📁 To Read
15 bookmarks
vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin)
📅 Jan 5, 2025 · ❤️ 2,883 · 👁 724,655
d/acc: one year later
https://t.co/pM3eVtJ1BU
Sam Altman (@sama)
📅 Jan 6, 2025 · ❤️ 7,783 · 👁 3,156,689
reflections: https://t.co/rHdE40AuOG
Jarrod Watts (@jarrodwatts)
📅 Nov 19, 2024 · ❤️ 430 · 👁 68,145
Beam Chain was the biggest announcement at Devcon, introducing 9 major upgrades for Ethereum.
But most people still don’t understand them...
So, here are 9 tweets to explain the 9 upgrades: 🧵 https://t.co/sbLAgf9LLO
Packy McCormick (@packyM)
📅 Oct 9, 2024 · ❤️ 4,188 · 👁 465,758
Peter Thiel remains undefeated. https://t.co/AEAWlX27xi
TechStockFundamentals (@TechFundies)
📅 Jul 9, 2024 · ❤️ 468 · 👁 359,564
Contact worked at $GOOGL Waymo in charge of strategic automotive partnerships.
Pretty positive on Waymo tech but highlights difficulty of scaling roll-outs which is necessary to get costs down. Was pretty constructive on sustainability of $UBER model and their advantage in not owning a fleet (w/ ability to flex it up and down based on pricing).
Highlights
-Worked w/ auto OEMs to modify vehicle platforms for Waymo. Worked closely w/ Waymo fleet ops teams to understand their requirements. Also spent time working on parcel good delivery, and shippers who ran major parcel networks to explore autonomous use cases – overlapped w/ robotaxis bc considered delivery as way to increase robotaxi yield.
-Waymo autonomous tech works – they have it solved. Cars are completely autonomous.
-Doesn’t see Waymo as direct threat to Uber. Initial Waymo goal was to get 50% share in any given market but then realized difficult of scaling / running a robotaxi fleet. Hard to compete w/ UBER cost per mile bc of their model which lacks a dedicated fleet. Can dynamically price to pull in supply which is incredible.
-Waymo can offer services that Uber cannot. For instance – multi-stops for errands are much easier and people don’t mind having a robot wait for them as opposed to a human.
-Thinks Waymo goal is to license the tech bc it is great and then can be applied to multiple applications. Running a robotaxi service is a means to an end. Good news is that US really has 5-8 cities that are bulk of ridesharing [not sure that’s correct?]
-Difficult to scale tech across vehicle platforms – really have to spend a lot of money and make big bets on a vehicle platform because need to get huge volume to get costs down in terms of parts. Auto industry wants to make millions of units while Waymo needs thousands of units – just hard to get economics of scale.
-Waymo car cost is over $100k. To get a purpose built vehicle from OEM is $1b vehicle program – so instead work w/ existing platforms. Even modifying existing cars is very expensive – have to run wiring, new software functionality in vehicle, redundant breaking / steering / battery / etc. bc is autonomous.
-Fleet operations also expensive – need to build out charging infrastructure – can take a couple years to get electricity needed for a location. Need staff to go get broken cars and repair them.
-Think Waymo yield is less than 50% which is why they are partnering w/ Uber for food delivery etc.
-Waymo needs to figure out how to get more applications which can increase yield which can increase volume of cars which can get cost / car down.
-Believe Waymo financial breakeven is far away.
-LiDAR tech isn’t expensive but making it work is. Have to build and maintain high-definition maps, sensor cleaning is more involved, sensors break, etc.
-Wayve has great funding and is doing a good job. Still work to do – not as smooth, choppy, runs red lights, etc. Really good people and think in great position.
-Uber: Thinks they can potentially run own autonomous fleets to augment network. Can take payout to drivers and easily route that into tech spend once it is ready. Also worth noting Waymo currently can’t operate in really bad weather.
-Hard to sell Waymos to public to operate. They only work in designated areas and Waymo wouldn’t want liability of car being in hands of consumer. This use case is just too far out.
-More bullish on trucking and maybe even delivery. Think robotaxi at scale much further out.
rachit (@rachitxdesign)
📅 Oct 24, 2023 · ❤️ 29 · 👁 1,991
all those looking for a “reading list”
https://t.co/k5mRjHBAuY
Trung Phan (@TrungTPhan)
📅 Dec 23, 2021 · ❤️ 1,729
12/ Manufacturing History
Even more than brand exposure, Red Bull Racing creates history, which ultimately reduces customer acquisition costs b/c:
◻️Fandom is heritable through generations
◻️Winning creates mythology around product
◻️Constant exposure creates deep affection https://t.co/PADzbRHeUV
david phelps (@divine_economy)
📅 Mar 27, 2024 · ❤️ 74 · 👁 17,800
Crypto Consumer Company Idea #2:
Permissionless Game Shows
For a few days each year, we all get excited about crypto consumer for one reason:
Game shows.
