Boo ya HORs (Higher Order Readers, duh) — welcome to the News3.
FIRST & FOREMOST
While Chad may have given us all the ole’ irish goodbye for the next few weeks, his trip across the pond will actually be spent sipping Scottish whisky in the highlands… or whatever Hemmingway would do over there.
This mediocre white male, who’s feeling lonelier than ever without a partner by his side, is just appreciative for the legwork that’s already been put in. Fortunately the winds of spring & fortune are finally blowing in to warm this crypto winter, as are the hot takes on Blue Chip Cryptos, Visionary Queens, and Social Anxiety, which are just blatant attempts to grab YOUR attention.
a Nutty Professor & a Drafts Folder
MARKETS
BITCOIN
$45,656.56 | -2.98%
ETHEREUM
$3,298.41 | -2.65%
CARDANO
$1.14 | -3.92%
SOLANA
$124.17 | +3.04%
DOGECOIN
$0.13 | -2.20%
SHIBA INU
$0.00002 | -5.73%
TEZOS
$3.75 | -2.58%
(Price changes reflect past 24 hours as of 3.31.22 @ 4:20 PM EST.)
Something witty about this newsletter being written by two SOL men...
CrypTok is clambering about new ATHs on the horizon & a key resistance support level breaking in BTC's price charts, but it’s a little too technical for me.
Cringe worthy jokes aside, there are plenty of bullish winds blowing in favor of crypto despite red charts today, including stanky sh*t from XRP rumored to be SWIFTly replacing the settlement layer for Russian & Chinese trade, and likely CBDCs worldwide.
SPOTLIGHT
PoS < PoW < PoID
Image: Sony Pictures
TLDR; We think parts of the technical design of Bitcoin and Ethereum are short sighted for different reasons, and we share a concept that is directionally closer to what I think we all are going for.
Bitcoin's Proof of Work system is responsible for its trustless nature, but the energy consumption involved, which is by design, abuses a resource that is already scare and thus a solution we consider to be already dead upon arrival -- you know, unless Tesla's free energy system were to be magically implemented.
Proof of Stake systems like Ethereum's basically boil down to "the biggest bags == the biggest voice" and well it's kind of like how is that any different than the American Political-Economic partnership today.
Now to be clear the reason that we feel PoW in Bitcoin's case is dumb, is not the use of expending massive energy to insure the integrity of a network protected from the corrupting nature of those in power too long, but using it to secure binary digits that only represent value, instead of securing the data of actual value, directly.
If we look back on warfare throughout the ages, whether in the boardroom or on the battlefield, intellectual property is one of the greatest assets that can be used to win the battle and the war, today we know this to be true when we see how the technology companies have weaponized our data against us.
Which is exactly why the proposal of networks like Ethereum, who were correct in using blockchains to secure data in away that it can be governed by its creator, switching to security measures like Proof of Stake undermine the whole integrity of a decentralized ledger in the first place because it re-introduces the need to trust the big fish not to collude or play games to materially change the system for their benefit.
The introduction of ZKproofs & Verified, Anonymous, Digital Identities in this newsletter's humble opinion opens up the possibility of a democratically governed blockchain. One where Proof of Identity enters the picture, and could be moving us another step closer to providing a blockchain where intelligence can be governed directly by individuals, and communities alike, in a free, transparent, and accountable way.
My mind loves hyperbole, so on days where things are actually hitting me hard you'd think it were the end of the world. Fortunately, this ELB rarely faces any true hardship outside of the one I manifest in my own head, which is precisely what resonated with me today looking at Ms. Moore's latest piece serendipitously named "Visionary Queen".
In Kelly's own words "in a newly minted world we would have a Visionary Queen not a bunch of old white guys stack up their bones in the shape of dollar bills..." and which echoes the tone we tend strike here as h0rs is decidedly ageist against the gerontocracy. Unfortunately while the white male has invented the concept of the sunk cost fallacy, he fails to recognize it in his own system; a serpent in his garden for sure.
To my Visionary Queen, I will do better, and to the sn0bs among us who look beyond the artwork and message for a meaning that resonates with them, I say consider purchasing one of Ms. Moore's NFTs on Opensea or supporting her work the ole fiat way, because she understands the business model, we just wish she'd ditch her Linktr.ee and take her talents to UniPro & the sn0b network.
OVER BEERS
The position game
Image: Imgur
The highest order readers among us may have noticed that our web3 takes, flip-flop more than my hippie mother on her biannual Hawaiian sabbaticals. Most weeks I consider the blockchain to a modern incarnation of Biblical plagues, though some rare weeks conversations with el Prof assure me that it’ll be the future of individual sovereignty and self governance, until reality inevitably seeps in again.
Now, to be fair, it is intellectual best practice to be constantly interrogating your own views – admitting your mistakes when you realize them, taking accountability for your own confirmation bias, and allowing it to be bested by a better argument. Which is sometimes what I’m doing, probably, sure. But mostly (if I’m being honest, taking accountability, and admitting my mistakes) I’m playing what I like to call the Position Game.
Presently our online identities are primarily made up of personal preferences and values as displayed through the aesthetics and emojis the litter the biographies and feeds of our social profiles. We like to think these things cement our individuality. When we leave a string of Spotify links in our Instagram stories, or offer unsolicited opinions in a celebrity’s mentions, telling ourselves: I have a perspective and it is unique to me.
However the world often reads the story differently, or more correctly the same on average. If we wanted to come across as truly unique, our bios would be like, ‘I loofah my feet for twenty minutes when I shower’ and ‘Samsung Sam stars in my sexual fantasies’. It’d go a long way toward our transparent future if they were, I’d argue. But they are not. Because, well you read what I just wrote, who'd admit to that shit.
I believe our opinions and preferences – especially when voiced loudly and publicly – are used to position ourselves in contrast to others. For example, if my bio says, ‘.eth | #feelthebern | Rickest Rick’, I’m saying as much about what I’m not as what I am.
It’s especially pronounced in social media discourse.
Why else take the time to tweet out in-depth replies destined for one or two likes, or even just type out ‘I agree’? I doubt most of us truly believe we’re contributing to some sort of global conversation, or getting meaningful attention from some high profile, verified consciousness stream from which our opinions are derived. We’re just putting together an identity who loves the right things and hates the wrong ones, piece by binary piece. I call this the Position Game.
I, personally, play it all the time. My research for this newsletter consists mainly of scrolling through a somewhat curated Twitter feed of hexagonal profile pictures with a few thousand followers. (Which, lifehack, is the primary source of most web3 news.) Every time I find a story that interests me, I spend time assessing where I stand on their take -- totally agree, strongly disagree, somewhat fuck with the featured image, etc. -- because I'm also immediately need to calculate how it fits into my identity. I'm never just reading about a subject or writing about it. I'm evaluating everyone else's positions on it to present my own.
Whether it's a symptom of an oversaturated content cycle, our narcissistic culture, or my crippling OCD, doesn't even really matter, I don't think. All I know is, it's fucking exhausting. One day, I'll learn to put down my chess piece and opt out of the Position Game. Until then, I'm stuck trying to win it, which doesn't even seem to be the point, given the rules I know so far. But at least the rest of the players seem to be catching on, if the taxonomy memes in my timeline are anything to go off:
BITCOIN
SOLANA
