# No-coder in a coding world Thoughts on being technologically-literate but technically mute in the dev-centric Web3 ecosystem. --- I'm not a developer. The most I've contributed to briq's codebase is my lackluster JS code during the [ETH Lisbon 2021](https://devpost.com/software/briq) hackathon, with my cofounder Lancelot correcting every other line I wrote while writing his first lines of Cairo. Back at Ledger I wrote some neat Python scripts to [automate the boring stuff](https://automatetheboringstuff.com/) and can build virtually anything on [Excel](https://www.notboring.co/p/excel-never-dies). Blockchain-wise I've never written a line of Solidity, have never deployed a smart contract. But I'm a black belt in Etherscan-fu and understand what CPFP means. I consider myself *mute but technically literate*. Blockchain space has a biais towards technical discussion: you must use the fancy words and talk about the latest word salad to be *in*. I'm no stranger to that. Maybe 5% of crypto twitter has actually written a line of Solidity, but we're all pretending to be developers and act as if everyone were a developer. It's strange to be a generalist, somewhat techy person, when the narrative baseline in the ecosystem is to be a developer. After all, the Bitcoin whitepaper was published in a cypherpunk mailing list, don't all "[*Cypherpunks write code*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vM0oIEhMag)"? This tech-first approach gets the pendulum to swing full force *the other way*. Decisively non-technical people also take a good chunk of the mindspace, see NFT Twitter or DAO Twitter. I've seen friends at crypto events play a game: look at someone and "*guess if it's a dev, VC or DAO person*". More often than not, they were right. It usually comes down to the hair color (with some [hybrids](https://twitter.com/m1guelpf)). NFTs are interesting in this sense, it's the blind spot of most the early thoughts we had about blockchain. Vitalik's blog is replete with references to prediction markets, decentralized finance, harberger taxes, the whole shebang. But NFTs are usually dismissed, except when they're [soulbound](https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/01/26/soulbound.html). I have always been fascinated with NFTs, there's something about them that I couldn't quite grasp when I first heard about them. Then, during NFT summer, I went back into it and realized they were more popular, but not because of a technological breakthrough like the AMM model, but a mental-model shift. Profile pictures. NFTs as objects. Loot for god's sake. It was a real "*There is no spoon*" moment for me. There's a wide category of people who say they don't "get" NFTs and are attached to "utility". The same people may buy designer clothes or a sports jersey and not think twice about it. There's an inherent *realness* to them that left an extremely strong impression on me. That's why I'm building [briq](https://twitter.com/briqnft). As my friend Liam recently wrote: > I thought long and hard as to whether to leave crypto - and I've decided to stay, at least for the short-term. It may not be an industry that is deep in substance. But it is closer to raw reality than anything out there. Crypto takes the idea of "value", and weaponizes psychology to reify it. This is what yield farming and Nouns DAO's are all about. It's about ways of hooking people's inner programming in order to believe in something. ![](https://i.imgur.com/T7uwXj6.png) There is no jpeg. That's why I'm happy the wordcels are banding together and coming up with new terminology to explore this new field: [hardness](https://stark.mirror.xyz/n2UpRqwdf7yjuiPKVICPpGoUNeDhlWxGqjulrlpyYi0), [autonomous worlds](https://0xparc.org/blog/autonomous-worlds), [generational games](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDOoFzR3JBg), [game 2.0](https://www.guiltygyoza.xyz/2022/07/game2), [wind-up worlds](https://www.thejaymo.net/2022/05/06/wind-up-worlds/), [onchain realities](https://www.guiltygyoza.xyz/2022/04/onchain-realities), "[computers haven't happened yet]"(https://twitter.com/0x113d/status/1547625903118643200). Here's a list I made about [this](https://www.are.na/sylve-chevet/on-chain-realities-and-autonomous-worlds) if you're interested. https://twitter.com/wandcrafting/status/1557780141647863809 Yeah we're really arrogant about it as well. There is a third, secret, way. I have a lot of respect for [Polynya](https://twitter.com/apolynya/)'s enlightened takes on [scaling](https://polynya.mirror.xyz/sA0qPEbQ99HXCEXEi3BW34HXohMpLyDDM1a4AJhCF4E), [governance](https://polynya.mirror.xyz/VLLgbn3ma0Xrp-lhW62YAOrzGGst9ls0-75TdfcHTDs), [rollups](https://polynya.mirror.xyz/BxU-dKVdgE_pnlfRiZg2267Lx631rqOrfCQuUQqq3GY), even though they're while being [widly non-technical and misinformed](https://twitter.com/cobie/status/1526786429632024576). They even dare to (gasp) talk to our lord and saviour Vitalik and sometimes disagree with him! https://twitter.com/apolynya/status/1533287829408649217?s=20 Vitalik himself has been advocating for a "less hypercubes more writing & communicating" type of ethos these past years, moving away from the seminal hardcore tech gadgets. There are few examples of peeps who've made it far enough in the tech space, and left a trace with zero coding skills. [Jobs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9ZQVlgfEAc), [Bob Taylor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_(computer_scientist)). Here's a defense of being widly non-technical and misinformed. You don't need fancy tech. You don't need complicated code (well, sometimes you do). Sometimes, you just need to look at things differently.
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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
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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