Benedict Evans: “The breakthrough of the web was effectively that you get this phrase “permissionless innovation.” That anybody could just make stuff and distribute it instantly to everybody on Earth. And you don’t need to get a carriage deal with every telco in every country. You don’t need to get a distribution deal. You don’t need to go and talk to a publishing company. What the internet did, you could say, is massively expanded the scope of the free market. Because by analogy, you could say that telcos and publishing companies and so on were central planning. That they were this massive bottleneck on what you could do.”
Tips for Productivity, Thinking, and Doing by Nabeel Qureshi. Among them: “Do the most important thing first thing in the morning, and don’t check social media until you’ve done it. Because energy compounds, the first actions in the day matter a lot: the right actions get you into a positive spiral, the wrong actions get you into a negative spiral. The further into a negative spiral you get, the harder it is to get out. So if you start the morning by doing something you care about (e.g. writing a page of an essay), you are way more likely to have a good, productive and happy day overall, because you’ve gotten yourself into a positive spiral.”
Sebastian Mallaby: “The real test for crypto is whether it creates services that non-crypto people care about. On this, the jury is still out, but the tentative evidence is promising. Digital tokens can create clever customer incentives — think a more sophisticated version of air miles. Crypto payments may generate cheaper ways to remit money across borders. Play-to-earn computer games, with digital assets that users stash in personal wallets, may bring a new dimension to the already vast gaming industry…Today’s internet renders frictionless the storage, transfer and sharing of information. Already, we cannot imagine life without it. Tomorrow’s crypto- and blockchain-enhanced internet may achieve the same for value.”
