Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
What’s a fundamental non-currency infrastructure affordance of blockchains that can’t be delivered with web2 or older stacks easily? A near-example is NFTs bought on one site showing up on another, which you can’t do in web2 (closest is walled garden/game badges). Things like this but more infrastructurey in flavor, and neither finance related, nor fun and games. Maybe like DeFi for nonFi things?
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Mark Beylin ⏻↑
@beylin
I’m not sure exactly what you’re asking here but I’ll take a stab at it My favorite example for why smart contracts are civilizationally important is - imagine a game of rock paper scissors where two players want to bet on the outcome but don’t trust each other to pay fairly if they lose. They need a third party to escrow the funds and take a % cut of the winnings. With smart contracts, you no longer need a human being to escrow the execution of your game logic to determine who wins. “Game” here is also intentionally vague because it can range from basic R/P/S all the way to real business logic based on specific (real world) data inputs. Zooming out, a surprisingly large % of our economy is made up of businesses whose entire job is charging an escrow % for managing logical execution of logic between two parties (or “brokering the relationship”).
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Mark Beylin ⏻↑
@beylin
When you combine this with the openness property you already described (where markets natively self-advertise for any interested party) the result is that you can vastly undercut the margins on a ton of these businesses. This isn’t just currency as a product, it’s a large portion of the financial services industry that simply no longer needs to exist (because the value of local relationship management with high fees isn’t worth as much in the end as global relationship self-selection with low fees). This result is only possible because the network itself is the one executing all business logic— instead of saying “we have this solution to digitally connect you to the highest trust person in your area to do this deal”, blockchains give us an efficient solution to connect you to the highest bidder on your deal, who you no longer need to trust as part of the deal’s execution. For specific examples of this see the entire financial services industry (at every level); also insurance.
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Mark Beylin ⏻↑
@beylin
Finally, to try and make this even even more general and less money oriented, consider the framing that blockchains are a tool for human organization. Across the world, millions of people all participate in collectively upholding the bitcoin network — mining coins in exchange for validating transactions. None of them know each other but collectively they form a large swarm of people who can coordinate extremely efficiently thanks to this software that offers a rigid system for coming to consensus on the state of truth of the world (and ensuring participants all comply with the state of the world).
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Mark Beylin ⏻↑
@beylin
We also see examples like Helium - again we have a large swarm of people mining tokens in exchange for deploying hot spots. The only reason a giant network like this can exist is because the on-boarding cost for the miners drops to 0 with smart contract based work verification, and similarly the miners can participate without worrying that the protocol is treating me differently/giving me a bad deal because I’m a small long tail miner. Coase described how expensive it is for groups of human orgs to scale to large numbers; blockchains offer a unique substrate for supporting orgs that can scale in an unbounded manner. These kinds of empowered egregores can be used to accomplish any goal you want, so long as the inputs for the equation can be surfaced onto a blockchain and validated against.
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