If anyone feels like taking a look at this currency profile to see if they like or dislike the format and content, I’m trying to establish a standardized feel before doing a bunch of them Cuban peso can be found here:

Paper’s Razor: Can a prodigy straight out of undergrad do your job consistently better than you or your peers? If yes, AI is your substitute; if not, AI is your complement. Experience & domain knowledge aren’t perfectly transmissible - otherwise 22yo would be best at everything

Hmmm. Is this not just a Uni v2 LP token (economically)? Is there something at the token level that differentiates it from the old v2 LPs? I like new things but confess I’m not catching what they’re pitching here.

One cool thing about this river graph is that BOTH the expansion and breakup of empires leads to widening bands. Note how the Spanish (of which USD is descended), British, and Russian lineages expand on the timeline

“instead, we get seven adobe-shaped applications, recreating the surface without understanding what led to the underlying decisions. …just a checklist of features to imitate” Banteg’s comment here could easily apply to most CeFi/DeFi products vs what they aspire to replace!

This would be one of the more exotic things I’ve seen onchain if it launches next year. Catastrophe bonds probably appeal to options sellers willing to hold someone else’s tail risk for a premium.

The world is begging for a modern version of Rithmomachia (the original takes like 5 hours to play so is too long for either a classroom lesson or for fun). For those unaware, Rithmomachia is a medieval board game that’s kind of like if you crossed Number Munchers w chess

Best reason to be hesitant as a CEO about going all-in on AI? You don’t actually know what the cost structure will be when AI companies can’t afford to give it away at a loss. Labor may still be cheaper if enough cost savings don’t materialize.

One of the most important innovations in finance was also one of the most important innovations in gaming - the coin. Coins first appear in the archaeological record in Lydia around 600s BC. While imperfect and asymmetrical by modern standards, hand-struck coins offered significant standardization of size, weight, denomination, and expected purity over ingots or scrap. For gaming, they introduced an imperfect-but-better version of a random number generator for 1 and 2. That is to say, you could flip a coin to approximate a 50/50 chance. Even a modern fair coin will still be something like 50.8% to 49.2% in favor of whichever side is facing up, and early coins were considerably more irregular in design and how an individual coin was struck. However, flips were still individually unpredictable enough that they became the standard for 50/50 odds by at least the 200s BC in the Roman Republic. We would say “heads or tails” and the Romans would say “heads or ships” to settle such a bet or decision. This is an important improvement in random number generation, including for early games, which give us early examples of what the coin flip replaced. In the ancient Egyptian game of Senet, the standard was to have flat sticks with a light and dark side, which functioned as two-sided dice (i.e. a coin for flipping). Queen Nefertiti is depicted playing the game in her tomb around 1333 BC. Going even further back to ancient Sumeria, the Game of Twenty Squares (sometimes called the Royal Game of Ur) from around 2500 BC uses tetrahedrons, but with two of the four tips marked for 1 and two unmarked for 0. Tetrahedron dice may be more familiar to DnD players as four-sided dice. Other attested methods around the world include flat rocks or shells. But pretty much everywhere coinage spread, it became the standard for an RNG across the set of 1-and-2, both because coins improved in regularity as a way to combat counterfeiting and because they became more common to have on hand (especially in a gambling context) as dice that were created by a disinterested third party. Actual dice supplied by one player or gambler could always be weighted, particularly if the stakes were high or you had never used them before. This may account for why animal knuckle bones - definitely not fair dice - stood in as dice for thousands of years. They were imperfect but no one was specifically trying to visibly disguise those imperfections, and they were manufactured by an impartial third party (usually a sheep or cow or pig). We take for granted that odds can be relied upon. The invention of the coin not only revolutionized commerce and finance, but also contributed significantly to gaming.

I don’t have an informed position on the specific governance conflict, but lack of independent boards are a pretty common problem for foundations. A board’s job is to hold management accountable to share/tokenholders. This obviously doesn’t happen when shareholders or tokenholders have no control over a board. I think a lot of people assume foundations are nonprofit and bound structurally to good governance processes. Unfortunately, even a willing company or foundation probably has difficulty identifying and bringing on independent directors. Often they have to dip into adjacent or several-steps-removed industries just to find someone who clears basic competency. The Venn diagram for DeFi domain expertise + can read financial statements with a critical eye + willing to be That Guy in a room with a founder or CEO is about 50 people (I can recommend some). And that’s before conflicts of interest, which make the combination a near unicorn. And while it’s probably easier to take someone from TradFi or fintech and teach them crypto than to make a DeFi native cram a bunch of accounting and business textbooks and make it stick, it’s still not a great solution. Good luck to the Safe folks if they do need to source independent directors who aren’t just collecting a paycheck to warm a seat.

