곱창 & Homebrew

[Also published on Cent]

It's Friday evening and I'm on my way to meet my wife at one of our favorite 곱창 houses in Chungmuro, an old neighborhood tucked inside central Seoul that used to be the equivalent of an old Korean Hollywood when it was home to the Korean film industry back in the 60's.

For those who don't know, 곱창 is the small intestine of cows and in Korea we grill it on top of cast iron skillets until the intestine casing gets golden and crispy. It pairs sublimely with soju and happiness.

Anyways, as I am riding the Seoul metro I'm listening to the latest episode of Patrick O'Shaughnessy's always excellent podcast with guest Hunter Walker. For the third time.

Hunter Walker, formerly of Second Life, Google AdSense and then YouTube before co-founding the VC house of Homebrew, is thoughtful as hell. He's blowing my mind with insights into maker platforms that seem ready made for Cent.

Like I said, Hunter was an original member of the Second Life team, a massive online world started back in the early 2000s that lets users build economies around user created digital anything.

I know it's a stretch, but as I'm listening to them talk, Cent is seeming more and more like Second Life, just instead of an economy built around primitive solid geometry, Cent is building an economy with ideas and thoughtfulness.

Anniversaries

[This post first appeared on Cent]

When I was a kid I remember always being a little confused every April when one night, late in the month, a baby sitter would come and my parents would leave on a date.

They'd tell me it was their 5th anniversary or 10th anniversary or whatever, so that meant it was a special day.

I'd nod, slowly, then furrow my brow a bit, and say ok.

But I never really got it. Why only do something special once a year?

I'm married now, and actually my own wedding anniversary is today, but I still don't get it.

Yeah, of course remembering great times gone by is important. Making sure you eek out at least one day a year to do that is probably why the tradition of marking anniversaries is around - but it's the bare minimum.

I get it though, as everyone with kids always reminds me, having kids changes everything. "Me time" let alone "couple time" basically disappears, or so I'm told. So perhaps kids really make it impossible for couples to remember what they had; save for one day a year.

To me though...that seems...like...kinda dumb, ya know?

While I don't have a kid (yet?), cherishing the ever deepening love, respect and admiration I have and feel for my wife is something I actively do every morning before we part.

We call it our morning vows. I say: "사랑해 쏘 많이. I'll love you always and forever, deeper and deeper, from the bottom to the top. Love through action. I'll over serve and out serve you with each passing day. All while achieving our plans for [insert year] and beyond." After which I take her wedding ring out of my pocket and slip it on her finger just like I did at our actual wedding.

So if wedding anniversaries are about remembering that original day, I guess everyday is our wedding anniversary. We live our love as much as we remember it.

The Golden Mean of Business

[This post first appeared on Cent]

What is a business?

There are a lot of common ways to answer a question like that.

My favorite answer, though, is from Peter Thiel in his book . 

This morning, after a funny discussion where I very poorly argued for a specific way of handling a particular type of issue, I remembered Thiel's description of what a business is.

Essentially, according to Thiel, every real businesses is a conspiracy, at the heart of which lies a secret.

You can choose to hold on to secrets so that nobody finds out about them, or you can tell the whole world. The golden mean between those extremes is when you only tell a select group of people, who then become your co-conspirators - that's a business.

Porn

[This post appeared first on Cent]

So I had a bit of a long night last evening and a busy morning until now, so my daily post (which I want to ideally send out before I pass out every night) is a bit late.

But I don't want to talk about the after work cocktails I grabbed with colleagues last night, or the secret plan I am cooking up with a few Centians or even the entertaining call I had with @Joel until nearly 12am. Instead I want to talk about porn.

By now I am sure all of you have seen - or quickly scrolled past - the NSFW post from @OneEyedKing.

Reactions poured in very quickly, and based on the replies and messages I've seen, it appears Centians are split on whether the post should be taken down or not.

What they don't seem to be split on is whether or not it's porn, or at least pornographic.

Regardless of whether or not you think that specific post is pornographic, this incident represents a super important moment for Cent. How it's handled will define the type of site Cent becomes. That's my belief at least.

So, should Cent ban posts like this? Or not?

I personally don't think posts like @OneEyedKing's should be removed. But I also understand many Centians simply don't want to see such posts.

So while the Cent team is still working on a solution, I imagine that whatever is decided will end up being a bit of a compromise.

For example, I think that adding the ability to tag a post as NSFW (similar to how users can flag posts and replies for potentially being illegal or violating Cent policies now) while also adding a NSFW switch to user accounts so that they can opt out of seeing posts that have been flagged as NSFW could satisfy both sides.

