What is Social Proof-of-Work? w/ Dan Romero - The Chopping Block Ep 608

Transcript

you know everyone talks about this idea that like own your data and like get paid for your data the reality is your data is probably not worth anything but there is a version of the world where you you as a person with with an audience can actually choose to amplify things and then actually participate on the upside in a programmatic way not a dividend it's a tale of two now your losses are on someone else's balance generally speaking air drops are kind of pointless anyways un trading firms who are very involved i like. e the ultimate on D5 Protocols are the antidote to this problem hello everybody Welcome to the shopping block every couple weeks the four of us get together and give the industry insiders perspective on the crypto topics of the day so quick intros first you got Tom the defi Maven and

master of memes hello everyone next we've got tun the gigabrain and Grand Puba at Gauntlet Aloha and joining us today we've got Dan the Duke of decentralized dialogue at farcaster what thanks for having me how long did that one take you h I thought I thought I thought that was pretty good thank you um and then I'm hasive the head hype Mana dragonfly we are early stage investors in crypto but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice legal advice or even life advice please see choing block. XYZ for more disclosures so man of the hour uh Dan it's great to have you on the show uh we just spent the last episode gushing about how much you have been kicking ass with farcaster and

uh we we thought it made sense to get you on the show personally to have you tell the world and tell us the story of foraster I know that you've been grinding on this project for a long time and it's now suddenly had its moment of being sort of shining the crypto Spotlight directly on what you're building how how does it feel I know that you've been uh kind of you know toiling in the dull Drums of of crypto on decentralized social uh to talk to us about what that's like yeah so let's let's start off with the caveat is we're not out of the woods quite yet I mean we've had a lot of growth in the last two weeks about 10x um which is always good to have uh fall out of the sky but there's a lot of work left to do uh

especially if we want to compare ourselves to what we should be comparing is is web two right so like if you take any Web Two social network foraster is still kind of a blip relative to the the size and scale that said I think we're really excited because we're finally in a place where I think we're in the conversation as as you kind of point out in that it was kind of this Sideshow before whereas now I think people are starting to pay attention to forecaster um within the Crypton native world right like you have all the Crypton native companies have reached out one way or another they want to get their brand account set up and so definitely an inflection point in the sense that um I think people are aware of what we're doing and I think it's on us now to kind

of like figure out okay how do we cross the chasm to the the kind of next 10x and the next 10x after that um I think if we get to something on the order of you know we're about 50,000 daily active users of the protocol today I think if we can get to something like 5 million uh then it then it starts to become I think real from a kind of like Lindy it's probably not going to go away anytime soon and obviously if you get to something like 50 million people using the protocol and again it can be across a bunch of different apps then I think you you start to have a conversation that maybe maybe it is becoming more mainstream and I think a good like proxy for that is like coinbase has about 100 million people who have an account with

kyc so if you can kind of get to some level of you know their total user base obviously they don't have 50 million people using the app every day um you you probably are starting to crack into mainstream and then obviously if you can get 50 million people to be using the protocol every day then then it's actually something that normal people are are clearly using I don't think there are 50 million Crypton natives that are are using any app or any chain right now so I I wrote a tweet a little while back um looking back at the stats for frch which people might remember was the viral social uh the social fi application that took off um I think it was like last summer uh maybe maybe late summer and it basically went from kind of peak virality to then totally falling

off a cliff within about four months and in in response to posting that chart um vitalic actually responded something that he said uh I'm registering a prediction forecaster and lens will not be deserted in four months or in one year uh it seems like now there's increasing convergence that what friendtech was doing with respect to connecting money and speculation with social was the wrong Avenue or maybe is just you likely to result in this kind of bubble speculative Behavior how how do you think about that and what did you take away from seeing what happened with frch last year so yeah let me start off with I feel like people uh tend to try to create beef between frch and farcaster because I think generally there's just not that much going on in

consumer crypto so naturally like like hey let's try to generate drum I'm not saying that you were trying to do that uh no no issue with frch like I actually think they they had some very clever things that they did especially around taking advantage of the p p pwa changes that Apple kind of released last year and they were kind of first out of the gate on that and I think cemented something that I P being Progressive Way Progressive um and and I think something that I just like Hammer home with crypto Founders especially in the consumer space is if you're not building on mobile you don't matter uh 85% of usage of farcaster mobile if you look at Twitter they released minutes usage Elon tweeted this I think a couple months ago 8 % of usage of Twitter is mobile uh I think like Instagram obviously it's like

90 95% so the fact that you know you had a mobile app uh that that they kind of built like clearly they know what they're doing in terms of like building for Consumer crypto I think the the thing that I've always kind of tried to figure out is social networks um are built off of status and and Eugene way uh has a famous essay on this status as a service which I think is like a good articulation of these points and I think one challenging thing about status is it's it's something that's earned and and you cannot buy status right everyone humans are really good at knowing about people who who who've tried to like buy their status they come off off as inauthentic or or fake and I think proof of work is actually something that

humans value implicitly especially in kind of social networks and I think generally like if you think about like social networks what what uh kind of itches do they scratch for consumers like why do people use them uh a they tend to use them from a leisure standpoint right they're not using them professionally for work I mean obviously Twitter kind of Blends that obviously LinkedIn is a lot more but generally why do people use social networks it's they're they're spending time like passing time and they're using it for either an entertainment um or or frankly it's they're trying to meet other people right so the dating apps are kind of a certain type of social network and so if you don't actually solve for one of those two things it's very difficult to create sustained long-term usage as a social network and again I I think it less to

do with frch as much as just you when you're building consumer products you have to uh kind of tap into latent consumer behaviors that they didn't even know what they wanted right like consumer preferences they're going to tell you one thing and then they're they're actually going to do a completely different thing uh consumers are very aspirational and I think you have to it's not like we have some crazy Insight but I think like ultimately sustained social networks are fundamentally built around something that uh is a deep-seated like kind of need for for human and their willingness to kind of keep coming back to the app every single day so wait also I want to I want to uh name and shame a little bit I think I think neither hi nor Tom have a forecaster account that's not true I

have a really early 103 so actually I don't even know if you have a farter account yeah Tom Tom came in like a kind of like a you know bad out of hell in early 2021 when I was onboarding people dropped a few memes and then disappeared which I mean is basically the story for everybody so I hold nothing against anybody on that yeah no I I I legit do not have account so I will take that I was I so I was I did say on the last show that I'm like basically a boomer and I try to avoid like I'm I am terrified that farcaster will actually take off like another 100x and then I have to get on but I am I am very much like late majority when it comes to Consumer I so what is it early majority

late majority whatever I'm like right at the 50% mark basically once everyone else is on I'm like oh [ __ ] I gotta I gotta get I like I was the same thing with Clubhouse everybody was peaked and went down right yeah yeah yeah exactly but I I did eventually get on right when the second half of people were were getting on board to clubhouse um and I was and I was very angry about it but the interesting thing about Clubhouse was people rotated their Clubhouse followings into other social networks like Clubhouse crashed and then they moved their followings into Twitter which I thought was that was an interesting piece of social media history I don't know if you've seen such a big like almost everyone moved you know as a platform crashed type of thing

