so much about startups is counterintuitive. And when you tell someone something counterintuitive, what it sounds to them is wrong. So the reason founders don't listen to us is that they don't believe us. At least not till experience teaches them otherwise. [4]The reason startups are so counterintuitive is that they're so different from most people's other experiences. No one knows what it's like except those who've done it.

I recently told applicants to Y Combinator that the best advice I could give for getting in, per word, was Explain what you've learned from users.

A line of code containing 6+ pieces of information should be simplified.

Errors detected during execution are called exceptions and are not unconditionally fatal: you will soon learn how to handle them in Python programs.

There are (at least) two distinguishable kinds of errors: syntax errors and exceptions.

When you run a command like python or pip, your operating system searches through a list of directories to find an executable file with that name. This list of directories lives in an environment variable called PATH, with each directory in the list separated by a colon: /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin Directories in PATH are searched from left to right, so a matching executable in a directory at the beginning of the list takes precedence over another one at the end. In this example, the /usr/local/bin directory will be searched first, then /usr/bin, then /bin.

To retrieve data, users pay a retrieval provider to fetch the data for them. Unlike storage deals, which are handled on-chain, retrieval deals may happen off-chain. This results in a faster data retrieval process.

Filecoin has two functions to keep data safe. First, it uses a cryptoeconomic guarantee that verifies the storage with zero-knowledge proofs. Second, it uses an economic penalty: if the data is unretrievable or the storage fails, storage providers are penalized through locked-up collateral.

The open-market environment incentivizes storage providers to offer their storage capacity in an efficiently priced way. That is, prices are determined by supply and demand dynamics, rather than a fixed pricing structure. To incentivize storage providers to participate in deals, Filecoin rewards them with the network's native token (FIL).

A storage deal is like a service level agreement (SLA) enforced on the Filecoin blockchain. Storage deals are agreements where users pay fees to storage providers to store their data. The terms of the deal include the fee amount and the duration of the storage deal.

Filecoin is a peer-to-peer version of AWS that regularly verifies data availability and integrity. This is made possible by deals negotiated on open markets for data services.

Four major categories have already found high demand: (1) NFT and Web3 storage, (2) permanent storage and Web2 datasets, (3) metaverse and gaming, and (4) audio and video.

IPFS may be regarded as a peer-to-peer version of HTTP, with an important twist. Traditional URLs and file paths identify a file by its specific geo-location on a server. IPFS uses content addressing to store data decentrally. It references a file by what’s in it, i.e., by its content. A content address is unique and is the result of hashing, which is essentially the cryptographic compression of content into a long string of characters. When retrieving a file, the network only needs the file’s hash to locate the nodes storing that file’s content.

Just like buffers, strings always have a fixed maximum length in Clarity.

Buffers are unstructured data of a fixed maximum length. They always start with the prefix 0x followed by a hexadecimal string.

Clarity provides three different kinds of sequences: buffers, strings, and lists.

Since types cannot mix, a list can only contain items of the same type.

bool, short for boolean. A boolean value is either true or false. They are used to check if a certain condition is met or unmet (true or false).

uint, short for unsigned integer. These are 128 bits numbers that can only be positive. The minimum value is therefore 0 and the maximum value is 2128 - 1. Unsigned integers are always prefixed by the character u.

int, short for (signed) integer. These are 128 bits numbers that can either be positive or negative. The minimum value is -2127 and the maximum value is 2127 - 1.

Primitive types are the most basic components. These are: signed and unsigned integers, booleans, and principals.

Clarity admits two different kinds of principals: standard principals and contract principals. Standard principals are backed by a corresponding private key whilst contract principals point to a smart contract.

A principal is a special type in Clarity and and represents a Stacks address on the blockchain.

Types fall in three categories: primitives, sequences, and composites.

There are two components to the Funding Rate: the Interest Rate and the Premium. The Premium is the reason why the price of the perpetual contract will converge with the price of the underlying asset.

Funding payments occur every 8 hours at 00:00 UTC; 08:00 UTC and 16:00 UTC for all Binance Futures perpetual contracts. Traders are only liable for funding payments in either direction if they have open positions at the pre-specified funding times. If traders do not have a position, they are not liable for any funding. If you close your position prior to the funding time, you will not pay or receive any funding.

Funding Amount = Nominal Value of Positions × Funding Rate

The funding rate is primarily used to force convergence of prices between the perpetual contract and the underlying asset.Unlike traditional futures, perpetual contracts have no expiration date. Thus, traders can hold positions to perpetuity unless he gets liquidated. As a result, trading perpetual contracts are very similar to spot trading pairs.As such, crypto exchanges created a mechanism to ensure that perpetual contract prices correspond to the index. This is known as Funding Rate.