Are there any better ideas or solutions that are easy to implement that could allow porn lovers and haters to each have their cakes and eat them too?

Are there any strong arguments out there for simply banning any and all pornographic material from Cent?

Check out this week's BOTI (11/19~)

Check out this week's BOTI on Cent and get paid for sharing the best things that appeared on the internet last week.

Student of the Internet

[This post first appeared on Cent]

I first started blogging towards the end of 2009. Back then I was a new transfer student at a Korean university and had just (barely) finished my first mid-terms.

There was a lot to write about, yet very little to write about at the same time.

My writings back then were sporadic, unstructured and in constant search of a real voice.

But I kept reading. And I kept learning.

In short succession I came across three great thinkers early on during my studies in Korea that have remained enormous intellectual influences until today: Dr. Dong-sik Lee, Lewis Mumford and Martin Heidegger.

I was lucky to be able to read many of the noteworthy classics from both the Eastern and Western canons before I graduated.

Even after graduating I continued to think of myself as a student, constantly learning and in the pursuit of truth in this world. To borrow the enlightenment phrase that either Franklin or Paine used - I'm not sure which one it was - I strove to be a student of the world.

At the time, being a student of the world felt like the broadest, most open-minded perspective one could adopt.

But in the span of a few short years I have come to realize there is a much broader, universal plane of existence that has been opening up into a legit alternative world.

Similar to our current world, but at the same time drastically different from it, any human that can access this new world can not only potentially connect and engage with literally everyone else on it instantaneously, but they can now program and exchange digitally native money. This new world is of course the internet.

While the internet is an extension of the physical world - it is after all grounded in it - it is not, and need not be a direct reflection of it.

Having been on Cent now for over a year, it has become crystal clear how different digital money can make the internet and how different an internet powered by digital money can be from the real world. At the same time, it has also become apparent that the impact that the internet will have on the world will continue to grow.

This is true not just in terms of increasing ecommerce levels, but in terms of defining and shaping new values and attitudes, such as thoughtfulness for example. It's my belief that the latter will have the power to transcend the digital world and impact the physical world in a profound way.

For those reasons I now want to strive to live life as a student of the internet, constantly learning and in the pursuit of truth in the digital realm and beyond.

A Communications Blackout in Seoul

[This article was first posted on Cent]

Yesterday at about 12pm an underground fire in a KT (Korea Telecom) broadband cable tunnel located in the Chungjeongno 3 ga neighborhood of Seoul effectively sent the districts of Yongsan, Seodaemun and Mapo back into the dark ages.

The broadcast signal that mobile phones, land lines, credit card readers and home internet + cable rely on was cut off sending every KT subscriber (myself included) in the effected districts into a communications blackout.

No cable. No internet. No Cent.

It's pretty amazing - not to mention disconcerting - that a single location is responsible for supplying the signal that as many as 956,000 residents depend on for, well, pretty much everything.

After food, water and shelter, internet connection is essential to being able to live and function in modern society.

For that precious connection to life and the rest of the world to be concentrated and housed within a single point of failure strikes me as incredibly poor planning.

I first learned about mesh networks a year or so ago, probably from this post about goTenna on avc.com.

Mesh networks essentially connect individual wifi routers (and mobile phones) directly, dynamically and non-hierarchically to one another in a way that provisions a localized internet where everyone within the area of connected nodes can connect to one another as well as any services set up on that network.

The fact that mesh networks do not have any single point of failure since there is no single individual owner makes it invaluable in emergency situations, since it ensures communication by anyone to anyone remains possible.

Luckily I didn't run into any great emergency today. And it gave me the perfect excuse to do as my ancestors did and grill meat over heated charcoal.

However, if a similar blackout occurs in the future I may not be so lucky. For that reason I will definitely look into what options or apps are available that could allow me to join or setup a mesh network as soon as I get my internet back.

Do any of you know of a mesh network app or service that I should check out?

Holidays Away From Home

[This article was first posted on Cent]

Another Thanksgiving spent away from home is now in the books.

To be honest, it's been years since the fourth Thursday of November became just another day on the calendar.

There's an equivalent holiday in Korea, called Chuseok (추석), which literally translated is 'autumn moon' but is usually translated as 'autumn harvest festival', that takes place at the end of September or early October depending on the lunar calendar. Sometimes people call it Korean Thanksgiving. By people, I mean me.

Despite getting a grip of time off for Chuseok, and it being one of the two major national holidays in Korea (the other being Lunar New Year), it just doesn't feel the same as the Thanksgiving I remember as a child. Probably because I never experienced Chuseok as a child.

