Showing posts with label nft. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nft. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 28, 2022

28: Ukraine, NFT, Diversity

The Garden of Magic Eden How the newest NFT unicorn has mastered scale through transparency, creativity, and community ...... Today, Magic Eden attracts over 20 million monthly unique visitors. ........ The platform retains the vast majority of market share and is typically responsible for over 95% of daily Solana NFT volume. ....... This all despite the fact that Opensea, the market incumbent, launched support for Solana NFTs in April—an event widely predicted to be a “Magic Eden killer.” ......... . “They haven’t necessarily done everything right, but they are always adapting and reacting to what the community needs.” The company even has its own term for this building philosophy:

“Twitter-Driven Development.”

........... startups are mirrors of their founders, from the cultural values they codify to the expectations they set through example ........ In a landscape dotted with scams, Magic Eden is deliberate in putting in place measures to prevent bad actors and manipulation. ......... one gets the sense that keeping Magic Eden running is like tending to the boilers of a steamship, where constant effort is necessary to keep the business propelling forward. ....... being authentically web3 over web2 (prioritizing community input over centralized decision-making) ......... All four co-founders are immigrants to the US (Jack, Zhuoxun, and Sid are Asian-Australian; Zhuojie lived in China until coming to the US for graduate school). Zhuoxun’s early childhood was spent in Malaysia, until his mother moved the family to Australia when he was five. ......... Each of the founders has their own story of deviating from the path of least resistance to arrive at their current positions. For Zhuojie, that meant diving into a new programming language and learning blockchain development from scratch when he took on the role of Chief Engineer. “I was curious about Rust (the programming language of the Solana blockchain), web3, NFTs, crypto, and running a startup,” says Zhuojie, recalling his reactions after getting the call from Sidney to help start Magic Eden. .......... Jack takes the opposite stance, arguing that Magic Eden ought to feel similar to using a web2 app while remaining web3 at its core ........ One of the challenges Magic Eden faces is scaling as a fast-growing, remote-first startup while maintaining strong company cohesion. The team is globally distributed, and building culture while remote is something that the founders spend a lot of time thinking about. “We’ve had success hiring from our own networks, but we need to cast the net wider and search for talent in different places,” Sidney said. ....... Solana’s wedge of fast, low-fee transactions could be eroded by a similar experience on Ethereum that also offers better security. .......... Today, most NFT marketplaces focus on the transaction itself, while the initial stages of creating purchase intent or sparking inspiration happen on other platforms like Discord and Twitter. The user experience is clunky and disjointed: users have to check multiple platforms to discover, communicate, transact, and connect, leaving an opportunity to build a more cohesive commerce experience that reflects the social activity happening around NFT purchases and ownership.

