Meta #38 - House of Ethereum

Seeds, Design Raid & Whatnot...

peth

Dec 03, 2020

⛓️ Chainlog 📜

This week yielded a calm-before-the-storm sort of situation 🙃

Misanth decorated the MetaMansion and we threw a Vitalik Party to celebrate the launch of ETH2!
The MetaRadio team is now fully assembled with Eowulia as the audio producer, Misanth as the video producer, kris as the post writer, defileZebra as the support writer & yours truly, as the host & editor.
New episode up on MetaRadio; Autonomous A1 - Taming Capitalism with Vinay Gupta of Mattereum.
Ben.oxmo compiled all the Chainlogs so far into a post of their own.
Penguin wrote about Achievmintry for the latest issue of the MagNFT magazine.
Nicolaslaw upgraded the XP bot that ben.oxmo built.
Discord experienced another overhaul! Channel descriptions updated and a bunch of new channels & categories added.
“Leisure” forked into Elevate & Chill Zone, “Inside MetaGame” split to Feedback Loops, “Active Raids” to Passive Raids
A whole new category called "Internal Guilds" appeared 😱
As we start gearing up for the Design Raid, Polina decides to reactivate as a documentation writer & project manager.
A bunch more people join the Patrons while others lose their Player status.
New Seeds being minted 😶

Coming up!

Platform design raid - tomorrow! 😱
more on the bottom 🙃

The post below is long overdue. As more and more non-crypto-native people start joining MetaGame, its about time we fill up some of the major gaps & help them transition into this brave new world.

Feel free to skip over!

Wait, WTF is Ethereum?

I won’t be going into merkle trees, hashes, mining & how it all fits to make up the blockchain because there are plenty of existing materials explaining this. What I want to do here is give a high level overview on the importance of this technology.

One of the main breakthroughs that Bitcoin made was to enable scarcity in the digital realm. Whereas previously, anything digital could just be copied & pasted - bitcoin couldn't.

Combined with the fact that it has no admin that can just decide to mint more coins outside the prescribed rules of the game, it made bitcoin the first global currency that isn’t issued by any nation state.

But, you know, it's still just a currency. You can send it, you can receive it, but that’s about it. Then along came a young wizard named Vitalik and basically said: “We should take this blockchain thing and make it Turing complete.”

Now we have what is basically an admin-less database, able to run any arbitrary function. This allows us to build a data infrastructure layer that isn’t controlled by any centralized entity. These so-called smart-contracts allow you to enter agreements & exchange value with strangers, resting assured they can’t screw you over.

Do you see how powerful this is?

The inability to make databases talk to each other enabled centralized middlemen such as Visa to sweep in, monopolize and start taking something like 1.5% off each transaction for being the global settlement layer between bank accounts; Paypal did the same for the online realm.

These were necessary evils; no longer necessary. Running on Ethereum, services of the future will not only be interoperable but composable. Imagine talking to your friends, ordering a new laptop & investing; all through a single interface.

You will often hear us refer to this whole space as Web3 - the next era of the internet. While the Web2 era was dominated by huge centralized service providers such as Amazon, Facebook & Uber, the promise of Web3 is the internet of decentralized peer-to-peer protocols, platforms & applications; tokenized & in the hands of their users.

"Ethereum is a game-changing technology." - Virgil Griffith

To recap:

There are no administrators in the Ethereum network.
The ledger contains a full history of all the changes that ever happened.
This allows us to have a source of truth we can be sure hasn’t been tampered with.
This single database that can’t be hijacked or coerced allows people who don’t trust each other to exchange value and build decentralized, interoperable applications & organizations

Getting Started

Tbh nowadays it’s hard to beat Ethereum.org as your go-to place for learning about Ethereum.

🤔 Understanding Ethereum

🗞️ News

👥 Communities

😮 Areas of Interest

Main areas of interest, I will not be getting too deep into those here because each deserves its own page.

Tokens

Tokens on Ethereum allow anyone to start their own cryptocurrency, except currencies are like, the least exciting possibility. Tokens can represent your stake in an organization, any physical or digital resource or an asset, like a house or a rare collectible.

dApps

dApps are decentralized applications running on Ethereum. They are basically collections of interlocking smart contracts used to deliver a product or a service that, at least in theory, doesn’t require you to trust the company behind it, and cannot be shut down or hacked.

DAOs

DAOs or decentralized autonomous organizations, are organizations running on Ethereum. The tooling around them is still crude & mainly allows management of decentralized treasuries through voting. Full post on DAOs here.

Books

The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-hackers Is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum
Mastering Ethereum: Building Smart Contracts and DApps
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

Any feedback welcome @petheth 👆

❓Quests

Already a player? Maybe do some of these 👇

🌲 Evergreen Quests:

🧠 Learn or Teach - We need more knowledge to spread! Go to the #🧠-brain-exchange channel and post “I want to learn X” or “I can teach someone Y”.

🏛️ Tread The Forums - Forums are a crucial place for curating useful information but currently still underpopulated. Go and do something about it.

🚨 Speak up! - We need more people suggesting improvements & speaking up for what sucks in MetaGame. Do that in the #🚨-issues-n-ideas channel.

💦 Water the crops - We need to plant more Seeds & water the existing plants.

📣 Shilleth - Post one of MetaGame’s articles on r/ethereum.

🙆 Diversify - We have people from all over the world. From US to Europe, to India, Asia & Australia. So, who’s missing? Women. Help bring more women to MetaGame.

💰 Donorator - Go to our Gitcoin grant and toss a coin. Don’t expect XP in return for this quest though, you know the policy, no tit for tat on Gitcoin Grants!

🏥 Help Others - Go help someone! May be a fellow metagamer or it maybe a a fellow stranger - any philantropic or ecological cause out there.

🤔 Open Roles

🛠️ Builder - Can never have enough builders, mainly looking for those familiar with working with React & Hasura, writing TypeScript & GraphQL.

📽️ Anchorman - We need someone to start recording update videos based on these newsletters & educational content for the wiki. Considering becoming a youtuber? Now is your time to shine 😉

👮 Border Control - Help filter the signups & onboard people into MetaGame.

☠️ Executioner - Help curate the membership by sending instructions to inactive members & stripping their Player role if they're not responsive.

🤗 Friendly Face - Keep an eye out on the #🍻-tavern & welcome new members.

🎊 Meetup Master - Make sure there’s going for each Community Gathering.

Interested in one of the roles? Feel free to ping me on Discord @petheth 🙃

Onwards! 🐙

The time has come!

MyMeta is nearing completion & its time to build the platform!
We invited some friends from Deep Work to facilitate a design raid on what we want on there etc.

We'll be going through all the ideas for what we want the platform to be, sorting them, prioritizing & wireframing.
So bring all of your best ideas & prepare yourself for battle!

The future will be written this Friday 😱

Come, take part in shaping it 🙃

Ping me @petheth if you want to join but can’t see the #townhall voice channel.

Friday @ 8:45am PST / 11:45am EST / 3:45pm UTC / 5:45pm CET / 9:15pm IST
- 🐙 Join us 🐙

Or Continue to MetaGame 👇

🐙 Discord 🐙 Wiki🐙 Seeds 🐙 Podcast 🐙 Raids🐙 Forums🐙

Realizing MetaGame 🐙