Crypto
- re(center)ed which provided an opportunity for people to write a message on a piece of wood and then hang it anonymously on the wall. Every few hours the curator would pull them down and burn them in a “pyre”, releasing the sentiment.
- Archive of Collective Memory that allowed you to submit a message via the web that was then turned into an audio loop and played through a wooden wall that you had to put your ear against to hear it.
- Blankets of Ice which had a bedroom set in the middle of the snow with a “quilt” pattern made of colored ice blocks.
- Chapsicle of Love provided marriage service at the event.
- Techno From the Sun was a shanty powered only by solar energy with people DJ’ing techno music inside. You could modify and add to the mix by moving levers and dials on the outside of the shanty.
- On-chain analytics, how close am I to POAP.eth via POAPs?
- Add annotation to each POAP so I can fill out the memory more.
- Notify me of POAP drops “around me”
- Notify me of any POAP Deliveries waiting for me.
- Credit for 1 mainnet migration a month.
- Issue POAP by email address, hide claim codes entirely from everyone.
- Collections/series of POAP.
- Integration with my analytics service, so embed my Phantom Analytics or other tracking code.
- Support for external identifiers in claim codes so I can embed an identifier to my systems.
- Post-claim redirect.
- Additional metadata added to each claim
- White Label claim page
- Design services, POAP specific look
- Priority support, will hit your deadline
- Assistance with claim code distribution
- Everything in POAP Pro.
- 2 Studio events a year included.
- Would need something more.
- PAOP Pro for free
- 1 Studio events a year
- Ways to make claim code management and distribution easier. When I talk with people about distributing POAPs managing the claim codes is always a burden.
- Anti-farming for issuers would be nice. I had one POAP event get completely farmed and I would like to be able to invalidate that event somehow.
- Creating images for POAPs seems like an obvious capability. POAPathon is doing this at small scale. Even for organizations that have their own designers they may want help getting that POAP-look.
- RSS has been around since 1999 and is still one of the most widely supported way to syndicate activity across the web. RSS is used by hundreds of different Feed Readers, which would be great for POAP to support. Equally important are services like IFTTT and Zapier that can take any RSS feed and use that as a trigger for automation. If every event offered an RSS feed of POAP claims, that could be used by event organizers to power a ton of automations when a token is claimed.
- Webhooks would also allow additional integrations with POAP events. Webhooks would be a great middle option between the full POAP API, and something simple like RSS. If you could register one, or even multiple, Webhooks for an event that would be triggered on a claim you could do even more powerful extensions into platforms like Zapier. Additionally this would allow an easy way for app developers to connect to POAP events and claims.
- Creating a POAP event is incredibly simple. You don’t need to even create an account, all you need is an email address. This is great to remove friction but it also means that anyone can create any event. POAP has put significant effort into the curation body and review process to make sure that events meet some basic standards. But there is no way to assert that an event is truly from the organization or event it describes. It would be great to be able to sign the event with your wallet! For example, my Birthday POAP would be more authentic if the event was signed by the thingelstad.eth wallet. This opens up a common set of issues associated with verification, but verifying that events are authentic would make those POAPs more meaningful.
- There is an opportunity to have POAPs for things that are bound to locations instead of times. There is already a POAP Geocaching app in the store and there has been at least a couple experiments like this. That would be a cool capability, but I would also think that POAPs that are well known to collect at locations would be very neat. I would make one for my house that visitors could collect (preferably signed by both thingelstad.eth and knoxave.eth!). Another use case I would love is a POAP for summiting a climb. If you removed time limitations, this would be ideal for restaurants and cafes to have a perpetual POAP you can claim for visiting their location.
- POAP events can currently be minted from a claim code, or reserved using an email address. The email option is a nice intent but it doesn’t do much. You reserve your POAP to mint later, even after the expiration date for the event. But until you mint it you will not show up on the list of token holders, and cannot do anything else. This is an okay feature but it is confusing. People tend to thing they are done after reserving with an email address. POAP should send reminder emails to nudge those that have reserved to move forward with minting. And it would be great for event organizers to be able to see reservations to help people get them minted.
- Better yet would be to have POAP provide a non-custodial wallet for users that don’t have one. This could work very similar to what Reddit has done to get Collectible Avatars working. In Reddit, you can provide your own wallet, or you can let Reddit make one for you. The wallet that it makes is completely real, and you have the choice of letting Reddit store the seed phrase to recover it, or you can manage it on your own. This would be ideal for POAP as well. With this capability you could get rid of the reservation process entirely by creating a wallet and managing it for people. If it is fully capable, like a Reddit wallet, you could even give it an ENS name and add it to a MetaMask or Rainbow if you wanted.
