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Dark StarThe Consumer Crypto Paradox
Saw this tweet the other day laying out how Zuck thinks about launching products at Meta. He simplifies it in a way that makes sense: Step 1: Spark Step 2: Retention Step 3: Growth and Scale the Community And then, only then, comes Step 4: Monetization The last part hammered a feeling I’ve had about consumer crypto products for some time: by measuring an applications success by volume, fees or revenue from the get, a product is choking its ability to capture a larger customer base. Basically,...
Dark StarBuild for Humans, Not Hashrates
Optimizing for users — not bots, vanity metrics, or protocol worship — is the only way this works. Behavioral economists often state that markets are made of people, not rational agents. Human factors like emotion, biases, and social influences impact our investment choices, which breed irregularities and inefficiencies. We experience this daily, even outside of markets. It creates perfect imperfections and keeps the world interesting. Crypto markets are no different, in that Housecoin can pu...
Dark StarAmerica Onchain: "You've Got Scale?"
press “play” before you begin… It’s not very helpful to make direct comparisons between the evolution of technologies. Other than broad similarities in the way new inventions evolve and are adopted, the unique way a technology interacts with a culture at a particular moment in history is so specific that such comparisons likely miss more than they predict. But there is something resonant in analogies between the dissemination of the ‘original’ Internet (in, say, the 1990s), the social compone...
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Dark StarThe Consumer Crypto Paradox
Saw this tweet the other day laying out how Zuck thinks about launching products at Meta. He simplifies it in a way that makes sense: Step 1: Spark Step 2: Retention Step 3: Growth and Scale the Community And then, only then, comes Step 4: Monetization The last part hammered a feeling I’ve had about consumer crypto products for some time: by measuring an applications success by volume, fees or revenue from the get, a product is choking its ability to capture a larger customer base. Basically,...
Dark StarBuild for Humans, Not Hashrates
Optimizing for users — not bots, vanity metrics, or protocol worship — is the only way this works. Behavioral economists often state that markets are made of people, not rational agents. Human factors like emotion, biases, and social influences impact our investment choices, which breed irregularities and inefficiencies. We experience this daily, even outside of markets. It creates perfect imperfections and keeps the world interesting. Crypto markets are no different, in that Housecoin can pu...
Dark StarAmerica Onchain: "You've Got Scale?"
press “play” before you begin… It’s not very helpful to make direct comparisons between the evolution of technologies. Other than broad similarities in the way new inventions evolve and are adopted, the unique way a technology interacts with a culture at a particular moment in history is so specific that such comparisons likely miss more than they predict. But there is something resonant in analogies between the dissemination of the ‘original’ Internet (in, say, the 1990s), the social compone...
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
the internet has become boring. we spend more time than ever before on it, but our ability to seek or be surprised or get excited feels less and less. it’s almost as if we’ve gone from a place of wonder (what new shit could be built on the internet?) to a place of expectation (i use this because i have to.). Maybe it was meant to be boring all along, and as it became more critical to our every day lives it lost that new car smell. Still, that kinda sucks.
i often like to think about experiences and relationships that make me feel something and try to pattern match that back to my online activity. what are the emotions I crave that I’d love to feel while being online?
a rare song drop at a concert
finding a $20 on the ground
running into an old friend
watching my team win
hugging my mom
and it’s not just the good feelings but the bad ones too. because those make us and break us and let us appreciate the good times even more. i’d even argue the internet indexes heavily on those bad feelings, just look at the News business and dunking folks on Twitter.
and there are things we get obsessed with, fairly so, like AI which can drive amazing emotion and creation (and much more). but it also welcomes predictability and algorithms and presumptions that cut away at our ability to be surprised or discover. This can possibly take us further away from stumbling upon the feelings that we forgot.
i’ve been spending a lot more time on Warpcast (bwo of Farcaster) and I sorta like it there. it reminds me a lot of why i got into crypto in the first place. there is a lot of reality in crypto that mimics things i crave emotionally from the real world. the space always feel new, undiscovered, experimental. there are new people to meet daily working on incredibly important or weird shit that you aren’t going to find elsewhere. while airdrops in itself are hard to grok for most, people love that feeling of reward, surprise. when money is involved, people feel closer and a deeper responsibility to build connection. we win together. we lose together. we have our misfits and our missionaries. it’s a society of its own. but at its core, owning and participating and belonging are the ingredients to many of these experiences, which in itself are a reflection of an identity and a community. it’s cool.
while some of us get on the bus, not quite sure where we’re going, we’re excited not by the idea that we can predict the next chapter but more so that we have no idea. and that serendipity is what’s been missing online for a very long time.
the internet has become boring. we spend more time than ever before on it, but our ability to seek or be surprised or get excited feels less and less. it’s almost as if we’ve gone from a place of wonder (what new shit could be built on the internet?) to a place of expectation (i use this because i have to.). Maybe it was meant to be boring all along, and as it became more critical to our every day lives it lost that new car smell. Still, that kinda sucks.
i often like to think about experiences and relationships that make me feel something and try to pattern match that back to my online activity. what are the emotions I crave that I’d love to feel while being online?
a rare song drop at a concert
finding a $20 on the ground
running into an old friend
watching my team win
hugging my mom
and it’s not just the good feelings but the bad ones too. because those make us and break us and let us appreciate the good times even more. i’d even argue the internet indexes heavily on those bad feelings, just look at the News business and dunking folks on Twitter.
and there are things we get obsessed with, fairly so, like AI which can drive amazing emotion and creation (and much more). but it also welcomes predictability and algorithms and presumptions that cut away at our ability to be surprised or discover. This can possibly take us further away from stumbling upon the feelings that we forgot.
i’ve been spending a lot more time on Warpcast (bwo of Farcaster) and I sorta like it there. it reminds me a lot of why i got into crypto in the first place. there is a lot of reality in crypto that mimics things i crave emotionally from the real world. the space always feel new, undiscovered, experimental. there are new people to meet daily working on incredibly important or weird shit that you aren’t going to find elsewhere. while airdrops in itself are hard to grok for most, people love that feeling of reward, surprise. when money is involved, people feel closer and a deeper responsibility to build connection. we win together. we lose together. we have our misfits and our missionaries. it’s a society of its own. but at its core, owning and participating and belonging are the ingredients to many of these experiences, which in itself are a reflection of an identity and a community. it’s cool.
while some of us get on the bus, not quite sure where we’re going, we’re excited not by the idea that we can predict the next chapter but more so that we have no idea. and that serendipity is what’s been missing online for a very long time.
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