Continuations

Of course Ethereum is not a walled garden the way AOL was. Anyone can write and deploy a smart contract, whereas adding functionality to AOL required a contract and a custom implementation. What I mean instead is that much of AOL’s growth in both revenues and functionality was financed by AOL itself. AOL made a lot of investments in startups which then purchased advertising on AOL, at least in the early days of this, extended AOLs functionality. The decentralized finance (defi) space, which i...

Upfront disclosure: I am long both Bitcoin and Ethereum (personally and also indirectly via USV). In preparation for the annual meeting at USV, we have been putting together some slides on the cryptocurrency market. Looking back at the last year I was most surprised by the run-up in Ethereum as part of the ICO craze. I did not see that coming to nearly the extent that it did. While the ICO is an important innovation, there has definitely been an excess both in the amount of money raised for s...

Both individually and collectively we learn more from our failures than from our successes. Failures make us question our assumptions, successes generally don’t. I therefore welcome the hack of the DAO (even if I wind up losing the 0.5 BTC I had converted to Ether and invested). It is exposing a lot of assumptions and that is the path to learning. The hack will not be the end of smart contracts or blockchains. Instead it will be more like the early failures in aviation. They are what gave us ...