Fan letter to Dom Hoffman
Dom Hoffman's views on crypto have shaped my own more than anyone else. Here is a collection of tweets that have inspired my thinking. The hope here is that by sharing these tweets I can better articulate what I find so compelling about this space.
What Dom articulates so well is that crypto rails allow us to develop software in a totally new way that is better than the way we develop software today. (Is it 10x better though?)
A world computer
a world computer should make software creation so simple, natural, and integrated that it could 10x the number of people who create software today
This tweet doesn't really explain the why behind the world computer making software creation so simple that 10x more people could create software. I have some hypotheses though.
Making software simple to write is one thing, but I don't think something like ChatGPT is what Dom has in mind. ChatGPT makes writing software "simple" in the sense that anyone can now speak software into existence.
The word that sticks out to me is integrated. What does it mean for software to be integrated? This could potentially mean something like Dynamicland, where computing is ubiquitous and integrated into everyday life. But to me, making writing software integrated means making it easy to build what you want to build.
There are many pre-reqs for building what you want to build. Simply having the skill is not enough, and this is why LLMs are not enough. You need a few things: data, access to platforms, access to networks. This is what the world computer would give you. You have access to any and all data you want to use to build the software you want to see in the world, and you have the ability to distribute your software anywhere you want via the internet and the rails that will be built around the world computer.
For example, if I want to make an app on my iPhone for just my friends and I, Apple won't let me. I need to get the app approved on the App Store for my friends to be able to download it. Why should Apple have a say here? You should be able to own the networks and distribution.
Public domain as a protocol
this is in fact how lots of public domain already works the world of king arthur is open to all but many of its incarnations (sword in the stone, excalibur, the green knight) are still protected and yet it can still be sensible to build upon bc the protocol provides foundation
This tweet demonstrates the power of composability. Dom talks about the power of building upon existing public domain IP, because the narrative world is already built and it makes sense to build upon it.
Crucially, if the original IP is public domain, it doesn't mean the derivative works need to be too. Smart contracts make it extremely easy to encode IP rights, so it's possible we could see a proliferation of the types of composability Dom suggests here.
Software and its community
first, software -> customers then, software -> users now, software -> community soon, software <-> community
End users should be able to modify the software they use. Of course End User Programming has existed as a field for a while, but my experience in crypto was a first taste in seeing end users actually contribute back to the software they use.
The reason this was (to me) a bigger thing in crypto is because many people were contributing mods that were highly creative, or additive (think Loot), rather than something like pure OSS, where users tend to contribute software that more improves the one core project.
Games as a model for composability
i think of boomer white guy sports like golf and bowling! casual players rent from vertical provider; dedicated players who own clubs can play with them at any golf course; same game has variations - candlestick bowling, mini golf
This isn't Dom's tweet, but I really like this framing for what makes a good composable project.
Minimum viable fidelity
a term for the ongoing world building conversations around cc0, data composability, pixel art (or simple drawings) as a starting point, pfps, etc minimum viable fidelity
I like this tweet just because it demonstrates how core data composability is as a tenet of Ethereum.
Standards are the utility
erc721/erc1155 (and their equivalents on other chains) are schemas for data entitlements if you conform to these schemas you get tradability, marketplaces, and other primitives around these entitlements for free that is ultimately the "utility"
I love this one. It's suggesting that the core value of ERC20/ERC721 is the standardization of the interface. Even if you don't care about NFTs or tokens, you should appreciate that deep down all these things are packets of data that conform to a standard interface. What we get from that is what is valuable.
By sharing a standard, anyone can write software that works with the standard. In the token case, it's swaps, marketplaces, etc. As more and more software gets built on top of the standard, it becomes more and more valuable to build on top of it (to create a token). The point isn't that tokens are a good thing, it's that standardization is a good thing, and crypto paves the way.
Borrowing a marketplace
if you're building something and a secondary market makes sense for some part of it (usernames, items, rights, whatever), you can build a simple export/import flow and plug in without needing to handle the other parts depending on complexity, this can be done in days or weeks
This tweet describes a powerful example of composability. If your game requires a marketplace for items between players, you could spend weeks building one yourself, or you could turn the items into NFTs and stand on the shoulders of all of the tools that exist for trading NFTs.
NFTs are open data
"nfts are just database entries" yes, exactly nfts are open and tradable data that's the power. jpegs are just one (very) early UI on top of it
This tweet reminds me of the standards tweet above. NFTs are just packets of data. If we can decide why a packet of data might make sense in certain contexts, then it makes sense to standardize the interface and build on top of it. So far, images and art have been a somewhat popular packet of data.
Peach
peach update: it's back up for now, but will have to figure out what to do next it costs ~25k a year just to maintain, which was fine for the last few years under byte, but now that byte is sold and the parent company is winding down, we need to consider other options
I'm not sure why I screenshotted this one, perhaps because it's depressing that Peach had to shut down, and if Peach was built on web3 rails it could potentially have been a hyperstructure that lived on forever.
Thanks, Dom.