- Sponsoring a contest.
- Submitting a design to a contest.
- Volunteers managing a contest.
- Volunteers sending a newsletter (see below).
- Volunteers hosting a community call.
- Winning a contest is already rewarded with the bounty. Governance tokens should be given equally to any artist that participates in a contest. Winning should not be a factor for governance tokens.
- Community call attendance is already rewarded with POAPs, and that should continue. That rewards engagement, and governance tokens reward contribution. However, a volunteer hosting a community call should be rewarded.
- Encryption has been an open debate for 30 years and is still unsettled. I suspect that crypto will have a similar path. I don’t think we will gain a consensus as a society soon.
- Existing entities with power that is threatened by encryption and crypto will not give it up easily. Progress will be slow and begrudgingly.
- Unfortunately these technologies do get used for nefarious activities. Terrorists do use encryption to protect terrible things, and bad actors do use Bitcoin to get payments.
- Vote for Lower Reserve Price to 0.10 ETH
- Vote for Dot as engineering resident
- Vote against Marketing Outreach Pilot
- Vote for Brook: DAO Operator
- Money
- DeFi
- Identity
- DAOs
- Hybrid Apps
- We sold 172 of the 180 Wicky Thing Candles we made. Last year we sold 134 candles.
- We sold all 50 bottles of Sweet Thing Honey.
- We sold 10 Jiggy Thing Puzzles, but it was the same puzzle we had in 2021 so a number of folks already had it. Last year we sold 26 puzzles.
- We had six Wicky Thing Candle scents this year: Winter Wonderland, Apple of my Eye, Oh my Darling, Tea Time (new), Red Hot (new), True North (new). Winter Wonderland and True North were nearly half of the 180 candles and together sold out the fastest.
- I’m not sure which vessel colors are the most popular, but it seems brown was likely the least popular.
- We achieved over 400% return on the expenses to buy supplies given the amount raised!
- Thus far 28 people have redeemed the Things 4 Good 2022 Fall Fundraiser POAP token. Printing out claim sheets with directions and the claim code was a much better way to distribute these.
Art Shanty Projects
We went to the Art Shanty Projects on Lake Harriet today. Tammy has been to this many times, but it was my first. I do like events like this that make for fun days in the cold of winter. The Shanties themselves were very cool. Notable highlights:
I was left wanting to have a Shanty next year that distributed a POAP and allowed people to record a memory of the event in some way. 🤔
Echo Forest Launch
Today is the launch of Echo Forest. This NFT project has Minneapolis connections being led by Brooks Clifford and Matt Benesch.
I minted two Wolf Healers, 18 and 19. I really dig the artwork and I’m excited to see how the utility evolves. Plus it is a great opportunity to be involved in a local project.
POAP Family
The new POAP Family feature is a cool way to see what POAPs people share between events. I looked at holders of my 50th Birthday POAP and I was surprised to see that there were 7 Cryptog’s HODLER’s who had my birthday POAP. The biggest were 13 of the 34 that also had my 51st Birthday POAP.
This kind of graph analysis of POAPs is an interesting extension and a way to build connection.
POAP as a Business
POAP is more than just a fun crypto product, it is also a business. I put some brief thoughts together on what I thought would be a POAP product that I would pay for as both a collector and an issuer.
As a POAP collector, I would want to pay a relatively small monthly fee to be able to get cool information about my collection and display it well.
POAP Collector - $3/mo
Now, changing hats to the issuer side there are a whole different set of things. What if we just kept everything as is, but added a new POAP Pro level.
POAP Pro - $20/mo
I think you could then have a service to provide a “full service” experience for the issuer.
POAP Studio - $500/event, require Pro subscription
And then you could turn both the Pro and Studio option into a subscription offering.
POAP for Business - $100/mo or $1,000/yr
And lastly, I think non-profits could be a really great avenue to get the word out about POAP. Aligning with non-profits would reach a very solid set of organizations that could benefit from POAP, and be a wonderful brand alignment with POAP itself. Make it super cheap or free for non-profits to use advanced POAP Pro and Studio capabilities.
POAP for Non-Profits - $20/mo or FREE
POAP Extensions
I was pondering cool things that POAPs could have and three ideas came to mind.
POAPs with Backs!
POAPs are a bit like challenge coins, and physical coins have a front and a back. Why not support two images for POAPs so they have a front and a back. This would be cool to flip them around and see the other side. It could be a whole new place to have creative imagery!
