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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Carlson-Wee: ICOs are the most efficient capital coordination mechanism in history
“With ICOs, I think that it's probably the fastest and most efficient capital coordination we've ever seen in capitalism, like, since money was invented.”
Carlson-Wee: Ethereum has 100 times more app developers than core developers
“Ethereum has this weird problem where there's probably a hundred X the number of developers building apps on top as there are building core protocol stuff for Ethereum.”
Carlson-Wee: Mitigating 51% attacks is significantly easier in proof-of-stake networks
“The second thing is that if you attack a proof of stake network, mitigation of the attack after it happens is significantly easier. So if you, come in with, you know, 51% of the coins, and in, in most proof of stake, it's actually 34% of the coins is enough to…”
Carlson-Wee: Decentralization is an architecture for permissionless building, not an ideology
“Decentralization is not an ideological thing. It's an architecture to support that permissionless building.”
Carlson-Wee predicts DAOs will use internet money for financial contracts
“If we do have these sort of decentralized, autonomous corporations or something, they're going to be using the internet money in order to communicate among each other and create financial contracts and things like that.”
Carlson-Wee: Locking 5% of Ether in MakerDAO creates systemic risk
“Now I do think it almost starts to create systemic risk at around, say, five percent of all ether.”
Carlson-Wee: P2P protocols will eventually compete with Web 2.0 giants like Uber and Twitter
“Many of the major Web two point O companies that have seen a substantial growth in the last 15 years, this is Twitter, Tumblr, Etsy, eBay, Uber, every single one of these companies could someday see competition from a peer peer-to-peer protocol.”
Carlson-Wee: Crypto development pace will never slow down post-ICO inflection
“I think that despite ICOs right now being very noisy, sort of scammy and all these things, it has created an inflection point where when you have a brilliant idea, the capital is much more readily available from a large group of people that actually conceptual…”
Carlson-Wee: Disproportionate economic value accrues to crypto protocols over applications
“I think in this space, disproportionate value accrues to that protocol level.”
Carlson-Wee: MakerDAO has high chance of failure, but massive upside if successful
“What the maker system is attempting to do, and I view it as hugely ambitious with, you know, likely a high chance of failure, but if they can pull it off, it's massive”
Carlson-Wee: Future web value will accrue to protocol users, not VCs
“So all of the wealth that's been generated by venture capitalists and entrepreneurs of centralized companies, I think will get pushback to everyday investors who have access to all of these things, and that all the value that accrues will go to the early adopt…”
Carlson-Wee: Bitcoin enables internet digital scarcity and sovereign-free finance
“It means that for the first time you can have digital scarcity on the internet, And of course you could move to a global unified financial and monetary system that's outside the scope of any sort of sovereign state political control and is really opt in by all…”
Carlson-Wee: Ethereum wallets function more like web browsers than bank accounts
“For me, I started seeing a big, like, breakthrough in my head was when I realized that Ethereum wallets were actually more like browsers than bank accounts.”
Carlson-Wee: Secure On-Chain Governance Is Achievable and Primary
“I'm very skeptical that we can't achieve very secure on-chain governance. I think we can. And to me, it's a very big deal because if you get governance right, in theory, everything else should be a sort of waterfall down from that.”
Carlson-Wee: Daily active users is the wrong metric for financial crypto products
“People are talking about daily active users, but of like financial products. It's just odd thing. So like, are you a daily active user of your mortgage, right? It's like the wrong framework. It's just the wrong question, right?”
Carlson-Wee: Cosmos is first system enabling cross-blockchain interaction
“And Cosmos is a great example, launched just about a month ago. And it's sort of the first system we've ever seen that will allow cross blockchain interaction.”
Carlson-Wee: Homomorphic encryption enables machine learning on private, encrypted user data
“One interesting intersection is homomorphic encryption, which allows you to train a machine learning system based on data that you actually don't know the plain text, so you only see the encrypted version. It allows people to say, okay, I'm going to share the …”
Carlson-Wee: Web2 ad business models create adversarial relationships with users
“Today, yes, Facebook loves its users, but also it wants to put as many ads in front of the users as it possibly can, which actually disrupt the user experience. So it's yeah, it's an odd relationship, I think, that these web two platforms have with their user …”
Olaf Carlson-Wee: Decentralized consumer apps will arrive in three years
“I think it's early, but the consumer apps will come in, you know, call it three years or something like that.”
