Onchain gaming is somewhat of a hot new trend predicted by the crypto thoughterati. Many predict it will take off this next cycle, especially as L2 proliferation brings fees down and more apps/experiences are enabled by feasibility of microtransactions. I agree with all this.

Why do games need to be onchain? What makes them more appealing than trad/offchain games? We know by revealed preference that it's not the P2E reason of turning play into labor. We also know it's not "you can play as your NFT PFP" or "you can take an item you own from one game into another game".

I believe it's because onchain games are fundamentally new asset classes. Asset classes, like all business and media properties, compete in the attention economy. Onchain games leverage mechanism design and storytelling to attract people to their asset class.

Onchain games will look a lot more like Friendtech than "Call of Duty but your gun is an NFT". Money is the property with which we play onchain games. It has to be, because crypto is fundamentally a monetary technology.

The Farcaster qDAU meme has had an impact on me. I've realized that every metric I basically previously thought important, I should add a q in front of it, and measure that.

If you're writing a newsletter, you may think your north star metric is subscribers. Whether you're writing professionally or just for the love of the game, "subscribers" is not the important metric, it's qSubscribers.

qSubscribers are quality subscribers. They open your e-mails, they click on links, they become customers of the businesses that sponsor you. These are the subscribers that matter. To take it to the extreme: would you rather have 5 loyal subscribers who act on every possible CTA, or 1 million fake subscribers out of a clickfarm halfway across the world?

The same thing goes for e.g. an agency. You want qClients - people who are easy to work with, stay on for a long time, refer others, etc. You don't just want clients who churn after a month of making your life hell.

Optimize for qEverything.

I'm increasingly drawn to very simple, sweeping rules for how to behave or how systems work. An example might be: "the only thing that matters in picking a place to live is the amount of sunlight you get".

This rule is probably false; proximity to family and friends comes to mind as an equally if not more important factor. But then, we can switch the rule to "the only thing that matters in picking a place to live is proximity to friends and family". Either way, stating things in very blunt or sweeping terms allows you to simplify the different factors that influence your decision-making.

Nuance is important, but there's a case where maybe nuance adds too much complexity which deters your ability to make the right choices. Such simple generalized rules, though lacking nuance, force you to confront what is actually worth prioritizing when making a difficulty choice. When you apply a simple rule across many potential decisions, you will not make the right choice every time, but you may still end up with a higher % accuracy than if you viewed every decision in its full complexity.

I'm starting to understand reality as a sort of n-dimensional tug of war game. As a human, every choice you make influences reality in some way, pulling your end of the rope in the direction of whatever your desired state of reality is.

The center of the rope is constantly shifting for as long as we exist; there is no winner, just an ongoing state that is always changing.

Some people are deliberate about playing this game well. They accumulate resources like capital, distribution, and talent, which create leverage that allows them to strengthen their position and have more influence over the direction of the game. Often, people with aligned worldviews team up to combine their strength together. Many people reject the idea of actively playing the game at all.

Reality is a competition of worldviews, with different actors imposing different strategies to strengthen their position. It could be something as big as starting a company, or as small as complimenting a stranger on the street. But the larger competition will always exist.

I just watched the KRO interview with Tim Ferriss, and towards the end he talks about his experience with ketamine therapy. He described life as a series of crunches (like the exercise), and prior to therapy he realized he had been doing the crunches with a 35lb weight on his chest. Afterwards, he felt the weight lifted and he moved with a lightness he hadn't felt since he was 11 or 12 years old.

That image stuck out to me, and it made me wonder: what is my equivalent of the 35lb weight I'm carrying? I'm not doing anything nearly as stressful as running a failed PFP project beholden to VC interests, but I'm sure I have some subconscious weights that are making life heavier than it needs to be.

After reflecting I think it's something with insecurities around my body. I feel very self conscious of it and it influences how I carry myself and move through space - posture, stiffness, comfort, etc. Something I'm conscious of and want to be more intentional about working on.