It's amazing how values and expectations can be so arbitrary and so influenced by specific experiences. It's equally amazing how we can lose traditions and make new ones.

I guess it's kind of sad to lose a holiday that used to mean quite a lot as a kid. But as long as we remember what made those holidays special to begin with (e.g. family, friends, good eats and drinks) we can re-create those days whenever we want.

That's what I did last night with a few good mates. Good za, good brews, and good talk (about Cent!) were had in a pub in the middle of Seoul. And for that I'm thankful.

P.S. It snowed in Seoul.

Between Free & Paid Subscriptions

[This post was first published on Cent]

The ability to subscribe to something as easily as we can today is really quite amazing.

Check a box or submit your email address and click ok, then *boom* - you're subscribed.

And there are so many great, high quality things that you can subscribe to today for free.

I'm subscribed to Token Economy, NFTY, Proof of Work, Exponential View, and Benedict's Newsletter. They're all free and they're all amazing.

All the podcasts that I receive automatic updates for plus every account that I follow on Twitter and Instagram are also examples of amazingly high quality free subscriptions.

But I also pay for some great stuff too, like Stratechery, Hot Pod and The New Yorker.

While arguable, the quality between paid and free subscriptions is negligible to non-existent in my opinion.

Others hold similar or even stronger opinions than me on the matter. Check out PoW's Eric Meltzer in issue #47: "PoW will always be free (and ad free!) because there’s no way to make money from it that doesn’t make it worse."

[Side note: What's noteworthy in Eric's statement, is that one can assume he has readers who want to pay, they just don't have any way to do so.]

Those arguments aside, both ends of the subscription spectrum fall into dead alignment on one point: Their success lives and dies depending on their readership. And more specifically, the vocal, passionate minority of typically early readers and supporters.

That early readership cohort is so important to the success of any subscription offering because they carry out marketing, sales and advertising functions. For free.

While I don't want to call that arrangement intentionally exploitative, I don't think that the trade of free content (or *paid* content in the case of those word-of-mouth marketers who still have to pay) is a fair exchange of value. It's not nothing,

That's where Seeding🌱 or at least something like it comes in.

The impulse for individuals to pay for *good* quality content is real. The desire to want to support and spread the good word about your favorite new subscription is basically the story of human socio-cultural development.

It's about time to reward those early, paying and passionate followers and supporters.

Seeding more perfectly aligns the interests and incentives between creators and their early, passionate and sometimes paying readership in particular by making it possible to easily reward the latter cohort for their valuable contributions.

Seeding provides a fertile middle ground for subscriptions right between the anachronistic extremes of the old free versus paid dichotomy.

How many people hold *any* crypto?

[This post first appeared on Cent here]

People are worried about crypto. Like a lot.

If you didn't know any better, it would probably seem like crypto is just one more price drop away from hitting zero.

But like @rhyzom and I have told one another a good 4 to 5 times over the last week alone, it's still super early days for crypto.

Long-term I have a pretty firm (and optimistic) conviction about where crypto is going.

That said, I'm just like everyone else. I'm still worried. I can't help it. While I'm lucky that price hasn't been a factor that I've had to worry about since ETH broke the $15 mark in early 2017, I have one worry that I haven't been able to shake for a while. In fact it's been growing and growing...

I'm worried that no one, save for a super small minority of die hard believers, is holding any crypto. If I had any issue with anxiety, that worry would keep me up every night. I'd probably worry myself to death because of it.

This whole collective fantasy of ours, that crypto will somehow become a part of everyone's lives in a myriad of ways, is contingent on people actually holding crypto in some way, shape or form.

That's partly the reason Cent exists to begin with - to put more crypto into more pockets. And since last year nearly 75,000 micro payments have made sure users in over 160 countries have received some crypto. That's a start - a small one, to be sure, but a start nonetheless.

So, what I really want to know is how many people are holding *any* crypto. I want to see research and estimates. Especially after this latest price crash, I want to know if the total number of crypto holders experienced its own dip or not.

For anyone that's able to provide insight into what that total number of holders is, either by coming up with original analysis or finding any sort of research or convincing speculation, they will be tipped (even if they provide a reply after the bounty ends).

Many thanks in advance.

So Nice You Listen Twice

[This article was first published on Cent here]

Long-time Centians know that I'm very big on podcasts.

The daily ritual of popping my earbuds in to listen to a podcast as I'm riding the elevator down from my apartment into the metro station every morning, and then again at night after setting the sleep timer and laying down in bed are the two solid oak bookends that bracket the beginning and end of each day for me.

While it doesn't happen everyday, I find myself coming across more and more podcast episodes that I end up listening to multiple times.

