Rendered at 17:29:38 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
jcfrei 6 hours ago [-]
Lots of similarities to the Bitcoin investment thesis. Where the chain itself becomes the product and not any utility derived from it. You have to believe in a future where all fiat money crashes and becomes worthless, evil states confiscate other forms of wealth, like stocks and bonds but for some reason will be powerless to prevent bitcoin transfers. At the same time the hard limit of 21 million BTC will never be revoked despite continuously declining miners revenue. And only within that strict narrative does a long-term investment really make sense.
rednb 2 hours ago [-]
It does not need to be all or nothing though. It simply needs to be true for a large enough number of people, to create an extremely valuable market.
We are over 8 billion on earth, even if as little as 1% of the population rely on it directly or indirectly due to some form of oppression real or perceived due to political opinions, a long investment thesis on bitcoin can make sense.
I am not a bitcoin holder once this is said. Arrived at the party too late IMHO, and i have better investment options for now from a risk-adjusted perspective.
However if i had more cash to invest than i know what to do with, i'd definitely take a long position on bitcoin.
the_snooze 2 hours ago [-]
>even if as little as 1% of the population
1% of 8 billion is 80 million. Coordinating that many people onto a particular platform or alternative is a gargantuan task. It's not "little."
pfortuny 3 hours ago [-]
Exactly: money disappears into the hands of Government (or because of hyperinflation) but somehow you can buy goods on a "free" Internet without the Government intervention. Also: all transactions are recorded...
Good luck with that.
mothballed 6 hours ago [-]
FATF and the government were desperate to eliminate/immobilize bearer bonds, bearer shares, high denomination notes, and hawala. It does seem like at least part of it is they think they have less control over oversight of their transfer for certain instrument or asset classes.
Aurornis 2 hours ago [-]
Bitcoin is not like high denomination notes or bearer bonds, though. Transactions are on the public blockchain.
In theory someone could have coins untraceable to them as long as they never intersect with something on chain that could be traced back to them, but that turns into a game of never spending the tokens when taken to the extreme. Bitcoiners quietly see that as a feature, not a bug, because the goal of the game is to get everyone to buy as much as possible but sell as little as possible. That’s the formula to make the number go up.
drdrek 7 hours ago [-]
I love the ending footnote, its the perfect statement to prove his thesis. Just because you understand the problem does not mean you are immune to it. Just because you know smoking is bad for, and you understand the mechanisms of addition, does not mean you manage to quit smoking.
aurareturn 6 hours ago [-]
Good products come from tight cycles: ship something, listen to users, iterate. Token economics break that cycle by introducing a competing optimization target. The team stops asking "what do our developers need?" and starts asking "what supports the token narrative?"
In other words, the team starts asking "How can we maximize the token price while delivering as little product value as possible"?
This is why 99.99% of crypto projects are a scam.
No, your token investors don't give a damn what you deliver. They only care about the price of the token. Lie if you have to. Hype up your project like it's the greatest thing in the world. Do whatever to enable security fraud.
When teams discover that lying does more for the token price than actually building, they quickly switch incentives. Now they'll just lie, sell tokens, repeat, until a final rug pull to scam the remaining bag holders.
SlinkyOnStairs 2 hours ago [-]
If you'll humor a cheeky substitution:
> No, your VC investors don't give a damn what you deliver. They only care about the valuation. Lie if you have to. Hype up your project like it's the greatest thing in the world. Do whatever to enable security fraud.
People are quite good at recognizing this dynamic amongst crypto startups.
Yet they pretend it's not the driving force in both the VC world and Big Tech.
aurareturn 40 minutes ago [-]
Not the same because VCs can only make money when the startup gets acquired by a bigger company or by IPO. Both of them will require professional due diligence. So it's far harder to fool investors than crypto which prey on the least sophisticated investors.
oofbey 1 hours ago [-]
Clever comparison, but the key difference is there’s no mechanism for a rug pull for most startups. Unless they reach a huge valuation, the stock is absolutely not liquid. There’s no way to cash out.
I'm concerned we may not be able to pull back from low-trust society in which most investments are fradulent; eventually it will become impossible to raise money for real ventures!
kevinak 3 hours ago [-]
Yep!
People in the Bitcoin space have been screaming at the top of their lungs about this for decades at this point, but it's hard to work against the marketing machine that comes from these ICOs.
pavlov 3 hours ago [-]
The weird thing is that this outcome was always obvious.
Token-driven projects were clearly just penny stock boiler room scams dressed up in a trenchcoat made of jargon whitepapers.
codechicago277 3 hours ago [-]
I remember Blockstack from the first crypto bull run. It was the product I thought had the most potential after Ethereum, building off of tools like Sia. The white papers [1] laid out a technical plan for fully building an internet on blockchain. It felt like the “decentralized internet” from Silicon Valley (the show), and must have inspired that plot point.
For an industry that was full of hype and fake products, it was one of the few you could download and get some use out of. I remember a very janky Google Docs clone running on the chain. Sad to see that they’ve lost their way. For now crypto still only has one value prop: token go up.
