Some of you may remember that about a year ago I moved this blog onchain from WordPress to a platform called Paragraph. I've been happy with the move, though I know that my daily emails have been ending up in many of your junk boxes since then. Sorry. Hopefully that gets better over time. Given my enthusiasm for crypto, it just made sense to make the switch. I'm trying to move as much as I can onchain.
At the same time, things still feel very early. Paragraph, for example, has been experimenting with ways for writers to monetize their work. I don't care about that for this blog, but I am interested in seeing how the business models may evolve.
I spent the past week listening to this Bankless podcast with Vitalik Buterin (the Canadian programmer and co-founder of Ethereum). It took me a week because I was listening to it off and on while I was in the car, headed to and from One Delisle and other meetings. But it's a fascinating episode. I think Vitalik is easily one of the most important minds of our generation.
But let me be honest and say that I wasn't able to follow everything in the podcast. I clearly still have a lot to learn when it comes to cryptography. For this reason, I'm not going to recommend that you all watch/listen to the episode — not unless you're prepared to go in deep. This is also supposed to be a blog for city builders (at least most of the time).
But I did want to share one takeaway that I found interesting.
In the episode, Vitalik describes Ethereum as the world's ledger. This maybe won't mean very much if you're not familiar with crypto, but the goal is a universal, permissionless, and censorship-resistant place for recording and securing basically everything: property title records, financial assets, AI-generated cat videos, and so on. Put another way, Ethereum wants to become a foundational layer of trust for the world.
Then, later in the episode, they somehow get onto the topic of dictators. There was a general acknowledgment that dictatorships do have their benefits, but that they also have obvious downfalls. Ideally, we would have a best-of-both-worlds scenario. We want the efficiencies of dictatorships, with all of the benefits of capitalist democracies.
I experience this feeling on a regular basis, especially because I'm also someone who interacts and uses crypto on an almost daily basis. This week's frustration came about as I was trying to move money around from our Parkview Mountain House account in the US. We bank with US Bank and, for the record, the people in the Park City branch are absolutely lovely people.
Some of you may remember that about a year ago I moved this blog onchain from WordPress to a platform called Paragraph. I've been happy with the move, though I know that my daily emails have been ending up in many of your junk boxes since then. Sorry. Hopefully that gets better over time. Given my enthusiasm for crypto, it just made sense to make the switch. I'm trying to move as much as I can onchain.
At the same time, things still feel very early. Paragraph, for example, has been experimenting with ways for writers to monetize their work. I don't care about that for this blog, but I am interested in seeing how the business models may evolve.
I spent the past week listening to this Bankless podcast with Vitalik Buterin (the Canadian programmer and co-founder of Ethereum). It took me a week because I was listening to it off and on while I was in the car, headed to and from One Delisle and other meetings. But it's a fascinating episode. I think Vitalik is easily one of the most important minds of our generation.
But let me be honest and say that I wasn't able to follow everything in the podcast. I clearly still have a lot to learn when it comes to cryptography. For this reason, I'm not going to recommend that you all watch/listen to the episode — not unless you're prepared to go in deep. This is also supposed to be a blog for city builders (at least most of the time).
But I did want to share one takeaway that I found interesting.
In the episode, Vitalik describes Ethereum as the world's ledger. This maybe won't mean very much if you're not familiar with crypto, but the goal is a universal, permissionless, and censorship-resistant place for recording and securing basically everything: property title records, financial assets, AI-generated cat videos, and so on. Put another way, Ethereum wants to become a foundational layer of trust for the world.
Then, later in the episode, they somehow get onto the topic of dictators. There was a general acknowledgment that dictatorships do have their benefits, but that they also have obvious downfalls. Ideally, we would have a best-of-both-worlds scenario. We want the efficiencies of dictatorships, with all of the benefits of capitalist democracies.
I experience this feeling on a regular basis, especially because I'm also someone who interacts and uses crypto on an almost daily basis. This week's frustration came about as I was trying to move money around from our Parkview Mountain House account in the US. We bank with US Bank and, for the record, the people in the Park City branch are absolutely lovely people.
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Up until recently, the way to make money on Paragraph was to have readers collect your posts: Writer publishes something, readers mint it as an NFT, and then writer receives small payments in their crypto wallet. I've had a few people collect my posts over the past year, but it has not been anything of significance.
Now Paragraph is testing something new called writer coins. Instead of collecting individual posts, readers can now buy a writer's coin and support them more broadly. I just set this up on my publication and so there is now a brand-new coin in existence called $BRANDON.
One of the interesting things that I was able to do was automatically distribute this new coin to anyone who has collected one of my posts in the past and who is subscribed to my blog (with a connected wallet). If you are one of these people, you should have received something.