POAP Collections
I’ve gotten a few POAPs that are officially part of a collection. The Ethereum Merge and POAPathon Krampus PAOPs are examples of this. It would be cool if there was an official collection that these were part of and that was part of the event pages. You could even unlock a collection POAP when you have all the POAPs in that collection. Some groups do that now but it is manual.
Unique POAPs
I would love to get a POAP every time we do an escape room. But it would be even cooler if my specific instance of that POAP had additional data like the time it took for us to escape, how many clues we used, and our team name. If an issuer could add one off metadata to a specific claim code it could unlock a ton of use cases.
Premium Features for POAP Issuers
I got this survey to provide some feedback on features for POAP issuers but it didn’t have any comment areas, only quantitative inputs. So I put my comments in a blog post.
Priority Support
This could be valuable and probably only for non-personal use. If it included design assistance as well that could make it more appealing, something akin to POAPathon. If bundled into a “full service” experience I think there are companies that may pay for this.
Event Promotion / Verified Event
I think verification using signatures would be great. I’m not sure what type of verification and promotion this would be, and the devil is in the details here. POAP should avoid the problems that come from things like a “suggested user list”. Also, since POAPs are about attendance, I don’t know that it is useful to get a feed of events I’m not attending.
Collector Messaging
Two-way messaging with people that hold POAPs could be interesting, but it feels odd to do this with POAP versus Discord or Reddit. It feels more likely that you would token-gate a different service for this.
Collector Notifications
One-way messaging to collectors of your POAPs would be great. For sure this would be a really big win. When I’ve explained to people how they can use POAPs at their events nearly everyone wants to use it to communicate and that isn’t possible today.
Custom Page Designs / White Labeling
For non-personal use I think this could be nice if it were relatively easy to do. I’ve done a number of POAPs for different organizations and nobody has asked about this, but if you were doing a lot of them this could make sense.
Post Claim Redirect / User Redirect
A redirect could be nice, but I think it would be sufficient for most use cases to be able to have a event setting for a URL for people to go to after claiming. Would not need to be an automatic redirect. This seems like a nice convenience feature, something similar to what most mailing list platforms do.
Drop Analytics / Drop Reporting
Analytics on events could be interesting, but these features need to all be at the wish of the issuer. I value privacy, and would want my drops to be the same way.
There are two dimensions to this too. One would be extending existing web analytics to the drop pages. That could be very helpful for some issuers.
On-chain analytics have a potential to be much more uniquely interesting. It could be valuable to know what POAP events people are connected to and what NFT projects those same users engage with. I do not like the idea of tracking anything relating to net worth value.
There were three topics that didn’t make this survey that I would also like to see.
POAP Wishlist
POAP (pronounced poe-app) is one of my favorite crypto application. There is a good overview of what POAPs are for. I think POAPs are a great way of capturing memories and events, and potential creating connection and community. I love that they are a crypto app that has no monetary component. I’ve created many POAP events as well as collecting many.
I love how POAP has gown thus far! The growth has been amazing and the organization has continued to create meaning and value. There are three areas that I would like to see POAP extend and wanted to explore in more detail.
Integration Hooks
POAP has an existing API which is great for people looking to create applications using POAPs. However, there is a bigger opportunity for POAP to offer simple integration hooks that could be used by many services and people to extend as they please.
Event Enhancements
POAP events themselves are pretty simple today. They have a summary, image, location (text), a URL, and relevant date information. Events could be enhanced in two material ways: authenticity and different types of events.
Web2/3 Onboarding
POAP is a great way to introduce people to crypto. I have personally introduced well over 100 people to crypto by giving out POAP tokens for various events. I’ve put together a very simple guide for people to claim their first POAP, including setting up a wallet! But more could be done here to make it easier for people.
I’m sure that POAP has a long roadmap and more things to work on than they have time to do. I think it would be great to see enhancements like the above because I think they hit on key areas that would drive POAP growth and adoption.
Enabling integration capabilities would allow POAP issuers to do things like send a Tweet every time a POAP is claimed. Additional authenticity would allow more confidence in POAPs, particularly if POAP Checkout is used to raise funds for a good event. And taking on more of the wallet tasks for users would make onboarding new people to POAP so much easier.
See also POAPathon Future Thoughts.
I’ve tried multiple times to participate in the KZG Ceremony for Ethereum and it times out after hours of waiting. The wait time is 10,143 minutes right now (7 days)!