Mad Realities. Love on Leverage. Crypto the Game.
The challenge has been letting anyone make these sustainably.
Until now.
Imagine this. It’s a few years from now, and a protocol wants to run its own version of Shark Tank as a new kind of hackathon: one where its community tunes in to vote on their favorite projects.
The winning projects get huge rewards, the losing projects get recognition and onchain credentials for making it so far, and the audience at home gets points from both the chain and from every project they vote for.
Both contestants and voters pay in—because it’s worth it to them for the money, status, opportunities, social connections, and potential airdrops they all earn. And that lets game show creators earn big in a way they never could before.
Now imagine bigger. Survivor. The Voice. American Idol. The Bachelor. Love Island. All giving contestants and new ways to earn reputation, to earn rewards, and to collaborate socially.
Or think even bigger than that. A monetizable Product Hunt. Presidential Debates with an audience live-voting on responses. The Grammies and Oscars with audiences picking who wins.
Any creator could have game shows for their fans to decide who they partner with. What track they release. What’s the most persuasive case they can make for future trends.
And all of this would be built on financial and reputational rails for everyone to earn.
Which is to say:
All of this can only be done onchain.
And as of this week, it can be done right now through us at @jokerace_io. By anyone. Without needing to worry about a single line of code.
There’s a lot of reasons this wasn’t possible before now—high gas fees, high overhead for managing the tech, and challenges letting anyone pay in to vote—but the main one is that it’s been hard to offer meaningful rewards for everyone involved in a game show.
In game shows, there’s literally some reward that’s at stake. That reward is usually financial: you get prize money. Sometimes, it’s reputational: you want the status of winning or backing a winner. And on rare occasions, it’s social: you form a community with others to back a favorite candidate. The best game shows will often integrate elements of financial, reputational, and social rewards all at once.
A game show without any rewards at all is a fairly doomed category, and we have a name for this cursed vertical in crypto: governance. In a sense, governance is just a game show without incentives or rewards, and yet in an industry built on incentives and rewards, we’ve insisted that the only types of decisions that anyone can make onchain are rewardless governance. Why? You might argue that rewards corrupt the integrity of the decision (maybe), but the real answer is because we haven’t wanted to do anything onchain that would enable these rewards in the first place.
It wasn’t until last week, when fees fell over 100x with EIP 4844, that it started to become sustainable to run social processes onchain in the land of ethereum. It wasn’t until this week that there was a way for anyone to participate in voting onchain with our introduction of anyone-can-vote at @jokerace_io.
So this is first week that it’s even been feasible to build game shows like the ones above.
And now that it’s cheap and fast to operate onchain, we can see the rewards for running onchain game shows are, indeed, huge.
Let me break that down a bit deeper to show how wild this opportunity is for all parties: the contestants, the viewers, and the game show creator.
First, and most obviously, contestants can earn from winning. A recurring show might give rewards to all players and teams on a given night, including the lowest-ranking ones that get eliminated.
That seems clear enough, but let me emphasize: contestants can also earn from losing. Even if the losers earn nothing, they still earn onchain reputation.
Every single person who votes for a contestant is attesting that they liked them. That’s a powerful social graph of permissionless data that the contestants can leverage for future communities, job opportunities, status, social connections, and, yes, airdrops. (If you won on karaoke night, a music project could do worse than to airdrop you its token.)
Imagine running all tiers of a game shows—votes to decide the contestants, votes to decide the finalists, votes to decide the winners. The reputation that everyone earns will create powerful graphs of proof-of-value, a far more meaningful metric than proof-of-humanity to help individuals find the ecosystems where we’re most valued.
Second, audience members can also earn. American gambling rules restrict payouts to voters of winning contestants, but it’s possible to imagine betting opportunities, bribes, and rewards overseas.
And what about in America? Voters might still earn other way. For example, they could earn NFTs, tokens, or points every time they vote. The fees they pay to vote could be used to buy up a token. They might even be able to swap or sell their voting rights (not financial advice).
But again, they’d earn reputationally and socially no matter what. Imagine voting for a no-name contestant who later became a celebrity and being able to prove you not only helped discover them but propel them to glory.
