Crypto
- What will this do to Bitcoin demand?
- What does this mean for MicroStrategy (MSTR) as they are effectively a Bitcoin holding company (in part) now.
- If this “legitimizes” Bitcoin, what is the follow-on to Ethereum? And other blockchains?
- There are 12 collectors that have all three.
- There are 21 collectors that have the most recent two.
- A total of 85 collectors have at least one of my birthday tokens.
- There are 8 reservations from 2022 and 7 from 2023 that have not been minted.
- Creating Content: Most notable activities here include writing the introduction, adding any “Currently” topics, taking and setting the picture for the week. Some of these I can do immediately, others I defer until a few days into the week. The writing is done in Drafts.
- Curating Links: I try to curate links and various points through the week, but I have two “deadlines” for the publishing cycle. Links are curated in Pinboard.
- Building and Sending: Content and Links are done, time to build and send. I’ve automated this to be pretty simple. See how I build the Weekly Thing for more.
- Finalizing: After the issue is sent and in peoples mailboxes, I need to do some final activities and most importantly create the project for the next issue.
- Changes: Not having it repeating means I can change and alter any given instance however I like. I might add a special task to one issue, like adding a POAP for the anniversary issue. Or a special section I’m only doing that time.
- Schedule: I may move the due dates for one step or another and I love knowing that will not persist to the next iteration.
- Lightning address is now
thingelstad@walletofsatoshi.com. - Nostr LNURL updated with new address.
New POAP Onboarding Process
A year ago (exactly!) I shared my POAP Wishlist which included three areas that I felt would be great additions to POAP. It is a year later and I still think POAP is a wonderful product, and I continue to issue and collect these proof of attendance tokens.
One of the areas that I called out was Web2/3 Onboarding. Specifically I noted that while token claim codes could be used to reserve a POAP (not minting it), the reservations themselves weren’t actionable. There was no email engagement to encourage the person that reserved it to mint the token. I also highlighted that POAP should make it easier for people that do not otherwise have an Ethereum wallet, and create a non-custodial wallet for them to use instead.
A couple weeks ago I noticed that POAP had a new beta onboarding process so I requested to be part of it, and they activated it for my 52nd Birthday drop. I gave it a try myself and I was excited to see that they had addressed everything I had wished for in this process!
Let’s take a look at the new process!
New Onboarding
Just as before, when you get a claim code you are presented with the option to get the token and you can provide a wallet address or Ethereum Name Service (ENS) name to directly mint it. You can also provide an email address to reserve the token to mint in the future.
With the new onboarding process when you provide an email address to reserve the token you get an email informing you of the next steps. Critically it presents options for you to act on!
Smartly they use language that people should easily identify with. Rather than saying “I don’t have a wallet” instead saying “Create an account”. To give this a test I chose to Create an account.
After clicking on this you are presented with a page where you can setup your account, which really means you are creating a brand new wallet address. I love that you can even specify an ENS name. I created thingelstad.onpoap.eth which got a brand new address 0xb81B…2056.
Behind the scenes this is powered by Privy to create an embedded wallet. The flow worked really well. After creating my new wallet I was then able to easily mint my POAP directly into that new wallet. Magic! 🪄
So this is great, and for a lot of people that only collect POAPs and do nothing else with crypto this is probably all that they ever need to do. But now that this wallet exists, I wanted to get access to it directly. After creating the wallet POAP send another email and this one includes those steps, and even points you to downloading Rainbow if you don’t know where to start.
I followed the directions, copied my private key, and was able to easily add the new wallet that POAP had created for me into Rainbow. 🌈
Conclusion
I’m incredibly happy about this new onboarding process. I’ve created 58 POAPs and most of my events are distributed to people that have never done anything with Ethereum before. I even created my own how to claim a POAP instructions to give people.
However, even with that it has proven too difficult for most people. With this new process, people will be able to claim and mint POAPs with nothing other than an email address! This is a big deal! I also think there are many crypto native people that may choose to do this as well. I isolate by crypto assets so I keep all my POAPs in an address just for them. Having POAP manage the wallet for me would be an even easier way to do that.
