Recent crypto learnings 5: “making money, having fun, finding community… in that order”

RECENT CRYPTO LEARNINGS AND READS

Tarun Chitra: Most ZK implementations are not about privacy but about succinctness

Berachain has invented – which they call Proof-of-Liquidity (POL).
7/ In a Proof-of-Stake blockchain such as Ethereum, gas fees and block rewards are distributed to stakers of the native token. In POL, however, block rewards (aka inflation) go to liquidity providers, thus providing a strong incentive for users to deploy capital on Berachain

—
I’m convinced the three reasons why 99% of people come to crypto are:

1. making money
2. having fun
3. finding community

in that order.

that means, projects that don’t meet those needs, in that order, will struggle to find pmf.


—

@redphonecrypto
Pay attn to new crypto projects and concepts that repulse you… it’s an indicator that the object in question holds sacred power
They’re lightning rods for attention, and attention increases distribution/price
Have seen this play out every cycle. From the launch of dogecoin to ICOs to NFTs to memecoins, ordinals and now runes
It’s the grand paradox: the greater your disgust, the greater the potential

On the call Buterin added that it is easy to underestimate how quickly ZK proofs will become commonplace operations for verifying blockchain state not only across Layer-2 rollups but across Layer-1 blockchains like Ethereum as well. “I think it’s very plausible to our belief that even within one or two years, we’ll have the capability of proving the Ethereum L1 in real time. So, I think it’s just important to mentally adapt to the fact that there’s no such thing as a distinction between ZK chains and non ZK chains. We are basically now entering a mode where every serious chain is a ZK chain,” said Buterin.

“Tarpit” Startup Ideas
• Roommate matching app
• VR/AR shopping
• Photo sharing
• X for Y (e.g. Airbnb for Y)
• Recommendations based on friends
• Anything related to travel planning
• “Better design” (e.g. Craiglist / Linkedin, but not shitty)
• Verticalized social networks
• Education accreditation
• Restaurant loyalty programs
• To-do lists
• News curation

Everyone loves launching new features, but in my experience, most growth comes from the less sexy work: incremental and consistent optimization of your core product.

I view L2s as solving an incentive paradox while also scaling the chain and allowing ETH to accrue more value as money. Use as money is the most important value accrual mechanism in crypto, and far more important than whatever fees L2s eat. I really do not care if Arb/OP is printing fees that could’ve been on L1 if they have 2-3M ETH locked up in their bridges. The use of ETH as money/sink of supply greatly offsets the fees lost to L2s, while blobs/NFTs/L1 DeFi keeps the ETH burn chugging along steadily

AI thrives within blockchain systems, fundamentally because the rules of the crypto economy are explicitly defined, and the system allows for permissionlessness. Operating under clear guidelines significantly reduces the risks tied to AI’s inherent stochasticity. For example, AI’s dominance over humans in chess and video games stems from the fact that these environments are closed sandboxes with straightforward rules. Conversely, advancements in autonomous driving have been more gradual. The open-world challenges are more complex, and our tolerance for AI’s unpredictable problem-solving in such scenarios is markedly lower

This is not getting smaller. There’s not gonna be less money in generative AI next year, it’s a very unique set of circumstances, AI + crypto is not going to have less capital in a year or two. – Emad re: AI+crypto

For instance, Bonkbot is a simple Telegram Trading bot that makes it easy to trade memecoins on Solana. Over just 5 months, its revenue has surpassed over $23 million.

Daily SOL transfers on Solana approximately match those of Ethereum in US Dollars. A noticeable peculiarity caused by Solana’s low transaction fees and fast execution is the seemingly high number of “minnow” transfers—those worth less than $1M—when compared with “whale” transfers. Over 80% of the total value transferred on Solana stems from such minnow transfers. On the other hand, Ethereum currently sports a minnow ratio of only 40% as users shy away from sending funds from which fees would take a significant chunk
—
The high throughput and large block size of Solana comes at the expense of an immense chain size. Altogether, the Solana blockchain is over 150 TB. As a result, Solana nodes cannot provide full history back to chain genesis, but are pruned after two epochs (approximately 4 days). Deep history is stored in centralized BigTable instances hosted by the Solana Foundation or professional RPC providers.

96% of the TON supply was distributed to miners during July and August 2020;
At least 85.8% of the supply was mined by a few groups of miners connected with each other and affiliated with TON Foundation;
Funds from these miner groups are used by network validators that control 2/3 of the TON blockchain PoS consensus

$10B+ of BTC is bridged on Ethereum via WBTC alone, a clear proxy of demand for smart contract-enabled use cases that can’t be fulfilled on native BTC…yet

When users invest in memecoins, they are implicitly making a statement that they believe that particular token and meme will grow in popularity: attention is the primary driver of value. One X user called memecoins “a way to angel invest in culture.”

