I have wanted to create my own “ink” on Nifty.Ink and my artistic capabilities are pretty limited. My one talent is block lettering. I also want to keep doing things to support Ukraine, so let’s raise $1,000 to donate directly to Ukraine via crypto.

I’ve minted 50 copies of Support Ukraine hand drawn by me, thingelstad.eth! You can even watch it being drawn by hitting the play button!

Each copy is $10, and I will match that and contribute $20 to Ukraine. If we sell all 50 of these, we’ll raise $1,000!

You get a cool NFT to keep, and we can do a little bit more to support Ukraine in their fight to keep their freedom! 🇺🇦

Notes

1. Nifty.Ink runs on the Gnosis blockchain. You will need to connect to it via MetaMask and you will need xDai on Gnosis to purcahse.
2. I’m gifting this image to some family members and others. For those, I will cover the full $20 donation.
3. I will send the funds to Ukraine via a different blockchain, likely Solana. I will post the transaction here as proof when completed.

I recently discovered the work of Cats Will Eat You, a Minnesota artist who has created and published a new, original piece of art every day for the last 15 years. To do anything for 15 years is incredible, but to push your creativity in this way is truly remarkable and impressive. I knew right away I wanted to own a piece in this wide ranging collection and Cats Will Eat You has been minting some of his art as an NFT. I’m now the proud owner of “ring rang rung”.

I liked the art as well as the communication metaphors embedded in it. You can also use Artivive and see the creation process. The artist also let me know that “ring rang rung” was featured in the 2022 SXSW NFT Gallery.

There are many organizations doing good work in Ukraine. I am going to maintain this list and update it as I find anything new.

The people of Ukraine need the worlds help as they struggle through the invasion of their country. Please consider helping with a financial donation to these causes. 🇺🇦

Fiat

• Ukrainian Red Cross: All funds will be used to help those in need, affected by armed conflict, blood collection, mobilization of volunteers and resources, and emergency activities.
• $1K Project: Sponsor a Ukrainian family in need.
• Samaritan’s Purse: Samaritan’s Purse has deployed an Emergency Field Hospital to Ukraine.
• International Rescue Committee: Over 3.5 million refugees have been forced to flee Ukraine. Help the IRC send vital supplies to displaced children and families.
• ProRizne Society: We support groups that will not be funded by the large agencies, informal groups without access to funding, and emerging groups that could transform into proper NGOs.
• Convoy of Hope: Whether it’s after a disaster, feeding a hungry child, or helping a parent put food on the table, Convoy of Hope is proud to deliver your kindness to those who need it most.
• Nova Ukraine: Dedicated to providing humanitarian aid to the people of Ukraine and raising awareness about Ukraine in the United States as well as in the rest of the world.
• Humanitarian Aid Account of the National Bank of Ukraine: Meant for charity contributions from Ukraine and from abroad. The Ministry of Social Policy will channel the raised funds to support Ukraine’s citizens severely affected by the war.
• Voices of Children: Providing non-stop assistance to affected children and families from all over the country, providing emergency psychological assistance, and assisting in the evacuation process.
• USA for UNHCR: UNHCR is on the ground scaling its response to provide assistance and ensure those displaced find safety in welcoming arms in this moment of crisis.
• Razom for Ukraine: Razom creates spaces where people meet, partner and work together to unlock the potential of Ukraine.
• United Help Ukraine: Help us provide medical aid and humanitarian relief to brave Ukrainians defending themselves! Stand with the people of Ukraine!
• Care.org Ukraine Crisis Fund: Give now to send lifesaving food, water, and hygiene kits to the most vulnerable in Ukraine.
• Direct Relief: Direct Relief is working with Ukraine’s Ministry of Health and other groups in the region to provide requested medical aid—from oxygen concentrators to critical care medicines—while preparing to offer longer-term aid to people displaced or affected by the war.
• World Central Kitchen: Providing meals to Ukrainian families in need.
• UNICEF: Help UNICEF deliver aid to hundreds of thousands of children in eastern Ukraine impacted by violence — and to hundreds of thousands more as UNICEF races to meet increasingly urgent needs across the country.

