1/ On Fiat Culture

NFTs are the scarcest cultural objects ever made, the only cultural objects with pristine provenance.

They are not BTC, but they will behave over time in ways that emotionally parallel BTC for the $100T in global intangibles. 2/ Let's start by looking at the numbers. I have read the ICOM Working Group on Collections in Storage report so you don't have to.

Here are how many objects, on average, museums have

1/ I'm back, after an 8-day o3-fueled maker's scheduler.

I naturally much prefer the maker's schedule but unfortunately spend almost all my life in the manager's schedule, stealing hours here or there for maker's schedule 2/ Holidays are great because people don't bother me as much so I can slip into maker's schedule

I did it at Xmas this year (solved some hard issues that were bothering me) and did it again at Easter (solved some other hard issues that were bothering me)

1/ On SZN11

The first Meme Card of SZN11 (Wed) - "Pepe X" by @Ars0nic has been selected.

This is a historic day in The Memes because it was not selected by me, it was not selected by @6529er, it was not selected by a curation board.

It was selected by a plurality of TDH... 2/ What is TDH? TDH is the central metric of 6529, the network state-to-be, the decentralized society-to-be.

I will explain what it means mathematically but I want to first explain what it means conceptually to me, how we got here and how this is only the beginning

1/ On How I Am Allocated

The punchline is not a surprise: almost all BTC and NFTs, and a smattering of other things

I am not sure, however, I've explained in one place why.

As always, this is highly personal and I'm not saying any of this is right for you 2/ 2013 to 2020 I was pretty much a BTC maxi

I traded some 2013 alts in Fall 2013 (Cryptsy!) and realized that:
a) I hated it
b) I was not any good at it
c) I was going to eventually lose all my money regardless of if BTC was GMI

1/ On Infinite Inference

I used to be a good amateur photographer. A long time ago, a friend was worried that the cycle of growth in hard drives was coming to an end.

I asked him why?

"Well, my business documents are only 5 GB or whatever - isn't my 30 GB drive enough?" 2/ I said "what about photographs?"

He showed me his phone with 3Mb photos and said "but I take 5 a day so even this is 5GB/year so ok maybe we go to 100 GB"

And I laughed and laughed and laughed.

1/ On So Few NFTs, So Many NFTs

Are NFTs the scarcest assets in the crypto universe?

Are NFTs an endless no-barriers-to-entry stream of good, mid and worthless tokens?

Buckle up. This is a long one. 60+ 2/ A few days ago, we discussed that a necessary, but not sufficient factor, for Bitcoin’s success was its 21M hard cap on tokens.

If you have not read this thread, go ahead and read it now

https://x.com/punk6529/status/1873402695224348804

1/ On the Nature of the Token Shapes the Nature of the Holders Who Shape The Nature Of The Token.

In the short-run, anything can happen with any token.

What determines the long-run though? What determines what will happen in 5, 10, 20 years? 2/ As always, it starts with Bitcoin. What was the "nature of the token?"

At the protocol level: It was fixed, progressively mined, and had a purpose inseparable from the function of the network (rewarding miners to encourage competition / decentralization of mining)

1/ On Living Rent-Free In Your Head

People and ideas are ferociously competing to live rent-free in your head.

For most people it is worse than that.

It is a high school rager with hundreds of people and ideas spilling beer on the sofa of your head.

Your job: face control 2/ It is impossible to live with a completely blank slate.

A functioning society is built on endless layers of abstraction on concepts and ideas.

Almost everyone, including the based contrarians, are repeating ideas that someone else propagated into their head.

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.