Jason Badeaux

Web 3 introduces a powerful new tool for bootstrapping networks: token incentives.The basic idea is: early on during the bootstrapping phase when network effects haven’t kicked in, provide users with financial utility via token rewards to make up for the lack of native utility.

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

This is a very new technology. It could be decades before it is developed enough to be put into a car. The high levels of cobalt could also be a huge issue. Not only is cobalt more than twice as expensive as any other battery metal, but its mining is environmentally and humanely dubious. Many companies, including Tesla, want to have cobalt-free... See more

Is the cosmic compulsion for disorder matched by an equally powerful compulsion for order, structure, and organization?

Jobs showed all of the other major smartphones in the industry to the audience, and in hindsight their cluttered, fixed, physical keys have not aged well.

Every one of these questions refers to a system that is complex, in the sense that a great many independent agents are interacting with each other in a great many ways [...] the very richness of these interactions allows the system as a whole to undergo spontaneous self-organization. Thus, people trying to satisfy their material needs unconsciously... See more

In terms of its function on the grid, the best way to think of Form’s battery is not as storage, but as the equivalent of a carbon-free natural gas plant. Rather than methane, it runs on renewable energy as fuel, but from the grid’s perspective, it provides basically the same service, which is reliable, dispatchable generation that can run for 100... See more

Tesla’s vision is simply batteries everywhere, for everything, all the time. And that means Tesla is going to need to produce a lot of batteries.