Verticals

• Media Lifeline Ukraine: Coalition to keep the flow of reliable information alive in and around Ukraine. We work hard to support journalists working in extreme circumstances to bring reliable information.
• Kyiv Independent: Support independent journalism in Ukraine. Choose one-time or ongoing support.
• Lifeline Ukraine: Suicide prevention support line.
• Doctors Without Borders: We have teams in Ukraine, Poland, Moldova, Hungary, Slovakia, Russia, and Belarus. We are an independent and impartial organization committed to providing medical humanitarian assistance to people affected by the war no matter who they are or where they are.

Crypto

• Donate Crypto to Ukraine: Support people in their fight for freedom.
• Aid for Ukraine: Aid for Ukraine is a collaboration between the Government of Ukraine, Everstake (a Ukraine-based web3 company), and friends from the crypto community around the world.

Thank you! 🙏

Love that Phantom Wallet is now available on iOS. Has integrated browser, support for staking accounts — just like the Chrome plugin. Can now use Solana services on the go!

Neeva recently rolled out their premium search offering. I’ve been using it as a tester for months and it was a “no brainer” to me to sign up for a year. In addition to the features I would have expected, they also offered an NFT to early Premium subscribers. What a great idea! This gives me an NFT as a keepsake to highlight my early support for private search.

Today I received my New Beginning with Neeva NFT, and it is super fun. OpenSea says there are 101 owners so far. OpenSea chose to mint the NFT on Polygon.

Thanks Neeva!

Original asset and metadata are on IPFS.

I’m so impressed with Famous Fox Federation! Today they announced that you can associate your Ethereum address with your Fox Profile on Solana.

THE FUTURE IS MULTICHAIN‼️

Famous Fox Dens now support the viewing of ETH NFTs!

Just connect your Metamask wallet and have all your ETH and SOL #NFTs visible under one gallery! 🤯

Check out the video below to see how the gallery looks like:#SolanaNFTs #ETHNFTs pic.twitter.com/iUTCCe9fpy

— Famous Fox Federation 🦊 (@FamousFoxFed) December 28, 2021

I went to my profile, signed in as thingelstad.sol with Phantom, and then connected to thingelstad.eth with MetaMask! 🤯

Now when I look at Foxesburg Geluksdal #GEL384 my Foxes are there (staked of course), all my Solana Angry Bunny Club, and my Ethereum wallet with my Divine, ENS domains, and even a POAP I migrated to Mainnet from xDai!

We make a custom jigsaw puzzle each Christmas. This year I also took my collection of Angry Bunny Club NFT’s and created a custom puzzle from it. I created a collage of the various images and ordered both of the puzzles.

I love how it came out! The Bunny images are all 3,000 x 3,000 pixels so there was plenty of resolution to work with. I wasn’t sure how difficult the puzzle would be but it turned out relatively quick to solve. All four of us did it together and finished in about 90 minutes.

I decided to make this puzzle with no specific up or down. This was partially due to the design of the Bunnies, which are all clipped at the chest. By having them go all the way around I could more easily align them all on the outer edge of the puzzle, and then have some in the middle behind the bigger ones.

This puzzle features 18 Angry Bunny Club NFTs, all are ones I hold in my wallet right now. The bunnies included are, in ascending order by ID:

Bunny #338, Bunny #393, Bunny #501, Bunny #519, Bunny #1308, Bunny #1626, Bunny #1688, Bunny #2076, Bunny #2465, Bunny #3069, Bunny #3337, Bunny #3678, Bunny #3680, Bunny #4598, Bunny #4801, Bunny #4926, Bunny #5011, and Bunny #5128.

I’m pretty sure this is the world’s first Angry Bunny Club jigsaw puzzle. 🤩

Tammy got us tickets to see the Quantum Mirror exhibit at REM5VR. We’ve been to REM5VR many times for VR games, but this Quantum Mirror is a “transcendent immersive art experience”. It was created by Adrian Stein. We weren’t real sure what to expect at all, and I was very curious.

The exhibit is limited to 6 visitors at a time, and is experienced in two settings. The first is a gallery space with digital art on the walls, and six chairs. After a moment you take a seat and take a VR experience to “upload yourself”. The VR experience was pretty cool. You didn’t walk around, more like you were on a train going through these experiences tied to the art.

Upon completion of the VR experience you then enter the Quantum Mirror. This is a room covered on all sides by mirrors, and at a variety of angles. In the center of the room are three portrait displays playing about a 10 minute loop with audio. There is no interactivity, but the reflections are very engaging. I captured a 30-second segment of the video which shows it best.

