Quotes

“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.“

– Richard P. Feynman

History is studying the past to understand the present. Science-fiction is studying the "future" to predict the problems of tomorrow.

"Eggs are broken, but the omelette is not in sight, there is only an infinite number of eggs, human lives, ready for the breaking. And in the end the passionate idealists forget the omelette, and just go on breaking eggs."

• The twentieth-century philosopher Isaiah Berlin

Crypto is fundamentally compelling because it creates scarcity in a world of zero marginal costs. That seems like an impossible contradiction, which is why it is almost certainly valuable and meaningful in ways we cannot yet imagine.

It also explains why all of the earliest manifestations have involved money: just as the spread of information was the initial use case of the Internet, a frictionless medium that is perfectly suited to endless copying, it makes sense that finance is the initial use case of blockchains. I don’t, though, think that is the end state: the ultimate outcome of a lack of friction was centralization, from cloud computing to social networks; the ultimate outcome of crypto is likely to be much more significant than just finance.

• Google and Facebook jointly dominate digital advertising.
• Microsoft and Google jointly dominate productivity applications.
• Microsoft and Amazon jointly dominate the public cloud.
• Amazon and Google jointly dominate shopping searches.

And, while all of these companies compete, those competitive forces have set nearly all of these duopolies into fairly stable positions that justify cooperation of the sort documented between Apple and Google, even as any one company alone is able to use its rival as justification for avoiding antitrust scrutiny.

• Stratechery Newletter

When the economic value of everybody that uses the platform exceeds the value of the company that creates it.

• Bill Gates