- to wield : exercer
- thrall : esclavage
- neutering : stérilisation
- ruthless : sans pitié
- to squelch : étouffer
- to defang : to have the cause of concern removed
- vernacular : jargon
- feint : feinte
- bout : poussée
- to endow : doter
- to beget : engendrer
- to slam : écraser
- neutering : castration
- wistful : nostalgique
- swath : partie
- paltry : dérisoire
- to bankroll : financer
- janky : pourri
- whim : caprice
- fledgling : débutant
- splurge : faire une folie
- to heed : écouter
- perk : avantage
- sour : tourner
- bait-and-switch : publicité mensongère
- clout : influence
- usher : conduire
- hatch : éclore
- onlookers : spectateurs
- gist : idée générale
- cast : lancer
- bidding : offre
- to beget : engendrer
- whiff : sentir
- lumbering : pataud
- sling and rock : lance pierre
- duds : qui ne marche pas
- nimble : agile
- to subsume : engloutir
- shrewd : malin
- swivel : pivot
- modding : tuning
- quip : bon mot
- to stall out : retarder
- lurch : laisser en plan
- spoil : butin
- trip up : trébucher
- sour : acide
- ebbing : reflux
- to tamp down : couvrir
- razzle-dazzle : tralala; esbroufe
- whim : caprice
- upkeep : entretien
- to stymie : contrarier
- liability : responsabilité
- to clamp down : stopper
- clout : influence
- knell : glas
- sprouted : germé
- squandering : gaspiller
- lore : tradition
- to bicker over : se chamailler
- sequel : suite
- undaunted : téméraire
- covenant : convention
- windfall : aubaine
- piddling : dérisoire
- stance : point de vue
- toil : labeur
- curtail : couper court
- cogs : rouages
- awash : inondé
- anoint : désigner
Introduction
- They store information and run rules encoded in software that can manipulate that information.
- A pivotal commitment involves digital ownership, which places economic and governance power in the hands of users.
- They can connect people in social networks while empowering users over corporate interests.
Part One Read. Write.
1. Why Networks Matter
2. Protocol Networks
- When you own something, you have an incentive to invest in it.
- Newsletter writing (like Substack) is having a renaissance among so many creators. Email gives creator a direct relationship with their audiences.
- The strategy of most tech companies is to capture, control, and monopolize networks.
3. Corporate Networks
- skeuomorphic : technologies that mimic existing activities or experiences.
- The most effective way to do this is to create a positive feedback loop where more content leads to more users, and more users leads to more content.
Part Two Own.
4. Blockchains
- Any developer in the world can write and run apps, ranging from marketplaces to metaverses, on blockchains like Ethereum.
- Blockchains are not databases, they are fully-fledged computers.
- The cloud is just someone else's computer.
5. Tokens
6. Blockchain Networks
Part 3 A New Era
7. Community-Created software
- Software as a service" or SaaS
- Making and remaking things is a big part of the game's appeal.
- "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"
- "Release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity"
8. Take Rates
- "Your margin is my opportunity" Jeff Bezos
- You own your domain name, and you can take it to any hosting provider you wish.
- Hosting providers have little pricing power and must charge based on the costs of storage and networking, rather than a percentage of revenue.
- Effective take rate - the actual price network participants end up paying to use the network.
- Google, Amazon, and other big companies were disrupters in their early days, when they were in the attract phase. Today, in their extract phase, they're focused on squeezing as much revenue as they can out of the networks they own.
- Your take rate is my opportunity.
- This means the things users care about - their names, social relationships, and digital goods - need to be blockchain-based and user owned.
- Clayton Christensen "The theory is that commoditizing a layer in a tech stack is like squeezing a balloon. The volume of air stays constant but shift to other areas. The same is true for profits in a tech stack (roughly, at least, since business isn't as deterministic as physics). The overall profits are conserved but shift from layer to layer".
- Because APPLE controls the iPhone operating system and its default web browser, Safari, the company can charge Google a reported $12 billion per year for Google to remain the iPhone's default search engine, and Google accepts this as a cost of doing business.
- When someone buys a Windows machine, Microsoft captures a share of profits that would otherwise have gone to Intel. When someone buy a Linux machine, more of that money goes instead to Intel. Intel supports Linux to commoditize operating systems, which complements its moneymaking processors.
- People give their attention and personal data in exchange for network access.