It is with a bit of surprise that I have to admit I haven’t explored digital art with any seriousness. Surprising because we have a good amount of art and appreciate it, and I’m obviously into technology, but the two haven’t intersected. This experience was cool and made me want to see more like it.

At the end of the experience you could type a message to yourself in the metaverse. This was a neat touch but lacked clarity on where it went or what happened with it. It would have been cool for that to be somewhere on the web or folded back into the experience for others to see.

Quantum Mirror had a couple of nods to crypto tech, most notably the premier digital art you could purchase also came with two NFTs. This would have been a brilliant use for a POAP token. I was really wishing I could have gotten a Quantum Mirror @ REM5VR POAP token.

Now that I have ENS setup as well as SNS setup, I ran across Namebase (HNS) recently and found it intriguing. Namebase does something that I think is really weird, it allows reservations of names at the root of the namespace. So, instead of thingelstad.com, thingelstad.eth, or thingelstad.sol you can just get plain thingelstad. They claim to say this allows it to interoperate with traditional DNS, which it sort of does, but it collapses namespace in a way that I don’t think is workable. Anyway, I decided to poke around and was really surprised.

It turns out that thingelstad was already purchased! Now, my last name is pretty uncommon so this seemed odd to me. Even stranger, it was purchased on June 29, 2020. The buy paid 0.40 HNS which is about $0.10 USD today, and only about $0.07 USD at the time of purchase. But, perhaps this is a valid purchaser. Some other Thingelstad playing around in crypto.

I decided to look for jamiethingelstad, surely that would be available. Nope! Someone just purchased jamiethingelstad as well. The auction ended on Nov 29, 2021, for 120 HNS. $30 USD! Someone seemed to think that it was worth $30 USD to buy my name?

Confused, I looked for the one other domain I typically buy, weeklything. And sure enough, someone bought weeklything on April 29, 2021 for 7 HNS. A measly $1.75 USD for that one. This one though is actively for sale, for the low price of 395 HNS, just under $100 USD. You gotta be kidding me.

These seem too focused and I wonder how these squatters identify their list of domains. I thought perhaps people watched ENS registrations and then bought available HNS tokens, but the HNS purchase of thingelstad was a full 10 months before I bought thingelstad.eth.

I’m dissapointed with Handshake/HNS because I think it sets up a bad system when you allow people to register a name for such low prices. But even with that, the person that bought my name paid a reasonable price of $30 USD for the pleasure.

I’m skeptical of this service, so I don’t plan to attempt to get any of these names. I think the way they structured the namespace is too flat to work well. But it is still annoying. 😤

I have been using Solana a good amount lately, namely for Angry Bunny Club (have 19 bunnies now). I decided to see if there was an equivalent of the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) but for Solana and found the Solana Name Service (SNS) from Bonfida. SNS is not nearly as mature as ENS, and has a whole different process for buying. You cannot just buy your preferred name, but instead have to start a 3-day auction that anyone can bid on and the winner gets it. So, I started auctions for thingelstad.sol, jamiethingelstad.sol, and weeklything.sol.

To bid on the domains you have to use FIDA tokens, not regular SOL. The minimum bid is about 2.75 FIDA, or about $20 USD. The SNS tokens are permanent so you do not have to pay a fee once you own them. And similar to ENS, they are implemented as tokens that you can send to another wallet if you want.

Getting FIDA in my wallet was much harder than I expected. There was a utility on the site that claimed to do it easily but it didn’t work. I found two exchanges that had it but they didn’t allow US citizens. Finally I found Gate.io which is a pure crypto exchange that I was able to setup an account on, transfer SOL in, buy FIDA, and get it out. Very, very painfully though.

Today the auctions ended and my 3 FIDA bids were not challenged. So, I now have three SNS tokens. The specification is still very vague on what you can do with it. When you claim the auction you have to specify how much space you want for the token. I decided to buy 7 kb of data that can be stored with each. The minimum was 1 kb and maximum was 10 kb. No idea how much I will really want. Essentially, I’m assuming my “zone file” for Solana will be smaller than 7 kb. Seems like a safe assumption. Solscan has a special tab to show my domains.

I had been thinking it would be really cool if Donor Advised Funds (DAF) were open to accepting crypto tokens as deposits. There has been a lot of wealth built up in crypto and it would be very beneficial to create simple means to move some portion of that to non-profit organizations. Shortly after this I stumbled upon Endaoment.