In theory, $BRANDON coin should increase in value as this blog develops incredible international notoriety, but in practice, who the hell knows? These experimentations are all part of the journey onchain. Some stuff will work, but many other things won't. Already though, I think you can feel product-market fit for things like stablecoins. Maybe one day the same will be true of $BRANDON.
If you'd like to try out this new feature and support the blog, click here.
Vitalik refers to this scenario as "dictators in a box," and he argues that we already have them: they're called entrepreneurs. When you start a company, you get to run within your box, and that is the power of entrepreneurship. But importantly, these boxes exist within a broader framework that includes the rule of law, property rights, freedom of speech, and all the other benefits of capitalist democracies.
This is how Ethereum sees itself — as a foundation on top of which "dictators in a box" can build new ideas, businesses, and opportunities. And because of this layering, it will be Ethereum that provides the backstop against people doing bad things, like stealing someone's crypto or falsely claiming that they hold title to a property when they don't.
I found this analogy fascinating, and I think it offers a glimpse of what's at stake if/when Ethereum becomes what it's aiming to become — the world's ledger.
But here's one of the things: US bank cannot interface with my mobile phone because I have a Canadian number. And because I live in Toronto, I'm also not able to download and use their mobile app. This means I cannot do rudimentary digital things like deposit a cheque (also known as checks in America). I'm constantly hamstrung and forced to do a lot of things in person. Is there really no simple solution to this?
In contrast to this, I own brandondonnelly.eth, which links to my personal Ethereum wallet. It'a also linked to my Farcaster account (Twitter-like social network), as well as many other onchain platforms and products. And it works, as expected, anywhere in the world.
If someone in Botswana would like to send me 0.001 ETH (~C$4) because they like what I write on this daily blog or they just want to buy me a morning coffee, they could easily do that by entering brandondonnelly.eth on their phone. They could also choose to do so with a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. And when I eventually do my income taxes and I review my wallet's ledger, this transfer would show up and I would be able to categorize it accordingly.
This, to me, is very clearly the future of the global economy.
Full disclosure: I am long ETH and companies like Coinbase.
Up until recently, the way to make money on Paragraph was to have readers collect your posts: Writer publishes something, readers mint it as an NFT, and then writer receives small payments in their crypto wallet. I've had a few people collect my posts over the past year, but it has not been anything of significance.
Now Paragraph is testing something new called writer coins. Instead of collecting individual posts, readers can now buy a writer's coin and support them more broadly. I just set this up on my publication and so there is now a brand-new coin in existence called $BRANDON.
One of the interesting things that I was able to do was automatically distribute this new coin to anyone who has collected one of my posts in the past and who is subscribed to my blog (with a connected wallet). If you are one of these people, you should have received something.
In theory, $BRANDON coin should increase in value as this blog develops incredible international notoriety, but in practice, who the hell knows? These experimentations are all part of the journey onchain. Some stuff will work, but many other things won't. Already though, I think you can feel product-market fit for things like stablecoins. Maybe one day the same will be true of $BRANDON.
If you'd like to try out this new feature and support the blog, click here.
Vitalik refers to this scenario as "dictators in a box," and he argues that we already have them: they're called entrepreneurs. When you start a company, you get to run within your box, and that is the power of entrepreneurship. But importantly, these boxes exist within a broader framework that includes the rule of law, property rights, freedom of speech, and all the other benefits of capitalist democracies.
This is how Ethereum sees itself — as a foundation on top of which "dictators in a box" can build new ideas, businesses, and opportunities. And because of this layering, it will be Ethereum that provides the backstop against people doing bad things, like stealing someone's crypto or falsely claiming that they hold title to a property when they don't.
I found this analogy fascinating, and I think it offers a glimpse of what's at stake if/when Ethereum becomes what it's aiming to become — the world's ledger.
But here's one of the things: US bank cannot interface with my mobile phone because I have a Canadian number. And because I live in Toronto, I'm also not able to download and use their mobile app. This means I cannot do rudimentary digital things like deposit a cheque (also known as checks in America). I'm constantly hamstrung and forced to do a lot of things in person. Is there really no simple solution to this?
In contrast to this, I own brandondonnelly.eth, which links to my personal Ethereum wallet. It'a also linked to my Farcaster account (Twitter-like social network), as well as many other onchain platforms and products. And it works, as expected, anywhere in the world.
If someone in Botswana would like to send me 0.001 ETH (~C$4) because they like what I write on this daily blog or they just want to buy me a morning coffee, they could easily do that by entering brandondonnelly.eth on their phone. They could also choose to do so with a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. And when I eventually do my income taxes and I review my wallet's ledger, this transfer would show up and I would be able to categorize it accordingly.
This, to me, is very clearly the future of the global economy.
Full disclosure: I am long ETH and companies like Coinbase.
