Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
22 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“I think nearer the beginning, I was more seeking out one or a very small number of big ideas that would explain a whole bunch of things.”
02 / belief
“” Then the people who are anti basically said, “Look, here’s the section where he outlines what the four crazy risks are.” It seems like everyone just walked away — I hope some people, and I think lots of people did get interesting information, but definitely, many walked away just certain that their existing opinion is correct, which is, unfortunately, the default response to most writing anywhere.”
03 / belief
“I think I definitely saw other spaces declining in quality, and MR didn’t, to its great credit, which I think was great.”
04 / belief
“I probably would have seen links to it from Twitter as well, though I think my Twitter usage was definitely pretty low back then.”
05 / belief
“I think, even if cryptocurrencies by themselves do nothing, if there was an established equilibrium where they roughly grow at the same or similar rate as other things, as long as they grow in a way that’s at least somewhat uncorrelated from other things, then it makes sense from a pure portfolio theory to have some of your money in them.”
06 / belief
“I think part of it is that, at least I feel like, the innovation in the crypto space isn’t just technological innovation or political innovation.”
07 / belief
“I think if there is some dimension to finance which is some kind of zero-sum conflict, then that seems very plausible.”
08 / belief
“I would say the thing that I liked about Episode VIII is that it seems to have a certain kind of realism that was lacking in some of the previous ones.”
09 / belief
“For example, I think advertising in terms of traditional advertising — definitely overrated. But advertising in terms of the broader category of trying to influence how people in the public think in order to benefit your product, I think we’re going to see lots of innovation in both good and bad over the next couple of decades.”
10 / belief
“Also, I think part of it is that, especially in lower-population-density environments, there are going to be contexts where more decentralized solutions — and in this case, I mean decentralized even as in uberPOOL — actually do end up making more sense.”
11 / belief
“There’s definitely people who work outside of the Ethereum Foundation as a formal organization that have made much bigger contributions than even some people inside of the foundation. I think that’s part of where a lot of the successful innovation has come from.”
12 / belief
“Also, on top of that, I think part of what makes cryptocurrency so attractive is that traditional financial systems have a lot of inefficiencies and annoyingness that go beyond the strictly regulatory.”
13 / evaluation
“I think one of the problems of libertarian tax havens and libertarian havens in general, both online and offline, is that they attract both people who like freedom and rich people who are not particularly interesting.”
14 / evaluation
“One of them is that offering a zero-fee market maker is itself a costly activity because if you do the equations, you get this result that you’re — instead of earning the average of the earnings of two assets, you’re earning the geometric mean of those two assets, which is lower than the arithmetic mean, and so you lose a bit of money.”
15 / prediction
“I think, because we’re used to it, people do underestimate the oligopoly and the rich-get-richer and the trust that’s necessary inside of proof-of-work systems already.”
16 / evaluation
“Converting ether into fiat currency is absolutely not frictionless. It is very possible that it’s not going to significantly get more frictionless in the near- and medium-term future because of all of the banking issues, where cryptocurrency exchanges have a hard time getting and maintaining bank accounts.”
17 / evaluation
“I think going to Beijing and seeing the Summer Palace, and then going to Tokyo and seeing some shrine and whatever, is basically useless because you don’t really get more than you would get by going to Wikipedia.”
18 / preference
“I was just at the Economics and Computation conference with Glen Weyl and other people in Ithaca last week, which I thought was very interesting. It’s always kind of an indispensable opportunity to physically go to places and actually talk to people, because that way you learn things about both what people are thinking about and how people are thinking in the space that you can’t easily find from the internet.”
19 / prediction
“The good news is that for everything that doesn’t work any more, people have already come up with replacements for them over a decade ago.”
20 / evaluation
“Another one is, of course, that all of the actors are anonymous, and what that means in practice is that you cannot drag people’s utility down below zero.”
21 / evaluation
“Particularly when you run into things like what I call speaker/listener fault equivalence, which is basically this idea that if the protocol requires Alice to send a message to Bob, and the protocol detects that Bob never showed a message from Alice, then the protocol knows that either it’s because Alice forgot to speak or it’s because Bob pretended not to listen.”
22 / evaluation
“The conclusion of my post, or at least part of it, is that I do think that blockchains are logically centralized, basically because there is one blockchain.”