META511-01-f22-w03-transcript-Part3.txt

                                      You                       I'm very excited about today's discussion we have with us today the very famous 4156 and has been famous in a variety of different contexts he was an incredible collector he is now a builder                                                                     six and has been famous in a variety of different contexts. He was an incredible collector. He is now a builder and we're going to talk a little bit both about his journey from one area to the next area. But then the part that I think we're really going to begin to, 4156 is a deep thinker about how NFTs are going to work over the long run and that's some very distinctive and strong views about what is going to make for successful NFT collections. So we're going to begin to those and hit upon I think some real structural issues and he's using those structural issues. So first I'd love to welcome him to the course. I very much appreciate the time he's taking with us today. And before we get into any of these complicated issues, I'd love it if you could just share with us a little bit your background and pathway in crypto and NFTs and how did we end up where we are today in your life? What was that journey? What was that pathway? Take us from the beginning to the present day and then we'll get into more of the concept structures. Yeah, sure, absolutely and thanks a lot for having me. It was a really fun and interesting initiative and really happy to participate. So I've been in the crypto space since about  around that time. I was working at like a Y-combinator startup. I had kind of previous to that had this kind of very mixed background where I was doing kind of more creative work and realized it wasn't super efficient back then at paying the bills and thought that maybe learning about financial markets would be kind of a valuable way to do that. And then I ended up I guess have a tendency to become kind of obsessed with things. So I became very obsessed with traditional financial markets in addition to the kind of creative pursuits that I was undertaking and spent a lot of time learning to invest successfully. So at the time when I was working in a sort of creative capacity at this startup, I learned about Bitcoin. I think I read the white paper somewhere around. I think it was like the end of 2013 I believe. And I think I had to read through it a few times but when it clicked, I think that it was in this sort of like meeting place in my kind of creative and finance brain. And I just became completely obsessed with it, recognized immediately. It's sort of potential to change the world ended up buying a bunch of Bitcoins. And then when this first Bitcoin bubble happened very shortly after that, I decided I was just going to leave my job by job and just kind of use the bit of capital that I had to to start building things on on Bitcoin and block chains. And that was sort of like the genesis of my journey. So I've been in the space since then kind of working in various capacities on different kinds of projects. Some bootstraps, some venture funded, some were successful, some weren't. And after I guess a period of kind of relative quiet, I was kind of rediscovering some sort of creative pursuits and kind of started thinking about NFTs a little bit more. And kind of fell down that rabbit hole. I would say that it was probably my sort of third kind of crypto rabbit hole after becoming obsessed with Bitcoin and Ethereum. And again, it really sort of spoke to the creative parts of my brain and kind of discovered crypto punks and very quickly sort of acquired a lot of conviction that these were going to be important. And that we had always sort of thought in the crypto space that the things that would make it go mainstream were sort of these like financial applications like payments and very quickly after kind of discovering NFTs. I think I started to understand that the application layer might be cultural rather than financial. And yeah, as I sort of developed more conviction around that idea and ended up purchasing punk for 156. So kind of very quickly acquired this conviction that NFTs were going to be important and decided to take the leap and buy a crypto pumpkin. And my original thesis was that it would be a really cool idea to buy a punk and kind of like build a brand around it. My original kind of plan or intent was that for 156 was going to be a sort of artist of its own within the NFTs space. And you know, this was kind of preliminary maybe a bit kind of naive thinking. But now I was thinking that you know, the punk would like mint its own NFTs about bananas and you know, just kind of do silly sort of like absurdist art around this idea. And then kind of after getting deeper into this space kind of kind of had this realization that collecting other work from other artists who were kind of much more accomplished and up to some very interesting stuff might be a kind of more interesting pursuit. And you know, again, we can get into the kind of later realizations. I think that that ended up kind of leading me to sell the punk and start working on nouns. But I think those are kind of related to other questions. So yeah, the initial kind of run up into the space was again, and having this hybrid kind of creative and finance background and going through these kind of long periods of building and sort of obsession with different parts of the crypto technology stack with this more recent realization that NFTs were probably one of the most important developments so far in so far as as they sort of represent the application layer and the way an awful lot of people get onboarded into this tech. Okay, well, I think this is a great background and let's start with actually punk 4156 because I had mentioned this in my presentation a couple of days ago. The crypto punks, I don't think when they were launched were thought of as PFPs per se. I think there was somewhere between collectible art, fun, crypto-native thing. And I'm not saying that they were not used as PFPs by anyone before G-Money and you, but I've been in crypto since 2013. I think I read the white paper three or four months before you, so I think we're in the same crypto class. And it was very, very clear to me when this idea of a punk as a PFP entered my radar screen and it was first with G-Money, I think it was in January 2021 and you in February of 2021. That's if I'm not mistaken. And let's take it a little bit to this concept of a PFP as an identity, how it's, how you thought of it, why you thought this would be a good idea. Where are you mentally now about the idea of a PFP as an identity? Is it something people are going to do? Is it something people are going to stick with one? Are they going to use different ones? How does that fly out to you? Yeah, it's an interesting question. I had originally also claimed some crypto punks on the day they were launched, just claimed a handful of them because, again, early in the history of the space, there just wasn't that much to do and it was kind of seemed interesting. And I claimed a bunch of them and never really thought about them. I think for me, it was also developing the thesis that you could build an identity around this came much later than the realization that it was something you could own or that it might be interesting to own. And if I think back to the time when they were launched, I do think kind of initially there were a handful of people that were using them as their PFPs, or certainly there was another project, and I can't even remember if this was like a blockchain project or not, but there was a project called 8bit.me, I think around that time where people were using the characters as their PFPs. So I think this idea was sort of in the air. I think at a certain point kind of experimenting with Erbit, I had this idea that you could take the Erbit ID and build a Twitter account around the Erbit ID. So I think all these ideas were sort of in the air and it just took a handful of us to actually start doing it and doing it with conviction for it to become very, very popular. As with any sort of important trend, in the absence of the people that did it, other people would have done it and it would have happened anyway. So there is something sort of inherent in the medium or inherent in the nature of what kind of NFTs are and PFPs are that makes all of this make sense. And I don't know exactly what it is, but it certainly seems to feel right. Certainly to the extent that people don't just want to be themselves online, they want to be a character and to the extent that it's kind of interesting and fun that being a character in the context of a community of fixed size where other people also want to be similar characters, but not exactly the same character. That's a lot of fun. And then also this idea that what NFTs are, maybe they're this thing that is sort of able to soak up or capture all sorts of cultural value that other financial assets can't, and that all of the things that you do online could sort of accrue value to this sort of cultural value sink. All of these things kind of mixed up together and make it just very interesting and fun. And kind of intuitive to use these things as PFPs. I don't think it's just like a short-term trend, I do think it's here to stay. And I don't think there's as with most kind of sustainable trends, there's not just one reason for doing it. There's kind of lots of reasons for doing it that are all mixed up together. Okay, so then in a few months after that, I think there are a couple of episodes that stick in my mind where I think you're very vocal about a certain point of view. And in both cases, but certainly the first case, you weren't completely alone, but you were more on the alone side than not on the alone side. I think the first case was when the crypto folks came out and for those in order to know this, this was someone who did a project and took all the crypto punks and flipped them. I think it was the exact same. Punks and they flipped them facing the other way. And at least among some punk holders, this caused an uproar. They felt it would somehow hurt their punk. And I think a lot of pressure went on Larva Labs to do something about it, to file a DMCA or somehow take action against the folks. And I remember because I think this was very obvious to me. You were very much against Larva Labs doing anything. And you were saying like, this is silly why are you doing it? It's the token bit matters. This is very silly. Tell us a little bit about that because you were I think outside of the punk's consensus and even Larva Labs' consensus then. Yeah, sure. And I think there were a few reasons for that as well. You know, I think as someone who had been on the internet for a long time and sort of really understood the way memes and kind of culture flow on the internet, it just seemed logical to me that it would be a bad idea to kind of censor people who are kind of engaging in remix culture with a brand. Like that sort of fan culture, that sort of remix culture I think historically has supported the proliferation of things and supported the growth of things that would otherwise be obscure. So it just it seemed very counterintuitive to me that that you would want to censor it. It was also the case and we can get more into this if you want, but it was also the case that I was never really sure if if crypto punks were sort of like I always thought that they were a work of genius. I was never really sure if they were kind of like an intentional or accidental work of genius. And I sort of took the the the act of censorship as like a little bit of evidence. I think at that time that it might have been a bit more accidental. Again, and you know that's not at all to sort of like discredit the invention and discredit larval labs and what they created. But more to say that maybe they didn't necessarily fully comprehend that thing that they had created in the way that some people who are a bit more crypto native might have. And I sort of took this to be like a little bit of evidence that that maybe you know as as like a company or a group. They they weren't quite as as kind of like aligned with