That’s basically what Web3 is. 4 layers:
1. Wallets
2. “Sites” you can visit with them
3. Blockchain pointing to everybody and everything forever
4. Content-centric network
Web1/2 were:
1. Accounts and passwords
2. Browsers
3. Address-based network
4. Servers
Conversation
Okay, so that long preamble was because I assume most of you had no idea what any of this is. You just see weird people with .eth names apparently trying to sell you jpegs of the Brooklyn Bridge. I knew most of this in principle before, but only learned it in practice last week.
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Okay so what have I actually been up to? Well the grabby headline, which I tweeted yesterday is: I’ve made 30x as much in 1 week on Web3 as I did in my first *year* on Web2.
This will make 1/2 of you yell “Climate-destroying scam!,” 1/3 of you go “🤑” and 1/6 of you go “Hmm…”
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Took me like 2 years to make my first $100 on Google AdSense back in 2007-08 or so... it's taken me less than a week to make over 3k on Web3.
Yes, I'm much better known now than then, and yes there's major frontier froth going on, but still... I get "internet of money" now
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I’m mainly tweeting at the last 1/6, people going hmm.
If you’re in the 1/3 🤑 crowd… there’s more talented hucksters you can look to
If you’re in the 1/2 “it’s a scam” crowd, let’s check back in with each other in 10 years, deal?
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You’ll have to take my word for it that I’m not in it for the money, though of course that’s fun. I got lucky enough with the first wave of crypto a few years ago that if all I saw here was an opportunity to dazzle people with techno-bullshit, I’d be too lazy and uninterested.
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I already only take consulting gigs that actually interest me. If this turns out *not* to have anything deeper going on than selling links to jpegs in a convoluted way I’ll get bored and quit the scene. There’s more interesting ways to earn a living. So…what’s interesting here?
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Let’s take learnings from my first 3 experiments. I’d been watching the scene idly and doing some mild heckling for a year, but wasn’t actually planning to do any experimenting until next year. But sucked me in early by listing me in a split for *his* first NFT auction.
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His piece sold for 8.25 ETH, but if you can tear your attention away from that or a minute… scroll down and click on “split”
What’s a split? An automated cryptographically secured contract on the blockchain to split a flow of money to more than one destination address.
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Ian generously decided my modest role in the project the NFT was worth a cut, and 4.2% is his little joke because he knows I’m a Hitchhikers Guide fan. But interesting thing is… even if we turn into Deadly Enemies I *still* get the cut of future royalties from any resales.
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Here’s the link to the “home page” on the auction on Foundation dot app. But our deal really lives entirely on the blockchain. Even if this site goes under and disappears, the contract lives on. 🤯
Click on the links that show you the raw records.
foundation.app/@eyecheng/~/10
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Even if the etherscan.io blockchain explorer site vanishes, the thing is STILL there. The only thing that can destroy the contract is the last ethereum node being shut down and getting thrown into the fires of Mount Doom.
Replying to
Second experiment. Again I got dragged in faster than I expected. I listed a jpeg from my art of gig project on OpenSea, another “site,” just to get a feel for the workflow. I want planning to sell it yet, but…
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…apparently on Web3, merely listing a thing can mean it is de facto up for sale and I got a couple of offers within hours. It’s like how people sometimes ping me to try and buy my kool 3-letter Twitter handle, but systematic. So I said okay whatever trigger the auction.
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Sold for ~0.36E in a week-long auction. Afaict OpenSea is a bit like eBay and Foundation is a bit like a mix of Etsy and MoMA.
But boundaries are blurred. All these markets kinda interoperate so things nominally minted in one place can show up in other places.
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But the wtf moment was: when I got myself a couple of .eth names from the ENS (Ethereum’s equivalent of DNS, more on that in a minute)… they *automatically* showed up on my OpenSea profile page like they were assets for sale, with “make an offer” buttons. I had to hide them!
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But I still hadn’t truly grokked what was going on. My third experiment was on the buy side, I “collected” a short story by on yet another “site” called mirror and when the site prompted me to “display” it on my profile I was unable to figure out how.
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bought my first NFT, a short story by @sachinnbenny ... trying to figure out how to "display it on my profile" like mirror is encouraging me to do. mirror.xyz/0x02Dad585640b
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But when I went back to OpenSea… it was *already* there!
