The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Yahya: Proof of stake can theoretically match proof of work security
“Now the cost of actually participating in consensus and making the entire network work in real terms comes down dramatically. And it's just as secure, or at least theoretically can be made just as secure. And that's a controversial statement, but I will sort o…”
Yahya: Current blockchain governance systems will likely devolve into plutocracies
“Today's governance systems and sort of blockchains and crypto networks, the way that they exist today will likely devolve into plutocracy simply because the mechanisms for vote buying are so effective as you've described.”
Yahya: Stablecoin adoption will trigger widespread DeFi adoption
“We believe that that'll likely lead to this cascading Sort of trend of adoption, because once stablecoins become a more kind of mainstay of the way that the financial system works, that opens the door for a lot of the other more advanced and futuristic ideas t…”
Yahya: Federal stablecoin regulation will likely pass in 2025
“We strongly believe it likely, it'll likely happen this year.”
Yahya: Stablecoin regulation will commoditize Tether and USDC issuers
“It will, it'll, to some extent, commoditize the issuance layer because it'll be easier for new issuers To emerge and create their own stable coins that, that are also user, you USD denominated to the point that those new stable coins are somewhat fungible and …”
Yahya: Fully embracing AI would force Google to cannibalize search revenues
“And I think that's actually becoming true for AI as well. Like I think that it was very, very true that AI was a very sustaining innovation. Before, but it's gotten so powerful that, that there are many elements of it that are disruptive. Like if Google wanted…”
Yahya: AI direct answers will eliminate web advertising models
“And that entire business model goes away if you just have an AI that just gives you the answer that you're looking for.”
Yahya: Blockchains invert tech history by giving software power over hardware
“It's a kind of technology that inverts the power relationship between the software and the hardware. Whereas historically, the hardware has always had power over the software because whomever controls the hardware can turn off the software or change it in some…”
Yahya: Ethereum Layer 1 cannot handle Nasdaq-scale exchange throughput
“If you wanted to build something like the Nasdaq exchange on chain, there's no way you're doing that on Ethereum one. You probably need a blockchain that has the kind of the level of performance that a Solana or a Sui or some of the other kind of More modern o…”
Yahya: Decentralized systems will always be costlier and slower than centralized
“Decentralized systems will always be more expensive and less performant than centralized ones. There's just an inherent trade off there, and there's an inherent cost to decentralizing a computer system. And so it won't, Replace everything. There will be applic…”
Yahya: Decentralized storage will not drastically cut costs for most uses
“So the reason that we need decentralized storage networks is not because they're going to reduce the price of storage by orders of magnitude. At least for most kinds of files and for most use cases, I don't believe that that'll be the case.”
Yahya: CryptoKitties introduced true digital ownership for the first time
“CryptoKitties is one where, where people became very invested in owning this digital collectible which is, this is something that is fundamentally new. Never before would you be able to directly own something that's digital. This is the first time that that's …”
Yahya: Blockchains can make bribery and vote buying more efficient
“Blockchains can be used to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of bribery and vote buying.”
Yahya: Programmable trust uses mathematical guarantees to replace human institutions
“Since the creation of the internet, we have begun to discover a new paradigm for trust. It is a paradigm that is programmable. It is enabled by software, and its guarantees come from something that is more fundamental than a human institution. It comes from ma…”
Yahya: A Google-sized company cannot be built on top of Google
“It is inconceivable that you could build a company the size of Google on top of Google in the same way that Google was built on top of TCP IP.”
Yahya: Crypto innovation wave may eclipse the current internet startup ecosystem
“We see this as the foundation for another golden wave of innovation on the internet that may be even larger than the current startup ecosystem on the internet today.”
Yahya: Crypto can decentralize emerging AI power structures
“Crypto can help decentralize the power structures that are emerging in AI.”
Yahya: Stablecoins generate $16 trillion in annual volume
“So there's something like 16 trillion dollars in volume on stablecoins per year.”
Yahya: SpaceX uses stablecoins for cross-border treasury management
“And stable coins are actually, like, apparently companies like SpaceX are already using Stablecoins for treasury management to move money from one country to another in a way that's much more efficient than using the.”
Yahya: Financial Web3 use cases will precede consumer crypto adoption
“It's now much more clear that the kind of the more financial use cases are likely to happen first. Those will act as a legitimizing force for the rest of the space, and then the consumer use cases, which we still believe in, Will take longer.”
Yahya: Worldcoin orb never transmits raw biometric data off-device
“In fact, like, the data itself never leaves the orb, and only a code or a cryptographic object that is derived from the biometric data ever leaves the orb, and from that cryptographic object that is not possible to infer anything about the biometric data itsel…”
Yahya: The Bitcoin network consumes more electricity than Denmark
“The Bitcoin blockchain alone, and it consumes like more power than like Denmark or something like this.”
Yahya: Measure blockchain scalability in instructions per second, not transactions
“So the right metric is not really transactions per second. It's really instructions per second. How many instructions of some computation can you process in any given period of time?”
Yahya: On-chain identity turns crypto interactions into iterated prisoner's dilemmas
“Whereas if you had identity and if you had reputation, you could turn all of those one-off prisoner dilemma style games into iterated prisoner dilemma style games, which are far easier to solve. You have like the long view of relationships. You can have a trac…”
Yahya: Crypto will not solve fundamental governance problems, only find workarounds
“These problems have become replicated in crypto as well, and they are, therefore, like, fundamentally difficult problems that have been unsolved for millennia. So, so it's not as if crypto will solve any of that. It'll just have to figure out the right mechani…”
Yahya: Ethereum attracts developers but fails to fund core protocol development
“Ethereum hasn't yet succeeded at incentivizing core development or development on the core protocol, and has succeeded massively at incentivizing people building on top of it. Developers, that is, not users yet.”