Funding rates are periodic payments made to either long or short traders, calculated based on the difference between the perpetual contract prices and spot prices. When the market is bullish, the funding rate is positive and tends to rise over time. In these situations, traders who are long on a perpetual contract will pay a funding fee to traders on the opposing side. Conversely, the funding rate will be negative when the market is bearish, where traders who are short on a perpetual contract will pay a funding fee to long traders.

When I began to understand that attitude doesn’t have anything to do with survival, I felt myself coming up out of deep water. I didn’t cause my cancer by having a bad attitude, and I wasn’t going to cure it by having a good one.And then Coscarelli told me the whole truth about cancer. If you’re ready, I will tell it to you.Cancer occurs when a group of cells divide in rapid and abnormal ways. Treatments are successful if they interfere with that process.That’s it, that’s the whole equation.Everyone with cancer has a different experience, and different beliefs about what will help. I feel strongly that these beliefs should be respected—including the feelings of those who decide not to have any treatment at all. It’s sadism to learn that someone is dangerously ill and to impose upon her your own set of unproven assumptions, especially ones that blame the patient for getting sick in the first place.

Externally, control of POLIS will enable the gaming community to influence decision making of the Star Atlas development team. This will follow a period of centralization of decision making, likely 2-3 years of game development and balance. At the conclusion of the centralized period, holders will be able to influence game economics (i.e. inflation rates), asset release schedules, game direction, and will otherwise provide some degree of ownership in development decision making.

Holders of POLIS will be in a unique position of jurisdictional ownership over entire regions, regardless of who owns title (NFT) to the land and equipment rights. These players will be able to restrict some of the activity that can occur while under their oversight, impose taxes on other players, charge tolls, and otherwise create a separate set of laws with which other players must observe. However, POLIS represents voting rights, not dictatorial ownership. In this regard, it will likely require multiple players to collaborate on these rules, fines, fees, tolls, etc., lest they be superseded by a more powerful group of players. Decentralized Autonomous Corporations would do well to take advantage of this tool.

POLIS is a multifunctional governance token, with applications both in-game and in directing real world economic policy.

ATLAS will serve as the native in-game currency within Star Atlas. It is the lubricant of the metaverse. Players will initially leverage ATLAS to acquire digital assets such as ships, crew, components, land, and equipment. However, as in any real economy, a financial system is necessary to facilitate commerce. Whether it be through NPC merchants, or direct peer-to-peer transactions, ATLAS is the unit of account to execute operational requirements. Operating a business is challenging. Managing resources will require critical strategic decision making. Players seeking the monetary rewards available in-game will need to carefully balance their operating expenses against income derived. Operating expenses, such as personnel for mining equipment, fuel for ships, and repairs for damages will all need to be paid in ATLAS. It will also serve as the predominant currency within the NFT marketplace.

Unlike most games in existence today, Star Atlas provides a unique opportunity for players to extract in-game virtual earnings into real-world income. Where many game developers opt to monopolize asset ownership and distribution through restrictions on reselling, Star Atlas fully embraces the potential of decentralized self-sovereign ownership of assets permitted through the implementation of blockchain into asset ownership and NFT marketplaces. The ethos of the Star Atlas development team is to encourage the monetization of time spent in this virtual world, and emphasize the ability for this monetization to transcend the metaverse to the real world. Digital assets owned always belong to the holder, and crypto assets earned can be converted into fiat currencies friction-free. We believe this is the model for the future of gaming.

The beauty of space science-fantasy adventure is to manually pilot or captain your own spaceship into the vast unknown. For exploration, combat and various other role-specific game mechanics, the cockpit view gives a sense of ownership and grounding to a player’s chosen ship purchases. This immersive first person, seated view will allow players to utilize equipment such as flightsticks, throttles, multi-functional button control panels, head tracking hardware, and most importantly, virtual reality head-mounted displays.

The first principle driving the entire economy of Star Atlas is the mining gameplay. The wealth derived from mining creates many other branching revenue streams for players to contribute to and establish a career. From trading raw and refined ore, to cargo hauling, to crafting retail components, there is a broad range of career choices a player can embody and advance within the specializations of that career.