Unbundling Work from Employment The internet and rise of micro-entrepreneurship ....... A 2017 McKinsey Global Institute study showed that 20-30% of the working age population in the US was engaged in independent work, and that the proportion of such work mediated by digital platforms like Uber and Etsy was growing rapidly. .......... YouTubers, podcasters, and gaming livestreamers who’ve monetized digitally-native hobbies ......... teachers, salespeople, farmers, chefs, and personal shoppers. ....... Freshbooks’ 2019 study on self-employment found that the primary motivations for those pursuing self-employment were non-financial: most individuals seek a combination of freedom, fulfillment, and career control. ........ humans are driven by autonomy (desire to be self-directed), mastery (urge to improve), and purpose (desire to do something meaningful)—all of which independent work can facilitate. ......... direct payment models have made it viable for workers to earn a livelihood from even a small number of loyal fans; and platform companies in the gig economy and passion economy have paved new paths to work. ......... Substack has enabled writers to more easily earn income from writing, and Blok.fit and Playbook have enabled fitness instructors to run a virtual business. ........ Given that the online creative economy is growing at nearly 20% per year, verticalization is becoming an increasingly viable strategy as each vertical grows larger. And, in particular, COVID is an accelerant to new vertical platforms as nearly half of the US is jobless and seeking new, turnkey ways to earn income through end-to-end digital platforms. ......... Podcasting has been around since the early 2000s, but Anchor, a podcast platform launched in 2017 that simplifies podcast creation, was reported to be powering 70% of all new podcasts as of Q1 2020 and believes that its monetization platform effectively doubled the number of podcasts running ads. ........... Shopify, which has stated that its mission is to “make entrepreneurship more accessible,” doesn’t just superficially enable the creation of an online storefront, but offers deeper functionality tailored to e-commerce merchants: a dedicated network of fulfillment centers, merchant cash advances, marketing & SEO, etc. This focus on the e-commerce vertical has enabled it to build a $114 billion business, blowing past horizontal website builders like Wix that also offer e-commerce functionality (market cap of $14 billion, as of 7/28/20). ............. In the local services vertical, Dumpling gives personal shoppers everything they need to run their own grocery delivery businesses, including a fully-funded credit card for purchasing orders, professional website, client-facing app, and business coaching. ......... For micro-entrepreneurs, the tradeoff of independence is a de-risked company environment for learning, pivoting, and risk-taking— ......... On Substack, individual newsletter writers are already self-organizing into subscription bundles, and some are hiring teams and further professionalizing their content, effectively re-bundling into a new media organization (albeit, with a significantly different cost structure). ......... Despite myriad attempts by startups to create better video consumption experiences aligned to a specific vertical, YouTube remains unbundled because it aligns to consumer usage patterns: there’s a large base of casual consumers who want to watch diverse content across categories, rather than visiting various destinations for different content verticals. As such, YouTube is an indispensable horizontal platform in the ‘entrepreneurship stack’ that supports independent creators across a variety of industries, from financial experts to unboxing video creators. ............... 22% of self-employed workers have multiple revenue streams, compared to 11% who work for an employer



Toys, Secrets, and Cycles: Lessons from the 2000s I started my internet career in the early 2000s during the dot-com bust. It's hard to picture this now, but the internet was a thing that people used only intermittently, to check email or plan travel or do some research.

The average internet user spent about 30 minutes a day online, compared to about 7 hours today.

........... The National Academy of Sciences ranked the internet 13th in its list of great inventions over the last 100 years, beneath radio and telephones ........ At the same time, there was a small but growing movement of developers and founders who were excited about the idea that the internet could be more than a read-only medium – that it could allow anyone to create and publish, to not only read but also write, as we said back then. This movement became known as web 2. The runner up name was read-write web. ......... there's a strong correlation between rich product design spaces and what smart people find interesting ........... Another striking thing about that period was how small and passionate the web 2 community was. I remember in 2004 going to what I think might have been the first New York Tech meetup. ......... Sometimes I get asked how I first met old friends like Fred Wilson and Alexis Ohanian. The simple answer is there just weren't that many people, especially on the east coast, who were interested in these topics. We all knew each other. ........ But people were very focused and excited. The feeling was that a revolution was brewing. We knew a secret and the rest of the world hadn't figured it out yet. ......... Yahoo was considered a savvy company, and said they were making web 2 a core part of their strategy.......... The basis of competition switched from creative idea generation to disciplined execution. You had to decide whether you wanted to be the idealistic band at the indy bar or be pragmatic — potentially making compromises — and play in stadiums. .......... By 2007, things were looking up for web 2. Among other things, Facebook passed 10M users, Twitter was growing and had just gotten VC funded, and Google acquired YouTube. .......... from a startup perspective, the 2008-11 era turned out to be a golden age. Apple released the iPhone app store in 2008 and by 2009 talented founders were pouring in. The mobile app revolution was in full swing. .......... Almost all of today’s top mobile apps were created by companies founded between 2009 and 2011, including Uber, Venmo, Snap, and Instagram. .......... even if social, cloud, and mobile each improved linearly, the combination could improve exponentially. ........ My belief is that the best place to look is crypto and web 3. ......... Things that look interesting to smart people usually do so because they are rich with product possibilities. These possibilities eventually become reality. Toys become must-have tools. Weekend hobbies become mainstream activities. Cynics sound smart but optimists build the future.



