Category: Tech

• CryptoParisian #112

  I have written about Bright Moments before. They are a digital art company exploring the intersection of NFTs and real-world experiences. It started as a popup gallery in Venice Beach California, where artists could show new work and where collectors could buy IRL. They then created their own pixel art collection called CryptoVenetians. It included 1,000 different people-centered NFTs by artist QianQian. Since then, they have gone on to host events and create new CryptoCitizen collections in New York, Berlin, London, Mexico City, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires. And this week they were in Paris.

  (I don’t know why they skipped over Toronto!)

  last day to mint a cryptoparisian. pic.twitter.com/KNyn21dVRt

  — seth goldstein (@seth) February 24, 2024

  Their end goal is to create a complete collection of 10,000 NFTs, most of which are tied to a specific city. (The only one that isn’t is their CryptoGalacticans collection.) What’s obviously great about this approach is that it’s a way to promote digital art and onboard new users into the crypto space. They are literally going around the world, throwing parties, and saying “look how cool and fun this whole crypto thing is.” At the same time, it also links the digital and the physical, which I believe is fundamental. We’re social beings and web3 will never change that.

  The other interesting thing about Bright Moments is that they are structured as a decentralized autonomous organization (or DOA). That’s like a company, except that governance is distributed to its tokenholders and it’s all managed on a blockchain. But it still operates as a company and it can raise money like one too. In 2021, Union Square Ventures invested 500 ETH into the DOA through a blockchain transaction that would naturally be public if you cared to look it up. Based on today’s spot price of about CA$4k per ETH, that was a CA$2 million investment.

  In the case of Bright Moments, its tokenholders are the people who own a CryptoCitizen. These are the people who get to vote on how the organization is run. They can also earn money if they do things like host a community dinner or organize a local meetup, with the idea being that, as an organization, you want to encourage this sort of bottom-up participation and innovation. I find it fascinating to watch this new governance and entity structure emerge, and it will only continue to evolve.

  I’ve been following Bright Moments more or less since they dropped the CryptoVenetians. I thought about jumping in then, but I figured I would wait to see if there would be a CryptoTorontonian. That would obviously be my number one choice. But once they announced their final list of cities, and Toronto wasn’t on it, I grumpily decided I would instead wait for a CryptoParisian. And since this week was Paris, it was time.

  I now hold CryptoParisian #112:

  

  I like that it has the Pont Neuf and that the human is wearing sunglasses.

  This means that I now have a small ownership stake in the Bright Moments DOA. So presumably I’ll soon have a say in important and serious matters! It also means that when they launch their final CryptoCitizen collection in Venice, Italy this spring (nice work going full circle here), there is a chance I might get airdropped a CryptoVenetian. It’s a random process, so whatever. I also know that it’s easy to look at this pixelated Parisian and think, “WTF, Brandon.” But something new is building here. And I’m sure that all of the folks who were in Paris this week can testify to that.

  2024.02.24

• Digitally twinning our cities

  Many of you have probably heard of the concept of a “digital twin.” Put simply, it is a digital representation of a physical thing. This could be a thing that already exists or, in the case of a new building, it could be a thing that you’re about to make exist.

  But there’s no reason to stop at the scale of a building. Right now, there are groups working on modeling entire cities. Sadly, in Ukraine, it is being done to document important buildings that could get destroyed. But in other places, it is being done in order to create a new kind of urban testing environment (via FT):

  “In the city, you don’t have a development environment; you only have one city. The laboratory is the place where the planners go to test. So test in a digital twin and then develop or implant in the city. That’s going to be the value.”

  The thinking is that if you combine a digital twin with good real-time urban data and AI, then you might actually be able to start testing new city building initiatives. For instance, maybe you could ask it: What would happen if we added a traffic lane, here? Would it actually help congestion or would it induce new demand?

  It’s hard to model this kind of stuff today, which is one of the reasons why there’s usually fierce debate about seemingly everything. But if we had accurate models that could tell us something close to reality, that feels like it would be a game changer for city builders.

