A ramble written in the middle of the night on everything, mostly unedited:

• The general energy is pretty good — It’s rare to see so many smart energetic creative young in spirit people excited and optimistic about something for once, regardless of how you feel about the rest this is energy I believe is worth capturing

• I primarily think of Ethereum as an identity system and this explanation usually works pretty well—this is something that I think it does incredibly well and to me everything seems foundational on top of that

• To continue, to me, bl*ckch*ins are primarily big global computers anyone can put programs that interoperate with each other on, which in and of itself pretty cool

• I’m generally bullish on DeFi — Interoperable financial lego blocks are really fun and cool especially if you’re a dumb nerd like me, its a wonderful and fun rabbithole if you're into that

• Despite that, I generally don’t like how much so much of rest the space is so financialized though—these things have a time and place IMO

• I hate meme coins. I understand why they exist (economic desperation and dreams of breaking free in our cruel and unforgiving world) but I really do not like them at all for the same reasons

• NFTs primarily as a programmable object primitives are really interesting — I really love projects that really take advantage and push the limits of this

• The scene around smaller artists is really wonderful too — love to see so many wonder creative people creating art for a uniquely digital medium and getting paid well for their work and building fanbases that love them

• I think of NFTs less as “I own this jpeg” and more as patronage and public domain brands and projects that really push on this (like the gremlins and blitmaps and nouns) on this are the most fascinating to me

• The rise of public domain brands is going to be really interesting and really worth looking at as well - incredibly excited for how the patronage system encourages well funded community driven world building, fanfic on steroids in a way

• Some of them are cute but for the most part I hate the big pfp projects a lot, they seem to be the worst of the financialization driven culture with talk they have about price and flips and gatekeeping—with that honestly really I hate the apes so much. So so so much.

• I'm generally not a fan of digital scarcity or gatekeeping ("you could not live with your abundance so you created your own scarcity"), although there are places where it makes sense in a skeuomorphic way and to ensure people get paid

• token enabled >>>> token gated by far for me

• DAOs are cool. Less so in technology and more so in spirit - it's wonderful to see a lot of people who never would have before embrace cooperative thinking. Something something accidental socialism hehehehe

• User owned and user controlled protocols and applications are great in concept too. The implications of this are still unknown and its funny to see people figure it out in real time but im pretty optimistic about it in the long run

• Almost everything being entirely open source and open to contributors and and feedback is pretty great too, even if democracy can be a bit broken at times

• On the gaming side of things, we’re really early but have had a lot of good discussions and incredibly thoughtful with builders and founders in the space and I’m cautiously optimistic based on the amount of care they seem to be putting in to this

• NFTs as primitive collectables (such as trading cards like parallel that can be used in games) make a lot of sense to me for skeuomorphic reasons, especially if we can ensure they’re easily accessible in the long run

• Play to earn mostly still feels icky to me. Maybe there are good ways to structure it but for now something about it is too much on the wrong side of the dystopia <-> utopia spectrum for me.

• Dark Forest is a really great example of an experimental game that really takes advantage of the technology without any weird need to feel icky and financial itself. I hope as we get more scaling solutions more interesting things like this pop up

• things are still *way way wayway* too expensive and slow (both in terms of prices and transaction costs) to really be accessible to regular people and usecases and that’s a big point of FUD for me

• I feel like part of why everything feels so icky and financialized is that since gas fees are so high everyone feels that in order to do anything they must have some chance of making back enough $$$ to cover that and then some because the stakes are too high

• Hopefully as we get more and better scaling solutions we really start to see more interesting projects that really push on the unique capabilities of the tech and actually pushing on decentralizing computing and the internet

• Things are starting to feel toppy. I still think we have some room to go but this market is getting stupid lol. You can also tell because there are so many obvious grifters which always I always find incredibly annoying

• There is also way too much going on right now. Too many projects too many ideas both good and bad too many metaphorical ponzis too many grifters too much news too much harassment too many haters too much discourse and its incredibly overwhelming

• I generally think bear markets are better because they focus more on experimentation and ideas and building and less on get rich quick schemes, but worry about the people who will get washed out that can’t afford to

• I am legitimately concerned for a lot of people when the bear comes, I’ve been washed out quite a few times already so I know to expect but I hope people experiencing it for the first time will be able to handle it

• The discourse around everything has gone entirely off the rails tho—I’m obsessed with information bubbles and am fascinated in poking into different ones and honestly, it really seems like there’s no winning people when they have completely different spheres of (mis)information

• I still have a lot of disdain for the skeptics I’ve seen because they both are usually factually inaccurate and also incredibly smug and condescending about their takes (you can only be one never both!), and often tend to encourage mass harassment and bullying

• I’ve lost *a lot* of respect for *many* established people in this industry the last few weeks-especially those encouraging or peddling smug and condescending misinformation, a lot of it incredibly deranged

• I’m okay with nuanced and thoughtful criticisms

• You know who you are

• There’s less money laundering than people think, much less tax evasion, half the most harassed projects are on clean chains anyways (this is actually where I lose a lot of respect for less toxic skeptics, this is right in their face and they still pretend to be environmentalists)

• FWIW I’ve managed to buy and retire mid five figures of carbon offsets and offset my next few generations of lifetimes, so my conscious is cleared there for sure

• I imagine a lot of the crypto people that feeds over to their bubbles is probably not the best stuff either, which might be why they feel that way. I try to ignore that side of twitter anyways so I don’t really see it on my end but there are still a lot of toxic people

• that's all for now.

• lets go buy the US Constitution together , join us at @ConstitutionDAO

Thanks for reading!!

Follow me on Twitter for updates on my next essays. I’m currently working on a curation of IKEA Bangers, coming soon.