One of the most important innovations in finance was also one of the most important innovations in gaming - the coin. Coins first appear in the archaeological record in Lydia around 600s BC. While imperfect and asymmetrical by modern standards, hand-struck coins offered significant standardization of size, weight, denomination, and expected purity over ingots or scrap. For gaming, they introduced an imperfect-but-better version of a random number generator for 1 and 2. That is to say, you could flip a coin to approximate a 50/50 chance. Even a modern fair coin will still be something like 50.8% to 49.2% in favor of whichever side is facing up, and early coins were considerably more irregular in design and how an individual coin was struck. However, flips were still individually unpredictable enough that they became the standard for 50/50 odds by at least the 200s BC in the Roman Republic. We would say “heads or tails” and the Romans would say “heads or ships” to settle such a bet or decision. This is an important improvement in random number generation, including for early games, which give us early examples of what the coin flip replaced. In the ancient Egyptian game of Senet, the standard was to have flat sticks with a light and dark side, which functioned as two-sided dice (i.e. a coin for flipping). Queen Nefertiti is depicted playing the game in her tomb around 1333 BC. Going even further back to ancient Sumeria, the Game of Twenty Squares (sometimes called the Royal Game of Ur) from around 2500 BC uses tetrahedrons, but with two of the four tips marked for 1 and two unmarked for 0. Tetrahedron dice may be more familiar to DnD players as four-sided dice. Other attested methods around the world include flat rocks or shells. But pretty much everywhere coinage spread, it became the standard for an RNG across the set of 1-and-2, both because coins improved in regularity as a way to combat counterfeiting and because they became more common to have on hand (especially in a gambling context) as dice that were created by a disinterested third party. Actual dice supplied by one player or gambler could always be weighted, particularly if the stakes were high or you had never used them before. This may account for why animal knuckle bones - definitely not fair dice - stood in as dice for thousands of years. They were imperfect but no one was specifically trying to visibly disguise those imperfections, and they were manufactured by an impartial third party (usually a sheep or cow or pig). We take for granted that odds can be relied upon. The invention of the coin not only revolutionized commerce and finance, but also contributed significantly to gaming.

Everyone in crypto wants to be that banker today. Before then it was farmer (the degen kind). Carpenters who build new financial infrastructure for people who can’t access what the bankers have is what crypto was meant to be, however.

I still remember meeting with Sen Warren’s banking advisor and taking nearly 15 minutes to explain that MakerDAO (today rebranded to the generic name of Sky) was not The DAO. Big Bank Beth is genuinely low information and I think by design. I’ve never understood how she got so much air time on talk shows.

@cljack The Roman and medieval customs were to use cloth. Not quite a diaper but functionally similar. They just cleaned and replaced them. Notably less often than we do today though. 3-4x a day is one of the few data points we have in texts

Our industry was exposed as unserious and incurious this week - insofar as personal finance goes - as AI/neobank fever continues to grow. Bank deposits do not generally pay a high yield. This is not disputed. The question you should ask is why. If your answer is “my target user is lazy, stupid, or too busy to care about money” then you’re already at an intellectual cul-de-sac. You should start from the premise that your target users are not irrational, at least in aggregate. Banks primarily carry transaction accounts for a household. This is money that needs to be received and then paid out reliably, and in a safe and convenient manner. The average personal checking account in the US lasts for 19 years. It’s not for the yield. It’s for the accompanying services. ATM access, direct deposit, mobile banking, and automatic recurring payments were all features used by >80% of US checking account holders. More than half still used paper checks. (Source: 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances by the Fed, the most recent year) So looking at the interest rate on a bank account is going to mislead you. DO NOT BASE YOUR BUSINESS PLANS ON THE ASSUMPTION BANK DEPOSITORS ARE UNCOMPENSATED. Instead, think of them being paid-in-kind with a bundle of services. Notably, that bundle of services is not taxed, unlike if the bank just paid them interest. So $100 of interest vs $100 of services will overstate the benefit of the interest. But let’s concede the premise going around Crypto Twitter and AI Twitter that households DO want to optimize for yield on their cash, rather than convenience, reliability, and associated services. Automatic rebalancing across high yield savings accounts? This exists! It’s got such creative names as “automated savings management” and branded as things like “Autopilot”. But what about all that switching of direct deposits and bill pay between all those accounts? Surely that needs an agent? Don’t be silly. You have those services in one feeder account that pushes and pulls into the yield accounts. And… this is already a thing! The hard truth is that US bank depositors are mostly not a good audience to win on the basis of higher yield on balances. Those that already cared strongly have mostly migrated to money market funds and brokerage accounts and duration products. My advice to would-be agentic neobankers: If you are competing on yield, you are not competing with US banks. You are competing with money market funds. There is plenty of open space between these two products - something that can produce near-MMF yields and also near-bank account transaction services would be a genuine value proposition. But worse risk-reward to MMF combined with worse services than a bank account is probably not the business plan I would adopt

> Banks are winning balances on convenience, reliability, and fees. Until there’s competition along these axes, I think neobanks and fintechs will be disappointed by minimal balance migration ⬆️ This is the part that Crypto Twitter glosses over. Yield on balance is not necessarily what people are optimizing for. If they are, they’re probably not sitting in a regular bank account, but in a HYSA or even a brokerage account.