naka, naka, naka...work anymore

Balaji Srinivasan’s new project, Nakamoto, is a big deal, and I’m excited.

Assuming you signed off for the weekend (as part of a new year’s resolution to be more present outside of the work week), you'd have missed the Friday night launch, torrid community growth, and silly crypto twitter semantics controversy around Nakamoto, a new journal focused on "emerging tech, philosophy, and culture” within crypto.

The project boasts curated insights from 60 high-profile contributors, including Zooko, Naval, Vitalik, and other only-first-name-required-thanks builders and thinkers. (I’m also contributing.) Many of these folks were participating in the nearly 2k strong member telegram conversation over the weekend. And some of the early insights in the chat were awesome (I've included some below).

At it’s best, Nakamoto could bring together content from a brilliant cross-section of crypto pioneers, focused on reducing the noise of Twitter and unnavigability of Medium. I’d imagine Nakamoto will ultimately serve as a more approachable, less vitriolic education resource for newcomers to the space, and Balaji may be one of the few people in the industry with the pedigree, execution chops, and gravitas to pull something like this off.

To understand the ethos of the project, you should read Balaji’s vision post, Bitcoin Becomes the Flag of Technology, which is required reading for anyone full-time in the industry if you want to kick off your new decade on the right foot. It should also be part of any on-boarding canon to new prospective crypto converts. My favorite nuggets:

Bitcoin as the Schelling point for tech in the 20s...
“[The values of technology] are implicit in common terms like MVP, product-market fit, or the idea maze. And they are expressed in writing via popular books by the most accomplished people in tech. But they usually aren't articulated outright. If we were to enumerate them, we'd find that technology is internationalist, capitalist, decentralized, hyperdeflationary, networked, encrypted, digital, volatile, ambitious, and quietly revolutionary. These are the values of technology. Bitcoin (and crypto more generally) moves us beyond the implicit by expressing these values in a piece of code that doubles as an investment vehicle. The code speaks to the developers, the upside appeals to the investors, and the values encoded within speak to both. If you believe in these values, you tend to buy Bitcoin."

Decentralization of coins as an industry strength...
"There are now enough different approaches to consensus and privacy that it's highly unlikely that cryptocurrency as a phenomenon will ever vanish. The vulnerabilities for proof-of-work are not the same as those for proof-of-stake, delegated proof-of-stake, proof-of-space, and so on. It's unlikely that any single issue can now take out all coins and all exchanges simultaneously. At least some will survive.‌‌‌‌ Thus in an absolute worst case scenario of a global crackdown on cryptocurrencies where Bitcoin itself is found to suffer from an unfixable vulnerability, we can expect a partial migration to surviving coins as well as an import of the Bitcoin ledger into one of the surviving chains."

Bitcoin as the real voting booth in 2020...
"Bitcoin is not about accomplishing change through folk activism. It's a network-based phenomenon which has accomplished a revolution in monetary policy through a billion private actions rather standing on the street corner spouting slogans. It is quietly revolutionary."

I also enjoyed seeing some fantastic real-time commentary from the likes of Vitalik, Zooko, Peter Smith, and others in the chat. These quotes happened within a single 30 minute window of the discussion on Saturday while the group was still revving up.

Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum) on various topics:
"Authoritarianism is the 1960s-era chemotherapy of coordination technologies.”
“PoS isn’t a voting system; stakers are military, not government. Stakers shouldn't decide policy.”
“Private property contains lots of coercion, but people accept it because a) they’re used to it, and b) it’s credibly neutral. I’m trying to push for “credible neutrality” as a better bottom level concept to strive for."

Peter Smith (Blockchain) on proxy voting:
"It’s not clear the POS is going to work out any better than proxy voting via advisors has in equity markets (and in those markets, the regulatory / laws provide most governance)."

Zooko (Zcash) on airdrops:
"I was talking to one of my closest, trusted advisors — I said "Let's do a fork of the Bitcoin ledger — give all Bitcoiners an amount of ZEC equal to their amount of BTC, in the Zcash genesis block.". Although, as we discussed, this had already been tried with Clams, and it was a total failure, so maybe it wasn't worth trying. But maybe it would work with Zcash. My advisor said "Well, why not give everyone who has USD an amount of ZEC?". I was like wut. He said "I don't want to give the USD billionaires a head start in ZEC, and I don't want to give the BTC billionaires a head start either. I don't respect their money." The "fork Bitcoin's ledger" idea would turn some people off in addition to turning some people on. Also, of course, Clams had failed. So I decided to keep it simple and dropped that idea."

The chat got a bit unwieldy towards mid-day Sunday and they shut down conversation temporarily, but there's plenty in here to digest if you want to get a sense for what a good, well-moderated community discussion could look like.

I’m excited to keep reading, contributing, and watching Nakamoto grow.

-TBI


P.S. There was some controversy over the chosen name of the project, Nakamoto, which was so ridiculous I don’t even find it worthwhile to cover. NLW has my proxy, and captured my thoughts in his post last night.