Brain dump [April 2021]
Eth is ultra-sound money…?
Great, catchy meme; can’t work out whether Justin Drake is a genius or a hopelessly unpragmatic optimist who misunderstands both human nature and the importance of proof-of-work. Regardless of its presently centralised situation, I have a feeling that there is something fundamental about PoW that is more ‘correct’ than PoS… I’m working on the theory.
Regardless of ETH the asset, I’m mind-bendingly bullish on Ethereum the network. Love to see it!
Ethereum killers can not kill Ethereum
Network effects and embeddedness are something Charles Hoskinson can’t understand. Polkadot will succeed because it seeks to complement — not outcompete — the biggest and most relevant player in the Web 3.0 revolution.
I’m also working on a theory tying first-mover advantage to the biological evolutionary principle… it’s something like this:
- Clunky, iterative, but functional evolution in practice is infinitely superior to a perfect product in theory (also explains BSC’s recent success — people don’t give a fuck about centralisation if it gives them cheap gas for DeFi)
- Pragmatism is perhaps the most important axiom of all — real world results are way more important than on-the-page metrics. This was driven home by a tweet about Bitcoin working way better in practice than in theory. So true that it hurts.
Maximalism actually makes sense
It just does. The most important move in this space is Bitcoin eating the market cap of traditional stores of value. This, plus fiat debasement, will have the biggest effect on our lives. If – HUGE IF – ETH 2.0 & EIP-1559 can actually achieve the ultra-sound money thing & PoS can prove itself as a secure consensus mechanism that actually differs from our current elite-run system in practice… then Ether will eat Bitcoin in this respect and push it into obsolescence. I don’t see that happening. I think PoW along with Bitcoin’s shitty, clunky, gold-based supply mechanism WORKS for a store of value application.
Concluding remarks on pragmatism & BTC
In his interview with Bankless (which is suuuuuper compelling regardless of your coin allegiances or maxi camp), Eth developer Justin Drake criticises Bitcoin’s deflationary monetary system for being based on gold. But maybe that’s the whole reason it works.
Gold is imperfect, and it may technically be an inferior monetary base system than that offered by Eth. But the law of unintended consequences, as well as a few other heuristics for understanding complex systems, dictates that something that should work better than what we have now probably won’t. Case in point: the EU. *super-state bootlickers shudder with disgust*
Can’t help getting the same vibes with this. Why do we expect a monetary system theorised out of thin air to work better than Bitcoin’s, which is basically a 2.0 of a monetary base (gold) which actually did work pretty well for a very long time.
Feel free to disagree & please challenge me on my dumbass theories!
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