Jason Badeaux

In Tesla’s 2016 annual shareholders meeting, Musk said:“We realized that the true problem, the true difficulty, and where the greatest potential is — is building the machine that makes the machine. In other words, it’s building the factory. I’m really thinking of the factory like a product.”

As I noted in Understanding Token Velocity, the V in the equation of exchange is a huge problem for basically all proprietary payment currencies. Proprietary payment currencies are, generally speaking, susceptible to the velocity problem, which will exert perpetual downwards price pressure.

Since 2017, Tesla’s capital expenditure per incremental unit of capacity has improved from ~$84,000, when the Model 3 was ramping, to ~$7,700. While these improvements indicate that Tesla could continue to increase margins, the more important takeaway is that capital no longer is a bottleneck limiting its growth. Instead, Tesla should be able to... See more

In order to build efficient, combustion-based generators, we needed to build them at economies of scale and extensive transmission and distribution networks to transport power along with them. Those wires are vulnerable to being knocked out by storms (or even squirrels), leading to blackouts, or supply shortages leading to cascading failure. That... See more

On the upside, regulatory steps are already being taken to reform how DERs are integrated as a grid resource – though seeing the process through won’t be easy. In 2020, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission introduced FERC Order No. 2222. This order requires grid operators across the U.S. to develop plans to provide DERs access to wholesale... See more

The next wave of $1B+ crypto companies will disrupt incumbents by keeping an existing consumer experience in web2 while rebuilding its back office in web3.

Crypto mullet’s customers don’t think about wallets, tokens or crypto. Instead, they log in with their email addresses, pay with their credit cards and access the company’s services through a normal web browser/app. Crypto mullet’s back offices, however, are decentralized and governed using thoughtful tokenomics and encoded via smart contract. They... See more