To me there's nothing better than coming across a new podcast episode that makes you feel so good you want to listen to it again. And in some cases again and again.

Luckily for me I came across another one of those podcast episodes today that just so happens to be as timely as it is good.

There is no doubt that crypto is in the middle of a very strong storm of skepticism and indifference that will probably linger longer thsn we'd like.

While it's important not to delude yourself about what's actually going on in the markets right now, it's equally if not more important to continue tracking good projects and long-term visions.

And for me, at least, Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan and AngelList CEO cum crypto philosopher king Naval Ravikant are two of the best people to listen to in order to accomplish both of those aims. What's more, they happened to speak with one another on the most recent episode of Erik Torenberg's excellent Venture Stories podcast.

I highly recommend everyone check that episode out, and I hope at least a few of you will end up listening to the episode a couple times because it really is that good.

Check out this week's BOTI bounty on Cent

This week's BOTI bounty got off to a quick start.

Check it out here and reply with the best of the internet last week for a chance to earn money.

Catching the Last Leaves of Autumn

[This post was originally published on Cent here]

It might just be me getting old, but autumn, my favorite season, seems to get shorter with each passing year.

Be that as it may, every autumn I look forward to seeing the leaves changing their colors. Especially here in Seoul.

Going on slow strolls with my wife up Mt. Nam each weekend of fall, to track the slow, but sure changes of the gingko trees as their leaves turn from summer green to sun stained yellow, is a tradition I'll try to keep alive as long as I have breath to breathe.

To mark the end of autumn I have one other tradition. A 366 year old gingko tree that my wife and I call Halmonee (Korean for grandma) lives in the center of the apartment complex adjacent to mine. Before winter arrives - like literally during the last few moments of autumn - about a million golden leaves flutter down to the ground from her branches. When that time arrives, my wife and I stand beneath Halmonee and try to catch as many of the last leaves of autumn as we can.

Today was one of those days. And it was glorious.

Do any of you have any special autumn traditions?

Universal Trustworthiness (2/2)

[This post was first made on Cent here]

First of all thanks to @kwame, @Ezincrypto, @GreenGiant, @agfnzn10 and @Reol for your thought provoking replies to my previous post. You all basically helped write this post🙏

In this follow-up post I want to look at 'thoughtfulness' or the ability to act civilly and provide value, which I see as potentially becoming *the* fundamental indicator used to establish a universal standard of basic trustworthiness.

But first I want to talk about Cent. Cent has, on the whole, one of the most thoughtful groups of users around. Hacker News, as well as the commentariat at avc.com, wolfstreet.com and maybe Quilette are the only other places on the internet that I know of with majority thoughtful users.

There are way more thoughtful people out in the internets and in the real world too. They pop up from time to time on Twitter or Reddit as well as in the real world in the workplace or on the street. And then they disappear, with only the memory of their thoughtfulness left in your mind.

What is setting Cent apart from those sites and real life instances, though, is that we are aggregating those thoughtful users by way of selective rewards. Although it isn't perfect yet, thoughtful replies (when delivered in a timely manner) are nearly always rewarded while trolly spam replies from users like @Kamran are not. Importantly these thoughtful replies are rewarded based on a wise crowd of users who are constantly sorting (i.e. evaluating) replies.

I see the series of thoughtful replies that Centians are getting rewarded for as forming a pattern of universal trustworthiness. It's universal for a few reasons. First of all because the transactions linked to the rewards for thoughtful replies can be recorded in public on the Ethereum blockchain, thus potentially creating a simple, publically verifiable data set of individual trustworthiness. Secondly, this constantly updating data set could be used by other sites as a way to screen new users who haven't used their site and/or don't have a reputation yet. Thirdly, individuals would be able to carry their thoughtful reputations with them anywhere - reputation, at least in this basic but incredibly significant form, would no longer only exist in other peoples heads.

Every reward that goes to a reply becomes an objective data point signaling that the person behind the reply is a thoughtful person, or at the very least is capable of being thoughtful which is no less important. The same goes for everyone else. Overtime as the frequency of rewards as well as total earnings from thoughtful replies increases for individual users, that transaction history which can be saved to a public blockchain becomes an even more reliable signal of thoughtfulness and thus trustworthiness.

What more could anyone ask for when they are trying to make the decision to trust someone at first than an easy, reliable way to discern whether or not they're dealing with a thoughtful person or not?