Endaoment describes itself as “We’re a tax-exempt Community Foundation built for decentralized finance and focused on social impact.” Endaoment is a DeFi version of a DAF like Schwab Charitable. This morning, while Ethereum gas prices were predictably low, I sat down to play with this first hand.

Setting up your Fund

I went to Endaoment and connected to my wallet. Easy enough, just like any other Web3 application. I then created my own fund. This was super simple. I needed a name, I chose Things 4 Good. Gave it a tagline. I then associated my name and address. There were no credit checks, no social security numbers, just basic contact information. After this I submitted a transaction that deployed the smart contract for my DAF.

Now I had my own contract associated with Things 4 Good, and it was time to provide an initial deposit to the fund. Endaoment requires a minimum $500 transfer so I sent in 0.15 ETH. When Endaoment receives the ETH they immediately transfer that to USD Coin (USDC). They sent me a receipt for tax purposes for the full value of the 0.15 ETH. Endaoment takes a 0.5% transaction fee, and there are some fees associated with the transactions to USDC, which are taken out after.

With that done, my DAF was fully established on the Ethereum mainnet, funded, and ready to use.

Granting Funds

Now that Things 4 Good was setup I wanted to try issuing a grant. The Internet Archive is an organization I have supported for a long time and I thought it would be a fitting organization to make a first donation to. I picked them off the list of organizations registered on Endaoment. This was fun to me, because this is also on-chain, so to send the grant you interact with the smart contract.

I appreciated this as it felt like a much different level of control than a typical DAF. We use Schwab Charitable and you make recommendations, they send checks, and you get emails saying it all happened but you can’t actually see it yourself. With Endaoment I can see my transaction and know exactly what happened when.

With very little effort I have my DAF setup on the Ethereum mainnet, funded, and already distributed a grant. This is holy crap amazing. 🤯

This seems like a powerful and needed capability as you manage your crypto assets. Plus it is an incredible example of the power of DeFi applications built on Web3 technology.

Deploying Organizations

After chatting with some of the Endaoment team on Discord they showed how you can deploy any existing 501(c)(3) organization. Any user can fund the deployment of the smart contract for that group. So I went ahead and deployed Constellation Fund and Minnestar on Endaoment.

ConstitutionDAO caught my attention right away. This DAO is forming to raise a fund to bid on one of two privately owned authentic copies of the US Constitution. Sotheby’s is holding the auction tomorrow.

The DAO started this morning with about $16M in ETH raised, and currently has $33.7M in ETH just twelve hours later via their Juicebox listing. The project was launched six days ago!

I couldn’t resist being part of this so I sent in a small amount of ETH and am waiting for the auction to claim my PEOPLE governance tokens.

What a wild idea, and all enabled largely because of the crypto stack. We’ll see what happens next! 🤞

I’ve been wanting to find an NFT project that I could be part of to learn and see first-hand what these are like. I wanted to find a project that was fun. I wanted something where the NFT appealed to me on its own. I wanted something that was affordable. I also was curious to have it not be on Ethereum, preferably Polygon or Solana. When I found the Angry Bunny Club it checked all the boxes.

The initial minting was over but Magic Eden is the official marketplace for Angry Bunny Club and there were a number of bunnies listed for 0.25 to 0.3 SOL. I got a couple, then a couple more, and now I have six. I had to get a Santa one. 🎅

Left to right: 338, 3069, 4801, 1308, 3680, and 3678. You can also see all bunnies in my wallet.

Like many NFT projects, the Angry Bunny Club is creating a number of different expereinces from these Bunnies, and then the community shares in the proceeds from those activities. They are working on some casual games that will feature the bunnies. There is also discussion of some publishing projects. 50% of the proceeds from those projects go back to Bunny owners.

They also distribute 50% of the resale fee from Bunny sales to holders on a weekly basis. This week that was 0.006 SOL for 6 bunnies. If that rate stayed the same it is 0.312 SOL a year. The purchase cost of the six Bunnies I have is 1.8 SOL. So if that stays flat that would be a 17% return. It is interesting to see these mechanics and to have an Airdrop land in your wallet each week.

Like nearly all of these projects it also has a Discord server, along with some channels that are only available to people with Bunnies in their wallet. There is a feeling of being in a club with others.

This is all learning for me. I picked this project because I think the NFTs themselves are fun, and the learning is just upside. 🐰

I just claimed my $ENS governance tokens and am now a voting member of the Ethereum Name Service DAO. I decided to not delegate my tokens at this time. My primary ENS name is thingelstad.eth.