9. Building Networks with Token Incentives
- "The internet flourished largely because it was ignored"
- Incentives matters.
- Achieving a word of mouth chain reaction is the dream of any marketer.
- Ownership has a powerful and lasting effect.
- Blockchain networks bake community ownership into their core design.
- The internet was originally envisioned as a decentralized network owned and controlled by its participants. Tokens restore that vision.
10. Tokenomics
- Paying excessive attention to prices is a bad sign - a hallmark of casino culture. Well-designed token incentives focus communities on constructive topics, like new applications and technology improvements.
- Understanding new technologies takes work.
- Ethereum generates the token equivalent of cash flow. The more applications written for Ethereum, and the more those applications get used, the greater the demand for computing time and for Ethereum's native token.
- This means the price of ether should roughly correlate with the popularity of applications built on the network.
- The economist Joseph Schumpeter, known for his theory of creative destruction.
- In 2009, Bitcoin pioneered the concept of a blockchain. In 2015, Ethereum expanded on the concept, creating a general-purpose programming platform.
- Blockchains: their key innovation is to enable digital ownership.
- Assets with actual substance or weight - fundamental value, in finance-speak--have the best prospects over the long term.
11. Network Governance
- "Democracy is the worst form of a government, except for all the others that have been tried" Winston Churchill
- "We reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code" David Clark
- It's hard to be a nonprofit in a for-profit world.
- Blockchains provide a mechanism for centralizing data while keeping control of that data centralized.
- Many proponents of federated networks refuse to use or even to consider blockchains, presumably because of the association blockchains have with the casino culture of scams and speculation. This is unfortunate.
- "Federation Is the Worst of All Worlds"
- Breaking a large dictatorship, like a corporate network, into smaller dictatorships, as in federated networks, works only if the countries stay small. But network effects ensure the opposite, that small advantages compound to create big winners.
- Blockchains are constitutions for networks.
- Many newer blockchain networks use "on-chain" governance, where token holders explicitly vote on proposed network changes.
- The ability to enshrine rules in immutable software, is a meaningful advance that was not possible in previous network designs.
Part Four Here and Now
12. The Computer versus the Casino
- The SEC has suggested that Ethereum's token is a security, but the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the primary U.S. regulator of commodities, has said that it is a commodity.
- Blockchain networks are the only technology that can reestablish an open, democratic internet.
- History shows that smart regulation can accelerate innovation.
- Future networks could have billions of owners.
Part Five What's Next
13. The iPhone Moment: From Incubation to Growth
- skeuomorphic uses, taking existing activities and making them better.
14. Some Promising Applications
- Blockchains are computers, capable of running arbitrary software.
- The NFT connect you to the brand, artist, or creator as well as to a collector community through an immutable signature trail.
- Generative AI will democratize content creation.
- NFTs add layers of scarce value onto a sea of abundant media.
- Encarta. Today, Wikipedia is the internet's seventh most popular website.
- The Questions-and-answers sites Quora and Stack Overflow.
- Blockchain networks have low take rates, which means most of the money earned goes back to creators.
- Blockchain networks raise money to fund developers, and they can store payment records in their core software, which acts as a shared ledger. They can run rules that ensure regulatory compliance. They have built-in trails to aid law enforcement. They have also low take rates and predictable rules that give developers incentives to build on top of them.
- Bitcoin. The high costs are due to a limited supply of block space - that is, how many transactions can fit in a single block.
- Sending money with USDC on Ethereum is usually faster and cheaper than using bank wires.
- Finance has always been centralized, run mostly by for-profit companies, but it doesn't have to be. Blockchain networks can make financial infrastructure a public good, upgrading the internet from handling bits to handling money.
- Google now commands more than 80 percent of internet searches.
- New AI tools are already generating and summarizing content, obviating the need for users to click through the site of content providers.
- AI is going to make bots so sophisticated that users can't distinguish between real and fake people.
Conclusion
- Google's motto was once "Don't be evil".
- Blockchains offer a much stronger assurance : "Can't be evil"
- Networks are the internet's killer app.
- Artificial Intelligence favors big companies with stockpiles of capital and data. new devices like virtual reality headsets and self-driving cars require multibillion-dollar capital investments. Blockchains are the only credible counterweight to these centralizing forces.
- Blockchains are the computing frontier, as PCs were in the 1980s, the internet was in the 1990s, and mobile phones were in the 2010s.
