#5 | Crypto Godwin v. AI Malthus

An unideal pairing analogy for an incredible era

Table of Contents

  • Intro-spection

  • 🪅Pinata Spotlight

  • Build

  • Books

  • Business Ordinals

  • Bonus Features - Limited Utility NFT

  • Upcoming

  • Footer


Intro-spection

If technology is anything, it's more than fiber, glass, buzz, bits, and autumn Apple events. It delivers to us a sense of timeliness, intuition, innovation and often times, long slumbering philosophical sentiment.

William Godwin and Thomas Malthus were political philosophers at the peek of The Enlightenment. Whereas the sentiments in today's nutshell-like compression would characterize the former championing anarchy, the latter was an advocate of population control. Contextually, there's a deep trench that would familiarize ourselves greatly if we were to consider all the weights to the biases, however, even in a kind of journalistic zip file, the spirit remains barely corrupted over time with loss of data.

We are familiar in modernity with both more control as a panacea and less control as one. Those calling either a panacea are in the mood to affirm skepticism for. However, the spirit endures and they graft the form of modernity's invocations: artificial intelligence and encryption.

With the chants from the digital stands that cry "x is a problem hunting for a solution". "y is a scam", there comes with these platitudes a broken bell curve. Noise drowns out the signal, yet the signal endures, reaching who it needs to. It's easy to make these technologies adversarial to one another, as in our adversarial time, the constant impulse to immortalize new symbols representing our liberation or damnation carry on. Untethered crypto as one could best imagine will individually harm an individual whose lost their private key but will compromise the centuries-long monopoly twixt nation-states and money. Untethered AI will imaginably compromise everyone. How, is the only black-box scenario here.

However, while we build this new vehicle to a bizarre and fascinating future, perhaps we only need do is provoke a notion of equilibrium. AI unconstrained will accelerate us to places we many survive and constrained crypto will accelerate us to places dormant and sterile where no one thrives.

Perhaps the Nash Equilibrium here is to let both flourish cautiously, guiding one to inform the other.

🪅 Pinata Spotlight

Pinata in short is one the first persistence layers that empowers the storage protocol of IPFS to usability, low-latency with gateways. Truth is IPFS is permanent, adjacent. An IPFS node will secure your data, however, if the node is not you, deletion is left to chance as to when that may occur. Not when, which indeed is one of the indelible performance enhancers that IPFS brings, moving data storage to content-specific rather than location-specific.
Digressing, holding encrypted data that's Merkle-friendly is a blessing. Again, self-custody will optimize your control. If you do not want such responsibility, there are a few great services, Pinata being our spotlight.

Pinata, at its core, is a pinning service, meaning the pinning of content insures there is always a viable gateway which ensures retrieval. These gateways are also browser-agnostic. What this means is for as much of a fan as I am of Brave, we haven't quite yet achieved the web-speed or reliability of raw ipfs urls and dlinks. Pinning satisfies this expectation with persistence.

Persistence, however, is not the only trick in the castle. Pinata also offers:

  1. Video and Image optimization

  2. Short Links

  3. The Submarine.me is a premium feature that turns all of your Pinned Content into token-gated content, adding additional product and security features.

There are four tiers of plans amongst Pinata's platform provided here:

I've used Pinata for a few years now for a storage redundancy to cloud services for professional purposes and a dropbox alternative for personal reasons.

BUILD

Thirdweb is an incredible tool for web3 development and frameworks. We use their platform to build out first an NFT collection contract, followed by a NFT Marketplace contract, to then build a fully functional website + embeddable widget.

The entire tutorial can be accessed here from our Charmverse Space.

Of note, we went through applying an additional feature working with Crossmint, which would allow NFTs and instant 'Pay with Credit Card' feature. Albeit, after working through a demo and testing, there's a limiting factor of needing to be apart of the platform itself with an account, even as a user, not just a creator, didn't provoke an iterative spirit to reduce friction enough to highlight frictionless crypto experiences. We will keep an eye on Crossmint, hoping they can successfully further pursue the trajectory they are on.

Books

Man-Computer Symbiosis = J.R. Licklider
The Ghost in the Machine = Arthur Koestler
Science Since Babylon = Derek de Sola Price
// This one can be experienced via audiobook in the link//

Ordinals

Ordinals is the modern version of hashing a secondary data layer atop BTC core. Both Counterparty and Ascribe offered BTC NFT's (digital collectibles) in the mid-2010's, their use case and size already on top of nascent crypto-currency made it ahead of the curve for a 'stickiness' movement.

Stacks, an open-source platform, established in 2018, makes Ordinals possible by giving a Turing-complete layer that Ethereum and Dfinity have been using since their respected inceptions. In short, this layer boosts Bitcoin from 'store of value', to an algorithm agnostic compute protocol that also stores value.

One of my BTC artifacts: a Pre-Segwit, Pre-Ethereum NFT, on BTC, thanks to the team of Ascribe.io, now BigChainDB

Bonus Feature - Limited Edition Utility NFT

Upcoming...

True mystery inhabits the next issue. 🪄


Thank you for reading. Have a great week!


- ♾️🕸️🕸️🕸️

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Contact for information or potential advisement, instruction, or development reach out to us at info.infiniteteams@skiff.com visit us at infiniteteams.io or check out our web3 tools and services directory at graphenegulch.com!

🏕️🔥🔥

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#pinata#web3#thirdweb#btc#ordinals#thomas malthus#william godwin#technology
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