I found that feeling again while building a game on the EVM. All of the constraints were new and different. Solidity feels somewhere between and high and low level language, not as abstracted as most popular languages today but a solid step above writing assembly.
A lot of people started building projects like mine when the EVM was newer. Some managed to get a little bit of popularity, like Dark Forest. But most were never noticed. The crypto scene has distracted everyone from the work of tinkerers and artists who just wanted to play with a new paradigm. The whole thing became increasingly toxic.
It was like one last breath of fresh cool air before the pollution of AI tools arrived on the scene. It's a bitter sweet feeling.
I hated this movie the first time I watched it. And the second. The third time I let go of the need for things to be realistic and took it all in as an artistic representation and snap... I loved it. One could argue that I loved it all along given that I watched it so many times... but there was a distinct moment where I let go and that's when I was able to see just how wonderful this movie really is.
People are seeking multiple things on social media. One common one is connection. I am in Mexico dealing with family business. I am in a rural area. My Spanish skills are developing but are still weak. I can have light conversation here, but I can't deeply connect. My desire to use social media has drastically increased.
But I only want to engage with my friends. Every platform feeds me various flavors of rage bait mixed in with my friends' content. Some of my friends groups have moved to chats on other less public platforms like Discord, Signal, or Whatsapp. But that's not the same experience. And a lot of the people I like to engage with aren't moving over to those platforms.
We all thought maybe social media would evolve into something good... but it was enshitified. So maybe part of the solution here is to develop a tool that offers that connection without the whole being exploited aspect?
I once interviewed for a tech job at the Seattle times. I didn't land the job, but the interview was enlightening. I was told that the investigative reporters at the newspaper did all of the "work" of uncovering news. Subsequently, the TV broadcast station would just report on what the newspaper found. Meanwhile, the broadcast news was raking in tons more ad revenue than the newspaper.
Ever since then, I've often brainstormed of ways to remove all of the layers between the actual investigative reporter and the general public looking for a way to get as much of the revenue directly from the public into the hands of those doing to investigations and reports.
I've had ideas though nothing revolutionary enough to share here. Still, I think the overall goal would be good for literally everyone.
Oh I've been a decentralist long before anyone coined the term "Bitcoin Maximalist". I've been watching haters whine and complain the whole time. Speaking of google searches, you could have easily looked up the use of hyrdro power yourself and found that it's a common practice.
Speaking of, I just did a Google search asking if we know how much power AI is using and this was the AI response: "It is difficult to determine the exact amount of power AI is using because most leading AI companies do not disclose specific data"
It doesn't matter how much you hate Bitcoin, it's here and it's not going away. You should probably get over it.
A lot of this work was done by Walter |2| Costinak. He was an absolute legend and he's still doing a bit of design work today. I know because he did the branding for my last company and product. I worked with him a lot at Gathering of Developers back in the day. Together we rebuilt the website for Take 2 Games and they used our work for well over decade before doing a redesign. If you like this style, I recommend you reach out to him. Here's his website:
We followed this practice at a Non-Profit I volunteered for some years ago. For us, it was motivated by a few reasons:
- we trained the community around us to look to our website first for the most recent news and information
- we did not want a social media platform to be able to cut us off from our community (on purpose or accident) by shuttering accounts or groups
- we did not want to require our users have accounts on any 3rd party platforms in order to access our postings
- but we still wanted to distribute our messaging across any platforms where large groups of our community members frequently engaged
Another aspect of our process that was specific to our situation and outside of POSSE - we only posted one topic/issue/announcement per blog post. We had a news letter that would summarize each of these. Many organizations like ours would post summaries of many things to a single blog post, basically the same as the newsletter. However, this was cumbersome. For example, if someone in the community had a question, it was much clearer to link to a single post on our site that answered the question AND ONLY answered that question. It made for much better community engagement, better search engine indexing, cleaner content management, and just a better experience for everyone involved.
What this site does not show is how much of the power used to maintain the network is waste power such as gas that's normally burned off at the well site or hydro electric that goes to waste.
Unlike AI, there's a strong incentive to find the cheapest electricity possible. Because that's what everyone else is doing. With Bitcoin, you now exactly what your costs are and what your yields are. There's a clear threshold, when power in an area becomes too expensive there's no reason left to mine.
AI, on the other hand, is a bet on the future - infinite gains. No matter how much power costs, it's worth it to keep using as much as possible. We can't know how much power AI uses. Unlike Bitcoin, there aren't any metrics from which to extrapolate. But we do know that AI uses more power than Bitcoin already. We just have no idea how much more.
