with Carey Lening which helped catalyze a few ideas I’ve been kicking around for a while.
In short, data ownership requires layer fungibility.
I’ll elaborate below.
While discussing BlueSky’s custom feeds and composable moderation with a friend, he wondered:
I will need to ponder whether it is viable at scale for millions of users to put in the effort to customize their feeds in a thoughtful way […]
They don’t have to - they only need one person they trust (or are willing to take at face value for a test) to create a feed, or to add a feed to a starter pack.
But more importantly, I realized, any customization someone can do, thoughtful or not, is an improvement. It introduces some delta on the perspective, even while they are within a group, instead of putting them into the monoculture dictated by which news items are more clickbaity and likely to bring ad revenue.
It is the same way with genetics: even small mutations can help diversify the perspective gene pool.
I’ve been somewhat erratic in posting these, but we have a new Spelunking Podcast episode out!
Mika Honkasalo, partner at Equilibrium Ventures, joins us on the latest Spelunking Podcast to discuss our hope that Futarchy can help fix token governance by forcing participants to risk something for their decisions. The discussion varied from liquid vs. illiquid vc investments, if we are in a bull market or seeing bull market behavior from crypto insiders (something we wouldn’t agree on), and wonder if the crypto market will end up dominated by TradFi.
There’s a discussion going on the Topology discord about what systems can be described as peer-to-peer.
I think the whole thing is mostly academic, and too focused on implementation details.
Sure, your particular choice of blockchain might have a peer-to-peer gossip protocol and consensus mechanism, but that’s rather irrelevant if people are mostly using tokens with a freeze authority, isn’t it?
And while Binance Smart Chain might have a P2P protocol for sharing information, that’s entirely irrelevant when it’s completely proof-of-authority and a single institution chooses who gets to validate.
If you are looking to describe a system, describe the kind of things it enables that no other approach does.
That’s something the local-first camp does right, and something other projects should strive for.
On my latest conversation with Teemu, we warn people off the vaporware of crypto + AI tokens, go over how the market is changing - including how ETFs may provide a path to something that scans like IPOs - and discuss the Eigenlayer grants to prominent critics at the Ethereum Foundation.
Over at BlueSky, Dell Cameron brought up that Facebook’s involvement in crypto, VR, and GenAI aren’t working out because they are only secondary to their main business purpose: surveillance. (link)
I disagreed. Cameron was right in that it failed because their main business is surveillance, but I suspect they screwed it up because it was such a great fit that they got too greedy.
Crypto would have been for them - if Libra had taken off, Meta would have gotten access to their users' transaction information, something they don't necessarily have right now.
They luckily came out the gate too hard and scared everyone off by making it too obvious it was a supranational currency.
— Ricardo J. Méndez (@ricardo.bsky.social) Jun 4, 2024 at 9:08
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Would it have been different if they’d seen it as a technology investment?
Two projects grew on the compost of Facebook’s Diem open source dump: Sui and Aptos. As of June 4, 2024, their combined fully-diluted valuation is about $10 billion. Facebook could have captured that value if they had spun it out from the start, even as a subsidiary where they control most of the token supply.
But Libra was never a tech investment. You don’t get to have an arms-length independent company and share data.
When all you have is surveillance, everything looks like a data trove.
Teemu and I discussed the possibility of Avalanche no longer requiring subnets to validate the main network.
At the time, I did not see the value - why wouldn’t you just build on Cosmos?
Teemu mentioned the possibility of raising from capital that needs to invest in an otherwise barren ecosystem.
I now suspect they may end up sucking air off L2s instead of Cosmos.
Also, I think Avalanche has the advantage that they can tell any EVM story to those were looking to L2s.
It is something I hadn’t considered.
It might not pull away teams that are looking into Cosmos, but will impact those that look at the L2 landscape and decide there is not enough there for them.
Markets are a series of bundling and unbundling, and whomever does the cleanest job, wins.
A clean unbundling makes it easier for others to build upon you, to integrate, to build businesses around you. It’s why people used S3 instead of other more elaborate mechanisms.
A clean bundling makes your whole stack look solid, integrated, like what Apple used to be.
In both cases, you get the advantage of reduced cognitive overhead.
Back in 1999, David Bowie spoke about how music used to be subversive, but had since become merely an information delivery mechanism - it was the Internet that was subversive.
Fast-forward, and the Internet is an information (and disinformation) delivery mechanism - it is crypto and other areas that are subversive.
The thing that is subversive now is the what will make money in a few years.