the crypto ethos as I thought they were. And and so you know I think I started speaking out out of a combination of like trying to advocate for the thing that would would create the maximum amount of value for punks. And then also out of concern that that you know that the stewards of this brand might be a little bit out of touch with the ethos of the space. And so I think that's a great follow on to what happened next. It's I think you were pushing for larval labs to have more permissive licensing back than their approach on licensing was at best unclear. And I think most people thought maybe you could use it up to a hundred thousand dollars per year of of earnings and the rebits license seem to emphasize something similar. So it was quite restrictive by what is now the current standards. And you were pushing for this model. There wasn't much of a response. And then you're very famously sold for one five six which I think was shocking to people. What was the logic there? Yeah sure so yeah you know I think all of this was kind of against a backdrop of just kind of developing a thesis over time. You know and I think it had started kind of significantly before that. It actually I think it started like a day or two after I bought for one five six. Because when I bought for one five six I never really thought about sort of like the copyright implications of trying to use for one five six as like a personality or an artist or a character. And a couple days later I thought I wonder what is the license on this thing that I bought. And so I started googling it and Google returned this article that I think had been co-created by Larva Labs and some a prominent law firm. I assumed it was their law firm at the time that talked about you know it was a blog post that that detailed like the order of operations to create a license that could be transferable within NFT. So I read this and you know with the understanding that it came from Larva Labs own firm believed that oh you know they must have a pretty liberal stance towards copyright if they're kind of co-publishing this sort of thought leadership with their lawyers. So I guess it's probably fine to do my own thing. And so I started doing my own thing and I had kind of DM the founders on a couple of occasions just to confirm that their stance was sort of as liberal as that blog post kind of made it seem and they just never responded. And so like kind of as time went on and you know they were doing things like DMCA and Fox. I started to worry a lot about well you know I mean worry about my specific kind of situation where I was I was starting to like build a brand around this thing and maybe I didn't own this thing. But then you know more generally again kind of worry about did they actually understand what was happening in the community because if like the whole thing that the community was doing was sort of like engaging in you know using these characters as their PFPs and you know kind of experimenting with building brands and personalities around them and again using the sort of NFT as as the sort of like sinking mechanism that like absorbs all of the activity that that that people are doing like nobody wants to do that that nobody wants to do that with something that they don't own in the in the long run right like nobody wants to kind of invest all this time in a situation where they could easily sort of be rugged by by the creators at some point in the future. And so you know I started to worry about it both in terms of my own situation but then also in terms of like is this thing as valuable as everybody thinks it is if if people can't actually do the thing with it that that they want to be doing. Now you know with in hindsight it seems a bit less obvious because I think after this conversation took place the narrative sort of shifted you know as it has happened in crypto on other occasions with Bitcoin going from you know being a payments mechanism to digital gold I think you know punks went from things that like people were using to represent their identity on some level to like you know the narrative the community changed the narrative to then kind of identify them as these historical artifacts right where where like you know the token was the only thing that mattered and copy right wouldn't matter but you know I started to disagreed with that stance and and you know I just thought it just does not make sense to continue to build a brand around something that I probably don't own and you know this thing is very valuable and I can use the capital for other things so you know I made I think at the time what felt like a very hard decision but I think ultimately the correct decision to to sell sell the punk and focus on other things. So after a few months after you did that and was hey for sure a bigger shock to everyone larvalabs then sold the IP to you that which then proceeded to put in a much more permissive license um a commercial license and this caused I think it's fair to say all types of mixed feelings among the punks holders and might take on it which I don't know it might be right it might be wrong I don't know my take on it was objectively the license is better it's more permissive it's more creative than it was before but what's clear but somehow the act of seeing the light the IP being sold maybe shattered some views illusions I don't know the people had previously about how larvalabs viewed the punks and even though objectively the punk owners had a better deal than they did ten minutes earlier a lot of them felt worse about how how do you say when you are someone on the outside now but what are your views on this? Yeah I mean I I think that when that happened it's sort of confirmed a lot of my fears so I mean I think the reason that there are sort of like there was a bad feeling around that is that again this sort of these brands are built by communities right like the the punks the punks IP is valuable because the community made it that way because people like g-money and me and you know lots of others kind of spent a lot of time kind of like turning our punks into characters and kind of proliferating awareness about them and then you know to see that kind of monetized by the creators without any real sort of meaningful value flowing back to the community I think that it sort of points out the kind of misalignment of incentives that was taking place there I also think and again you know I tend to be kind of like a lot more purist and kind of extreme in my views than a lot of people so you know to take this for what it's worth but like I don't think that a commercial license necessarily solves the problem yeah I don't think that I don't think the commercial license necessarily solves the problem because because I think it's the case that like no matter how permissive that license is it's the fact that it's revocable that that will cause people to not make that kind of you know deep and fundamental investment into you know building up the character or or building up the brand like I think no real serious entrepreneur is going to ever consider putting in you know five years ten years whatever it takes to like really build something meaningful when it's always the case that you know someone can pull the rug and say hey you know by the way that thing you built you know that the IP has been transferred to yet another another corporation and they don't want these things to have commercial licenses or we don't like the sort of sort of business that you're building so I think the the thing that the punk sort of received was kind of much lower in value than the thing that they saw kind of larval labs receiving based off of you know the community's hard work and that you know that that's sort of the reason that it didn't feel as good as as one might think it would intuitively yep okay that I think that parts clear and before we go to nouns which is I think the logical next step I want to take a sidetrack on something else because if we don't do it now I think I'm going to forget you want also if you asked me a year and a half ago what thoughts come to mind about you one was the pump 4156 but the other thing was that you're a very vocal ex-copy collector and just wanted to take it's kind of a side path here but take two or three minutes to share your thoughts about ex-copy you own some amazing ex-copies you own a lot of ex-copies you're a very vocal about it ex-copy also now has cc zero his work so where's the 4152 now and ex-copy yeah sure and you know I think again this this is like sort of interesting and and maybe evidence that all of this stuff is kind of mixed up together and you really have to kind of tease out the the different parts of it but like at the time I sold the punks and kept the ex-copy both punks and ex-copy were you know we're not we're not cc zero and you know my my thesis around selling the punk and keeping the ex-copy was that ex-copy was kind of more quote unquote crypto native than than larval labs and that it would probably be the case that the work would eventually become cc zero I mean also it was the case that the the the the kind of the premise of ownership was not you know based around the sort of like avatar pfp movement and people sort of like creating things around their their personas and so it seemed like you know the the commercial rights kind of mattered less for for ex-copy and and so yeah you know I I think I feel sort of validated there in the sense that you know after the sale Larva transferred the IP to Yuga and an ex-copy kind of cc zeroed all of their work so that that felt good but you know in terms of just like the the the kind of like pure value of of the ex-copy ownership you know I think in in in most fields and and I think especially early on in most fields you know you you have these these kind of like outlier performers and and it's my view that that ex-copy is is one of these kind of outliers in the context of crypto art I I think there's like a very sort of large gap between ex-copy and second place whoever that might be I don't have an opinion but you know I I think certainly like if if there's there's anyone to have like a thesis around with with respect to crypto art I think it's ex-copy I think the work I mean aesthetically it's incredible he's he's clearly you know they're clearly a master of their craft the the work itself I think is very interesting in the sense that it sort of like talks about crypto history and it kind of like references crypto history in a way that kind of like proves and proves ex-copy's crypto nativeness and and I think it's also the case that these these NFT timestamps sort of matter and and again this is a whole other kind of field or a whole other subject to get into but you know like if if if the things that sort of matter with with respect to like crypto art are kind of like timestamps and and aesthetic and provenance like ex-copy has all three kind of in in a way that that no other other artist does right like the the work is stunning the work is very very early and the work is kind of like about the movement and and kind of native to the movement in a way that almost nothing else is so I I just think it's like it's a very very obvious like if you if you have a thesis with respect to crypto art ex-copy is like the purest and highest quality way to kind of express that thesis and you know they're they're just super cool to to own and and yeah I just everything about it is just very very interesting in my opinion okay so I mean you're not going to get any objection to me about from about from me about ex-copy I agree completely with everything you said two interesting points that one of these out from there and one I think it's clear given your thesis on why owning the IP is important the pfp's really do gain value from the activity of the community whereas an ex-copy less so now it's still probably better I think in view of you but it words you're not that it is cc zero because of the derivatives will get more attention on what have you but it is less if you own a certain ex-copy you and your personal activities are likely to add less value to it than if you own a certain pfp is that a fair assessment yeah I think so like if like the and I actually