well there's a little inside baseball there by the way is that Twitter the only reason Twitter was able to launch spaces is that they had an internal team that you know this was an ERA when Twitter wasn't innovating at all from a product standpoint right it's like pre- Elon and they're moving at a glacial Pace they just happened to have a team that had been redoing um some like web RTC stuff related to Periscope and so when Clubhouse kind of had its moment it's like they had a brand new shiny core of of being able web RTC is the protocol that actually allows you to do the audio and so they were able to just kind of quickly relative to Twitter speed at that point launch spaces any version of the world where they hadn't worked on that I actually think Twitter would have never

launched it and then basically Clubhouse probably would have gotten to some place where clearly it was the place to do audio and I think you know got a covid bump but I think what was challenging is Twitter's copy in the same way that frankly Instagram stories and and Snapchat who who originated the stories concept like when you have more distribution and you're able to copy a core feature it gets really difficult as as a standalone app to actually build it off of of that kind of like one breakthrough feature my impression though of the downfall of uh I mean this is a little bit of a tangent but my impression of the downfall of uh uh of of kind of what is it real- time audio social audio whatever was that it was just a CO thing right like even Twitter spaces relative to what um uh relative

to what it was doing during the pandemic is just like much much lower engagement today yeah like it's just it was just a pandemic Behavior yeah I I think that there's probably some you know kind of blending of what we're doing right now we're using like a podcast recording studio you know you have a couple of these that exist and the idea that kind of almost like you could do a live podcast that then easily turns into the content I think most of the kind of broadcast platforms are Audio Only there's no video and it doesn't make it easy so I think at some point someone will figure it out and then it'll kind of be this super fans get the live show right maybe a little unedited a little bit more fun and then and then kind of you can cons consume all of that content

async and I think that Clubhouse did wasn't able to kind of figure that out fast enough before kind of losing people's interests so so Clubhouse does illustrate a broader Point actually that I think you you mentioned Eugene we his status as a service blog post which for anybody who's interested in Social I have recommend reading that post it's a it's kind of a masterpiece it's actually like a decade old now right more than that yeah decade it's pretty crazy it's really old 2016 well I think it that's eight years yeah that's a lot you know what I mean that's it's pre ethereum being on the map yeah I like I remember I remember like being a different person when I read that that post right okay fair

enough fair enough well so the the um the point that I want to make is that one one of the things that Eugene points out is that generally speaking when a new social media platform is able to really take on uh a life of its own and potentially supplant the previous generation is when there's a modality shift so you know you go from uh short form text to long form text or long form text to uh to to images images to video to short form video there's generally some kind of shift and and Clubhouse was an example of that right there was this modality shift of okay we're doing real time uh these You Know audio shows essentially uh and that allowed new social networks to form a new kind of status competition for people who are very good at that who weren't

necessarily good at podcast or weren't necessarily good at you know Tik Tok or whatever um how do you think of that in the context of what what you're doing with farcaster which which seems to be pretty directly Laden over what Twitter is doing yeah so that's why I spent three years in the wilderness and not having kind of anyone pay attention for the most part because what we were doing is building table Stakes for you know in 2024 you kind of have to have you know the mobile app at a certain level of Polish you need the kind of base level features likes re retweet equivalents all all that kind of stuff needs to kind of be there and then we were kind of searching for what is our social primitive right like what is the thing that is uniquely differentiated about forecaster relative to Twitter otherwise

people just say it's a Twitter clone and and going back to the reason people churn and like this this is obvious in retrospect but I go onboard all these people in in 2021 I have a pretty sophisticated network with both within Silicon Valley and crypto so if you look at the initial thousand people on the network like there's some pretty Heavy Hitters there and everyone left right why they have massive audience tter like Tom they they spent a decade building those audiences like why would you why would you go from having a 100,000 or 200,000 people on Twitter who follow you get the dopamine of all those likes to going into this new network I mean maybe other than the you know ideologically pure person like vitalic who's like yeah million followers on Twitter doesn't matter I'm going to use this really small social network because it's

ethereum line like I think ultimately people are just rational and they're not going to go spend time on that and so especially in a world where it's basically just like Twitter but way smaller so two things one from that Eugene uh ways say talks about most new social networks have a new social nobility that get minted are the basically the people who like immigrate from the other one because they they're like The Losers of the algorithm or they're too far behind and they show up to the new one and kind of like showing up to a new country and then they build the new Elite there because they were early and then they benefit from the growth of the network which I think we've seen with with forecasters there's a lot of new faces who have actually big followings of forecaster because they had kind of done the compounding early

enough and I think the second thing and then this goes back to the the social primitive is frames frames basically was the first thing that we launched that I think kind of people could crystallize around saying oh that is interesting and different and and it fundamentally is social right it's it's taking a link with which obviously in a previous era Twitter was very good about sharing links like I remember the era of Twitter where it's like that's where I'd go to find interesting links on the internet and now we're in an eror of Twitter saying if you put a link in the first tweet we're going to Nerf you in the algo so you kind of take the link but then you say because that's what a frame is ultimately it's just a link and we said what can we add on top of it that

makes it both interactive and then I think more Crypton native and so very quickly you had all of this experimentation and and kind of creativ coming from developers and that I think was the kind of catalyst to kind of start pulling people in from an attention standpoint to say wow there's actually a bunch of cool things that I can go do on this and like if if I kind of like I'm into nfts or I'm into meme coins or whatever there's a frame for that and and I think that is the area that now I think we're doubling down on because it's saying okay this is actually something that a a social network where you have a strong guarantee that every user under the hood has a ethereum wallet right like so to in order to use the the network you you have you know cryptographic key pair

underneath and so that there's just a lot of creative freedom that developers can do and and I think that that's you know it took us three years but I think we found something that okay let's try to double down on this and see how far we can grow it so if you if you look at Twitter today anybody who posts on Twitter with uh you know and if you touch crypto in any way you the first thing you notice about Twitter is that it is overrun with Bots with scams with you know anytime you post anything there's just like 15 block comments below the fold that are you know telling you to do some giveaway or whatever and um right now uh well so as a not active user or forecaster I have to ask how do you think about moderation and how do you think about you know the inevitable

influx of scammers and you know the these kinds of uh these kinds of elements of crypto given that you were running such a crypto native Community yeah so a couple different things so the first is in order to sign up for farcaster and at this point the the protocol is actually permissionless so you don't need to use our app warcast which is kind of the the reference app anyone could if you you want to build your own client and directly interact with the smart contract you're able to do that but everyone has to pay $ five dollar um so you actually have to pay in order to create an account so right there p$ five to to whom to the protocol like there's a smart contract there's a treasury contract it just accum it's accumulating eth and and so that gate by itself okay so every time you want to

