Tag: Decentralized Finance

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Chronicle Finance Internet Culture

Day 74 and Unfinished Thoughts

First off I’ll admit that I don’t really feel like writing today but I’ve committed to “putting pen to paper” every day so I’m stuck with it. I have a dozen topics I actually want to discuss but I don’t feel like I’ve got it in me to be coherent.

I’ve been thinking about how the idea that all property rights are a gradient from violence to grift to institutional legitimacy and this is just how civilization codifies worth. I’m particularly interested in it because we’ve reached the NFT is a grift stage of the discourse but I’m not at all convinced that NFTs are a grift for the reasons people think.

And while I’ve made really elaborate jokes about NFTs, finance, crypto and semiotics with illegal.auction I’ve noticed people with vested interests in this category working out, really don’t want anyone to joke about it. It’s likely wise as we all have varying degrees of horror that property rights is always some degree of grift working towards legitimacy.

That we don’t like to touch on it amuses me. I suspect that the internal logic of wealth and money as always being abstraction guarded by state violence is just too much for folks. It hurts too much. It makes us angry. Surely money, wealth and inherent worth must exist in a moral framework? Good hard working people are rewarded with wealth right? If you want a truly excellent read on the subject of property rights, violence and investing I recommend this essay on emerging market investing and Deadwood by Ben Hunt at Epsilon Theory

Another topic I also want to dig into is environmental impact of crypto and energy equity but I don’t think I’ve got all the facts. I’m still very much in a skeptic phase when it comes to moralizing over the energy usage of crypto. As if crypto brought about the carbon apocalypse on its own.

I’m sure “crypto used a lot of energy” is a valid criticism until you remember we subsidize monsoon crops in deserts (they grow rice in California ffs) and we ship plastic trinkets across the globe while a plutocratic elite consumes the majority of our resources. Maybe moralizing about impact should come with some caveats on how many lives it might improve? I haven’t seen much discourse on this topic as American media leans towards a generic tech skepticism stance at the moment which is making them lean in on attacks as it’s the wrong people who are pushing the crypto agenda. But we deserve more than “environmental impact bad” like maybe it’s a net good to use this energy to decentralize finance?

By allowing the global south and the unbanked to have access to capital instruments we actually discover this is the best use of our energy resources and may distribute wealth more equitably. I don’t know yet and I’m not even confident I can find relevant statistics that won’t overstate one tribal position over the other.

At any rate none of these thoughts are coherent or useful yet but I’m thinking about how we codify wealth and property and what energy usages might be valuable for a more equitable planet. Don’t cancel me please.

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Finance Internet Culture

Day 61 and The Semiotics of Ownership

I wrote a lot today. Like a LOT. Over the weekend my dear friend and erstwhile cofounder decided to make an interactive art installation to explore our interest in non-fungible tokens. We’ve been watching the explosion of interest in digital art, sports memorabilia, and tickets. We had a lot of questions about how value is created, traded and ultimately decided.

We typically learn best by building and doing so we thought rather than get mired in spammy YouTube tutorials and long essays we would build our own minimum bid auction for a set of NFTs. Phil Leif thought a funny domain would be illegal.auction and we were off to the races.

We both share a love for Matt Levine and his running gag that everything is securities fraud. This leads to lots of funny discussions about reprehensible behavior that is totally legal and perfectly fine decisions that somehow end up being felonies. The American financial system!

It turns out that it’s relatively simple for a developer or even someone nominally technical to mint an NFT using platforms like rarible. Putting together our own site was the same basic stack you’d expect for a simple web app that sells e-commerce things. We thought a web 1 Craigslist aesthetic fit the bill.

The last step was what on earth would we sell. Too many jokes have been made a lot bad art, dumb art and meme art. In fact, the entire concept of art seemed less interesting than a discussion of what constitutes art and how removed we are from the source of creation in a financialization scenario where something that is supposedly unique is made fungible. So we thought screw it, this is clearly a meditation on art, representation and the semiotics of value. So why not go all in on the satire? Why not ask why finance is so keep to manufacture another esoteric asset class with some technically novel structure. Is this good? Is it bad? Who knows. We aren’t even sure if it is a “thing” or not the further you remove it from reality. It’s just all so abstract.

This the first unsanctioned sale of art representations was born. Featuring a diverse selection of copies of contemporary and street art for new and seasoned collectors alike. The sale includes unauthorized digital images.

We went pretty far down the semiotics rabbit hole in our artists statement.

The auction works. You can buy representations of art thanks to a non-fungible token. The token is legitimate and shows just how early you got in on this. And it’s pretty darn funny. Except for all the people who have some ideas about IP law. Even though it’s pretty clear we mean this as satire and they should really jump into the discourse on what it means to own a unique item that has been reduced to a hash on a blockchain. Financialization gets pretty weird and we would all benefit from a discussion of the cultural foundations of ownership.

Categories
Chronicle Finance Internet Culture

Day 39 and Trustlessness

It may come as a bit of a surprise to people that know me that I find Bitcoin to be a little boring. Finance and decentralization are extremely exciting to me so you’d think I’d be into our standard bearer currency. It’s deeply cool and I’m HODL but it’s not the most fascinating intellectual problem that blockchain can unlock. The possibilities around ditching trust are what make the space.

Some of us don’t don’t trust the dollar. That primes decentralized finance for broader user adoption. as the dollar gets printed. Add in many governments, from India to Nigeria, pushing currency controls and bans, and the political desire for forgoing “trusted” central grows. It’s going to be a fun time as financial products and services get built out just as politics comes for crypto.

Culturally more Americans are sick of relying on trust. A chaotic year building on top of historic institutional meltdowns makes the need for trusted third parties significantly less appealing across all institutions. As a woman I’m excited to be less bound by bias and social expectations. We won’t need to fixate on gender or identity as old trust paradigms of who or what is risky fall away. It simply won’t matter. Decentralization frees us from old white men as being the most trustworthy. Excellence that is validated not by a third party institution but by verifiable information frees us all.