I don't know for sure like it could be possible that all of this is the same thing and you know we're just talking about like very small nuances but like you know intuitively it feels like if if I set my pfp to the Mona Lisa my my activities are going to have very little impact on the Mona Lisa you I suppose you could argue to the extent that there's there's only a small handful of people in the world that know ex-copy that you know if if I set my my pfp to like this is clearly money laundering or right click save guy and you know what was like a famous character that that was kind of like you know identifying as that thing but that that actually it it could kind of operate the same way as it does in the in the pfp universe but I think maybe the distinction is that like in in the pfp universe like it doesn't really feel like anybody is sort of like competing around the same piece right like there's the reason that there's 10,000 crypto punks and there's only one right click save guy well actually not the reason that that that's true but but the the the consequence of that is that like a community of 10,000 people can form and like each one can can each individual in the community can kind of like inhabit one of the 10,000 but you know there's only one right click save guy and so and so there's like maybe an unnatural amount of competition that would emerge if everybody wanted to kind of inhabit that that identity so I don't know there there's some sort of like cultural difference I guess even if mechanically all of these things work the same way that there's like a cultural difference around the pfp's versus the the sort of canonical works of crypto art and and how people want to use them that makes perfect sense and I want to go to the timestamp issue because this is one where I think your view is what's generally believed um what I think I believe early crypto timestamps are important but let me make the opposite case for a second if I think about major art movements any of them like literally any major art will last a few hundred years nobody cares what specific date the first piece of fill in your favorite art movement right was made right I mean I don't even people maybe talk within decades they certainly I don't think talk within like days or months and the pieces that you remember the pieces that have become important often come later in an artist's career I'll take Picasso Picasso's most famous work was not as early as work as early as work is interesting historically what have you but if someone is going to pick the Picasso you could pick only one Picasso and you could put it in your museum you wouldn't go to young Picasso and take the first painting you made right how do we how do we reconcile this tour is it different with a blockchain yeah I mean I think it's different with a blockchain because because like those those artistic movements weren't kind of built on top of time stamping machines right like it it's it's it's related to the medium I think that the timestamps become more important in crypto art than in traditional art um yeah I think it's just kind of like a a fundamental property of the medium and again I'm not saying that like timestamp is the only thing that's important you know I I think there's there's probably a Venn diagram and and you know maybe maybe uh in in the context of crypto art like the timestamp circle is just like much larger than it is in in in then in traditional art um I think like one one way you can think about this that I I mean and again I don't know if this is right this is just kind of a crazy way that I think about it is like if you look at NFTs as as as as currencies right as social currencies and every artist is kind of creating their own currency you know there there is a sense in which this the kind of aggregate supply is unbounded right and and and the market will have to make decisions about um you know which which ones are valuable and which ones aren't and again like looking at the movement and looking at the culture you could you can reference something like Bitcoin which you know we all know is sort of like obsessed with this this 21 million coin limit um if if you look at NFTs I believe you know it's like only very recently um have there been kind of 21 million ERC721s created and and the number of of NFTs that are created is kind of increasing kind of exponentially with adoption and interest in the technology so you have this like very obvious kind of like um curve in in the in the NFT kind of money supply creation right that you know the the kind of hockey hockey stick shaped growth that you see in as most technologies are adopted and I think that curve makes makes like for a very interesting kind of thesis around collecting right that like in in the early history of this space um these that this currency was much more scarce and if if the timestamps matter uh like old timestamps are more scarce the new timestamps um and I just I don't think we have that sense when we think about uh think about paintings right we we don't think about like the exponential growth of like canvases over time and and that we could like track that with 100% certainty using some sort of technology but in in the context of NFTs we can do that now whether people will do that I don't know but you know at minimum it's a kind of interesting thesis to have or interesting kind of angled it to to use to think about the tech got it makes sense well I guess we will this one we just won't know until the future right we're going to have to like run the clock forward a few decades and then see see how it plays out it's compelling it's compelling but it is it will be different I think if it happens okay I agree great one one last point on that is like I mean someone could easily go and and kind of model it today right like you you there's um there's probably some sort of like multi-factorial analysis that you could use to kind of like cancel out the the sort of like the provenance and aesthetic premiums and and like just look purely at timestamp and just see if this sort of curve is intact and I mean I would argue that like they're inferior at least could be a lot of value in doing that because you could run some sort of statistical arbitrage on on timestamps you know if if if the pattern is emerging and then there are lots of kind of like outliers within the pattern interesting interesting well if someone's listening and is good at math and good at reading data from a watching there might be an interesting analysis to do there okay let's go now to nouns because I think given what has happened over the last 45 minutes we can kind of see the pathway to what nouns came from and let's start with describing your words you know what the nouns are what they're trying to accomplish or the design design decisions that you made and how that links to your thesis about what's going to work with NFTs in general or PFPs specifically yeah yeah sure happy to do that yeah so I mean you know the the kind of invention of nouns was in many ways a sort of reaction to you know all of the kind of like emergent issues that I saw with with crypto punks and you know if I remember correctly I sold for 156 after yeah kind of a while after I had already been kind of thinking about noun so you know it it wasn't necessarily that the reaction to this like came from disillusionment with punks it had been just starting to think about like you know what could could quote unquote punks 2.0 look like a while before that and and I thought you know I thought I had kind of written down some interesting features that that it might have so you know like like one of the issues that has has been kind of present all through crypto history it is is this sort of idea of fair distribution and and you know just the large extent to which kind of being in the right place at the right time has has kind of like influenced who ends up holding holding certain assets and and how how that group ends up kind of using that luck in some ways to kind of like secret on on future crypto participants so I thought well one one feature that you know this this next version of punks or you know however you want to think about it should have is that you know the distribution should happen very very slowly over time and I thought it might be really really interesting to start one of these collections with with zero kind of zero money supplies zero instances and then just have like a new one created every day forever the forever part you know if if you kind of like kind of increase the money money supply kind of slowly enough then it could just be kind of perpetually inflationary and and you know it any one over over any any kind of period of crypto history would would have in some sense like an equal opportunity to participate um so I thought that that's kind of where where one one one entity every day forever came from um then I started thinking about well like you know if if um this project is like if it if it is going to to be forever then maybe it should be um like what is the most extensive kind of what is the most extensible metaphor I can kind of come up with um to create something that that could have this kind of longevity um and that's what made me think about nouns um it's it's just so kind of not specific right you could you could you could kind of include anything in in a collection that you know it it doesn't identify itself as as punks or you know penguins like it you could just include anything at all and that might make it really fun um the next thing I thought about was was this sort of um the maybe a little bit of a lack of coordination um that existed within the punks community and then also the fact that like the whole reason that people had kind of got together to to kind of cheer these things on like that that it was mostly predicated on this idea that that the price was going up or the number was going up and you know what what might happen if um if that stopped what what would happen to kind of the culture if if the only thing to do in the community was kind of like cheer on the price bubble um so then I thought about well maybe um maybe this this sort of thing you should instantiate a doubt and then all all of the NFTs can can can act as this kind of governance tokens for controlling uh the organization uh and and then um I thought well that that actually works really well with this sort of like um perpetually inflationary money supply because in theory it would mean that um the the doubt could have this this perpetual source of funding um and and so I mean you know it I kind of wrote down all of these ideas um noodle them for a couple of weeks and then um had had this moment where I kind of composed them into a Twitter thread and just did this got check of like should I hit send or not is this something I want to build or not um and then I hit send on on you know you can look on my Twitter um and and see the I guess like the sort of de facto what like paper that I wrote down for nouns and at the end of it I said hey does anyone want to work on this um and I think it you know it was very fortunate that at that moment kind of in the history of the space um there were a lot of like really talented interesting people around that were looking for something cool to work on um and a bunch of them reached out and the rest was history over over the next few months we we built what nouns is today uh and we want we launched did on uh August 8 so in addition to one noun a day I think other interesting features of the nouns are that the money from the sales is not received by you are the team that goes into some type of treasury which we'll talk about you and the team are receiving aggregate one in every 10 nouns for a period of time the the nouns are all cc 0 in the public domain and there are no royalties right so this is quite a lot of different design decisions and in aggregate I think your logic on some of these but I'd love to hear it is that they will allow the nouns and the nouns culture or token or have you to spread further faster right is that the logic yeah that's that's right and yeah thanks for filling in those those details that I missed that that that's right um you know that I think one of the