Diversity & Friction friction is one inevitable result when any organization – a company, a non-profit, a government agency, or a military unit – accepts more diverse members into its ranks. ......... When individuals in the group no longer have the same shared backgrounds, perspectives, and life experiences, those emerging differences can generate friction, discomfort (not unlike the discomfort that can come with sudden silence), and even conflict. ......... Denying friction in a diverse organization is akin to Victorians denying sex. It doesn’t go away; it just comes out in other, unexpected, and possibly counterproductive ways. ........

diversity plays an essential role in counteracting groupthink. But volumes of literature also reveal how resisting groupthink creates conflict.

.............. Diverse perspectives fuel creativity. ........ tension and friction – ideas and people rubbing against each other. It comes from conflicting visions of how the world works coming into contact. These collisions generate heat but also light .......... Organizations stagnate without friction. They become sterile, boring, conformist, and risk-averse. Or the friction erupts, but without warning, in the form of conflicts that can sap morale, cause talent to leave, or even create legal threats, public relations disasters, or customer relations nightmares. ............ continuous learning alongside fellow workers and constant negotiation with those colleagues. .......... The best teachers don’t deliver or download knowledge. Instead, they provide scaffolding so that students construct their knowledge. ......... Diversity & inclusion lectures often devolve into a class where neither pupils nor students want to be. .......... Charged topics like diversity and conflict can often best be approached indirectly. It lowers the stakes for everyone involved. It also helps the learning feel less like a chore. ........ Play is so essential to humans and animals. It is how our young brains develop the patterns and tools we will need for the rest of our lives. It is also how we learn about conflict. Play is thus deadly serious. ........... Play is also – obviously – joyful.

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Thursday, May 05, 2022

News: May 5



NFT’s A New Way To Monetize Your Speaking Material

Life’s a Trip: My Journey As a Web3 Artist Thus Far With the introduction of COVID-19 the shows I was scheduled to play began to get canceled one by one, and I slowly watched everything I’d built in the last half decade deteriorate before my eyes. ........ My newly found free time led me to freelance songwriting and my interest in cryptocurrency. I poured all of my energy into researching everything I could about the space. ........ After 1000’s of hours of reading white papers, watching youtube content, and exploring discord servers, my interests started trending towards NFTs. ....... I’d heard of NFTs beforehand, but after the February / March wave of 2021 I was completely sold on the fact that many things can, and probably will be tokenized in the future. ....... As a musician, my only question was where in the world is the music? ........ Before I released a single piece of music on-chain I spent 5 months

chatting with strangers on twitter

who I had grown to be big fans of. ........... and I started participating in many conversations via twitter spaces. ........ Public speaking has never been my forte, but talking about the things I am truly passionate about has really helped me develop that skill in the last year. ........ The music sold out in under 30 seconds

The Countdown Memorandum Doubling down on the future of American industry ........ in the fourteen years since California launched its high-speed rail initiative to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles, less than 120 miles have even begun construction ........ In roughly the same amount of time, China has constructed close to 25,000 miles of high-speed rail, spanning quite literally its entire country. ....... China appears to be rapidly developing its hypersonic arsenal and is the largest outbound investor in alternative energy technologies. ........ The past century of prosperity cannot be extrapolated to the next one, and it is certainly not a given. Despite a repressive and authoritarian political system, the Chinese citizenry has experienced more than three times more economic growth over the past three decades than any other citizenry in the world and have proven to be quite capable of the type of dramatic change conducive to technological progress. ........ America is still the most innovative country in the world, with technological progress highly valued by both the private and public sector. By many metrics and surveys, America is also still by far the most desirable country for immigrants. .......

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Monday, December 13, 2021

Poetry As NFT

NFT Poetry — Is now the start of a new era for poems? NFTs are Non-Fungible Tokens that are unique in the blockchain world, meaning that ownership of a single digital art piece on the blockchain (NFT) is retained by one user, as opposed to copies of the same art piece. This form of tokenisation has spread from a few pixels to fields such as digital art, gaming, and photography. ........

NFT writing seems to be at its conception.