This transition of ENS into a DAO has been incredible to watch. NiftyTable has a great writeup on it.

ENS is one of the best case studies for why people should care. The community now owns and governs a public good they use everyday that has billions of dollars in treasury.

ENS is leading by example how a decentralized entity can operate, provide real value, and be sustainable.

For comparison, this would be like going back to the early 1990’s and having the community involved in the structure of the DNS system.

This block of updates from today’s Modern Finance newsletter on recent activity around NFTs blew me away.

Here are some fun NFT stats from the last few days:

• @artblocks_io has done 5,570E ($13M) in the last 24hrs, up 401%, primarily driven by @tylerxhobbs Fidenza project
• Two CryptoPunk zombies purchased for 700 & 850 ETH ($1.72M & $2.09M). The next available zombie is 1.23KE or $3.71M. There are only 88 zombies in total
• Gary Vee buys rare CryptoPunk Ape for 1,600 ETH ($3,764,576.17 USD), this triggers a CryptoPunk buying frenzy
• I picked up a badass a 1/1 XCOPY (🏆 grail for me)

I continue to see a lot of potential for NFTs, well beyond just the collectible space. However, it seems that the collectibles are a huge deal on their own.

• Alchemy: AWS for Blockchain?
• Offchain Labs: Layer 2 scaling solution for Eth, solid.
• Veem: Payment solution using crypto underneath. Like Venmo.
• Bakkt: Digital wallet solution.
• Bitso: Over 1 million users, 15% of all assets going to Mexico.

• Staked: Solution to build yield off of DeFi ecosystem.

• Are getting into NFTs as well, undisclosed investment.

• 37% of crypto market is non-Bitcoin and non-Ethereum, up from 16%.

• Why has gold not done better? Perhaps demand is being captured by BTC.

• BTC at 233% for 11 years and has no correlation to other asset classes.

• If 3.5M people hold BTC, price is $700,000… possible in 5-10 years?

• China Ban is positive signal?

Time for another Crypto Allocation update. The last two months have seen a huge draw down in all crypto markets. Here is NYDIG Market Update on June 23, 2021 to put it into context.

The current market drawdown, the peak to trough decline, currently ranks as one of bitcoin’s toughest periods. The current decline of 55.6% is the fifth most severe, following big rallies and subsequent drawdowns in 2011, 2013 (which had two), and 2017.

So needless to say all crypto assets are down substantially in that period. Here is how my allocation looks as of today, with notes below. I’ve added some footnotes. Tokens that have no notes are ones that I have made an active decision to hold some invested amount in. Others are either included in my basket, or are tokens I hold for some utility.

* Indicates tokens that Coinbase makes a market in with a $10B market cap.
** Indicates a token that does not meet one of my criteria, meaning it is either less than $10B in market cap or is not traded on Coinbase, however I have purchased it for some other purpose.

Notes:

• Polygon: I got into Polygon with OpenSea’s announcement that they were adding it as an alternative blockchain to Ethereum for NFT sales. Polygon is a Level 2 chain with substantially lower costs, and has the very powerful benefit that you can transfer NFTs from Polygon’s Layer 2 chain to the Layer 1 Ethereum chain. I’m intrigued by the model of Ethereum as a core blockchain and specialized Layer 2 chains connected to it, and allowing fluid movement of tokens between them all.
• Solana: Solana is an incredibly performant blockchain built on Rust. It support smart contracts and you can even write them in Rust. Solana does not meet my market cap requirement however I bought my minimum to get early exposure to it and to get my wallet setup and play with it.
• Uniswap: Powerful solution to swap any token for any other token. Seems like a core component of the DeFi solution space. Meets the $10B market cap threshold.
• Polkadot: Newly listed on Coinbase and meets the $10B market cap threshold. Facilitates cross blockchain movement of tokens and data.
• ICP: Newly listed on Coinbase and met $10B threshold so added to basket. Promises to offer an amazingly performant blockchain with very good features. Worse performing token I’ve had now dropping 90%.
• Zcash: Zcash is super interesting to me because it supports multiple types of addresses including a shielded address that is more private. Zcash is one of the few that overs private transfers on its blockchain. Zcash does not meet the $10B market cap requirement.
• Tezos: I purchased Tezos just so I could buy some NFT at the REM5 for Good event.
• Bitclout: I’ve setup a profile on Bitclout, and all profiles on Bitclout hold CLOUT tokens. I also have one for the Weekly Thing. The whole ecosystem of creator coins and “diamonding” posts is pretty interesting. Bitclout can be purchased with Bitcoin, and you can sell Bitclout back to Bitcoin. The Bitclout blockchain is merge mined with Bitcoin. This does not meet the $10B market cap requirement, and it is also not traded on Coinbase.
• Basic Attention Token: BAT is the token that the Brave browser uses, and I’m intrigued by Brave and what they are doing to I added it to my basket. This does not meet the $10B market cap requirement.