sort of central um part of my central pieces around cc 0 is is that kind of copies make originals more valuable right if like ultimately the thing that is valuable here is is the token is this kind of um thing that we can you know we can point to the blockchain and and we can prove that you know beyond a doubt this this is the original original instance of a noun um that that you you no longer need in that context to kind of um defend how an image is used or how an image is is proliferated um you know just just like we look at um something like the original Mona Lisa and it's famous because everybody knows what it is um it could be the case that you could have you know if you if you own one of the very few original nouns and everybody in the world knows what they are that that you know that might make them more valuable and so so the sort of like one of the objectives of these communities and I think you know there's lots of subtle reasons we can we can identify that they should have other objectives but one of the objectives of these communities is the sort of like cultural proliferation of the meme and and yeah a sort of set of initial conditions that let that proliferation happen as freely as possible you know that that subsidize that proliferation or or kind of set it on a trajectory to kind of happen as quickly as possible um that that might be something that kind of creates value will that creates value for for the community all right let's dig into some of these things let's say I don't own a noun right because the nouns holders how many nouns are there today uh let's see where are we today um today is uh 484 I think there's some pretty big holders right so how many how many addresses hold an noun maybe a couple hundred something like that yeah I think a number of unique holders is about 50% of the total supply I believe somewhere around there okay so let's say a couple of hundred so there's 8 million people in the world 200 out of noun for the 7.999 billion people who don't own a noun why should they go help the nouns become more valuable which is the thesis yeah sure so I mean I um I think there's a few different things to talk about here right um and and I think the the reason it's sort of like unintuitive to talk about these things is um partly because of the the kind of initial set of conventions that the NFT community has adopted um you know one one is one of those conventions is that like um NFT ownership is this kind of like one to one premise right like you have one individual and one owner right that um communities for example won't eventually own uh individual NFTs which which I think they will so I think you know it's kind of a false premise in the first place to to say that because there are only um you know 400 nouns um there can only be 400 owners I think in the very long term you know it becomes actually much more interesting than you know 8 billion nouns if if you know thousands and thousands of people are are kind of um not forced but like um kind of encouraged by the protocol to to kind of coordinate their ownership of of a single noun and to operate that vote so I think that that's one way you can think about it you know the the other way you can think about it is that um like if you look at kind of traditional traditional brands um or or sort of like traditional media properties the kind of like the ownership of the IP and um the the sort of like fandom of the IP are rarely the same thing right like every every Mickey Mouse fan is not like an owner of Disney equity right um there's there's kind of a relationship between owning the Disney equity and uh being a Mickey Mouse fan which is like there's a sense in which owning the equity kind of like seeks rent on on on the fandom um but I I think um that can be very very fluid right it's it's it's possible that people can be fans of of nouns and and fans of kind of like what the protocol gets gets up to without owning uh owning a noun it's possible that they they can kind of unlike the case of Disney they can actually just use the IP and kind of monetize it for themselves right and in that sense the IP sort of like seeks less rent on the fandom because the fans can just make their own merch and and kind of make make their own stuff um I hope in the long run you know it um the the the sort of cost of ownership um for for kind of participating um in in in ownership uh drop significantly right such such that a fan that has five dollars could own like you know point zero zero zero one percent of of a noun and and you know consequently get to participate in in kind of governance decisions around around the protocol um so you know I I think there's sort of a lot of subtleties here that um will in the long run inform the relationship between ownership and fandom and that these things are not as as kind of like vanilla as as the NFT space has has led them uh has sort of led people to believe they are so if that's the case right if people get together and buy a noun collectively does it suggest that the nouns become more like general brands less your identity right because it seems hard to me let's say ten thousand people each shipped in five bucks and we bought now three thousand two hundred and seventy two I've very early on I tried to see what it was like on the fractalization side I think I bought sixty ape tokens one of the fungapes is fractalized and I'll be honest I didn't feel the same connection as when I owned a punk directly right like one one I felt like I own an identity uh I had the sense of ownership when I owned an ERC twenty token a fungible token that was x percent of a punk ape maybe it's an investment maybe it's about investment but I didn't I said I don't have these identity feelings right and so given how few nouns there are given that you're saying people should or might collectively control them does it mean that the nouns are less apfp identity type uh NFT and something all different how should we think about that yeah I mean it's a good question I you know I think again it kind of it the I think it's there's a sense in which the early history of the NFT space is probably responsible for you know the sub-optimal experience that you had with with the ape ownership I think there are sort of much more interesting design decisions that can be made around collective ownership you know if we just wanted to brainstorm a few with with respect to nouns like you you could look at the noun that that I have right now and you could imagine that that it is sort of the the pfp or the flag for a community um but that community members would have a certain freedom to kind of interpret how they relate to that flag right so maybe everyone in the community has the same glasses but a different head or we all have the same shirts or we all use the horse head and we dress it up differently um there there's a kind of um uh it kind of experimental protocol that's being built on top of nouns right now called composables um which which kind of proposes building a kind of market marketplace uh for for traits for nouns um so that you could you could kind of apply those traits to the pfp so I think there again there's there's all sorts of room for for nuance and and for builders to to create kind of interesting experiences around collective ownership uh and I think a lot of those don't exist today so I I do think ultimately it's just very interesting to think about a noun as representing a community rather than an individual with kind of lots of room for individual expression um you know uh within the context of that community or or kind of within the context of of the noun as as the flag for the community yeah this makes sense to me and I think that is what I was trying to get up and though given the structure of nouns specifically how few there are right just not that many nouns it is one so some people some noun or g's in the future they'll be noun or g's might actually own a whole noun right is that that's going to be a thing like oh I don't know a whole noun it's like you own a whole bitcoin like that type of logic and but many of them might be like a symbol for a guild or a community something like that is that a right good way to think about them yeah I think that's right and again I think there's there's very very little correlation between like um you know whole numbers in the money supply and uh like you know the cap of possible participants within within a community um you know this idea that these things are are kind of like directly correlated I do think it's like a product of of just how early it is you can you can certainly imagine and like it's hard to imagine um creating like okay so I would ask how do you how could you if you wanted to to create like one instance of an NFT for everyone in the world you know you you can't today create a kind of PFP collection you know that that like let's eight eight billion people buy in you know nobody wants to kind of participate in a community at the moment where where you know the the money supplies that inflated um so I think I think you just have to think about like how do you how would it be possible to scale any one of these communities um um to kind of maximize participation and also just have like a sort of seen money supply and I think like the only reasonable answer is that over time people will have to kind of figure out how to divide up the money supply such that more and more people can participate okay I think I think that's clear let's talk about royalties because that is a very hot topic today and the space is divided I think um some exchanges and said look we're not going to order or honor artists royalties or we'll make it optional which I think is more or less the same thing um some I think long time crypto people say like well yeah this is obvious of course this is how it's going to end up like anything else is naive some artists saying well this is kind of ridiculous like I part of what I signed up for when I minted this piece was I'm minting it a surprise and this is the expectation this was that the royalty was part of that price it was part of the deal and then I guess there's this third point of view that it's kind of wide and top technical but it'll be kind of weird to say like hey you can do whatever we want on Ethereum but the only thing we can't do is have a royalty right I think it seems conceptually weird for permission the system right and we must have the technical issues right it's not a technical question it's kind of a philosophical question where are you on this right where are you on this topic obviously nouns do not have royalties how do you feel about royalties in general is it different for pfp is it different for one art is it anyway are they anyway doomed should people think about organizing themselves not to expect royalties what's your view yeah sure so I mean obviously it's it's a very kind of controversial topic and and maybe rightly so because people have have this idea that you know they're kind of future earning power is is kind of like wrapped up in their ability to to collect royalties so I I respect you know that the conversation gets very heated when discussing it now I try to take like a maybe like a sort of first principles approach in thinking about it and the way I think about it is that like artists or kind of NFT creators if you if you if you start from the premise that that these are are kind of social tokens right artists and and kind of creators of NFTs mentors of NFTs already just have a tremendous kind of amount of of kind of power in the relationship between artist and collector or you know mentor and owner that never existed before and that power is that that you know they have the final say in it over the money supply now I mean you can you can kind of carve out things like nouns where where we try to kind of get around that problem by by making the the sort of money supply algorithmic but you know like most of I think the most interesting conversation about royalties is around kind of individual creators right and and their relationship with royalties and so I think I think what's kind of misunderstood with respect to this topic is is just like how much power artists have with respect to the money supply