During the first era of the internet — from the 1980s through the early 2000s — internet services were built on open protocols that were controlled by the internet community. This meant that people or organizations could grow their internet presence knowing the rules of the game wouldn’t change later…
Roundup of lots of recent posts on crypto tokens:
Balaji S. Srinivasan — Thoughts on Tokens
Fred Wilson — ICOs and VCs here, Ethereum in 25 minutes, Polychain
Joel Monegro — Fat Protocols
Nick Tomaino — Cryptoeconomics 101 , Some Blockchain Reading, Tokens, Tokens and More Tokens
Fred Ehrsam — The dApp Developer Stack
Albert Wenger — Crypto Tokens and the Coming Age of Protocol Innovation
My post and podcasts — Crypto Tokens: A Breakthrough in Open Network Design, podcast with Vitalik Buterin, podcast with Olaf Carlson-Wee
Regulatory discussions — Coincenter
It is a wonderful accident of history that the internet and web were created as open platforms that anyone — users, developers, organizations — could access equally. Among other things, this allowed independent developers to build products that quickly gained widespread adoption. Google started in a Menlo Park garage and…
From Benedict Evans’ Cars as Feature Phones:
This is a common theme in many classes of device: you start with a product that has a few electronic functions added, and then those functions are delivered with chips, and perhaps they gain an interface and then a screen, and more and…
As [Edwin] Land ultimately recognized, the adoption of his [polarized headlight] system was fatally hampered by the fact that there was no competitive advantage for any car company in using it first. Since all cars needed to incorporate the technology as simultaneously as possible, it was either going to be…
“The strongest force propelling human progress has been the swift advance and wide diffusion of technology.” — The Economist
In the year 1820, a person could expect to live less than 35 years, 94% of the global population lived in extreme poverty, and less that 20% of the population was…
“Ether is a necessary element — a fuel — for operating the distributed application platform Ethereum. It is a form of payment made by the clients of the platform to the machines executing the requested operations. To put it another way, ether is the incentive ensuring that developers write quality applications (wasteful code costs more), and that the network remains healthy (people are compensated for their contributed resources).
Ether is to be treated as “crypto-fuel”, a token whose purpose is to pay for computation, and is not intended to be used as or considered a currency, asset, share or anything else.”
Source: ethereum.org
“Steve Jobs supposedly said, returning to Apple, that his plan was to stay alive and grab onto the next big thing — to listen for the footsteps. He tried video, and a few other things, but he got there in the end. But he might not have.”
“If you asked people in 1989 what they needed to make their life better, it was unlikely that they would have said a decentralized network of information nodes that are linked using hypertext.”
Credits:
#1–#9 by Morgan Housel, Time
#10 by @peterpeirce
