Devin Baker

Therefore, what we get out of life is not determined by the good feelings we desire, but by what bad feelings we’re willing and able to sustain to get us to those good feelings.

One way to rethink these platforms is to think about all the users across the 90-0-1 ratio; to figure out how to share a platform's overall value with all its contributors, big and small. In the creator economy, this means rewarding readers and curators alongside creators.

Our digital systems generate noise and there's little the algorithms can do... See more

18) Trading is a zero sum game inside a larger positive sum game. Though every trade has a winner and offsetting losers, markets as a whole direct resources across space and time and help civilizations grow. The emergent objective of complex systems is usually only visible in hindsight. If you get too cynical about the uselessness of what you do,... See more

Consider the contrast with centrally planned economies. USSR’s economic model, for instance, relied on predetermined outputs and strategic decisions made by a select committee of party officials. It's a system that wins praise for its ability to mobilize massive resources toward national priorities but is widely faulted for its inflexibility.... See more

Tokens give users property rights: the ability to own a piece of the internet.

Not only have finance and economics lately drifted even further apart, it gets worse: rather than economics (or economic expectations) driving finance as the textbooks tell us, finance seems to increasingly drive economics . Bitcoin and crypto, for example, fit badly into the traditional framework because they lack conventional ‘fundamentals’.... See more

But the most interesting teams in our view are those that either deeply understand where the demand-side is and how they can solve their problems in practice, or those who are building on a longer-term thesis toward something not widely appreciated today.

The last 40 years have been us trying to convert the world to liberalism(our new incumbent system), to attempt to ensure global peace. The reverse of this will now begin to occur, and many will be very surprised, (especially China and Mid-east) at just how ruthless the west will be in regards to the countries aligned against the America/western... See more

The first point is that in a world of closed-source centralized ledgers, an open-source decentralized ledger is valuable. Specifically how valuable is hard to say, but right now at $2 trillion it’s only worth about 0.2% of global capital. It would have to approximately 10x in price from here to reach the market capitalization of gold, which is... See more