Thumbs' Update: A Little Bird Told Me
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Hey friends 👋
Welcome to the Mirror edition of Thumbs’ Update, the only edition you can collect as an NFT!
This is the first newsletter that I’m writing on my beautiful new mechanical keyboard. After receiving the Arbitrum airdrop (which I had to cash out quickly to cover my taxes from last year), I wanted to treat myself and, as usual, my frugal mind convinced me that I should do so in a way that benefitted this project. That way I could view it as an investment.
NOTE: what follows will probably be very very nerdy but none of it will constitute financial advice
I went with a keyboard I’ve been eyeing for months: the Nuphy Halo96. It’s a wireless mechanical keyboard with pre-lubed Gateron G Pro 2 switches, multiple layers of silicone dampening, an aluminum frame, RGB backlighting, and USB-C for charging and wired use. It has a physical switch to go straight from mac to windows mode, includes alternate keycap sets and a keypuller; the function row is defaulted to media keys, and you can switch between up to 3 devices with the click of a button.
I’m not sure if you care about any of that. I really just wanted an excuse to type more words on my beautiful new keyboard 🤓
So anyway as I alluded to above…
It’s Tax Time
I did my taxes recently, with the help of this month’s sponsor actually. No really, I reached out to CryptoTaxCalculator to sponsor because I was so enamoured with the product that I thought it would be a good fit for this month’s newsletter.
See, last year I used Koinly and it worked well enough, but this year, I shilled out another $300 to them and I did not have the same experience. In fact, nothing I did helped, and customer service was not able to solve my issues after days of back and forth. It just kept getting outputs with missing or miscategorized transactions, and as if that wasn’t enough, there were a number of other bugs that caused me to have to repeatedly start fresh.
Nothing against Koinly. I’m sure many of you have had different, better experiences (more akin to mine from last year), but since trying CryptoTaxCalculator, I’m convinced this is the software I’ll be using going forward. It worked flawlessly on my maelstrom of transactions across many chains and it provided me multiple options for reporting outputs. It was easy to recategorize and even auto-categorize transactions and everything loaded smoothly and displayed clearly.
And on top of all that, they keep shipping updates regularly. In fact, the only critique I can find is that you can’t pay with crypto yet. So if the devs are reading this, please add that and you’ll get the full five star review from me.
After all was said and done, and my taxes prepared, it turns out I owe the tax man around $7000. That’s most of what I’ve earned in crypto this year–the majority of which was from the aforementioned Arbitrum airdrop–all gone in one fell swoop. But hey, I got a nice keyboard, so I’m happy 🤓
Anyway, out of the darkness…
Into the Bluesky
A few months ago when I relaunched Thumbs’ Update as a monthly newsletter, I came in hot about the future of social media. I wrote about the need to decentralize social graphs and how innovative developers working on protocols like Lens were trying to build this future.
I’m still very bullish with respect to the Lens ecosystem which is shipping great products in record time. Just look at apps like Buttrfly (currently in beta) and Orb (live on iOS and Android) that serve as front ends for the Lens social graph. Both are usable, enoyable, sticky experiences.
There is something in particular about Lens that is either good or bad depending on who you ask: it’s built on blockchain. Lens profiles and posts are NFTs on Polygon. The benefit of this is that they’re portable, resellable, and immutable. This gives a lot of control to the user in terms of what they can port to other front ends.
But it also means that users:
need a crypto wallet
need some funds to pay transaction fees
can make mistakes which are irreversible (like burning or transferring their profile nft by accident)
Now I believe that a lot of these issues could be solved by better smart contract/social recovery wallets. If you mint your token to a wallet that whose fully encrypted key lives in your phone’s secure enclave and is recoverable only when you prove ownership an email address, a biometric scan, and a passcode, then it would feel a whole lot more accessible to everyday people.
In fact, I think we’re getting close to this and it’s going to upend a lot of traditional web2 businesses. I reflected on what this might look like in a recent tweet 👇
Something I’ve been certain of this whole time is that it’s not really if decentralization will come to the mainstream, but when. One thing I don’t really know however, is what form that decentralization will take.
