balajis

@balajis.eth

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183169 Followers

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We just launched the Network School Fellowship. Anyone from anywhere can apply for $100k in funding. Apply online at ns.com. https://x.com/balajis/status/1913280710531826057

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So true, great point. Totally agree and well said.

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Farcaster’s photo UX is now better than X. Just swipe.

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The best thing about Farcaster is that it’s an open backend that can be used to create many different kinds of frontends. The initial Twitter clone flagship app shows how to use accounts, posts, likes, a feed, and other tools. And it also packages a wallet, embedded apps, and soon DMs. But it’s only partially an app. It’s really a dev kit. Showing the sophistication of what can be built.

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Is this the user’s fault or the platform’s fault? Excellent question by @ted. Should be asked in many situations, not just this one. Because sometimes it’s user error, sometimes it’s platform error, and sometimes it’s both.

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Most countries are small countries. More than 50% have <10M people. Almost 20% have <1M people. We've built social networks much bigger than that.

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See point #7. Creators should be able to curate their comments (or set an AI prompt to do it for them, essentially a probabilistic whitelist or blacklist).

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There were three applications of Zora content coins: buy because you think it will get more popular, buy because you want to support the creator, or buy because you want to show you’re a talent scout. But buy because you want to show an ad is the most deterministic use case. https://warpcast.com/jacob/0xd46e443f

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Peer to peer ad markets are now live on Zora. For any post you can buy the content coin. And if you’re the number one holder, you can pin a link under the post. This solves many issues at once. (1) First, it gives utility for holding a post-specific digital currency. (2) Second, it allows creators to share directly and instantly in ad revenue. (3) Third, it allows advertisers to micro-target individual posts more specifically than ever before. Entire new crypto ad exchanges can arise on this basis. (4) Fourth, it’s an application that’s legible to web2 execs, as they understand the monetization of attention. (5) Fifth, you can work out the CPMs, but they may well be lower than traditional ads. (6) Sixth, it’s enabled by the p2p aspect of crypto, as it’d be hard to facilitate this kind of microtransaction otherwise. (7) Seventh, creators will probably want to curate their top reply or have AI doing it for them. (8) Finally, if this works it can be scaled across any social crypto product.

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Great work. The infrastructure is finally there to enable internet micropayments.

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Cryptocurrencies are digital boundaries. That is, in the physical world you can clearly distinguish where France ends and Germany begins. And you can enumerate the millions of people near the Franco-German border, as opposed to those who are more internally located. But in the digital world, you can’t easily see the Instagram/X border. You can’t see which people spend a lot of time on both platforms, and are in a sense near the network border, as opposed to those who are “patriots” to just one platform. Until crypto. Because coin holdings give public digital boundaries. You can determine from wallets and posts which people are coin maximalists (and hold 100% in one coin) vs which people are in digital border territories (and hold balances in multiple coins). This is machine-readable information that can establish digital and physical borders for a community. NFT-gated Discords and door locks prove the point. So: it’s early now, but eventually crypto tribalism becomes crypto patriotism.

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This is the source of their graph data. https://www.unibocconi.it/en/news/network-conclave

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A map of the cloud predicted the pope.

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The innovation of @zora style content coins over 1-of-1 art NFTs is simply that there is always a buyer, at *some* price, for a content coin. Because they have Uniswap as the buyer. Whereas art NFTs are much more illiquid — so you can buy, but it’s harder to sell. Moreover there can be as many buyers of a Zora-style content coin on a post as there are viewers. [1]: Horse is a viral mint by @jacob that illustrates what Zora could be. A monetized Instagram. https://zora.co/coin/base:0xf1fc9580784335b2613c1392a530c1aa2a69ba3d?referrer=0x3a5df03dd1a001d7055284c2c2c147cbbc78d142

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NFTs have evolved into at least four categories. First, there are name NFTs like yourname.eth. These are the easiest to understand because they are just like domain names or usernames. Next, there are profile NFTs like Bored Ape. These have value because they are like club memberships, and people make them part of their public identity. Next, there are Zora-style content coins like horse (see reply), which update the art NFT model by setting up a market for every Instagram-style post. Buyers buy these coins to show appreciation for the creator, to speculate on how much more popular a given post will get, and sometimes to show (via onchain timestamps) that they’re early to spotting new talent. Finally, there are micro-NFTs that just represent onchain data, akin to “typed likes”. Many social actions are now cheap enough to record onchain.

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Meaning: the practice of organizing countless in-person conferences worldwide for the globally decentralized crypto community is a necessary first step towards materializing cloud communities into physical form. It’s an important thing that many don’t yet think of as important. Like video games leading to AI GPUs, or social media leading to AI training data.

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Crypto conferences are a precursor to crypto communities.

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Come visit Network School. You can apply at ns.com/apply. We have a prototype of a startup society node and we can discuss.

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Just saw this. (1) Actually, I also completely agree with you that the US should stop interfering in LatAm. Now, I probably think they destabilize countries more to the left, and you might think they destabilize more to the right, but we both agree the US destabilizes LatAm countries. And this has been policy since the Monroe Doctrine. That’s why Porfirio Diaz said “Poor Mexico. So far from God. So close to the United States.” (2) Second, I also completely agree with you that we should not give up on democracy. I unironically believe in science too, and rule of law, and even in journalism via citizen journalism. The only question is the implementation mechanism. I believe in the network, more than the state. Yet at the level of principle I think we are aligned. Democracy is about the consent of the governed and without consent there is no legitimate government. In fact, I gave a talk on implementing digital democracy here which I call technodemocracy: https://youtu.be/AT3mwJOdSHQ?feature=shared

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I believe in global meritocracy. Always have, and always will. So we've now launched the Network School Fellowships. Anyone from anywhere can apply for $100k in funding. And Farcaster users are particularly welcome. Just include your Warpcast username when you apply! https://ns.com/apply

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