• The most difficult part of agencies is balancing supply and demand
• Owning Bitcoin is currency trading. If you’re not trading other currencies, why trade Bitcoin.
• I’m sure we’ll invest in a crypto company at some point but for now I’m watching it play out

• Pretty incredible note at 41 minutes about real benchmarks for chains under real conditions - says that if you throw (pretty basic) AMM transactions at each of the chains, solana doesn’t do 40k, the actual number is 280, which is higher than other chains but still orders of magnitude lower than advertised.

Highlights
- web3 should give us the richness of web2, but decentralized
- why centralized platforms emerged to begin with
- People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will
- premise for web1 was that everyone on the internet would be both a publisher and consumer of content as well as a publisher and consumer of infrastructure
- A protocol moves much more slowly than a platform
- If something is truly decentralized, it becomes very difficult to change, and often remains stuck in time
- There are entire parallel industries
- figure out how to organize enormous groups of people so that they can move as quickly as possible
- the blockchain can’t live on your mobile device (or in your desktop browser realistically). So the only alternative is to interact with the blockchain via a node that’s running remotely on a server somewhere
- But, as we know, people don’t want to run their own servers
- Almost all dApps use either Infura or Alchemy in order to interact with the blockchain
- So much work, energy, and time has gone into creating a trustless distributed consensus mechanism, but virtually all clients that wish to access it do so by simply trusting the outputs from these two companies without any further verification
- these companies also have visibility into almost all read requests from almost all users in almost all dApps
- There’s nothing in the NFT spec that tells you what the image “should” be, or even allows you to confirm whether something is the “correct” image
- MetaMask displays your recent transactions by making an API call to etherscan
- your account balance by making an API call to Infura
- displays your NFTs by making an API call to OpenSea
- Rainbow has their own data for the social features they’re building into their wallet – social graph, showcases, etc – and have chosen to build all of that on top of Firebase instead of the blockchain.)
- if your NFT is removed from OpenSea, it also disappears from your wallet
- royalties aren’t specified in ERC-721, and it’s too late to change it, so OpenSea has its own way of configuring royalties that exists in web2 space
- Iterating quickly on centralized platforms is already outpacing the distributed protocols and consolidating control into platforms
- from the very beginning, these technologies immediately tended towards centralization through platforms in order for them to be realized
- The people at the end of the line who are flipping NFTs do not fundamentally care about distributed trust models or payment mechanics
- I think enough money has been made at this point that there are enough faucets to keep it going
- designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure
- uses cryptography (rather than infrastructure) to distribute trust
- changing our relationship to technology will probably require making software easier to create
- in my lifetime I’ve seen the opposite come to pass
- distributed systems have a tendency to exacerbate this trend by making things more complicated and more difficult