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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.
Quote Tweet
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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