Rollups use a collection of compression tricks to reduce the amount of data that a transaction needs to store on-chain: a simple currency transfer decreases from ~100 to ~16 bytes, an ERC20 transfer in an EVM-compatible chain from ~180 to ~23 bytes, and a privacy-preserving ZK-SNARK transaction could be compressed from ~600 to ~80 bytes. About 8x compression in all cases

Jesse Pollak:
Original ETH scaling vision had 64 shards
Optimism is really strong w onchain governance

Logarithmic curves make the token price rise rapidly at first as more tokens are added. But then the price increases slow down as the supply keeps expanding. So, the price spikes in the beginning but levels off over time. This benefits early investors the most since their tokens gain value quickly up front. The potential for fast early profits can attract the first buyers to provide liquidity

Ordinals are arbitrary data inscriptions (in the form of text, images or videos) inscribed onto individual satoshis

Activity on Coinbase Layer 2 network Base continues to gain momentum as more than 2.6M daily transactions have been settled on the network, a new record and an increase of 550% month-over-month. To put this into perspective, this is more daily volume than leading L2 networks Arbitrum (1.6M) and Optimism (680K) have seen combined

Digital art displays are at the point where they should get mass adoption. I’m no longer embarrassed by this technology and I stood proudly in front of a lot of work we exhibited on screens this week.

From Coinbase report on AI+Crypto
—
Nvidia’s February 2024 earnings call revealed that approximately 40% of their business is inferencing, and Sataya Nadella made similar remarks in the Microsoft earnings call a month prior in January, noting that “most” of their Azure AI usage was for inferencing
—
The often touted blanket remedy that “decentralization fixes [insert problem]” as a foregone conclusion is, in our view, premature for such a rapidly innovating field. It is also preemptively solving for a centralization problem that may not necessarily exist. The reality is that the AI industry already has a lot of decentralization in both technology and business verticals through competition between many different companies and open source projects

There currently exists no regulatory pathways to host sensitive data on decentralized storage platforms like Filecoin and Arweave. In fact, many enterprises are still transitioning from on-premise servers to centralized cloud storage providers. At a technical level, the decentralized nature of these networks is also currently incompatible with certain geolocation and physical data silo requirements for sensitive data storage.

5./Lots of times if you are early to these kinds of coins you can make lots of money.
For example:
– Hobbes who was Ansems cat
- EPIK which was a memecoin from Mando and others.
- SLERF after the dev accidentally burned $10m
Just be early to crazy and funny things

The key intuition uniting all of these examples is that providing instant settlement of borderless bearer value is a unique and unprecedented phenomenon with derivative implications for every industry, and it will inexorably pull businesses that currently have nothing to do with bitcoin into bitcoin’s orbit

Given that only a few hundred million dollars have been deployed into companies focused on bitcoin, whereas well over $25 billion have been channeled to the broader “crypto” ecosystem, it is safe to say virtually every capital allocator around the world is substantially underweight bitcoin infrastructure

11/ In Solana, there is only one instance, or “singleton”, of the token contract.
Any DEX, blockchain explorer, wallet, etc. can check if the token contract is an instance of this specific, expected, safe token contract

“Bull markets are born on pessimism, grown on skepticism, mature on optimism and die on euphoria. Maximum pessimism is the best time to buy, and maximum optimism the best time to sell.” — John Templeton

This brings me to the core idea of degen communism: a political ideology that openly embraces chaos, but tweaks key rules and incentives to create a background pressure where the consequences of chaos are aligned with the common good.

And 0DTE (zero-day to expiration options, or they expire that day on the close) is now over half of all options traded

@trippingvols
If there’s one lesson I’ve learned onchain, it’s to go balls long every semi-legit new token standard

Today, I would argue that we are decidedly on the decelerating, right side of this S-curve. As of two weeks ago, the two largest changes to the Ethereum blockchain – the switch to proof of stake, and the re-architecting to blobs – are behind us. Further changes are still significant (eg. Verkle trees, single-slot finality, in-protocol account abstraction), but they are not drastic to the same extent that proof of stake and sharding are. In 2022, Ethereum was like a plane replacing its engines mid-flight. In 2023, it was replacing its wings. The Verkle tree transition is the main remaining truly significant one (and we already have testnets for that); the others are more like replacing a tail fin

Upon closing of this token merger, a governing council for the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance will form to monitor and guide operations of the newly merged tokenomic network

Memecoins like DEGEN are marketing coins. Like the marketing layer of a decentralized project. So what does this mean
Is there such a thing as a meta meme coin? A base layer meme coin like ETH to ERC-20
Or a meme coin standard like MEME-20? Allow anyone to easily mint their own meme coin?