Yahya: High friction for hard forks encourages consensus and prevents lock-in
“It's good that it's expensive, because it, it's good that it, it's hard to do that, Because it encourages the participants of a network to try to figure out their differences, but it's also very good that that always exists as a possibility, because you don't …”
Yahya: Human Collaboration Is Bottlenecked by Requirements for Trust
“One of the most exciting features of this new building block is that collaboration with humanity tends to be bottlenecked on the requirements for trust.”
Yahya: Centralized institutions have become the gatekeepers of societal trust
“The problem today is that these institutions have become the gatekeepers of trust. We are strongly dependent on them to cooperate.”
Yahya: Traditional financial trust models cannot scale to eight billion people
“This model of trust can work in a developed world, but there is no way we can scale that to eight billion people.”
Yahya: DAI offers Bitcoin's advantages with price stability for hyperinflationary economies
“Now, the beauty of DAI as a cryptocurrency is that it has all of the advantages of Bitcoin, but it is also a price table, and it is because of that stability that it is a credible digital alternative to fiat in countries where hyperinflation is a problem or fo…”
Yahya: Crypto networks represent the next computing paradigm after smartphones
“This is a fundamentally new paradigm for computing. We've gone from mainframes, to the personal computer, to the smartphone era, and now onto crypto networks.”
Ali Yahya: Ethereum incentivizes application developers but fails core protocol development
“Ethereum, Hasn't yet succeeded at incentivizing core development or development on the core protocol and has succeeded massively at incentivizing people building on top of it. Developers that is not users yet.”
Yahya: Incumbents struggle with crypto due to business model disruption
“Crypto is, like, a fundamentally Radical set of technologies that is very, very hard for incumbent players to adopt and run with precisely because it is so fundamentally disruptive to the way that, that they do things.”
Yahya: Blockchains now process sub-second transactions for under a penny
“One of the big things that has happened is that the infrastructure has matured tremendously to the point at which now we are at a level where a transaction of any amount of money can be done for less than a penny in cost, and it can be done in under a second, …”
Yahya: Cross-border remittances take up to 7 days and cost up to 10%
“It can take up to like three to seven days To move money from one country to another, and it can cost, like, up to 10% of the transaction to do it.”
Yahya: Google refused to pursue crypto beyond basic node hosting
“Google would not touch crypto with a thousand foot pole unless it was like a very, very kind of vanilla, like we will like run and run some like note or whatever.”
Yahya: Major AI research labs are not focusing on crypto
“For the most part, I don't think so. I think for the most part, the AI labs, they're just running with AI, and there's so much that's exciting in that world that I think crypto is not, Doesn't really factor the actor in at all”
Yahya: Half of average computer hard drive capacity goes unutilized
“You could say on average, ah, maybe half of the hard drive of any one particular computer is likely to be unutilized.”
Yahya: Decentralized storage protocols guarantee fair rules and censorship resistance
“Then you end up having some of these additional properties that it's censorship resistant you can trust that, that that sort of the rules that make it a platform will stay the same or will stay fair because it's the control sort of by a, Body of representative…”
Yahya: Centralized storage is the weakest link for decentralized applications
“All of those will require storage, and if that storage were centralized, Then the whole point would be lost. That would be the weakest link. So you need decentralized storage for those applications to come along.”
Yahya: Cryptographic security scales trust globally by removing human intermediaries
“There's, there are fewer humans involved and therefore this could be more scalable. You could scale trust to a larger number of people. You could imagine this being a truly global, ah, decentralized network for storage where everyone can participate because th…”
Yahya: New computing paradigms initially underperform but succeed via novel capabilities
“And so I think with every successive wave of computation that we've seen throughout the history of computing. Normally, the new paradigm tends to suck at first and tends to be pretty bad at most things that the old paradigm is very good at. But it happens to s…”
Yahya: Crypto decentralization means removing human control, not geographic distribution
“When people talk about decentralization in the world of crypto, they mean decentralization of human control. Not decentralization of, ah, computing in a geographic sense. It's not decentralization in any other way that you may think. Like, the key thing about …”
Yahya: Ethereum ecosystem has the richest developer activity in crypto
“I think some of the things that we are seeing already in the world of Ethereum, kind of the Ethereum ecosystem is maybe the richest so far in terms of actual developer activity on top.”
Yahya: Blockchains as general computers is a five-year-old paradigm
“Even if it's been 10 years since the publishing of the Bitcoin white paper, this is still very, very early days, because I think that it's only been recent, it's only recently that, that people have begun to conceive of blockchains as computers, as opposed to …”
Yahya: Decentralizing crypto networking is one of Web3's hardest problems
“It's very early because this is actually probably one of the hardest problems in the space to tackle. Like, how do you decentralize even the networking layer, the communication between different nodes, and to not have it depend On centralized internet infrastr…”
Yahya: Web3 innovation will accelerate faster than previous computing waves
“The kind of innovation that we're likely to see is, is just, It's combinatorial in nature, and likely more explosive, and will accelerate more quickly than it has in previous, for previous waves of computing and previous waves of technology.”