Jason Badeaux

The future success of Tesla doesn’t depend so much on their products but rather on one thing: the Tesla Gigafactory.

Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers.

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

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.

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

The home page has nothing on it. I didn't want to join a startup which had only a textbox. [from a friend who was offered a role when Google had 15 employees]

Electric lighting, for example, did not simply replace candles and oil lamps on a 1-to-1 basis, but instead opened up entirely new residential, commercial, industrial, artistic, and scientific applications. Refrigeration did not just replace ice boxes on a 1-to-1 basis, but instead found new applications ranging from air conditioning and... See more