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 21 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
Walden: General base-layer protocols must ossify to foster developer trust
“The more general the service of a crypto network, the more it should be ossified. So again, coming back to this, IP is ossified, Bitcoin has ossified, maybe a general computation substrate is better ossified because it lends itself to the trust that the develo…”
Walden: Algorithmic stablecoins lack collateral and rely solely on market belief
“What's critical here is, like, there's no collateral backing this. There's nothing behind it. It's just people's belief that it will stabilize itself based on this adjusting supply and demand.”
Walden: NFTs act as canonical identifiers linking arbitrary metadata to digital assets
“NFTs, non-fungible tokens, are an embodiment of the same idea, where you have a canonical identifier for a thing. It could be an image, a song, you know, a you know, anything, literally anything. And hooked to it is metadata, and the metadata is arbitrary, and…”
Walden: Blockchain streaming networks are fundamentally better for creators
“This is, I think, fundamentally better for creators than the way things work today, where it's like this very clunky manual process where you have to coordinate all of these relationships in, in contracts, and there's tons of middlemen and lawyer fees, and lik…”
Walden: Blockchain projects should not compete directly with Spotify
“I wouldn't encourage, you know, blockchain projects that want to go and compete with Spotify directly, but there's this new territory that's opened up to figure out new sort of modes of creative expression that benefit from these properties, and hopefully we'l…”
Walden: Releasing half-baked, compelling ideas works best in open source
“One of the amazing properties of open source is that someone can put an idea out there and then galvanize developers to finish the idea, and that's in fact one of the features of open source that you know, you get, and it gets to this idea that Dennis talked a…”
Walden: Not every crypto project needs its own native token
“Not every one of these projects necessarily needs its own token. Some of these projects could be just sort of core infrastructure at the base layer of the protocol.”
Jesse Walden: Not every crypto project needs its own token
“And not every one of these projects necessarily needs its own token. Some of these projects could be just sort of core infrastructure at the base layer of the protocol but there's not an incentive or there's at least no mechanism by which the community can for…”
Walden: Token ownership creates emotional connection to Ethereum's underlying values
“Ethereum participants own the token, and therefore, you know, have an emotional connection to, you know, the values of the infrastructure, and what, you know, its goals, and what it aims to achieve.”
Jesse Walden: Base layers suit single tokens, higher layers require separated governance
“So I would argue that the base layer of the system being more general lends itself to this sort of single token model a little bit better. But as you move further up the stack, I think you do want this separation between sort of the management and the users be…”
Walden: General computation blockchains benefit most from rough consensus governance
“I would make the argument that general computation platform would lend itself to that same process, because you want it to do this very general thing, and a thing that is very deterministic.”
Walden: DApps require stablecoin stability to scale to millions of users
“Well, in order for decentralized applications, which are deployed on top of blockchains to reach millions and millions of users, the experience needs to rival that of, you know, a traditional web two startup. And, you know, in most parts of the world, we have …”
Walden: Stablecoins create a flywheel of tokenization and stability
“That's really cool because there's this flywheel where Dive has already sort of improved the user experience of today's early applications on the blockchain, and, you know, that in turn fosters adoption of those applications, and increased adoption in turn lea…”
Walden: Maker will accept real-world assets like gold and real estate
“Maker's sort of a wrapper for all these other asset types, so fiat-backed stablecoins are one type of asset, but there will be others, gold and, you know, real estate, et cetera.”
Jesse Walden: Open source creates structural asymmetry favoring large tech firms
“Also, also just, like, raw engineering power, like, Facebook has hundreds of engineers to deploy something like MySQL, you know, and then the weekend hacker has to do it themselves, and it's just, like, there's an asymmetry in terms of, like, how you leverage …”
Jesse Walden: Blockchains unify software into canonical instances unlike siloed open source
“On blockchains, we get one canonical thing that multiple parties converge on, and, you know, in traditional open source, you know, everything is fractured into its own silo.”
Walden: Blockchain Networks Align Ecosystem Incentives Like City Economies
“The analogy would be in blockchains that the more people are using the network, like, the more valuable the currency, because the currency is what powers all the commerce, and that, that's sort of like the tax, and that goes, you know, to the value of all the …”
Walden: Blockchain defaults to referencing canonical data over duplicating content
“With blockchains, the default setting is to reference the canonical, because it's harder not to. It's harder to break the rules than to follow them.”
Walden: Most crypto services operate like traditional companies with open backends
“In practice, the way that a lot of these services operate today is is more like, I would say traditional companies with a decentralized open back end. There's still like a, an organization responsible for the smart contract, but their back end is open and tran…”
Walden: Ethereum Foundation pulled Casper FFG deployment for joint sharding upgrade
“Just about 45 days or so before Casper FFG was set to be deployed the Ethereum Foundation decided that they were gonna pull that recommendation to the network. In favor of sort of a joint update between Casper, FFG, and sharding, which is another project that …”
Walden: Ethereum had no code or network when its whitepaper launched
“If we talk about a project like Ethereum, for example you know, early on, there was this amazing white paper, and it described this profound vision about what the platform could enable. And at the time, you know, the code hadn't been written. There was There w…”