The Tortoise Wins the Race

Vol #54 - October 1, 2021

Since the days of Aesop we’ve struggled with the balance between zeal and effectiveness.

 In his classic tale of the race between the tortoise and the hare, the tortoise challenges the hare to a race because he is tired of being mocked for his slow moving ways. The hare is so confident he’ll win, that he takes a nap midway through the race, only to wake up and find the tortoise crossing the finish line. 

The classical interpretation here is that even good natural abilities can be ruined by idleness, and that zeal and perseverance will ultimately win the day. Aphorisms like “the more haste the worse speed”  also stem from the story.

As the fable has been passed down over the centuries, our interpretations have evolved. One 19th century interpretation creates an imaginary post-script, where shortly  after the tortoise emerges victorious a great fire engulfs the forest. In order to alert their fellow animals, a messenger is sent - the race winning tortoise.

There’s no true answer to which character traits are most virtuous. Different situations call for different skills. That said, most people would be hard pressed to justify the laziness of the hare. 

Yet according to Larry Wild, the author of the Perl programming language, laziness is one of the three virtues of a great programmer. Hubris and impatience are the other two, so he was very much trying to invert the list of capital sins. 

The laziness of a programmer manifests itself because she will go to great lengths to reduce overall energy expenditure. Necessity is the mother of invention, and what drives an engineer to create a solution is the sloth of not wanting to waste more time on the same solvable problem. 

In addition to building an effective program that saves time, this laziness also encourages the developer to document well what they have produced. If anyone else is to use the program, they will necessarily have questions, and clear documentation obviates the need to respond to every single one. 

While we often praise the diligent and hard working tortoises, sometimes our most basic instincts drive superior outcomes. Finding ways not to work, can actually produce better results. 

The world of digital assets is being built by lazy engineers. New forms of money, gaming, and socialization are being created every day by people who see opportunities and inefficiencies in traditional constructs. 

One of the most significant developments in the world of decentralized finance is the creation of the automated market maker. Instead of all the points of friction between customer, broker, exchange, and human floor trader, you simply have a protocol with two piles of assets. Put in one asset, get out the other in proportion to what’s in the pool. Pricing is both transparent and accessible.

When lazy programmers create automated mechanisms, they not only save time but produce superior outcomes. Even very simple mechanisms like automated dollar cost averaging can have a significant impact on investment outcomes. We all know we’re supposed to continually invest our savings, but a handful of relatively minor obstacles are enough to keep us from doing that. 

In the world of crypto, people like to draw the lines between “TradFi” and “DeFi”. Folks that wear suits and own treasury bonds are the gatekeepers preventing the mavericks from disrupting antiquated institutions. 

In some ways TradFi is like the hare. They have a huge endowed advantage from simply being around and evolving alongside the current regulatory and consumer framework. DeFi has only been diligently building for less than a decade. Initially scorned and mocked, they might seem like the tortoise whose persistence pushes him to keep grinding. 

On the other hand, DeFi is growing rapidly. The pace of innovation is blistering, and there is a Cambrian explosion of new methods and models. The adoption rate has seen annual increases over 100%, compared to only 60% for the internet at its peak growth stage. Those are hare numbers. The programmers might be lazy, but if TradFi takes too long of a nap, the opportunities will pass. 

Rather than treat the competition between these two models, the overall “Fi” ecosystem will benefit from a combination of both. Traditional payments networks could use a dose of blockchain, and totally decentralized protocols could use a dose of compliance rigor. 

Like the satirical post script of Aesop’s race, there is a time and place to match each skill. Don’t send the tortoise as a fire warden, but don’t sleep on him either.