right they they they can create a new piece and inflate the money supply kind of arbitrarily at any time if the thing that is being kind of purchased by collectors is provenance it doesn't matter if you know the the the pieces in the same collection as the last collection you know that if it's the artist's first token or 70 a token like none of that matters the point is that it sort of every time that that kind of creator creates new work they're they're kind of inflating the money supply of of the social token and that and that gives them just a tremendous amount of kind of leverage and and frankly earning power right that in my view means that they shouldn't also need to sort of tax the transactions that that happen within their own economy and and I think ultimately that that's sort of what what royalties are in more practical terms I think I think royalties are are just kind of make for poor incentive alignment because what what they sort of incentivize for the artist is is more volatility because every time people want to buy and sell that that artist's work that artists collects a royalty so like you know in any one of these communities the the community the the the kind of individuals that are are collecting the royalty sort of benefit from volatility and that doesn't doesn't seem like you know like a sustainable kind of long-term trajectory trajectory so no I I think like the the fact that you can just like creators can create new work and and sort of dilute the money supply at any time gives them a tremendous amount of earning power and we've already seen evidence of that right you know like some of these like X copy open editions I believe that was one of the art blocks creators recently you know made like 12 million dollars or something in a day by creating new work I just don't see the need for kind of taxing the money supply as as like an additional mechanism for for for income when it creates so many kind of undesirable effect does you're basically saying artists can monetize to additional primary sales and then what would you say to an artist that said oh look you just you mentioned X copy you mentioned Tyler Hobbs okay fine I mean I'm pretty sure under all scenarios of any scenario of the world X copy and Tyler Hobbs are of course perfectly capable of monetizing their reputation any point in time because their reputation is stellar they're the top of their field but a lot of artists struggle to make primary sales right and they're saying well maybe this doesn't apply in the same way to me how should they think about it how should they organize themselves if I mean I think in a sense what we're saying here is that like successful people make lots of money and unsuccessful people won't you know like I think like the the sort of structure I described is like kind of holds in all cases right like if you're successful at making primary sales you you would probably make a lot of royalties and if you're unsuccessful at making primary sales you probably you probably also wouldn't wouldn't make a lot of royalties I think the reality is that you know this this is the cost of producing NFTs is very low this is it is a very very competitive marketplace and and it's it's an entrepreneurial marketplace you know just like YouTube was and is just like a lot of other sorts of markets are and and you know I think it's a sad reality but the fact is that not everyone's going to make it the people that do make it if if they those people that do make it could monetize with royalties they can also monetize with with primary sales and I think they can they can do that better and if you if you can't make it with primary sales it seems very unlikely to me that royalties would help the only scenario that that this actually captures is this scenario where you like for example you create a lot of early work and then for some reason you're unable to produce additional work and people discover your early work and it becomes tremendously valuable and you sort of have have no way to kind of monetize what you did in the past I mean the way to defend against that is is sort of like keep some NFTs for yourself um that that's that's one possible solution but you know the the royalties in this case really cover just a very narrow set of circumstances that that I don't think like everyone on average should be designing for okay next perfect sense let me ask you you mentioned the word social token sometimes social currency what do you mean by that I mean I I think largely that's what NFTs are um you know they again all of this is sort of happening um in the context of of blockchains in the context of like the world kind of moving from governments having a monopoly on on money to kind of individuals and kind of entrepreneurs and communities being able to create their own currencies and I think there's a very real sense in which you know these these kind of artists one one of ones that that these are that these are kind of artists artists currencies or social currencies for individuals you know and there's lots of evidence for this right like if you look at this sort of like correlation between and of social media success and uh and kind of NFT value um you know I I think um it's kind of evidence that that what is being bought and sold in a sense is is attention and attention kind of as it relates to an individual so I do think you know that that's a reasonably good model for for looking at what is happening in the space you know we're moving from a world where you know governments create currencies that kind of look and act in like pretty boring sort of uh objects and artists are are creating currencies that look and act in much more interesting ways and there's some small level of adoption happening where people are willing to kind of use these as as stores of value and use them to transact and use them to to you know do social signaling all sorts of other things um and that that that's really to a large extent what what we're we're witnessing in the NFT space so I was having this discussion with Vincent Vandell and he had the following concern about this terminology under a nor it's very clear that if you make a piece of one of one art which a lot of what artists think they're doing right they're making one of one art this is not anything that has any regulatory implications right like it's protected by the first amendment it's obviously not a security ex copy makes a piece of digital art Vincent this is no different than someone meant to you know painting a painting and selling it no one has ever crossed their mind that these things might be securities if we start saying all other currencies there competing with other currencies or financial instruments would have you do we risk either mischaracterizing them to our detriment or people start doing things with them that then end up edging more towards the regulated financial services side of crypto and all of a sudden something that as far as I can tell should have no no regulatory implications for an artist minting a photograph right if they're doing the social currency and do I don't know what it would be something that looks more like an American security all of a sudden we get back into the world of registration and as you see it what have you is there what's your view on this yeah I mean I don't think I have a super strong view because I just don't have a lot of expertise in that domain I would like my intuition is that one like what what we call them doesn't really matter you know in the long run they either are or they're not securities financial assets what you know what whatever I mean I think you know outside of the outside of the context of like you know how regulators look at them I think that they are completely new things you know that have they have properties of many different things and that it's generally overly simplistic to think of them as you know A or B or X or Y like there are many things simultaneously and that's what makes them interesting I also think the sort of long-term trajectory of this space is probably some some sort of like revolutionary type confrontation with regulators with with governments because it just seems inevitable to me that you know that that one of the most powerful things that the technology does is it it kind of democratizes the ability to create currency and when that kind of butts up against you know the government's sort of ability to monopolize currency that it's going to be confrontational so I think that sort of confrontation is inevitable no matter what we call these things and you know we should do them the service of naming them the thing that describes them best versus kind of trying trying to be dishonest about it for for fear of of how regulators will look at them we we've already seen sort of like the negative implications of of that with respect to governments governance tokens and people being kind of intellectually dishonest about about like what what things are so I think it's just good to call them what they are okay I think that's a fair fair question let me a fair answer let me ask you this it's 20 years from now now and so right about minting now 7300 or something that's where we'll be in 20 years in your best case outcome vision of what 20 years from now the future looks like for knowledge and the picture what what does it look like yeah so I think the most interesting case for nouns in the very long term is is that they emerge as something like the first network state you know they each noun becomes a very kind of large community of its own and that you know that the nouns down the kind of organization that that glues them all together is the meta-organization you know it's it's kind of like the the UN or you know it's the body where they all kind of coordinate the activity between you know these very very large internet communities I think in that scenario you know the the treasury that that these communities have access to is quite large probably measured in the tens or hundreds of billions and that this this treasury can be used to to kind of at this time go well beyond proliferating the meme and and start being used to actually build public infrastructure to build public goods and you know we we already do this at a very small scale but you know I I think there um the optionality kind of exists within the structure for this to emerge it's it's very early and there's a lot of work that we have to do um towards that goal um and and you know as with any sort of crypto it's all very risky and novel and there's lots of things that could go go wrong on the way but I think in the case where everything goes right and in the case where you know the internet sort of continues to to become more important and blockchains kind of continue to become more important as the as the way we we govern how the world works I think it would be very very interesting if nouns or something like nouns uh emerged as as one of the key pieces of of governance infrastructure and public goods funding and that that got linked back to the world and and could do a whole bunch of good there um that that's kind of the most exciting vision I can think of for the project you had tweeted something I think a few days ago then every time someone talks about the book value of the treasury you wanted to give a million dollars the treasure away something something along those lines if and now you're saying about the treasury being for public goods how should noun holders think about the treasure is it something like it's end endowment of a not for profit and they need to be used just to promote nouns and then along with other public goods it's not and by extension it's not something say oh look we have this pile of leaflets pay ourselves a dividend is is that what was implied in that book value treat yeah I mean um I I think on on on my twitter and and just generally I'm very kind of public in in kind of working through uh these problems in my own head I I don't know that that this was any sort of definitive statement about how uh how the treasury should be used it it was really just largely how I was feeling at the moment that you know my my personal sense and again you know I'm I guess there's there's a sense in which I'm