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Okay will hit pause on this train of thought. Trying hard to stay on the hands-on side. It would be just too easy for me to get carried away by this flow 🤣 My natural mode is tinker with real things for 5 minutes, speculate wildly in the abstract for 15. Must resist.
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Prediction: MetaMask will add a messaging function. You already have an address book. You’re probably doing splits with them. Why go to Signal or wherever? Mutisigs will develop attached group discussion fora. Messaging companies may acquire wallet companies. Or vice versa.
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Your main transactional (but not custodial) wallet will be your identity/social, replacing email and phone number.
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Venmo has already created a weird social network around Web2 payments. But Web3 is the natural home for the idea. On Venmo, it’s vaguely voyeuristic, like Glassdoor reviews. But on Web3 such things may have a healthier valence.
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A general pattern of question I’m getting as in every tech futures conversation I’ve ever had, is “How is Web3 thing X different from obvious analogical old thing Y?” Anchoring on the most obvious analogy tends to minimize distinctions and magnify similarities.
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The snark form of this is perversely self blinding, as in “X, you invented X” “Rideshare with published routes”… “public transit you invented public transit” (treating app based failing as a rounding error). Thing is *you choose your anchors, you choose your blindness*
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This is why I don’t engage “how is it different from X” whether motivated by sincere curiosity or bad-faith trolling. You chose your anchor. I don’t have to. I may offer alternate anchors, but I don’t have to correct the invisibilities of your frame. That’s a futile battle.
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In general, I try to understand a thing on its own terms. You can never avoid metaphors (unpopular opinion: there is no System 2; there is no ‘first principles thinking’, there’s only conceptual metaphors too subtle to notice), but you can pick one that highlight the differences.
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Obvious metaphors and analogies aren’t intrinsically bad. They do save you cognitive labor. But they make good servants and bad masters. If a hammer in your hand makes you see everything as a nail, the hammer is using you, you’re not using the hammer.
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I’m not trying to preach. Just explaining why I don’t engage with some comments. I am not necessarily assuming bad faith or disputing or ignoring your point. You’re just using anchors I don’t care to conform to. Choose your anchors. Don’t let them choose you.
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I guess part of me is just kinda exhausted by a sense of “here we go again; new tech revolution same debates” deja vu. It would be nice to have weird new arguments and a strange new type of techlash at least.
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A question I’m mulling — anyone have a sense of the demographics of the ENS token drops, or how to probe that? Unlike the early crypto era, where those who got in were either wealth-privileged or tech-privileged, or both, this one I suspect has been more of a true trickle-down.
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Poll: Sampling demographics of ENS token drop. Interpret rich/middle class/poor by your local geography.
  • Got drop, rich
    11.7%
  • Got drop, middle class
    16.2%
  • Got drop, poor
    3.8%
  • Didn’t get drop
    68.3%
290 votesFinal results
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This is the future Bitcoin maxis want 😆
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Hard-earned cash: The monumental stone coins used by the Yap (Jap) people in Micronesia which are called Rai are still a working currency on the island of Palau. Although no more disks are being produced or imported, this money supply is fixed.
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I've been looking at Web3 culture through the lens of Geertz' classic Deep Play lens. The DeFi degens (profiteering hucksters) are clearly shallow play, and those building DAOs etc are clearly deep play, but happy frothy gm/wagmi crowd is kinda in between jstor.org/stable/20024056
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For those unfamiliar with Geertz, it's a classic anthropology study that pioneered the "thick description" research approach. It looked at Balinese cockfighting through the lens of Bentham's (19th century utilitarianism pioneer) "deep play" idea.
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Roughly speaking, shallow players are gambling for legible profits, deep players are playing to signal, shift, and reshape political alliances and commitments to ideologies, kinship relations etc. But gm/wagmi culture frankly doesn't strike me as deep enough.
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But one cultural bit that DOES strike me as deep play signaling is the Web3 crowd eschewing .com domains for their web properties. Besides the native .eth tld handled by ENS, the DNS tlds that are popular are .xyz, .io, .app etc. Anything *but* .com.
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TIL... the common auction pattern on Web3 where the deadline gets extended repeatedly by late bids (kinda like overtime) is called a Coldi auction.