POAPathon Future Thoughts
On the December 30th POAPathon Community Call there was a request for feedback on where POAPathon should go in 2023. I thought about it and here are my thoughts.
First some background. POAPathon is a community driven organization that facilitates design contests for people that need an image for a POAP event. I love creating POAP events, but I lack the design skills to create great images. I’ve used POAPathon a few times to get amazing images for my events. The process, collaboration, and results are great.
Some POAPathon designed events I’ve done include:
Magic Pines Summer of 2022
by kavishsethi
Jamie Thingelstad’s 51st Birthday
by designatum.eth
TeamSPS 2022 Kubb Tournament
by InsertGenericArtName
POAPathon DAO
Creating a DAO for POAPathon would enable two important functions:
Treasury for the DAO to fund programs, strategy, and execution.
To fund the treasury some percentage of all bounties should be directed to the DAO. POAPathon is providing direct value by creating this marketplace, and directing some of those funds into the treasury to be used by the DAO is best for the overall health of the community.
Governance tokens to enable decisions making.
Governance tokens have no monetary value and should never be bought or sold. These tokens would be distributed for actions done in the DAO. Examples would include:
There is likely a broad list of additional activities that could be rewarded with governance tokens, but there are two activities that should not be:
Serious thought would need to be given to governance token amounts for each activity. Fortunately POAPathan has been doing nearly all of these things for a year or more, and that historical set of activities could be used to model what the amounts should be. Future changes to reward amounts could be handled via a DAO vote.
Lastly, the DAO should be run on Gnosis Chain in recognition that POAPs are distributed on Gnosis Chain. (Disclosure: I am a Gnosis Chain validator.)
Contests On-chain
Today contests are created via a survey, USDC is sent to POAPathon, and the Contest Managers (POAPathon volunteers) are trusted to setup the contests and distribute the funds. To further embrace a trustless approach, contests could be moved to a smart contract and executed on-chain.
When a contest is created the USDC would be sent to a contract. That contract would then manage the distribution. Some percentage would be sent to the DAO immediately after the contest is approved. The remainder would be sent to the addresses of the winners.
There are a lot of options here. It would be ideal if the smart contract knew what artists had submitted art for the contest, and could even handle distributing governance tokens rewarding them for participating. The contest requester could then select the winners from a list of participating artists.
This would require development efforts that may go beyond the scope of volunteer engagement. If so, the DAO treasury could be used to fund the development of this.
Other Stuff
Focus on just POAPs. The POAPathon website suggests a variety of design services via contest (PFP, Logos), but POAP is right there in the name and focusing on just that use case may create more opportunity.
Email newsletter. Discord is great, but is only useful for very engaged community members. A newsletter that highlights the contests, selected artists, and more could be very compelling. This is a way to stay connected and broaden the reach of POAPathon. POAP has This week in POAP for example.
Give out more POAPs. POAPathon distributes a POAP for each Community Call. It would be cool to give a POAP for submitting a contest, and winning contests. I’ve created five contests now but there is no record of that outside of Discord history. I’d love to have a POAP from POAPathon showing that.
Closer connection with POAP itself. POAPathon could be part of the POAP process. There seems to be no mention of POAPathon on the POAP website that I could easily find. Getting in this flow of requests would help make sure there are enough contests to have a thriving community.
Polarizing Technology: Encryption and Crypto
The fury and vitriol towards crypto is strong. People use words like “hate” and you can feel the emotion in their voice. I’ve had friends suggest that I must hate the environment if I support crypto. Or even that they thought I was “too smart” for crypto. Many suggest that blockchains are “just a database”, but I’ve never seen people yelling at each other, dismissing opinions, and ultimately even losing friends because they liked a database!
This made me wonder, is this unique to crypto? What else in technology might be so polarizing and carry so much emotional energy with it?
Then I realized that crypto isn’t alone. Encryption has a similar polarizing affect. And as I explored that hypothesis, I clearly also saw that the entities that find these technologies threatening use very similar tactics to attack them.
Encryption
Ways to encrypt data have been around for as long as we’ve written things down. Famous hardware devices like the Enigma machine were key tools to successful war operations. Modern technology has made encryption more sophisticated and even more difficult to defeat.
In 1991 Phil Zimmerman wrote Pretty Good Privacy or PGP. PGP was the first widely available implementation of the incredibly secure public-key cryptography. After Zimmerman created PGP he shared the source code online, triggering the US Government to open an investigation into Zimmerman and PGP for potential violations of the Arms Export Control Act. For obvious reasons, the US Government doesn’t want encryption technology that it cannot defeat to be in the hands of other entities. Five years later the US Government dropped its investigation into Zimmerman with no indictment.