maybe a spiritual leader of the community but there's also a sense in which I can be very wrong and I'm also you know my my only kind of hard power here is the number of of noun votes that I have which is you know I'm not I'm not even close to the largest holder um and and so you know it I think in that moment I was feeling like um as a community we we had had sort of  stopped being as aggressive as we were with with funding public goods and kind of funding charitable endeavors which I think for a whole bunch of other reasons that we haven't discussed is like something that's very very important for for crypto and blockchains to do um so I I was just kind of vocalizing um you know I I guess maybe in the way I do sometimes very strongly my my opinion that um you know we we we could move back in in that direction um but you know I I think it's ultimately up to uh all all noun holders to to kind of collectively figure out what it is the project should do I think the thing that makes it interesting is that it's permissionless um and and the thing that makes it interesting is that it's it's the competing visions of of of all the owners and all of the members you know it um that that determine what the organization will do you know I I think you can really think about the kind of disbursement of the treasury as sort of like a function right and that function like the the thing it reacts to is is sort of like the overlapping area as of of all of the venn diagrams of of of of all of the owners and and what they want to do there's that space in the middle where we all agree that that this is something valuable and and and and the treasury is like a function that that executes that thing um so I I mean I think that that's probably the right way to think about it long term um and then you know I I I continued to kind of inject my opinion as opinions as as they kind of uh form okay and then I think not exactly related but sort of related you're in the process I guess it has been decided to do something that I believe to most projects would be inconceivable which is you're going to delete the discord and the logic if I understood it correctly was to to theories one theory is in time of bounds becomes super successful that official discord is going to be very powerful ground I guess I kind of what happened with bitcoin dot com and uh uh in the bitcoin area are so yeah right and so it's going to be fine our bitcoin and it's going to be fought over and maybe not in a way that aligns with the real project who gets to run that discord what views happen in that discord and then you also said something that like the mix of people who were involved for culture and development versus for financial purposes in a way the discord management is a subsidy from those involved in the culture and operations to those who are just in it for financial return how do how do we think about that and I guess the discord is going away is that is the decision been made yeah that's right so uh how Halloween October 31st will be the last last day of the quote unquote official nouns discord and again you know I think a lot of my public comments are me me trying to work through a lot of these things in in my head um I you know I I think the I think the reality is that it as as quote unquote neutral territory it already was being fought over it was being fought over in in very subtle ways but you know that I think that dynamic already did exist and and yeah I think it was just ultimately something that um again in these very nuanced ways was was kind of unhealthy for for the community and and making it a less fun and productive place to be than than it otherwise was and otherwise would be um and I think yeah the the the factors that there are already um dozens if not more um uh discussion forums where you know there's there's like very interesting and productive discussion that is taking place about nouns and those spaces have points of view and so they're not fought over right they don't they don't pretend to be neutral um and it's just a much more healthy and productive thing for the community to kind of disperse into those spaces and then ultimately for us to to kind of come back and meet on chain uh and and really have have our discussions um about the governance of the protocol in a place where um those discussions have like weight where they have meaning right where where like um in in in essence these votes um are a place where where kind of like words and actions are the same thing or or these proposals are a place where words and actions are the same thing um and that is not necessarily happening in the discord you know I think I think if you if you sort of like just looked into the discord and and tried to take the temperature in there based on on the discussion that was happening as to whether we should shut down the discord or not you know you you would have had an intuitive sense that people were kind of overwhelmingly against it but on on you know the noun owners call when when someone kind of like took the temperature of of actual owners um I think the uh uh the vote was um you know it was it was a smaller call but the the vote was like you know something like 20 to four uh in in favor of shutting it down so again this this is the way in which the uh the the supposedly neutral space can become contested right and like obviously the people that um kind of benefit the most from taking over that neutral space would be would be in favor of keeping it um and and so you you can see there's kind of hard evidence right there that that this is an unhealthy unhealthy kind of dynamic for the community so I think it's ultimately a great thing that we're shutting it down you know and I I think ultimately if if the protocol can't survive um the the the end of a single discord server then then it doesn't really deserve to survive so I you know I I think it is quite quite robust in certain ways and and we're we're already seeing just like a lot of a lot of new discords popping up and a lot of more interesting conversations happening so I I do think ultimately we'll look back and see that it was the right move okay it's taken up a lot of your time so we're gonna end with one question which is what's the question that I should have asked but didn't ask what's the thing that you'd like to close on and the thing that we we didn't cover but I should have asked that we should have covered um I'd say maybe just with with respect to the cc zero stuff like I think a lot of the conversation um always kind of revolves around ownership and licenses and you know what's right and what's wrong I think one of the thing that things that's like really frequently neglected is just like how awesome remix culture is um you know but but like certainly at the at the peak of like the NFT frenzy you know people were just doing so many cool things with punks like remixing them and all sorts of fun and interesting ways and that that remix culture uh in in the nouns community is super super strong and and people are always making just like incredible things and I think this sort of remix culture is just very very native to the internet it's just like it's it's a it's a place where people want to take things and synthesize them and and you know uh have fun with them and play with them and proliferate them so I I think maybe like the the most important reason um to be kind of bullish on on cc zero it is that you know and and if he's actually allowed this sort of remix culture to be monetized uh in in ways that are going to produce like really really fun and and refreshing and and in great culture um so I think it's it's really important not to lose sight of that uh I couldn't agree more and in some ways it's interesting and we have just not gotten the story yeah as a field the idea that a collector is willing to spend money to in effect keep artists working and then also at the same time make that art available to the global public commons seems like literally the best case outcome for the world of large right literally something that people should be very happy about and that message hasn't gotten out I mean but people who are not into the NFT space and sometimes they argue with me on twitter and I try to be helpful and they say well I mean just you don't know anything right that's just the kind of thing and kind of my view is like what are you doing if I'm happy owning a token or a piece of art that cc zero who's the victim here I mean the artist has gotten money for their work literally the rest of the planet has this art to play with and for some reason then a rich collector is the victim who's the actual victim I'm the victim I show you I'm not the victim and if I'm not the victim what's the victim of this and but people struggle it struggle with it I think and I think it doesn't mean all art should be cc zero right people should each artist should use whatever license they want but cc zero art I think does have the dynamic that in effect everyone I think is winning and I don't see who's possibly losing and so we probably agree on this is that fair yeah yeah I agree very strongly you know I think one one interesting way to frame it and and I think I have to run in a minute so I don't have time to get into it but I think the two like two of the killer apps of blockchains are NFTs and public goods and and the kind of the intersection between those things is just very very fruitful fruitful space and and I think thinking about the cc zero conversation in that context it is maybe a really nice way to think about it and and kind of leads you to to a lot of these conclusions okay well thank you again so much for your time this was excellent and look forward to seeing what happens in the mountains ecosystem as things evolve yeah thank you and really looking forward to the kind of Q&A that's a response to to this conversation so thanks again for having me this is a lot of fun hi everyone I thought that was a great session and very generously  I can stay a few minutes now post a session and answer some of your questions 4156 are you there can you hear us yeah here good morning how are you great great I am mostly going to stay out of this because I think this people want to hear from you I think some people some questions will be put here in the chat in the chat in the studio where we are and what I'd like to ask people to do is also post their questions now in the on chat and then some of the team members will try and feed them up here and I'll only intervene if we get confused otherwise I mean I think the floor is yours 4156 and there's a couple of I think fairly straightforward questions to start with and we'll see what else we got sure sorry so you want me to read the questions or you're going to you're going to curate them in the region I think you can just read them as little as you like okay sure I see two two questions here correct and I'm going to go look for more we're going to see what else is out there okay all right so I'm just going to review some talk I guess it's kind of hard to get a sense of what the feedback is but we'll give this a try okay so question 4156 is the revenue of the noun staff shared among the founders in the no so safe only or is it also shared with the community so there is there is no no so safe the nouns now is kind of an instance of compound governance so 100% of the auction proceeds when when somebody buys a noun flow into the Dow so the the founders actually receive none of that what the founders do get is every 10th noun for the first five years of the project so if you go and you watch the noun options you know when you get to noun I don't know 419 you'll notice that noun  isn't actually option just sent directly to the founders of the project and then the option skips to now 421 so 100% of the proceeds go into the Dow zero to the founders what the founders get is is every 10th noun for the first five years and after that that kind of quote unquote nounters reward is is finished the founders aren't capturing anymore sort of value from from the project and 100% of the proceeds go to the Dow 0.456 if I have a noun what are the expected utilities apart from the voting right I'm sorry this moved and the potential price upside of