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, rich11.7%
- Got drop, middle class16.2%
- Got drop, poor3.8%
- Didn’t get drop68.3%
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.
Replying to
This presents an interesting tension. The main website is a .org, and we have .com held in reserve, and just won a $WRITE token to create a mirror.xyz subdomain. I suspect we're going to be hybrid and have use both .com and .somethingelse primaries.
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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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I have acquired an official Gen Z mentor. gmi.
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Replying to @vgr
no problem, happy to help 
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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 suspect control rather than ownership is the core concept.
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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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As with Web1 and Web2, most creators get nothing, the rest are power-law distributed.
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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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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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If it doesn't make it, then instead of getting the stake back, I'd like to see it being used to do something else, like maybe draft a new constitution. There is some really good energy here. And I'm not the only one to gesture at 42 in the contributions, I see a few 42s in there.
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Oh shit, this is a financial flash mob
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If this works, it will basically kill kickstarter/gofundme etc.
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Ah here we go! Couldn't come up with a better message on short notice. Some of the messages on there are fun.
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Worthwhile note of caution. In this case, I happen to know a couple of the people driving this, and it's both a fun experiment and driven by the right people for the right reasons, but like all tech, it's definitely a double edged sword.
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The @ConstitutionDAO sets off so many alarm bells I’m afraid I might go deaf. A
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I’m hitting pause on more serious experiments for now. Beginning to understand why gas problem is a rate limiter. It’s not just that it cuts into any profits but that it limits who else can participate in anything you do. Might save them for next crash-slump or Solana/polychain.
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I’m sure bitcoin is technically capable of going most places newer chains are, but my skepticism of it is now primarily cultural. Feels like core community has too much gravitas to do anything besides compete with gold and hold the political line re self-custody etc.
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Replying to @vgr
I mean, Bitcoin is fun, too. Lightning, statechains and liquid, stacks (I mean I wouldn’t use it but I’m sure it’s fun). And it’s all super cheap. Plus Bitcoin just got a real upgrade, promise fulfilled (taproot). Create the shelling point if you can’t find it, that’s fun, too.
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So an interesting thing that's happening due to Web3 (though the pattern existed before) is that Twitter is turning into the de facto identity verification service. So you're going to see people tweeting addresses etc. to link twitter accounts, like this.
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EJtxPdbCLugvC2UXBjYfN6PufV2HJHUBMaH6s31Q49EL
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The above is me verifying my solana wallet address so people can send me sol using my twitter handle. This sort of use reminds me of the trajectory of email from pure comms to identity verification loops (verify links in email) and in general, media aging from human to bot use
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Over the years, my email address has gone from primarily human "letter writing" to primarily bot-procedural-transactional + newsletters, as actual human comms have increasingly moved to messaging apps. I really only use email in "human" ways for consulting notes now.
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