the most interesting news to come out of crypto in the last decade is the fact that we now have the means to stand up a globally accessible digital clock that pays people to keep it ticking
3 of 8 references in the Bitcoin whitepaper are about decentralized time keeping
incentives around consensus (agreement about history, tick by tick by tick) can get a little confusing but basically all ticks hold some data (merkle proofs of a tree of transactions) and Proof of Work leaks some money per tick while Proof of Stake pays people interest on their "at risk" investment to keep ticking
Ethereum adds a Turing complete virtual machine onto the clock, tracking function arguments, return values and code deployed to the virtual machine as data in each tick of the clock
there are a bunch of modern implementations of the Ethereum model in NEAR, Solana, Polkadot, Avalanche and others who have found a viable way to parallelize the single threaded virtual machine of Ethereum -- driving to make everything faster and cheaper so this idea can operate at scale and www shopping cart speeds
if you can get past the emotionally charged hype and news cycles vying for our attention, you will notice, with few exceptions, that the coins of 2017 and NFTs of 2021 are very early and relatable applications about things we care about and understand: money and shiny things. DeFi (decentralized finance) is about porting the financial system to this new new forever-clock
but the brand new primitives of (a) identity, enabled by public/private key cryptography (b) money, enabled by irrefutable record of time-bound value (c) ownership, identity + money and (d) provenance, identity + money + time ... are all just starting to build up
we're only just now learning to use this digital clock so we're thinking of it, naturally, as a permutation of what we already know, not something completely new. see tech adoption cycle, etc
your best bet in this environment, imho, is to focus on the actual tech -- it's no more complicated than a slow, expensive database that can't tell a lie (as long as it's economically viable to keep the clock ticking, and who knows how long that will be). at least that's good enough for the first year or so until you get used to it.
disclosure:
I'm learning how to teach people about this stuff at https://near.university and we're hiring 1000 teachers
3 of 8 references in the Bitcoin whitepaper are about decentralized time keeping
incentives around consensus (agreement about history, tick by tick by tick) can get a little confusing but basically all ticks hold some data (merkle proofs of a tree of transactions) and Proof of Work leaks some money per tick while Proof of Stake pays people interest on their "at risk" investment to keep ticking
Ethereum adds a Turing complete virtual machine onto the clock, tracking function arguments, return values and code deployed to the virtual machine as data in each tick of the clock
there are a bunch of modern implementations of the Ethereum model in NEAR, Solana, Polkadot, Avalanche and others who have found a viable way to parallelize the single threaded virtual machine of Ethereum -- driving to make everything faster and cheaper so this idea can operate at scale and www shopping cart speeds
if you can get past the emotionally charged hype and news cycles vying for our attention, you will notice, with few exceptions, that the coins of 2017 and NFTs of 2021 are very early and relatable applications about things we care about and understand: money and shiny things. DeFi (decentralized finance) is about porting the financial system to this new new forever-clock
but the brand new primitives of (a) identity, enabled by public/private key cryptography (b) money, enabled by irrefutable record of time-bound value (c) ownership, identity + money and (d) provenance, identity + money + time ... are all just starting to build up
we're only just now learning to use this digital clock so we're thinking of it, naturally, as a permutation of what we already know, not something completely new. see tech adoption cycle, etc
your best bet in this environment, imho, is to focus on the actual tech -- it's no more complicated than a slow, expensive database that can't tell a lie (as long as it's economically viable to keep the clock ticking, and who knows how long that will be). at least that's good enough for the first year or so until you get used to it.
disclosure:
I'm learning how to teach people about this stuff at https://near.university and we're hiring 1000 teachers
come help us, please
(edit: formatting)