  2024.02.21

• Wuhan is right now a driverless car capital

  Remember Wuhan? Well, it turns out that it is emerging as an important hub for driverless vehicles. Right now it is home to the largest fleet in the world:

  In Wuhan, 500 robotaxis, mostly run by Baidu, China’s rival to Google, recorded more than 730,000 ride-hailing trips last year. That compares with combined orders of more than 700,000 last year in Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles, according to Waymo, the self-driving car developer of Google’s parent company Alphabet. Waymo told the Financial Times that it had “a couple of hundred cars” in each of the three fully autonomous zones.

  One of the things that is allegedly helping Chinese companies is that they have access to more data. The networks of cameras and other infrastructure that make Chinese cities the most surveilled in the world are, coincidentally, also good for training machine learning models.

  This has some industry experts speculating that China could reach an autonomous vehicle “tipping point” sometime around 2027. Meaning, the technologies will be significantly safer than human drivers (at least 10x) and ready for mass adoption.

  I don’t know if this is the right timeline. There have been many forecasts made over the years. But I do know that competition is good for progress and that having a rival can be an important motivator. And right now, this is yet another example of the US vs. China.

  2024.02.05

• And that’s a wrap

  

  My time in the mountains has come to an end. I’m on a flight back to Toronto and about to start watching old Bond movies (as one should). If you don’t ski or snowboard or do any other winter sports, it’s maybe hard to relate to this, but the mountains are a truly special place. I’m always sad to leave them. In my opinion, there’s no better place to disconnect and recalibrate.

  And even though I’ve been mostly disconnected, it has been hard not to miss the hype around the new Apple Vision Pro, which was released into the wild this week. I haven’t tried one yet, but every review that I have read or watched seems to come to the same general conclusion: “Wow, this thing is incredible. It feels like a glimpse into the future of computing.”

  If you’re looking for a comprehensive technical overview of the device, you should check out Marques Brownlee’s video, here. But if you’re just looking to get a sense of what it might be like to, you know, wander around New York City wearing one, you should definitely check out Casey Neistat’s video, here.

  Now I think there’s no question that there’s a dystopian element to all of this. When Casey is standing around and watching a butterfly eat his donut, he looks pretty strange from the outside. Only he is seeing the butterfly. But then again, we all look pretty weird standing around staring down at our phones all the time. Maybe this will help us become less disconnected. I don’t know.

  Either way, it’s hard not to imagine this changing — a lot. I mean, here’s just one small example. Already Zillow has an app for Vision Pro that allows you to tour homes for sale. Assuming it’s as good as everyone says it is, I can’t imagine anyone going to physically tour a home ever again, unless they’re really serious and/or ready to put in an offer.

  Of course, there’s also no shortage of people saying that this device is simply too expensive. But I think that misses the point. This is version one. At this point, Apple just needs to be directionally right about what they are calling “spatial computing.” (They don’t want you to call it VR.) Because if they are right, the price will come down and then we’ll all be watching old Bond movies on these devices.

  2024.02.03

• How I’m displaying my NFT art

  

  

  I recently got a Samsung Frame TV to use as an NFT display at home. I had been looking for one for a while and I finally pulled the trigger last week. The way the Frame works is that it’s a TV when it’s on, and it’s an art display when it’s off. But I really don’t care about the TV part. I just wanted a good looking art display.

  There are a lots of purpose-built NFT displays on the market right now, including Tokenframe, Blackdove, Muse, and others. And I was very close to getting a Muse Frame.

  But ultimately I decided on the Samsung Frame because it was (1) cheaper for its size (50″), (2) it looks cool, and (3) I was fine with just a simple high-quality display. I think there will be lots more software and dongles created in the future for people who want to showcase their NFTs on whatever they happen to have at home.

  However, if you’re a crypto and NFT purist, this maybe isn’t the display for you — at least right now. Out of the box, it doesn’t connect with any crypto wallets. And so you’re not going to automatically see the provenance of each art piece (more on this below). Instead, the default method is to just upload JPEGs to the TV from Samsung’s SmartThings app (insert right-click-save-as jokes here).

