10 Powerful Quotes From the Book: "Zero to One"

By Peter Thiel

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1. “Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.”
2. “Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule,”
3. “The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete.”
4. “If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution.”
5. “A product is viral if its core functionality encourages users to invite their friends to become users too.”
6. “The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.”
7. “Sometimes you do have to fight. Where that’s true, you should fight and win.”
8. “the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places,”
9. “Ralph Waldo Emerson captured this ethos when he wrote: “Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances…. Strong men believe in cause and effect.”
10. “you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.”
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Viruses and other pathogens are often studied as stand-alone entities, despite that, in nature, they mostly live in multispecies associations called biofilms—both externally and within the host.

https://t.co/FBfXhUrH5d


Microorganisms in biofilms are enclosed by an extracellular matrix that confers protection and improves survival. Previous studies have shown that viruses can secondarily colonize preexisting biofilms, and viral biofilms have also been described.


...we raise the perspective that CoVs can persistently infect bats due to their association with biofilm structures. This phenomenon potentially provides an optimal environment for nonpathogenic & well-adapted viruses to interact with the host, as well as for viral recombination.


Biofilms can also enhance virion viability in extracellular environments, such as on fomites and in aquatic sediments, allowing viral persistence and dissemination.
So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.