@kaufman

Some reflections on what minting a coin teaches you: I have to admit that I always found the whole idea of coins confusing. I understood the utility of cryptocurrency, but the value assigned to seemingly random coins that random people would mint seemed so odd. I trust and admire my friend @mazmhussain, so when he decided to mint MAZ I figured it was worth following him on that journey and seeing where it went. It's only been about half a day since I minted my @paragraph writer coin ENERGY 0x365C6BB4d3399D125a5495dE5Aa809f5356BC0e0 and tried out @clanker to make $electric. Watching the token trade and talking to many of you about it here finally made me realize what it's about. You build a community and externalize its shared values in literal shared value. Some of the coins I've seen on here that seem silly? That, I'm realizing, is the point. It's fun! The value is the shared value of fun, of the inside joke. And over time that grows into something bigger than itself because enough people come to see the value in it. I'm somewhat worried my concept of how to create value with my work may be too heady and pretentious. But since I joined Farcaster earlier this year, I found a community of people whose adjacency to crypto and digital work made them interested in systems and curious about the physical infrastructure that powers the digital infrastructure. That made my reporting on energy, electricity, the grid, supply chains, minerals, and more relevant to many of you. Your genuine interest, embrace of nuance, and ideological diversity has made this often a much warmer place to come and do journalism than Bluesky or X. If holding a coin projects a certain value, I would like the value of ENERGY to be rooted in: 1. Earnest curiosity and feeling no shame in changing your mind when you take in new empirical information. 2. A belief that our societies are best served by ensuring an abundant supply of cheap and environmentally sustainable electricity to guarantee basic modernity and fuel technological progression. 3. A respect for difference and a global vision that can reckon with the worldwide supply chains that dictate our lives. For $ELECTRIC, I would like that to be for readers and investors who are laser focused on the electrical grid, data centers, and the near-term challenges and opportunities we are facing. I'm sure these ideas with evolve over time. None of what I'm thinking now would have been possible without the conversation with many of you so please let me know if I'm off base here or if there are better ways to think about this. In an age when reporting is expensive and the traditional methods of funding on-the-ground journalism are less reliable than ever, I'm eager to find a way to build a unique bond with readers that can help me better serve all of you with high quality, vetted, and exclusive information – and hopefully increase value of our shared endeavor.

7 replies

9 recasts

48 reactions