A ramble written in the middle of the night on everything, mostly unedited:

• The general energy is pretty good — It’s rare to see so many smart energetic creative young in spirit people excited and optimistic about something for once, regardless of how you feel about the rest this is energy I believe is worth capturing

• I primarily think of Ethereum as an identity system and this explanation usually works pretty well—this is something that I think it does incredibly well and to me everything seems foundational on top of that

• To continue, to me, bl*ckch*ins are primarily big global computers anyone can put programs that interoperate with each other on, which in and of itself pretty cool

• I’m generally bullish on DeFi — Interoperable financial lego blocks are really fun and cool especially if you’re a dumb nerd like me, its a wonderful and fun rabbithole if you're into that

• Despite that, I generally don’t like how much so much of rest the space is so financialized though—these things have a time and place IMO

• I hate meme coins. I understand why they exist (economic desperation and dreams of breaking free in our cruel and unforgiving world) but I really do not like them at all for the same reasons

• NFTs primarily as a programmable object primitives are really interesting — I really love projects that really take advantage and push the limits of this

• The scene around smaller artists is really wonderful too — love to see so many wonder creative people creating art for a uniquely digital medium and getting paid well for their work and building fanbases that love them

• I think of NFTs less as “I own this jpeg” and more as patronage and public domain brands and projects that really push on this (like the gremlins and blitmaps and nouns) on this are the most fascinating to me

• The rise of public domain brands is going to be really interesting and really worth looking at as well - incredibly excited for how the patronage system encourages well funded community driven world building, fanfic on steroids in a way

• Some of them are cute but for the most part I hate the big pfp projects a lot, they seem to be the worst of the financialization driven culture with talk they have about price and flips and gatekeeping—with that honestly really I hate the apes so much. So so so much.

• I'm generally not a fan of digital scarcity or gatekeeping ("you could not live with your abundance so you created your own scarcity"), although there are places where it makes sense in a skeuomorphic way and to ensure people get paid

• token enabled >>>> token gated by far for me

• DAOs are cool. Less so in technology and more so in spirit - it's wonderful to see a lot of people who never would have before embrace cooperative thinking. Something something accidental socialism hehehehe

• User owned and user controlled protocols and applications are great in concept too. The implications of this are still unknown and its funny to see people figure it out in real time but im pretty optimistic about it in the long run

• Almost everything being entirely open source and open to contributors and and feedback is pretty great too, even if democracy can be a bit broken at times

• On the gaming side of things, we’re really early but have had a lot of good discussions and incredibly thoughtful with builders and founders in the space and I’m cautiously optimistic based on the amount of care they seem to be putting in to this

• NFTs as primitive collectables (such as trading cards like parallel that can be used in games) make a lot of sense to me for skeuomorphic reasons, especially if we can ensure they’re easily accessible in the long run

• Play to earn mostly still feels icky to me. Maybe there are good ways to structure it but for now something about it is too much on the wrong side of the dystopia <-> utopia spectrum for me.

• Dark Forest is a really great example of an experimental game that really takes advantage of the technology without any weird need to feel icky and financial itself. I hope as we get more scaling solutions more interesting things like this pop up

• things are still *way way wayway* too expensive and slow (both in terms of prices and transaction costs) to really be accessible to regular people and usecases and that’s a big point of FUD for me

• I feel like part of why everything feels so icky and financialized is that since gas fees are so high everyone feels that in order to do anything they must have some chance of making back enough $$$ to cover that and then some because the stakes are too high

• Hopefully as we get more and better scaling solutions we really start to see more interesting projects that really push on the unique capabilities of the tech and actually pushing on decentralizing computing and the internet

• Things are starting to feel toppy. I still think we have some room to go but this market is getting stupid lol. You can also tell because there are so many obvious grifters which always I always find incredibly annoying

• There is also way too much going on right now. Too many projects too many ideas both good and bad too many metaphorical ponzis too many grifters too much news too much harassment too many haters too much discourse and its incredibly overwhelming

• I generally think bear markets are better because they focus more on experimentation and ideas and building and less on get rich quick schemes, but worry about the people who will get washed out that can’t afford to

• I am legitimately concerned for a lot of people when the bear comes, I’ve been washed out quite a few times already so I know to expect but I hope people experiencing it for the first time will be able to handle it

• The discourse around everything has gone entirely off the rails tho—I’m obsessed with information bubbles and am fascinated in poking into different ones and honestly, it really seems like there’s no winning people when they have completely different spheres of (mis)information

• I still have a lot of disdain for the skeptics I’ve seen because they both are usually factually inaccurate and also incredibly smug and condescending about their takes (you can only be one never both!), and often tend to encourage mass harassment and bullying

• I’ve lost *a lot* of respect for *many* established people in this industry the last few weeks-especially those encouraging or peddling smug and condescending misinformation, a lot of it incredibly deranged

• I’m okay with nuanced and thoughtful criticisms

• You know who you are

• There’s less money laundering than people think, much less tax evasion, half the most harassed projects are on clean chains anyways (this is actually where I lose a lot of respect for less toxic skeptics, this is right in their face and they still pretend to be environmentalists)

• FWIW I’ve managed to buy and retire mid five figures of carbon offsets and offset my next few generations of lifetimes, so my conscious is cleared there for sure

• I imagine a lot of the crypto people that feeds over to their bubbles is probably not the best stuff either, which might be why they feel that way. I try to ignore that side of twitter anyways so I don’t really see it on my end but there are still a lot of toxic people

• that's all for now.

• lets go buy the US Constitution together , join us at @ConstitutionDAO

Thanks for reading!!

Follow me on Twitter for updates on my next essays. I’m currently working on a curation of IKEA Bangers, coming soon.