To augment that grand strategy, Star Atlas enables players to captain deep-space, crewed spaceships to scan and discover celestial and terrestrial assets. Once discovered, rich claims that are staked can be mined, refined and traded through a network of commercial mining installations, refineries, and the Universal Marketplace. Exploration will lead to many other surprises in the outer limits of space. In this mode the player primarily interacts with a top down space view showing their spaceship exterior with the ability to go into an x-ray view to see the interior of the ship and the crew performing their individual tasks. Players can also captain and pilot the ship manually through the first person cockpit/bridge view. Cockpit view is also suitable for seated virtual reality gaming.

The grand strategy genre of video games encourages claim staking to expand your empire and install strategic trade routes using an offensive and defensive tactical plan of action. In this mode the player primarily interacts with a dynamic overview of the charted and uncharted regions of space via the map view aka the Star Atlas.

The way a blockchain network is designed closely mimics the basis for the genre of Star Atlas. Mining or staking is the core of how blockchain assets are proven to be legitimate and tangible. To discover mined assets requires exploration on the part of a miner to unlock value. People set up mining or staking nodes and plug them into the blockchain network to enhance the network while also earning value from it. The hybrid experience of Star Atlas closely mimics the nature of how blockchain technology functions.

Major breakthroughs in recent technology created an opportunity for a futuristic science fiction experience that is entirely new and groundbreaking. Real-time graphics technology using Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite allows for cinematic quality video game visuals. Blockchain technology using the Solana protocol established a largely serverless and secured gameplay experience. Non-fungible tokens obtained and traded within Star Atlas creates an economy that replicates the tangibility of real world assets and ownership.

You, a faction citizen of Star Atlas, will have the ability to influence the outcome of this intergalactic conflict while creating the opportunity to earn rewards for your contributions.

Star Atlas is a virtual gaming metaverse based in the year 2620. In this distant future, three major factions have emerged; (1)The MUD Territory governed by humankind, (2)The ONI Region as a consortium of alien races, and (3)The Ustur Sector controlled by sentient androids. These factions are in an ongoing struggle for resources, territorial conquest, and political domination.

According to Brian Balfour, "The fastest growing products are better represented as a system of loops, not funnels. Loops are closed systems where the inputs through some process generates more of an output that can be reinvested in the input. There are growth loops that serve different value creation including new users, returning users, defensibility, or efficiency."

So how can rollups win in the long run?To my mind, there are two ways: one is that a non-rollup sidechain catastrophically fails, and the industry learns a lesson à la Mt. Gox. And catastrophically fail doesn’t just mean “nodes can’t sync.” It means “the money is gone” or “the chain has completely halted.” That’s possible, but probably unlikely.So that leaves us with the other way: rollups have to actually become significantly better than the alternatives. Decentralization virtue signaling is not enough. For this, I personally only see one path forward, which is the promise of cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs.

(Note that ZK rollups don’t suffer from this issue, since their withdrawals are effectively instant.)

Then consider the movement of funds in and out of rollups.For optimistic rollups, when you want to withdraw funds, there is a ~1 week challenge period during which your withdrawal is frozen. This sucks. So to facilitate “fast withdrawals,” market makers will stand ready to move your assets quickly across the boundary—for a fee. The fee they charge you will depend on their inventory and the liquidity of the asset. If you’re moving ETH, this will cost maybe 0.2% or something, but if you’re trying to move a random dog coin, it will likely cost much more, possibly 1% or higher. Some assets may not be possible to fast-withdraw at all if there’s not enough liquidity.

And none of the rollups are exactly EVM compatible — there are subtle differences between each of these rollups’ virtual machines and the EVM. For Arbitrum, they use AVM, for Optimism, OVM, each of which subtly breaks some contracts and EVM-compatible tooling. And for the ZK-rollups, that’s a whole nother universe — ZKRs will instead compile Solidity down to equivalent zero-knowledge circuits, to be executed in a ZK virtual machine.Now compare this to Polygon, where you literally just copy and paste your contracts and everything works.

Why are rollups more expensive than these sidechains? This is because every rollup ultimately must post calldata onto Ethereum; this tethers their fees to Ethereum fees. Each rollup can only scale Ethereum by a constant factor. So the fees won’t be that low compared to what many users are already used to.

Right now on Polygon, a simple Uniswap-style trade costs $0.0001. On Binance Smart Chain, it costs $0.20. On Ethereum, it costs about $7. And on Optimism, it’ll cost around $0.68.

I often say there are three motivations that drive crypto users today:Making moneyHaving funIdeologyOf these three, ideology is the weakest. And I worry that ideology will end up being the primary driver in favor of the adoption of rollups.