create a Spam account uh it's going to cost you five dollar and then the second layer comes in where you know our app warcast uh we are pretty aggressive about labeling accounts of spammy and what's interesting about that is it actually is unaffected your account is unaffected at the protocol but in terms of the attention of all the people on warp cast in the same way that you know Gmail can label any email it wants spammy right and ultimately if you want the attention of a user of Gmail you need to actually kind of follow their rules that is that is the kind of second layer of okay wait so if I go and I try to start spamming people I'm going to get my account labeled as spam by by the kind of warcast team automated manual right now then I I'm out5 because I get

no distribution now um you could get to a world where people get sophisticated on this but I actually think just by having cost and then the ability to lose distribution that is a natural kind of regul regulating force on people's behavior um I think the third thing and part of this is just we are much smaller and we need to kind of make this work from a quality standpoint is we can pull in a bunch of other signals uh because there's an onchain element right so most of the people who are signning up for forecaster actually connect an ethereum address we're about to add salana addresses so we can actually use that as kind of this public you know ability to kind of look at address kind of analyze it and say okay does this address look like it's spammy or not um and then you

you you you have all these additional signals that we can actually use that make it very hard for a programmatic botnet to kind of show up um and I think that if if we nail quality early on um and we make that a focus just because we have no other alternative then as we scale it that actually becomes a distinguishing feature of the network like I I'm convinced that actually Twitter could go solve their spam problem uh I think that they're probably doing it in too automated of a way uh versus actually being more Scrappy which is frankly like having read the Elon biography and and nothing but respect for Elon Musk like I think he's you know American hero I I'm surprised that someone hasn't like really gotten in

there and fixed it like it it actually feels like the crypto spam got has gotten back to the level that it was at it got like better for a little bit but like anytime I Tweet now I like I get all this crypto spam and um I think part of it is just like people trying to do everything automated allows the spammers to get through versus actually just getting in there manual like one basic thing is like why why am I able to not just kind of like have one click ability to label things as spam as like a 15 plus year user of Twitter 100,000 followers and you know like if basically I'm marketing a spam you should probably trust me at this point that that like I I don't you know there's a bunch of like lwh hanging fruit that I I'm surprised

that they haven't done so going back to this Gmail analogy I thought that was um uh an interesting one to contrast with so right now um so so we established forecaster is totally decentralized uh it's a protocol that anybody can build a client for and you know it's it's kind of what what many people have imagined that maybe day Twitter might do is open the graph or open the algorithm itself so that anybody can see a tweet obviously they haven't done this you know this is not a something that we see from the normal social media companies um but that said warp cast is by far the dominant client for forecaster you know almost everybody who that says oh sign up for uh sign up for foraster they're pointing me toward toward warp cast um and so in some sense it actually is a

lot like Gmail um you know Gmail obviously is one of the most dominant clients uh Gmail also exerts this kind of gravitational force over email email is technically permissionless you could run your own email server if you wanted to but it's kind of not a great idea in 2024 to run your own email server because the way that Gmail labels you is ultimately going to determine whether or not you can really interact with the rest of the network right because in in some sense like yes you are running SMTP and like that's the protocol but in another sense like actually no if Gmail decides that you're spam uh you're just never going to get to anybody's inbox with your shitty little mail server um and so in some sense is it is it not

also true that if if warcast is like where 95% or 98% of all the forecast I don't know what the number is but if it's like the vast majority of all the forecaster users then uh can we not also say it's well it's almost like Gmail well you guys warp cast itself is exerting such a gravitational force over the network that like your moderation effectively is the moderation for forecasters the protocol yeah so i' I'd say a couple things there one that that's entirely true at this point so I anyone who's tried to like I mean obviously I'm the one pitching it so it's like I am not trying to sh away from that it is extremely centralized in the sense that from a tension stpoint which is the actual thing that you have to think about on a social network right it's like the people using it but it's

like where are they spending their time warcast has a disproportionate you know impact right like I I label someone to spammy effectively they disappear there there are two things that immediately come mind though is one um just like ethereum or Bitcoin I can take my my forecaster account and simultaneously use two different clients you cannot do that with Gmail right Gmail you're actually tied to the domain associated with Gmail I you could forward your email to another thing but ultimately it's not like I can run on on two different like the backend Services you can use email clients but the way actually think about email is like the server that actually receives and hosts your email is is the kind of centralizing point so I I think that's like one important thing is like their

seamless ability to kind of migrate in the same way that I can take a pneumonic from uh you know metam mask and move it to coinbase wallet and simultaneously use those like that uh freedom to move is is very easy and I think that's really important and so in in doing so you you allow exit uh in a world where warp cast starts to get too aggressive right and I think the the second thing and this is actually the part where and it doesn't really work most the time in crypto so I want to acknowledge that but part of it is this like you have to trust us like in the sense that like the goal is to build a protocol like we we want the protocol like verun and I had a lot of success at Queen base didn't necessarily have to go do any any

startup we wanted but like ultimately when we started on this is saying like wouldn't it be cool if we could get to a protocol that had a billion plus people using it that that looked more like ethereum or Bitcoin and I think where we've done a decent job is we delivered on the core part of the protocol last year we got it to 100% % permissionless you can sign up you don't have to use a single warcast API we have this kind of system of servers that that sit above the blockchain called hubs that's where all the the social content is completely open source permissionless you can write your own implementation if you want um and that system works right now right there are like 500 hubs uh running around the world they're not even incentivized so it's like people are just running them on their own and so I

think that is like a good first step in in a good faith effort to say like hey this is something that we actually care about but ultimately until we get to a world where warcast doesn't have 95 98% whatever the market share we have right now I would completely agree with you is that it it is a uh a network that technically is decentralized but practically centralized from a if you know the government comes in and forces me to do something that you don't have that level of censorship resistance for most people whereas a world where and this is actually why we're so focused though on on making warp cast great is our belief is that at Le at least with um you know social uh protocols people don't use protocols they use apps right

and so no one actually cares for the most part there are very few people who are very ideological and they're very special they don't actually use an app because it's decentralized they they use the app because it's either entertaining or they meet other people and or potentially hook up with other people like those are the fundamental drivers of using a social app and so our our point of view and I I have a blog post about this but it's product Le protocol development and it's it's if warp cast can drive the growth of farcaster to something on the order of 5 million daily active users or 50 million daily active users I can promise you assuming that that core protocol remains you know actually decentralized and permissionless you will have Venture back companies that come in and say wait a second I can build a better product

than these guys and start to peel away market share in the same way that metamask was basically the only game in town for an ethereum wallet for a while right I mean we can rip missed but like ultimately you know you could argue that oh well metamask can have a disproportionate impact on the network ultimately the free market came in and said well you know hell I'm going to go build you know so you have guus wallet you have rainbow you have rabby like so because the actual underlying Network actually does work like that people um you know are going to compete away that that advantage and and so R rip my ether wallet I was about to say I was I was like there are a couple there are a couple little there are a couple little you know gem I mean talk about that