For an example, let’s look at Bluesky. In 2019, former twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey announced that he was trying to build an open source protocol of which twitter could eventually serve merely as a client. It was funded with several years of budget to operate independently towards its goal which it has recently begun to realize.
It’s still early days for Bluesky but it already feels like a natural winner. The underlying protocol, known as the AT Protocol allows users to switch front ends at any time but keep their name and social graph. This is similar Lens Protocol, except in that it’s not running on blockchain, so theoretically it won’t scare away the normies or the crypto-averse. That said, it’s an evolving design built entirely open source so we can’t really know what is to come. Blockchain may or may not be the right solution for parts of this system.
All I know is that in these early days, I’m getting most of what I like about twitter and very little of what I don’t like about it. Oh and by the way, I reached out to Bluesky’s CEO Jay Graber for some invite codes and I was lucky enough to score five!
If you’re interested in trying it out, let me know by sharing this post on twitter, Lens, or Substack Notes and commenting why you want to try Bluesky. Make sure to tag me!
@thumbsup.lens on Lens
@thumbsupfinance on twitter
And if you’re already on Bluesky, follow me
https://bsky.app/profile/thumbsup.bsky.social
Some of you might have got hung up just now and be thinking…
Substack Notes?
Did you miss the announcement from Substack that triggered an all out war from Elon?
Basically Substack announced a social media feed and Elon decided to:
block tweets from being embedded into Substack posts
shadowban tweets with links to Substack
block comments on tweets with links to Substack
remove automatic search results and trending feeds for Substack-related content
seemingly making up conpsiracy theories about Substack and his former favourite journalist being in cahoots
Drama aside, Substack did launch something, and it is, somewhat, like twitter.
https://open.substack.com/pub/on/p/introducing-notes?r=ogmsq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Where Bluesky and Lens are the decentralized answers to twitter, Substack has taken an entirely different approach with their new feature Notes. It’s a feed and it looks like twitter to some degree, but what sets it apart is it is only for subscribers to interact with writers. In order to follow someone and interact with their Notes, you need to be an email subscriber, so it kind of disincentivizes trolling to some extent. It’s far from foolproof, and it’s absolutely not competing with these other platforms in my opinion, but it is an interesting venue for conversations that are intended to remain on-topic.
I think news and politics Substacks will breed a very twitter-like discourse and crypto Substacks will breed a very crypto twitter-like discourse, but what I’m really intrigued to see is how this plays out for niche communities. I think this is one of the cool things about Substack is that it’s positioned as a home for writing and podcasting in a way that really fosters niche communities.
I love competition, so I’m personally excited to see how this helps move social networking forward. If you read this newsletter on Substack, please restack this post and share some Notes of your own. I’d love to see what you think. And remember, you can earn one of those sweet Bluesky invites by restacking this post and commenting why you’re interested to try Bluesky.
Speaking of telling me what you think…
Let’s do some Q&A already!
Back in the March issue of Thumbs’ Update, I pitched the idea of a new perk for my supporters: you send me questions, and I’ll answer them in the newsletter!
As of the time of writing, there are over 10 holders of my patronage NFT, Hey Friends!
All along, I’ve wanted to find ways to give back to my supporters and recently, while listening to an episode of StarTalk, I was inspired by something they do for their Patreon supporters: they let them ask questions, which they answer on the show.
Now I don’t have a podcast, and I have no immediate plans to start one, but I do have a newsletter, so I was thinking, starting now, holders of the Hey Friends! NFT can message me their questions, and I’ll try to fit them into upcoming newsletters.
I’ll only be answering questions that are respectful and relevant to other readers (if you just have a simple question or comment I’ll respond one on one, within reason), but I think this could be a fun opportunity to collaborate.
What do you say? You can become a supporter by minting Hey Friends! on Zora or by tipping with at least 0.02 Ξ on Juicebox.
I’ve sent out calls for questions before the last two newsletters, but so far no one has sent me any 🥺
I think this could be fun. So start thinking up questions! They could be about my content, things happening in the crypto world, or some technical quandaries you need help understanding. If they’re reasonable and I’m able to, I’ll answer them. After all it’s all about…
Growing the Pool, Together
Back in February, I began contributing the PoolTogether Growth Team. As I explained in the February Bonus Issue, this is not a formal role, but more like a piece of a holon within the holon that is the PoolTogether community.