the noun NFT I owned if I only have one noun and I'm not selling is is is it only the voting right I get yeah so I mean I think the interesting thing about nouns is that probably unlike most other NFT projects all of the value is created by the community so so you know in essence like when you ask the question what what do I get the answer is really you know what whatever it is that you're sort of willing to contribute and and you know the the net benefit of all all the other the contributions of the of the other noun owners and and whatever one sort of collectively decides to do with the treasury you know and in in in literal terms what what you're getting is you're you're getting the NFT and the NFT lets you have one vote kind of to to help direct the treasury you know everything else by design is kind of as open as possible so you know this is really sort of bullish on the notion of NFTs as digital originals so you sort of own the provenance of of you know a real noun and an OG noun you know to the extent that you think that token on its own is valuable independent of any sort of like you know IP rights or or you know discord rights or anything else kind of conferred upon you you know and most of those things are absent what is present is you know the ability to vote to govern the DAO and and the ownership of of the the digital original okay I read a while back about nouns starting and nouns starter project for new noun style DAO's to try the experiment but with more specific goals or orientation could you elaborate on that yeah so that project is actually coming from Jacob Horn and and and Zora it's called nouns builder I believe it's launching very soon you know I think I believe they have they have a twitter that you can follow I'm not running that project or you know haven't been following it super super closely so Jacob or nouns builder would you know that they would be the people to kind of chat with about that but yeah you know I think this idea of sort of like commoditizing the you know the ability to create nounish DAO's is super interesting and you know to the extent that we've seen a lot of success with the first instance of the model I would expect that we'll see success with other instances of the model and of course the very very interesting thing is is like when all of these things are sort of networked in the long run and and able to kind of you know vote on each other's proposals call functions on each other I think that starts to get it and that that sort of like vision for you know like a governance layer of of the internet or or the metaverse or whatever you want to call it in the long run I think that's going to be super interesting that question can you show how you analyze a project I guess that's with respect to like just discovering other NFT projects and like thinking about are they valuable or not I mean I can I guess I can talk more generally about this and by the way if if that someone is out there with feedback it's still like which of these questions they want more more time spent on just let me know I feel like I'm just kind of talking into the boy gear which I'm okay with but as long as this is interesting can you show how you analyze a project right so I mean I think maybe the the way I think about things is after a lot of years kind of investing in financial markets like I think they're just kind of typically some signs that you can look for that you know something a value is being created and I think this stuff is sort of generalizable between traditional financial markets and a few projects sort of like venture capital I mean in general I would say that like one of the things that I use before committing capital or time to something is like you know am I obsessed with it I typically I'm like very very selective about things I invest in and those things are typically also things that I'm willing to spend a lot of time on personally you know so I don't know like just as a as an example like you know way back I guess several years ago now when I invested in Tesla early on you know I like had become obsessed with the company I was like I sat in my friend's Tesla I was like you know this is like being in a rocket ship you know I eventually bought one and you know like there's like a deep understanding that comes from that that sort of obsession that was true with Bitcoin and Ethereum and true for NFTs as well so it's you know it's I think personally it's less about like you know kind of scouring the internet for like something that you think nobody else has discovered yet and it's more about kind of bouncing around online until you find something that you become obsessed with and then you know you can eventually sort of you'll find natural ways to monetize it if you become obsessed with it and you know sometimes those things won't necessarily even be investible like you know if if you're like obsessed with stable diffusion right now like maybe you could build a business around it for for example so I think you know it's really about being sort of selective and then about committing your time and your capital to things that you know kind of peak your interests and where you see an awful lot of depth versus just you know hanging out and looking for the next board apes and you know throwing like 5% of your portfolio at each one of these do you think it's a good idea to use the nouns governance model but for something unrelated to nouns generative art every day forever where that treasury is used to acquire generative art yeah I think so and you know maybe I just want to spend a ton of time on this one because as it relates to the 6529 question above you know that I think we're about to see what happens when you sort of like generalize this infrastructure and you start forming communities with different kinds of objectives I would add to that like you know one of the really interesting things about the original instance of nouns it is that it's sort of that it doesn't have an objective but that like the objective is sort of driven primarily by the art and the meme and the feeling of the community so like that the objective is an emergent property I'm not sure like I think it will be interesting to see how it works when you know the the objective is kind of more explicitly stated at the outset and of course I think we're going to see a mix of these these nounish dows with with explicit and and then sort of emergent objectives okay next question you currently have a treasury of approximately 30,000 teeth accrued from more than a year what are your short and long term plans for the funds again you know I do sort of think of the dows as a function that you know bit based on the kind of interests of like the places where the interests of the down members overlap that that's kind of what the funds will be allocated for you know as as for sort of my own opinion you know I do think there's a sense in which like the the treasury is kind of misunderstood like you hear a lot of people kind of that don't know much about the project you know talk about how you know the the the funds haven't been used yet and that's like some some sort of like horrible misallocation you know or like they've been squandered or you know the sort of like kind of nonsense I think you know I do think there's a sense in which the treasury is the sort of like um it's like the the federal reserve of the nouns right like the reserve assets aren't necessarily there to be spent immediately what they're therefore is to kind of reinforce the caliber or the quality or the long term nature you know or the credibility of of of the protocol um and and you know I think yes like proposals passed that that sort of um at disperse you know a certain percentage of of those funds every month every year but you know I I think there's actually a lot of value especially sort of early on in the history of this thing um to to being pretty conservative with how the funds are used um to you know to use them in in ways that kind of run experiments and and sort of further the mission of the protocol but but really um I think there's a lot of value from um from the treasury just like sitting there at as the sort of meme and as as the sort of gold reserves of uh of the nouns ecosystem um and so in that sense I think you know it like it's more of a question of like what should we do with the treasury in in 10 years when when it's you know um in eth terms 10x larger and in via terms you know maybe a hundred or a thousand x larger you know what what what are the things that we could do at that point um that that seems like the most interesting question to me uh okay question seemed like small contradiction um between royalties view artist control long tail of supply versus provenance value early tokens matter more than trad art can you try to reconcile these okay let me think about this for a second oh I see like so it's like how should artists kind of like monetize their early work if if that's the most valuable stuff um yeah I mean that I guess that's an interesting point like um um I mean I would just say I think there's a lot of uncertainty kind of um in both those perspectives so it's kind of difficult to comment on on like what should artists do in case they overlap but I mean it is a valid point like if if if most of the the value kind of comes from early early tokens you know um how do artists sort of monetize those I mean I you know I would say it's it's less about like an individual artist early tokens and more about like the the early tokens of the NFT space I think kind of outside of those um you know very very early uh pieces um that that like you know we're minted in 2018 2019 etc like I think as you sort of move away from that era um it does become more kind of analogous to traditional art where it's about the the value of the individual piece versus like the you know the historic value of the token uh what is the best strategy for nouns in terms of fast and and widely and wide massive option in web 2 I mean again I think the best strategy for nouns is the strategy that the community kind of agrees upon right um but the interesting thing about it is that it's it's kind of like you know community created content um I will so one one of the things I was sort of uh kind of alluding to at the end of uh the conversation with 6529 um was the sort of like importance of uh public goods funding um and and kind of you know like I think I heard somebody call it I think they called it like warm crypto or warm blockchain I saw that just just one instance of that um but it seems like maybe a useful term you know um the this idea that um so okay so here's here's sort of an example right like if if if you um have right now a kind of like a CO2 negative Bitcoin right we're like every block that was mined um kind of removed CO2 from the atmosphere right I mean you can't do that but just imagine kind of um as a thought experiment that you could you know I think you would see like kind of relative to um kind of traditional sort of like environmental negative externality Bitcoin you would see like rapid adoption of of that version of Bitcoin right because because people sort of would collectively recognize that that the adoption is collectively good for the world um and and I think that sort of thinking with respect to crypto and blockchains is um probably super important and has been kind of undervalued and and under emphasized as a tool for mass adoption so I do think that this sort of like um like public goods funding as a method for proliferation and for mass adoption is pretty important because I think people need to see that this technology can be used for good and I think you know as as a kind of community um like the crypto space has really not not been created that right like the world has seen that a handful of people have gotten like absurdly wealthy um you know the the world has seen um you know that the huge sort of energy footprint approve of work but the world hasn't really seen and you know I think up to this point we have not done a great job of sort of like demonstrating the value for for people that don't necessarily own these tokens right like what what are the positive externalities that these systems can