This was, as I said, my Aha moment. The content had only the flimsiest relation to the container. Form and content are decoupled *globally* as a matter of Web3 architecture. It’s not a design choice for “sites”
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If you recall old Web1 debates about form/structure separation vs coupling, xml/xslt vs html/css (remember ColdFusion? PHP is still around), this is kinda an end run around it all. On Web3 form and content are minimally separated outside the scope of your personal tastes.
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Interlude: ENS. It’s $5/y to get a .eth name >5 chars payable in eth (4 chars is $160/y, 3 is $640/y, which is why I didn’t buy vgr). But at $5 level, current gas prices (transaction fees, like credit card fees but variable based on demand) cost way more than registration!
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So weirdly, because the tx fees depend on amount of data you write, and it makes little difference whether a number is “1” or “10” in the contract that represents your registration on chain, it makes more sense to register for long periods. Web3 commoditizes transaction costs!
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Okay report on final experiment. A couple of days ago I tried to summarize my learnings so far with a little cartoon. A capability maturity model pyramid overlaid on a 2x2. And of course I immediately joked “I should NFT this” and of course I immediately thought “well why not”
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Aside: the diagram has the x-axis separating sustainable futures (above water) from unsustainable ones (below water) and the y-axis separating positive futures (right half) from the negative ones (left half). The annotations are in a weird language Web3 types speak. Primer:
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Anyhow, I minted it as my “Hello World” NFT on Mirror. This works a little differently. The exact same thing (yes the thing you can right-click and save right here for free) can be “collected” at 3 different levels with floor prices of 0.01, 0.1, 1 eth.
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Not counting all you freeloading right-clickers on here at the 0 eth level, it’s been collected by 9 people so far (7+1+1), for a total of 1.17 eth.
It took me about an hour to think through and draw this, so technically this is the highest paid work I’ve ever done.
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Oh, one last Week 1 experiment. Mirror does something called a "token race" to win a $WRITE token which you can trade for a subdomain of mirror.xyz on which to run a decentralized publication using their suite of tools (a cross between kickstarter and wordpress).
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I registered for this coming week's race to try and win a token for the ... there's a 2 hour voting window on Wednesday. Anyone can vote, though existing token holders get a bigger weightage. This will help us get going on our DAOish plans.
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The yakcollective is in the $WRITE token race on mirror mirror.xyz/race?candidate #yakbot
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I'll keep updating this thread as I learn more, and as I or collaborators do things. has a few more cued up. I have a handful of experiments of increasing complexity cued up. Many in collaboration with artist who I've made various graphics with for years
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And also
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A nice time to revisit "Eight Qualities of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations" via @keikreutler
Autopoietic
Alegal
Hyperscalable
Executable
Permissionless
Aligned
Co-Owned
Mnemonic
From 2020 October 01, an age ago.
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Okay I bought a bit of Solana and put it in my Ghost wallet. Any recommendations for where to go play with it?
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explainer on playing with solana (linking mid-thread where the usage stuff begins since the earlier part is investment stuff twitter.com/liminal_warmth
This Tweet is unavailable.
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Okay this is like auspicious or something. I registered my .eth domains like mere hours before the ENS governance token airdrop deadline (which I did not know about). So I've claimed my tokens (and delegated them to Coinbase).
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It's like me, a hobo, wandering into the lobby of a company and they ask me "do you want to be on the board?" and I say, uhh no, and they say "well here's some shares because you were born before a certain date, and you can assign it to someone as a proxy."
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Coinbase is perhaps not the best choice, but the devil you know etc. Also, I don't actually see the tokens in my wallet, though the tx was successful. So I assume they're either on loan to my delegate or will be airdropped later or something? I supposedly have 361.
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Update: got them imported. And wtf they're *already* worth like 8k??? How did the market even price this thing so fast. So voting rights on ENS are this valuable...
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Replying to @vgr
They’re there. Are you using MetaMask? Add a custom token using the token contract address.
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TIL... the hawala markets move fast
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Replying to @vgr
Thanks to decentralized exchanges, people set up liquidity pools almost immediately. Price discovery happens within hours or even minutes, though liquidity is probably pretty thin. Big buy/sell orders would have a large price impact. Will improve in the coming days.
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Okay, next experiment, I have now minted and listed my first serious NFT on Foundation. The Ribbonfarm Map of 2016, split with . Once the first bid rolls in, a 24-hour auction will begin. foundation.app/@vgr/~/106332
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Signed this "declaration of interdependence for cyberspace" not so much because I agree with all the sentiments expressed, but because it's fun to sign with a wallet and because it's forkable. I look forward to signing many inconsistent forks of this.
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