simondlr #17 - Firms Orbiting Firms

In celestial physics, there exist the concept of the “Roche Limit”: the point at which an orbiting object starts to disintegrate due to its own tidal forces as it approaches a nearby, larger object. I found this to be an interesting idea, and wondered whether this could translate to firms. In this article, I transpose the Celestial Roche Limit, and derive a first pass at Economic Roche Limit: when firms should absorb other firms. Enjoy!

https://blog.simondlr.com/posts/economic-roche-limit

A reader, Kenny Peluso, left a great comment on doing more research on this concept, including reading up on Cesar Hidalgo’s work. Thank you Kenny!

Life News

As with several billion others, I’ve been in quarantine/lockdown for several weeks now. I’ve been alone, working from my apartment. It has given me time to do some work, which includes starting the process of setting up a US company to formalise more of my work, and continue experimentation. I will share more of this soon! Still somewhat under wraps.

Book(s)!

Secondly, I’ve given my novel (“Hope Runners of Gridlock”) to a handful of BETA readers and have gotten excellent feedback thus far! I’m extremely grateful that others have taken the time to read the novel. I’ve been busy taking in this feedback and revising the book. I’m quite happy with the changes, and where it’s going. That being said, I think what’s interesting about this process is just how long something like this can take. This is especially the case for doing something like this, the first time round. I’ve run straight into dead-ends that I won’t run into again. I’m learning a lot. After this revision, I likely won’t be doing another big revision and will be sending it an editor. If you know or can recommend sci-fi/cyberpunk editors, please let me know!

Why, ‘books’ you ask? For a long while, I’ve been meaning to collect a bunch of my essays and compile it into a more readable format, along with updated commentary and background. This would be for essays from 2014-2020: six years of content. Instead of fumbling around online, on blogs, it fits more into a compendium of essays on blockchains, economics, and life. I’ve started with this project too, and hope to have a decent attempt done before the world goes back to normal.

This Artwork Is (Still) Always On Sale

On 21 March, my art project, This Artwork Is Always On Sale, has officially been on always-on-sale for more than a year, netting me 15.5 ETH as the artist. Happy to see that it worked, and is still working!

Links!

Balancer Is Live!

Balancer continues innovation in the automated-market-maker space. Great team, and they just launched. Go check it out.

Emergents Alpha

Probably one of the more exciting use-cases of bonding curves I’ve seen. As proposed: cards (each type) is on a bonding curve, which directly cause its value to rise based on its usefulness in the game. They are heading into alpha!

Endangered Animals And Radical Economics

Megan Doyle interviewed JonJon Clark on Wildcards, one of my favourite projects in the ecosystem (using Harberger Tax to support wild animals).

Crypto Business Models

Jesse Walden is one of my favourite writers in this space. He penned down a simple article explaining the benefits of crypto business models.

DHTs: From Kademlia to Discv5

Distributed Hash Tables are fascinating data structures. Dean Eigenmann gave a techinical tour on DHTs and how they are used in Ethereum. He writes great articles on distributed systems, and cryptography. Give his newsletter a subscribe!

Thank you for reading friends! For those who can afford to see a sunset during this pandemic, I hope you do. It’s kept me sane. Just like every sunset, it will soon pass.

Cheers!

Simon