11:11. Make a wish. Mine was for the world to be a little less ego driven and for the universe to be a little more than a digital simulation. But damn. I told you. Now it won’t come true. So I might as well tell you the rest now too: the $20k horoscopes, infinity tweets, virtual shoes, and everything else important on the Internet.
Chad & El Prof
Markets
BITCOIN ETHEREUM CARDANO SOLANA DOGECOIN SHIBA INU TEZOS(Price changes reflect past 24 hours as of *|DATE|* @ 4:20 PM EST.)
- It was a dark day for crypto once we realized we should be buying shares of Bitcoin, not Coinbase.
Tweets you can't delete.
How can we not be HORs for a project called NFT Culture Proof? Today marks the start of the ‘participatory performance on the Blockchain’ in which crypto writers are invited to contribute to a string of text placed directly on-chain.
For those not in the know (read: me up until like three days ago) most NFTs are not actually ‘on-chain.’ This means you can’t go to the address of a cryptographic hash and find the actual image you just paid $4.4k for, only a record and random string of characters representing it. The cost to leave your immutable stamp on an actual blockchain — permanent, for as long as the human race still has power — is even more absurd than today’s Ethereum gas fees. But now, for the cost of a mere 65 MATIC, you can do just that.
The concept of the project is simple. Each day, 256 CPT tokens will be dropped, along with a prompt. Every token owner has two lines of 64 characters each to give a response. (Which, given the eternality of the whole thing, will hopefully be more thoughtful than your average tweet.) Then the responses will all be minted as NFTs, airdropped to whoever wrote it. The project will run until 5 PM PST on 12.12.21, at which point the contract will freeze and the month long conversation will end.
I gave the project a spin today myself and now my Internet epitaph / Metaverse birthname exists in the ether forever. (Pictured above for your viewing pleasure.) ~$110 might seem like a steep price to pay for 120 characters, but to a writer of my profile and ego, any sort of timelessness is invaluable… even if it is just the meta version of a particularly profound exchange written in Sharpie on a bathroom wall.
Purchase tokens, participate, or just see the Proof for yourself here.
H0R_oscopes.
With our video series in the works to relaunch next week, El Prof gives his critical eye a rest and uses the astrological (and astronomically priced) Ghxsts collection as a backdoor pilot for the newsletter we should’ve been writing all along: h0r_oscopes. Our future coverage of all things psychonautic, psychedelic, and just plain psychotic is written in the stars.
Some don't hate NFTs, others do.
Metaverse discourse is so — for lack of a better word — meta. It’s hard to keep up. Let’s all be thankful, then, that I get paid to put in the work to make it easier for you. Here’s some speed dating on what the kids these days are saying about NFTs, so you don’t have to hear it from them firsthand. (I know you hate to.)
- Nike’s joining Meta and Microsoft in the VR game. Or so say the Internet sleuths, on finding that the brand has filed trademark applications for their signature phrase and Swoosh. It’s been a second since I’ve been in school, but I guess the only thing cooler than $100 of leather clout is 24 pixels worth of it.
- Some guy who achieved vague Twitter fame for owning a CryptoPunk cried NFT burnout. Long story short, he went to NFT.NYC and found reality to be less pretty than the PFPs. A bunch of high tech gamblers and Internet celebs are teeming with insecurities? Oh my stars! But the message is pure. Spend your hard earned ETH on a therapist. Everyone could stand to benefit.
- Greg Isenberg is a self-professed ‘Reddit advisor’ (whatever the fuck that means) who thinks NFTs will forever change… the hiring process. His argument is logically sound, albeit built around the assumption that the future of proving your qualifications will be based on blockchain games. At a certain point I’d have more fun playing Madlibs than reporting these true stories.
- Discord’s CEO hinted at crypto wallet integration. Crypto skeptics threatened to boycott. Degens with a decentralization fetish mourned adoption by a Web 2.0 giant. But considering that Discord servers and the extent of DAO use cases in 2021 are one and the same, I’d say this is little more than an inevitability.
- Indonesia’s top religious council forbid Muslims from trading crypto. I find it hard to blame them. In my limited experience, the blockchain is a lot of things, but godly is absolutely not one of them.
In even less newsworthy news, here’s a tweet to sum up my feelings on the whole thing. I’m a young millennial with the soul of a grumpy old man living in a cabin in the woods. If I couldn’t handle the Poptropica economy, I’m gonna have trouble with the Metaverse. But I’m hanging in there for you.
