Before NFT's ravaged the world
I made this subreddit quite a long time ago. I thought it was a good idea.
I handed over the reins to a Mr. JT Nichol, who is/was a Kansas based DJ. He’s still into Ethereum looking at his reddit handle u/Jtnichol.
He used to throw a celebratory backyard kansas bonfire every single time the price of ether went up a dollar after it crossed $12 USD (which he called a donut), and I’m pretty sure he coined the term “flippening” which was a desire of the Ethereum community to be the top scam over Bitcoin. It never happened, but I remember a funny website we all cheered for with an animated dolphin that would spin around in circles based on how flipped it was.
It wasn’t this one, but the dolphin is there.
I didn’t really ever make NFT’s, but it is quite funny that a small idea of mine turned into something massive. There were people buying pictures of rocks and monkeys for very large sums of money. People just went absolutely crazy for it. A great product market fit I guess, and I was just a little early.
That era was just so funny. I’m not sure how many people were even aware of what was happening. The people outside of cryptocurrency just thought it was the dumbest thing ever (and it is), but the people inside of it were also not all there (the best shareholder base is an extremely lucid or insane one).
What you see above is Ansel Lindner replying to a now deleted account of mine, where I believe I probably said something like “this is a molehill on the side of a big mountain.” But he didn’t understand what I was saying. To me, these projects losing all of these coins and people losing their wallets every day backdropped to an ever-growing pool of liquidity was indicative of something quite a bit different than what met the eye.
Let me rephrase it to a way that’s more understandable: they were completely free buyback programs and the number go up corrupted all of our institutions and moral systems to point ever growing amounts of liquidity at a shrinking lot of coin that’s a negative sum game.
The DAO hack from Slock.It was the first big free buyback.
It felt like dreaming in public markets as a venture capitalist. I was hooked. I put markets down for a short while after due to some trouble I got into, then I got fortunate with Enphase and Tesla.
Enphase was wonderful in its simplicity. You had this empty space where string inverters ceded share to microinverters. Volumes on units just exploded higher. The average upfront cost to a project went up but it was worth it. The modularization of the inverters made all of these projects more efficient, and the workflow for installation was so easy for installers to handle. It was like Lego blocks. Saved customers time and money and the ensuing wave was ferocious.
The overwhelming number of people that know me online spent a few years talking about a growing army of turtles in public. ClearPoint Neuro. At first the only people inside that thing were nutjobs. Especially after Rodrigo Benedetti with hid band of LSE appreciators rode the first wave. I was tripping out on start dust with what I was seeing in that thing. I appreciate the army of turtles for their adept speed, Joe has raised quite a farm.
I’ve spent the better part of a decade as someone running amok in smaller companies, trying to give away dreams of mine to other people.
Often they’re not comprehensible at first glance but some people I’ve known have come to fall into them and appreciate it. When you begin to shine a light through a dark tunnel like Huntington’s and appreciate what that means for a medical device company, it gets easier. A virtuous maelstrom brews inside the march of the turtle army. The part that hurts though is of the number of people I tried to help, when I began acting strange, almost no one said anything. Most people were just mean. Almost no one that even knew what I was talking about would say anything.
I’m supposed to go to Vegas in a month, but I think I’m just going to make a treasure map of a site of locations I found for an interesting software company. If you fall into that dream, you will find something big for a small company waiting for you in just a mere 5 years.