People could have lowered their expectations, but in the real world that wasn't how things went. Instead of losing faith in the power of government to work miracles, people believed that government could and should be working miracles, but that the specific people in power at the time were too corrupt and stupid to press the "CAUSE MIRACLE" button which they definitely had and which definitely would have worked. And so the outrage, the protests - kick these losers out of power, and replace them with anybody who had the common decency to press the miracle button!

In Gurri's telling, High Modernism had always been a failure, but the government-media-academia elite axis had been strong enough to conceal it from the public.

If you read the debates among the Founders—in The Federalist Papers, their letters, etc.—it becomes very clear very quickly that they remembered and cared about a lot of stuff the rest of us have either forgotten or never knew. They examined Ancient Rome, the Republic of Venice, the wars of religion, and countless other events—and they gleaned rules from them.

In economics, a rule is just another word for an institution. Institutions build up around rules like coral around a sunken oil rig. Maybe you shouldn’t have built the rig in the first place, but once the coral—and the sea life that depends on it—grows around it, short of a really good argument for removing it, you should leave it be. 

I’ve written a lot about how traditions are essentially storehouses of trial and error. People experimented with one practice after another and learned from the results. Over time, those lessons formed rules, and many of the people who live by them today don’t even know why the rules came into existence.

Disruptive innovations have weird metabolisms. They have a cost structure and product-market fit that are alien—even toxic—to incumbents, like blue-green algae eating sunlight and generating oxygen. Incumbent companies can’t adapt to it. It’s not in their DNA.

Disruptive innovations don’t compete against incumbents, they compete with nonconsumption. They start where there is no competition, at the low-end of a market, or in a completely new market. What they offer is not better. It is different. It shifts the basis of competition.

Developing the new magnet is seen as the greatest technological hurdle to making that happen; its successful operation now opens the door to demonstrating fusion in a lab on Earth, which has been pursued for decades with limited progress. With the magnet technology now successfully demonstrated, the MIT-CFS collaboration is on track to build the world’s first fusion device that can create and confine a plasma that produces more energy than it consumes. That demonstration device, called SPARC, is targeted for completion in 2025.

In 1963, the Canadian geophysicist John Tuzo Wilson suggested that volcanic chains like this are forged when a tectonic plate continuously drifts over a stationary hot spot in the mantle — the scorching rock that makes up 84% of Earth’s volume. This creates a sequence of volcanoes that erupt, grow, then die out as the plate migrates away from the magmatic fuel source.

In 2012, a team of geophysicists and seismologists set out to map the plume, deploying a giant network of seismometers across the vast depths of the Indian Ocean seafloor. Nearly a decade later, the team has revealed that the mantle is stranger than expected. The team reported in June in Nature Geoscience that the plume isn’t a simple column. Instead, a titanic mantle plume “tree” rises from the fringes of the planet’s molten heart, with superheated branchlike structures appearing to grow diagonally out of it. As these branches approach the crust, they seem to sprout smaller, vertically rising branches — super hot plumes that underlie known volcanic hot spots at the surface.

Commercial software, especially aggregators, are incentivized to resist interoperability. To be composable is to be commoditized. Interoperability means you no longer have a data lock-in moat, or a privileged hub position in the network.

Files act as hubs around which interoperability can emerge. Rather than implementing each other’s bespoke APIs, apps can collaborate over a shared file type, cutting down the necessary integrations from n * (n-1), to just n. Take a .png. How many apps can work with a .png? Too many to count, and it’s an open set. Any app can opt in to working with .pngs. Workflows that span multiple apps can emerge organically and permissionlessly.

You can’t live their lives for them forever, and if you try, their lives will be less fulfilling and meaningful as a result. I have a newfound respect for the attraction of helicopter parenting and a newfound appreciation for how selfish it is.

The government can’t love you, and when it works from the premise that it can, folly or tyranny follow. We need people in our lives, not programs. Because people give us the very real sense that we are part of something, that we’re needed and valued. Programs treat us like we’re metrics in some PowerPoint slide.

I’ve written a lot about what Hayek called the “microcosm” and “macrocosm” and the dangers of confusing the two. The microcosm is the world of family, friends, and community; the macrocosm is the realm of laws, contracts, commerce, and citizenship. And the rules are different for both because the microcosm is for people you love while the macrocosm is for strangers. As I often joke, in my family I’m something of a communist. I don’t charge my daughter for food and she doesn’t pay taxes. If your best friend needs a bed or your car, you don’t charge him for it. But if a stranger wants my food or car, we’re gonna need a contract and compensation of some kind.

Philosophically, this entails keeping the government, particularly the federal government—which is the least equipped branch of government to understand and respect the contours of the unique snowflakes of families and communities—restrained and constrained to specific tasks.

Solana has a higher Nakamoto coefficient than Ethereum or Bitcoin, and it’s increasing. The reason is that while there are a larger number of Bitcoin and Ethereum miners than Solana validators, those miners operate in “pools” that behave as one, and often run software managed by the pool. As blocks get harder to mine, miners are more likely to pool resources. Bitcoin’s current Nakamoto Coefficient is somewhere around 4. Ethereum’s is 3 or 4. Solana’s is 19, up from 8 in December, which you can track live on Solana Beach.

