Fred Ehrsam Quotes
3 min readFeb 10, 2023
- The fundamentals of the token model are valuable and powerful. They allow communities to govern themselves, their economics, and rally a community in powerful ways that will allow open systems to flourish in a way that was previously impossible.
- When the Bitcoin white paper emerged in 2008, it was completely revolutionary. The amount of concepts that had to come together in just the right way — computer science, cryptography, and economic incentives — was astonishing.
- The ability to easily buy and sell Bitcoin has been a really key factor in accelerating Bitcoin adoption.
- I’d guess blockchains will be the full-blown backbone of virtual worlds — the system for currency, assets, identity, even governance — before doing the same in the ‘real world.’ Which is where I think we will end up in the real world eventually; it’s just a matter of which goes first and how long until it’s the case for both.
- We are on our way to blockchains as the fabric of society — the system for what we own (assets), who we are (identity), how we make decisions (governance), and more in an increasingly digital world. It’s going to be a wild ride.
- AIs are only as good as the data they are trained on. And while many of the tech giants working on AI, like Google and Facebook, have open-sourced some of their algorithms, they hold back most of their data.
- AIs are only as good as the data they are trained on.
- There’s been a myth perpetuated where people think, ‘I need to go into consulting, banking, finance, law, or medicine to make a consistently reasonable amount of money.’ People are now realizing that’s not the case.
- There is nothing that Bitcoin can do which Ethereum can’t. While Ethereum is less battle-tested, it is moving faster, has better leadership, and has more developer mindshare.
- When Coinbase was starting, we thought we were seeing the birth of something that was really important — what I would almost describe as the future fabric of society — the system for who we are — our identities, what we own, our assets.
- Everything will be tokenized and connected by a blockchain one day.
- At the end of the day, what’s going to make bitcoin successful is more people making more interesting things, just like the beginning of the Internet.
- OpenAI is doing important work by releasing tools which promote AI to be developed in the open. Compute power is largely produced by NVIDIA and Intel and still relatively expensive but openly purchasable. Blockchains may be the key final ingredient by providing massive pools of open training data.
- The Internet had a core innovation that made it valuable: The ability to disseminate data over a distributed network in a way that was significantly cheaper than the prior methods.
- Ethereum may make monetary policy decisions like, ‘Let’s do 1% inflation to support the ongoing development of the Ethereum protocol.’ A token built on Ethereum might want to do the same.
- The self-driving car revolution was kicked off by The ‘DARPA’ Grand Challenge to make an autonomous car traverse 132 mi. of a desert.
- The best engineered organisms can outpace others, even if they start smaller or later.
- Ethereum has taken what was a four-function calculator of a programming language in Bitcoin and turned it into a full-fledged computer.
- Not having sub-governance would be like anyone who owns USD being able to walk into a Google shareholder meeting and voting without owning Google stock just because Google shares happen to be denominated in USD.
- Bitcoin is inherently international, and one of its great promises is it enables cross-border payments in a more efficient way.