Open security contests, like that of Code4rena, are interesting because they attempt to quantify how secure a contract or protocol is. How does this work?

When you start a contest with $100,000 up for grabs for people who find bugs, inefficiencies, and vulnerabilities - you are essentially saying that the contract is secured by $100,000 of value. If you had put up $1,000,000, people would have 10x the incentive to find bugs and issues, which means its 10x more likely that any issues would be found. That contract would be secured by $1,000,000 of value.

The more open the contest is (i.e how likely it is that the right people find and participate in the contest), the less "leaky" the security value is. For example, I could pay my 3-year-old nephew $10M to audit the contract. He doesn't know how to read or write *anything* yet, let alone complex Solidity, so it's not fair to say that protocol is secured by $10M. Well, it is under this framework, but the $10M is 100% leaky. a $10M bounty on Code4Rena might be only 5% leaky.

Feeling an interesting dissonance this weekend. In real life I'm around my family spending the holidays, eating good food and playing games and generally having a "merry" Christmas. On Twitter the ETH and SOL maxis seem to be engaged in some sort of tribal narrative warfare. And on Farcaster things seem pretty chill and positive for the most part.

Both the first and the last are the way they are because of their scale, which is relatively small and somewhat self-selecting for like-minded individuals (not always the case with family, but I'm fortunate that it's the case for mine).

I think the crypto twitter stuff will eventually pass, one way or another, but people always get tribal about narratives that put their heavy bags at risk - not just financial bags, but psychological bags too. I think if you're engaging with crypto, one of the first technologies to really explicitly blend money with identity and social behavior, you especially need to be able to zoom out a bit and try your best to be intellectually honest. Or at least, put your energy to what you want to see more of.

Throughout the day I have so much to say, I feel like I tweet and cast all the time. But then I arrive on the Zora notes page, and try to come up with something to write about, and have nothing.

The friction comes from a couple things; first is the notion that I have to have a thought that's actually packaged and presentable, for the world to see. The aforementioned social networks don't carry this same constraint when composing a post. The other reason is that there's a stark difference between having a thought come to you and flow through you to the computer, versus sitting down and trying to summon some sort of insight. The latter almost never works.

So, when that happens, the result is something like what you're reading right now. More of a journal, stream of consciousness flow where I can just type what I'm thinking. I'm not going to post this one on any socials, but it's crazy that some of y'all might see it via Interface or whatever. Fascinating.

Attestations are a core building block of society. An attestation is made when an entity makes a statement about something.

We imbue value onto things because of the attestations they've received, and the people and institutions attesting them. When you are born, the government attests to your name, birthday, and sex, then when you are in school the school attests to your grades and your graduation, then when you get a job companies attest to your employment, and so on and so forth.

An attestation consists of two parts: the entity issuing the attestation, and the actual statement of the attestation. When you graduate college, the university hands you a degree attesting to the fact that you passed all the requirements of that degree. Now, note that anybody else can attest to that - the barista at your coffee shop could attest to the fact that you passed all your classes, but it wouldn't matter. The attestation only matters to people when the university issues it.

Attestations are valuable to the extent that people trust the issuer of those attestations.

Channel-specific clients will be a Farcaster meta in 2024. To date, we've seen alternative clients like Flink and Supercast, which found some meaningful traction. Both of these are positioned as alternatives to Warpcast, with Supercast geared towards pro users and Flink differentiating on Reddit-like UX.

We haven't seen many channel-specific clients though, in my opinion because there aren't enough users of individual channels for it to make sense for devs. That being said, if Farcaster grows, it will start becoming viable to build unique experiences for clients. As an example, we saw the Degen channel go off this past week with $POINTS and then $WOWOW and $FARTS. There's some features where a degen-focused client might enhance the experience: aggregating casts via tickers mentioned, showing live price data, showing information about holdings of different users, et cetera. That would be a much stronger UX for degen activity than just using Warpcast.

If channel users grow, which I predict they will, then clients designed from the ground up specifically for those channels will thrive.

