1/ On Buying The Statue of Liberty

I did a lecture today for @giaglis's MOOC on NFTs and I got the RCSA question.

"NFTs are just a receipt, just a pointer to an image. I can download them and view them without buying them"

A classic question! Here is what I said. 2/ Imagine the Statue of Liberty.

It is very large.
It is on Liberty Island
It was a present from BFF (France)
It is owned by the Federal Government and specifically National Park Services
Anyone can look at it, whether the President of the USA or you

1/ On Our Bubbles

The reaction of my circles to the election:

✅tech/crypto: euphoric
✅nft artists: muted, possibly self-censoring in some cases
✅american east coast friends: upset / some women very upset
✅europeans: utterly and completely shocked/baffled 2/ You have to fight to not end up in an information bubble

This is not a "right" thing or a "left" thing; it is not an American or European thing

it is not about whatever is the "hot topic" of the day

it is about everything

1/ On Drowning

This afternoon, along with a stranger, I rescued an old man who got dragged pretty far out to sea by undertow in heavy surf. We swam out and brought him in.

Every single cliche about events like this turned out to be true 2/ Cliche 1: "Drowning does not look like drowning"

The old man was not flailing around or yelling. In fact, he could not even talk to us while we brought him back.

He could not speak until he was on shore with wife. "thank you, I thought I was gone out there"

1/ On Software, 3-pointers & magic

Yesterday, I revealed that my pocket money in high school came from refereeing rec league soccer

I also played a lot of pickup basketball, video games, and ping pong; ate a lot of Doritos & pizza

All-in: idyllic American suburban HS life 2/ But there were two more things:

✅ Photography (which we discussed before)

✅ "programming" or "coding" (software engineering is way too fancy a term for this).

I started, like most of us, with Logo and BASIC in grade school

1/ Videoconferencing Phishing (a mini thread)

A very common phishing pattern is:

✅ Offer an appealing business proposition (job, commissioned art, consulting project, investment)

✅ "Download my special videoconference software"

🚑You now have a keylogger on your PC 2/ Once the keylogger is on your PC, they can enter both your web2 accounts and your hot wallets (but note: not your hardware wallets).

Here there is a very simple rule: treat all requests of this type as a complete scam, of the same type as "enter your private key"

1/ On Not Buying A Dali Today (a mini thread)

So I was looking at Dali editions in my inbox and I realized how totally and utterly ruined I am by NFTs.

This one is kindof elegant, though not super-Daliesque.

In any case: 1.1 ETH for a 1/250 Dali Edition. Sounds fine tbh. 2/ If this was just "click a few buttons on Rabby", I think it would already be sitting in the 6529 Museum SAFE.

Instead: "email gallery, wait for reply, fill out credit card form, have it shipped to Europe, customs, delivery, probably reframe, find a place on wall"

1/ On crypto-denomination

I want to try to avoid topics I have covered before better in "Survive," so I just want to share a thought that I find to be helpful to me and to others

https://x.com/punk6529/status/1477259809493819393

2/ I more or less mentally denominate my crypto assets in crypto.

Yes, I am a "1 BTC = 1 BTC" person and, progressively further out the spectrum, "1 ETH = 1 ETH" and "1 punk = 1 punk"

People think I am bullshitting them when I tell them this

1/ On The Time Is Now to get your personal act together

A mini-thread, views loosely held.

If you are like me, you may do a good job in your professional life but there are quite a few things outstanding in your personal life. 2/ The type of things that I am talking about are the things that appear on Jan 1 every year.

You are sitting on the couch the day after New Year's Eve and are like "I absolutely am going to get this stuff dealt with this year" and they end up on the resolutions list

1/ On How Many Tokens You Have Left

You can notice changes in your visual environment in about 12 to 20 milliseconds (1/1,000th of a second).

It is why monitors that refresh 60x/second are pretty smooth and by 90-120x/second, they are in good shape 2/ Vision feels like a continuous process but there is no such thing. It is discrete, just like everything else.

The rods and cones in your eyes do not respond to changes in light instantly. They respond to changes in light very quickly.

It feels instant but it is not.

1/ What will ASIs want?

Do we really believe in ASIs?
Can we really conceive of ASIs?
Will ASIs buy your crypto portfolio?
Are you just a cat?

It is an odd journey. 2/ ASI is short for Artificial Super Intelligence, as opposed to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence).

The idea is that AGIs are as smart as us, and ASIs are a lot smarter than us.

There are a lot of theories about ASI - it will happen, it won't happen, it will kill us all

1/ On Being An Agent

You think you are unique, I think I'm unique, but probably we are agents in a biological system, sent out to do a job for the collective.

You can probably guess how people describe me at "work" - forward-thinking, open to new ideas, not afraid of change 2/ This is also how I think about myself.