Imagine you were able to develop friends around this contestant who you could reach around the world. And imagine all of this entitled you, once again, to future communities, status, social connections, and airdrops. The social graph alone for measuring shared tastes among users could become the most valuable protocol for building a friendship or dating app in existence.
And then, most importantly, the contest creators earn. And they can earn three ways:
I. Data.
By operating onchain, creators will be able to access onchain information about their participants—what DeFi protocols they use, what NFTs they buy, what communities they’ve joined.
The simplest way to leverage this data is for sponsorships. For example, @rehashweb3, which runs a regular mini-game show onchain on @jokreace_io to decide who will appear on its podcast, recently worked with @bellosights to determine that 20% of their users were @zerion users. That insight was enough to get Zerion to sponsor their whole season.
But this data can be massively useful in other ways. It can let creators understand their community’s values. It can give them leverage to draw other players and judges to the show who are provably popular in their community. And it can incentivize other game shows, products, and protocols to want to reward anyone who participated as well.
All of this represents a huge unlock for the show’s growth.
II. Tokenization.
Perhaps you need the token to vote. Perhaps voting entitles you to buy the token. Perhaps voting entitles you to get an airdrop for the token. Perhaps paying to vote serves to purchase you the token. Perhaps the token is just used to select the contestants who will appear on the show. Or perhaps the token is just used for the final round.
Endless gamification is possible to support a token for the project.
III. Directly from show itself.
Most importantly, contest creators can monetize directly from the show they run. In a game show with 1000 contestants and thousands of dollars in prizes, they might conceivably charge $10-20 per entry and make a few thousand dollars.
But in a game show with 8 contestants and tens of thousands of voters, they could let anyone pay per vote—say, $1 per vote—and potentially make far more. And that’s for a single episode with a relatively small viewership.
Now imagine how this can scale over time. As the contest creator raises the prices to play, they can use this money to offer bigger rewards. Bigger rewards can then justify higher prices to pay, and so on. Over the course of a few years, they can scale up the financial incentives exponentially—and sustainable.
Imagine this at scale, and creators are making millions.
I’m excited that this is what we’ve been building for two years at @jokerace_io—a way for anyone to run these contests. Game shows are just one use case, but they’re a major one: when @eigencloud featured eight contestants to pick as their next supported LST, they got tens of thousands of voters paying in to participate.
You can imagine what this would look like at scale for something like, say, Miss Bumbum: the Brazilian beauty pageant for “best buttocks” that’s gotten more than 2 million voters for a given contest.
What would (may God forgive me) Miss Bumbum look like onchain? Well, the incredible thing is that this wasn’t even possible until this week—not only because of low gas fees, but because we’re the first contest tool that has ever let anyone vote. Until now, letting anyone vote would have been a recipe for random bots to give random number of votes.
But when you build on monetary rails that let you charge per vote, you can open up contests to anyone, proportionate to how they pay. And given the potential rewards, as well as the fun of playing, people stand to pay in substantially—if you design your mechanics well.
Of course, part of the mechanics means building a strong social brand, livestreaming with platforms like @unlonely_app, and taking time to align incentives for everyone involved. Creating a good game show is not easy.
But this week, it at least became easier. Because if you make one—and really, anyone can make one today—you can build a whole business of your own in consumer social on blockchains.
Without writing a single line of code.
This is my second in a series of posts on entire consumer social businesses you can build on top of @jokerace_io — the first was on gamified hackathons. If you’re interested in building any of these, my dms are open, and I’d love to be in touch.
https://t.co/JRnRC1Jml9
thanks to @seanmc_eth, @ddwchen, @medeana, @winnyeth, @reka_eth, @daisandconfused, @bdguan, @gracewhiteguan @DevinLewtan for all their feedback and insight
Miles Deutscher (@milesdeutscher)
📅 Mar 25, 2024 · ❤️ 4,862 · 👁 2,203,861
GCR is one of the greatest traders the crypto space has ever seen.
Although he's no longer active on X, he has left behind a trail of alpha.
I spent 2 hours on the weekend reading & collating it.
🧵: Here's a compilation of the top 15 GCR alpha tweets.👇
Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan)
📅 Mar 24, 2024 · ❤️ 332 · 👁 198,952
Kunal Shah (@kunalb11) is one of India's most admired and well-known product leaders. He is the CEO and founder of @CRED_club, an Indian-based fintech startup valued at over $6 billion. Prior to CRED, he founded three other startups, including FreeCharge, which he sold for over $400m to Snapdeal. He has also been an advisor to India’s most influential organizations, a part-time partner at Y Combinator, and an advisor at Sequoia Capital.