security ux you used to paste a seed phrase into a website I know I know I know not saying it was a good one I'm just saying it was I don't know that metamask is a great example of uh an edge getting competed away unfortunately it's like insanely sticky their their dominance in market share right but I but I would say is I I think that that there's a healthy wallet Market in the sense that if you're in the market for a new wallet today I don't I don't think metamask has a dominant uh you know they they probably have a lot of brand awareness but obviously coinbase has 100 million customers that they can push coinbase wallet to and um yeah I I I think it's it's hard right like because I I could take the ideological approach of like oh we need three clients going

on and and I think when I started working on forecaster I was naive in thinking you know the original name for the product was or project was RSS plus so I I come from a world of like RSS readers I still use one I'm I'm weird nerd like that and I think I was under the impression that oh once we get kind of like the core set up we're going to have like a multiple sets of clients I think where I was wrong on that and this is pattern matching back to days of like the early Twitter ecosystem when Twitter didn't even have a mobile app and you had like Tweety and tweetbot and all these different kind of third party independent is its 2024 and a consumer's expectation of what a social app and the performance of a social app and a mobile app rather than a web app and so you

have all this kind of like table Stak stuff that for like an indie developer to actually go build and like have a significant number of retained daily active users I think that that's really hard and I think where we are is if we can get the the total number of daily active users of the protocol from 50,000 to 500 5 million 50 million then you're actually going to have it be a big enough market that you can actually get a kind of like real Venture back team and this is not to to denigrate any of the independent developers it's just like in terms of like building an experience that that is going to actually take significant amount of market share from people who actually want to be using the product every day and I think frames is actually an update on my incorrect prior is I assumed the

growth would happen as a result of people building other clients I think that's still too hard for most people whereas frames allow independent developers within a very short period of time right like if you're if you're a decent developer you can have a frame up and running in an hour or two and actually have it launched in the feed no app store approval no like you know have to go get a duns number to get like your app store like all these kind of things that block developers and the important thing is you have distribution right so you can go viral with a frame really fast whereas imagine trying to launch a website that does anything crypto today outside of like kind of having some big Venture backing and like a big PR campaign good luck getting your your link in a Twitter feed to go to go viral

right whereas on a uh you know launching a frame which is almost like a gateway to your app right like you can use a frame and a click on a frame is authenticated with um the EDSA signature for forecaster user so kind of like the underpinning identity component but you can actually click into an app and have it basically be oneclick onboarding into an app so almost like sign in with Google or Apple and so I think that was a change in our perspective as saying oh there is a lot of developer demand it's just the today relative to the size of forecaster it's not building alternative clients it's tapping into this distribution on on this you know growing social network where everyone is Crypton native and part part of it is warp cast

has said yeah we're not going to Nerf links we think this is good like it's good for growth of the protocol um and and so that that's I think kind of where we are so actually coming to the the frame kind of inspiration you know I as far as I understand it it does share a lot of similarities with the Facebook sort of early days API maybe 2013 I will to say 2014 yeah but it was like this graph API right that was like the key and so you know I guess in that case it didn't succeed because you know it was a fight between the platform and the app developers and ways how do you see that evolving here in a place where like you

can't really stop the app developers which is the point of the network uh but also that such that like you know it has some moderation you can right I mean that's that was the thing that we just having the effect of Monopoly let's suppose that that we're in some world where there's a way for warcast let's say there are alternative clients and maybe it's like ethereum there's only six you know there's not five the number of clients doesn't scale with the number of users but it's it's greater than two or something um well ethereum and salana let's say those are only really two that have credibly multiple clients and so uh you know how do you kind of view and so let's say

moderation becomes hard in this you know at least three three clients you know it's like bft they all can't agree on moderation so like at least one of them will accept your thing uh which by the way would be an amazing outcome in in the sense that then there's no Monopoly there's no oligopoly right SMTP is essentially an oligopoly like Amazon and Gmail they share their block lists right and yeah so so so let's say we got got to that point um and so you know yes you could censor but you'd have to get all the different clients to collude so um you know in that world how do you view frames evolving right now if you like took the history of like how developers tried to make all this stuff

in the early days of kind of The Social Network growth and then kind of got stopped how would you you know how how do you see that evolving and like where do you where do you want that to go and where what do you what's your like best unbi estimate of where it goes yeah so I mean kind of hard to predict frames are you know two and a half weeks old for sure for sure but this is a podcast we're allowed to speculate we're allowed to speculate wildly and wave our hands yeah so let let's let's just kind of take Facebook for example so it's 20072 2008 it's a desktop oriented platform with that that kind of Facebook launches we you actually brought up open graph is the standard so open graph is the reason that sometimes when you P paste a link into a messaging app or Twitter there's

an image that shows up versus other links don't if you go Google open graph today it's a it's a literally like a single page website that Facebook still hosts so it's like the equivalent of the tailbone of like web 2 it's like yeah open graph exists but Facebook doesn't care about open graph for the most part and the reason Facebook you know and kind of pieced this together through people who kind of living through Facebook at that Arrow but basically it didn't make the transition to mobile one because the mobile platforms at the time just didn't have the performance right like you know Netflix streams video games now through the Netflix app like you know they could do it in the cloud but at the time like you know building a Farmville within the limitations of an iPhone was just not going to work you

know the whole Steve Jobs flash thing so there was like basically no way to translate this to mobile Facebook goes public in 2012 and there's a very famous like the company just completely burned the boats in terms of like just focus on mobile and it turns out they have this insane business model of app install ads specifically Gam and you know who cares about the platform so kind of rugged all those developers Zenga being the kind of like most prominent was a public company that was basically built off Facebook games um I think where we are is it's slightly different in the sense that one frames are simpler than Facebook apps were right like they were pretty sophisticated Facebook apps in games if frames it's just literally an image with four buttons and I think the

magic of what makes frames great is that it it can kind of enable these crypto econom I actions um in a very seamless way because the data itself on the network is completely permissionless right so when I click on a button that says like mint right now uh what's actually happening is the developer is getting kind of like my FID the the kind of ID number that you know Tom has the lowest one in this group uh but my FID is three so then basically the developer is like okay wait who's one and two wait what uh forecaster the account forecaster and then uh you know R did more of the work the early days so got too okay got it got it got it but uh I think so so you kind of like basically are able to just

programmatically say okay for fd3 give me their connected ethereum address when we launch a salana you could just like grab that and then just shoot an nft to that address and so that can all instantly happen with one button click and so that is something that is not the same as like playing a game like Farmville where you're like sitting there clicking like harvesting carrots or whatever and it it is like kind of like you're interacting with this thing ephemerally in a feed and then you're continuing to go but that is actually an interesting thing in the sense that that attracts a very specific type of user um in the sense of like okay like you have now all of a sudden all these people are like I can get free stuff I can get free nfts I can get free you know Meme coins

