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Not ether specifically, but as indicator of crypto overall. If analogies to 2000 are justified, then a 90%+ crash for 5+ y might be what you plan around as worst case. Can you keep tinkering with NFTs, DAOs etc through such a winter? I frankly don’t know my lower limit.
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I’m not talking about the relatively internal boom-bust cycles within crypto that we’re all used to thats been primarily speculative-financial. This time, there’s a non-trivial scenario where it’s a long *tech* slump/winter like 2000. The grown-up general economy version.
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Replying to @vgr
This has happened in cycles since all of crypto started (bulls in 2010,2013,2017,2021). It's so accepted that people even joke about wanting bear markets because development is nicer. Less grift, nicer people, less anxiety of having to rush development, etc.
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The Web3/ETH scene now seems less like a weird sideshow and more like Amazon in 2000. Web3 today is like “e-commerce” in 2000. Took Amazon ~9y to regain early 2000 peak. 9y in which they proved all skeptics wrong and pioneered cloud, but it was still hard to believe in them.
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Yes, everything good tends to get built in long winters, but large numbers of talented people do tap out at various points along the way simply because they do not have the resources to stay interested. So macro good/micro ??.
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Replying to @vgr
ERC-721 standard was proposed in Jan 2018. The same month as the first big crash. All of everything *gestures* was all built out in winter. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ #BUIDL
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After a burst of enthusiasm in 1997-2000, between 2001 and 2007, I basically did not write online, did not participate in internet culture really, and did not buy tech stocks. Telling though that I did shop more and more at Amazon but still didn’t believe enough to buy stock.
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Partly, life got in the way. I was on a student visa gathering old economy credentials, unsure if I’d stay in the US or ever get back to internet stuff. Placing bets elsewhere. But if I’m being honest, it was also loss of confidence. Lost interest/faith in the internet for ~7y.
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I think some combination of 4 things sustained those who stayed in game 2000-07: 1. Enough $ to sustain belief (delusional or not, think Google vs Yahoo) 2. Belief in non-social-proof trend (eg: YouTube = bet on cheaper bandwidth) 3. Specificity of goal (mobile web, cloud)…
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4. Most important… sunk costs, both financial (imagine holding what would now be millions in Amazon stock at the bottom in 2000 after believing) or psychological (entire identity invested in code you’ve written over a decade).
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None of the 4 applied to me. I had no money, I had no specific trend I believed in, no specific goal that required the internet (I was working on internet-agnostic aerospace tech). I had a few options from the startup I’d worked at 2000-01 but forgot to exercise these in time 🤣
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Can’t recall the details, but I probably lost a few 10s of k due to that carelessness. But it tells you how little I cared about what little stake I had. I was still mildly and peripherally interested in the internet, but it wasn’t my “thing” through that period.
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This time 1 and 4 are somewhat true for me. I’m actively hunting for a thesis on 2 and it looks promising. But I suspect what will keep me hooked through a potentially long winter is hooking into a good goal. I think it’s robotics for me. Web3+robots = I care enough to stay in.
One of the interesting things about crypto is this possibility of digital destruction that works without taking a physical hammer to a hard drive or something. Not entirely sure how it works. I think you send tokens to a blackhole address or something?
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Edit: I think somewhere up the chain of events, you do need some sort of physical destruction, but once you have an address set up with physically lost private keys, it can serve as an information destruction black hole. Or more precisely, information *control loss* black hole
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"NFT" is a slightly misleading term for Mirror's model. Though the checkbox to mint is labeled "NFT" what it actually does is create 3 "editions" that can be collected 5, 50, or 500 times (at 1E, 0.1E, or 0.01E mins). Maybe these should be called LFTs? Limited fungibility tokens.
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Per my speculations upthread, this one is an attempt to do a "serious" NFT that's more than a pet rock type thing. This maze can obviously be the root of many other projects, which we may or may not pursue. How this LFT does will be a strong factor.
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So when you buy a “serious” NFT… one that’s more than a pet-rock collectible and shows signs of future generative evolution, you buy a stake in the *realized* future. Of course this doesn’t preclude wysiwyg art valuation, but the generative direction is more interesting.
