idea dump - we had lofty ideas about which ideas would take off in blockchain. We thought the killer apps would be identity, predication markets and more aspirational stuff: turns out the killer app was tokens & NFTs - it is **still** all NFTs and tokens - we're only thinking about zk through the rosy lens of research: better for privacy-preserving tech, people should care about privacy, people - we should look at which efficiencies zk can bring about, which viral distribution mechanisms can be used - when was the last time cryptography was used for viral development? -> PGP, a little, but mostly *https* because it allowed online commerce to flourish. People gave zero fucks about e2e encryption of communication over the internet, they had *nothing* going on with the Internet, no business to be had, nothing to lose. But add e2e encryption and sunddenly Visa is interested, suddenly you can pay online, suddenly you can buy rare baseball cards dumb app ideas - P2P games that can create NFTs that can be minted onchain - local currencies & p2p payments
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Provable gods and autonomous worlds

Two trends are shaking up the gaming worlds: artificial intelligence and autonomous world. LLMs offer new ways to escape the content creation rat race by reducing the marginal cost of content creation (see ChatGPT playing Ultima Online). By leveraging the decentralization and trustlessness properties of blockchain, games can also create new affordances and live without any single centralized entity. Think of an evergreen game of "r/place" running entirely on the blockchain, that no one can turn off. Zero-knowledge proofs and validity proofs could be a third affordance, providing game builders a way to offload computation to end-clients and trust the output, obfuscate information, run trustless P2P multiplayer systems with local consensus rather than executing the game on a centralized server. We had a fun thought experiment during the Bitkraft summit that mixes all three technologies. Buckle up. Picture an autonomous world called Gaia. The game is a simulation of a planet which physics systems are running on the blockchain directly. The game is made of a few systems, such as weather, population, etc. The system ticks forward every block and different parameters of the planet evolve: temperature, number of humans, number of trees, etc. How do we make sure Gaia generates drama or sufficient "fun" for people to care about a planet simulation? (I'd argue not much, since people are already watching marbles racing but that's another topic). Let's introduce a game mechanic where players are able to decide what happens to the planet, similarly to Twitch Plays Pokémon. You'd have 100s of players competing to get an outcome they believe is interesting. Crashing an asteroid in the planet, raising the temperature by a few degrees and seeing what happens. What if we asked an AI to choose the outcome of certain functions? Let's call these AI gods. The world contract would reference a god_list that can be called upon by players. Let's say we have two competing gods. One of them is an orderly god trying to take care of the planet, and a chaotic god trying to set it on fire. Players can use the pray(god_id, amount) system to tip the scales in favour of their god to win the next theological event round.

10/16/2023
Naming system for autonomous world

Uploading file..._u2x5isr8u

10/14/2023
No-coder in a coding world

Thoughts on being technologically-literate but technically mute in the dev-centric Web3 ecosystem.

4/17/2023
Random thoughts on Account Abstraction

Hey folks, it's Sylve aka s0lness building briq on StarkNet. We're all hyped up at the prospect of higher programmability for our wallets, I thought I'd jump in and share some of what I've seen recently. The examples provided below revolve around StarkNet but could be applicable to other network supporting account abstraction. Account Abstraction, a primer On Ethereum L1 you have two entities: Externally Owned accounts (EOA) and smart contracts. EOAs are addresses on the blockchain controlled by a private key. You generate them by creating a private key and deriving a blockchain address from it. You now control the key that can sign transactions from said address. But the key is the account: you can't authorize another key to sign for a given address and you can't code custom logic on top it. Governance and spending logic have to be implemented outside of the blockchain. A smart contract is basically code held at a certain address on the blockchain. Some smart contracts are built to behave like wallets and are aptly called "smart wallets". You can be very creative with smart wallets because you don't have a unique signing key: for example, multisignature contracts like Gnosis safes allow you to define a spending quorum, ("you need signature from 2 out of 3 authorized keys to validate transactions"), and add other governance features on top of it ("this address can only spend 50 USDC per day").

1/5/2023
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