  Overall, I’m really happy with the display. Here are my initial thoughts:

  • I have it set to randomly rotate through my art every 3 minutes. There’s also a motion detection feature that works reasonably well. If it doesn’t detect any motion, the display will go completely to sleep. But for some reason, it occasionally gets possessed and the TV will randomly turn on. Last week it kept turning on old Baywatch episodes. Possibly user error.
  • Samsung’s SmartThings app is bad. It’s buggy and a pain to use. For example, even though I’ve given it complete access to my phone’s photos, they never seem to show up. I have to limit access and then go and select the ones I want to use in my gallery.
  • I have found that I prefer when the art is full bleed versus within the Frame’s skeuomorphic picture mat. This is a new form of art and so I like the idea of breaking past traditions. But unless your images are 16×9 and a high enough resolution (I have generally found > 3000px wide to work), then you’re going to get prompted to insert and select a mat design.
  • I have solved this problem by manually cropping and editing the individual pieces. Some NFT collections, such as CyberBrokers, also give you vector files which allows you to play around as you see fit. Again, if you’re an NFT and/or art purist, you’re probably not going to like this. But I think of it as curating the pieces.
  • Most of my art is on Ethereum, Solana, and Tezos. Being able to upload whatever I want is helpful, because not all NFT displays support all of the chains. The Muse Frame, for instance, only supports Ethereum and Polygon right now.
  • PNG files and video files aren’t supported natively. This is a significant drawback and so eventually I know I’m going to have to change up the software that powers this display. And there are options. Bright Moments offers display software for holders of its NFTs. Fred Wilson’s venture firm USV created this setup. And I’m sure there are countless others. These can solve the provenance issue mentioned above by pulling directly from the various blockchains.

  In the end, I knew what I was getting into with the Frame. I knew it wasn’t a purpose-built NFT display and I was fine with that. It’s still early days in this space. But it sure is nice to finally see my NFT art in large format.

  2024.01.13

• Rescue reflectors vs. avalanche beacons

  

  Last week, I decided to order a RECCO rescue reflector for my snowboard helmet (the red strip pictured above). My new jacket — a wonderful Christmas gift — doesn’t have one built in, so I decided it couldn’t hurt to just stick one on. They cost about $50.

  However, a passive RECCO reflector is not an avalanche beacon. These reflectors only work if a rescue crew has active RECCO detectors on hand. I don’t know what percentage of resorts have them, but if you’ve ever been cat or heli-skiing, or if you do backcountry skiing, you’ll know that what you need is a beacon.

  Avalanche beacons generally have two modes: a sending mode and a receiving mode. When you’re riding, you want it in sending mode, meaning you’re automatically transmitting your location. No further action is needed.

  If something bad were to happen, and someone gets lost, everyone in the group will then switch their beacon to receiving mode. And this is how you go about finding someone if they’ve been caught in something like an avalanche.

  I don’t know that many people who do this while skiing inbounds, but today’s tragedy at Palisades Tahoe is a reminder that sometimes bad things can happen even within managed resort areas. My heart is heavy for the skier who died today.

  2024.01.10

• Turquoise for autonomy

  One of the realities that we will have to face in, oh I don’t know, 5 or so years, is that there will be a mixture of different cars on the road. Some will operate with drivers. And some will operate with no drivers. Assuming that the cars with no drivers do well at their job, I would imagine that this will become the default. But in the interim, it’ll probably be useful to know which is which. And that’s why Mercedes-Benz (and probably others) has been working to establish a new internationally-accepted signal for computer-driven cars.

  The decision so far: turquoise lights.

  

  

  The company has just received permits from the states of California and Nevada for its Drive Pilot system, and as part of this, turquoise lights were earmarked for this exact purpose. Supposedly turquoise was chosen because it’s distinct and because there’s nothing else on the road that uses it. But I think the real reason is that it looks cool and kind of cyberpunk. So I hope this does become the standard way that we all visualize our shift toward autonomy. I can already imagine the long-exposure photography that will follow of our roads.

  Images: Mercedes Benz via The Drive

  2024.01.04

• Nearly 1 out of every 10 cars sold is now electric

  I’ve said this before, but the car I currently have will certainly be the last internal combustion engine vehicle that I own. I truthfully even felt a bit weird buying it 6 years ago, but at the time, there weren’t that many options other than a Tesla. And I didn’t want a Tesla.

  Today, there are lots of EV options, and the numbers are starting to show that. When the final figures come in, it is estimated that the US will have sold 15.5 million new cars last year. And of these, about 1.44 million units are expected to have been electric.