........ NFT writing does seem to be knocking on the door, and the current feeling is when, not if, will the cyber world open it.

OpenSea

How to Create NFT Poetry and Art It costs money (technically Ethereum) in order to list your NFTs for sale. Smart contracts (the brilliant medium of exchange for NFTs) cost money. Yes, it’s frustrating to pay in order to sell something as it smacks of a MLM type scheme—but in this case we are getting to list as many NFTs as we want in a searchable, easy to use interface. Plus, it means we don’t have to learn code in order to sell our art! .........

The good news is that I found a way to list all the NFTs I ever want to create for around $100.

......... In case you’re brand new to the crypoverse, a wallet is just what it sounds like—a digital version of the one you carry around in your pocket or purse.



This NFT project is literally putting poetry on the blockchain So far, the project has released two collections of poetry NFTs.

Turning my latest poem into a non-fungible token (NFT) on the blockchain I have just launched one of my latest poems as a NFT. This is also art, although in written form, so I decided to mint it as an NFT among my other visual artworks. ........

I mean if you can mint a Tweet as an NFT – something with zero literary or artistic value – and sell it for a fortune on top of that

– then I can certainly tokenize my original written poem, which has artistic merit in its own right. ........ I don’t expect it to sell really. You could simply copy the poem anyway so who would want to buy it? .......

I’m nobody important so I can’t expect my poem to sell like a random Tweet by someone famous.

........ In future I might even be able to put my poem to music and make a song out of it, which can also be tokenized as an NFT.

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Sunday, December 12, 2021

December 12: Metaverse, Moon, Maps

Virtual Land in the Metaverse Is Selling for Millions of Dollars The trading volume of NFTs reached $10.67 billion in the third quarter of this year, with more people apparently willing to shell out huge sums of money for art that will never actually hang on their walls or adorn their homes in any way (with the exception of artist Beeple’s newest piece, which lives in a 3D box the buyer can put wherever he chooses). Now there’s a related, equally bizarre item selling for millions of dollars online: virtual land. It’s like real land, sort of, except you’ll never set foot on it because it only exists in the metaverse. ........

virtual land is becoming as much of an investment as physical land

........ Facebook, now Meta, aims to rule the metaverse of the future, but it seems likely that people will gravitate towards platforms like Decentraland precisely because they’re not owned or controlled by a centralized authority. ....... we’re in for a future where more of the things that populate our lives start to have digital counterparts

Scientists Model What Would Happen if a Mini Black Hole Punched Through the Moon The lunar surface is a record of the solar system’s violent origins. But look closely enough and we may find something even more exotic there—the cratered remains of an impact with a black hole the size of an atom, birthed in the first moments of the universe. ...... Stars orbit their galaxies much too fast given all the matter we can see. This invisible component, whose gravity can clearly be observed in stellar orbits, is called dark matter. To this day, no one knows what it is. ........ Star-sized black holes commonly form when a giant star, many times the size of our sun, exhausts its internal fuel and collapses in on itself. The star’s outer shell is blasted away in a brilliant explosion called a supernova, while the core, unable to resist gravity, implodes into a point of extreme density. Gravity becomes so strong near the center of a black hole that, beyond a threshold called the event horizon, nothing, not even light, can escape. ........ the very smallest black holes—those with masses below your average asteroid—would have evaporated by now .......... Hawking famously established that black holes radiate energy away, and given a long enough time, they disappear in a flash. But primordial black holes with slightly larger masses, yet still not much larger than atoms, would have lifespans longer than the current age of the universe and wouldn’t otherwise be detectable. ........ “They’re going at incredible speeds, 200 kilometers a second,” Caplan told New Scientist.

“It’s like a bullet punching through cotton candy.”

....... primordial black hole craters ought to be at least a meter across, within the resolution of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. ...... training a machine learning algorithm to scour orbiter images of the moon’s surface for just the right ones. ......... Even if all dark matter were explained by mini primordial black holes, Caplan and Yalinewich calculate the odds of a lunar impact at 10 percent. So, the real likelihood is lower than that.

