In my recent post on the differences between layer 1 and layer 2 scaling, I ended up roughly coming to the conclusion that the most important differences between the two approaches are not technical but organizational (using the word in a similar sense to the field of "industrial organization"): it's not about what can get built, but what will get built, because of how the lines between different parts of the ecosystem are drawn and how that affects people's incentives and ability to act. In particular, a layer-2-centric ecosystem is inherently much more pluralistic, and more naturally leads to a greater diversity of different approaches to scaling, virtual machine design, and other technological features.

One of the points that I made in my post two and half years ago on "the Endgame" is that the different future development paths for a blockchain, at least technologically, look surprisingly similar.

In Ethereum, resources were up until recently limited, and priced, using a single resource called "gas". Gas is a measure of the amount of "computational effort" needed to process a given transaction or block. Gas merges together multiple types of "effort", most notably:

Ten years ago, two weeks before the Ethereum project was publicly announced, I published this post on Bitcoin magazine arguing that issuing coins could be a new way to fund important public projects. The thinking went: society needs ways to fund valuable large-scale projects, markets and institutions (both corporations and governments) are the main techniques that we have today, and both work in some cases and fail in others. Issuing new coins seems like a third class of large-scale funding technology, and it seems different enough from both markets and institutions that it would succeed and fail in different places - and so it could fill in some important gaps.

On July 4, Balaji Srinivasan released the first version of his long-awaited new book describing his vision for "network states": communities organized around a particular vision of how to run their own society that start off as online clubs, but then build up more and more of a presence over time and eventually become large enough to seek political autonomy or even diplomatic recognition.