The early history of the Electronic Frontier Foundation also involved encryption. In 1995 they represented the defendant in Bernstein v. United States. Similar to Zimmerman, Bernstein wanted to publish the source code of his encryption software. After four years we had a landmark ruling that determined that software source code was speech, and is thus protected by the First Amendment.
It is worth noting that the Bernstein v. United States ruling was one of the cases referenced by Apple when it refused to hack the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone.
Encryption is now used widely, and necessary to provide hundreds of secure services. Every modern phone has dozens of encryption routines in it, many that just operate in the background so that if someone stole your device, your private information would be protected.
But should private citizens be able to use encryption that is so secure that nobody else access it? Even law enforcement? Even the US Government? Even after 30 years public opinion on this is still not settled. It absolutely makes law enforcement harder when all communication between parties is encrypted, but it has immense benefit to the privacy of those individuals.
I firmly believe that we have a right to encrypt data in a way that no other entity can ever access it. The same way that I cannot be compelled to share a secret I have memorized, I have the right to have digital information that is completely secure and private to me.
However, there are many people who disagree completely. Many feel strongly that law enforcement particularly should have a backdoor to get into encrypted data. Many believe that Apple should have hacked those terrorist phones and retrieved information for the FBI. The government itself continues to fight for this with. In 1993 we had the Clipper Chip, but the battle continues.
Encryption itself challenges power. It allows normal people to do something that beforehand only governments or corporations could. The power to access secret information is a big one. Those that previously held that capability exclusively are not going to let it go easily. And that is why the FBI steps in to sue Apple when the time is right.
There are two wedges that are used to argue why encryption should not be allowed for regular individuals: terrorism and protecting children. Horrible topics to be sure, but they are the most effective at swaying public opinion against encryption. The next time an established entity with power makes a legal claim that encryption must have a backdoor, look for those two topics.
If we had a Digital Bill of Rights, I would include encryption as one of the first.
Crypto
Crypto, blockchain, cryptocurrencies — this technology has many similarities to encryption. First, let me clarify that while encryption and cryptography play a key role in crypto, it is a completely different solution and set of use cases. There could be no crypto without cryptography, but the application of crypto is not about protecting secrets.
Very similar to encryption though, crypto takes an activity that was previously the exclusive domain of powerful entities and makes it accessible to many. You could not have created a currency that could be trusted by millions without crypto. I can assert ownership of many digital assets without the benefit of any company or government entity, thanks to crypto.
Crypto allows individuals to store and exchange things of value completely on their own, common digital ownership.
The Bitcoin Whitepaper written in 2008, and then launched in 2009 was in many ways like Zimmerman’s publishing of PGP in 1991. The technology was furthered significantly when Ethereum launched in 2015, allowing completely new use cases to be created. Similar to encryption, in the crypto world we now have dozens of technology solutions and thousands of applications built on top of that. But the fundamental ethos is about storing and transferring value between people, directly without a company or government in the middle.
The efficiency benefits of blockchain are incredibly enticing, and like encryption it is possible for existing entities that control power to use these technologies internally to get benefit. The crypto version of a government backdoor is a US Digital Currency, run on a private and controlled blockchain.
Imagine if the FBI published an encryption tool. Would you use it?
Depending on when you start the clock with crypto we are between 7 and 14 years into the same kind of debate that we have been having with encryption. Should groups of people on their own be able to store and transfer value without any tools from the Government? Many smart, educated, and well-meaning people will have different views on this. It is important that a government can control their own currency. It is also important that a government have legal domain over certain forms of ownership. But personally I don’t believe those are blanket needs, and I see a great opportunity for technology to enable new capabilities here.
To fight off crypto there are two narratives that have developed. The first is that crypto supports fraud & crime. The second is environmental destruction. It is true that almost all Ransomware takes payment in Bitcoin, and the energy footprint of a proof-of-work blockchain is enormous. However, Bitcoin has also enabled people with no access to banking systems to store and transmit value. And while the energy footprint for Bitcoin is high, the gold industry certainly has a large energy footprint too. What amount of energy is acceptable for a digital reserve currency of the world to use?
