stacks are eating the world

There are only 3 real challenges to free speech at the tech level a) the need for CDNs at scale b) distortions of net neutrality c) nation-state firewalls.

All other claims are about social governance on private sites, where applying free speech doctrine is a stretch at best

Baseline free speech has expanded modestly since 1776 or whatever your reference point is.

About 20% beyond core case of government-critical speech in formally public spaces and media I'd say.

You can (for example) have more kinds of conversations in a bar without getting punched or kicked out by other patrons or management. You can teach more things in colleges than 100 years ago.

That's a genuine de facto increase in practical, informal free speech/expression.

But online free "speech" is, as @reneed has pointed out, not an expansion of free speech at all, but an expansion of reach. It is like the secondary freedom of the press to print as many copies as they can afford, not primary freedom to say what they want

If a newspaper wants to print more copies it has buy more printing equipment and front more upfront costs. Reach for a paper publication is not "free", but a function of desired circulation, which in turn is a function of demand prediction etc. But that logic is obscured online.

following a discussion at @yak_collective this morning, I came up with this chart to capture a hypothesis I have that the difficulty of creating communities scales exponentially with the the "depth" of what you're trying to do

thanks @grigorimilov for leading the discussion that sparked this.

The way to read the graph is: each line is a time history of difficulty. It starts dotted, goes through a criticality inflection point, and then crests in difficulty before coming down to a stable plateau.

The inflection points have different names depending on context, but are all topologically similar. They are the make or break moment when a network-effect either kicks in, or fails to. "Product-market fit" in the case of market is the best known such point.

Level 1 is a basic social community, such as a FB group, meetup etc. There are millions of successful ones, and 100s of millions of failures. The "fit point" is what I call a meme-mind fit, when some social object catalyzes a sustainable long-term conversation of growing richness

Almost everything I've helped instigate is Level 1. My contributions to the social-object soup have been things like the vocabulary around sociopaths/clueless/losers, legibility, 2x2s etc.

We're in the phase of the market where there's a lot of retail inbounds but not enough education about the Ethereum ecosystem and DeFi.

So, let's break down the basics of some of the top protocols.

First on deck: Aave (@AaveAave), an Ethereum-based money market protocol.

A 🧵

TL;DR: Aave is a protocol through which any user anywhere in the world can take decentralized loans by collateralizing their assets.

Aave also allows those will idle assets to earn a relatively safe return on capital from lenders, whose rates are determined by a curve.

1/ For years, most crypto assets had no indirect or direct utility.

Users would hold BTC, ETH, and other assets (including many ERC-20 tokens) with no expectation of a native yield or dividends.

ETH, for instance, was long just an asset for transaction fees, as was Bitcoin.

2/ If users wanted to borrow against their assets, they were relegated to centralized platforms—which were few and far between years ago.

3/ Aave, formerly ETHLend, is a protocol allowing users the ability to lend and borrow on-chain, without KYC and untransparent fees.

Users can deposit a variety of assets as collateral, then use that collateral as ammo to borrow other assets to be used in DeFi or beyond.

This "bitcoin is better than gold" statement going around once more show that bitcoiners have no clue about monetary history and what the purpose of a monetary system is. A thread.

1- Metal standards were never inflexible; they could not in order to operate properly. Qty of metal was changed, usually lowered, to accommodate for changing economic conditions: price of metal, scarcity of coins, financial needs of economic units (state and private), etc.

2- The purpose of a monetary system is to make the rest of the economy go. It is there to accommodate financial needs. The more elastic one can design the supply, the better.
That doesn't mean that monetary creation & destruction shouldn't follow any rules & have no constraint.

3- Rules and constraint impose depend on economic system and evolve over time has we learn how to manage better the system. In a capitalist economy, the private sector is subject to the profitability constraint. We have learned from experience that this is not enough.

3 (ii) Financial stability requires a "hedge finance" constraint for most private agents: profitability should be judged on income gains, not capital gains.
In the government sector, the constraints are ressource availability and political constraints.

@VentureCoinist @HypeBillion @MycolePawket If the whole world settled on one stablecoin, I'd agree with you. But stablecoins are always going to be tied to jurisdictions and counter-parties too. So it is unlikely one winner will emerge.

@HypeBillion @MycolePawket Today, one of the roles of the dollar is acting as an intermediary or bridge between currencies. For that role, its tie to the US jurisdiction is both an advantage and a disadvantage. Better US than a worse jurisdiction, but a pure digital asset is better still.

@HypeBillion @MycolePawket Imagine a future (maybe not so far off) where everything is tokenized and you can have your salary agreed in dollars but gold gets delivered to your wallet and you can buy groceries by selling tokenized shares of a REIT.

@HypeBillion @MycolePawket In that world, there will need to be concentrations of liquidity. You can't go from gold to shares of an obscure REIT by finding people who want to go those same shares to gold. The liquidity-concentrating asset likely can't be one country's currency. How could that be universal?

@HypeBillion @MycolePawket So, sure, if you get paid in dollars and pay your bills in dollars, it may make sense for you to use a dollar-denominated stablecoin for short-term holdings and payments. Absolutely.

Master class on HEAD & SHOULDERS pattern for trading Bitcoin.

A thread.

Comprehensive guide to head and shoulders pattern. Made exhaustive enough for Trading purposes.

t’s a frequently occurring, misunderstood and arguably the most useful pattern.

RT would be appreciated.

H&S is probably the first pattern a trader hears of. Here is what we will cover.

Content
1. Nature
2. Identification
3. Occurrence
4. Historical performance
5. Finding entries
6. High probability trades
7. stop losses
8. Miscellaneous
9. Conclusion

Nature

The head and shoulders top is a reversal, bearish pattern, signifying a prospective drop in future prices.

The formation of pattern with a breakdown from its neckline(base) starts a probable bearish move.

Identification.
A prospective H&S pattern should have 3 distinct peaks. The middle peak is the head. This is the highest point of this pattern, sitting in between 2 shorter peaks, i.e. the shoulders. There must be an overlap in prices of these 3 distinct peaks.

The line where these prices overlap is called the neckline. A head and shoulders pattern is easily visible. So, don’t force yourself into finding it. The more times the prices overlap, the stronger is the pattern.

We’ve been around CT for a few years, and while the road still appears curvy, we believe the pieces are moving into place and the destination becomes more clear with each passing day. The following people are all pioneers, when they speak you should listen.

Going to lay out who we think some of the most fascinating thinkers are and some of our favorite podcasts. While these people still differ on some of their viewpoints, they are either the thought leaders of the world we are moving towards or contributing towards building it.

1) Nick Szabo (@NickSzabo4) - Truly one of the pioneers of our space and one of the first podcasts we ever listened to. Still the pod we send to people wanting to dip their toes in the space. Funny listening to nick, @naval, and @tferriss 4 years

2) Naval (@naval) - Clearly a thought leader in the traditional world, but he understands and is dedicating time to bring the future to the present. When this guy speaks the whole world seems to listen. Once again @tferriss does a phenomenal

3) Vitalik Buterin (@VitalikButerin) - The father of Ethereum and when Vitalik speaks we all should listen. He thinks differently than almost every human in this world. Yes...he’s a