Carlson-Wee: Token ownership creates fanaticism by combining utility and financial gains
“People in Bitcoin are fanatics, and it's because they not only gain value in a more traditional sense of network effects when the user base grows, they also actually gain wealth from that user base growing.”
Carlson-Wee: Ethereum enables features simply not possible on Bitcoin
“So you can build all sorts of more advanced features in Ethereum that are simply not possible with Bitcoin.”
Carlson-Wee: Polychain bought Maker tokens via Ethereum because Maker lacked bank accounts
“When we wanted to do a deal with Maker and purchase some of these tokens, there was no legal entity. Behind them. It's a pure open source project, and there was no bank account they had, so there was no way we could send them money. So we actually had to send …”
Carlson-Wee: Crypto assets are uncorrelated with traditional markets and commodities
“This is uncorrelated with Oil, gold, emerging market currencies, the equity markets, bonds, it's really just uncorrelated with everything else, and it's because it's a totally new phenomena.”
Carlson-Wee: People underestimate how much developer abstraction matters
“And this is one of the things I think people really underestimate how much the developer abstraction matters.”
Carlson-Wee: Delegated Proof of Stake Sees 70-80% Token Holder Participation
“So in a lot of these, Delegated proof of stake protocols. You see, you know, 70, 80% of token holders participating in consensus.”
Carlson-Wee: Almost every blockchain launching in 2019 uses proof-of-stake
“There's a reason that every, you know, I think 2017 was a major year of fundraising. And 2019 is a major year of launches, and there's a reason that every blockchain that's launching today is mostly using proof stake.”
Carlson-Wee: 2% of all Ether is locked in MakerDAO
“It's about two percent of all ether is, is held in the MakerDAO contract, and now that's hard capped by the protocol.”
Carlson-Wee: Stablecoins will be critical for high-level crypto applications
“I think that stablecoins are going to be a critical part of the recipe for a lot of more abstracted, higher level use cases.”
Carlson-Wee: Polychain invests exclusively in crypto protocols, not company equity
“So Polychain is an investment fund that invests exclusively in cryptocurrency protocols. We do not invest in the equity of private or public companies at all.”
Carlson-Wee: Buying Filecoin tokens is the only direct exposure to the protocol
“So if you want to invest in the Filecoin protocol, the only way to invest in that is to buy Filecoins. There's no company you can really back, per se, to get exposure directly to that protocol.”
Carlson-Wee: A decentralized Twitter requires Filecoin's storage infrastructure
“Until you have IPFS and an incentive system using something like Filecoin, on top of that, you can't really have reliable peer-to-peer file storage. So you can't really build Twitter the protocol until Filecoin is deployed and robust and easy to use.”
Carlson-Wee: Almost no live crypto protocol has formal governance
“And right now, in pretty much every live system, there isn't a clear governance model. There's no formalization around how decisions are made or executed.”
Carlson-Wee: Blockchain protocols are decentralized tools for human organization
“Ultimately a blockchain protocol is just a way to organize humans very, very precisely without a central hierarchy telling people what to do.”
Carlson-Wee: Token launches on Ethereum have raised over $300M
“Those token launches on top of Ethereum have raised over three hundred million dollars.”
Carlson-Wee: Blockchain protocol developers monetize with every new user
“Now as a lead developer behind one of these blockchain based protocols, You can actually make money every single time a new user signs up and is interacting with this blockchain.”
Carlson-Wee: Tezos executes protocol upgrades on-chain via coin-holder voting
“In Tezos, all of those governance decisions happen at the protocol level. People effectively vote with their coins, and the protocol will change based on what those coin holders want.”
Carlson-Wee: Lack of standardized terminology signals a genuinely new tech category
“If no one knows what to call something, it means it's new.”
Carlson-Wee: Too early for viral consumer crypto app tokens
“It's too early still, in my opinion, for really viral end-user app coins or app tokens. So I think that's a lot of what we're thinking about is, is what technologies will enable that, and that's what we want to invest in right now.”
Carlson-Wee: Some crypto projects will fail because they are impossible
“We're actually creating things that previously did not exist, and some of the things will fail because they are literally impossible. So these are hard technology challenges where you're actually sometimes making a bet on something that it could turn out is no…”
Carlson-Wee: About 15 new cryptocurrencies launched in March 2017 alone
“So in March alone, there have been about 15 launches of new cryptocurrencies.”