Devin Baker

A good hint to the presence of leverage is the possibility of failure. Upside must be balanced by downside, so if there is big potential for gain there must also be a terrifying possibility of loss. CEOs, stars, fund managers, and athletes all live with the sword hanging over their heads; the moment they start to suck, they're out. If you're in a... See more

Once there’s trust, infrastructure, and liquidity, the market always finds a way to extract productive value, even from assets originally meant just to preserve it.

The moment a store of value is secure enough to be trusted, it becomes too valuable to remain idle. It becomes a productive asset. It starts generating yield.

This is the thing that Silicon Valley has always understood better than Wall Street. Silicon Valley was raised on exponentials, while Wall Street was raised on linearity. And over the last few years, crypto’s center of gravity has migrated from Silicon Valley to Wall Street. You can feel it.

Granted, crypto growth doesn’t look as smooth as... See more

These organizations often position themselves as the future of communities, but they look a lot more like the past, a sort of romanticized feudalism.

Peter Turchin calls the driver of today’s status pressure elite overproduction. When a society creates more elites and elite aspirants than there are elite positions, competition intensifies, instability rises, and status conflict spills into politics and culture.

The unusually prosperous boomer decades produced more elite aspirants than legacy... See more

Jean-Jacques Rousseauwas a great enlightened man, but he was the first of the Romantic movement, too. I think that in the last 30 years, we have tried to govern mankind through enlightenment, through the use of reason, our mind. This is no good.

This century is where enlightenment and romanticism must blend. A great idea that is born out of the mind... See more

Yes, we’ve scaled via rollups, but one of the few remaining use cases for Ethereum is settlement and DA. If the very few applications that actually accrue any source of value back to Ethereum are forced to leave due to constrained DA capacity, what source of value will Ethereum have left?

To the extent that it is an empire, America is an empire defined not by its ability to expand geographically to capture existing resources, but by its ability to expand technologically to create new ones. America, therefore, is a boundless empire.