Until now it's been impossible to tell, at least initially, whether or not someone is basically trustworthy. There has been no easily verifiable indicator for that. You can't quickly tell that by looking at a persons CV. Maybe their history of social media use or carrying out a reference check or two could color in some of who they are, but that is usually impractical and takes to much effort. I see Cent as potentially leading the way on creating a new paradigm for reputation (despite this never being a direct aim) because it is helping to create the basis for a universal trustworthiness in aggregating and constantly evaluating thoughtfulness.

Universal Trustworthiness (1/2)

On the company shuttle into work this morning I read this tweet from bounties.network founder Mark Beylin:

"I get somewhat confused when people are working on “reputation systems” for blockchains without specifically targeting particular activities/verticals/websites.

Reputation is ALWAYS context specific, there is no such thing as universal “trustworthiness”!!!"

And it got me thinking.

My first thought was, "Wow, that's a lot of exclamation points."

But more than that, it got me thinking about whether or not a more or less universally trustworthy generalized reputation could possibly exist.

I think it can. But before I explain why, let's take a quick look at what reputation actually is.

Reputation is kind of a funny thing. Despite any individual's reputation being predicated on a myriad array of different objective historical inputs (e.g. grades, schools/classes attendes, experience doing something somewhere, tendency to act a certain way), those inputs aren't what we call reputation.

Rather, reputation is what we call the result of someone else's evaluation of (some or all of) those objective historical inputs that are unique to any one individual .

Logically then, someone doesn't just have a (single) reputation. Instead then, any one individual has multiple reputations equal to at least the total number of people who've evaluated them.

Since there is no way for anyone to keep track of all of their reputations (let alone anyone else's), all of those reputations end up getting averaged into a sort of general reputation that is either more positive than negative according to some standard or vice versa.

So in other words, we (i.e. humanity) already rely on generalized reputation. Hmm. That's interesting.

Product Update: Cent Has Filters! (11/15)

If you’ve been on Cent long enough, you may remember the good old ‘live switch’ - a switch that was once in the bottom right of the app, and could be switched ‘on’ to display live bounties or ‘off’ to show every post.

Many of our newer users have probably seen others mention the live switch longingly, imploring the Cent team to add it back either in the Cent Telegram channel or in a post right here on Cent. But beyond that, there have been far more requests asking us to provide filters to help deal with the increasing daily influx of posts to Cent.

Users have been finding it tricky to see new posts before they get buried by even newer posts. The growing numbers of bounty hunters have been struggling to keep up with all the new bounty posts. Likewise sorting - particularly the sorting of later replies to older bounty posts - has become nearly impossible to keep track of.

We heard you guys, loud and clear — and now the answer is here.

All users should now see two new dropdowns located in the top center of the app. Clicking the left tab will give you three filters to choose from: Top, New and Live.

Top (the default setting) displays a mix of the latest and greatest bounty posts alongside posts that have received the most seed money from other users. Clicking New will show all posts (bountied or otherwise) in reverse chronological order. And finally the Live filter will display every single live bounty in reverse chronological order so the newest bounty posts are featured first.

Each of those filters can then be augmented with a time filter to only display posts made within one of four specific periods of time: Today, This Week (default, for now), This Month and All Time.

We hope these updates make browsing on Cent even easier.

Stay tuned for continued improvements over the next few weeks, and most importantly, please keep all of the amazing feedback coming.

Cent on everyone.

Digging Into Comments on Cent

[This post was first published on Cent here]

There were many reasons that got me excited about Cent early on. But more than anything my selfish desire to use Cent as a way to incentivize real interaction with my writings was probably one of the biggest reasons I got so excited.

For so long - literally months and months - I talked about writing on Cent, and now it's been more than a week since I've switched to publishing my daily musings exclusively on Cent. And it's been better than I ever imagined.

Of course the initial replies have been there - about 10~20 per post - as I'd expected, but the real magic to me has been the back and forth interaction below the replies in the comments with fellow Centians like @kwame, @geekkid, @zianzam, @egg, @fizzgig656, @vineet15 and @framore.

What's magical and exciting about those conversations can actually be summed up in one of my sorta long winded replies to @zianzam which also happened to inspire this whole post today to begin with.

Again it's probably too long and maybe not the clearest, but these daily posts are all just attempts at expressing what's top if mind for me each day. I'll keep trying to get better.

"It's been so surprising to receive seed money from other users so quickly. When I set out to publish on Cent I never expected anything other than replies actually.

But what has me most excited is the relationship between me as content creator and the consumers of or readers/repliers to my writing.

Right now my bounties are attracting people to read and engage with me, and for that they are receiving some money. But if we continue to have these exchanges everyday, after 6 months or a year that could mean that my core readers and repliers will have accumulated a non-trivial amount of money.

