nemild

The first wave of stablecoins isn't replacing fiat currency, but replacing money movement protocols.

Expect most teams to convert stablecoins once they receive it, but even then it's a cheap/fast money movement layer, especially globally. Even in US, cheaper and faster than wire.

(On the small team that helped create x402)

To start, it's great for micropayments globally. There are examples where you want an API once and not again, and you don't want to create an account or link a credit card.

Cloudflare was one of our earliest partners, and they saw a critical need for it for web scraping by AI.

Fast, cheap money movement globally (compared to wire or ACH in US).

At this phase, stablecoins are largely best for easy money movement, but the money ends up in fiat.

We are seeing some examples of teams using it for payouts, e.g., Gusto and Deel both support stablecoin payouts. Expect that to grow, but still very early days.

Agreed, and I don't think that's a bad thing.

To start, think that stablecoins are great for money movement, even if fiat is used on both sides. For example, Bridge (now part of Stripe) started with a stablecoin sandwich, where the stablecoin was just the money movement piece and both source and destination were fiat. That was cheaper and faster than the other ways to move money.

Answering this seriously.

Most goods today are denominated in fiat, so stablecoins are a better fit than gold.

And at this stage, stablecoins are great for easy money movement (rather than holding in crypto). I actually think most people won't even know that crypto rails have been used to move their money, with stablecoins like tcp/ip for money movement.

Beyond crypto teams, we're seeing increasing use cases for more teams to use stablecoins to pay. For example, both Gusto and Deel (YC teams) are using stablecoins to offer worldwide payouts.

Here's Gusto's CTO: https://x.com/edawerd/status/2018785968669815011

Think this is the future, as the AI Web takes over the human web.

At Coinbase, we've been building tools to make the blockchain the ideal payment rails for use cases like this with our x402 protocol:

https://www.x402.org/

Ping if you're interested in joining our open source community.

You're welcome to borrow my copy, feel free to ping me.

My dad was at this talk in 1986 that PG shares on his blog:

https://paulgraham.com/hamming.html

Said it was amazing.

I help lead the Coinbase Developer Platform team (https://cdp.coinbase.com/).

Our goal is to build crypto developer tools that bring millions of developers and billions of users into crypto (today, crypto has <50k active developers). If you're a developer, our job is to make it simple to build products, while providing the trust, scale, and usability that users depend on Coinbase on. Our teams work directly with our CEO (Brian Armstrong, YC S12).

We're looking for three sets of roles:

- Full stack engs for our Developer Platform Portal, Commerce, and Staking teams

   - You have a passion for crypto (even if you're new to the space)
   - You care deeply about developer experience (geeking out about things like SDK design)
   - We move at the pace of a startup, with value to full stack skillset, shipping fast, total ownership

- Senior Product Manager, ex-engineer, who has built API products before and written documentation

- Engineering Manager for our Commerce team ( https://commerce.coinbase.com/ ), help make onchain payments a reality

To apply, submit here:

Engineering Manager

https://www.coinbase.com/careers/positions/5962675

Developer

https://www.coinbase.com/careers/positions/5954018

https://www.coinbase.com/careers/positions/5961013

https://www.coinbase.com/careers/positions/5966589

Product Manager

https://www.coinbase.com/careers/positions/5479981

Coinbase (YC S12) | Remote (North America) | Full-time ==============================================

I help lead the Coinbase Developer Platform team (https://cdp.coinbase.com/).

Our goal is to build crypto developer tools that bring millions of developers and billions of users into crypto (today, crypto has <50k active developers). If you're a developer, our job is to make it simple to build products, while providing the trust, scale, and usability that users depend on Coinbase on. Our teams work directly with our CEO (Brian Armstrong, YC S12).

We're looking for three sets of roles:

- Full stack engs for our Developer Platform Portal, Commerce, and Staking teams

   - You have a passion for crypto (even if you're new to the space)
   - You care deeply about developer experience (geeking out about things like SDK design)
   - We move at the pace of a startup, with value to full stack skillset, shipping fast, total ownership

- Senior Product Manager, ex-engineer, who has built API products before and written documentation

- Engineering Manager for our Commerce team ( https://commerce.coinbase.com/ ), help make onchain payments a reality

To apply, submit here:

Engineering Manager

https://www.coinbase.com/careers/positions/5962675

Developer

https://www.coinbase.com/careers/positions/5954018

https://www.coinbase.com/careers/positions/5961013

https://www.coinbase.com/careers/positions/5966589

Product Manager

https://www.coinbase.com/careers/positions/5479981

> A number of transactions looked enormous but turned out to be some form of washing e.g address X sends $100MM worth of bitcoin to two addresses, with ~$1k going to address Y and the rest going right back to address X.

Bitcoin is based on the UTXO model, and requires the full amount of an input to be sent. For example, I might need to transact 20 bitcoin even if I only need to pay 1 bitcoin, with 19 bitcoin being transacted to a "change" address.

More by googling Bitcoin change addresses: e.g., https://support.blockchain.com/hc/en-us/articles/44170823927...

On a related note, a few years ago, I went through an entire year of top headlines in the New York Times (top few pages), and mapped them against actual death rates:

https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html

It's obvious that these would be different, but it was especially glaring just how much we focused on intentional deaths in our media coverage. It also makes sense that this is newsworthy (aka profitable), but it leads to some terrible inferences and decisions if that's all we see.

One more to add is Reddit's Personal Finance, where this question gets asked a lot. The wiki (second link, search for Windfall) esp has a number of great articles on topics like this.

https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/

https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/index

Great point. Would you argue the media landscape is the way it is due to incentives these select organizations face or the monopolistic nature of these companies?