In both my personal and professional life, I think I live 3 to 15 years "in the future" vs my peers - who themselves are statistically abnormal - highly educated white collar professionals.

OK, so what? This is no surprise.

1/ All Memes are Memes but not All Memes are Memes

So I spoke remotely at @arts_dao over the weekend and I am going to boldly put some of this down in a thread.

We go like this: memes -> the intersubjective -> the internet -> NFTs -> freedom 2/ For the last 30 years, everyone knows what a meme is.

It is on the internet. It is cute or it is dank but it is definitely countercultural.

It is not top-down socially corporate constructed Walt Disney or Hollywood or Goldman Sachs, but bottom up

1/ What is the Nakamoto Threshold?

This is a bit of Memes inside-baseball but I am tweeting it out so we have it available for reference.

Meme Card #4 is an homage to the first Rare Pepe which had an edition count of 300.

So Meme Card #4 had an edition count of 300.

2/ The Memes were deliberately designed to be relatively low unit price and relatively high edition count.

This is important for the overall mission in a large numbers of ways.

There is no way the mission works with a small number of rich collectors.

1/ On How / Why To Use A @safe As An Individual.

I saw a question from @HugoFaz in a 6529/Memes chat and I was going to answer there but I think the answer is more generally useful so I will tweet it here

First read the TAP thread

https://twitter.com/punk6529/status/1701623475725533524

2/ Now that you are back. Let's discuss using a SAFE wallet as your vault / cold wallet in a TAP setup.

@HugoFaz asks (and I paraphrase): "who are the other signers going to be? Other hardware wallets? people I trust? What does this add?"

1/ On Your National Tax Policy for Cryptoassets

A rare thread for the tax authorities and legislators around the world.

One day you will need a tax policy for cryptoassets and you will pay McKinsey $3M to write it.

Or you can just read this thread for free 2/ The assumption in this thread is that you are a jurisdiction that likes taxing things.

And in that light, you will enjoy taxing cryptoassets too.

If you are one of the other jurisdictions (the 0% tax ones), then you don't need this thread anyway

1/ On What Is Decentralized

A brief, beginner thread. Sorry in advance to the nerds.

tl;dr

1) Some L1s (like BTC, ETH and some others)
2) Zero websites
3) Very few L2s

Basically, you only get permissionlessness and censorship resistance on the L1s for now. 2/ Let's start with the difference between ETH (an L1) and OpenSea and Etherscan (which index ETH)

ETH = permissionless
OpenSea and Etherscan website = not permissionless

(Separately, OpenSea has deployed contracts on ETH, which is not the website)

1/ On Bitcoin in Four Tweets

Some people meditate on the oneness of the world to achieve enlightenment.

I also meditate to achieve enlightenment, but on how I can describe "how Bitcoin works" in the fewest number of words

Sharing last night's version below 2/ Imagine a Google sheet w/ everyone's bank balances and the whole world has full access.

Solutions That Do Not Work

a) Everyone can change any cell? Chaos and theft

b) Only one person with editor access? Works fine but the whole world is at the mercy of that one person

1/ On Dying In A Year

I was thinking about this phrase the other day "Live every day as if it is your last"

It is a very popular saying, you are supposed to appreciate each day each day, something like that.

People inspo-tweet it a lot. 2/ And I concluded that this phrase was unhelpful to me.

I most definitely do not "live every day as if it was my last" and I am pretty sure nothing in my life would be improved if I did.

Because if I try to do that, I envision something very different than what is intended.

1/ On Stated vs Revealed Preferences

This is a hugely useful (and very easy) framework.

It comes out of the world of economics.

But your grandma knows it too: "see what people do, not what they say do"

This is easiest to show with examples. 2/ My Stated Preference: "I will eat organic microgreens irrigated only by tears of angels"

My Revealed Preference: "A half-eaten chunk of blue cheese in the fridge"

1/ On Ether Rocks (sortof briefly)

My mildly spicy take on Ether Rocks is that, if you are triggered by how Sotheby's describes them, you still don't totally believe in building a on-chain decentralized future and you need more conviction.

Who cares what the description says? 2/ You see, the reason you care, is because you still want the imprimatur of Sotheby's for your favorite intellectual, artistic or financial NFT bag.

I mean, ok, this says more about you than about Sotheby's or Ether Rocks.

Why do you care?

1/ On Getting A Job In Crypto

You like the field of cryptocurrency field. You believe that it has a bright future.

You would like to get involved.

How can you doing this? 2/ The first thing I will tell you is which job you will NOT do.

That job is "full-time cryptocurrency trader"

Most people "buy high and sell low" (this is why we have market cycles)

Even worse, if trading is your main source of income, the chances you panic-sell go way up.