Alex Wittenberg

With the emergence of the internet of value, robust DID solutions will be required to allow Web3 to go mainstream by enabling new use cases. We are still in early innings, but the future is bright. 

Philosophers have been worrying about distraction at least since the time of the ancient Greeks, who saw it less as a matter of external interruptions and more as a question of character—a systematic inner failure to use one’s time on what one claimed to value the most. Their reason for treating distraction so seriously was straightforward, and... See more

By portraying our opponents as beyond persuasion, social media sorts us into ever more hostile tribes, then rewards us, with likes and shares, for the most hyperbolic denunciations of the other side, fuelling a vicious cycle that makes sane debate impossible. We mustn’t let Silicon Valley off the hook, but we should be honest: much of the time, we... See more

Acquiring users is not enough to reach liquidity. You also need the right type of users, i.e. those who feel the problem most deeply and would put up with any amount of friction to engage with your network. When you acquire these users, activity outpaces adoption and the utility of the network grows. As a result, the network becomes significantly... See more

Never before in history have so many people been under the gaze of so many strangers. Humans evolved in small groups, defined by kinship: those we knew, knew us. And our imaginative capabilities allowed us to know strangers—kings and queens, heroes of legend, gods above—all manner of at least partly mythic personalities to whom we may have felt as... See more

It’s tempting to imagine that ending or at least easing the struggle with time might also make you happy, most or all of the time. But I’ve no reason to believe that’s true. Our finite lives are filled with all the painful problems of finitude, from overfilled inboxes to death, and confronting them doesn’t stop them from feeling like problems—or... See more

Every single action we take — calling our grandparents, cleaning up the kitchen or, today, scrolling through our phones — is a transaction. We are taking what precious little attention we have and diverting it toward something. This is a zero-sum proposition, he realized. When you pay attention to one thing, you ignore something else. 

But how can we produce these statements such that they can be verifiable with on-chain data? MakerDAO produced real-time P&L and balance sheet data using Dune Analytics. The next step is adding relevant governance voting and discussions for context. For example, every large treasury transaction should have an associated “receipt” in the form of an... See more

Right now in the creator space, the closest thing to this model is in the upfront advances that more and more big platforms are paying creators to join and produce content. Substack, Clubhouse, Snapchat, Facebook, YouTube, and others all pay cash advances to creators in the hopes that they then generate even more revenue for the platform. So far,... See more