  This means that we are just under 1 out of every 10 new cars sold in the US. The trend line is also working in the right direction. 1.44 million new EV units is roughly the total number of EVs sold between 2016 and 2021 in the US. 

  So things are accelerating. And presumably there are other people like me waiting on the sidelines. I am deliberately roughed in for an EV charging station in my new parking spot and, if/when it comes time to purchase a new car, that’s exactly what will get installed.

  (I added “if” because, depending on how mobility evolves over the next 5-10 years, there’s a chance I may no longer want to own a car.)

  2024.01.01

• What might happen in 2024

  Yesterday we looked in the rear-view mirror. Today we’re looking forward:

  • The market consensus right now is that this cycle of interest rate increases has come to an end, and that we should see rates start to come down next year. Having confidence that rates won’t go any higher in the near future is what markets need in order to start making more decisions. So this is, of course, positive. At the same time, I don’t think anyone should expect a return to ultra-low rates. Rates today are still low when viewed historically.
  • Lower rates are good for levered assets such as real estate, but I don’t think that our industry has fully felt and processed the impacts of higher rates. Unfortunately, I think that things will get worse (in 2024) before they get better (maybe toward the end of 2024 or perhaps in 2025). This is when a “risk-on” approach will return in commercial real estate. A year ago today, I thought 2023 would be the year for this, but as I said yesterday, I was overly optimistic in terms of my timing.
  • On the residential resale side, I think we will see greater optimism sooner, certainly for the most in-demand cities and areas. There is pent up demand waiting on the sidelines and, once we can get past the current bid-ask spreads and deadlock, I believe we’ll return to a more balanced market in 2024. To be clear, I’m not expecting bidding wars and the like. And because of our housing affordability crisis, I also think the Bank of Canada will be more resistant to lowering rates compared to other central banks. This will help the Canadian dollar.
  • If you’re a buyer of real estate, I generally believe that 2024 will turn out to be a pivotal year for you. Roughly speaking, you win acquisitions in one of two ways: either (1) you pay the most or (2) you believe in something that most other people in the market don’t. This second approach is harder to achieve in bull markets. But in slower markets, the door is open and history has taught us that it can be the foundation in which great fortunes are made.
  • As I mentioned yesterday, I agree with the prognostications that hard costs will soften further next year (perhaps even more than 5% on average). Obviously every market is different. But here in Toronto, I just don’t see us returning to the level of construction starts that we have seen over the last number of years.
  • Since 2021, I have used my hyper scientific Jimmy the Greek Reopening Index to keep tabs on office utilization and the overall return to office. And based on this, 2023 was a positive year. Initially, souvlaki consumption appeared dramatically lower on days like Monday. But I noticed discernible increases as the year went on. However, if you look at actual data, such as what we have from swipe cards, the great return to office seems to have stalled out at around 50%. I don’t think this will hold, though. I continue to believe that of the people who work in offices, most will spend > 50% of each week there. And we will see that in 2024.
  • 2023 was the year of AI. But Fred Wilson makes an excellent point, here. AI is 40+ years in the making. Last year only became the year of AI because a consumer-facing app — ChatGPT — was revealed that captured everyone’s attention. Crypto will eventually have this moment, but it will likely need to marinate a bit longer. Instead, I think 2024 will be the year of augmented reality (AR) and a further blurring of our offline and online worlds. Think digital art, fashion, and other collectibles (such as NFTs).
  • Right now, autonomous vehicles feel like they’re in the trough of disillusionment (within the hype cycle). There were moments last year where it felt like we were finally moving beyond this phase. But then some very suboptimal things happened. I think AVs are our reality in the next 5+ years, which means that for next year we likely want to be focused on the inputs: vision/LIDAR, battery tech, etc.
  • Zooming out, we should be thinking about the above two trends in the context of a broader shift toward greater automation. I think it will feel more insidious than immediate (certainly in 2024), but the longer-term impacts are going to be profound for our society. The so-called gig economy is likely to be impacted first. Eventually the overall economy will create new jobs, but we are still going to need to manage this transition toward more automation.
  • TikTok Shop is where to look for the future of shopping. I think the platform will continue to see strong adoption and ultimately prove to be a dominant e-commerce platform throughout 2024. Amazon, Meta, and others will see this, and try their best to catch up and copy it.
  • At the time of writing this post, the total crypto market capitalization is about $1.74 trillion. This is down from nearly $3 trillion at the peak of the market in 2021. The recent gains suggest that the so-called “crypto winter” might be over, and so combined with lower interest rates and more real-world use cases, I think that 2024 will be another strong year for crypto. Total crypto market cap at the end of the year will exceed its 2021 peak.