or whatever um so th that set of users if if you were to kind of try to rug frames assuming we can continue to grow the protocol right like so just to be clear I have no intention of of rugging frames but in a world where you say B disappears and warp cast is run by like kind of Dilbert minion people um the other clients of the network are going to compete away those users very quickly because it'll say hey like you want to get your distribution with frames which benefits whether it's a developer or Creator use this client so you're gonna have a massive group of users that are going to go switch over to that pretty quickly I think that the the second thing is um where I think warp cast and and and other clients are going to quickly start to kind of like figure out

is like frames basically turn into this like web 3 Crypton native ad format and that's not like we're going to go have ads tomorrow but I think it becomes this kind of like clear thing where if you think about like what a Facebook ad is for install a game in this case it's it's it's it's the launching point for a something that happens on chain right and whether that's a swap or a mint or some verb that someone hasn't come up with yet and I would imagine that that will be something that instead of like I don't want these to exist it's like no actually this is like good like I want as many people to build these like kind of like interactive links essentially because that benefits the platform both from a usage standpoint as well as a

potential future monetization standpoint and and so that I'm not misquoted like we're not adding ads with frames anytime soon but I would imagine you can build something that ised and and and basically be able to basically if there's an economic action happening as a result of you clicking a button someone will be willing to pay the person that originates that action in the same way that um an Amazon referral link like huge huge business for a lot of like kind of bloggers back in the early 2010s but basically if you link any book on Amazon from your blog you got an 8% commission if someone ordered that book I don't think anyone found that offensive because obviously if I didn't want to recommend a book I'm not going to but if I do like I get a cut and so I actually think that there's

going to just be natural ways of being kind of user aligned while also being able to make money that I think naturally people want to to continue to support frames whether it's the warcast client or another client so I have a question for you you know in uh you know the the the web 2 Mantra is is uh you know you're the you're you're the product you know if you're if you're not paying you're the product right basically sorry I'm butchering the the the original statement but you know like uh but the interesting thing I think at least you know when we look at certain things in frames like the DG airdrop it's not clear who the product or the user is in the case of like you could argue that dgen used a frame as a

form of advertising but then the user is G getting paid to like engage with the ad right like indirectly and I think that to me is the most interesting part about having the ability to control these economic relationships you could also that's in a way true for airdrop Farmers generally is that it's not clear what the product is right like the user the product or is the product the airdrop they're getting or like but the thing here is it's almost like a loot box it's more like a loot box in a frame than it is like a airdrop Farm like I'm looking you know like I I feel like it has a completely different ux to the end user right the end user is just like haha I clicked this link it's funny oh wow I got air dropped right versus like the intention you know it's like passively

getting air dropped randomly um and I think like that's an interesting to me that that seems to be one the more interesting like user modalities that has happened the last few weeks and and I have to wonder like how much of that is a function of what the early forecaster user base is composed of right now like like as you mentioned Dan the the the initial user base was like these kind of high powerered crypto you know big dick types who are um generally have much much higher nth than the average are you insulting Tom here yeah that's obviously why he had to get off platform check no no uh what I yeah no um what I what I mean is that

the like the the average arpo for Twitter is what like less than $10 something like that I have to imagine yeah I guess because they monetize terribly but Facebook Facebook in the US is $200 per user yeah Facebook is crazy but everyone else everyone else is like I would I would right so I'd have to imagine that like the early cohort of foraster users probably the arpo if you are Monti you know if you're thinking about it as like wait usually is the one correcting people on acronym uses but arpu means average revenue per user so that any listener yes okay there you go very nice okay um so I have to imagine the early user base at forecaster is probably much higher than that if they were being fully monetized on an equivalent basis to to Facebook and that might be why they're a very

attractive user base for airdrops and you know this kind of thing like hey mint my nft do my this thing because on average I'm just going to be hitting a lot of really high value users um if you do scale to the 500,000 the 5 million the 50 million then it's kind of like okay how many random Twitter users do I actually want to give my airdrop to um maybe zero right maybe just on average you're missing you're missing the point you're missing the point that like airdrop farming in general is usually a very active activity like I go into it being like I want to do this right but the the frames thing is interesting because it's like passive people are just scrolling and randomly clicking a link and maybe get an air drop right I guess what what I'm implying is that yes

so the question is like okay if you're if you are launching some mem coin all right you want to decide how to get your meme coin to get net buyers okay and the assumption is that okay if I airdrop this to a random person on foraster the calculus for them must be that this airdrop is going to result in a net buy right if I give this person free DJ Tok or whatever tokens I'm guessing they're going to be a net buyer and if I air Dr to a random person on Twitter my guess is that they're a net seller they're going to oh here's a great air drop great well let me let me sell this thing I think that's too I think can I can I so two two things and this is already starting to happen so let let me um step

back though on the so naturally with any new primitive people are using it for all these different things so one there is very much a airdrop meme coin and nft oriented you know click a button and get something right ton of ton of growth has has happened as a result of that that's said there are a bunch of other developers who are kind of like building other applications and I think you know for example farcon uh was selling tickets through you know Aro the conference the community run conference for forecaster and so someone sold Girl Scout cookies and so someone actually today launched some Shopify integration with this so basically you're you're kind of offering a primitive where basically you can do an economic action in the feed and and it's using a blockchain and so that that

is going to be a whole canvas I think where the kind of like memein and nft collectible stuff free stuff I think people are getting actually much more sophisticated even within the last two weeks where now they're actually taking that FID and they're actually looking up your effectively page rank on the network so we have this like active badge concept where it's like you have to have X number of followers and you have to have a ratio of like posts to engage and so now you can actually and I'm calling it social proof of work but I could just get really specific on saying okay I only want people who are are you know influencers or people who have a certain level of clout I don't know if you guys remember this company in Silicon Valley not bitcloud but clout there there's actually a whole element

of that where not only can you take the social proof of work that you have from the network right so you you you're ship hosting you're doing whatever you do every day and now you're getting benefit okay there's a second component though where if you connect your onchain address all of the public activity could actually be in Incorporated it's like I only want P so now you're sving down even further who is worthy of your air drop right who is actually definitely going to be a net buyer yes so imagine if you said I want to overlap everyone has penguin yeah for mem coins what else would they be thinking about but I I think you you want to establish the early lovers of the thing before you just start being like hey you want to think about the price right like

