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 17 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
Ehrsam: Bitcoin created the world's largest supercomputer network by 4 orders of magnitude
“And years later, we have a seventy billion dollar cryptocurrency, a whole ecosystem of companies, users and investors involved and the largest supercomputer network in the world by four orders of magnitude.”
Ehrsam: A working sharding upgrade would boost Ethereum's market value by 10-20%
“If you're to come out and submit an improvement, like sharding, for example, a working implementation, it could easily raise the value of the network 10 or 20%, which we're talking two and a half to five billion dollars.”
Ehrsam: Crypto tokens resemble currencies rather than cash-flow equities
“Upon closer examination, tokens more closely resemble currencies where you look at some kind of monetary theory equation like MV equals PQ, and it turns out that the important things to look at are not the right to a future stream of cash flows. Rather, it's t…”
Ehrsam: Crypto enables direct monetization of internet building blocks
“You could pay for literal goods and services on the internet, but the building blocks of the internet themselves were not precisely programmed and parceled out into little units that you could pay for directly through the protocol. And that's sort of what we'r…”
Ehrsam: Requiring economic staking on email accounts would eliminate spam overnight
“Spam email is killed overnight, probably.”
Ehrsam: Ethereum throughput is 20,000x short of running Facebook
“And if you look at what Ethereum is capable of in terms of just throughput of the network, it can't handle more than about twenty-ish transactions a second right now, which means that you're about 20,000 X off being able to run Facebook on the chain.”
Ehrsam: Only two top 50 websites were created by pre-internet companies
“One thing I think is really interesting to look at is the top 50 sites on the internet today. Guess how many of them were made by companies that existed before the internet was popularized? It's two. MSN.com and Microsoft.com, both by Microsoft. Every other si…”
Ehrsam: Underlying valuation equations for digital commodities and network tokens are identical
“I would argue the equation actually that underlies both of them are the same though.”
Ehrsam: DAO Smart Contract Bug Leaked $160M Worth of Ethereum
“The DAO which was a large decentralized application with a couple hundred million dollars in it was found to have a software bug and basically leaked you know, let's call it a hundred and sixty-ish million dollars worth of Ethereum”
Ehrsam: Tech value from 2002-2017 accrued to proprietary database networks
“If you look at all the value that's really accrued over the last 15 years, the vast majority of it has come from companies who have effectively built proprietary databases with strong network effects around them.”
Ehrsam: Over 1,000 tokens exist, acting as mini central banks
“You can view each token as basically creating its own little central bank and its own little government. And there are already over a thousand tokens.”
Ehrsam: Developer activity is crypto's key leading indicator
“Perhaps the leading indicator of the whole industry is developer activity and experimentation.”
Ehrsam: Most ICO projects will fail like ordinary startups
“Just like startups, there's a small percentage that are legit and really worth funding. And there's a whole glut of projects that unfortunately are not and probably won't go anywhere.”
Ehrsam: Crypto infrastructure startups have higher success odds than consumer apps
“So as a result, it's probably a lot more valuable and relevant to build infrastructure components that lets people scale that and build apps in the future rather than trying to build Facebook right now. I would assign a higher likelihood of success to systems …”
Ehrsam: Tech paradigm shifts commodify previous value layers
“And the surest way to fail is to assume it's a zero sum game. It does not have to be a zero sum game. And this is true of all technological paradigm shifts where there's a commodification of all the value creation that happened in the last paradigm. So now val…”
Ehrsam: Bitcoin's restrictive language prevented developer application building
“And when you ask that question, then you try to sort of do a root cause analysis of it where you ask, okay, well, why aren't there many, that many apps getting built? And I think the answer you arrive at is the scripting language in Bitcoin makes it really, re…”