Our thought exercise above puts the total potential valuation of ETH between $3.7 and $4.7 trillion in the distant future base on the following parts:ETH’s valuation as a consumable is likely bounded given its high velocity.ETH’s valuation as a capital asset with cash flows is likely in low single-digit trillions. $3.2 trillion was our point estimate extrapolated from a somewhat conceivable success case.ETH’s monetary value can potentially be $0.5 to $1.5 trillion. We assumed that the value from ETH’s payment functionalities will be nonexistent and that all of ETH’s monetary value comes from it being a non-sovereign store-of-value driven by DeFi.

Ethereum will generate $60.2B annual fees. This is only an 18x increase from today whereas transaction volume and count would have increased by 250x and 3300x respectively. The deflationary power of technology!Finally, pricing ETH like a capital asset using a dividend growth model with the $60.2B number above gives the token a terminal value of $3.2 trillion in 10 years. Although this may seem like an enormous number, it is ten years out and does not account for any risk (e.g. technical, competition, regulatory). A shrewd investor needs to apply the appropriate probability or discount rate.

it is believable that ETH can take 10% of Bitcoin’s market share if Ethereum and DeFi continue to grow. If we take the potential market cap of Bitcoin to be around $4.7 — $14.6 trillion, then ETH’s potential monetary value could be at $0.5 trillion — $1.5 trillion.

ETH derives its value from two sources. First, its utility value, as described in the argument above. But the second source of its value is in its monetary premium, which derives in its preference as a “money-like” asset for use in the Ethereum economy.

Ethereum and DeFi have the potential to disrupt legacy finance and should be valued accordingly because of the following:Permissionless innovation at software speed: all DeFi protocols are open-sourced and composable. DeFi entrepreneurs can remix and innovate in finance at incredible speeds and reach a global audience with almost no fixed cost.Incentive alignment: with the right token mechanism design, all the stakeholders in the ecosystem (protocols, users, liquidity providers, engineers/protocol maintainers) can be properly aligned and growth can be bootstrapped with almost no upfront cost.Cost reduction: DeFi eliminates costs associated with legal, labor, compliance, and fixed infrastructure. Financial transactions in the legacy world are based on legal constructs and enforced by the government. The cost of recourse can be high and non-transparent in complicated situations like bankruptcies. These costs do not exist in DeFi because value is governed entirely by code.Frictionless capital and near-instant settlement: Capital within DeFi flows frictionlessly and programmatically with the sub-minute settlement — it is a truly digital-native experience. In comparison, payment rails from different jurisdictions do not natively talk to each other (better now with companies like Stripe and Plaid) in the legacy world. The processes are manual and many systems are decades old.Mass customization & synthetic assets: much like how the internet enabled companies to reach different niches users, DeFi will enable users to access almost any asset in the world. Today, through AMMs like Uniswap, anyone can create a new trading pair as long as they have the trading assets in inventory. Synthetic assets are taking this to another step. Theoretically, as long as there is a trusted data source, anyone can create a synthetic asset by providing on-chain collateral. Teams at Synthetix, UMA, Mirror and many others are exploring in this direction.Governmental neutrality: the financial system built on Ethereum is open and accessible to all. While this may not sound very attractive to users in countries with matured financial markets such as the U.S., it offers unparalleled advantages to people who live in countries where the local financial systems are less efficient or corrupted.

FTT stakers receive maker rebates as low as -0.0030%, and it costs only 25 FTT to have 0 maker fees.

*Fees for the spot market are charged in the target currency for maker orders and the quote currency for taker orders (e.g., market buy order on BTC/USD would pay fees in USD, limit buy order that executes as a maker would pay fees in BTC)

When the Ethereum network starts to become congested, you always here talk about Ethereum’s gas limit. This talk can be confusing if you aren’t familiar with the term. Because, as it turns out the term gas limit is used in two different ways in Ethereum. As we’ve covered, transactions have gas limits. However, blocks themselves also have an overall gas limit. There’s limit for the total gas that can be spent on the transactions contained within a block. Limiting the gas consumed in each block helps manage the growth of the Ethereum blockchain and the cost of operating a miner or node. Miners collectively have the ability to increase or decrease Ethereum’s block gas limit within a certain range. Theoretically, raising the limit would allow the Ethereum network to process more transactions per second. So when transactions start to pile up, you’ll often hear discussion about miners signaling for higher gas limits.

When you send an Ethereum transaction, you specify your gas price, typically denominated in Gwei, and a gas limit. The gas price you set determines how much you’re willing to pay per unit of gas. Whereas, the gas limit determines how many units of gas you’re willing to pay for. You can think of your gas limit like a budget you set for the miner processing your transaction.