Dogecoin came from the love of the dog first before it kind of grew like I think you're you're you're not sympathetic to people who do who are in this world see that's what I've learned from this I well I I think a lot of the new generation of meme coins that just move much faster than that I don't think it's about love of the dog I think it's about you know being early in a cycle or like a sort of mini wave so so maybe let me paint out like a version where you know because I think there's such a negative association where there drops and meme coins of just like it's like free money it's kind of sibl or things like that you could imagine a world where um you know whether it's like an EAS on chain credential or some proof that like I could basically Target

the entire network and say I want anyone who has an open source commit on a GitHub repo and that now my you know Aptos Oru or whatever L1 blockchain wants to get people to build on their thing is saying here you go you as a developer you can click this button in a frame and immediately shows up in your wallet okay and and so I think that starts to get much more interesting because a all the data is permissionless and B you can Target based on a social growth and so I and again all totally opt in right or or maybe you just say hey I'm going to look at the network and I'm just going to airdrop to these people so you don't even need the frame but I think love that you describe the Celestia airdrop by the way the air drop to get there a number of them yeah a

number of them have worked that way that's they were the first one and then then everyone copied after right but but the point is here is I don't need to even touch a button on your site someone can basically just say hey this has been aird drop to your account if you want to claim it or whatever like and and so I think that will be a whole area of experimentation and then I think second thing is um you could imagine the there just becomes like very uh ongoing economic relationships so like I can provably look to see if you've been following me the whole time right so if you're following my account maybe I'm giving uh you know as a company I'm giving some benefit to the people who are broadcasting my message or things like that and so you know everyone talks about this idea that like

own your data and like get paid for your data the reality is Ben Thompson's done an amazing job profiling this like your is probably not worth anything but there is a version of the world where you you as a person with with an audience can actually choose to amplify things and then actually participate on the upside in a programmatic way um I don't know if if that's going to be something that people are that excited about but like I think it's just going to be a surface area that people are going to play around with right and I think the reality is like on Twitter now with the Creator rewards is anyone like being like Oh I mean maybe some people are making life-changing money because they have these accounts but like the reality is it's like Twitter's paying me $600 a month to use Twitter are like great like

I'm more incentivized to use it and so I think that just being able to do that in a way that is not centralized and just like allow anyone the creative freedom of saying like hey if you're doing X actions in a way that is beneficial to my brand and or my account as a a kind of audience you know I I think I think you're going to just get interesting use cases and then I think that the other important thing is so if you're listening to this podcast and you're going oh this sounds awful like farcaster is going to be loaded with ads and it's just going to be all meme coins and scams but you're getting the beauty of the system is you can go use a client that is like Zen mode it like doesn't use any of the dopamine tactics of social media and

it's just like you just see you know the the great takes from balic and tun and like all these kind of like gigabrain you know philosopher types and and you don't have to see any of the the DJ content and that system can coexist and I think that is what I'm most excited about is you get to a world where you have the freedom to choose as a as an end user how do you want to play this game and and you that's all that's all well and good that's all well and good but we are a crypto podcast and so the DJ we're here for the DJ stuff um I want I want to I want to shift a little bit because I really like that you brought up this like whole mem coin thing and and I I I kind of want to delve a little

bit and and kind of get people's perspectives uh maybe a little bit a larab above forecaster of what you think about right now the meta around m coins because it seems like like so obviously in large part that's driving a lot of the engagement on foraster it's driving a lot of the engagement on everything to be honest uh like a lot of the activity on salana is trading mem coins um what are your guys feelings about where this memec coin um just I you know I don't know what the the best metaphor for it it seems like kind of a uh like a what's what's the um what's that physics thing that that uh rotates really fast Mach no centrifuge centrifuge like this this

sort of meme coin centrifuge that we seem to be playing um yeah what are your Tom what's your what's your take on what's happening in the meme coin world I don't understand the centrifuge analy are we're separating the the meme coins from the from the good coins no okay maybe all right Ferris wheel I don't know all right fast spelled f e r r o u s of course it's amazing um nailed it I uh I I mean it just feels very like like mask off I think that's been a little the market for the the past you know year or two has been um you know I think like like nfts for example initially was like okay um it's going to be about art and for a long time it was about sort of

artist selling art and there was pfps and people like no we just love you know this lion or whatever and then then blur came along was like no actually you just want to trade the the [ __ ] tokens back and forth and really do that really really really really really well and that was kind of what what blur was doing I feel like mcoins are almost sort of like the next evolution of that of like you don't actually even care about the picture of the line that you're trading you just want to trade like the concept and that's what m coins are doing is like you know imagine like 2021 10K pfp launches but like uh just distill down to like the pure Essence and and that's what you're getting out of the centrifuge is uh this this mem coin Essence all day mem coin what's

your take by Tom like the meme coin Essence your your your your fragrance coming out soon um very much my my take is uh actually maybe yeah maybe more the optimistic take is that the meme coins I I like this idea of meme coins that are conditional and I think that's where the foraster meme coins seem very different than like the salon meme coins the salon meme coins are like haha Drake you know wore a funny hat with a a name on it and so we're going to make a meme coin that is the same name and you know trade it right it's like Market did towards DJ gamblers this the the one where it's like I'm using this thing and like

randomly get loot boxes feels like almost more like um uh just like uh Roblox or something like it's like social Roblox where you're like converting the dopamine hit from like likes into dopamine hit from like random I get something which to me seems extremely different from like the absolute like salana dgen mem coin and so I kind of think of them as two separate types of things because one is like almost like a game that you get random rewards in and the other one is like you're really going in and the game is like who you suckered in your group chat to buy last you know like that which is a very different ethos I think that's what and to me that's why I think

like the the ironically named D gencoin on on Bas is like a funny example of this but I yeah I I think like there could be a world where meme coins become this kind of like incentivized action thing and yeah like kind of like like was saying like I I don't know what the where the boundary is between the two worlds Dan what's your take where do you think meme coins are going as a concept yeah so just to be clear I'm not involved in any of the mem coins and I you know I'm back from my coinbase days I just I just don't touch like I own Bitcoin and eth and that's it like I'm I'm as bit in coin stock right that said I I think one interesting thing to to build on what you said tun is I think I

think it fundamentally comes down to is it's people self-organizing over the Internet over kind of some shared thing and it you know at least the ones that exist on faras or D gen being kind of like the the most prominent there were actually a few that happened in December points and a few other ones but the thing that I think is stuck with djen is that they've created a mimetic culture around it in the same way that Doge and and and I'm less familiar with some of the salana ones but one interesting behavior is they built a tip poot so like basically people will reply like I you know I have a bunch of followers on foraster I'll say I'll say something and then I get all these like people replying to me with like d gen like 420 D gen or like you know 69 D gen and it's

it's it's an entirely like an offchain it's just like a like a ledger and and there's some airdrop I actually don't even know enough about the mechanics but basically it's created a whole culture and then now people will tip Degen things that people are using uh Linda X's like Bounty caster which was like usdc and has like hire a developer to do something for you they now support like paying and djen I think like Zora now allows you to Mint in dgen so there there is like this like uh kind of like rewards points component to it that be because it actually has a social layer deeply integrated in it that I think is I think it's easy to dismiss because it's just like oh this is just a you know Ponzi scheme or you know some like sucker's bet but but I think you know there there