I’m eager for this new onboarding process to be the default and I think I can get rid of my “how to” page and simplify POAP distribution significantly. With this new process, POAP ease-of-use is much improved!
Bitcoin ETF Approved
Milestone day to recognize — SEC Approves Bitcoin ETFs for Everyday Investors. Bitcoin doesn’t need this to validate it or prove value but it is a big plus for the credibility of Bitcoin. BTC currently at $46,611 now.
Questions:
My 52nd Birthday POAP was highlighted in the newest This Week in POAP. 🤩
Birthday POAPs
I’ve made it a tradition since my 50th birthday to issue a POAP token for my birthday and share it as a gift from me to others to celebrate the day. I’ve now done this for three years. Each year I’ve used a POAPathon bounty to create the image and have featured a different artist each year. POAP launched POAP Family a while ago and one of the features it has is the ability to show collectors across multiple POAPs. I like how this works when you have a series of events like my birthday POAPs.
Today is my 52nd Birthday, but I also share my birthday with Bitcoin. Happy 15th Birthday to Bitcoin! Genesis block was mined 15 years ago. 🎉⚡️
I created a POAP to share for my 52nd Birthday! Here are five claim codes! Each link can only be used once. See how to if needed.
612 Series — Cherry and Spoon
My favorite local NFT project has been 612 Series by Erik Halaas of StayNftyMpls. I’ve collected 35 of them, and am the only person to have one of every landmark in the series.
To celebrate collecting all of the unique landmarks Erik asked if I would like a block painting of one of my favorites. I leaped at the opportunity and suggested one of the most iconic Minneapolis landmarks in the collection — 612 Series #134 Cerry and Spoon
Here is the NFT image.
And here is the amazing block painting!
I’m going to get this framed and likely have a print of the NFT alongside it. So very fun.
POAP just published the Year in POAP 2023 with highlights of the year. POAP is one of my favorite crypto projects! I’ve issued a bunch of them! It was great to see the POAP I made for 20 Years of Olson Family Vacations highlighted in the Year in POAP!
I was excited to be the first to claim tonight’s MN Blockchain Holiday Party POAP! Also see related POAPs.
Took a pre-order for the Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser and the purchase was made with Bitcoin Lightning! ⚡️ That is the first sale for our annual fundraiser done using crypto! No fees, instantaneous settlement. Magic. 🙌
I claimed my POAP for participating in the KZG Ceremony. This is one of the POAPs that I will treasure for a long time, right alongside the ENS 6th Anniversary and the Ethereum Merge POAP.
DeFi with Agave sDAI on Gnosis Chain
The recent announcement that Agave launched their Savings xDai on Gnosis Chain piqued my interest. This is connected with MakerDAO, the backers of the Dai stablecoin amongst other things. I generally find MakeDAO interesting and already had some xDAI so I deposited 100 xDai and now have have Agave sDai tokens that earn interest. Current APY 7.521%.
The DAI Savings Rate (DSR is an addition to the Maker Protocol that allows any DAI holder to earn savings in DAI. It is a premium reward by MakerDAO for users depositing DAI, bolstering user benefits and rewards in the ecosystem. sDAI tokens represent DAI stablecoins deposited in MakerDAO’s DSR module. With the launch of sDAI on Gnosis Chain and SparkLend, users can now deposit xDAI to receive sDAI on Gnosis Chain.
I don’t do a lot of DeFi experimentation but this being native on Gnosis Chain I wanted to give it a try and see how it worked.
Task Management for the Weekly Thing
I’m often asked about how I create the Weekly Thing and how I’ve been doing it for over six years. People are usually curious about how I find things to write about or how I build the Weekly Thing. However, there is a critical part that is invisible to others but key to the consistency of sending every week for 262 issues — project management!
With the recent rebuild of my automation I needed to update my project template which seemed like a good time to share how I do this. I’m a Getting Things Done practitioner, and my tool of choice for as long as I can remember has been OmniFocus. Everything here is in OmniFocus or supporting automation.
