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).

“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.” From: Inevitability in technology

“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.” Farmer & Farmer

I’ve never heard of it. I’ve heard of it but don’t understand it. I understand it, but I don’t see how it’s useful. I see how it could be fun for rich people, but not me. I use it, but it’s just a toy. It’s becoming more useful for me. I use it all the time. I could not imagine life without it. Seriously, people lived without it? It’s too powerful and needs to be regulated” Credits: #1–#9 by Morgan Housel, Time #10 by @peterpeirce