Issue #19: Participation

In a nutshell, the opportunity to be an active participant is one key difference between centralized and decentralized financial infrastructure.

Uniswap looks a lot like Bitcoin in the sense that the functions traditionally performed by a company or its employees can now be performed by anyone!

DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations - a topic for a future issue) are so important to this thesis because they become the new framework for a group of specialists to organize and coordinate.

My bold prediction here is that crypto networks and other DAOs will be some of the largest employers of talent on the planet. Imagine working for the Internet…

Now the missing piece in all this is the user interface around reputation. In the traditional financial world, we have credit scores. In social media, we have follower counts and engagement metrics (likes, retweets). In crypto, there hasn’t been a tool or platform that has been able to look at everyone’s wallet history, make sense of it, and presen... See more

As an individual not employed by Visa or the Federal Reserve today, you can’t participate in US currency issuance or transaction processing today. In decentralized networks like Bitcoin, you can.

My goal and challenge for today’s issue is to convince you that crypto is less like the stock market and more like social media, where you can participate, build a reputation, and actually add more value to the network than you extract.