What is the next best alternative to throw support behind? I did a very shallow search and the forks of Firefox I found don't appear to be actively maintained.
I have been not happy about it up until this post. While reading the article, I thought about it differently.
What Firefox provides today isn't drawing in new users. Those of us who use Firefox do so for a number of reasons related to privacy or security or what not.
I simultaneously like being able to use ChatGPT to look stuff up and I hate that I'm feeding the machine a profile of me. I don't use ChatGPT nearly as much anymore mostly because of that sick feeling I get in my stomach knowing whatever I tell it will absolutely be abused in some way some how.
Nobody is building a very good "thing" that lets you use AI services with a solid layer of protection. That is a new market that deserves a product. I'm not saying that I think putting AI in Firefox is a good idea. Just that I can finally see the motivation.
Personally, I think the "solution" should be some kind of stand alone product that maybe has integrations into Firefox if you have both of them installed. Keep it in it's own cage. Make the only possibility of it existing on my system be me choosing to install a specific app. And if I'm going to do that, let me also use it outside of Firefox if I want.
But at least now I see a reason for what seems like such a bone headed decision.
I disagree. Sort of. I agree that the things you listed like altcoins and stablecoins and NFTs aren't that valuable.
Note: I hate using the word "blockchain" to describe these decentralized networks hosting distributed ledgers, but it seem to be the word most people recognize. With that in mind:
Bitcoin was a first generation blockchain technology. It's the gold backed standard that supports the rest of the ecosystem and it always will be. That network should never do anything but be money.
Ethereum and all of the networks that replicate what it does are second generation blockchain technologies. They generalize what blockchain does to the degree that we can write arbitrary programs. It is a global decentralized computer, albeit a rather limited one. People use them mostly for finance because people have no idea what else to do with them.
Third generation networks are on the way. My favorite example is Polkadot and what Gavin is doing with JAM. This brings us a bit closer to what "Web3" was supposed to be about. JAM is something new, something different, upon which you can run all kinds of blockchain networks. Very few people understand how Ethereum works or how to use it. JAM is even more difficult to get your head around. But it is a radical paradigm changing technology.
The noise of altcoins and NFTs is the result of hype and greed. It overshadows Web3. It makes it nearly impossible for anyone working on Web3 tech to get any kind of coherent messaging out to the masses. And it will be that way for a while. But not forever.
All this to say that it's not wasted effort and it's not a dead end. It's just that what is valuable in the scene is almost impossible to see due to the overwhelming hype and nonsense.
There's a lot of talk these days about the enshitification of the Internet. What I rarely see mentioned is that the Internet's first steps towards enshitification started when we attached the banking system to the Internet.
Before you could make transactions online, if your infrastructure was hacked, it was your fault and your responsibility to implement better security. But once money was involved, you could complain to the police about a hack and involve the authorities - because now actual property was involved. This changed everything.
This was also about the time we started seeing spam, scams, and other negativity suddenly spring up. It's hard to believe that we used to post to usenet with our email addresses publicly exposed... and never worry about being added to a spam list.
Money attracted bad actors to the Internet. Bitcoin was money from the start. So of course the whole cryptocurrency scene is a magnet for bad actors - like we've never seen before. This was inevitable. And 95% of the cryptocurrency scene are some flavor of bad actors.
But Bitcoin mostly sits outside of the legal frameworks of the world. So it's much harder to call the authorities when your cryptocurrency is stolen. You can. It happens. But not much. And for this reason, the only path forward for this new technology/money is right through the middle of the hoard of bad actors. That means we have to create technological and social solutions for security instead of relying on the monopoly of violence (the police) to protect us.
The bad acts and just general greed in the scene are holding it back. But this is, unfortunately, necessary. This is a wall of resistance that has to be pushed through for a better tomorrow. It's part of the process.
The future that decentralized technology will bring us will be different from whatever we are imagining now. But we still have to keep imagining and building. Because even though it will be different than the fantasy, its still the right direction.
> I also don't really care if the content is chronological
Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. It depends on the content. And that's one thing I've longed to see solved in RSS feed readers as well as podcasts. However, I have not been able to imagine a UX that solves my problems, so there's that.
You can't do transactions with just a database. You'd have to add a payment processor. Now things are getting wildly complex.
x402 is designed with agentic AIs in mind. AIs make mistakes. Having an immutable record that can't be tampered with is a nice layer of security.
And while I haven't worked with it personally, I understand x402 to be extremely straight forward for devs to implement.