  And there you have it. My current thoughts for this upcoming year. I should note that I’m not an economist, analyst, or an expert on souvlaki demand for that matter. But I enjoy writing this post as an annual discipline. It forces me to think critically about the topics that interest me. And in the paraphrased words of Howard Lindzon, it gives me an archive that I can go back to and either cringe at or think to myself, “hey, I could have been a somebody!”

  And with that, a big thanks to everyone who has read this daily blog over the last year. This year marked its 10th anniversary. I wish you much success and happiness in 2024. Happy new year!

  2023.12.31

• What happened in 2023

  As per tradition around here, I like to bookend the new year with two posts: a post that revisits my random predictions for the year and a post that talks about what might happen in the year to follow. Today’s post is the former. So let’s see how I did:

  • I thought the interest rate hikes would come to an end in Q1-2023. But that didn’t happen until the summer. I also thought this would lead to a mild recession in Canada. Technically, we are not actually in one, but according to some, we kind of are.
  • I thought the real estate sector would start seeing some distress in the first half of the year, and that a new equilibrium would be found in the second half. This proved to be overly optimistic in terms of timing. A lot ended up being on pause for the entire year, and I now think that my forecast was at least a year too early. The sea change is still underway.
  • Given the overall slowdown in real estate, I felt that construction costs had to see some softening. This did, in fact, happen with some of the “earlier trades”, such as shoring and excavation, and we did see some specific trade pricing, such as concrete formwork, come down by as much as 30%. The smart cost consultants we work with now expect to see overall hard costs come down by a further 5-6% next year in Toronto. This makes sense given construction starts are way down.
  • With me expecting the interest rate increases to stop in Q1, I thought that pre-construction condominium sales would return in a meaningful way by the spring. While we did see some buoyancy around that time, it was short lived. Sales remained nearly shutoff for the entire year, but for maybe a handful of projects. The more successful projects tended to be outside of the Toronto core and at lower price points.
  • With respect to home prices in more tertiary/fringe markets, my sense then, as it is now, was that these prices would remain below the peaks for many years. In addition to the upward momentum created by low rates, my view was/is that some of this pricing was the result of a bet on urban decentralization. I don’t think that has played out as many expected it to, so that’s why I think it will be many years before the pricing we saw in early 2022 returns.
  • The momentum around “expanding housing options” in our low-rise neighborhoods is many years in the making. And a lot of progress was made in 2023. Here in Toronto, we adopted new multiplex policies that now allow fourplexes plus an accessory dwelling (so 5 homes in total) on an as-of-right basis. I continue to believe that this momentum is only going to grow. I also think we will see the arrival of more mixed-use opportunities.
  • I believed that, broadly speaking, urban transit ridership would remain below pre-pandemic levels for all of 2023. This proved to be the case for most US and Canadian cities. But things are improving. For Canada as a whole, it looks like we’ll see full recovery sometime in 2024 based on this trend line.
  • I thought 2023 was going to be the year I took my inaugural ride in an autonomous vehicle. Sadly, this didn’t happen. The sector as a whole also saw some setbacks. Hopefully I’ll get a chance next year.
  • I assumed that Apple would finally release its augmented reality device. And though they didn’t technically release Vision Pro, they did announce it. So I guess that counts for something. I also thought that 2023 would be a big year for “phygital” goods. Maybe it was. Or maybe it was more of a building year. A lot of people are curious to see how Vision Pro does in 2024. It’s not set up for the mass market, just yet, but I think it will do exactly what it is supposed to once it’s out in the wild.
  • Finally, crypto. I know that a lot of you like to skip over these posts, but it is something that I feel strongly about. A year ago, though, I was pretty bearish on Solana. Boy was I wrong. Solana ended the year as the best performing major crypto asset — up 933% at the time of writing this. Oops! However, Ether is also +91%, and I continued to dollar-cost average in all throughout the year.

  Next up: What will, or more accurately, what might happen in 2024.

  2023.12.30