April Gibberish Recap
I started writing again at the end of March and it culminated in a week of off the cuff musings. What did I write about and what happened?
Warming Up
After taking a six year break, I started writing again in 2021. I posted five times and the reception was good! Writing was instrumental to finding my way to my current role at Flipside — it also forced me to separate what I understood from what I thought I understood. More than anything, it was fun.
My posting last year started longer and trended shorter over time. I wrapped 2021 with what felt like half-hearted effort, but without regret. I didn’t write again for three months
Then I came back.
Trifurcation of NFT Collectibles
As NFT contracts are optimized and communities splinter, usage of a wide range of wrappers will increase. This will start to break the supply into subsets and can lead to the fracturing of communities as well as supply shocks for collectors. Functional wrappers will also allow NFTs to enter new spaces and to be taken apart and combined in new ways.
Much of this information was informed by conversations I’ve had in UTC and observing the behavior of participants in the NFT space for the past 9 months.
I received a thank you from the Fluffy Polar Bears team mentioned in this post and was gifted an NFT.
This was also my first time minting on Mirror! I enjoyed the process and recommend everyone try it out. There’s a lot of buttons but the docs are great and the team is welcoming.
Zero-Knowledge Proof Exploration
I had been dealing with sharing more PII than I would like to over the past year. I’ve also dealt with changing addresses often of the past 10 years. I started to think about what things would look like if I could use a pointer for my address and if there was a way to expose aspects of that information to quasi-trusted parties without exposing all of the needed information. I drew a lot of content from this video:
For the first time in awhile I simply sat down, wrote, and shipped. I didn’t do a lot research. It only took so long because I had to keep rewinding to take screenshots and notes. I wove some ideas together that likely have no reason to be together — but it was comprehensible, I think.
Public Keys as Primary Keys
What if we could link our public keys to our off-chain accounts? What if off-chain accounts trended towards protocol implementations and didn’t require proprietary clients?
On-chain analytics is tough but mixing on and off-chain data effectively is another level. As analysts continue to get better — shout out MetricsDAO — they continue to seek more and more data sources. With Elon’s bid to buy Twitter driving more attention to the idea of Twitter as a protocol, I explored what things could look like with more composability and greater data sharing.
Keeping up with the zkp post, I sat down and wrote this in a single go. This is where the burners turned on.
Social Tokens & Definitions
I’m done with the Music NFT tweets.
Say what you’re actually talking about and come up with better branding. But I guess this is the best branding ever cause it’s infectious and meme-able. When people say “Music NFTs” they are referring to a suite of tokenized experiences that exist in digital and physical mediums. It underserves this asset type and some of its implications by calling it Music NFTs. Access as an asset is still highly under explored.
I whipped this out in about an hour and the reception was good. That signaled to me that I could pretty much write about anything — regardless of if I thought the writing was good.
Get Discopilled
After being welcomed to gm house by LoganOP.eth I was schooled on how some of the ideas presented in my Public Keys as Primary Keys post could be improved. I got disco-pilled and I learned about DIDs. My view of soulbound NFTs as a one size fits all solution for many issues was questioned and I learned a lot about OpSec, InfoSec, and what digital identities can become.
This also provided great feedback that informed another post that I had planned about why I was writing more.
Let’s Get Meta
I wrote 1000 words about writing 1000 words and people shared it. This is kind of the same thing… will anyone share this?
This is the case for writing more. Just do it. You will benefit. I have.
I’m not going to tag you here Logan — gonna let you find it organically.
I told you the mid was selling.
At this point, all I am doing is putting groups of letters in order.
There are so many types of content creation you can do. You can be a primary source, a secondary source, you can aggregate information and add commentary. This is a culmination of all of those.
Veillance and Decentralized Trust
Without traditional regulators in crypto, we have turned to a variety of oracles that exist on a spectrum of nicheness and authority. Many of these surveyors do not have the power to enforce rulings but they provide an information flow to citizens that can guide their decision making.
This one feels reachy again. But I had to keep the burners on a bit longer.
Recap & Metrics
I wrote 7 posts in April made up of 10,000 words. I speedran 6,000 words in 4 days at the end of the month across 5 articles. Shout out gmh for inspiring me to let it rip at the end.
I gained 169 followers and reached over 205k impressions. I’ve had better months from a vanity metric perspective but I feel good about these because I worked long form content into my incessant shitposting.
Much of this content is self-referential. It’s almost all being re-used and re-hung as new content at this point. That’s meta.
For the time being, I’m retiring. I’m out of anything to say and I need to go back to ingestion. Time for me to check out a the NoSleep Reads.
I’ll see you in a MetricsDAO community call or on the bird app.
