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Potential-evangelism impedance mismatch. When the potential of a new technology exceeds the imagination of the evangelists so much that evangelism actually acts as drag. Been feeling this about all blockchain/crypto/Web3 commentary for a long time.
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A high potential technology will usually create big value, but rarely in the way early evangelists are excited about. So you have to pay attention to the low-level concrete mechanics of what the tech does and ignore the evangelists to the extent there is an impedance mismatch.
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Precedent I’m thinking of is space. Early (20s-30s) evangelists were uniformly excited about traveling to and settling in space, a “space-facing” bias that still shapes scifi. But basically 99% of the value 63 years in is earth-facing and in 3 sectors: comms, gps, imaging.
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This potential was unlocked when Arthur C. Clarke noticed that 3 satellites positioned in a triangle in orbit could provide global communications and get past the then limitations of radio. This technical idea of his has created more value than all his scifi put together.
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Before satellites, you could choose horizon-limited line-of-sight comms or ionosphere reflected shortwave, both of which have issues. Satellites create global line of sight that breaks this constraint. Same thing enables GPS and earth imaging. LoS is 99% of the value of space.
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So I wonder… clearing aside all the excited chatter about decentralization and creator economies, which sound a bit like “space colonization,” what’s the “put 3 satellites in a triangle constellation” type killer-app idea? What’s the “line of sight” type value unlocker?
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Space tech’s “one weird trick” is really “line of sight.” I like scifi, deep space missions, human space flight, Hubble, and rovers more than most but there’s no denying those are luxuries paid for by the ridiculously huge wealth created by “global line of sight as a service”
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It feels reductive and perhaps anti-imaginative perhaps to look for the “one weird trick” in some low level technical feature, but actually that’s the imaginative thing to do if you want to break out of science fiction and fantasy to real things.
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Like literally space economy relies on two arbitrary technical facts: an equilateral triangle can circumscribe a circle, and geostationary orbits exist. Result: we can see around the corners of our world.
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For crypto one arbitrary technical fact is likely “you can make passwords that nobody can help you recover or reset if you lose them” Which sounds like a liability mostly but isn’t. Or to restate “anyone can now effectively destroy their digital information unilaterally.”
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“Line of sight” is a weird thing. It’s an intangible concept but with very specific, tangible, and physical implications unlike “decentralization” which is more a metaphor. What are other things like it? Eg: 1/2/3 point perspective which revolutionized art in the Renaissance.
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All the terms used to characterize crypto tech potential are frustratingly abstract. Like trust/trustless. That’s a couple of abstraction levels above line of sight.The corresponding LoS level concept is something like “private key” probably. Or “immutability”
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Another fundamental property angle I like is “crypto is computing that can measure time.” The killer app of web3 probably dies something fundamental with time the way satellites do with (the geometry of) space. Seeing around the corners of time perhaps?
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Good line of thought. But the numbers feel not radical enough. Containerization took the world from like 50% port costs in time/money to single digits. You need that kind of impact.
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Replying to @dschorno and @vgr
or like escrow costs are 1-2% of all real estate sales. Lots of little areas like this that don't sound flashy until you actually add up what that boils down to. How much does it currently cost to do insurance payouts in uncomplicated cases? etc
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My own first real use of non-speculative use of crypto ideas is probably this encrypted prediction about a tv show. Verifiable predictions are like “seeing around the corners of time.”
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Just for fun, I’m going to try predicting the plot turns of the show, but without spoiling it for people. Here is the SHA-256 hash of my first prediction. Will reveal when either verified or falsified 851606c989ff0da8fe3f3ede3861d8a012469dbb67e82391825eb3e511e69f86
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If you combine 3 elements 1. Encrypted predictions (like mine above) 2. Immutable public feed (twitter approximates this, blockchains exactly embody it but are harder to use) 3. Immutable revelation commitment (I don’t know how to do this) You have something that seems big
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“Smart contract” is a misleading term. Iirc Vitalik recently tweeted that he wished he’d called it something else. It obscures this more basic potential for creating temporal lines of sight. If making auditable predictions were as routine as sat comms, how would the world change?