On top of that if I am able to earn a little more than I pay to my readers in bounties (which is not unreasonable given my current average bounty level) that could mean *we* will be able to go from zero to one in terms of creating an economically enriched collective of like minded individuals.

What could *we*, as a strong collective, be able to do with that new found economic power?

My assumption is that we'd be able to do whatever we want. Setup an irl meetup in Tokyo to discuss how to scale our operations. Fund a special interest of ours and hire an agency to further an agenda. Whatever.

The possibilities are kinda endless, but my case is just one small example. There are so many more bigger and for sure way more consequential latent collectives and interests just waiting to form.

The fact that something like that can potentially be brought together in a way that mutually strengthens everyone involved financially as well as qualitatively is just super exciting to me."

The Napster of Crypto

[This article was originally published on Cent here]

> Most of us kind of agree on the thrust of history. The key is to understand how we get there. The transition strategies are more important than understanding what the outcome state will be. ~ Sean Parker

A lot of people are on Cent because they agree that things should be different.

Social media is exploitative. Content creators should get paid more. Users likes are worth something more than free. Cryptocurrency is going to change the world.

Sorta like what Sean Parker meant by that opening quote, we all kinda agree that it would be much better if social media actually paid content creators and users, well, anything. And we all suspect that crypto will be a major key in unlocking a future where that and so much more will be possible.

But without a transition strategy, those visions and beliefs of such a future are nothing more than dreams.

Since Day 1 Cent has been focused on becoming a rocket ship towards that future, and everyone is welcome onboard. Allowing anyone from anywhere to earn crypto is *the* mission. And we won't stop until we put crypto in the pockets of every single man, woman and child on earth.

There will be a lot of other products that could serve as transition strategies though.

And thanks to the post that @Ezincrypto shared today, it looks like the crew at Volca Tech have come up with an amazing product that does just that. The linkdrop tech at Eth2.io has made sending crypto to *anyone* as simple as sending a url. No crypto wallet? No problem. The url you send that contains the ETH will trigger an automatic download of Trust Wallet.

As a way to play around with this awesome development and help demonstrate the power and possibilities of it, I've embedded some extra sexy ETH in the guise of an unassuming hyperlink hidden within an old blog post of mine. Click the right link, and the ETH is yours.

So, what transition strategy do you all think will give us that extra push into the history we're thrusting towards?

The BOTI at Six Months

I didn't know it when I posted this week's BOTI, but thanks to fellow Centian @dileep I found out today marks six months from when I first posted my Best Of The Internet bounty on beta.cent.co.

Weekly participation has been creeping up, and I receive way more comments from users than I'd have ever imagined telling me how much they enjoy and look forward to the BOTI each week.

That's so freaking cool.

Well here's to six months and hopefully 600 more.

Question: How are you keeping up with all these new posts on Cent?

[This was first published on Cent here]

Well, it looks like Seeding🌱 and the ability to post for free have really started to take off.

But now that a ton of new content is getting posted each day, I'm finding it all a bit hard to keep up with. Despite having upped my overall replies, comments, and total sorts, I still feel like I'm missing a lot.

The biggest frustration I've been experiencing is that I'll see an interesting looking title as I'm scrolling down through all the new posts, but forget to come back to it.

I'm curious how my fellow Centians are handling all these new posts (and bounties too - it looks like we're averaging around 25~30 live bounties each day)?

If you're experiencing any challanges due to the explosion in new content like I am, please describe those pain points, but more importantly please share any potential solutions you may have that we could implement to make your Cent experience even better.

Settling on a new Publishing Schedule

Will be posting everyday around 10~11pm KST starting from today.

Forging Deep Relationships Across Continents

[This article was first published on 11/9 on Cent here]

One of the many amazing attributes of the Cent team is the ability of each and every member to collaborate and stay in sync across multiple continents and opposite time zones.

At any given time, over half of the Cent team works remotely.

@max and @cameron are based in SF, but travel frequently. @pavan moves between SF/LA as well as the East Coast. I'm in Seoul. @rayma is everywhere. And @dgerm is East Coast based.

Every weekday at a fixed time, @pavan sends out a url that let's us all join a Zoom call. We use those daily calls to discuss how we can keep improving Cent, to set individual tasks in order to implement planned product improvements, and to share any updates regarding on-going tasks or issues related to Cent.

Outside of those typically hour-ish long Zoom calls, Slack keeps us all on the same page. If Zoom calls are primarily product focused, Slack is for everything else. Literally everything, from philosophical rants, to jokes, questions, clarifications, info sharing, appointment setting and customer support.