Simply put, the growth team is made up of contributors working towards growing the protocol and my role within this team is to produce educational content around new features and collaborations the team wants to promote or explain.
I’m proud to announce that the Growth Team’s budget proposal for the next quarter was approved by the community of POOL token holders in a recent vote, which means I can continue producing great PoolTogether content for you all to read and enjoy.
This month, I’ve already put out two new pieces which I’ll link below, but first, I have an ask for you. I’ve been paying close attention to the analytics on platforms like Substack, Medium, Publis0x, and of course twitter, and one thing has become extremely clear:
The algorithm feeds on interactions.
I know, it sounds obvious, but what this means is that even if you read a post and enjoy it, if you don’t like and retweet it, as far as twitter is concerned, that content doesn’t exist. Even my own followers may not see it! And it has almost no chance of showing up to even the most algorithmically matched content consumer.
It has never been more true than now, your interactions are currency. So please, tip generously.
Without further ado, here are the tweets about my newest articles:
I’m so proud of this post. And more specifically I’m proud of the PoolTogether community for coming up with this concept. I don’t want to spoil the article for you, but in essence there is now a way to have your cake and eat it too with respect to staked Ethereum. Check out the article to see exactly what I mean 😉
This second post is a bit more time sensitive because it’s about an event that’s only running until the 17th of April. So hurry!
The tl;dr here is that for a limited time only, you can earn unique pixelated assets in the gamified social metaverse, Phi Land just by using PoolTogether. These are some of the coolest unlockable nfts in Phi so far and you won’t want to miss them! So if you haven’t already heard about this, speed-read the post linked above and you’ll know exactly how to get started.
I just wanted to clarify, the thing I said about liking and sharing isn’t just about my PoolTogether content. If you like this newsletter, my tweets, posts on Lens protocol, Bluesky etc, please do me a solid and a drop a like, comment, or share. Between the bear market, the exodus of users from twitter to other platforms, and the changes to the aglorithm, it feels like an uphill battle sometimes, and it can be a bit disheartening.
Sometimes I just want to know that someone read this content and that they enjoyed it or it helped them in some way. If that someone is you, let me know, one way or another. If you want to, that is 🤝
Anyway…. you stuck around this long, how about some goodies!
Recommendations
Ok, first off, did all this keyboard talk go right over your head? I mean I write pretty nerdy content right? So there’s gotta be some nerdy folks amongst my readers. If so, check out this video from one of my favourite keyboard content makers, :3wildcat whose youtube videos are aesthetic af
This one is about the keyboard I was dreaming about for a long time before I realized that it’s just too hard to find (and a bit too expensive) to be realistic at the moment: the Cyberboard R3
This keyboard answers a question that I’m not sure anyone was asking: what would a keyboard that you find on the set of a Wes Anderson cyberpunk film look like?
All confusion aside, I think it’s a thing of beauty, and this video is meditation for me. Enjoy.
Now I talked a lot about Bluesky in this issue, but if you’re unfamiliar, then the best thing to do is familiarize yourself, right? To do so, I recommend reading these three posts from Bluesky’s blog (don’t worry they’re short!):
Here’s another one I think you’ll like. Remember earlier when I used the word holon and you were “wtf is a holon?” 🤨
That was my response when I first heard that term as well. But it turns out be a bit of an interesting concept especially when thinking about coordination and game theory. And if you’re interested in decentralized systems, coordination and game theory need to be front of mind all the time.
With that said, I recommend checking out this thread from Kevin Owocki of Gitcoin fame (which is actually the deck from a presentation Kevin gave at ETH Denver). In it he aims to answer a pretty big question: How can crypto regenerate the world?
I’m personally pretty confident that it can. Between Optimism and Gitcoin’s work on funding open source software, the mass-scale coordination on things like sybil resistance, decentralized verified credentials, and portable platform-agnostic digital assets, I see a future that looks brighter than ever. We just need to keep moving towards it.
Until next time,
Thumbs Up
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