A detail to share on dates and times for the publishing schedule. My target for sending the Weekly Thing is Saturday at 7:00 am CT. If I miss that it’s fine, I can shift things. However, the content cutoff is actually Thursday at 11:59 pm CT and that never changes. This allows me a window from Thursday night to Saturday at 7:00 am CT to publish. One odd side effect of this is that a blog post I publish on Friday will not be in that issues Journal on Saturday, but will wait for the following week. Nobody seems to notice this and it is necessary for me to have the time to do the publishing.
Project
Here is what the project to send Weekly Thing 264 looks like in OmniFocus. The two dates on the right are the defer and due dates. Defer dates are critical for me since they keep things off my plate until they need to be. Note everything in gray is deferred. You can see that right now, there are only three tasks available. I’ve expanded select tasks so that you can see the helper links and text that make things a bit faster for me.
There are four major steps to publishing each issue:
All of these steps are sequential. And the tasks in them are sequential, except for Creating Content which can be done in any order.
Repetition
This project is not a repeating project. That is the reason for the last step in the project, to create the next project. Why not repeating?
So how do I get the repeating project without doing all the work? Plus, there are tons of date references that need to be calculated, where does that come from? This is where TaskPaper and project templates come to the rescue.
TaskPaper allows me to have a template for sending the Weekly Thing that I can “run” via a Shortcut. You can see the Send Weekly Thing Taskpaper Template for all the details. Take note of two special “tokens” in the template: «Issue» and «Date». These are not part of TaskPaper, but instead two “variables” I handle.
Before I hand OmniFocus the TaskPaper to create the project, I’m going to process those two tokens using a Shortcut. My Send Weekly Thing shortcut will get the “Publish Date” and “Issue Number” from Data Jar. It will set those “variables” in the TaskPaper and the rest of the data offsets are magically handled by OmniFocus. Most critical thing here is making sure I format the «Date» as yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm aa so that OmniFocus understands it.
The Shortcut also puts a time block on my calendar for Thursday night to send the issue. This is a nice benefit of combining Taskpaper and Shortcuts together.
Summary
Creating the Weekly Thing isn’t a single “Send Weekly Thing” task on my list. Instead I’ve focused on “next action thinking” to try and make each component a simple task. Overall this works really well for me. It doesn’t solve writers block, but frees me up to focus on the creative aspects instead of the tasks.
You might be curious how this works when I take my summer or winter breaks? In those cases, I still create the next project for the issue when I come back from break, but then I set the defer date for the whole thing to the week before that issue publishes. I also usually add a housecleaning task to the beginning of that issue to clean out my Safari Reading list and Pinboard Unread links.
TeamSPS 2023 Kubb Tournament
Today we held our 5th Annual TeamSPS Kubb Tournament! This event has now become a real tradition and many of our team look forward to playing Kubb together in early fall every year.
We had 16 teams of 6 people, with a full registration of 96 players. Plus plenty of folks came down just to watch, hang out with team members, and cheer on the players.
The great thing about Kubb for a team event is that anyone can play, the game is quick to pick up, and I guarantee you that you are going to meet and talk to the other members of your team. The game is casual, and can be enjoyed by players of any age.
Some of our team really get into it. As the Tournament Director I’m responsible for calling matches, making rulings on anything questionable on the field. It is awesome to see the folks that really git into the spirit of Kubb.
This year we decided to up our game a bit and got 8 custom Kubb sets with SPS colors on the kings, and the logo etched into it. These amazing sets came from JP’s Backyard Games and he threw in some shirts that I got to hand out to some players as well.
It was a great afternoon to Throw Some Wood!
Just like previous years, we had a POAP for the event!
We played three Round Robin matches in four different groups (results at the end), and from the round robin we placed teams into four different brackets. The winners of each bracket got bragging rights for the year, and an awesome medal!
Bracket 1: Lead the Way
EDI Emperors (W) vs. Kubastank
The Kubb Nubbs vs. Kubbless (W)
EDI Emperors (W) vs. Kubbless
Bracket 2: Know More to Be More
Kubbcumbers vs. Simply the Best (W)
Kubbiks Rube vs. Kubb Me Up, Scotty (W)
Simply the Best (W) vs. Kubb Me Up, Scotty
Bracket 3: Win Today, Win Tomorrow
Ice Kubs (W) vs. Kubb Scouts
Lucky #13 vs. Knock’n Kubb Uff-da-bash! (W)
Ice Kubs vs. Knock’n Kubb Uff-da-bash! (W)
Bracket 4: Succeed Together
Kubb on the Cob vs. Kubb Your Enthusiasm (W)
Kubby-doo Where Are You? (W) vs. Kubb 2: Hyperkubb
Kubb Your Enthusiasm vs. Kubby-doo Where Are You? (W)
See: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2019, and 2018 tournaments.
