Coconut Report 18

status

Utah, US

A “black lives matter” protest happened in Provo this Saturday.

We saw a group of people around age 20 pass by our windows, with the handwritten signs of “black lives matter.” It was my first time being so close to a protest, and I was curious.

People were quiet and polite, and the protest was peaceful. When we left, we saw a guy with a “white lives matter” sign joining in the crowd.

This week I read a bunch of whitepapers from stablecoin projects – I love reading papers!

By reading research papers on economics and stablecoin projects, and their references, I learned the basic concepts. By moving one step further, to understand logic based on those concepts, I am slowly developing a mental model for the topic I am learning.

I will dive deeper and generate insights from notes and practice.

Other than learning about stablecoins, I read more books than last week.

I feel a need to train and expand my memory, for which I learned new note-taking and management tools (see Tools learned). Those tools build a wiki-like knowledge network based on note-taking, with keyword connections and relative links. That helps writing on specific topics, for example, academic research.

Recommend a quick read on the roam theory: A Brief Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method, and I plan to use Emacs org-roam to implement my wiki-network ;)

Built

  • Notes on stablecoins
  • Rust trending bot run
  • Libra run
    • Follow Libra doc
    • Libra’s documentation is really well written. I didn’t meet any problem while testing it, which was a different experience from most of other blockchain docs.
  • Cocoverse: Rules of Walking draft
  • English notes

Tools learned

Readings

Books read

Papers

Posts

As adoption increases, individuals may not store large amounts of wealth on a stable token but instead “use” it as a utility. Whales still dominate both DeFi and dApps. If an app or utility is unlikely to capture them early on in their growth cycle - they may likely not see much traction due to the small market that crypto today holds DAI does have a higher average transaction per month count due to the fact that it is used for use-cases other than exchanging alone.

It’s worth noting that virtually all reputable stablecoins are based on Ethereum. While this may not seem like a huge issue in the short term, interoperability will likely play a huge role in the eventual success of blockchain-based systems at large. To this point, it’s important for existing stablecoin projects to embrace new emerging protocols with open arms.

A common pattern is to begin a piece with a problem or a mystery or a promise. Resolving the problem or mystery or fulfilling the promise is what defines the purpose of the piece. Of course, your writing may take the reader on a journey, gradually refining (and perhaps redefining) the purpose. But it nonetheless remains with the reader and the author. “Destroy the One Ring” is our obsession in The Lord of the Rings. The problem confronted in Where Do Good Ideas Come From? needs no elaboration. The Language Instinct promises to explore the idea that much of the structure of language is innate to our brains, not learned. Each book focuses relentlessly on its purpose.

There are several elements to it: (1) Primary note-taking; (2) Queueing; (3) Refactoring and organization. You need to get good at all.

Read the abstract (if provided)

Read the introduction.

Read the conclusion.

Skim the middle, looking at section titles, tables, figures, etc.—try to get a feel for the style and flow of the article.

Is it methodological, conceptual, theoretical (verbal or mathematical), empirical, or something else?

Is it primarily a survey, a novel theoretical contribution, an empirical application of an existing theory or technique, a critique, or something else?

Go back and read the whole thing quickly, skipping equations, most figures and tables.

Go back and read the whole thing carefully, focusing on the sections or areas that seem most important. Once you’ve grasped the basic argument the author is trying to make, critique it!

Fun