tl;dr: open-source, economically incentivized networks are better suited for evolution than closed sourced, economically captured networks.
As part of my deep dives into memes (for more, see yesterday’s post), I watched Susan Blackmore’s TED talk on “Memes and Temes.”
The image above (thumbnail for the video) frames the conversation thusly:
The Meme Battle for Survival
Imagine that the world is just full of brains, surrounded by memes that are trying to get into them in order to find a host and replicate-the evolutionary purpose of the meme.
However, there are more memes than there are space in most brains, so many of the memes die out. Some manage to get into a host brain and live. Others are even more successful and are able to leverage the host brain as a jumping off point into other brains.
There’s probably a whole riff we could go on here in terms of “influencer marketing” but I’ve discussed that ad nauseum .
The most successful memes, though, are the ones that are most suited for evolution per Darwin. Here’s a screenshot of the “money slide” from her presentation
Aside from proving that you don’t always need great design to prove your point, the slide reminds us of the fundamental characteristics for long-term success and survivability.
Which brings us to my passion, cryptoeconomic networks.
The Pace of Crypto-Economic Evolution
As of this writing, there’s almost $11bn locked in various DeFi protocols and I’m betting that this is just the very beginning.
And that’s because the pace of innovation is just insane.
I touched on this in Fork Defense and Marketing Lessons as well as in The Good Governance Premium and will highlight Ian Lee’s quote again here:
Forks take the code of a parent protocol and redeploy it, sometimes with tweaks. A fork might add a token, target a new market, or change investor allocations.
source
And sometimes a fork is just an attempt to cash out on someone else’s work…
but it was only after watching Blackmore’s talk that it started to click for me.
Crypto Networks are Better Suited for Innovation
A “fork” of a crypto protocol is a variation of something that has already been deployed and tested and adopted, which means it has heredity.
As people move their value around with near frictionless effort (save the gas fee issue) in the “Great Liquidity Unlocking,” we see the process of selection taking place, as we saw during the SushiSwap experience.
According to Blackmore, the inevitable result is evolution.
Whereas private/closed-source software like Facebook’s will evolve at a pace that is limited by the number of employees at Facebook who can touch it, crypto economic protocol evolution is limited only by the number of developers who want to look at the code and “fork” it.
Therefore, a natural selection (as driven by developers) will occur as they choose the code/cryptoeconomic design that is most appealing to them (which is in and of itself a meme), based on its past success and appeal, and then variate on it.
All of this just happens faster because each crypto meme (e.g. Uniswap or Bitcoin or Ethereum) is viewed by more people sooner.
So evolution happens faster.
And the software that evolves faster is going to win.
We’re still early in this, but closed-source software may end up being the neanderthals to crypto’s sapiens.
