3 month update on leaving the EF: i've been working full time with @seer_pm since august! its been a seamless transition to move from being a client of Seer to now joining their team full time. I originally worked with them on the deep funding pilot, during which we battle tested their infrastructure and smart contracts somewhere along that journey i got heavily pilled on info finance as a category, so joining them was a natural next step. the simplest explanation is a two-sided marketplace with traders on one side and information seekers on the other. Seekers pay to create markets on questions they care about, while traders are paid for being right Vitalik wrote earlier about why AIs are a big unlock for info finance: LLMs can profitably trade tiny, low-liquidity micromarkets that aren’t worth a human’s time. Another unforeseen reason for their timeliness is how AI is making it cheaper to produce an output than to evaluate. the bottleneck is deciding what deserves our attention, which is where info finance thrives A few example use cases we’re excited about; 1. Hiring / grant selection You put out a job posting and get 10k+ applicants. You open a market on whether each candidate gets shortlisted for interview (or, more ambitiously, on the performance score they’d earn in their first 3 months if hired). Your team then reviews applications ranked by market odds. 2. Token listings / partnerships You’re an exchange with thousands of token listing requests. You run conditional markets on how much trading volume each token would generate if listed, and review from the top down. 3. Market discovery / recommendation algorithms You’re a trader with an edge in certain kinds of Polymarket markets, but finding them eats most of your time. So you fund a market on whether your wallet will trade polymarket markets. Traders who learn your taste get paid, and you get a ranked list of where to look. At Seer, I’m focused on growing our trader community, working with information seekers who want markets created, and protocol economics. DMs are open if you’re drowning in more than you can review or you want to trade these markets!

context: zcash has a civil war brewing between the house of fungible capital (tokenvoting) and nonfungible humans (ZCAP council) the house of nonfungible humans is around 200-250 OG cypherpunk email addresses that have brought zcash to where it is today. their hard power is appointing 5 council members who allocate 8% of zcash block rewards & soft power is considerable weight of technical expertise the house of fungible capital is relatively new to zcash but has played a huge role in its meteoric rise. their ideological leader is @naval and count @mert, tom, @maxdesalle among their proponents. the house of humans are mostly happy to live and let live, but cannot do so since the house of capital desires their complete elimination. @paradigm is the rare investor that backs the dual governance system rather than the mono-one favored by house of capital the worst possible outcome is a no-deal scenario with an ENS style community split. the next flash point is likely the 2028 halving and how block rewards allocation will be changed, with house of humans desiring to retain power of the ZCAP council in allocations while house of capital is in favor of dramatic changes

To expand on this point, i feel like DAO governance focused way too much on intelligent mechanisms that select between options whereas the real gap is empowering people to come up with good options that can then be voted on or improved For eg QF was a good way to divide money b/w projects. But over time many of the great projects stopped participating in the rounds, so the selection mechanism isn't enough to ensure good outcomes Companies solve this by hiring employees who create options that are then voted on by the board. Whereas we outsourced the proposal creation part to volunteers in favour of focusing on the selection mechanism In 2024 i created a proposal for arbitrum dao to diversify $30 million of their treasury, it took ~3-4 months of full time work interviewing delegates and RWA providers to come up with a sensible proposal having broad consensus. I could only do the research thanks to @DisruptionJoe funding the proposal creation, but most DAOs neglect the part of decentralized mechanisms to pay contributors for coming up with good proposals

2 forms of privacy in prediction markets; 1. odds are hidden but outcomes being traded are public the benefit: if a company is providing liquidity to get information, keeping the prices private prevents free riding behaviors where competitors can also see the info and act on it 2. outcomes being traded are kept private but whoever has access to them can see the odds the benefit: companies can't create markets where the outcomes themselves are proprietary information. for eg a market on "if we review (candidate) application for an open role, would they reach the interview stage?" is useful, but they obviously can't make the list of all applicants public overall (2) seems more important than (1) in unlocking information finance use cases, since getting good options is much harder than selecting among them

1st order effect of AI: Capital is starting to matter much more than labor (compared to 2021 era where labor was more important) 2nd order effect: The Thing That Matters is raw materials, not the human capital. so US invading greenland or China acquiring siberia would actually make economic sense 3rd order effect: warfare is now a low-casualty hardware vs hardware stage followed by a totally one sided stage where hardware imposes its will on the defeated populace, which reduces PR cost of an agressive war So on the present trajectory we should start seeing the world resemble 19th century Europe with frequent conflict over natural resources more than the general peace we've enjoyed over the last 80 years

i read that intelligence is selecting wisely from among the options while power is having many options to choose from seer is intelligent with its prediction market style filtering & advisory mechanism, but power is with you to submit worthwhile designs 🙏 oct 23rd deadline

just figured out my schedule during Devcon! I'm leading the prediction markets community hub with @abhitejxyz, the idea being that people in the niche of crypto have a space within the venue to congregate rather than have to do a side event. our plan for the hub is a series of roundtable discussions around issues in prediction markets from liquidity to new use cases to resolution to go to market plans. im quite looking forward to deep discussions with fellow practitioners rather than shallow networking if you needed another reason to book your tickets this year, just look at the 14 approved hubs and see if any is in your niche!

Correction: it seems banned users on farcaster have an appeal mechanism where they can click a button saying "yes I broke the rules but promise I won't going forward" Has anyone tried using it? It is practically the same as a warning but morally much stronger in forcing users to admit their past uncouth behavior before getting replatformef The analogy for farcaster shouldn't be Singapore so much as a school where there's a strict headmaster and misbehaving students are made to write their misdeeds on the blackboard 😆

Does anyone know why lily can't say the actual reason solana event in china was cancelled? And also in 2016 how did the EF manage to hold devcon 2 in shanghai, was blockchain not banned then? I would rather she have not stated a reason at all than given such a dumb one of overbooking, imagine the uproar if EF said they are cancelling Devcon mumbai because we sold too many tickets 😂

How do product people distinguish a UX issue from product not solving an actual pain point? The temptation for many teams to grow adoption is making it easier to use the product, although when it solves a genuine need people overcome bad UX to use it nonetheless

Overall there is strong cultural alignment b/w farcaster & network state, both have a strong builder ethos at their core While i appreciated how NS pinpointed the posts of each user that led to their account becoming read only, I think it should have been a warning, that these types of posts will get you banned in the future. It would have been much more interesting to see how many users posted in contravention of the new code rather than retroactively applying it to remove users before they get a chance to modify their behavior I like that there's now real firepower to take a shot at a human first social media network. The status quo of decentralized social media was cursed as it is, if it can't survive censorship by a new team it never deserved to take over social media in the first place