Also see April 2021 and March 2021 allocations, and my approach to crypto.

REM5 for Good ran a digital art event, Simulacra Two, and in addition to other options they offered NFTs of a number of items.

I missed the real event but found out about it before it was all done and picked up four NFTs.

They used Tezos for this and minted and sold the NFTs on H=N. I wasn’t setup for that at all so I bought some XTZ on Coinbase, setup a walled on Kukai, and was then able to grab these.

Balaji Srinivasan shared these links in a tweet. I’m putting them here for reference, with a couple of my own added.

Main List

• Mastering Bitcoin 2nd Edition - Programming the Open Blockchain
• Mastering Ethereum
• Resources from a16z for Understanding Crypto
• Crypto Startup School
• Crypto Reading
• Learn to Code Blockchain DApps By Building Simple Games

Extended

• Bitcoin Block Explorer
• Ethereum Block Explorer
• DeFi Pulse
• Crypto Fees
• Open-Orgs

My adds

• Gas Now
• Filecoin Explorer
• Bitclout

On Wednesday May 12 at 5:06pm CT Elon Musk tweeted that Tesla would no longer accept Bitcoin to buy cars. The company also has $1.5B of Bitcoin on their balance sheet, reported $300M of which they’ve sold. Musks message is about the carbon footprint of Bitcoin. Odd since this isn’t new information.

Tesla & Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/YSswJmVZhP

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 12, 2021

Anyway, my commentary is not about Musk’s position but the market reaction. Immediately, as one would expect, Bitcoin dropped 10%.

BTC

Now lets talk about kids soccer. Any parent that has watched their kids play soccer knows what it looks like. There is a big group of kids chasing the ball around with no tactics or strategy. Ball is over there, run and get it.

The crypto market was all kids soccer with this. Filecoin, which has nothing in common with the Bitcoin news dropped nearly the same, with a slight time lag.

FIL

Then Cardano drops the same too. Cardano however is a massively more efficient blockchain. The fundamental argument doesn’t apply. They even told that story.

ADA

The point here is that these markets and investors are still treating all of these assets as a single thing. Only Ethereum in recent months has broken out and moves materially on its own. I put this in my approach, but I think it is really important. You need some mental model of the utility for each of these assets. That utility should drive how you value them, and how you differently value them.

I’ve been building out my approach to crypto. I shared my allocation in March and updated it this weekend.

Notes:

• I’ve been increasing Ethereum to get closer to Bitcoin.
• Bitcoin and Ethereum together are 80%.
• Increased the amount of Cardano as an additional Ethereum-like blockchain.
• Doubled Filecoin, which builds a permanence layer on IPFS.
• Added Curve DAO because of the focus on cost-efficient swapping between stablecoins.
• Added Enjin because of the focus on NFTs.

I’m sharing this as my own notes for any value they may have to others.

In my continuing exploration and learning about Ethereum I decided to setup what would be my usual entry on the Ethereum Name Service (ENS). The same way the Domain Name Service (DNS) converts names like thingelstad.com into something computers can use, ENS can convert thingelstad.eth into the wallet address I prefer for Ethereum, and other crypto as well.

ENS is a companion to DNS. Mostly it holds addresses for crypto destinations. It also can hold additional metadata like pointers to your Twitter and Github profiles, as well as your website, email address, and profile image. ENS is completely decentralized like all things on Ethereum. It is operated and governed via a series of smart contracts.

The process is super easy, as one might expect. You simply connect to your wallet. I use Rainbow for all my Ethereum dapps connections. To buy the domain name you execute a series of two transactions on the blockchain. In fact, all changes to your ENS entries are changes on the blockchain. Some of them have fees, and all of them cost Ethereum gas. After registering the domain, you have to set your resolver. The resolver is saying which contract should requesters ask for information from. Think of this as your DNS host records. You can then add any number of crypto addresses to your entry. I setup Ethereum (of course), Bitcoin, Litecoin, Cardano, and Filecoin. It is unclear to me that there is any benefit in setting up all of them, but that was the list I thought may get used.