Just the other day @pavan, @rayma and I spent like 5 hours where we were each individually taking turns managing a super challenging user-related issue while simultaneously communicating with one another on Slack about it.

While the issue itself was super challenging, that's not what I want to focus on. What's most amazing to me was how, through that shared mutual experience that the three of us battled our way through, despite each of us being separated by thousands of miles of land and water, we actually became closer.

Or at least I totally feel closer with them. We've still never met face-to-face, but I'd literally go to war for them any day. And I'd say that for the rest of the team too.

The Cent team is tight af. With each passing day our bonds are getting stronger and our relationships deeper. It's just mind blowing how this is possible despite all living in different places around the world.

Pathetic vs. Dangerous

[Note: the following was first published on Cent here]

The world is a funny place. And it's full of funny people, not to mention people who are boring, important, inconsequential or pathetic.

There is another type of person too: the dangerous type.

The dangerous type is never quite as obvious as you'd expect, so you have to be extra vigilant in order to protect yourself.

Sometimes dangerous types are funny, or so they seem at first. Other times they may seem boring or inconsequential.

But often, or at least it seems like that to me, dangerous types first appear to be simply, utterly, pathetic.

You know the types. They get *super excited*. They @ all the famous people in the world. Then they @ you 40 times, in ten minutes, over two or three platforms.

Hmmm🤔

Private DMs flood in. It seems like they need help, but they don't let you help them. At all. And then they start to criticize you for not helping them.

All of a sudden you see they're trying to shame you on a public messenger channel.

The next thing you know you're put on blast for supposedly doing a poor job. But your DMs are blowing up simultaneously with them asking for help (again) as well as money. And then they start DM'ing co-workers, investors, your boss.

You'd thought they were pathetic, the zero likes and all that, but now you see they're dangerous. They're trying to get you fired.

And there is very little you can do other than continue *trying* to respond to them while keeping your cool; and praying their craziness latches on to someone else with the quickness. Hoping beyond hope that an encounter with a dangerous type doesn't happen to you again anytime soon. Sigh. At least it's Friday😅

The Magic of Cent

[Note: the following was first published on Cent here]

Cent reminds me a lot of the internet when it first appeared. It's a digital primitive that can allow for - not to mention mean - many different things to many different people.

So, what clicked for you when you were like, "Wow, Cent is crazy awesome?"

In other words, when you first heard about Cent, what future possibility got you most excited?

Decisive Moments

[Note: the following was first published on Cent here]

Habits account for 40~50% of our actions on any given day.

But there are some moments, like when your alarm goes off early in the morning and you can either pull yourself out of bed or hit snooze for an extra 20, 30 or 40 minutes of sleep, that can set you down two extraordinarily different paths.

If you force yourself to wake up and go for that run or review what you studied the night before, and you keep that up over a period of time, you will become a new you before you know it. That's pretty amazing. But if you hit the snooze button day after day? Well, let's just say your life will follow a more predictable trajectory.

In other words, decisive moments present you with two options: the choice to do something that feels immediately pleasurable, but ultimately is either not beneficial or is actually detrimental; or something that immediately feels uncomfortable but ultimately provides an outsized benefit.

While getting in the habit of waking up early in the morning to go for a run largely depends on an ungodly level of grit and determination (or genetics for a lucky few), fortunately life hacks exist that can help us adopt other equally beneficial habits quicker, so that when we're confronted with decisive moments, making those less common choices becomes easier.

For example, say you've made the decision to read more, like vineet15 recently did. Thanks to @kwame's awesome share in this week's BOTI, we now know that alternating between multiple books by reading or listening to a few chapters of one book before picking up another, and then another after that, not only makes reading feel more enjoyable, it makes you a better reader.

Thus by reading more books at once, you quickly develop a strong reading so that, when you're faced with the next decisive moment, like after coming home from work and having to choose between reading or turning on Netflix and watching three episodes of Mad Men, you can effortlessly - almost unthinkingly - start digging into a book.

If you're at all interested in this concept of decisive moments, and would like to learn more about habit setting, I highly recommend listening to this brand new episode of David Perell's North Star Podcast with guest James Clear. It's a really, really good episode.

BOTI Monday

Today is BOTI Monday on Cent where I post a bounty to incentivize users to submit tge best of the internet from last week.

The top 10 submissions receive about a dollar each, and top submissions are voted on by users who get paid for their voting (or what we call sorting) efforts.

Check out the BOTI here.

Get Passionate About Something, Early

[Note: the following was first published on Cent here]

I really liked the post fellow Centian @Arnorth24 made yesterday.