👀

The Nouns True Fan problem

Noun 40 has talked extensively about a need for some way to discern Nouns "true fans". The ultimate goal would be that you can look at a given actor, and see what other people have attested to about that person. From this data, you should be able to discern whether they are a "true" Nouns fan or not.

It's important to know who such fans are and how many exist, so that you can track success of Nouns over time (ideally # of true fans increases over time). You can also use the knowledge of *who* the true fans are to improve governance. Gardeners is a V1 of this, where true fans were determined via Prop House vote. V0 is the Nouns onchain governance model, where truefanness is determined by token ownership (purchased voting rights) and delegation (earned voting rights).

It's clear these early algorithms have some level of lossiness to them. V0 is susceptible to mercenary actors as we saw with the entire arb situation this past year. V1 is better in some ways, but has a capped amount, and is static, not dynamic. What might V2 look like?

There's been a vibe shift in Nouns. Organic buyers are back, Prop House protocol is live, Proposals are being updated, and Bound lets us track Nouns-related mints onchain. Nouns-aligned communities like BasePaint, Farcaster, and Zora are all thriving, reinforcing our positive-sum crypto vision. We're bringing in new aligned participants via Scout rounds, and rewarding past participants via onchain props. DAO V3 lets us engage in meaningful onchain discourse during all stages of a proposal. And we have several dope proposals in motion. Prices are at all all-time-low, but I think we might be back.

I'm kind of nervous to reflect on 2023. I didn't meet the goals I set out to, but the year also surpassed my expectations in many ways. Probably one of these essays as we get closer to the end of the month will be a 2023 year in review of some sort. I am excited to think about 2024; I'm entering a period of change in my career and personal life and I feel like I'm ready to lean into it fully.

I put up two Stripe Press posters on my bedroom wall. One is a rocketship that says Works In Progress and the other is a more abstract poster about the Housing Theory of Everything.

I'm fond of Stripe Press, and particularly the Collison brothers, because they are opinionated about the world and the direction they want to see it go in (and it's an opinion I agree with). Stripe is a vehicle through which they achieve that, and so is Stripe Press. It's super random for a tech company to also be a book publishing company, but they execute so well, and it makes sense given their larger mission, so I'm quite fond of it. I have a life side quest to read every Stripe Press book. A larger life side quest is to get published by Stripe Press myself, but that's a bit more ambitious .

I predict the Boston Celtics will win the 2024 NBA championship.

For All Mankind

I really enjoy the show For All Mankind.

It's a speculative fiction series about an alternate history where the Soviet Union wins the space race, and the downstream effects of that in America. I've never been much of a space guy; this show mostly changed my opinion a few episodes in.

Space is important because of the image it creates. It's a reminder of our collective will to accomplish great things. I don't personally care much about e.g. colonizing Mars in and of itself, but the simple ability to get there in the first place is a huge feat of technology and coordination. It requires policy, technology, health, and social innovations to make it happen. I feel like if we can go to Mars, we can do anything.

We've had a lot of great innovations in the world of bits in the past few decades, but none of that is really inspiring in the way that space exploration is. We need to be able to see things to feel things.

America should try to at least put someone on the moon again. It would rally people around a much needed, new vision for collective ambition and progress.

I'm writing this with Zora's new Notes feature, directly in zora.co. Already on the TL today I've seen several different people mint shortform text, and it got me thinking once again how critical tools are to creating new forms of behavior.

It was entirely possible to mint HTML text prior to this feature existing (I've been doing it for a few weeks now), but it was more friction - you had to type into a text editor, save as HTML, create/save an image for the thumbnail, and then upload it all here to mint. Now you just type into the box.

Notably, the emergence of this feature doesn't just make it easier for people who were already minting text. It actually drives new people to mint text (or so we can predict, they only launched this today) as well. This means the tool has actually created net new activity, instead of just increasing efficiency for existing people doing that activity.

This is why tools are important. Tools make certain behaviors easier, which makes more people engage in that behavior. More people engaging in a behavior influences our collective direction.