Link for those unfamiliar with it. This thing was my North Star for a few years. google.com/amp/s/amp.thea
Conversation
In Web3 it feels like the fundamental behavior is not following a trail of links from stock to stock, but following a stock as it flows from address to address. Even our basic metaphor of a “bitcoin” is utterly wrong because it anchors on a stock view.
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The coin metaphor is going to prove to be severe baggage for Web3, just as the document metaphor was baggage for Web1 and Web2. The late Web2 metaphor of the stream (effectively infinite dynamic frankendocument) is a clumsy Web2 version of a Web3 flow.
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This is why the split is the hyperlink of Web3. It forks a flow structurally. Voting and staking mechanisms look like flows > stocks. Multisig wallets are flow control valves. “Balances” (not coins) are levels of fungible stocks in flow buffers. Burning tokens is flow.
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Minting is an unfortunate coin-metaphor term (“coinage” 😖). It’s really a kind of source spigot. I wish they’d called mining drilling. Drilling for hashes.
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Ethereum developed better language tbh. Ether, gas… fluid metaphors all over the place.
Oh yeah, hash rates! Can’t get more flow than that!
And mining “pool” … you can’t really pool solids.
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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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But here’s an old thing I wrote on hyperlinks when I was high on Memex visions in 2009.
Maybe I can write a sequel, the Rhetoric of the Split.
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Someone make a Sankey diagram based blockchain explorer. At the very least it will improve Sankey literacy for climate awareness. You can split me a royalty for the idea. See how natural the language is? “Link to me” —> “split to me.”
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Replying to
It’s interesting to me that you’re so fixated on splits. You’re not wrong, I just haven’t seen smart contracts for automatically splitting between N people besides Foundation.
It would be cool to create a protocol for revenue splits on payments for an eCommerce type site
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Replying to
Mirror does it too. And don’t forget — airdrops are essentially massive splits.
have been working on this with a friend:
Recursive (splits can point to other splits), fully composable, & gas efficiency scales well the more splits you’re in + the more often a split receives funds
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