I can't believe this field turned into this. It used to be so cool and rewarding.
brazzy 5 hours ago [-]
So... his takeaway after taking 7 years to realize that "blockchain ecosystems" are an empty hype machine... is to start a project that brings blockchain into LLM coding agents.
mhendric 2 minutes ago [-]
Author here. Neotoma has nothing to do with blockchain, at least for any foreseeable future. It's a structured memory layer for AI agents. Think: entity storage with relationships, provenance, and queryable state. No token, no chain, no crypto.
The whole point of the essay's ending is that I chose not to issue a token and instead shipped a developer release to collect real feedback from real testers.
The takeaway wasn't "blockchain bad," it was "feedback loops matter and token economics break them." Neotoma is built around the opposite approach: short cycles, real users, and no financial instrument that makes belief liquid.
api 1 hours ago [-]
Seems like you could get a very similar phenomenon in lavishly funded hot startups.
The company's stock is the product. The product only has to be good enough to look plausible. Growth can be bought by selling $1 bills for $1.50 and by plowing money into marketing. The most important thing is to keep the hype up and raise the next round and make sure it's not a down round, or even if it is who cares... the execs just pay themselves fat salaries or work side sales of stock into there to cash out even if the main stock price is underwater.
You get inherent problems when you're selling a promise or a certificate not a product.
stuaxo 6 hours ago [-]
Does anyone else find this kind of LLM written stuff tiring to read.
Admittedly I only read the titles.
the__alchemist 3 hours ago [-]
The author even copied ChatGPT's website design!
Tklaaaalo 5 hours ago [-]
'read the title' is not the same as reading an article.
Im also not sure why this would be LLM written and i have not seen a lot of / relevant amount of LLM written articles especially on hn
ramon156 5 hours ago [-]
I have a feeling that people who shout this (I gotta be careful, I call out a bunch of articles as LLM-written) do not always know what to look out for. Em dashes aren't inherently LLM, neither are some of the phrases it uses.
One pattern I look for is; how is the end part written? Does it tie into the whole story? Is it extremely generic? Did the author put something real / raw / personal in it? If not, its a grey area, any other hints will lean my conclusion to real or fake.
We are over 8 billion on earth, even if as little as 1% of the population rely on it directly or indirectly due to some form of oppression real or perceived due to political opinions, a long investment thesis on bitcoin can make sense.
I am not a bitcoin holder once this is said. Arrived at the party too late IMHO, and i have better investment options for now from a risk-adjusted perspective.
However if i had more cash to invest than i know what to do with, i'd definitely take a long position on bitcoin.
1% of 8 billion is 80 million. Coordinating that many people onto a particular platform or alternative is a gargantuan task. It's not "little."
Good luck with that.
In theory someone could have coins untraceable to them as long as they never intersect with something on chain that could be traced back to them, but that turns into a game of never spending the tokens when taken to the extreme. Bitcoiners quietly see that as a feature, not a bug, because the goal of the game is to get everyone to buy as much as possible but sell as little as possible. That’s the formula to make the number go up.
This is why 99.99% of crypto projects are a scam.
No, your token investors don't give a damn what you deliver. They only care about the price of the token. Lie if you have to. Hype up your project like it's the greatest thing in the world. Do whatever to enable security fraud.
When teams discover that lying does more for the token price than actually building, they quickly switch incentives. Now they'll just lie, sell tokens, repeat, until a final rug pull to scam the remaining bag holders.
> No, your VC investors don't give a damn what you deliver. They only care about the valuation. Lie if you have to. Hype up your project like it's the greatest thing in the world. Do whatever to enable security fraud.
People are quite good at recognizing this dynamic amongst crypto startups.
Yet they pretend it's not the driving force in both the VC world and Big Tech.
I'm concerned we may not be able to pull back from low-trust society in which most investments are fradulent; eventually it will become impossible to raise money for real ventures!
People in the Bitcoin space have been screaming at the top of their lungs about this for decades at this point, but it's hard to work against the marketing machine that comes from these ICOs.
Token-driven projects were clearly just penny stock boiler room scams dressed up in a trenchcoat made of jargon whitepapers.
For an industry that was full of hype and fake products, it was one of the few you could download and get some use out of. I remember a very janky Google Docs clone running on the chain. Sad to see that they’ve lost their way. For now crypto still only has one value prop: token go up.
[1] https://cs.brown.edu/courses/csci2390/2019/readings/blocksta...
The whole point of the essay's ending is that I chose not to issue a token and instead shipped a developer release to collect real feedback from real testers.
The takeaway wasn't "blockchain bad," it was "feedback loops matter and token economics break them." Neotoma is built around the opposite approach: short cycles, real users, and no financial instrument that makes belief liquid.
The company's stock is the product. The product only has to be good enough to look plausible. Growth can be bought by selling $1 bills for $1.50 and by plowing money into marketing. The most important thing is to keep the hype up and raise the next round and make sure it's not a down round, or even if it is who cares... the execs just pay themselves fat salaries or work side sales of stock into there to cash out even if the main stock price is underwater.
You get inherent problems when you're selling a promise or a certificate not a product.
Admittedly I only read the titles.
Im also not sure why this would be LLM written and i have not seen a lot of / relevant amount of LLM written articles especially on hn
One pattern I look for is; how is the end part written? Does it tie into the whole story? Is it extremely generic? Did the author put something real / raw / personal in it? If not, its a grey area, any other hints will lean my conclusion to real or fake.