Separately, you note the high concentration of media creation, but don't speak to the even higher concentration of media distribution (e.g., social media), which likely has its own influence on what is created.

It depends on what "diverse" means to you. I would say that Scientific American isn't the same as a partisan news channel.

But to the degree that an ad driven model and social media is the primary way news distribution happens, media incentives are monolithic for media organizations.

On a discursive note, if you are interested in media incentives, "All the News That's Fit to Sell" is a great book that goes into media incentives in previous eras. When the economies of scale for printing presses went up, media naturally became more centrist and less alarmist because a single paper had to appeal to a larger audience. It gives you a sense for the power of incentives in dictating what media is created/distributed.

Two observations:

1. There isn't a single media (often, when your tribe is against another, you view the opposition as monolithic rather than a spectrum composed of different viewpoints)

2. And they're not insane, editors and social media algorithms are rational and reacting to reader incentives (but it is "insane" to mistake media sources for a rational human, because most media is about covering extreme events[1])

More in my media literacy guide:

https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README....

[1] The deaths that are most covered are a tiny fraction (<1%) of the way we die https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html

This last came up for OSS and Slack (e.g., "Please don't use Slack for FOSS")[1][2].

I took some time to reflect on why OSS wasn't the default for these messaging tools, rather than proprietary alternatives — and what it would take to make more users use OSS alternatives:

> As Slack has continued to grow, open source developers have had lengthy debates about using it rather than IRC. For some, the fact that Slack is closed source and a walled garden makes it unsuitable when building projects that are open.

> I’ll take a different approach: in the age of software, why is open software not more competitive for many products used by non-engineers and what can be done?

What Open Source Can Learn From Slack

https://www.nemil.com/musings/oss-and-slack.html

-------

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486541

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11013136

I've been writing a series called Notes to a Young Software Engineer, and handling burnout was one of my first posts.

Most importantly, see a licensed medical professional. Burnout is often confused for other health issues, and you may not be dealing with burnout, but rather a larger health issue (e.g., PTSD).

If it is truly burnout, some that work for me are treating my body well, cultivating human relationships, and addressing root causes at work.

https://www.nemil.com/on-software-engineering/beware-burnout...

A common argument (that you also make) is that if you're on the inside, you obviously know better than those on the outside. There's a lot of reasons to believe that isn't true.

First, you may not have the right training (e.g., media studies, media economics, privacy). Second, you favor your coworkers because they are your friends. Third, the positive news and justified criticism of external critics is widely shared internally, but the points that are appropriately critical are much less shared. A single flawed external article can lead to defensiveness, making it that much easier to dismiss tens of other appropriate articles.

More poetically, it's like the Three Blind Men and elephant. The conviction of the blind men is so great, but their closeness leads to a misplaced confidence that they know the answer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant

I call this effect the "truth distortion field," and liken it to the Facebook friend filter bubble:

https://www.nemil.com/tdf/part1-employees.html

Compared to credit cards:

- Bitcoin doesn't have chargebacks

- Bitcoin's base protocol transaction throughput is low

- There is a fixed cost per transaction (credit cards have low marginal costs for the credit card processor, and variable, percentage-based fees)

I'm doubtful that most journalists actually want it to be that way. Those are just the economic and reader incentives in journalism today.

There are some great stats about just how much the number of professional journalists has shrunk in the social media era.

One of the scariest quotes for me was Facebook's Little Red Book in 2012 (a book handed out to every employee) that had this quote:

> "When everyone has a printing press [i.e., Facebook], the ones with the best ideas are the ones people listen to."

In retrospect, it gives a ton of insight into the flawed beliefs within the company.

https://twitter.com/nemild/status/1006533287378968576

https://www.businessinsider.com/inside-facebooks-little-red-...

More in this post too:

https://vicki.substack.com/p/keybase-and-the-chaos-of-crypto

> All of a sudden, I started receiving lots of random messages from people without profile pictures.

> These were people I didn’t know contacting me on a pretty frequent basis, and I had no way to opt-in to their messages. Pretty ironic for a platform built on privacy.

> I wasn’t the only one. After asking around, it seems that everyone I knew on Keybase was getting these. But of course, women with female names and profile pictures got a lot more than most men I knew. Other women online were experiencing it, too.

I dealt with burnout as a startup founder and wrote out my thoughts:

https://www.nemil.com/on-software-engineering/beware-burnout...

Each burnout situation is different, and happy to chat (my contact info is in my profile). One recommendation: don’t make any decisions without taking some time to get yourself back into a good headspace. I was terrible with making decisions when I was burnt out.

Words like this drive engagement. Many journalists also don't have statistical training.

I wrote a financial media literacy guide for precisely this reason:

> Extreme Language: Articles use extreme language to represent price movements, as these engage readers (e.g., meltdown, bloodbath, crash, massacre, topple), but are often statistically suspect

https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/financi...

Some other good notes in this article:

Context Matters. The Stock Market Drop Is Less Scary Than It Seems.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/upshot/context-matters-th...

One caveat I would make: it is often over-generalized to then dismiss all media on a topic, especially when readers have some limited knowledge of the topic at hand.

Always value contributors to my media literacy guide. This message is a key point that underpins all the examples I list.

https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README....

There's also one for engineers in the tech industry:

https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/softwar...

No it's not between two trusted parties. If those parties disagree, they have recourse to the blockchain, and so don't have to fully trust each other.

The lightning network couldn't be built without having a lower level trustless party. Bitcoin actually lets us bootstrap trust.

More thoughts on bootstrapping trust:

https://www.nemil.com/crypto/why-cryptocontracts-matter.html

For those interested, Morning Pages are pretty great as well (3 pages each morning of quick, freeform writing):

https://www.chriswinfield.com/morning-pages/