***
This thought exercise was helpful for me to add some context and perspective to these two debates. I hadn’t previously connected the encryption debate that I’ve observed and supported for years with what I was seeing in crypto. Connecting them in this way draws a couple of conclusions:
I’ve been validating the Gnosis Chain for about three months now. I’m running 32 validators. Gnosis made the transition to using proof-of-stake. The validators generate about 0.4 mGNO a day, or about $1.09, a 14% annual yield. On average my 32 validators propose 4 to 5 blocks a day, with a maximum of 10. There are currently 109,386 validators.
Find Unique Addresses for Multiple POAP Events
How do you get a list of unique addresses that have claimed any set of POAPs?
Each POAP event allows you to download a CSV file that has the addresses that claimed it, along with other data. Download all the CSV files into a directory. Now, assuming you are on Unix-like system, the rest is pretty easy.
First put all the CSVs together in one file. The download from POAP is missing a trailing newline, so loop in the shell.
for file in *.csv; do
for> cat $file >> combined.csv
for> echo "" >> combined.csv
for> done
Now lets spit the second column, the address, into another file. awk does this well.
awk -F "\"*,\"*" '{print $2}' combined.csv > addresses.txt
Now the classic sort and uniq combination will give us what we want.
cat addresses.txt| sort | uniq > addresses-uniq.txt
And you have your list!
I’ve created 27 POAP events that have had 630 tokens claimed from 354 unique addresses. Art for 4 of them from Poapathon. I 💚 POAP! Pretty cool!
PS: I’m planning a fun surprise for those 354 people. 😊🎁
Crypto in Three Words
While driving around on some errands I was yammering about something crypto related with the family. This is when they patiently listen a bit, and then change the subject back to something else when I leave a break in the conversation.
This time though my break was met with a question from my daughter. “Dad, describe crypto in three words or less.” I’m going to ignore the presumed verbosity in limiting me to three words. I decided to embrace the challenge.
I thought for a bit and hit on the three words:
Common Digital Ownership
I suspect that these are not the three words that everyone would come up with. So, let me give some context.
Digital
Let’s start in the middle. It is very clear that the digital world is continuing to grow in significance for our lives. Certainly the amount of time we spend online has increased significantly over the last decade. But that is just the beginning. Nearly every part of our life now involves some form of digital interaction. We do our banking digitally. We watch nearly all of our entertainment and news digitally. We keep track of our favorite sports digitally. We book our restaurant reservations, haircuts, Doctor visits, and everything else digitally.
With every passing day the digital world becomes increasingly important to everything we do. In fact, many of us now have a digital identity that is part of our overall identity.
In short, we need to care and pay attention to our digital experiences.
Ownership
As digital becomes an ever increasing part of our life there are concepts that are obvious in the real world but are very complicated in the digital world. Ownership is one of those.
Since the beginning of computing, technology has made it increasingly cheaper to make perfect copies of anything. In fact, so cheap that we could consider it free. If I have a song or a photo, I can make copies forever for nearly no cost.
In the real world we like to say that “possession is 9/10ths of the law”. Mostly, if I physically have an object, more than likely I own it as well. This is patently not true in the digital world.
I could have an application, an image, a song, or any number of different things that I have gotten digitally but not own any of them. However, ownership is still important, particularly as more of our life happens online.
There have been workarounds. When we buy software now we get a long string of random characters that is a license key for us to use that software. That is a form of asserting ownership. I could embed into the IPTC and EXIF metadata for a photo a copyright statement to assert ownership. But none of these have the same qualities of actually possessing something, like if I have a hammer in my house. It is almost certainly my hammer. Or my neighbor is missing a hammer.
Crypto gives us a means of asserting, verifying, and proving ownership. In fact, enables the first digital asset that cannot be copied at any cost.
This ownership could be of anything. It could prove that you own some Bitcoin or Ethereum. It could prove that you own an NFT that represents the right to use a piece of software. It could be a certificate that proves you have a degree from a certain college. It could be the literal digital file for a song that you have ownership of. It could be a POAP that proves you were at my cabin one summer.
I believe that being able to own things, and transfer that ownership, is an important feature of our digital world.
Common
The first word is last because I want to first establish that the digital world is critically important, and then second that ownership is an important feature of the world that should be represented in that digital world.
It could be argued that we have this feature already. In fact, if I login to the iTunes Store and buy a DRM-free song, I have ownership of that song. Or at least I do as long as iTunes agrees with me. If I buy an eBook on Amazon I think I sort of own that book, although I really don’t since they have recalled books that people have purchased.
I believe it is vitally important that we have a way of owning digital assets that is independent of corporations and governments, relying on something akin to “the commons” as much as possible.