I'm sure people are coming in and saying how can I make money on this but I think that there's a component where it's actually like people come for the meme coin and stay for the culture I think that like that channel on foraster it's own subreddit effectively um people show up and it's entertainment it it it's like oh I get to like what is the latest like meta in in D gen today and like what are we doing like as a group in the same way that I think Wall Street bets you know everyone focuses on the the AMC stock price and you know GameStop but the reality is I think it was a community of people and it feels like oh I I'm I'm finding like-minded people on the internet and there's also this component that it's a little bit like it's it's ground swell um Bottoms Up

Against The Man In some ways and so I I I think that there's like an actual um something actually there at as a meta category but I don't think anyone's quite captured it uh maybe maybe farcaster has and we don't even realize it but I think I I think it's very easy to dismiss because it's easy to look at the you know the rugs and the and the kind of uh you know clear fraud and pump a d cases but I think in the case of like these community-driven bottoms up uh meme coins I don't know I I I think it's easy to overlook them in terms of like there is some interesting human phenomenon happening yeah I I think um as as you're saying that it occurs to me that mean coin is kind of a superposition of

multiple things at the same time right on on the one side it is like you said a community of okay we're all the people who hold DJ or we're all the people who hold you know whiff or or whatever um at the same time it's also an inside joke so there's there's something about like there's something that's like intrinsically kind of funny and subversive about like sitting around trading a mem coin or accumulating a mem coin um and then I think the the other hand it's also a lottery ticket and this is the kind of the financial behavioral part of a meme coin which is hard to ignore is that a lot of people the reason why they buy a mem coin is that they saw what happened on Reddit or on some Twitter post of some guy who bought you know the meme coin of the day and it

went up you know uh 150x and it's like oh my God this person made life-changing money and every time you see a new mcoin the question in the back of your mind is like maybe this is maybe this is the one maybe this is my you know this this is my buying Doge early or my buying you know this thing or that thing and um and this it is in some sense uh it's not that dissimilar as as Thomas pointing out to what was happening with nfts and pfps in the last cycle and it seems like that behavior on the nft side is kind of being replaced more and more with meme coins where mem coins are creating these communities they're not bound by 10,000 people they don't have an arbitrary entrance price and so in some sense if that was the role that nfts were playing

in the last cycle mem coins are a better way to play that role because they obviously you know they're fungible you know you can play for five dollar if you're on if you're on salana you can pay for play with $1 um and so it's more inclusive in that sense they're more scalable Beyond 10,000 people you don't have to be a you know you don't you have to be able to pay $50,000 in order to play this game uh it it does seem at the same time that there are like the velocity of meme coins is also what's really unique right uh like they just there are new meme coins being launched every single day The Meta Shifting the velocity of memes on the Internet is like that right like it's not just the part the first part is quite important

there right it's not like I have to come up with a a series of attributes that this collection has represent right that's true they are more efficient in that way right like you don't you don't really need to do the pretense of well we we hired an artist and we created a universe uh that these pfps belong to instead it's just okay this one has a new name [Music] and I want yeah distilled me there you go Tom Tom's got to make a sent now but the um the one thing I want to say is like if you think about these communities around nfts historically they just centered around Discord and in Discord you were disconnected from your wallet and what that meant is you got a [ __ ] ton of scams right like Discord is just filled

with Spam of like people trying to like rug you give you fake wallet addresses whatever like malicious malware type stuff and I think the interesting thing of like if the social app is actually directly tied to crypto and your wallet is already there and you can be confident that like when you sign something like you don't have to really think about oh like is this link going to make me sign something malicious that does change your interaction with the the asset in a way that I think like the Discord being separate from the asset added so much extra friction for the end user and and actually build on that so one of the the things with frames today and we're adding onchain transaction

support so there's got to be a layer of security that we'll add there when we do it that's like over the next week or so most of the way the frames work today is you Tap a button and then someone is actually sending you that asset to your address so there's actually no risk to you right you didn't have to sign anything you didn't give any scary permissions it's just kind of it's it's like okay drop something in your mailbox that's that's that's the kind of interaction um the the other thing that you know when you were kind of mentioning um the the kind of last talk about where meme coins sit just think about Super Bowl we just had um you know this this huge cultural event like most watch Super Bowl in history right Taylor Swift and all this kind of like the meta

stories about it and the memes um um$ 23 billion dollar or bet on it like so it's a fundamental human behavior of like oh if I put a little bit of money on this like it makes it a little bit more interesting for me and I don't think anyone is is kind of I mean maybe there are some people but for the average person it's they're putting whatever $50 $100 on the game and it just like it intensifies the the Euphoria of of having that game that entertainment be interesting right and I think if you if you think about how sad like a lottery ticket right so it's like I don't even know what the of people who spend money on Powerball or lottery tickets in the US right completely acceptable because the government's getting all that money by the way um and you know they they say

oh it's paying teachers but the reality is is like it's taking advantage of the fact that there's a fundamental human interest in if I put a little bit of money in here I could make a bunch of money and I didn't have to actually work for it and so I think that it's easy to like judge meme coins which actually kind of like there's a cultural element there's a medic element it's like people actually you know potentially making friendships online and saying oh those are bad but this thing that is depressing when you go to the gas station and people are spending you know $50 a day buying scratchers like your moral positioning right I kind of re I'm not I'm not taking a moral stance on any of these things dismisses meme coins yeah well I you just came up with the greatest kpi

for meme coins which is total volume per day of meme coins divided by the Super Bowl betting volume what like I feel like that's like a good measure of like our our mem coins making it yeah so well here here's the point that I I actually I made this um a couple weeks ago in the Empire podcast is that uh I I increasingly think that the mem coin meta is probably not sustainable and actually the the reason why I make that argument is an analogy to gambling um so if you look at gambling so if you look at lotteries or if you even look at you know the most part of casino game of slots and slot slot machine uh manufacturers I mean it's probably you know one of the most lucrative Industries uh they an enormous amount of human capital in research and

Engineering goes into optimizing slot machines to maximize the amount of money they make from gamblers and if you're optimizing a slot machine there's there's multiple things you're doing at the same time right you're you're uh doing this variable reward ratio making you know loud sounds and wonderful lights when people win um you're not the important thing is that you're not making people lose too fast so you you make them lose just enough money that they they sit they feel like they can win um but mathematically they're losing something like 20 cents uh for every pull or something like that or some some really obscene number that that you can optimize a slot machine into uh you know Bas making a rake on every single poll and the problem I would argue with memecoins is that because memecoins have

such high churn right there are like new mem coins being launched you know every single week and and they it's not like we're all trading Doge still you know like obviously there are some a bunch of people still trading Doge has materially increased yeah but the velocity of me coins has really materially increased and my argument is that I think Dogecoin is sustainable Dogecoin can keep going up and down forever because it's more or less the only rake is being made by binance and coinbase right um otherwise there there's kind of no loss of free energy so to speak but for most meme coins they are just too extractive because there's a new team launching a new mem coin every single day right with nfts there were very well understood I you know obviously they they were bad