—

Past updates 1, 2, 3, and 4

April TV and movies: Parasyte Netflix series, Shogun S1, Fallout S1, Physical 100 S2

Physical 100 S2 — super motivating and inspirational; can’t wait for S3 though I really hope they can add some exercises or rules that give at least *a small edge* to women, otherwise the women just consistently lose or hinder the teams in almost every competition (from the first curved treadmill race to the pullups to the pvp wrestling to the miner sack carry I could go on)

Parasyte live action mini series on Netflix — much better than I expected; they managed to make the parasites not look corny, and keep the story tight and engaging, which is an impressive achievement after the consistent failures of live action conversions like Death Note, One Piece, Ghost in the Shell, Cowboy Bebop…
The lead protagonist (Jeon So-nee) was great; the pacing was fast and intense; the show didn’t drag on, they did 6 great episodes and noped out

Shogun S1 — finished; ended on a high note although I can’t for the life of me really understand wtf is going on with Blackthorne or why he’s in the story at all besides blah blah cannons blah blah ship blah blah anjin-sama

Fallout S1 — a few episodes, but none of the characters resonated (except maybe Norm in moments), and the intentionally corny cliched writing didn’t land for me; it got increasingly awkward, like watching a standup comedian continually bomb

Previous months:

8 excerpts from Stanford’s 2024 AI Index Report: “…individuals with higher incomes and education levels are more optimistic about AI’s positive impacts”

Excerpts copied verbatim (bolding mine):

—

Industry continues to dominate frontier AI research. In 2023, industry produced 51 notable machine learning models, while academia contributed only 15. There were also 21 notable models resulting from industry-academia collaborations in 2023, a new high.

—

Robust and standardized evaluations for LLM responsibility are seriously lacking.
New research from the AI Index reveals a significant lack of standardization in responsible AI reporting. Leading developers, including OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, primarily test their models against different responsible AI benchmarks. This practice complicates efforts to systematically compare the risks and limitations of top AI models.

—

The number of AI regulations in the United States sharply increases. The number of AI-related regulations in the U.S. has risen significantly in the past year and over the last five years. In 2023, there were 25 AI-related regulations, up from just one in 2016. Last year alone, the total number of AI-related regulations grew by 56.3%.

—

Open-source AI research explodes. Since 2011, the number of AI-related projects on GitHub has seen a consistent increase, growing from 845 in 2011 to approximately 1.8 million in 2023. Notably, there was a sharp 59.3% rise in the total number of GitHub AI projects in 2023 alone. The total number of stars for AI-related projects on GitHub also significantly increased in 2023, more than tripling from 4.0 million in 2022 to 12.2 million.

—

Human evaluation is in. With generative models producing high-quality text, images, and more, benchmarking has slowly started shifting toward incorporating human evaluations like the Chatbot Arena Leaderboard rather than computerized rankings like ImageNet or SQuAD

—

ChatGPT is politically biased. Researchers find a significant bias in ChatGPT toward Democrats in the United States and the Labour Party in the U.K. This finding raises concerns about the tool’s potential to influence users’ political views, particularly in a year marked by major global elections.

—

AI organizational adoption ticks up. A 2023 McKinsey report reveals that 55% of organizations now use AI (including generative AI) in at least one business unit or function, up from 50% in 2022 and 20% in 2017

—

Demographic differences emerge regarding AI optimism. Significant demographic differences exist in perceptions of AI’s potential to enhance livelihoods, with younger generations generally more optimistic. For instance, 59% of Gen Z respondents believe AI will improve entertainment options, versus only 40% of baby boomers. Additionally, individuals with higher incomes and education levels are more optimistic about AI’s positive impacts on entertainment, health, and the economy than their lower-income and less-educated counterparts.

—

Full report: https://aiindex.stanford.edu/report/

Health and fitness learnings for March and April: “the human body loses about 8 ounces of water per hour on an aircraft at altitude, mostly from breathing”

Snack on pumpkin seeds. One ounce of seeds contains more than a third of your recommended intake of magnesium. According to Mildred Seeling, M.D., author of The Magnesium Factor, magnesium deficiencies have been linked to most risk factors for heart disease, including high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol levels, and the increased buildup of plaque in the arteries.