Common wasn’t the first world that came to mind here. First was “decentralized” which I think is a fine word, but it is a how more than a why. Plus it’s a $5 technical word that most people will scratch their heads about. Yes decentralized is important, but more important is that it is decentralized in “the commons”, meaning average people running average infrastructure to make this service work.
The other word I liked was “public”. I think that works well too, but I worry about potential interpretation as a government service. Ownership must be done without corporations, non-profits, the government, or any other finite “entity”.
Important to “common” is the legitimacy that comes along with it. There is a common argument that critics of crypto make, that blockchains are just a database, and a bad one at that. Blockchain isn’t a database, because it has legitimacy as a feature. A database only gets legitimacy from the organization that runs it, companies or governments. For us to have ownership that is more akin to the hammer being in my house, it needs to be legitimate and owned as a common capability.
✧✧✧
Common Digital Ownership
This is the foundational argument that I would make for crypto. There are a near infinite number of things that can be built on Common Digital Ownership, but the core is simple. We shouldn’t rely on corporations or governments granting us the right to own digital things. We need to be able to create, own, share, transfer, and sell things completely on our own in the digital space. Just like we can in real life right now.
LilNouns DAO Votes
Time for some LilNouns voting.
I wasn’t supporting of having a price floor of any kind, so I’m voting for the reduction of the reserve price, but ultimately don’t believe there should be a reserve.
What in Ethereum ecosystem excites me
This was originally published in Weekly Thing #237 as the featured link, but I’m also publishing it here for easy reference.
As the creator of Ethereum I was very interested in reading about Vitalik Buterin’s take on what he is excited about in the space. While obviously being a promoter of Ethereum, Vitalik is also a reasonable critic and has a track record of highlighting problems or limitations. He starts with that…
We’ve also come closer to identifying fundamental limits of the space. Many DAOs have had a fair chance with an enthusiastic audience willing to participate in them despite the inconveniences and fees, and many have underperformed. Industrial supply-chain applications have not gone anywhere. Decentralized Amazon on the blockchain has not happened. But it’s also a world where we have seen genuine and growing adoption of a few key applications that are meeting people’s real needs - and those are the applications that we need to focus on.
Hence my change in perspective: my excitement about Ethereum is now no longer based in the potential for undiscovered unknowns, but rather in a few specific categories of applications that are proving themselves already, and are only getting stronger.
Many people (including me!) have said that blockchain is a solution looking for a problem. I think that was a fair assessment a number of years ago. The space has evolved in significant ways, which is partly why I prefer to refer to the solution space as “crypto”, and not blockchain. I tend to not love the Web3 term either, as it is often placed in opposition to Web2 which is incorrect in my opinion. My own “tinkering” in the space has been to be a user, a builder, and see what I can do with it in my own hands.
Summary of Buterin’s list:
My list would be the same, but I would probably change the order with Identity being on the top.
Some thoughts of mine using Vitalik’s list:
Money
Money will be digital. I think we are well beyond the tipping point on this. I don’t think paper money should disappear, but having digital cash is too powerful to ignore. The innovation here will continue to happen in smaller and less developed economies, but will come everywhere.
Unlike wealthy countries like the United States, where financial transactions are easy to make and 8% inflation is considered extreme, in Argentina and many other countries around the world, links to global financial systems are more limited and extreme inflation is a reality every day.
I think bound to this future is a multi-currency world. Something that will be new as well to wealthy countries. The power to be able to move a variety of currencies directly wherever I want is huge. Simple stuff, like paying for a designer directly with a designer in another country by sending USD Coin with no intermediary is incredible. Stablecoins are also a critical unlock here to allow for more average, everyday transactions. Vitalik’s overview of different types of stablecoins was interesting to me and got me looking at RAI closer.
My hope and belief here is that this is all additive. It isn’t a replacement, but in addition to. Will credit cards go away? No, they provide a debt tool and protection against fraud since the funds move slowly.
Blending fiat and digital, along with a variety of stablecoins as well as traded currencies, will allow people to use different tools for different jobs, and give more freedom and choice to how we transact with others.
DeFi
An observation about finance that isn’t limited to crypto. It tends to get wildly complex and have hidden leverage that results in unsustainable returns, that eventually blowup. We’ve seen this in DeFi, we’ve also seen it in traditional finance. We’ve also seen a ton of fraud in DeFi, which we’ve also seen in traditional finance.
The use cases Vitalik lists here are interesting. I would add to them that access to simple financial capabilities, particularly debt, via smart contracts is a boring but very powerful tool.