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I think “digital money” has been a big distraction the way “human space colonies” has been for space economics so far (though that may change if SpaceX actually delivers on $10 to LEO). It’s impressive the way Apollo was impressive. Men on the moon! Then nothing for 50 years.
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The speculative non-fiat store-of-value angle is legit, ie enabling digital goldbuggery, but I don’t think there’s an economic-foundations future beyond that in transactions, unit of account etc. The big idea lies elsewhere.
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To avoid overindexing on space, another interesting precedent is nuclear weapons. Specifically their ability to credibly create doomsday level threats, which induces a whole new way of doing geopolitics. Dr. Strangelove stuff. In particular credible deterrence theory.
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Yeah this time lock stuff. Has it been implemented yet in a consumer-grade metamask-accessed thing?
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Replying to @vgr
For #3, think time lock encryption (gwern.net/Self-decryptin) or Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs) (vdfresearch.org). I would also point out that, although the coiners didn't invent it, the space has been a massive boon to Zero Knowledge proof theory and implementation.
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Good question. Why encrypt predictions? My proximal reason is avoiding revealing spoilers for a tv show but I think there’s a general deeper reason: you want to prevent predictions from *altering* the future. This is a deeper idea.
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Replying to @vgr
What value is created by encrypting your prediction in the first place? Avoiding spoiling it for people, even though you're making a prediction and not having absolute/inside knowledge?
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See, the problem with open predictions is if you’re good at it, people will start listening and acting on what you say so strongly, it changes the future. Sometimes in self-fulfilling prophecy ways, but more often in future-remystifying ways. Seeing the future well clouds it.
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An entire human social technology, narrative, is based on the ability to change the future by getting people to believe things about it. Think of all the religions based on doomsday predictions, and their fates after declared doomsday dates came and went.
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Most storytelling is smart enough to only make falsifiable predictions too far in the future to matter, but some dumb cults limit their potential by declaring doomsday will be next week. Politics and marketing narrative are all based on making future-distortionary predictions.
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Maybe the “killer app” of crypto is specifically to kill manipulative storytelling as a technology? Would be ironic since the whole damn sector is based on manipulative storytelling right now 🤣
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This is not new btw. The idea of “letter to be opened 100 years after my death” is old. It would be interesting to look at a bunch of these and think about the psychology of them.
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Btw not all big technologies are this way. Some are wysiwyg from day 1. Steam promised to replace water/animal power and that’s what it did. Airplanes promised bloodier war and fast civilian travel and that’s what they delivered (modulo big airliners rather than flying cars)
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Fred Pohl famously said that the job of the scifi writer is to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam. This is true of what we might call Pohlian technologies, where the automobile is the *easier* prediction. Space and crypto are non-Pohlian technologies.
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With both space and crypto (and a few more like synbio) the traffic jams are easier to predict than the automobiles. So you have to get non-Pohlian in your speculation.
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An example of this effect is DAOs. They feel like traffic lights built before cars have been invented, and now we have to use them with… engineless horses? Aka stablecoins? Don’t mean to snark, but so far I haven’t figured out how to use DAOtech to make communities better.
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Which is weird because I’m part of trying to build the which on paper looks like a perfect fit for DAOfication, but it’s a case of “you have a decentralized community problem? Use DAOs! Well now we have 2 problems.”
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I read this thread of “open problems with DAOs” and went, “errr these are the same problems we have with our non-DAO community, so if they’re open problems for you too why would I add the headache of a volatile speculation-attracting token to our list of existing headaches?
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0/ DAO CHALLENGES THREAD Over past 2 weeks, I've been compiling a series of 12 "DAO Problems" — key questions to ask in building DAOs. And I've collected them below. Use them for reference, for debate, and click through to see brilliant answers from some wonderful thinkers.
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Related… this isn’t Web3 until the barrier to entry is *far* lower. For web1 I could make my 1998 html geocities pages, for web2 I could futz around enough with php/css etc to make Wordpress work for me in 2007. Here 12 years in, it’s still too hard to do anything besides hodl
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I’m no hacker but I’m competent enough to be among the early adopters of any tech wave claimed to be generally democratically accessible. This feels closer to the “mobile revolution”… I never built an app because it never got easy enough. It was a specialty thing.
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