Wellington (Welly) Sculley’s Post

How to make Passive income with crypto

I heard a reporter discussing this venture on Bloomberg Radio this morning and couldn’t resist the temptation to have a mini-rant. The reporter was explaining why they’re not using blockchain, citing two main reasons. First, while an immutable record of livestock would be useful, there’s already a reliable source of truth in government-managed livestock records. Second, blockchain is considered “too difficult for farmers to understand.” These arguments are reasonable but also reveal a common misunderstanding about the blockchain value proposition. Yes, blockchain offers a tamper-proof and tamper-evident way to store data and can eliminate inefficiencies through smart contracts. However, these benefits are not exclusive to blockchain. Similar outcomes can be achieved with centralized or more traditional technologies. For instance, WORM drives (for those old enough to remember) have provided data immutability for decades, and modern solutions like AWS QLDB offer the same feature. For automation, we’ve had “software” since at least 1945 (ENIAC) to handle process optimization. Who knew!? Immutability and automation, while important, are not sufficient reasons to choose blockchain—at least not on their own. Blockchain emerged from a libertarian dream, a compelling vision that eventually gave rise to Bitcoin. At its core, blockchain is about decentralization, or if you prefer, disintermediation. This should be obvious, as these concepts are central to blockchain’s identity and frequently emphasized by its practitioners and ventures. Yet, upon closer inspection, genuinely decentralized projects and implementations are rare. Instead, blockchain is often shoehorned into centralized business models, which contradicts its foundational principles. I suspect Murray Roos is pursuing a centralized business model for his venture—and why shouldn’t he? This, in fact, is the real reason blockchain isn’t being used in this case. To be clear, I’m not arguing against blockchain itself. Rather, I’m highlighting how its application has been bent and twisted far from its original principles—and not in a good way. I’m also realistic enough to recognize that even in a blockchain-native world, centralized services would still play a vital role. But let’s stop forcing blockchain into centralized business models where it doesn’t belong. I still believe, but keeping the faith isn’t always easy … #blockchain

This article makes a good, if cringey, point about historical airdrops. They are often "farmed" for the airdrop token, after which the farmers dump the token. Farmers are motivated by the token payout rather than the properties of the project or network. An important factor is eligibility criteria, which unfailingly invite controversy, reward farmers, or leave organic usage out. Rather than giving up on airdrops, perhaps the way forward is to use a transparent, credibly neutral, algorithmic scoring mechanism that's predictive of future contributions to the project or network. The scoring mechanism has to be hard to attack by sybils and similar methods. Fortunately, such scoring mechanisms do exist. Historical activity on a network is predictive of future activity, by way of explainable, transparent machine learning methods like onchain pagerank. 👍 #pagerank #airdrop

From airdrops to yield farming, here’s a modest guide to the crypto terms and jargon that separate the normies from the true believers.

From airdrops to yield farming, here’s a modest guide to the crypto terms and jargon that separate the normies from the true believers.

From airdrops to yield farming, here’s a modest guide to the crypto terms and jargon that separate the normies from the true believers.

From airdrops to yield farming, here’s a modest guide to the crypto terms and jargon that separate the normies from the true believers.

From airdrops to yield farming, here’s a modest guide to the crypto terms and jargon that separate the normies from the true believers.

From airdrops to yield farming, here’s a modest guide to the crypto terms and jargon that separate the normies from the true believers.