Round Robin Results
Group A
Game 1:
Ice Kubbs (W) vs. Kubbcumbers
Kubb on the Cob vs. EDI Emperors (W)
Game 2:
Kubbcumbers vs. EDI Emperors (W)
Ice Kubbs vs. Kubb on the Cob (W)
Game 3:
EDI Emperors (W) vs. Ice Kubbs
Kubbcumbers (W) vs. Kubb on the Cob
Group B
Game 1:
Simple the Best vs. Kubastank (W)
Kubb Scouts (W) vs. Kubb Your Enthusiasm
Game 2:
Simple the Best (W) vs. Kubb Scouts
Kubastank (W) vs Kubb Your Enthusiasm
Game 3:
Kubb Your Enthusiasm vs. Simple the Best (W)
Kubb Scouts vs. Kubastank (W)
Group C
Game 1:
Lucky #13 (W) vs. Kubby-doo Where Are You?
The Kubb Nubbs (W) vs. Kubbiks Rube
Game 2:
Lucky #13 vs. The Kubb Nubbs (W)
Kubby-doo Where Are You? (W) vs. Kubbiks Rube
Game 3:
Kubbiks Rube (W) vs. Lucky #13
The Kubb Nubbs (W) vs. Kubby-doo Where Are You?
Group D
Game 1:
Kubbless (W) vs. Knock’n Kubb Uff-da-bash!
Kubb 2: Hyperkubb vs. Kubb Me Up, Scotty! (W)
Game 2:
Kubbless (W) vs. Kubb 2: Hyperkubb
Knock’n Kubb Uff-da-bash! (W) vs. Kubb Me Up, Scotty!
Game 3:
Kubb Me Up, Scotty! vs. Kubbless (W)
Kubb 2: Hyperkubb (W) vs. Knock’n Kubb Uff-da-bash!
It was cool to see UBS prominently marketing their Bitcoin offerings in Zurich airport.
I’ve been collecting ekekonfts.eth “🔌 Ŝԝ𝞘ፐc₶” collection on Nifty Ink. I dig these and think the collection is a lot of fun. I want to create a backstory for each one of these characters.
London Welcoming Crypto?
You may not be a fan of a16z (Andreessen Horowitz). You may not be a fan of crypto. But pushing fintech innovation outside of the United States is not a good idea. The movements by regulators against crypto have much more to do with protecting power and marketing than they do about protecting consumers. See my post from Dec 2022 on Polarizing Technology.
Andreessen Horowitz, an American venture-capital firm, will open its first international office in London. The branch will focus on investments in crypto and blockchain startups. The firm believes that Britain’s government is more hospitable towards cryptocurrency. Regulators in America have clamped down on big crypto companies recently. — Economist Espresso, June 12, 2023
Also, inside the crypto community it is disheartening to see some in the Bitcoin community in effect supporting these moves. Bitcoin isn’t somehow immune on this, it is just the biggest and most widely-held of crypto. Regulators will try to undermine smaller ecosystems first.
Bitcoin Lightning makes the majority of the micropayment models that have been envisioned for the last two decades possible today. Instant, nearly free, person-to-person digital transactions — and the usability is reasonable even at this early stage. ⚡️thingelstad@walletofsatoshi.com
I added a bit of metadata to my website to enable Bitcoin Lightning “tips”. One line to indicate my Lightning address.
<meta name="lightning" content="lnurlp:thingelstad@getalby.com" />
In Chrome, with the Alby Extension you can easily send Satoshis.
Moving 1,000,000 Satoshis (0.01 Bitcoin) between Bitcoin addresses on-chain so I can claim a customized Wallet of Satoshi Lightning address. 😬
Achievement Unlocked:
Thanks Wallet of Satoshi ! ⚡️