A list of references for the crypto-curious... / Also a personal case study with PoolTogether DAO.
| meta
| Forever in progress • Crypto • Confidence: Possible |
Disclaimers: This is not financial advice etc. Also, don't look here for for a balanced, super-objective, bipartisan view (you can find negativity everywhere) — instead, it’s mainly an attempt to trace my thought process and explain the potential people see in the technology and the culture to the curious but skeptical.
Mina protocol - a blockchain in 22kb, forever (while, as Gwern notes, the components that make up Bitcoin were availible for years before the whitepaper was actually published, Satoshi did not have access to ZK-Snarks, for example, a newer cryptographic development. In utlising for its core protocol a kind of consistent hash, Mina is tiny in total blockchain size and thus easily verifiable.")
Side note: how on earth is the stock market not on Polygon? Quickswap really puts the entire NASDAQ to liquidity-sourcing to Robinhood to user complicated ecosystem to shame. On Quickswap, trading USDC to another crypto asset is fast, practically feeless, and non-custodial. Try it out and see. Also, for a more detailed economic model of Automated Market Makers, see An Analysis of Uniswap markets
PoolTogether is a Dapp and a DAO I’ve both used and been involved in. It’s part of the reason my beliefs regarding crypto are more positive than negative. This is because I feel it shows the promise of blockchains at two levels:
Practical. Depositing to PoolTogether cost me NZ$0.004356 in Polygon transaction fees. The process of depositing involved connecting my Rainbow wallet, typing in my USDC balance, and confirming the transaction. Done. As all the code, logic and balances are on chain, I can additionally get a great deal of transparency about my chances of winning each specific prize (currently 1 in 22 in general, revised probabilities from 0.03 for a $1 prize to 0.00002 for a $2,500 prize.), as well as the source of interest, current total deposits, etc etc. So in summary PoolTogether beats legacy premium bond systems like NSandI in the UK by being: fast, cheap, open and globally accessible, and also high in transparency of the actual workings of prize winning selection and current winning probabilities.
Political/ethical. PoolTogether is good on the governance question, in my opinion, for two reasons. 1. The benefits of crypto software specifically, in terms of the protocol being live and immutable up to adjustments of specific metrics like prize distribution, source of interest etc by on-chain and off-chain governance, the treasury being a transparent multi-sig, etc. 2. The less-tech specific culture which surrounds such a project and its political goals. The discussions on the governance forum invite everyone to pitch in with ideas, while the Discord is friendly and all questions are answered.
The governance forum, specifically the discussion, which I contributed to, on adjustments to prize distribution in order to maximize inclusivity: here. At one point the suggestion that adding $1 prizes was pointless was offset by many reminding that in some of the countries PoolTogether is used in—say Argentina, $1 is not an insignificant amount of money.