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Replying to @vgr
It's called a Coldie auction, and afaik it was pioneered by @Coldie, who started by doing the whole thing manually
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In 2000-08, .coms were the *only* serious option, or .org if you were really a nonprofit. A .net meant you weren't savvy enough to play. In Web2, the .com hegemony began to unravel ~2010 as a few others like .io, .me, .ai, .ly began to gain alt subcultural cachet
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But the Web2 subcultural fragmentation tlds were still kinda in harmony with .com. They typically signaled a vertical orientation, but still with "dot com" basic neoliberal capitalism values/ethos. I think Web3 is signaling a fuck-you to that at an axiomatic tld level.
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Update, it's only a strict Coldie auction if you extend by 24h each late bid, because the intent is apparently global time-zone fairness. I guess the 15-minute extension model is a Coldie-like model but with other intentions (sniping defense etc)
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Replying to @vgr
@withFND does not use the Coldie Method. The auction function i invented extends the bidding 24 hours for each new bid. I did this so people across the world would have equal opportunity to bid no matter what time zone they are in
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Own = still stock thinking, the flow equivalent might be “execute” (contracts, instructions, orders) so we get rwx on global computer 🤔 All Unix metaphors then apply. chmod, chown, pipes, redirects
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web1: read web2: read / write web3: read / write / own twitter.com/j1mmyeth/statu…
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I’m genuinely surprised by the number of people whose basic posture is “give me one real use case and convince me.” I can understand hostile rejection or just diving in to either explore or grift. But standing around like it’s somebody’s job to win you over? That is odd.
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Kinda ironic that Web3 thing presents as 100% transactional and money driven, and you have to buy in with cash, but it’s nobody’s job to actually sell it to you. Yes, there are self-appointed evangelists and people shilling coins, but this isn’t *actually* a product.
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It’s a cousin of Paul Ford’s “why wasn’t I consulted?” (wwic) phenomenon. “Why wasn’t I marketed to?” (wwmt) Why didn’t somebody carefully analyze your tastes and values and figure out a positioning and value proposition to appeal to you? Why indeed. ftrain.com/wwic
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I suspect this is how people miss booms, waiting to be invited. Same thing happened with PCs, Web1, Web2. This is a crash-only party. Nobody is invited. Everybody is a party crasher. Starting with Satoshi crashing central banker party. Crash in or sit it out. wwmt is silly.
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I think Web3 is waiting for its cgi moment. Web1 went from memoryless to stateful over ~5 years with cookies+cgi. Web3 is coming from the other extreme, from only immutable memory towards stateful.
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Replying to @vgr
@ricmac’s Web History Project is the best thing like this that I am aware of webdevelopmenthistory.com/1993-cgi-scrip
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It’s not just gas fees. The whole persistence model is like eeprom. Write operations are like flashing in embedded programming. Need a throwaway state on top that gives up some trustless verifiability for convenience for the less critical stuff.
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Like if you wanted to use NFTs as tokens in a decentralized wallet-to-wallet game, where do hold game state? In a Web2 style db layer? That seems wrong. But it also seems silly to store game state on chain.
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Okay fine not necessarily state, but *some* controlled transient persistence model that’s decoupled from browser session but is less expensive/permanent than on-chain, while still being Web3 native paradigm-wise.
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State is usually bad. What you really want in most situations are values and references (see infoq.com/presentations/ and infoq.com/presentations/).
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This seems like the beginnings of an answer, though you need opensea to be a TTP temporarily. It’s not quite p2p decentralized state.
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Replying to @vgr
you store it off chain with each user signing, and if match, execute on chain. That's how opensea works under the hood: docs.opensea.io/reference/term
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This keeper model seems more in harmony with Web3 architectural vibes
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Replying to @_callil and @vgr
need something like keeperDAO: docs.keeperdao.com/reference/#wha @vgr i think you'd like this concept of keepers
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Well, I guess I had to dabble in at least 1 memecoin. Sent 0.042E (about $200 rn) to the project that's trying to buy a copy of the US constitution at auction. tx succeeded and I claimed my tokens, but I don't see tx or message on the juicebox feed yet 🧐
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