This is gonna be random.
I want to try something new to me - at least, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this format in action, which may tell you something about the idea. We’ll see. What I want is something mostly off the cuff, minimally edited but regularly revisited so ideas can be refined or expanded or dismissed. Stuff I see, stuff I’m thinking about, things I’ve heard. Will it be interesting? Maybe. Let’s see.
Jan 18 22: I ran across a Revisionist History episode from a couple of years ago, focused on the work of Adam Cronkite and a lottery model for electing leaders - the Powerball theory (another topic itself, to be sure). The relevant (to me) idea is that people are bad at predicting, generally, and are particularly bad at predicting who will be a good leader. Elections aren't helpful - anyone who wants to be president should never be president. Instead, everyone who is interested steps forward, and representatives are chosen at random from the pool of candidates. Elections by their nature exclude a big chunk of the population- people who want to run an office, but don’t want to run FOR office, and so are not great for recruiting good leaders. Gladwell proposes Cronkrite’s 3rd Law: “Nobody knows anything” to say that no one or ones has a lock on knowing who will be a great leader, and so trying to pick the best one out of many is a fool's game.
As the blockchain develops - people figure out how to do things, then how to do them better, then how to make that better, abstract away four more layers of complexity, and then finally get that bored ape or one of a kind rainbow unicorn NFT - no one can predict which solutions will be the most efficient, which ones will be used the most, or what anyone will do with anything that blockchain enables. The whole crypto world decides, based on what works, what’s hyped well, and what’s needed. You can form broad generalities that will inform where you invest, but to pick a single coin out of a hundred or more very similar things is not a winning strategy over the longer term - you might get lucky once, but it's not repeatable.
