Instructor: Chris Dixon (a16z GP)
Personal Summary:
Despite going through waves, Crypto’s price volatility provides a feedback loop which draws in interest and activity. This encourages building. Chris introduces Blockchains as virtual computers running on top of physical computers, that make commitments. The consensus mechanisms used provide trust guarantees, which enable the creation of new primitives (e.g. digital goods, smart contracts, DAOs).
Ultimately, Blockchain tech should allow you to own virtual goods (similar to how you can own physical goods). Crypto should ideally be interoperable.
Key Learnings:
- In Crypto, you get a price-interest-activity feedback loop, where the price drives interest and encourages founders to build
- Focus less on the price, and more on the interest and activity
- Blockchain as a new type of computer
- Blockchain defined as a “virtual computer that runs on top of a network of physical computers that provides strong, auditable, game-theoretic guarantees that the code it runs will continue to operate as designed
- Computers that are making commitments (a profound new idea)
- Consensus mechanisms as voting tools
- Game theory of nodes + consensus mechanism provides trust guarantees
- These trust guarantees also enable the credible creation of new computing primitives such as digital money, digital goods, smart contracts, DAOs
- You will be able to build apps on top of the Blockchain without having to understand the Blockchain, similar to how mobile apps are developed on phones
- Each of PCs, smartphones and blockchains had strengths and weaknesses, and killer apps took advantage of strengths as the weaknesses diminished over time
- Interoperability of virtual goods is inevitable, with a true sense of ownership
- You can’t own much on the internet currently (virtually) as you can in the digital world, Blockchain tech aims to improve that
- Analogy to internet and IP having sidechains that are interoperable, similar to how Crypto could look
- When building a Crypto Start-Up, founders can think of starting as more conventional start-ups and then slowly moving towards decentralization (e.g. remote workers, distributing tokens)