Layers of defence and layers of conviction. Find asymmetry and understand your target inside out. This is how you exploit systemic upside. - xh3b4sd

"America's Class Politics Have Turned Upside Down", "The Worst of Crypto Is Yet to Come", "A Bogus New Rationale for Trump's Economic Agenda", "The Most Opinionated Man in America", these are the headlines everyday people are confronted with when reading The Atlantic today, one of America's most renowned newspapers. Long gone are the days in which we found balanced fact based news in those traditional media outlets. What you and me are bombarded with today is rarely rooted in facts. Traditional media seems rarely balanced. It never seems optimistic or hopeful, and it definitely never appears to be inspiring. If you wonder why everyone is angry all the time, then there you have it. Because people are still watching the "news". We have talked a lot about the individual's responsibility to properly curate one's media diet here in the Powerlaw memo. As always, garbage in, garbage out. Manifestation is a real thing, and thus thy shall become thy words. Looking at the opinionated headlines above, it is no wonder that half of us are on anxiety medication. We need to be competent in this world. Not only competent for others, but first and foremost competent for ourselves. If we as individuals are not able to properly and sustainably navigate this world, then life becomes miserable. I know that manifesting works because I practiced it myself for years on a daily basis. The term that I prefer to use though is "priming". You can prime yourself through journaling and other means of thinking. You can simply write down your own thoughts and refine what you write over and over again, over long periods of time. For instance, write down a single thought today, and be it a single sentence. That is very simple. Basically everyone can do that. It does not matter what you think or write down, the important part is simply that you do it. So go ahead, and write it down, today. Whatever it may be. Then, tomorrow, do it again. Write down one thing that you have in mind. It might be something that you are ruminating about, it might be something you just want to get off your chest. It might be something that you have heard, or something that you strongly believe in. It does not matter what you write down in the beginning. The important part here is that you just write. Priming yourself that way happens then over longer periods of time if you just keep writing. Eventually you will come back to what you have written. And looking back at your past writings you will encounter different sets of emotional reactions. My own reactions on my own past writings unfold on a distribution that goes all the way from "I am actually a genius" to "this is so so bad, why am I such an idiot". What this entire process of priming does for you is the following. You start thinking, and even more important, you start thinking for yourself. There is no "journalist" force-feeding dictated narratives. There is no Twitter timeline or family members that trick you into believing some very specific thing. When you prime yourself, then this very act of writing is the pure process of thinking for yourself. And that is a competence that nobody is taught in school. Why I am telling you, dear reader, all of this? Because markets are ruthless. This life is fundamentally ruthless. And in fact, nobody in the government or social media gives a shit about you and your family. It doesn't matter what you believe in. It doesn't matter on which side of the aisle you are comfortably seated. It does not matter how you vote. Nobody gives a fuck about you when push comes to shove. And so, all that you can rely upon on this life, is your level of training that you fall back to, if life gets really rough. Your level of training is the competence that opens doors, and that allows others to trust you. Because with competence, you become a person.

I was riffing on this idea last night with people at Crypto Drinks in Amsterdam. Sometimes I do rage writing to just get ideas out. A takeaway I had during one of those rage writing sessions was that truth is not as important to humans as is consensus. I realized this when I started building Uvio information markets. We don't know what consciousness really is. All that really matters is my perception of you being conscious. Matter of fact, I couldn't tell the difference anyway, unless I can. People arguing that there is no ghost in the machine miss the point. Like, yeah, you may be right. But the point is that this doesn't matter. Because we are going to make you believe that the ghost inside of the machine is real, which is when you can't tell the difference anymore anyway. All of that is a long way of saying that all that matters to people is their own social reality. Not what is real, but what they think is right. It doesn't really matter what's real or not as long as I can rely on you as a person, so that we can go through it together. Stuff that is on public blockchains can represent objective truth and that is all good and well. More of that please! But a lot of issues that concern real people in the real world have no clear black and white answer. Humans live in the shadows of many shades of gray. That is why I say that on Uvio, truth is irrelevant to the extend that consensus is simply overwriting it, if there is a good reason for it. And somehow this notion blows peoples' minds and out of a sudden eyebrows get raised and a lot of words get shouted at me for saying that. The thing is, it is actually very simple and very close to nature. If you care, and if you are right, then consensus will be formed. If something gets exploited maliciously, and nobody cared, then the exploit was maybe rather meaningless in the first place. No harm no foul? And here is the upside, if people do care about a Claim on Uvio then consensus will be reached, intersubjectively. No matter what. A lot of the fancy technicalities are meaningless when social groups have to make progress. We can't make everyone happy. Stop trying. Overall I think information markets like Uvio has implemented them are not new at all and it's no rocket science either. I think so far people have simply not used solutions like Uvio proposes in governance and other domains where decision making is important. Meanwhile every other DeFi protocol keeps brewing their own rotten governance architecture. And we end up with low participation snowflaky systems all around. If you want to learn more about information markets and if you think Polymarket doesn't predict anything after all, then try Uvio.

While Crypto Twitter is hating on the Ethereum roadmap, founders and engineers of many L2 rollups came together this past week in order to talk about the vision of one unified Ethereum. The problem we are talking about today is the user experience of many segregated L2 rollups that are not particularly good at moving assets between those different chains. This missing piece of interoperability between L2 rollups is a key challenge for Ethereum's future. First of all, people shouldn't even have to know anything about any chain when they use applications that are secured by Ethereum. Users should always have the option to take back control in good old self custody fashion and do everything manually without any centralized middleman. In any event, the default for most people should rather be that decentralized applications "just work" without any prior knowledge of blockchain networks. Ultimately, the L2 rollup experience today competes with all the integrated L1 experiences elsewhere. And to that end, there are going to be more events and meetups over the next couple of weeks in order to develop interoperability standards for a singular Ethereum user experience. It should be easy for new L2 rollups to launch and integrate with other establish L2 rollups. That helps not only the onboarding of new L2 rollups, but also helps the onboarding of new users onchain in general. Achieving the final result with all of its perfectly balanced tradeoffs will take years to implement and rollout. In the end though, I am convinced, we will allow crosschain functionality without compromising trust assumptions and asset security. Eventually all of the required technological progress will depend on having fast and cheap validity proofs, which will all be based on zero-knowledge cryptography. The long term endgame of interoperability is ZK. Always has been.

I want to say that my number for this week is 4, and that is not meant to be an insider joke. 4 is the number of days, at the time of writing, that we have been operating at blob count target. Now, normal people will read this, and they will not understand what this even means. So let's explain. Blobs are the separate fee market that L2 rollups use to post their state to Ethereum L1. Blobs are part of the magic that we use to scale Ethereum. The blob count target is the amount of free blobs that every block can contain before blob space has to be paid for by L2 rollups. Hitting the blob count target means that L2 rollups are in high demand, which in turn means that Ethereum security is in high demand, which is effectively helping to price Ethereum's security, and thus ETH the asset appropriately, all the while we scale Ethereum. The bottom line here is this. We will use all the blobs, then we will create even more blobs, and then we will use those too. And eventually, Ethereum becomes ever more valuable because this ecosystem has real economic activity, and it is growing.