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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.”
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: 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: 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: Decentralized networks cannot succeed long-term without protocol governance
“And if it is going to be a complex system that adapts and evolves over time, this question most certainly has to be answered in order for any of this to work.”
Yahya: Crypto networks resemble cities more than firms or organisms
“And my sense is that crypto networks are actually much, much more like cities, which could be Considered a specific kind of organism than they are like individual organisms or firms or coral reefs.”
Yahya: Successful crypto networks emerge bottom-up from community collaboration
“They also tend to emerge in a bottom-up way. They're organized in a bottom-up way. And I think this is a trait that's common to a lot of the crypto networks that are most successful. I think Ethereum Bitcoin to a considerable degree emerged out of communities …”
Yahya: Bottom-up crypto networks endure longer by eliminating central failures
“Cities, like crypto networks, may have this property in common. They tend to live for a very long time because of their bottom-up nature. That makes them sort of more robust and more resilient. They have fewer central single points of failure.”
Yahya: Ethereum exemplifies a bottom-up modular software design
“Like Ethereum, I think, as sort of Jesse was saying, is more an example of the bottoms-up modular approach, where there's a kernel of an idea, there's that riverbed along which people people get together. But then there's also a community that's building all s…”
Yahya: Crypto bridges open scientific inquiry and free-market capitalism
“Oh, yeah, exactly. I think your point about positive externalities in the case of cities, how people, like, no one individual wants to fund, like, a public good. So that's super interesting, because we often talk about how, what's exciting about this new techn…”
Yahya: Mapping Blockchain Addresses to Real Humans Is Crypto's Hardest Problem
“One of the hardest problems in the space is mapping cleanly one, ah, public key or address on the blockchain to an actual human being. So this is known as the civil problem. The problem that any one participant can create multiple addresses for themselves and …”
Yahya: Decentralization is a means to security, not the primary goal
“Decentralization is a means to an end. It's a means to each of these four things. It provides you with security. If done correctly, it can provide you with scalability of the underlying World computer. And it can help I think, I mean, usability and governance …”
Yahya: Cryptography's primary modern role is data integrity, not secrecy
“But by far, the most important application of cryptography today has nothing to do with secrecy. Rather, it is all about helping make data tamper-proof.”
Yahya: Bitcoin's incentive structure enables self-policing network security
“The genius of Bitcoin is an incentive structure that helps the network be self-policing, and thus makes it secure.”
Yahya: Proof of work aligns incentives among mutually distrustful network participants
“The insight is that you have to contribute something to the network in order to get to vote and to get paid. The result is an elegant incentive structure that encourages mutually distrustful participants to keep each other in check.”
Yahya: Ethereum is a decentralized, collectively-owned world computer
“Ethereum is therefore more than just a decentralized database. It is a decentralized, collectively-owned world computer.”
Ali Yahya: Crypto networks resemble cities more than corporations
“Crypto networks are actually much, much more like cities, which could be Considered a specific kind of organism than they are than they are like individual organisms or firms or coral reefs.”
Ali Yahya: Bottom-up architecture gives crypto networks long-term resilience
“Cities like crypto networks may have this property in common. They tend to live for a very long time because of their bottom up nature. That makes them sort of more robust and more resilient. They have fewer central single points of failure.”
Ali Yahya: Protocol decision-making must rely on first principles, not analogies
“And of course, I think it's a very good point to clarify that analogies only go so far and they're like a good tool to explore the maze of ideas, but ultimately when we actually have to make decisions or, Rigorously think about something we should think about …”
Ali Yahya: Crypto tokens enable open-source developers to capture value
“So what's interesting with this brave new crypto world is that now we can have modular components that are built in an open source way that are granularly incentivized. So people can work on building those modular components, and if there is some crypto enable…”
Ali Yahya: Crypto combines open-source collaboration with free-market capitalism
“What's exciting about this new technology is that it brings together two of the most powerful forces in history. There's what makes science tick, say the free flow of ideas and the universal freedom for criticism and discourse about those ideas on one hand, an…”
Ali Yahya: Network forking acts as a governance mechanism of exit
“And what's interesting about forking is that that is, that in and of itself is a mechanism of governance. It's a form by which communities can decide to run a different experiment. It's a, in a sense, if you, if we go back to the analogy to cities, it's like s…”
Ali Yahya: Expensive forks force consensus while preserving exit options
“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 w…”
Yahya: Decentralization makes usability and governance harder to build
“Decentralization is a means to an end. It's a means to each of these four things. It provides you with security. If done correctly, it can provide you with scalability of the underlying World computer. And it can help, ah, I think, I mean, usability and govern…”