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.
why aren't all 38 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.”
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: 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: 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: 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.”
Yahya: Crypto trust relies on financial incentives, not social capital
“Crypto today has no sense of identity. That people are pseudonymous. People can create multiple addresses and pretend to be different people. People can abandon identities that, that maybe have a bad reputation and move over to new identities that don't. And t…”
Yahya: OpenSSL Heartbleed stemmed from open source's failure to capture value
“And this has been historically a big problem in open source, like, for example, in the world of which is generally open source, like for example, the Heartbleed bug in SSL is interesting because even though SSL is a critical piece of infrastructure, and is use…”
Ali Yahya: Blockchains Lack Effective Reputation and Identity Infrastructure
“The one that is still missing is that of social signals. There's still no real good mechanism for reputation or for identity on the blockchain, and that's one of the things that many people are working on, and that's a building block that will be needed going …”
Yahya: 1.7B people are unbanked while credit card fraud hits $190B yearly
“There's 1.7 billion people in the world today that are completely unbanked, and the cost, the yearly cost of credit card fraud is now up to a hundred and ninety billion dollars.”
Yahya: DAI maintained its US dollar peg throughout the crypto downturn
“Now, Maker launched DAI almost a year ago, and it's been in circulation ever since, and has defended its peg against the dollar beautifully, even through the crypto downturn.”
Yahya: Ethereum asset ownership persists even if the creator company dies
“No matter what happens, even if the company that built CryptoKitties were to go away, this kitty is still mine. My ownership of it is burned into the Ethereum blockchain.”
Ali Yahya: Ethereum Foundation balances top-down control and bottom-up autonomy
“The Ethereum foundation has figured out a way of striking a balance between these two ends of like top down monolithic design and imposed control versus completely bottoms up Anarchy.”
Ali Yahya: Traditional open source captured very little value created
“And what's interesting is in, in neither of those two worlds, at least historically, like pre-crypto, has much of the value that those open source contribute been captured.”
Ali Yahya: OpenSSL underfunding highlights open-source value capture failure
“Even though SSL is a critical piece of infrastructure and is used by sort of every single person in the world who connects to the internet only a couple of people were really in charge of maintaining the implementation of OpenSSL. And so, not enough of the val…”
Ali Yahya: Bitcoin is organized around digital gold, Ethereum around technology
“But in the case of Bitcoin, or at least the later form of Bitcoin, the current Bitcoin, the shared meme seems to be fixed supply, store of value, digital gold. In the case of Ethereum, it's more of a meme around technology. Say we're building a technology, it'…”
Yahya: Blockchain lacks effective mechanisms for identity and reputation
“The one that is still missing is that of social signals. There's still no real good mechanism for reputation or for identity on the blockchain, and that's one of the things that many people are working on, and that's a building block that will be needed. Going…”
Yahya: Blockchain technology cannot yet scale to billions of web users
“There's scalability because in order to build anything that Is web scale, as Chris was saying, that billions of people can get on. You have to have some mechanism via which technology can scale, and that's not really the case yet.”
Yahya: Crypto networks with lower security than Bitcoin will emerge
“So certain blockchains, like say, like the Bitcoin meme is that Bitcoin is fully decentralized and is extremely secure, secure to the point at which it'll be resilient even against attacks by nation states like China. But there are applications out there that …”
Yahya: Ethereum can only process about 14 transactions per second
“It currently can only really process around 14 quote unquote transactions or 14 kind of, you can think of them as computations per, per second.”
Yahya: Early successful Ethereum applications are primarily financial tools
“And a bunch of the applications that have worked so far in the Ethereum ecosystem primarily have been financial in nature, have been things that build on top of that initial idea. So things like lending platforms, derivatives, exchanges, things that depend on …”
Ali Yahya: Bitcoin and Ethereum emerged from bottom-up community collaboration
“Ethereum Bitcoin to a considerable degree emerged out of communities working together as opposed to necessarily a top-down monolithic design that's imposed upon an organization or a group of people who are working together by a single person or a small group o…”