Libra/Diem was told by regulators to not move forward with the project. They were very early days, and trying to "do it right" in which the administration said "not at all".
Similar also happened with Visa... check when they were publishing in-depth reports from their crypto arm and then suddenly stopped.
What if the work these folks do to increase market efficiency does produce real-world value, as slower verifiable economic information would increase periods of uncertainty and price slippages?
Or the HFT engineers producing research and products that speed up general compute, such as accelerating SHA and ED25519 signature verification, so that their trading shops get information faster?
I wonder if there are actually a lot of third-order, downstream effects that society gets by paying engineers to just make computers and telecommunications faster.
I think everyone will have different behavior sec for their funds, with the options now ranging from simply committing a 12 or 24 word seed phrase to memory and buying ETF shares.
There is shamir secret splitting, multisig, MPC, secure enclaves with biometerics, etc...
I think how one handles their wallets will be much like how people make their espressos. Some will just stick k-cup in a machine and hit a button, others will become full-blown coffee enthusiasts that carefully measure their beans, de-static their grinds, and extract for the exact right amount of time.
This should actually be quicker and easier to prove than something like gold ETFs (e.g. SPDR) or other commodity ETFs.
The custody provider (e.g. Coinbase is the custody provider for most of these ETFs) should be able to simply show wallet addresses for all the Bitcoin they hold.
1. Low fees. I think five of the ETF filers even have 0% fees for first 6-12 months. Compare this to Coinbase, where the fees will seem astronomical in comparison (maybe this drives Coinbase fees down.)
2. There is a non-zero number of people in the family office investing world that don't want to deal with learning new tech and just want to call up their stock person on the phone to buy them something.
One I didn't see the other's mention is that in Line Goes Up, Dan calls secure-scuttlebutt (SSB), a p2p messaging protocol, a blockchain.
IIRC Dan was relying on a sentence from an outdated, archived documentation site made by an open source contributor many years ago. The core SSB devs then had to try to convince people that Dan was wrong about their project. Dan refused to admit he was wrong, despite a lack of blockchain in the open source code, and just pasted a screenshot of the old docs.
Well yeah this is how he gets paid. It's not about being informative about a class of technology, its about generating clicks to get more patreon subscriptions and youtube ad payments.
For me it was less the commute time and more planning around traffic.
Even if the commute was 30 minutes (a good day), I'd usually need to buffer time to plan for being late due to traffic accidents and construction (frequent).
Switching to remote work gave me back at least an hour every morning, and at least 1.5 hours in the evening. Anecdotally this has led to massive performance and quality of life increases.
The lack of multi-device support was a constraint that gave me a different perspective of interactions on the web.
My ssb keypair was on a work laptop, so when I changed jobs and had to give my laptop back, I lost my keypair. Now, I could have exported the keypair and continued to use my "account" on my new laptop. The network would have synced on my new device, and I'd get all my posts and pictures back. But decided to embrace the constraint instead.
When I rejoin the network, I'll have a new keypair, and no post history. I think this can have an interesting effect on how we view our attachment to data.
It's been a while, but I used to be an active SSB user.
I hosted SSB pubs and used to post on patchwork semi-regularly.
I thought it worked pretty well as a social network. I discovered new and interesting ideas from folks that I don't see much on mainstream social media.
I haven't followed the space much recently, and I'm curious about how it has evolved over the last year or so.
My favorite memories on SSB:
Someone promoted a book that they had written, and we arranged for a sales transaction by talking purely over the network. I sent them some amount of Bitcoin, and they sent me the PDF of their book. It felt very personal to work with the author directly, and side-step payment processors.
I loved taking my laptop out on the train or to a coffee shop, and replying to threads and publishing a post to SSB while offline. Something about reading other peoples ideas while disconnected, and then writing my thoughts, and having them automatically sync to the network when I got back on my WiFi at home, gave me a different perspective on ways to use technology.