The New World Blogger

_{Benedetta Cappa Marinetti, Velocità di motoscafo (1923–24)}

(2009) - Bitcoin's Genesis

Our first taste of the blockchain came right around the birth of the world's first peer-to-peer electronic cash system. With a global community of voluntary digital-resource miners, it was a glimpse into the future of money! It just depends if people were willing to start putting value into these cryptographically secured tokens. Next, start creating and diversifying resources into other coins. Then maybe everything will start to snowball at one point. So we mined about 12 Bitcoins with just a laptop, and called it a day. It was such a long time ago..

(2014) - Ethereum's Universe

The Ethereum whitepaper was the most mind-blowing piece of work we've ever read. Anything that comes out of this community is filled with dreams and high fantasy. Maybe lots of conjobs too. Anyways, people can finally start creating universes with programmable crypto-economics. Populate them with bots, populate them with people. Play a game. Win valuable tokens. That's profound.

Games can get very real with crypto-economic incentives. It has the potential to completely merge physical and virtual reality and digitally "re-skin" them in many different ways. If following crypto-economic incentives is a way of life, Ethereum has the potential to create truly immersive Virtual Reality games. But we were just having too much fun with electronic dance music back then to bother with any of these..

(2015) - Energy into Ether

This was the year when we started thinking about wealth creation - we've neglected this for far too long. So we spent hundreds of hours scripting out some Holy-Grail forex bot that seemed to perform extremely well in 10-year backtests using the most detailed historical prices available. But of course, the bot burned us a small fortune with its silly mistakes when it went live for a couple of weeks. It was then a friend said that it's weird that we were speculating and dealing with national currencies, and suggested that we invest in technologies instead. It seemed to be good advice as we do enjoy indulging in some of these lofty "new world stuff".

Being reminded of Ethereum again at a time when were thinking about money, it was then we took half of whatever we had and smashed that buy button, getting a handful of those ether tokens at $7.00 per piece. That was certainly our first great FOMO ever as it felt like we were entering the age of exponentials. We didn't mind the risk. The worst case scenario for us were to continue life as it is, working from 9-5. If things get worse, we'll just eat less and enjoy the finer things in life.

So we went deeper into the rabbit hole and started building our cardboard armies. 6-GPU mining and noise machines. Collaborating with some neighbourhood pals, we set up a mini operation called Orbital Virtual Mining with plenty of broken 2nd hand computers. But none of us were hardcore technicians interested in optimising and maintaining it all, so we just let the miners operate without much supervision. Our robots were quite well-rested machines. Due to our negligence, they've only worked for about 30% of their lifetime. Talk about lazy!

(2016) - Surfing the Singularity with Steemit

The DAO was announced and we were mesmerised by the idea of a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation. So our bright idea was to dump half our ethers into The DAO without really knowing what the hell we got into. A small group of friends being part of a cutting-edge superorganisation, and making business decisions in search for profits. It just sounds like a super interesting concept to us at that time.

Anyways, the experiment flopped.

It also pays to be reminded of what we're all doing here in tokenised blockchain platforms other than being token traders from time-to-time. Any of us can be the following:-

• Passive investor: Buy up tokens and just hope for its value to improve over time.
• Active investor: Stake up tokens and continuously influence the value and state of the network.
• Worker: Perform valuable tasks for the network (bot / human).

The Steem / Steemit experience is one that has shown us that we can be all three kinds of network participants. You can say that we've all been one way or another just by being social around here. There's just no sign of stopping, and I really wish the rest of the crypto-community and any entrepreneurs to start embracing Steemit as their social platform. While trust networks do not have the same effect on everybody's different beliefs, working out loud here could provide both attention and credibility to any projects.

(2017) - The Year of Blockchain Tokens

Recently, we've been spending plenty of time studying new tokens to diversify into. So we took the time to figure out a framework just to manage the craze of ICOs a little bit better. With so many tokenised projects out there in the wild, we started figuring out some important broad-stroked fundamentals for projects, and ways to evaluate them. Below are some of our notes:-

• Potential for scam / fraud - what kind of token? who are the core devs? distribution of tokens?
• Potential for take-off - legal situation, funding, churn rate.
• Potential for changing lives - solutions to problems people are facing.
• Potential for on-boarding - how easy is it for people to start experiencing the platform? Disclosure effectiveness?
• Potential for user experience - what's the medium / spectrum of technologies in involved? Disclosure effectiveness?
• Potential for familiarity / reach - branding / marketing angle.
• Potential for workers - what can they perform?
• Potential for active investors - how do they influence valuation and state of the network?
• Potential for passive investors - what kind of perks?
• Potential for sustainability - socioeconomic evalutation.
• Potential for growth - scalability, ease of development, etc.
• Potential for liquidation - is it easy or difficult to get out?

So that's it for our blockchain adventures at the moment. What's your story?