Best of davidphelps.substack.com on Kiwi News
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9 stories from davidphelps.substack.com have been shared on Kiwi News since 17 July 2023, with 34 upvotes and 4 comments in total. The latest was shared on 21 July 2025. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- The Social App Thesis
The author describes "The Social App Thesis," a sequel to "The Proto-App Thesis," arguing that apps will win by operating as social apps. The piece contends that financial capital and social capital are inversely correlated, so wealth cannot easily buy status, and that financial incentives tend to fail at retention, which the author says explains why many Web3 social apps have failed. It argues that Web2 monetized social behavior while its users did not, whereas blockchains let users monetize directly from other users. The excerpt ends mid-argument, before the author's discussion of zero-sum financial incentives.
- Persuasion Markets: A Manifesto
Persuasion markets, where people earn rewards for registering subjective opinions, are presented as a way for crypto to move beyond speculation and social hype toward conviction. Unlike prediction markets, they resolve onchain without oracles and can self-fund from participants' votes. JokeRace's Conviction Markets sell votes at a price that rises exponentially every minute, pool the funds for voters who backed the winner after a 10% platform fee, and let contest creators seed the pool.
- the-proto-app-thesis
The next wave of major social apps will look like protocols, or "proto-apps," and ChatGPT is presented as the first major app in nearly a decade because it is an example of this new category. The Social App Thesis holds that the main social categories are held by incumbents whose distributional network effects are too strong to challenge. ChatGPT launched as a web app rather than a mobile app, which carries a 30% app store commission, and it is horizontal, with no set use case.
- Against Scarcity
Virtual worlds and NFT platforms largely replicate the scarcity economics of physical land, even though digital goods can be copied without limit. Decentraland's 90,000 land parcels go to the highest bidders, and Upland sells map squares of a simulated New York Stock Exchange for $23,000, so what is called decentralization mainly shifts power to wealthy buyers. Roblox, by contrast, gives users free land and building tools but leaves creators to impose artificial scarcity by charging for access. Drawing on Murray Bookchin's 1971 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, it asks what an online economy without artificial scarcity would look like while still rewarding contributors.
- The Fat App Thesis
Writer argues that for the first time in crypto history apps, not protocols, will capture the most value, reversing the "Fat Protocol Thesis" that Joel Monegro published in 2016. The author cites 2024 as the year apps such as Polymarket, Pump.fun, Hyperliquid, Virtuals and ai16z were the winners, and says many protocols have gained hype mainly from the ways they support apps. The argument rests on three reasons: historical cycles, the fact that apps now have user moats while chains are largely interchangeable, and users gathering where other users spend time through apps.
- Cosmic Timing
The essay argues that blockchain builders' focus on technical parity with legacy finance has left them with little work on the political structures and imagination that could give web3 reasons to exist. The author says crypto's greatest current threat is ideological rather than technical, pointing to centralization across cloud providers, MEV, governance, liquidity, and sequencers, which he says undermines promised economic benefits to users. He also argues that web3 apps copying web2 products are a "doomed enterprise," and that the industry's biggest crisis is now irrelevance, a "crisis of imagination."
- The Social App Thesis
The Social App Thesis, a sequel to the author's Proto-App Thesis, argues that apps will win by operating as social apps. It contends that social incentives outweigh financial ones for most people, and that Web3 social apps often failed by assuming financial incentives could build retention and that people could buy status. The piece says Web2 monetized social behavior through closed-data advertising, while blockchains let users monetize directly from other users and replace ads with tokenization.
- Apple is a State
Apple has become the first state on the internet because of its closed architecture, not despite it. Drawing on James C. Scott's definition of a state, Apple is described as a fiefdom that takes fees from developers and users. Li Jin, Nathan Baschez and Yash Bagal list grievances including a 30% cut and payments capped at $999, while Matthew Ball estimates that on $100 of revenue Roblox loses $25 and Apple makes $30. Ben Thompson argues that Apple's App Store policies are anti-competitive, and similar complaints about closed architecture appear in a 1985 Cider Press note and in a 2011 remark by Peter Cripps.
- The Internet as religion
Sara Issakharian argues that the internet functions as a religion, one in which users pretend to be gods, shape their own moral codes, and worship and trivialize figures in equal measure. She describes losing her faith at 15 during an AOL Instant Messenger chat, when she answered "me neither" to a crush's question about believing in God. Drawing on the link between games and religion, she frames crypto and NFTs as internet-native religions, and she suggests the internet's polytheism may reflect a deeper human need to believe in multiple authorities at once.