The generally-accepted way to measure decentralization is what Balaji Srinivasan coined the “Nakamoto Coefficient.” Since you need to control 51% of a PoW blockchain to take it over, “we define the Nakamoto coefficient as the minimum number of entities in a given subsystem required to get to 51% of the total capacity.”

Anatoly’s key innovation was Proof of History. On most blockchains, miners or validators need to communicate with each other to figure out how to order blocks. On Solana, all of the blocks act like radio towers, verifiable with a clock.

If they validate correctly, they earn rewards in the form of more tokens; if they behave dishonestly, and try to push through inaccurate blocks, they lose their stake. There’s game theory at play here: the amount of tokens each validator has at stake is greater than what they should be able to steal by misbehaving. 

NASDAQ, though, handles 500,000 transactions per second, and it’s one of many exchanges. To decentralize the world’s financial markets, you need a solution with higher throughput and lower costs. 

This industry structure adds another potential difficulty for construction innovation - conventional construction projects get a large amount of the work “for free”, in the form of existing expertise, standards, and expectations. If I want to get a house built, I can rely on the builder and the subcontractors to figure out most of what needs to be done without needing to be told.

It seems like a trivial optimization, but it is shockingly difficult to get builders to adopt advanced framing. The details and assembly methods are different from conventional wood construction, it differs from what the building code prescribes (though the code allows it), and it’s not what framers have generally been trained to do - it exists outside the community of practice. Most advice for how to get a house built with advanced framing is “find a builder familiar with green building techniques” i.e.: find a builder in a different community of practice.

Tradition and culture in construction is thus load bearing - “the way we’ve always done it” is the answer to how we’re able to do it all. This method of organization stems from construction’s history as a collection of tasks performed by skilled trades, workers hired for their expertise (often acquired under an apprenticeship), and given wide leeway to accomplish their tasks.

But beyond documented standards, the industry is also strongly shaped by what Dubois and Gadde refer to as a “community of practice” - a combination of informal norms, widely accepted techniques, craft skills, and unspoken assumptions that together create a common set of expectations on a project. When a team comes together for a project, even if they’ve never worked together before, there will already be a shared set of expectations as to how information will be represented on drawings, the deliverables the project will require, who will have responsibility for what, how the different systems will interact, and all the other items that might otherwise require time, effort, and expense to coordinate.

Production of other complex artifacts tends to require close relationships between the firms doing the work. Firms develop strategies for working with each other, spend the effort to adapt to each other’s workflows and processes, and create close partnerships that can last for years or decades. Boeing’s suppliers would have engineers stationed on-site at Boeing HQ to help resolve coordination and manufacturing problems. Lear recently built a factory in Flint specifically to manufacture seats for GM. Prior to the pandemic, Apple was reportedly spending $150 million per year on flights to China, where most of their manufacturing and suppliers are located.

With a top-class algorithm, every output will have something new about it, a little surprise that teaches you more about what is possible. You shouldn't ever get bored flipping through the results. If you do, edition size should have been smaller, or the algorithm should have expressed more variety.

We were able to do all of this: launch the token, seed the liquidity, and open it up for trading, in one evening. And less than two weeks later, there’s nearly $3m of liquidity deposited, letting people buy and sell these new crypto tokens as easily as any other crypto asset.

Normally on a CEX like Coinbase, they own the supply of tokens and they collect all the trading fees. But on a DEX, anyone can add liquidity and earn a share of the trading fees.

As people trade their MATIC for RAIDER, the supply of MATIC goes up and the supply of RAIDER goes down, which increases the price of RAIDER to balance out the values of the two tokens in the pool. The more RAIDER and MATIC tokens in the pool, the less the price will fluctuate in response to trades, so it helps to have more tokens (aka liquidity) in the pool to prevent crazy price swings.

Creating a new trading market for a token is fairly simple. You need an initial supply of that token, as well as an initial supply of the token you want it to be traded with. Since MATIC is the native token for Polygon (like ETH is the native token on Ethereum), we decided to make our initial trading pairs MATIC + RAIDER and MATIC + AURUM. 

Decentralized Exchanges like Uniswap are one of the first killer apps in crypto. They’re replacing a core piece of the Traditional Finance infrastructure, and doing it with 1/100th the headcount. 

What Coinbase does with 1,700 employees, Uniswap does much of with 13.

We need many shots on goal here, which is why Susan Danziger and I have personally invested in three different fusion startups already (Zap Energy and Avalanche in the United States and Marvel Fusion in Germany).

Third, there’s been tremendous progress in the necessary supporting technologies. Superconducting magnets for the magnetic-confinement approach to fusion have become much cheaper, lasers for inertial confinement fusion have become much more powerful, and breakthroughs in material science have made nanostructured targets available, which enable the use of completely new approaches to fusion, such as the low-neutronic fuel pB11.

However, we remain far from the finish line. According to the International Energy Agency, global emissions of CO2 this year are set to jump 1.5 billion tons over 2020 levels. And more than 80% of global energy consumption is still made up of coal, oil and gas.

He’s playing a postmodern game against modern rivals. He’s like Neo. He’s not trying to forcefully bend the spoon; he understands there is no spoon. He has more money points than all but two people in the world to show for it.