Skip to content

Guest Talk with Chris Dixon | Read, Write, Own

TalkChris Dixon
researcherpractitioner
Guest Talk with Chris Dixon | Read, Write, Own
Open resource →

Chris Dixon discusses his book Read, Write, Own with Venkatesh Rao, arguing that blockchains represent a third type of network architecture—alongside 'protocol networks' (like HTTP/RSS) and 'corporate networks' (like Facebook)—that combines the societal benefits of open protocols with the competitive funding advantages of corporate platforms. He uses an extended city metaphor (public/private balance, logical vs. organizational decentralization) to explain why Web1 protocols stagnated due to lack of funding mechanisms, while blockchain networks like Ethereum and Farcaster enable 'composability' and persistent user ownership without centralized platform risk.

Topics

city-metaphor-for-decentralized-network-governancecomposability-and-platform-risk-cant-be-evildigital-ownership-as-the-own-in-read-write-owngovernanceguest-talksprotocol-networks-vs-corporate-networks-vs-blockchain-networksprotocolstechnologyvalue-creation-vs-value-capture-and-token-design

Related resources

Talk

Guest Talk with Benjamin Funk | Crypto-Powered Information Games

Benjamin Funk, an analyst at crypto VC firm Archetype, presents a framework for analyzing the 'information supply chain' and argues that surveillance capitalism persists because we lack protocols that work backward from what information consumers (governing bodies, businesses, individuals) actually need to make good decisions. He critiques existing crypto decision-making mechanisms—EigenLayer's token (good for intersubjective faults but not subjective predictions), Optimism's retroactive public goods funding (centralized preference function), and MetaDAO's futarchy (fails to surface surprising information and suffers from reflexivity)—while highlighting the Negation Game as a promising model that incentivizes surfacing consequential and surprising information through self-slashing stakes.

Benjamin Funk

Talk

Guest Talk with Daniel Bashir | A Survey of AI for the Protocol-Minded

Daniel Bashir, ML engineer at AWS and host of The Gradient podcast, surveys how protocol thinking applies across AI—from funding and scaling laws (like DeepMind's Chinchilla compute-optimal training protocol) to benchmarks (perplexity vs. François Chollet's ARC benchmark for measuring sample-efficient generalization) to regulation (the EU AI Act's risk-tiered categorization). He argues that nearly every layer of AI development—research, engineering, deployment, and governance—can be reframed as a set of competing or evolving protocols, using examples like Sarah Hooker's 'hardware lottery' and Tolga Bolukbasi-style debates over fair/responsible AI operationalization.

Daniel Bashir

Talk

Guest Talk with Varun Srinivasan | Technology & Architecture

Varun Srinivasan, CTO and co-founder of Farcaster, discusses the architecture of Farcaster and its commercial client Warpcast, tracing his path from Coinbase to building a decentralized social protocol. He details the concept of 'sufficient decentralization' (the test that two users must always be able to communicate even if the rest of the network tries to stop them), explains why Farcaster pivoted from a Federated model to a hybrid blockchain-identity approach, and describes how the 'Frames' feature emerged by extending the Open Graph protocol to embed interactive mini-apps directly in the social feed.

Varun Srinivasan