Opinion
Carlson-Wee: ICOs are the most efficient capital coordination mechanism in history
“With ICOs, I think that it's probably the fastest and most efficient capital coordination we've ever seen in capitalism, like, since money was invented.”
Assertion Partly supported
Carlson-Wee: Ethereum has 100 times more app developers than core developers
“Ethereum has this weird problem where there's probably a hundred X the number of developers building apps on top as there are building core protocol stuff for Ethereum.”
Insight
Carlson-Wee: Mitigating 51% attacks is significantly easier in proof-of-stake networks
“The second thing is that if you attack a proof of stake network, mitigation of the attack after it happens is significantly easier. So if you, come in with, you know, 51% of the coins, and in, in most proof of stake, it's actually 34% of the coins is enough to…”
Insight
Carlson-Wee: Decentralization is an architecture for permissionless building, not an ideology
“Decentralization is not an ideological thing. It's an architecture to support that permissionless building.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Carlson-Wee predicts DAOs will use internet money for financial contracts
“If we do have these sort of decentralized, autonomous corporations or something, they're going to be using the internet money in order to communicate among each other and create financial contracts and things like that.”
Opinion
Carlson-Wee: Locking 5% of Ether in MakerDAO creates systemic risk
“Now I do think it almost starts to create systemic risk at around, say, five percent of all ether.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Carlson-Wee: P2P protocols will eventually compete with Web 2.0 giants like Uber and Twitter
“Many of the major Web two point O companies that have seen a substantial growth in the last 15 years, this is Twitter, Tumblr, Etsy, eBay, Uber, every single one of these companies could someday see competition from a peer peer-to-peer protocol.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Carlson-Wee: Crypto development pace will never slow down post-ICO inflection
“I think that despite ICOs right now being very noisy, sort of scammy and all these things, it has created an inflection point where when you have a brilliant idea, the capital is much more readily available from a large group of people that actually conceptual…”
Opinion
Carlson-Wee: Disproportionate economic value accrues to crypto protocols over applications
“I think in this space, disproportionate value accrues to that protocol level.”
Opinion
Carlson-Wee: MakerDAO has high chance of failure, but massive upside if successful
“What the maker system is attempting to do, and I view it as hugely ambitious with, you know, likely a high chance of failure, but if they can pull it off, it's massive”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Carlson-Wee: Future web value will accrue to protocol users, not VCs
“So all of the wealth that's been generated by venture capitalists and entrepreneurs of centralized companies, I think will get pushback to everyday investors who have access to all of these things, and that all the value that accrues will go to the early adopt…”
Insight
Carlson-Wee: Bitcoin enables internet digital scarcity and sovereign-free finance
“It means that for the first time you can have digital scarcity on the internet, And of course you could move to a global unified financial and monetary system that's outside the scope of any sort of sovereign state political control and is really opt in by all…”
Insight
Carlson-Wee: Ethereum wallets function more like web browsers than bank accounts
“For me, I started seeing a big, like, breakthrough in my head was when I realized that Ethereum wallets were actually more like browsers than bank accounts.”
Insight
Carlson-Wee: Secure On-Chain Governance Is Achievable and Primary
“I'm very skeptical that we can't achieve very secure on-chain governance. I think we can. And to me, it's a very big deal because if you get governance right, in theory, everything else should be a sort of waterfall down from that.”
Insight
Carlson-Wee: Daily active users is the wrong metric for financial crypto products
“People are talking about daily active users, but of like financial products. It's just odd thing. So like, are you a daily active user of your mortgage, right? It's like the wrong framework. It's just the wrong question, right?”
Assertion Contradicted
Carlson-Wee: Cosmos is first system enabling cross-blockchain interaction
“And Cosmos is a great example, launched just about a month ago. And it's sort of the first system we've ever seen that will allow cross blockchain interaction.”
Assertion Supported
Carlson-Wee: Homomorphic encryption enables machine learning on private, encrypted user data
“One interesting intersection is homomorphic encryption, which allows you to train a machine learning system based on data that you actually don't know the plain text, so you only see the encrypted version. It allows people to say, okay, I'm going to share the …”
Opinion
Carlson-Wee: Web2 ad business models create adversarial relationships with users
“Today, yes, Facebook loves its users, but also it wants to put as many ads in front of the users as it possibly can, which actually disrupt the user experience. So it's yeah, it's an odd relationship, I think, that these web two platforms have with their user …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Olaf Carlson-Wee: Decentralized consumer apps will arrive in three years
“I think it's early, but the consumer apps will come in, you know, call it three years or something like that.”
Insight
Carlson-Wee: Token ownership creates fanaticism by combining utility and financial gains
“People in Bitcoin are fanatics, and it's because they not only gain value in a more traditional sense of network effects when the user base grows, they also actually gain wealth from that user base growing.”
Assertion Supported
Carlson-Wee: Ethereum enables features simply not possible on Bitcoin
“So you can build all sorts of more advanced features in Ethereum that are simply not possible with Bitcoin.”
Disclosure
Carlson-Wee: Polychain bought Maker tokens via Ethereum because Maker lacked bank accounts
“When we wanted to do a deal with Maker and purchase some of these tokens, there was no legal entity. Behind them. It's a pure open source project, and there was no bank account they had, so there was no way we could send them money. So we actually had to send …”
Assertion Open · timeframe Apr 2017
Carlson-Wee: Crypto assets are uncorrelated with traditional markets and commodities
“This is uncorrelated with Oil, gold, emerging market currencies, the equity markets, bonds, it's really just uncorrelated with everything else, and it's because it's a totally new phenomena.”
Insight
Carlson-Wee: People underestimate how much developer abstraction matters
“And this is one of the things I think people really underestimate how much the developer abstraction matters.”