The last step is to create a reverse entry for your wallet. That is just like your Reverse DNS entry. Doing that allows dapps to show your friendly thingelstad.eth entry instead of the address. This is another transaction.

You can see the records for thingelstad.eth, it is all setup. I also have the reverse record set. To test, Etherscan Name Lookup for thingelstad.eth works as does the reverse lookup. Nice! 🙌

It was fun to do this and another opportunity to get familiar with dapps and Ethereum. Unfortunately this type of experimentation is extremely expensive right now due to gas prices being so high. The actual costs of doing all of the above are very low, but the gas prices to execute the transactions were more than 10x the cost of the thing itself. Right now this is like buying a $10 item on eBay and spending $100 to have it shipped to you.

Lastly, the ENS service operates as a token. My address, thingelstad.eth, is a token that only I own. It is kind of neat that it now shows up in my wallet as well!

I’ve recently clarified my thinking on Bitcoin and related crypto. To be transparent, I’ve followed this for years and had plenty of opportunities to buy BTC for a few hundred dollars. It’s now over $50,000 a coin. So, based on that, you may want to stop reading now. 😊

Focusing on 3+ year horizon / Investing

First, I’m not looking to become an active trader. That isn’t my game. So I’m going to look at all crypto investments with a 3+ year horizon. I have a long view that crypto is real and will be a component of corporate and personal balance sheets over the next decade. How large of an element? More than it is now!

Only $10B instruments / Limit Risk

I’m only considering crypto that has a total market cap over $10B for at least 30 days. I’m also only considering crypto I can trade on Coinbase. Setting a value threshold limits the noise and distraction. I am sure there is positive activity below $10B, but I’m choosing to ignore that for now. Based on that limit Bitcoin (BTC) at $1.1T, Ethereum (ETH) at $233B, Litecoin (LTC) at $16.2B, Chainlink (LINK) at $15B, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) at $13.8B, and Stellar Lumens (XLM) at $11.8B are the only things I’m watching. (Market caps as of Feb 20 2021 7:00 AM CT.)

Any crypto over $10B in value is worth a nominal investment and puts it on the radar to consider more broadly.

The one exception I am making to that limit is stablecoin. I don’t know what to think of stablecoin, and I am tracking USD Coin (USDC) to learn more.

Develop a Model / Diversify

Crypto are very different, with different objectives. You can treat them as a basket for broad crypto investment and a bet on decentralized financial systems. But that is where it ends. I think you should develop a model for each one and why it is applicable for investment. My current thinking is:

Overall Allocation / Portfolio

Crypto is super volatile and risky. I like Ray Dalio’s comment.

Bitcoin looks like a long-duration option on a highly unknown future that I could put an amount of money in that I wouldn’t mind losing about 80% of.

So with that in mind, this shouldn’t be your retirement fund!

I’ve watched this for too long from the sidelines and have not participated other than some small dollars for fun. My brother-in-law Hector made a comment that resonated with me. With a handful of public companies now holding BTC on their balance sheet, others will follow suit. I’ve also had many people approach me about using BTC as a hedge on inflation.

The net of all this is that crypto has moved from experimental to maturing and I expect we will see a multi-year increase in demand.

I haven’t talked about the technology behind it all. I’m entirely confident in that component, and I use Coinbase to manage my wallet for me.

I was reading this very interesting article on Bitcoin by Jasan Calacanis and used the term “technotarian” and then defined it in a footnote as:

We made this term up to describe the “good people” of the internet who believe in the fundamental rights of individuals to be free, have free speech, fight hypocrisy and stand behind logic, technology and science over religion, political structure and tradition. These are the people who build and support things like Wikileaks, Anonymous, Linux and Wikipedia. They think that people can, and should, govern themselves. They are against external forms of control such as DRM, laws that are bought and sold by lobbyists, and religions like Scientology. They include splinter groups that enforce these ideals in the form of hacktivism, such as the takedown of the Sony Playstation Network after Sony tried to prosecute a hacker for unlocking its console.

Great term. A quick search also brought this 1995 definition of Technological Libertarianism.