In our conversation, we discuss:
🔸 The prevalence of successful Indian immigrants in top CEO roles
🔸 Why companies in India can grow DAUs, but not ARPUs—and what the means for building products for India
🔸 The power of curiosity and second-order thinking
🔸 Challenges and opportunities in the Indian market
🔸 The Delta 4 framework for building new products
🔸 Lessons from building CRED (so far)
🔸 Lessons from failure
🔸 Much more
Elad Verbin (@verbine)
📅 Mar 22, 2024 · ❤️ 19 · 👁 1,933
I'll be speaking in Dappcon Berlin on 21/5 about the upcoming Ethereum-powered AI apocalypse
Here are the slides of the previous version of this talk, given last year at Zuzalu
https://t.co/0ezHLbgfYa
And here's a low-quality recording:
https://t.co/PA1xanjoWg
Jesse Walden (@jessewldn)
📅 Apr 7, 2020 · ❤️ 43
Here is my high level reading/summary of
@RobertJShiller’s book: "Narrative Economics"
The All-In Podcast (@theallinpod)
📅 Sep 16, 2023 · ❤️ 7,236 · 👁 6,222,865
2,851 Miles by @bgurley from the @allinsummit
now available in full on @x
(0:00) 2,851 Miles
(24:44) In conversation with @bgurley https://t.co/FhePndpqac
yuga.eth 🛡 (@yugacohler)
📅 Sep 17, 2023 · ❤️ 1,759 · 👁 976,298
With respect, I found @ErikVoorhees' keynote to be jejune, anti-democratic, and disingenuous. It may be effective as a rallying cry for libertarians, but as a strategic framework for the global adoption of crypto, it is so divorced from reality as to be worthy of ignoring.
The speech's strongest points centered around the notion that "code is better than law." There is merit to the claim that transparent, mathematically-based rule-making can yield superior results to an opaque, politically-based process. I also agree with his characterization of the right to transact as fundamental to human existence.
However, I disagree with the perspective that American democracy is so deserving of disdain as to be rejected. Voorhees' conflation of the "state" as a single entity ignores the variety of political systems across the world and their relative levels of freedom. Democracy is categorically better than totalitarianism, and to reduce both to the machinations of men with "dead eyes and weak hearts" is to deny millennia of political progress, as well as the suffering of those under more oppressive regimes than the one Voorhees himself is subject to.
Voorhees' political framework reveals a level of hypocrisy and immediately crumbles when applied to the real world. Does he not comply with the subpoenas issued to him by the regulators he calls out in the audience? Does he not pay the income taxes that he castigates at the beginning of the speech? Would he have the creation of roads, bridges, and highways mediated through smart contracts today? There is a place for decentralized finance; there is also a place for the actions of a centralized state on behalf of its people, and to deny that is childish.
Voorhees says: "The political class... that legion of bureaucrats suckling at the teat of plundered wealth, with all their ornaments of authority, with all their hubris masked as confidence, with the inauthenticity of their smiles matched only by the absurdity of their ideas, and I see no reason to submit to the permissions under which they seek to restrain me. To such people, we owe nothing."
The reality is that Voorhees - and all of us - do submit to these permissions because we recognize the rule of law under a democratic system, arrived at through voting and lawmaking. The process is never perfect; it can even be corrupt; yet, we comply because we have faith that the inclusive political institutions that propelled America to become the financial hegemon will eventually recognize the importance and utility of crypto. It is reasonable and just to seek the consent – i.e., the permission – of the governed; that is democracy.
I strongly question a strategy which alienates all those involved in government as weak-willed and immoral. What does painting with such a broad brush achieve beyond revealing your own biases? In government, like in crypto, there are good people and bad people. We should aim to excise the bad people and have the good people in both spheres work together towards an open, global financial system.
I have much respect for Voorhees as an OG of crypto, and I understand that his perspective is a large part of how crypto came to be as big as it is today. But it is an untenable perspective weighed down by its idealism, dogmatism, and hyperbole and will slow down the adoption of crypto as we approach its next phase of global adoption.
To wholly reject the democratic state is libertarian propaganda and is of no use for the growth of crypto as an open, global financial system. We should instead recognize the merits of democracy and use them to further expand the reach of crypto.
Inflection Point (@BWInflection)
📅 Sep 13, 2023 · ❤️ 10,863 · 👁 3,935,935
Why are we here?
Permissionless II opener from @ErikVoorhees that got an entire crypto conference on their feet https://t.co/48kbXMaQjE