I read “Read Write Own” by Chris Dixon. It was thought-provoking and spoke to a lot of the promise of blockchain technology. Beyond that, it spoke to a few misconceptions I had and brought up several new questions. Ultimately, I’m intrigued by the tech and I’ll be looking for opportunities to invest time better understanding it.
At a high level, Dixon talks through the creation of the internet and how we’ve gotten to this point. He puts forth blockchain tech as a natural extension to the woes of our current systems. The big pitch amounts to “you can’t trust corporations to do the right thing. What you can trust, is auditable code that enforces rules of play.. provided the switching cost to an alternative is kept adequately low to keep things competitive”.
Networks
Central to his thesis are the three types of networks.
Protocol networks, like the web and email, are community controlled. There’s a strong incentive for folks to build on top because no one specific group controls it. Transacting on the network is free. What you can sell is yours. On the downside, funding core development is hard because there’s no central entity to hold funds. Creating more of these is also difficult, given the costs involved.
Corporate networks, like Facebook and YouTube, can hold funds because they’re a company. All of their infrastructure is controlled by them, which reduces coordination costs and makes large updates much easier. On the downside, they have a high take rate and the rules are at the whim of their management. Incentive structures also invert when they reach critical mass, leading to attract/extract cycles.
Blockchain networks, like Ethereum, can hold capital (through tokens) which they can use to fund future development or increase adoption. There are structures for community governance. They have a low take rate. The downside is they’re new, the tooling kinda sucks, and there are performance concerns which can limit functionality.
Learnings
- Ethereum has moved to a proof-of-stake system which has dramatically decreased emissions to the point that it’s less energy intensive compared to other popular things (like paypal or netflix).
- He called out the release of the iphone in 2010 as the inflection point for web 2.0. I wouldn’t have pinned it on that, but the timing does track.
Quotes/snippets I found enjoyable
On the beauty of the web as a neutral technology:
I could even choose to self-host, the digital equivalent of living off the grid.
He referred to block chains as the “worlds largest bug bounty program”.
Companies simply cannot be trusted to keep promises to users. Fiduciary duty trumps other concerns.
Protocol networks [like web/email] respect digital ownership. Corporate networks [like twitter/facebook] do not.
DAOs are like the network equivalent of homeowner’s associations
On legal structures like LLC and C-corps and how they don’t work well in a influencer/creator economy.
The world needs new, digitally native ways for people to coordinate, cooperate, collaborate, compete.
Every year, thousands of students and others early in their careers come to me and my partners to collaborate on blockchain projects. When we ask why, they tell us they don’t want to spend their careers helping Google or Meta sell more ads. They want to work on the frontier.
You are here now. These are the good old days.
A list of things to read afterwards
- Declaration of the Independence of Cyber Space
- Where Wizards stay up late: The origins of the Internet
- Commoditize your complement
- Price-innovation cycle
- Federation is the worst of all worlds
- Snow Crash
A list of open questions
- Are all validators on a network (e.g. ethereum) equal for the purposes of calculating consensus?
- One of the pitches of blockchain is the economic sustainability side. How do the economics of dweb tools like IPFS work?
- If something happens with a blockchain and a bunch of folks decide to “fork” to revert the commit.. how does that work in practice? How do those folks coordinate?
- What do deploys for blockchains look like? What about smart contracts?
- Who has done writing on tokens / DAOs from an anti-capitalist perspective?
- How does blockchain differ from DeFi (decentralized finance)? I think DeFi is a particular use.. but I don’t fully get it.
- Who, if anyone, is working on supply chain, open source, and funding models via blockchain (e.g. solving the Open Source funding problem)?
- What does blockchain governance (DAO) look like in practice?
- He mentions that “blockchains have only recently become performant enough to support social networking”. What have been the big performance overlocks for blockchain throughput? Is it layer2 networks and doing things off-chain? Why wasn’t that a pathway before?