Gas markets determine if and when transactions will get confirmed. Set your gas price too low and your transaction may get stuck. But, set your gas limit too low and your transaction cannot be executed because it runs out of gas.

If you’ve ever sent a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain, you’re familiar with the concept of paying gas. The gas you pay covers the cost of computing your transaction. But, there’s no way to predetermine how much computation is required. And, that’s why you need to enter a gas limit for your transactions.

A good trading system defines the conditions under which a trader is most likely to emerge profitable and outlines how to engage those conditions.

In essence, a trading system is a set of rules or principles that governs a trader’s overall approach to trading financial markets.

So while some people's lives converge fast, there will be others whose lives never converge. And for these people, figuring out what to work on is not so much a prelude to working hard as an ongoing part of it, like one of a set of simultaneous equations. For these people, the process I described earlier has a third component: along with measuring both how hard you're working and how well you're doing, you have to think about whether you should keep working in this field or switch to another. If you're working hard but not getting good enough results, you should switch. It sounds simple expressed that way, but in practice it's very difficult. You shouldn't give up on the first day just because you work hard and don't get anywhere. You need to give yourself time to get going. But how much time? And what should you do if work that was going well stops going well? How much time do you give yourself then?

It can be harder to discover your interests than your talents. There are fewer types of talent than interest, and they start to be judged early in childhood, whereas interest in a topic is a subtle thing that may not mature till your twenties, or even later. The topic may not even exist earlier. Plus there are some powerful sources of error you need to learn to discount. Are you really interested in x, or do you want to work on it because you'll make a lot of money, or because other people will be impressed with you, or because your parents want you to?

What keeps me going depends on the type of work. When I was working on Viaweb, I was driven by fear of failure. I barely procrastinated at all then, because there was always something that needed doing, and if I could put more distance between me and the pursuing beast by doing it, why wait?

The only way to find the limit is by crossing it. Cultivate a sensitivity to the quality of the work you're doing, and then you'll notice if it decreases because you're working too hard. Honesty is critical here, in both directions: you have to notice when you're being lazy, but also when you're working too hard. And if you think there's something admirable about working too hard, get that idea out of your head. You're not merely getting worse results, but getting them because you're showing off — if not to other people, then to yourself.

That limit varies depending on the type of work and the person. I've done several different kinds of work, and the limits were different for each. My limit for the harder types of writing or programming is about five hours a day. Whereas when I was running a startup, I could work all the time. At least for the three years I did it; if I'd kept going much longer, I'd probably have needed to take occasional vacations.

There's a kind of solidity to real work. It's not all writing the Principia, but it all feels necessary. That's a vague criterion, but it's deliberately vague, because it has to cover a lot of different types.

There are two separate kinds of fakeness you need to learn to discount in order to understand what real work is. One is the kind Hardy encountered in school. Subjects get distorted when they're adapted to be taught to kids — often so distorted that they're nothing like the work done by actual practitioners.

The most basic level of which is simply to feel you should be working without anyone telling you to. Now, when I'm not working hard, alarm bells go off. I can't be sure I'm getting anywhere when I'm working hard, but I can be sure I'm getting nowhere when I'm not, and it feels awful.

Of course, those famous adults usually had a lot of natural ability too. There are three ingredients in great work: natural ability, practice, and effort. You can do pretty well with just two, but to do the best work you need all three: you need great natural ability and to have practiced a lot and to be trying very hard.

"fallibilism" has been used to describe the claim that:

Another good habit to get into is to review your trading journal spreadsheet every single day. That way, you can get a bird's-eye-view of your portfolio of trades, which can give you some insights into your level of exposure as well as if there's room to enter any more trades.

A good habit to get into is to record your trades the moment after you execute them. That's when they'll be fresh in your mind, and you'll save yourself time in the future.

Entry Signals — in order of importance

I never use oscillators alone when deciding on the actionability of a trade. I mainly use them for finding divergences

Useful for: Trend Determination, Entry Signals, Exit Signal, Re-entry signals

Do not use when: market is clearly trend less and sideways. In these instances, use Bollinger Bands or Chart Patterns.

If the majority of token holders are corrupted, they can successfully impose an incorrect answer, and at that point it’s up to the minority holders to create a fork of the system where the attackers’ coins are zeroed out and convince the community to prefer the fork from that point forward. The cost of such an attack is thus half the market cap of the token, minus some amount to account for very lazy holders who are not willing to participate in a vote even in an extreme emergency that could cost them their coins.