Conversation

I don’t think people are setting out to make flawed comparisons. Unless you’ve been in tech for long enough that parsing illegible cost pictures becomes second nature, you’ll miss things and fall prey to sloganeering.
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I still think “if you’re not paying you’re the product” was a deeply disingenuous attack on Web2 by a privileged bunch of Web1 early adopters who acted like everybody should have the technical and financial ability to oat for ad-free Mastodon servers.
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I ran a Mastodon server for a couple of years ( runs it now). It was non-trivial work+cost. I’d rather “be the product” and click on the occasional ad (odd btw how a Web2 virtue, paying do you’re not the product, is suddenly a Web3 vice?) for bigger public spaces.
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Web2 replaced Web1 because it genuinely created more openness for more people at lower cost than Web1 ever did. All while weathering criticism from Web1 mavens fetishizing USENET and The Well. Now Web2 mavens are doing it to Web3. Eventually Web3 mavens will do it to Web4 🤣
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This thread is now too big and unwieldy. I might stop it simply because it's too big, and start a new thread with a clearer Chapter 2 quest to it. Open to suggestions on what to do with it. I don't have the energy to transform it into longform rn.
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This thread is formally done as of this tweet. We’re now officially in the after-party portion of this thread. Any further tweets should be considered 2x more shitposty and 3x more drunk.
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Drunk thought 1 We need a Web3-native word like “operator” that’s not operator. It seems to mean all the wrong things in Web2 mode. So something more procedural and less guanxi-cronyism. Less FAANG alum with sketchy “2x exits” bio, more Humphrey Appleby. Nominations open
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My candidates Token whisperer Non-fungible player Whip (my favorite, as in party-line vote rustler in legislatures) Whipperer = whip + whisperer Stonecarver (cf immutability) Blocktackler (as in block-and-tackle pulleys buy also blocking and tackling)
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🤔 Maybe it's time to stop sandboxing Web3 poasting with polite qualifiers and prompts to skeptics to mute/unfollow. It's a bit tedious to deal with open reactions to unhedged tweets, but it's also annoying to tiptoe around the sensitivities of skeptics
For those treating this thread as a half-ass 101 thread, be aware there are key topics I've learned about but not touched: defi degens, yield farming: boring people doing boring things L2 stuff: don't understand tech yet Discord culture: feels privatish, explore on your own
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There's also the tribal subcultures emerging around identity-NFTs (punks, apes, various ripoffs that nobody is buying...). It feels kinda important but in a fork-ish way. Some largish fraction of the Web3 energy will be organized by those tribes, but they strike me as meh.
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And finally, technical things that are being prematurely politicized (basically everything Vitalik writes about). There will be time enough to argue the politics of the asymptotic features once they settle enough that the innate politics of the technology acquire some stability.
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The purpose of every generation of Web is to create the frustrations that trigger the next generation of Web while solving the frustrations created by the last generation. Web3's purpose is to aggravate people into creating Web4. While solving the culture war created by Web2.
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To work, Web3 will require humans to be very effective chain runners. But of course humans are mostly bad at anything involving procedural discipline, so most chain runners will suck and create problems of various sorts. From lost keys to hacks to voting screwups.
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So around 2030, holy warriors will demand a Web4 built around reliable robots that solve the problems created by unreliable human chainrunners. 4 laws of robotics ftw.
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The moment reliable custodial behaviors built around airgapped hardware wallets becomes central, you've opened the door for robots eating everything. Every robot will soon be basically an extremely complicated hardware wallet. Just like we're basically complicated digestion tubes
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When we build the Web4 wallet-robots, there should be a low-level firmware logic that turns a pair of LEDs from green to red when it turns evil through malicious code.
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Replying to @vgr
A hardware wallet that can run malicious code is no better than a software wallet.
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Gotta move to PoS and L2 stuff soon. These calculations are always super sketchy and comparisons are often disingenuous but zero-carbon blockchains are a necessary goal.
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"The average NFT generates 440 pounds of carbon—the equivalent of driving 500 miles in a gas-powered car—producing emissions 10 times higher than the average Ethereum transaction" news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/09/20/bit
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In the past I’ve countered “bitcoin uses more energy than Nigeria” opening gambits with “whatabout all the physical bank branches with AC and people and ATMs?” but it’s a lose-lose type whataboutism detpfest argument to have.
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Details
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Happy holidays 🦃 Listed now: a 1/1 NFT @withFND to celebrate Worlding in times of compounding enchantment. The final digital drawing from my 2019 Ribbonfarm guest post “World To Live” foundation.app/@eyecheng/~/10
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Perfect drunken afterparty coda to the saga... my $200 donation to the thing got me 42k $PEOPLE a few weeks ago, and because I was lazy about claiming my refund, this morning I found myself holding 42k worth of the latest, greatest memecoin, worth about $3200 🙄
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I just sold about 8000 to bank about a 2x return, net of tx fees, and am gonna sit on the rest to see where it goes. Unless someone does something more interesting with it than simply pump it as a memecoin, plan is to dump all but 42 tokens somewhere along the way.
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Much as I like experimenting, I've never liked the pure memecoin end of this stuff, and never bought any doge or other obviously meme-ish thing with no interesting tech angle behind it. I think there is room for complex non-tech social stuff to happen, but pure memeing ain't it.
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Since I started this casual experimentation on Nov 7, I think I've made enough money off the things I've been doing on this thread that it's now the 3rd highest earning gig of 2021 for me. Only my largest consulting project and my Substack have made more $.
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This is more than mildly worrying. Even after factoring out frontier serendipity, random relatively clueless 101 experimental trial and error should not have such ridiculous returns on effort/time.
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The bulk of my returns are from the ENS drop (even after selling a third early to cover downside, the rest is currently worth 20k) which has nothing to do from being internet-famous. But fair point for my nfts.
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Replying to @vgr
seems too obvious to say but this is only the case for (internet-)famous people if I did exactly what you did the return would be negative
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