PEOPLE HAVE SOME WILD THEORIES ABOUT THE CUBE CHINA FOUND ON THE MOON “By the time Elon shows up he’ll find a Tim Hortons every two kilometers”



These Maps Reveal the Profound Progress and Peril of Modern Civilization The growing demand for energy and meat helps explain the steady rise in carbon and methane emissions. Coal-belching factories and burning forests are in turn speeding up global warming, increasing the frequency of storms, deepening food insecurity, and imperiling flood-prone cities. The interdependent nature of our biggest challenges and most promising solutions is hard to conceive.

Maps can help bring clarity to complexity.

......... Satellite images, especially when layered with additional data, offer insight into how we are changing the planet and paths to a more sustainable future. .......... In 1950, less than half of humanity had a formal education. By 2050, a century later, most of the world will have acquired at least secondary education. ......... Maps show how just a handful of countries are responsible for most emissions. In the 1980s, the US and Western Europe were the biggest culprits. Today, China releases more greenhouse gases than the US, EU, and Russia combined. There are other culprits too, including Australia, Canada, India, Japan, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile,

just 100 companies extract, process, sell, and use the fossil fuels behind roughly 70 percent of global emissions.

............ there are signs of real action on achieving zero carbon and zero deforestation in the coming decades ........ Investors with assets of trillions are demanding that governments speed up action on decarbonization, and not a moment too soon. ......... The sheer dimensions of today’s cities are unlike anything we’ve ever witnessed. In 1950, there were just three cities with ten million residents or more. Today, there are over 30 and another 500 cities with one million people or more. ....... Just a few hundred of them account for over two thirds of global GDP. ....... When fully recognized nation states emerged in the 17th century, less than one percent of the world lived in a city. Today, more than 55 percent of people are urban, and by 2050, the proportion will rise to almost 70 percent. Cities are exerting diplomatic overtures and forging alliances—over 300 of them—to channel their interests ......... Cities, companies, and citizens are also increasingly digitized. Today, there are over 4.6 billion active internet users, up from 3.9 billion in 2019. Over 60 percent of all inhabitants on Earth are connected to some digital device. The Covid-19 pandemic underlined the critical importance of connectivity and the fact that

data, more than ever, is the most important strategic asset of the 21st century

. ............ The internet is the world’s digital nervous system: download and upload speeds have increased tenfold every five years since the early 1990s. ...........

The internet, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and 5G are giving rise to highly integrated networks and connected systems crisscrossing the planet.

......... almost half of jobs in the US and up to two thirds of jobs in some developing countries could be automated in the coming decades. ............ Inequality within countries and globally has increased as the wealth of the top one percent has soared, while nearly 125 million people around the world have fallen into extreme poverty (having to live with incomes of below $1.90 per day). ..........

New York state alone consumes more energy than 48 countries in Africa.

......... New York consumes 392 gigawatts of electricity a day compared to just 5 gigawatts for all of Nigeria, a country of 200 million. ........... For about 150,000 years, average human life expectancy averaged between 20 and 25 years. Then something extraordinary happened. Between the 19th and 21st centuries, life expectancy almost quadrupled. This is due to better diets, medicine, reproductive health, and education. ..........

How DeepMind’s AI Helped Crack Two Mathematical Puzzles That Stumped Humans for Decades

Robots Evolve Bodies and Brains Like Animals in MIT’s New AI Training Simulator

Why It’s Still a Scientific Mystery How Some Live Past 100—and How to Crack It

A Plane Powered by Cooking Oil Just Flew Across the US the global fleet of aircraft could nearly double by 2039, from 25,900 in 2019 to 49,405. .......... The flight’s fuel was made by World Energy and Virent Inc., and was composed of cooking oil and fat mixed with synthetic compounds made from the sugar in plants like corn, beets, and sugar cane. This fuel reportedly creates 80 percent less carbon emissions than regular jet fuel. ........... The existing jet fuel industry didn’t spring up overnight; it’s taken decades to reach its current state, with oil companies, airlines, aircraft makers, regulators, and others all acting as pieces of a finely-tuned machine.

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