Skin in the Game
Proof-of-stake as a way to have skin in the game
Enjoyed this Fireside Chat between Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Naval Ravikant where they discuss concepts from Nassim’s “Skin in the Game” book and how these apply to blockchains. The chat focusses more on the former than the latter but offers a useful framework for assessing and designing crypto ecosystems.
One of my favorite projects applying these concepts is Numerai, “an AI-run, crowd-sourced hedge fund” that uses its token and proof-of-stake to offer stakeholders a way to have skin in the game.
Highly recommend this podcast, which explains what Numerai does whilst the fund’s “An Unstoppable Predictions Marketplace — Introducing Erasure” blog post deep dives into how it’s expanding the these concepts to democratize data access for investors.
From around the web
Post-Bitcoin-Maximalism: A call for embracing the currency competition (Medium) — Makes the case for alt-coins: instead of threatening bitcoin these actually strengthen its position.
Why isn’t Bitcoin banned everywhere? (Hackernoon) — Argues that bitcoin isn’t banned because governments don’t feel threatened by the store of value use case (long read).
Private BitTorrent trackers are markets (Medium) — Interesting post on the underlying economics of p2p file sharing.
An Introduction to Auction Theory: Blockchain Edition (Medium) — Good introduction to auction mechanisms and how they affect transaction incentives and economics.
Tether is exiting and nobody noticed (Medium) — Theory on what’s happening with Tether changing banks and depegging from the USD.
Nearly 1% of All ETH Now Locked in DAI, Maker Become the Most Valuable Ethereum Token (Trustnodes) — Related to the above, if Tether is exiting the market, MakerDAO’s remarkable stability despite 2018’s market crash is getting reflected in the value of its governance token, MKR.
Monero Becomes Bulletproof (Medium) — Monero is the first cryptocurrency to implement bulletproofs, which is a zero knowledge protocol designed to improve private transaction efficiency.
State of the Token Market (Fabric.vc) — Report on the token market nine months into 2018.
Cool corner 😎
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The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of my employer.
