# Placeholder Blog

In the coming quarters, a high density of "Ethereum Killers" (EKs) plan to launch their mainnets, and in so doing, release their assets to the public crypto markets. The transition of price discovery from the private to public markets will be an important one to watch and understand, especially considering many EKs carry billion-dollar anticipated launch values.

To follow, I’ll reason through my expectations for _asset prices_ and the _prices of services_ offered by EKs. While maximalists may dismiss this as hopeless investigation of shitcoins, I expect the behavior of newly launched EKs to impact the development of the sideways market we’re currently in, as well as the bull market to come.

[Read more](/content/blog/2019/10/22/fire-before-growth-the-likely-fate-of-ethereum-killers/index.html)

A recent Flipside Crypto [post](https://medium.com/flipsidecrypto/decentralized-network-protocol-foundation-blockchain-organizations-are-businesses-a7982ec8a273) alarmed me when it stated the following: “Despite labeling themselves as decentralized networks, protocols, foundations, and frameworks, _cryptocurrency projects are, in fact, businesses_ – that will fail to succeed if they don’t start thinking of themselves that way awfully fast.” I respect Flipside and what they’re working towards with the [Fundamental Crypto Asset Score](https://flipsidecrypto.com/fcas) (FCAS), but fear that encouraging protocols to think of themselves exclusively as businesses will defeat the promise of protocols in the first place.

Protocols provide structure for businesses, but are _not_ businesses themselves; they are systems of logic that _coordinate exchange_ between suppliers (businesses) and consumers of a service.  As coordinators of exchange, protocols should be _minimally extractive_, whereas businesses are incentivized to be _maximally extractive_(that’s profit, and a business is valued as a multiple of its profit).

[Read more](/content/blog/2019/10/6/protocols-as-minimally-extractive-coordinators/index.html)

In October 2020 the Zcash network will undergo its first halving, slicing the annual rate of ZEC inflation in half. Halvings are important moments in any cryptomoney’s maturation as they double the marginal cost of producing each incremental unit (at constant hash rate), moving the asset further along the scarcity curve. Concurrent with this halving, Zcash will undergo its fourth network upgrade (NU4), in which key decisions (especially re: the Founders Reward) need to be made that will shape the next four years of Zcash’s life.

As ZEC coin holders, Placeholder recognizes that NU4 will be a critical upgrade for the Zcash network, and therefore have chosen to submit our thoughts about its contents.

Read more [here](https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/placeholder-considerations-resources-governance-and-legitimacy-in-nu4/34045).

The majority of cryptoassets are shaping up to be _capital assets_ in nature, whereas many early examples like bitcoin are better characterized as commodities, with a subset poised to become commodity monies. Within the burgeoning _capital asset field of crypto_, some closely resemble equity, others more closely resemble debt, and others have a bizarre enough mix of capabilities and value streams to be unrecognizable from prior renditions of capital assets. As part of explaining why governance assets have value, Joel has done an excellent job of laying out [foundational principles behind capital](/content/blog/2019/2/19/cryptonetwork-governance-as-capital/index.html), which is a piece that should be read before continuing here.

[Read more](/content/blog/2019/4/26/value-capture-and-quantification-cryptocapital-vs-cryptocommodities/index.html)

Interoperability of state and value is likely to place downward price pressure on layer-1 blockchains that have no monetary premium, while enabling strong [_middleware protocols_](https://twitter.com/cburniske/status/1022140822165352448) to achieve cross-chain, winner-takes-most dominance in their respective services. While not a perfect mapping to traditional use of the term _middleware,_ these protocols can be thought of as anything sitting just below the interface layer (i.e., the applications the end user interacts with), but leveraging the lower-level functionality provided by layer-1 blockchains and interoperability protocols.

[Read more](/content/blog/2019/2/14/the-defensibility-of-middleware-protocols/index.html)

Credit has greased economic wheels for millennia, and [Maker](https://makerdao.com/en/) is the world’s first 100% software-based, community owned and operated credit facility. As a family of smart contracts operating on Ethereum, the system offers secured loans of equal cost to anyone in the world. The by-product of loan generation is _dai_, a stablecoin collateralized using on-chain rules and assets.

[Read more](/content/blog/2019/1/23/maker-investment-thesis/index.html)

Joel was the first person that stuck the word _cryptoeconomy_ in my mind. It was mid-2017 and the idea struck me because most everyone was thinking about cryptonetwork valuations (most commonly ICOs) in the context of company valuations. Which is partially why they were considered so obscene.

What the crypto market vaguely understood, though could not fully articulate, is that the prices being paid were for emerging economies. Emerging economies using a protocol in place of the government, specializing in a single (digital) service, and capable of global scale from inception. The good ones, at least.

[Read more](https://medium.com/@cburniske/cryptonetworks-are-not-companies-a307ad6a61ae)

Humans have an innate desire to first understand, and secondly reason, about what they see in the world. We go from observing things (facts), to reasoning about those facts (theories), to then applying those theories back on present facts to predict future facts. This habit pattern explains the birth of religion. It also explains how we can expect quantitative models to be formed, evolved, and applied by cryptomarket participants in the years to come.

[Read more](https://medium.com/@cburniske/theory-follows-price-follows-theory-304ef97d1b71)

Thus far, cryptonetworks have used their native asset to entice early investment in their economies via two primary pathways:

- Minting to _supply-siders_ that install _productive capital_
- Selling to _investors_ that contribute _investment capital_

While _investment capital_ can ultimately be converted into _productive capital_, the two are not synonymous, and value doesn’t always make the leap from investment capital → productive capital. Sometimes investment capital can waste away on balance sheets like unused kindling. The question comes down to who is first prioritized, the _supply-side_ that installs the productive capital or the _investors_ that float the investment capital?

[Read more](https://medium.com/@cburniske/productive-capital-in-cryptonetworks-3bad74ad9bfb)

This week crypto has been afire with Nouriel news. After voicing my own disgust at Nouriel’s behavior, Chris King [responded](https://twitter.com/cjking711/status/1050495044476657666): _“He’s triggered and we’re triggered. No one really wins.”_

Chris is right. We’re all so triggered that conversation between the crypto-community and Nouriel has devolved into an intolerant pissing contest of insults, and such rhetoric between groups goes nowhere. We appear just as badly to Nouriel, as Nouriel appears to us.

I raise it as a reflection now, because a _rhetoric of intolerance_ is dangerously common in crypto.

[Read more](https://medium.com/@cburniske/the-nouriel-in-all-of-us-7ebef421a88)

**Decred** (DCR) is a cryptocurrency with [hybrid proof-of-work/proof-of-stake](https://docs.decred.org/research/hybrid-design/) consensus that enables on-chain governance. Its proof-of-work mining is similar to Bitcoin’s, except each block has to be approved by a randomly-selected group of users who “stake” their DCR. In addition to approving a block, these selected stakers can also vote on changes to Decred’s consensus protocol, allowing them to influence the long-term evolution of the network. This architecture creates a [fair system](https://docs.decred.org/getting-started/constitution/) of checks and balances between users, miners and developers.

Click through to read our thesis.

[Read more](/content/blog/2018/5/12/decred-investment-thesis/index.html)

“We hypothesize that crypto’s heightened reflexivity is driven by uncertainty and confusion around the early-stage technology, virality of communication mechanisms, lack of standardized valuation frameworks, regulatory paranoia, and majority retail participation. All of these characteristics are amplified by the liquid nature of this emerging asset class, which creates sub-second informational signals that violently feed back on themselves.”

[Read more](https://medium.com/@cburniske/cryptoassets-flow-amplification-reflexivity-7e306815dd8c)