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For those interested in the unit economics, in USD right now, minting this cost about $121, which is a sort of variable cost, and setting up and unlocking the split contract for Dan and me, which is kinda like a fixed cost for our future collaborations, cost about $116+$53
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An interesting thing about wallet account histories mostly show $0 actions, since most transactions are zero value contract actions, and only cost gas. You have to click through to the receipts like in the tweet above to see what it actually cost.
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It's like getting shopping receipts for $0 but nonzero taxes. Nice motif for abundance economics with nonzero Coasean transaction costs.
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Made a thread of just my NFTs on the ribbonfarm twitter account. This time, without a polite "mute this if you don't like Web3/nfts" stuff, so that's an experiment in itself. That account has 18,631 followers right now, how many will rage-unfollow? 🧐
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A thread of ribbonfarm NFTs. You can find the current index here. ribbonfarm.com/nfts/
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While I'm not exactly a people-pleaser type, I do like peace and harmony, so I tend to avoid conflict in public. But Web3 is a seriously divisive topic, and there's no way to be active in it without pissing off people, no matter how gently you tread.
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Wise person once told me: you’re always going to piss off some group if you try to do anything at all, and the trick is to piss off the right people. I have since modified to: piss off a unique set of people. If your hater list matches another person’s too much it’s just a tribe
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Something that seems trivial at an individual level but could have big implications at protocol level. Many contracts need fee-based actions to get money out. For eg, one of my Mirror edition contracts has 0.2E on it, and the withdrawal cost is 0.011664E, or 5.8%... not cheap
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It doesn't scale with amount, so if the amount were 2E as in one of my other contracts, it would be just 0.58%, which is more reasonable. But point is, a lot of money is probably sitting in contracts waiting for either low-gas period or more accumulation to be worth withdrawing.
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These aren't frozen assets exactly, but more like costly-to-unlock kinda-stranded assets. So based on gas prices, the protocol itself be more or less full of funds. A bit like islands you can walk to at low tide, but not at high tide.
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Funds quasi-stranded on the blockchain are like funds in a bank account in another country (which is also an annoying thing I navigate re an account in India) from which repatriation is difficult/costly. In principle, you have access, in practice, you should time it to be cheap.
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On post-game, I feel the same as David here. This is a good team, and if there were an option to let my contribution ride to the next quest rather than pull it, I’d take it. Solid coordination-serendipity tailwinds should not be wasted. It’s a rare resource.
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I don’t want my ETH back, I want to vote on how we can allocate 40 million dollars to something equally ambitious @ConstitutionDAO
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Though there are many structural similarities, there is some sort of vibe difference between r/wsb and Web3 that makes me meh to negative on the former and favorably disposed towards the latter. Not just good vibes but upside creative potential of a sort missing from r/wsb.
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It feels like r/wsb is/was defined by the very Wall Street ethos of zero-sum gamesmanship and Wolf-on-Wolf Hobbesian competition it resists. Just decentralized. Web3 certainly has a grifty side to the ethos, but also a genuine e creative streak. Like a NY vs LA thing almost.
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Interesting factoid: 860k on gas for a 41m flash fund amounts to about 2%, comparable to both credit card processing fees and VC/hedge fund management fees in a typical 2-20 arrangement. And could have been *much* lower if for eg they’d imposed a minimum contribution.
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In case you're curious, @ConstitutionDAO members have collectively spent 199.38 ETH ($860k) in gas. dune.xyz/queries/252602
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I spent about $40 to contribute about $200, a 20% fee I didn’t mind paying at all. But it would have still been $40 if I’d contributed $2000 which would have made it 2%.
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People are upset in various confused ways about these fees. But try and remember that the cheapest comparable fiat mechanism, like a GoFundMe, would have actually taken vastly more than 2% off the top!
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But if I were to pull a stunt like this I’d probably try to encourage a high minimum. It’s a trade off: total raised vs yield. 98% for 41m is pretty good.
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Repeating the prompt at the top of the thread: if this whole Web3 topic offends you or triggers your scam-dar, please mute this thread, or mute/unfollow. From some of the questions/replies it looks like some people didn’t see that. Should repeat it periodically.
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If you have questions like: “How is this not just X but worse?” “What problem does it solve?” “What value does it create?” “How can you justify the emissions?” “Isn’t this just privileged play?” I’m the wrong person to ask. I’ve done my tours of duty on such debates.
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