Jason Badeaux

In 2019, Bloomberg surveyed 5,000 Tesla Model 3 owners. The survey revealed that 99% of Tesla owners would recommend the car to a friend, and 98% would buy the same Model 3 vehicle again. The results of this survey suggest that every customer an ICE manufacturer loses to Tesla is unlikely to return to their brand (at least until they can produce a... See more

Though it will require enormous upfront investment in the coming decade, laying a quilt of DERs over the nation’s distribution systems is the best thing we can possibly do to enable the rapid emission reductions we will need in the decade after.

One of the most powerful features of crypto-economic protocols is their ability to create incentive structures that allow anyone in the world to permissionlessly contribute to a set of shared objectives. These incentive structures can be finely tuned to facilitate large-scale coordination to achieve specific goals. This represents a step-function... See more

We refer to this thesis as “proof of physical work.” Protocols that fit this thesis incentivize people to do verifiable work that builds real-world infrastructure. Relative to traditional forms of capital formation for building physical infrastructure, these permissionless and credibly-neutral protocols:1. Can build infrastructure faster—in many... See more

When building a two-sided blockchain marketplace (buyers and sellers, or buyers and miners), which comes first, the chicken (miners) or the egg (buyers)? One solution: pay off the chickens.

Blockchains are an alternative system for promise enforcement, fundamentally different from any system human history has seen before. Promises in blockchain systems are enforced by miners, who — in reasonably competitive mining markets — have limited ability, and weak incentives, to do anything other than execute others' promises roughly according... See more

Second, there are use cases for "crypto". Most notably: money. Money that's not issued by a central government is a perfectly reasonable use case. Crypto is successful at being money. You may think decentralized money is bad or not useful to you in particular, but if you can't accept money as a use case, then that's a hint that this claim may be... See more

And when was the last time you tried to go to fill up your tank and you couldn’t because there was no fuel? The 70's? That was one of the worst existential crises our real economy has faced since the Great Depression. This is a far more frequent occurrence on the electricity grid: nodes can’t function individually, unlike how cars and boilers can.

Rooftop solar, battery storage, electric vehicles, and energy management devices are all examples of DERs – numerous pockets of energy spread throughout the grid rather than concentrated in a single spot. Unlike centralized sources of power, DERs can make the grid flexible and enable control of both electricity supply and demand in real-time.... See more