actors sometimes with nfts but they were relatively well understood Norms about okay how much of the nft mint goes to the creators and the royalties and this and that right like there was there was more or less a well- understood game that limited the amount of energy loss or the amount of rake that was taken by these users but when somebody launches a new memec coin it's like look I my one memec coin took off I've made like 20 of them this is the one that took off so I just got to [ __ ] extract and when people are paying for the lottery ticket of like okay I buy this new coin overwhelmingly like I I have no idea whether or not this Lottery Creator is taking out 50% or taking out 30% or taking out 10 per. next time you're my AR is that I want you to go to a deli

and count the number of different [ __ ] lottery tickets and then go back to the same Deli a month later and count the number that are the same the state is also turning these like yes but the state is yeah but the state is very highly optimized in the same way right I mean lotteries are super highly optimized to be the maximal amount of extractives to maximize Revenue at least here it's that's because it's a repeat player because it's a repeat player that's my than the state than the state doing it the state's version of this is like even crazier to me than than slot machines then the mem coins like I I if I if I view the meme coins for their lottery ticket value I I think the way that states introduce and remove lottery tickets is completely not transparent

they're just like oh yeah sure we're going to make some new like $100 game and okay actually it didn't perform well so we're going to get rid of it and I don't know the mcoin thing at least seems more it seems more friendly to people who aren't over 50 for that type of experience on on what basis do you say that that it's more I mean it's OB more attractive to people who are under 50 they're both op aggressively optimizing for extracting a rake right like I think I think A's point is the state you know is careful not to like overg graze the comment whereas when you have you know a bu of R out there I I I don't know if that's true either I think they I think they found the pruto optimal where they

can clearly they have because people still buy lottery tickets but they also collude right like to do the Powerball type of [ __ ] where like multiple states are like here how do we increase our rake we make a cartel it's like I don't know like I I can't I can't really I can't really like fault the the meme coin Creator to this like I think this is a fake moral high horse you're living on I'm not making a moral uh argument I'm making an economic argument is that because mcoins as a whole will end up becoming too extractive people will move on to a new meta so they it was pfps now it's mem coins and they'll pick something else when memec coins start feeling too extractive but but maybe one one thing to think about is it does does the equilibrium start to happen where

you get more and more transparent in terms of you know talking about the nft projects to a point where it's okay the founding group of the the meme effectively says we're only taking whatever 1% or 5% and the rest is kind of unlocked over time there's a proof of work component to it and so you get to actually a market in the same way that I don't know like think about an IPO right completely different thing like basically the bank is able to just take a 15% delution on like like so so there naturally becomes a a point where you say hey there is value in creating a mimetic thing TBD on how long it lasts and and you you can get but maybe maybe the actual long the Pito optimal long term is if I can

create a meme that lasts as long as Doge that actually makes me the most money in a world where even though I only own 1% but has a 10 billion dollar market cap you know that that actually I I agree with that but the market is telling is that's not what people are shooting for right and this is why I think if you remember Zack xpt he got a bunch of people mad at him normally he's like one of these Twitter Heroes because he's constantly unveiling these frauds uh a lot of people got mad at him because he he was just [ __ ] on memecoins saying that like look overwhelmingly memec coins are fraud pumping dump blah blah blah blah um and you know I have to assume that for the average mcoin or I should say the the the median meme coin that's probably true the best meme coins

are genuinely community-led kind of you know no rake they're just you in it For the Love of the Game it's just a funny meme and it ends up taking off but there are most meme coins are you know they're Enterprises right there's people basically trying to make money running their own Min Lottery maybe this is the point though these socially driven meme coins which are like again they're not like this like active thing that like you know someone is creating with like a lot of intent of like trying to to get a bunch of liquidity and the price go up someone is just adding it in another experience might have a totally different equilibrium than the like you know yeah I think if you if you remember uh da iOS that was like this thing that vitalic up with about the Dao I remember

those things that was like so funny it was so complicated yeah so the idea was that so you know in the Ico era icos are literally okay you know we just sell a bunch of tokens and uh whatever we make we get a bunch of money the whole idea of a daic which vitalic postulated I think no one ever actually did was that we we raise money from retail to buy our token but we don't actually get the money until we hit certain Milestones that like the token holders vote on and so the money it technically could never get released if we don't actually hit the milestones and so you can imagine if we create this Norm around beam coin such that the team only gets their you know Meme coin drop or whatever if this thing becomes like Doge and it's like okay you know what if you do create a

lottery that's as good as that then okay you deserve 10% but you gotta you know you got to really these social experiences give you a lot of events that you can condition on right which you it's like other things in crypto don't you you have to like do a lot more work to get like fil proofness right and things like that at least here you're like you have this yeah proof proof that you've like kind of done this thing and it's documented and you can use it as your conditions for distribution like maybe one other just kind of thought is so let's let's just take away the version where you can buy into it at the beginning and it's strictly proof of work right so and and like let's use something that is not going to happen in crypto anytime soon

but let's say Taylor Swift basically had a Taylor coin on some cheap chain and the idea is all the swifties on Twitter who basically just like you know protect her from these deep fake porn things and all that like you know the army of swifties that are online right are flying back and forth with with Swifty the coin that basically you can't buy into or whatever and then at some point it like actually turns into this economic thing where people care enough about this little token that they're willing to be like okay well I want to be able to use this on Shopify to buy like I don't know whatever merch and and and so all of a sudden people are willing to take this because it it gets to a point where it's there's some you know exchange rate with dollars I like and if no one had to in

and the idea is like you ended up doing the drop completely based on proof of work like I I I think it's just easy to dismiss because the current meta looks like the Mississippi company to say stocks are bad um we're we're going to basically get rid of this financial primitive whereas like obviously you get to the point of you know 1930s like you put the SEC in place not to say the SEC has made every right decision but obviously you know the joint stock Corporation is an extremely valuable way of organizing humans and and capital I I think that there's something there in ter terms of the idea of social mtic value being exchanged it's very fundamentally human right so so your solution is we need to reinvent the SEC is what you're saying exactly bring Gary Gensler to meme coins

I think that's the problem yeah cool okay well with that we we actually we're at time so we got to wrap uh Dan thank you so much for sharing your thoughts of this this is awesome how can people find you on foraster dwr dwr on farter you heard also also on on Twitter right but for both same same name PIR Twitter also on Twitter also if you want to find Tom Tom you're not active anymore I'm I'm guess I'm I'm active again now I'm just Tommy Schmidt also on Twitter Tom I got the Tom G by the way the Taylor Swift thing might you know what's the funniest thing is um there's someone from crypto who is

at her birthday party so so maybe maybe that like that's the that's the missing link to the Swifty mecoin okay let's make it happen when someone figures out the selebrity way to do mem coins that is SEC compliant I can promise you every celebrity will have a meme coin yeah I agree okay I guess that's where the Met is going that actually going full circle with like nfts in the early days being about celebs and now meme coins are going to go okay anyway um everything old is new all right that's it thank you everybody [Music] hey