Yesterday, Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, outlined several of the ideas in his sketchbook he did not have time to build upon. Which is hilarious to think about, especially when we're talking about a man with a net worth of 3.5 Billion hiring talent to implement those ideas for him. He doesn't need to invest time anymore. I guess it'd be a huge endeavor because many of these ideas are scattershot, and don't ramp up to achieve a certain purpose or connection. Lucky for him, he won't have to scout for talent, most of his ideas are already on Hive.
1/ I'm sharing the 10 ideas I'm most excited about in crypto right now. If you're building something in crypto or thinking about doing so - check it out.
— Brian Armstrong 🛡️ (
We’re building lots at Coinbase, but we don't have time to tackle everything. So I figured I'd share these. Bear markets are… pic.twitter.com/XKzCkMaOOT_armstrong) August 30, 2023
So what's he thinking of?
Flatcoins
One of the ideas he's proposing is an algorithmic flatcoin, essentially a stablecoin, that tracks and adjusts its purchasing power according to the inflation of the U.S Dollar, as well as be backed with assets underneath it that is also completely decentralized.
For starters, a stablecoin that not only has to stabilize itself meticulously around the $1.001-0.999 tightrope, but preserve its purchasing power as well sounds like a nightmare to keep from collapsing. If this flatcoin was around just days before the pandemic, then its holders would've made a killing selling in exchange for the assets underneath it. In holding a flatcoin, you are basically gambling against the CPI, and by extension, any catastrophic event that would lead the CPI to increase in the first place.
Not to mention the attack vector tracking the CPI through an oracle could present. Hell, even the word Oracle is enough to give me flashback of the DeFi hacks. Streaming off-chain data on-chain is a big no-no in my book. We don't have any guarantees that the source isn't gonna spaz out and give us false information that's critical to the well being of basically the entire blockchain. We aren't about to introduce this silly sort of risk in here.
HBD is the closest equivalent to this hellish contraption. Its decentralized, algorithmic and kept stable by the stabilizer, backed by HIVE and thriving with an (currently) industry-leading %20 APR. Yeah, that idea is a pass for me.
On-chain reputation
It's actually scary to think that he isn't basically talking about hive the longer I watch his presentation. He could slap the hive logo on there and he wouldn't have to change much about his ideas.
This one is pretty obvious. A reputation score that gradually becomes harder to increase as your rep grows. This score is a distilled tally of all your positive activities on-chain, in our case being the upvotes and downvotes received.
This is essential to any social media platform. Aside from fraud prevention, it broadcasts to others how trustworthy you are in whatever it is that you do. Brian doesn't posit anything new that we don't already have on-chain
On-chain capital formation
He's talking about perhaps the most difficult of the bunch to implement: The DHF. And I really think we've created the most democratized, Vox Populi-style funding process ever. Much more than Brian probably imagined, as he proposed there being individual investors roaming around the community.
The DHF really is the 8th wonder of the world. Here is a truly fair process, in which the voice of the people is the heart of, that dictates whether a proposal is funded or not. You get the idea: We ultimately adjudicate where value in the chain is directed and built.
On-chain ads
While this sounds like an element we deprecated away in the move to Web3, there is no denying that independent business are going to be built upon the blockchain, especially the frictionless/feeless ones like Hive. Therefore, there's gonna be a huge demand for ad space around frontends. Some, like Leofinance, have already used traditional Web2 ad networks in order to distribute dividends to the LEO stakers. But we're talking about Web3 here, right?
The problem is that we aren't at that stage yet, technically speaking. I envision an ads network that is built on smart contracts (which, by the way, are still a WIP on Hive!) that pays out to frontends by meeting certain criteria. Tracking those criteria metrics would also mean the ad network smart contracts would need to track payments made to the store owner and pay the frontend accordingly. This is just one way of doing things in a decentralized manner.
For now though, we have something akin to an ad: promoted posts. You could spend a little to get to the top of the page
As I write this, Keychain has just released their Keychain Store app. This is a great step towards presenting Hive as a payment processor, especially to digital product stores looking for feeless solutions. Pretty exciting.
Private L2 Transactions
This is a controversial one. Transparency is at the heart of the crypto-anarchist. Meaning, in any given transaction, the address/name of the sender, recipient, funds and timestamps are all known to the public. There is a paper trail to anything taking place on the blockchain readily available to anyone to view. This is particularly the case for Hive and more: comments, articles, upvotes and downvotes, claiming rewards, you get the idea. No one can hide.
Ideological significance aside, what Brian is positing here may be possible to execute, but not on an on-chain level. Both sides of the transaction must be known and declared publicly. It's called a public ledger for a reason, right? The only to obfuscate both sides is through the use of mixer services, where the funds are pooled together, distributed to hundreds of addresses then sent to their rightful owner on another untainted address, essentially obfuscating the paper-trail.
Does that ring a bell? That's money laundering!
On-chain games
Splinterlands. I spoke about on-chain games in great length as to why most of them are copy cats of each other here. TLDR is that the GameFi field is in dire need of a renaissance. It's too reliant on aspects of luck more than work and effort.
Conclusion
To sum it all up, somebody should just call up Brain and pitch him in on Hive. We tick all important boxes he's looking for. In fact, I'm pretty confident that we are the only chain that tick the most boxes compared to the comments on the tweet. We've come a long way since we forked away from Steem, and everyone around us seems to describe in exact details what Hive is really made of without knowing what Hive is.
What's more bullish than that?