I’ve been lending for 15 years on Kiva and have ben part of 258 loans so far. I’m a fan of Kiva and the basic thesis of microlending. However, it is a complete and total black box. I have to trust Kiva, and their field partners, and just cross my fingers that this all works. This entire thing could be rebuilt in so many better ways.
Another good example here is Endaoment which I used to create a donor advised fund on-chain and fund in minutes using my browser.
The key with this space is to keep it boring and simple.
Identity
How the crypto ecosystem has approached identity is surprisingly one of my very favorite things. It is important to note that in crypto identity is often aligned with a wallet, and you can have any number of wallets. I love the fact that you can build up multiple identities and could even bind those all to one person. The ecosystem is the win here.
When I log on to Blockscan chat, I sign in with Ethereum. This means that I am immediately visible as vitalik.eth (my ENS name) to anyone I chat with. In the future, to fight spam, Blockscan chat could “verify” accounts by looking at on-chain activity or POAPs. The lowest tier would simply be to verify that the account has sent or been the recipient in at least one on-chain transaction (as that requires paying fees). A higher level of verification could involve checking for balances of specific tokens, ownership of specific POAPs, a proof-of-personhood profile, or a meta-aggregator like Gitcoin Passport.
I like what Reddit is doing here as well. Reddit is slowly moving avatars and their own reputation system into crypto, and doing it with either a wallet that they manage for you or you can provide your own.
You can see reputation forming here with a combination of systems like Reddit Karma, and then layering on POAP tokens as well.
If you take a look at the POAPs that I have it gives you a clear sense of me, at least in some dimensions of my life.
I agree with Vitalik’s assertion that Privacy is a key issue that has to be addressed here. However, I would put user experience even higher, which isn’t on his list. This stuff is wonderful for geeks, but is far too difficult for average users to pull off. I think Rainbow is ahead of the pack here. Using Rainbow you can buy an ENS name right in your wallet and manage your profile, in addition to seeing your various POAPs.
Additional to identity, I think we are going to see attestation added here through signing and other cryptographic proof. How do you know that the text you are reading was actually written by me? Well, you can trust that nobody was in the middle. But if I digitally sign it with my thingelstad.eth wallet, and you can attest that wallet is me, you can know for sure.
DAOs
I think there is a lot of potential in DAOs. I’ve described them as a means of organization collective action. Vitalik’s definition is more specific.
Most generally, a DAO is a smart contract that is meant to represent a structure of ownership or control over some asset or process.
I’m a token-holder in multiple DAOs, mostly in the Noun ecosystem but also in Ukraine DAO, Elf DAO, and others. For me DAOs have been filled with as much disappointment as excitement, but I still think there is a huge potential here.
Vitalik’s thoughts on DAOs are much deeper than my own. I would like to consider small DAOs and how that could enable new things.
My favorite DAO example would be a neighborhood solar collector. Using a DAO you could remove much of the trust and governance requirements. if 80% of the households in a neighborhood wanted to collectively setup a solar collector, a DAO could be created to hold the treasury, pay for the installation, provide maintenance, take votes on improvements and changes, and pay the members out as needed. That could be a big enabler of “collective action”.
My bad taste with DAOs today is that nearly all of them vote with tokens, and that means that many DAOs are controlled by a small number of mega token holders. LilNouns DAO, which I have 2 of, is dominated by a handful of people that hold large collections and they effectively control the votes. Governance models need to evolve greatly for DAOs.
Hybrid Apps
Using crypto technology to solve just part of the solution for an existing service is a great use case. I think these will lag though as they need significant adoption of crypto via primary use cases to power these secondary ones.
In conclusion, this list is what makes me excited about the Ethereum landscape. There are other valuable things happening in crypto, but these use cases have a lot of potential, and are not easily solved using other approaches.
I reserved three Ethereum Name Service (ENS) names for Minnestar: minnestar.eth, minnebar.eth, and minnedemo.eth. Minnestar doesn’t have a need for them today, but I think they will in the future. I’ll have them over in my thingelstad.eth ENS collection in the meantime. 🤓
Things 4 Good Fall Fundraiser Notes
We had a great Things 4 Good 2022 Fall Fundraiser. With the help of many friends and family we raised $5,217 to support four good causes.
Some notes from the event:
I’m already looking forward to the 2023 Fall Fundraiser! 🤩
I love that This Week in POAP highlighted our Things 4 Good Fall Fundraiser POAP in the Nov 15 edition! ❤️
“POAPs for good: a POAP at a family fundraiser.”