joshmarlow

I bet this was fun to think about and build. Thank you for sharing!

The ultimate goal of tokenized stocks is that the token is a share - just represented on the public blockchain instead of in the databases of companies like Fidelity. So in this respect, it's just changing the record keeping system. We're not quite there yet, but that's the vision.

Why would you do this? Current stock trading often takes a day or so to actually settle - you execute a buy but it doesn't settle immediately. There is room for leverage and counter-party risk to live in that gap.

Tokenized stocks (or any asset) is building towards atomic on-chain settlement - you have stock in MSFT, I have stablecoins, we perform an atomic transfer where you send me MSF and I send you stablecoins. This speeds up the system and eliminates counterparty risk. We each must have the asset ready to trade at this point in time.

The benefit is faster settlement, not keeping capital locked up because of long settlement times and decreasing the space where leverage and counter-party risk can live.

Longer term - this potentially means it could be easier for non-US parties to buy US stocks. I can put my savings in the stock market, but a farmer in a developing country cannot. But with tokenized shares, they could invest in US equities - or even a fraction of a US equity if they cannot afford a full share. So this longer term vision could democratize global access to capital markets.

Yeah I agree that monetization seems hard here. But one niche that might work - tons of people are using LLMs to build out side projects and keeping tickets in the same repo as the project could be really frictionless for LLMs to reach for without an MCP server.

Don't sell to developers for their day jobs, but sell to developers for their hobbies.

I've been thinking for a while that something like this could be a solution for the suboptimal UX in the digital assets space.

Imagine a very small LLM embedded into a MetaMask equivalent where you just specify the task you want to do - ie, "I want to send USDT on mainnet", "I want to import the token at address 0x..." - and the wallet assembles the UX for this task for the human to execute.

"End to end ownership is the job."

This is an incredibly good and concise articulation of where the role is going. Thank you.

I would not advocate nationalization of any operations - I think the free market will run the data centers better in general.

I'm only suggesting (eventual) negotiations between countries and automated corporations - to operate here, you contribute equity.

I don't understand why this got downvotes - simply extrapolating current trends leads to the need to answer all of these questions.

My own $0.02 on the economics piece - every country should have a sovereign wealth fund. Governments should block market access from automated[0] companies until those companies provide equity contributions to the wealth fund for that country. This aligns regulator and corporate interests. Dividends flow into the sovereign wealth funds and then can be allocated locally from there - UBI, job programs, etc. Let different jurisdictions explore different ways to structure a post-labor society.

On the broader social front - I think a lot of lack of meaning discussion boils down to the overemphasis we have on your job as your self-worth. We need to realign our societal expectations - and people need to spend more time with their families.

[0] for this to work, I think we would need well accepted metrics for 'how automated' a company is - and that probably needs a 3rd party auditing industry.

I've often thought that s-expression diff-viewers would be very nice tooling. I've also often wondered how easy it would be to just sling s-expressions across the wire to execute in another environment. What would modern infrastructure look like if you could just have lambdas running lambdas?

I've often wondered how viable it is to use AI to fill out the ecosystem gaps in awesome but niche languages (still looking at you OCaml...).

I've not gone too deep down this train of thought because a standard library/ecosystem should be solid and I don't think LLMs are quite there... but if we can use LLMs+Lean maybe we can get the quality we need to bootstrap more of the Lean ecosystem?

A couple of years ago I listened to a Lex Fridman podcast with a researcher at the MIT Media Lab. I don't know the status of it, but the researcher spoke about how people in developing countries were experimenting with using local resources as 3D printer feedstock - things like ground-up sea shells - as a way of using local supply lines.

One of the most interesting things he said was that the current waste from 3D printing (and other technology) is really a sign of technical immaturity; nature repurposes everything - there is no trash in an ecosystem, only food for something else. Maybe we'll eventually learn to build infrastructure like that.

That makes sense and had never occurred to me!

I just asked and Claude says it's Haiku.

Absolutely the same. Now that Fable is back, the Claude voice interface is... worth dealing with. The app mostly seems to have trouble recovering from networking issues which is jarring in a deep conversation.

I'm so mad that this might make me re-subscribe to ChatGPT. I wouldn't have believed how much I use the voice feature before LLMs and ChatGPT currently has the best voice interface. I think Grok's interface is the next best, then Claude.