Jeff Wang: would NOT mess with ashwagandha. too many people i know got bad liver markers from them, including me. cycle off every 2-3 months if you do

Apple cider vinegar (ACV) can be an effective digestive aid. It can help to calm stomach discomfort associated with indigestion, reflux, bloating, or fullness. While studies have not been done to analyze how ACV works, the acidic nature of apple cider vinegar and other types of vinegar may support better stomach pH.

It takes 3-7 days from last drink to fully detox and remove alcohol from your system

The researchers…found that even if people walked as many as 20,000 steps a day, the health benefits continued to increase. They have not found an upper limit yet.

Because a lack of fiber brings on most cases of constipation in the diet, apple cider vinegar’s high concentration of pectin, a water-soluble dietary fiber, is believed to help improve digestion. Once the constipation has passed, pectin from ACV will help ensure the digestive system and colon are running smoothly.

Cranberries and pumpkin seeds can improve prostate symptoms

The chest should neither expand nor collapse during proper inhalation or exhalation.

the human body loses about 8 ounces of water per hour on an aircraft at altitude, mostly from breathing

When you’re healthy you have 10,000 needs, but when you’re sick you only have 1

When you consume alcohol you need to detoxify it. Two of the main enzymes are ADH and ALDH. Both require NAD as a cofactor, thus b3 is great to supplement. Another option: EAT CHEESE which massively stimulated both of those enzymes. The French get it.

Puzzlingly though, despite facing an increased risk of skin cancer, people who are exposed to lots of sun appear to have longer life expectancies, on average, than sun avoiders.

Previous updates:

A meditation compendium: learnings and esoterica on the benefits and practice of meditation

I’ve done bits of meditation for 10+ years, but my standards are laughably low: I consider 5 minutes a day as an achievement :)

And thus I’m always reminded of the saying, “if you don’t have time to meditate for 5 minutes, then you should meditate for 10 minutes”.

Guess I’m not wise enough yet!

All the below is copied verbatim from various sources, but mistakes mine:

—

Brain changes. People who meditated showed increased activity in the left-anterior part of the brain. Increased activity in this area is associated with positive feelings and emotions. This suggests that meditation makes changes in the brain that help us feel better.

Immune boost. The meditation group also had a stronger response to the flu vaccine. They produced more antibodies against the flu, and their bodies are better equipped to fight off the virus compared to the non-meditators

—

Meditation like a massage for your brain

—

a state of profound meditation called samadhi. When meditation becomes very deep, breathing becomes slow, steady, and even, and the windows of the senses close to all outward sensations. Next the faculties of the mind quiet down, resting from their usually frantic activity; even the primal emotions of desire, fear, and anger subside. When all these sensory and emotional tides have ceased to flow, then the spirit is free, mukta –at least for the time being. It has entered the state called samadhi. Samadhi can come and go; generally it can be entered only in a long period of meditation and after many years of ardent endeavor. But one verse (5: 28) adds the significant word sada, “always.” Once this state of deep concentration becomes established, the person lives in spiritual freedom, or moksha, permanently. This is extremely rare.

—

Consider washing the dishes the most important thing in life. Washing the dishes is meditation. If you cannot wash the dishes in mindfulness, neither can you meditate while sitting in silence.

—

Human beings are animals; meditation is one way (among many) to deny our animal nature and perhaps reach a higher spiritual plane

—

The eighth-century Buddhist adept Vimalamitra described three stages of mastery in meditation and how thinking appears in each. The first is like meeting a person you already know; you simply recognize each thought as it arises in consciousness, without confusion. The second is like a snake tied in a knot; each thought, whatever its content, simply unravels on its own. In the third, thoughts become like thieves entering an empty house; even the possibility of being distracted has disappeared.

—

The dev bites / bytes code guy email about meditation advice
– Meditation is uninteresting repetition, again and again, no matter the technique. It’s only natural to find it uneasy.
– This is not a race. It’s the opposite of a race. The faster you try to go, the slower you will progress. Yet efforts will lead to results. You have to be motivated without avidity, and it’s not an easy balance to find.
– There is a huge difference in effects, between a casual practice (a few minutes, some of the days) and a robust practice (long sessions every day).
– It’s a long term work. It’s, in fact, a life work. Our teacher jokes that at the center, we are at “Vipassana Kindergarden”. We are just beginning. Now we have to carry on and on. Half of the secret of success is simply showing up, every day.

—

I have been practicing meditation for 15 years, sometimes in batch of 100 hours.

The more I practice, the more the time slows down. Not just while meditating, but after the fact as well. Although it fluctuates and I’m not back to my kid self, it feels that I have tremendously more time now than a few years ago.