Not only was it their very first bounty post on Cent (which is super dope in its own right, cuz circular crypto economy) but it reminded me of when I first got passionate about Cent and how that eventually led to me joining the Cent Team.

A little over a year ago I came across beta.cent.co, a little known site that had launched on mainnet a few months earlier. It had just been included in a list of notable new dApps in the must-read Token Economy newsletter. I was hooked from my first visit.

For the next few months leading up to Xmas I became a Cent power user. I was posting all the time, and even used some of my earnings to attach a few bounties to posts.

And then on the plane ride back to Korea from the states on New Years Day, I penned my first blog post about Cent. It was way too long, but it was super earnest and encapsulated my passion for Cent perfectly.

After I published that article I posted a bounty seeking suggestions from fellow Centians for how @max and @cameron could improve the site. And I emailed the two co-founders. A couple times. No response.

Nonetheless I continued to use Cent and write more about it. Then one day I penned a few fictionalized pieces detailing the future I imagined Cent potentially creating for its users. I sent another email with a link to the twenty or so articles I had written about Cent by then. And this time I got a response.

After a couple of calls with the two co-founders, I was offered the chance to join the team. We threw a few numbers around before agreeing on a figure. Then after making sure I could get paid in ETH, it was official: I was now a part of the best team in crypto.

As someone with a non-technical background who works a full time job in corporate HR for a major Korean conglomerate in Seoul, the path to working for a crypto startup wasn't an obvious one. Were it not for my passion that I channeled into writing about Cent (which I still do btw - this is my 114th time writing about Cent) I never would've had this opportunity.

So @Arnorth24, I know you're looking for some potential side hustles or part-time gigs. But if my case can be any example or help to you (and anyone like you), I hope that you find something new that not a lot of people have found (yet) that you can get really passionate about it. Then you just need to pursue the hell out of it.

Cent Publication, Blogger Syndication

Yesterday marked my first time publishing on Cent.

And from here on out, I shall continue to publish first on Cent while syndicating here.

I've been publishing on Blogger since the winter of 2009 without any complaints, but also without anything noteworthy happening as well.

My publishing schedule on Cent will switch to late evening KST time, so that means I will make a placeholder post on Blogger (such as I am doing now) before noon KST each day before updating with what I publish on Cent.

I will probably continue in this way until I hit post number 365 on Blogger. Why? Because that's a boss number.

Writing on Cent is Remembering Together

[Note: get paid to comment on this post on Cent here]

> Writing is remembering.

That is my favorite all time quote from my favorite blog, Fred Wilson's avc.com.

If you aren't familiar with Fred or his writing, he is a VC or venture capitalist (hence the name of his blog, avc) and he blogs everyday.

His writing is really good. It's clear and he shares valuable insights into investing and other things using great anecdotes taken from the companies he's invested in as well as his own life.

But I don't open up avc.com every morning just for Fred's writing - or even primarily because of it - for me it's all about the discussions that take place beneath the daily articles in the comment section.

Reading through the discussions and debates that crop up beneath Fred's articles is more than a diversion or entertainment. It's more like intellectual sustenance. In a way it's almost spiritual. It's food for my soul.

But I've also found that the more I consume the hungrier I grow for more *real* conversation. I want to engage in more discussions. I want more feedback. Way more than Twitter or Medium or Facebook or even my own daily blog has been or is capable of providing.

As a non-famous normie, though, there just hasn't been a way to get that kind of real thoughtful engagement easily or consistently.

And why should anyone - not just me or you - expect others to donate their valuable time? To listen to another perspective? Or understand a different side of an argument? Or listen to a new song? Or read today's blog entry? People just don't typically do that.

But what if you let people know that they could get paid if they read, listen or think deeper *and* engage with your blog, song or argument?

In the case of my daily blog, if I were to attach a bounty to incentivize readers to engage with my writing, my writing would still be remembering for me, but it would turn into a remembering together with others. That is powerful, especially if it's applied to other ideas and content.

So that is what I plan on doing. I'll post whatever is top of mind for me each day and attach a bounty so that you can get paid for engaging below the post. Until tomorrow yall.

Seeding & Posting are now Live on Cent

Cent has finally announced Seeding🌱 & Posting.

These two functions represent the latest experiment in building innovative tools for creators on Cent.

And they have me pretty excited.

Seeding seamlessly enables creators to generate income. Users who support good content early receive rewards from follow up supporters. You can read more about Seeding in this article.

Posting allows anyone to post. It's super simple, and when combined with seeding it provides creators with one of the quickest ways to monetization. The ability to attach a bounty to a post will help creators get engaged viewers on-demand. Apply for access to Posting here.

Cent on everyone.