create so far they've they've sort of like hordered the profits and just it created negative externalities but I think from here if we want to see mass adoption we have to we have to create sort of positive externalities I think I'll in second I can I drink some water perhaps and I have a question but I think I heard that in exchange cannot honor royalties I presume that royalties were encoded into a smart contract and were always honored what am I missing I mean I think you probably like a someone with more kind of deep technical expertise about ethereum can answer this better than me but effectively you can you can always sort of create derivatives and sort of wrapper contracts that allow things to happen on ethereum um in in these kind of meta contracts that don't have to honor the royalties that that the original contract and has created you know it it's just like these systems are designed to be sort of like the ultimate ultimate free market infrastructure and and so it's it's very difficult in that context to to enforce a very specific sorts of constraints how well audited is your DAO smart contract um yeah so I mean audits are obviously super super important in this space um so that the the the actual um kind of governance module the infrastructure which which is you know the that's like the most critical piece of nouns is is a fork of compound uh governor bravo which itself you know has has been used for a long time and and undergone um uh you know significant audits and then all of the changes that we made to it um were audited by you know some of the best people in the space um the recent kind of V2 um of nouns that that uh was just deployed um that that um improves a upon a a couple of of the governance mechanisms uh underwent a cotorino audit um and yeah you know the the um the sort of technical nounism cells you know these are a large number of them um they're they're all kind of um very very elite developers um kind of at at at the top of the field so you know um those those smart contracts I would say are kind of as as uh well as well scrutinized as as sort of any other uh kind of critical piece of of infrastructure in this space uh do you feel there are still talented people willing to build on top of collections as they did following your nouns tweet um or the talented ones already made it and it's just as plebs left um I mean I I think that's actually a really good question especially the first half of it you know if if like I created that sort of nouns tweet today you know what what would the response be like um and and I do think this sort of like um speaks a little bit to the value of uh building and being present at in in bull markets right but like this sort of um there's the sort of like wild enthusiasm for trying new things in the context of of media all of that said um you know I I think we were very lucky um when we all got together to build nouns that we had a group of people that were not concerned with kind of instantaneous monetization um and and really like thinking um about building something for the long term um and and I think that you know that sort of um that sort of outcome is probably much more rare that during during a bull market so I think like maybe the answer is twofold like on one hand it's a lot easier to get get people together to try new stuff on the other hand it's a lot more difficult and like I think we were pretty lucky with respect to getting people that were willing to build for the long term you know like in um in kind of measurable terms that group of people probably could have you know we could have if we wanted to kind of monetize something short term in the midst of that mania you know we we probably could have made tens of millions of dollars or more um by by just you know focusing on that objective so you know we all kind of chose to to kind of leave a lot of money on the table to to try to build something interesting and kind of focused on the long term and and I think it's easier to find people that are willing to do that in a bear market than a bull market even if it is kind of more difficult to to get them all together um are there specific ways cc  artists might model their career in managed ways other than treasury for proliferation um other specific way cc 0 artists might model their career in managed ways other than a treasury for proliferation so I guess is if the question is like what are the ways that cc 0 artists can kind of like monetize their work I mean I I think the answer there is like really just native to NFTs like do you believe that selling digital originals it is valuable um I guess if if the question is more related to setting up sort of like instances like new instances of announced out with with nouns builder um I mean you know um I think that the model of kind of keeping every you know nth uh NFT for yourself um and letting all of the value flow to the treasury is probably difficult for an artist that's starting out and it's it's probably like a structure that that's more well suited suited to to kind of communities that want to do work together uh question as the supply of nouns keeps increasing is the thesis that newer minted nouns will become less valuable and the OG nouns will maintain higher value so I mean I think certainly that that's possible if if the sort of like timestamp theory is correct um you know that that said I I do think you know and it's sort of like difficult to speculate on on where the value will come from because again it it it is really community driven um but but I do think like in in the long term um the value is this sort of like combination of of provenance right like you belong to the original original instance of nouns of which there are now you know hundreds of thousands of sort of like uh copies of that organization out in the world doing doing various things um and and um and then also sort of like the you know the the membership and community value you know what what does it mean to be to have a vote kind of um in in that in that protocol um what what does it mean to sort of be able to direct that treasury uh and to have the the sort of like um status of of being being part of that uh that organization um and and you know I I do think um you know people kind of frequently look at this idea that uh the the supply is infinite and assume that that causes it to to trend to zero in a long term um you know like one one down every day is it's it's it's a very very kind of slow trickle of new supply uh it takes about 27 years to to get to the market cap of um or sorry to to get to the um the number of instances of nouns um that are like equivalent to the the total supply of pawns or board apes etc uh and and you know if if you certainly like look at the the kind of like market cap quote unquote of of those collections um you know especially yeah one second if if you look at the sort of like market caps that that those collections can can support and sort of compare it to um that they kind of current current market caping nouns um you know I I think it's like it's pretty clear that um the rate of noun production probably doesn't have that much um impact on the noun price um the price is probably much more a function of demand than supply uh on royalties and this may be a very naive question but how can artists who create one-on-one uh create one-on-ones keep their own work right I mean we create and sell one um that's very different from an addition or collection yeah I mean I I agreed uh and you know I think you know the the royalty stuff like um to me is it's still like the the correct answers there are sort of like much less obvious than um then CC zero right where it's like you know that there's there's already um kind of good infrastructure uh and and um kind of good conventions around kind of solving solving that problem um royalties I think it's probably gonna take a lot more kind of experimentation before there's a sort of like consensus model or maybe there won't ever be a consensus model like maybe every artist will kind of um do do things a little bit differently um you know I I think it's maybe like to the extent that the thing that artists are monetizing is is provenance right um I think it's it's probably less about um keeping you know 10% of every piece and more about um monetizing the provenance over the long term right so like as an example it doesn't really matter for those early ex-copies it's like you know there there are royalties on them or not because the amount of money ex-copy would make from an open addition today or you know the amount he made a year ago or whatever you know it's like orders of magnitude larger than than what the royalty would capture um so I think it really it's about kind of um monetizing the provenance like over over your career I think yeah the really tricky thing here that is I guess not yet solved with which might be interesting to think about trying to solve um at you know outside of implementing royalties is like if if you create a bunch of work early on um and then kind of stop creating work and then that early work becomes very very valuable how do you monetize that you know that that's the very specific case where the royalty makes a lot of sense um but my best guess is that there are like other more kind of like crypto native ways to solve that problem um that kind of don't come with them some of the baggage that that royalties comes with um I don't know if the question is coherent but uh do you see dows expand in the future as a possible framework to manage manage businesses in general what is this prevent what is preventing this possibility today um yeah I mean it's an interesting question um you know I I think probably just like crypto itself um there are some low hanging fruit like you know that there are some kind of obvious use cases um where dows make a lot of sense um and and like where the advantages of dows versus kind of like traditional corporations um give them a lot of a lot of leverage and like those are the natural um natural sort of spaces that they're going to occupy for a while and you know I maybe that that's just like Bitcoin and ether and and these sorts of assets as well right which is like they have these like very very obvious early use cases but in the long run we all expect that they will eventually kind of consume everything um and you know I I think the um you know the the like dap dap as as like a concept is kind of like blockchain as a concept right like um it it's sort it's a set of ideas um and and like um a sort of a set set of like abstract rules about how something can work without necessarily being a specific implementation of those things right like so it seems unlikely to me that you know like um I don't know like the nouns framework is is the best way to manage a business in general because it's just very impractical to manage like a business or a startup in a permissionless way where where you're like inviting someone you into into the business every day and and you know you you can't say whether they should be in or out like obviously that that's not not the correct uh kind of framework for for running a startup um but you know that that all of the sort of tools are there to to do this in a very efficient way and and people will probably eventually figure out how to engineer them in such a way that you know when when presented with the question of like should I should I start a uh sort of like on-chain organization you know or or should I go and kind of like set up a Delaware uh C-Corp like the answer will always be yes let's do it on-chain you know whether the sort of like decentralized autonomous part of that is is is intact um I'm not sure but certainly on-chain organizations will um will kind of eat eat everything in the long long term I would expect um yeah that so that that's the end of the questions there I I'm not sure if anyone is is out there and still listening um but just let me know if you have more questions or you want to wrap it up okay six five two nine says I think you're good let's wrap it here all right um okay look thanks a lot for uh for the questions everyone and uh hope hope you have a great day uh thank thank you uh 6529 this has been a lot of fun cheers