Your P2K Articles (2021-09-10) - Guido Percu's Notes
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Your P2K Articles (2021-09-10)

📅 May 21, 2026 📁 books 🌱

Your P2K Articles (2021-09-10)

Kindle Highlights

Jim Heckman,

“You will probably work for a protocol someday.”

Christianity is not a system of man’s search for God but a story of God’s search for man.

Programming–thinking in ways that a computer can help you with. From Excel and Photoshop to C++.

For those interested in learning more, I’ll point you to Packy McCormick’s comprehensive deep dive.

History and propaganda–what happened and how we talk about it. More why than when. The fundamental currents of human events over time.

It is important to recognize that most organizations are simply legal fictions which serve as a nexus for a set of contracting relationships among individuals.

The best deep dives on DAOs are Aaron Wright’s journal article and Coopahtroopa’s Mirror post, which points to many additional articles if you want to go further down the DAO rabbithole.

The scientific method–understanding what we know and figuring out how to discover the next thing. Learning to do the reading and show your work. There’s no point in memorizing the Krebs Cycle.

Games–finite and infinite, poker, algorithms, business structures, interpersonal relationships, negotiation, why they work and when they don’t. We all play them, even when they’re not called games.

One mechanism to coalesce a nexus of smart contracts is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). You can think of it like a shared treasury among the members, with hard coded rules that govern how funds can be disbursed.

Crypto networks facilitate new forms of human coordination and set the stage for the future of work. It’s all being developed right now, in real time, and you’re invited. Your digital wallet is the passport to this land of opportunity.

Tem texto para quem gosta de matemática, filologia, geografia, zoologia, botânica, tanatologia, história, filosofia, teologia, anatomia, telepatia… não dá para criar um universo como o de Tolkien sem criar tudo o que cabe e o que pode caber dentro dele.

Citizenship–Participating, leading, asking and answering good questions. As a voter, but also as a participant in any organization. Real skills–Hard to measure things like honesty, perseverance, empathy, keeping promises, trust, charisma, curiosity, problem solving and humor.

When we hired our last intern, I asked him to send me his wallet address in advance of the interview. By reviewing what he had done on-chain, I knew that we were probably going to hire him before the interview even started. Next time, maybe I’ll just ask for the candidate’s RabbitHole level.

Statistics–seeing the world around us clearly and understanding nuance, analog results and taxometrics (learning how to sort like with like). Realizing that everyone and everything doesn’t fit into a simple box. Learning to see the danger of false labels and propaganda, and the power of seeing how things are actually distributed.

Communication–listening and speaking, reading and writing, presentations, critical examination and empathy. Can you read for content? Can you write to be understood? Can you stand up and express yourself, and sit still and listen to someone else who is working to be heard? What happens when we realize that no one is exactly like us?

Art–expressing yourself with passion and consistency and a point of view. Not because it’s your job, but because you can and because it matters. Appreciating the art that has come before and creating your own, in whatever form that takes. Decision-making–using the rest of the skills above to make better choices. Meta-cognition–thinking about thinking, creating habits with intention.

Axie Infinity is a play-to-earn game that has proven to be the breakout of the year, not just in gaming but in crypto generally. The key feature is that the players own the game. They own the board (Lunacia), they own the characters (Axies), they own the ability to create new characters (breeding), and they own the in-game currencies (SPL and AXS). It is as much an economy as a game.

(i) Decentralized justice: Early efforts can be found within UMA, Aragon Court, and Kleros. (ii) Subjective appraisal: Upshot is working on peer-prediction models for valuing NFTs. (iii) Curation: SuperRare and JPG are working on decentralized curation for cryptoart. I wouldn’t be surprised to see decentralized curation expand to other areas that utilize a subjective mechanism to screen on quality, such as journalism.

Today there are grants DAOs, doing the work of nonprofits and community development funds, protocol DAOs operating numerous decentralized finance applications, media DAOs driving the future of journalism and information dissemination, social DAOs turning social networks into economies, and service DAOs doing work of so many varieties that I can’t even adequately cover them here. DAOs are, or will be, the organizational form for many of the applications I describe in the remainder of the article.

Compare the scenario above with Flamingo DAO, a group of 64 collectors, of which I am one, who pooled resources in a DAO to build a shared collection of NFTs. Here are the logistics: Form a DAO: Mostly a function of replicating software. There are tools being built (e.g. Tribute DAO) that will make this easy for anyone to do with a few clicks. No filing fees since it exists only in the cloud. No annual reports since all activity is visible on-chain in real time. Open a bank account: Unneeded. The DAO smart contract acts as a digital wallet. Deposit funds: We all sent ETH to the DAO smart contract. It took 30 seconds for me to complete. Since the smart contract has hard coded rules, I have no concerns that it will be disbursed without consensus. Buy assets: We vote on-chain using signatures from our personal digital wallets to reach hard consensus about what to buy. Once purchased, the assets are held by the DAO smart contract, so there are no concerns about one of the members running off with the assets. Most Flamingo members did not know each other when the DAO was formed, and this was not a problem.