I suspect that it’s tied to how much present you manage to be.

When you are a kid, you are deeply immersed in whatever you are doing, and less and less so after that, especially in our age of distractions, multitasking, and intellectual work loads.

I think that the more you are immersed in the daily boring stuff, like just walking, doing chores, or taking your shower, the more you register the time you spend doing said activity, and the time seems to pass slowly.

In fact, I am sometimes under the impression my minutes, not just feel longer, but actually contain more, because I do so many things and then looking at the clock, it hasn’t moved much. This sensation increases when I meditate a lot.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29109066

—

to meditate each morning is a radical act of love, take that time, take care of yourself – Jon Kabat Zinn

Jerry Seinfeld has done transcendental meditation since 1972

—

Other lifestyle interventions #
Meditation (mean rating = 5.8), bright lights in the morning (5), cold shower (4.7), and masturbation abstinence (4.1) also got impressive to pretty good ratings.

—

When all these sensory and emotional tides have ceased to flow, then the spirit is free, mukta –at least for the time being. It has entered the state called samadhi. Samadhi can come and go; generally it can be entered only in a long period of meditation and after many years of ardent endeavor

—

The Buddha withdrew for six years, then returned for forty-five. But each year was likewise divided: nine months in the world, followed by a three-month retreat with his monks during the rainy season. His daily cycle, too, was patterned to this mold. His public hours were long, but three times a day he withdrew, to return his attention (through meditation) to its sacred source

—

The right brain is in charge of present-moment awareness, and this is the part of the brain that meditation takes to the gym. Essentially, the longer we meditate, the more we’re able to balance the right and left hemispheres of the brain. The result of this is more attention, awareness, and computing power for the task at hand.

—

Chen: For the overwhelming majority of Asian Buddhists, Buddhism is a devotional practice. Bowing to images of deities, burning incense, worshiping at an altar — those are all fundamental elements of Buddhist practice. There is this acknowledgement of worshiping higher beings. Meditation was not at all a mainstream lay practice in Buddhism

—

“Meditation is a high interest savings account for your time”

—

As a novice monk, several times a day I had to light incense to offer on the altar of the meditation hall. I was taught to pick up the stick of incense with both hands, the left hand on top of the right hand, which picks up the stick of incense. A stick of incense is very light. Why do you have to use both hands? The idea is that you have to invest one hundred percent of yourself into this simple act of picking up an incense stick.

—

“meditation is a non-pharmaceutical Ritalin” – Daniel Goleman

—

“meditation is as deep and as powerful a tool as we have” – Waitzkin

—

Meditation is not about feeling good. It’s about feeling what you’re feeling with good awareness. Plot twist: Eventually that makes you feel good

—

Meditation has been linked to reduced activity in the default mode network, which is associated with self-referential thoughts and mind-wandering. This reduction can lead to an enhanced ability to focus on the present moment and increased self-awareness.

—

I’ve come out of (non-psychedelic-enhanced) meditations crying. I’ve sat and stared at the traffic outside my window for as long as I might normally have watched a TV show. I’ve had profound creative unlocks I’ve never experienced without drugs or other extreme state changes. I’ve even had brief moments of the fractal vision and plants breathing (IYKYK). It is not the same as a psychedelic experience, but they’re neighbors

—

Your best decisions come from stillness. Stillness is amplified in nature & meditation.

—

People who exercise, meditate, or do yoga to get high usually report that their experiences get better and better over time, which is a great contrast to the reports of heavy users of drugs.

—

Every time you meditate is like making a deposit in a bank (Maharishi)

—

Even the gods envy those who are awakened and not forgetful, who are given to meditation, who are wise, and who delight in the repose of retirement (from the world).

—

There’s concrete evidence that meditation calms your brain similar to valium. Actual structural and measurable changes within brain itself

—

Intensive meditation, even after only one day, can also affect gene regulation in your brain through similar mechanisms. Attending a monthlong meditation retreat reduces the expression of genes that affect inflammation, and experienced meditators can reduce inflammatory genes after just one day of intensive meditation.

—

Hindu meditation practices have long understood the benefits of sound, especially through the chanting of “Om.” This sound, central to many Hindu traditions, is more than a symbol; it’s a powerful tool that engages the vagus nerve, known for its role in regulating stress and relaxation responses. The act of humming, inherently part of chanting Om, creates a gentle, soothing vibration. This process not only brings a physical dimension to meditation but also enhances the spiritual experience, as the sound of Om is said to represent the universe’s primal sound.

—

And some of my previous writings on meditation: