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      "permlink": "steemitboard-notify-awaldstein-20190602t185256000z",
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      "body": "Congratulations @awaldstein! You received a personal award!\n\n<table><tr><td>https://steemitimages.com/70x70/http://steemitboard.com/@awaldstein/birthday2.png</td><td>Happy Birthday! - You are on the Steem blockchain for 2 years!</td></tr></table>\n\n<sub>_You can view [your badges on your Steem Board](https://steemitboard.com/@awaldstein) and compare to others on the [Steem Ranking](http://steemitboard.com/ranking/index.php?name=awaldstein)_</sub>\n\n\n###### [Vote for @Steemitboard as a witness](https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=steemitboard&approve=1) to get one more award and increased upvotes!",
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      "author": "awaldstein",
      "permlink": "a-new-paradigm-for-crypto-philanthropy",
      "title": "A new paradigm for crypto-philanthropy",
      "body": "Little Honu, the adorable, aquatic CryptoKitty was released to the wilds of the Ethereum blockchain this past week.\n\nEnding the first-of-its-kind charity event to benefit oceans and wildlife, but as well, the beginning initial steps towards the realization of a new paradigm for community-driven, crypto-philanthropy.\n\nIt’s been heartening to watch the cycles of public support for this idea.\n\nHow for the past couple of weeks, this part kitten/part turtle conservation icon has captured the markets imagination, connecting the 250,000 member game community of the CryptoKitties marketplace with diverse conservation communities from across the globe.\n\nThis project was not only about gaming, nor just about these endangered sea creatures. Nor even just about collective giving.\n\nIt was about the innate responsibility we have as humans to take action as a community for each other, our planet and its wildlife.\n\nAnd for the first time, there is a platform on the blockchain that can tokenize intent and good will to bring these natural drives and communities together, instantiating something new and tangible in its stead.\n\nAnd amazingly, that these unique digital pieces of art can be sold and sold again, creating in future iterations of the platform, a perpetual annuity for the charities.\n\nThis is simply one of those head nodding aha moments.\n\nWhen you realize that the $25,000 bid to own Honu will provide supplies and fuel for the Sea Shepherd to keep poachers away this year’s hatching beaches, and support the legislative changes being driven by UniteBVI to protect future generations of these sea turtles.\n\nFrom art on the blockchain to continued life and preservation of wildlife in our ocean. A new continuum and a new direction for crypto-philanthropy. And a new way for all of us to economize our beliefs as responsible citizens of the world.\n\nThis is step one. A new beginning and what we hope will be a scalable platform for giving in a new way.\n\nA very special thanks and congratulations to Sean Walsh.\n\nSean is the CEO of Hyperblock Technologies Corp, founder of Redwood City Ventures, and the winner of the auction and owner of this rare CryptoKitty.\n\nHe is an early investor and visionary in the crypto-asset segment, not only with his pioneering mining-as-a-service but in his support of companies creating consumer products (like CryptoKitties) that bring the power of the blockchain to the mass market. We are honored to publicly thank Sean for his purchase and his inspiration in leading the charge towards an innovative rethinking of crypto-philanthropy.\n\nLook to upcoming innovations in this area, already in process from the partnership between CryptoKitties Kitties for Good initiative, Bill Tai and ACTAI GLOBAL, and Sir Richard Branson, Gigi Brisson and Ocean Elders.\n\nThis idea of a better world wiring together tokenized objects on the blockchain with social causes is starting to be in play.\n\nOne of the magical moments where real market demand and extensible platform capabilities come together in a new way, for a greater good.\n\nThis is what we believe has begun.",
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      "author": "awaldstein",
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      "title": "Thoughts on hacking philanthropy",
      "body": "Just about everything in our culture is in a state of forward flux today.\n\nFrom how work is being redefined and how goods are produced, to how we organize ourselves as communities to drive and support change.\n\nThere’s a shitload to worry about politically and environmentally to be certain. But there's also a lot of momentum and good will to platform, much of it within the economics of the blockchain and the capital raising possibilities of incentivized communities.\n\nMy friend Bill Tai and I have been talking about what he calls Active Philanthropy, a term I like a great deal.\n\nIt's all about hacking philanthropy as we know it today, creating a new category that includes adding crypto to the mix and reimagining how to break the black box of charitable giving.\n\nActive philanthropy weaves in a way to economize support of projects for social good into our daily lives. To incorporate things that matter to us through the very platforms we frequent and work on. Rethinking how to tokenize intent and aggregating good will into a new type of marketplace, where our beliefs and contributions raise the transactional value of our giving as the community grows.\n\nWhere the token gives back forever to its cause and with each transaction, the seller profits as well.\n\nIn simpler terms, making the act of giving a behavioral reflex where contributing is a natural and beneficial act touching our basic drives both personal and collective on a daily basis.\n\nTo be clear, in the face of a changing world, charity or philanthropy, as it is today, is broken.\n\nWhile wealth generally has increased and collective common goodwill expanded across our communities, we still raise funds the same old painful and exclusionary way. It is fraught with friction and so hard.\n\nInvariably this resides predominantly in the world of high net-worth individuals with little transparency into the projects or organizations funded. A process with no real momentum of its own, no natural rhythms and divorced from the flow of our lives, while our beliefs and desire for change certainly are not.\n\nHonu the CryptoKitty Charity Auction (now extended) is a first great step towards actualizing this idea of active philanthropy. A step driven by an incentive to be inclusionary and transparent by design.\n\nTying together adorable aquatic Honu, a proxy and CryptoAsset to raise funds, to these heartfelt projects to protect these endangered and beautiful sea turtles. And Honu, part turtle, part kitten will forever exist on the blockchain to support them and remind us of their status.\n\nThis project was designed to broaden popular appeal, bring diverse communities together and extend to the crypto world a way to support things that need and depend on us for support.\n\nIn this case, the two conservation projects: Operation Jairo , spearheaded by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in Antigua and Barbuda, and Unite BVI, in the British Virgin Islands. They will be the direct recipients of the funding raised.\n\nI don’t know as yet whether this terrific idea that arose out of an amazing partnership between CryptoKitties, ACTAI Global, and Ocean Elders is best termed Hacking Philanthropy, CryptoPhilanthropy, Blockchain Conservation, Active Philanthropy or Conservation. Some variant of these will become the name of our new Telegram channel to aggregate communities from this campaign and the others that follow.\n\nBut I do know that the blockchain is a perfect platform for this.\n\nThat a whole lot of people in the world, within the crypto space and without, will gravitate towards participating once a new way, more natural to all of us, more integrated into our lives, more democratic for everyone regardless of financial status, is here.\n\nThat is what we are about in this initiative. Setting the seeds for change while making a tangible contribution to projects that depend on us for support.\n\nIf you are in a position to bid on Honu, help reinvent philanthropy, and make a smart, tax deductible investment,  at the same time, a big thanks!\n\nTo everyone, we welcome all ideas and support to help push this idea forward.\n\nIf you leave your contact points in the comments, or email me, I'll add you to forthcoming projects, meet-ups and our telegraph channel.",
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      "title": "Private blockchains and the food supply chain",
      "body": "I listened to this WSJ podcast on the possibilities of the blockchain fixing our food supply.\n\nThey were discussing in broad terms a project where IBM and some large partners were building a private blockchain to document and monitor the food supply chain.\n\nI am not a private blockchain expert certainly, but the supply chain for perishable foods, the reporting rigors, the costs and issues of the business are something I know well first hand. A process that appears from this podcast and my experience with the crypto space, a natural fit for the blockchain to address.\n\nTo be clear, the food supply chain status quo in NA is a serious mess. It has always been one.\n\nThere are government certs. There are the rigors of HACCP but it simply doesn’t work in a trusted way that is efficient enough to protect people, especially with perishable goods that require refrigeration.\n\nToday, every food producer, regardless of size is required to keep records of all ingredient sources and map delivery of ingredients to the lot number of the product by sku. So that at any point in the chain that there is a problem, it can be determined what product is contaminated, pull it, alert the public, then figure out the root cause of it and inform all others using the problematic ingredients.\n\nIn the podcast, they talk about a bad load of frozen Mango taking 16 days to track back to the source and pull the product. This sounds very realistic to me.\n\nSource identity, verifiability and speed of communications and action are the thee broken pieces of a three-piece system.\n\nWith little or no automation, no streamlined communications disaster systems, no real visibility to anything during transport, and built on legacy systems over a century old, it is a pressing public safety problem. The only real change that has occurred in decades is a sharply escalating price of insurance as this reality becomes more out of control.\n\nThe blockchain as an infrastructure can fix this in concept. It’s perfect technologically in many ways.\n\nIt will require dramatically changed reporting behaviors up and down the supply chain. Require connects to sensors that are not yet there, but it could possibly as a platform enable a solution for this horribly thorny and critical piece of our food supply.\n\nIn a recall situation for example, something that takes days to decipher could happen in abstract in a minute or less. Lives could be saved literally.\n\nI believe this will happen and many are working on this. That is good news on some fronts.\n\nBut there is another, darker side to this scenario.\n\nA telling vertical case study of private blockchains replacing current supply chain plumbing in a way that will stifle competition and bolster the dominance of the current players, potentially hurting the economy, killing off the small players and harming us, the customers.\n\nThe artisanal food market that drives innovation and healthy eating in our food supply is shrinking dramatically as is.\n\nIt is mostly a cost equation, as the cost basis for someone making pickles or herbal infusions for example, are prohibitive for most artisanal or startup business models. From insurance costs to the percentage points taken by the handful of huge distributors and the stores themselves—be they Whole Foods or Albertsons.\n\nIt is a shrinking ice cube in the sun business model that simply doesn’t work well, if at all, for smaller vendors.\n\nI think this private chain spoken about in the podcast will certainly get built. Many will and I can see Amazon building one to handle every piece of the Whole Foods and home delivery grocery distribution business.\n\nI fear though that in this case, it will accelerate a process of restricting artisanal food producers, already crowded out by the costs and costly compliances in place today.\n\nYou make granola, ketchup or organic bread, let’s say.\n\nNot only will you have to enter the info at the kitchen or processing place, you will most likely need to pay to be on the chain, possibly pay to insure your correctness of your info, post a bond even to prove your capacity to respond quickly, but also every supplier down your chain will have to do so as well.\n\nThis will in effect remove the smaller Green Market suppliers, remove a large number of the artisanal makers and shrink choice on the shelves for the customers.\n\nConsumers will have a safer industrial product pipeline with less choice, less competition, less healthy food. We will all lose except the current incumbents.\n\nThis narrative is an interesting reality check on the use of private block chains. Or moreso, a scenario on how this technology can hurt and limit choice and innovation, not help in this one vertical instance.\n\nThe market and health needs for accountability and real-time information in the food supply chain are very real.  I know this from the inside.\n\nThe blockchain is a near perfect tech platform to build it on.\n\nBut the economic drives of the monopolies involved is to do this in a private proprietary chain with no transparency, no openness and in most ways potentially more restricting than the current broken model.\n\nThis is an important discussion.\n\nOne that orgs like ConsenSys should surface and include the community, the food industry, the artisanal makers and us, the consumers in the discussions around it.\n\nRather than rebuilding a proprietary limiting  system with a highly-functional blockchain closed system, is there a model to do this as an open system that will not only protect us all from food safety concerns but democratize the process and increase choice?\n\nBringing in more vendors into our stores. Increasing variety for the consumers. And still allowing people up and down the chain, large and small alike, to build prosperous businesses.\n\nThere is a market and human side of the vast potential of the blockchain.\n\nThis is one example—of many to come especially with private blockchains—where it is time to get ahead of the reality and think through the options and repercussions.\n\nA private non-transparent blockchain making the current, inefficient system safer in some respects but debilitating in others is not progress in my mind.\n\nThis is our food supply. This change is coming and it is wise to make it best for everyone.\n\nOr in the very least, approach it with eyes very wide open.",
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      "title": "Hatching Honu the CryptoKitty",
      "body": "Honu the CryptoKitty was hatched this Monday morning when the CryptoKitty Charity Auction went live.\n\nThis adorable and unique art object that will live forever on the Ethereum blockchain is up for sale, and on Sunday the 15th at midnight, she will be released into the wild and have a new owner.\n\nOr more realistically, like with all cats, Honu will have her own human who can sell, trade or breed her.\n\nPart kitten, part turtle, Honu is first in a lineage of CryptoKitties born for a specific cause. In her case, to raise funds and awareness for two non-profits. One is Operation Jairo in Antigua and Barbuda, and the other Unite BVI, in the British Virgin Islands, both protecting endangered sea turtles during mating, from poachers and from illegal harvesting.\n\nThis initiative is right in so many ways.\n\nIt speaks directly to hacking philanthropy, a brand new way to raise funds to help us take care of the planet’s precious and endangered species.\n\nIt creates a pathway for the immense amount of capital created within the crypto ecosystem to move to projects for social good, economizing our innate human will to do socially responsible things as a global community.\n\nIt extends the vastly popular CryptoKitties platform, the most active consumer app on the blockchain into adjacent behavioral spaces, leveraging its popularity, its community and its fun way of creating value for projects that can benefit from it, and likewise, benefit us all.\n\nIt highlights conservation and philanthropic groups that for years have been doing the hard work and leading the charge for change. Specifically the innovators of this initiative along with Cryptokitties–Bill Tai and the ACTAI community of activists, athletes and investors, and Ocean Elders, a conservation group headed up by Sir Richard Branson, Gigi Brisson, and others.\n\nIt brings communities, seemingly disparate and separate, together for a common cause, in this case the gaming, crypto, philanthropic and conservation communities.\n\nAnd it as well native to the blockchain, natural to people and unique, taking the idea of open source, adding money and extending it to basically all of us, everywhere.\n\nThere is something more though.\n\nWe as individuals have a responsibility to take care of ourselves, each other and our world.\n\nA great example of how the blockchain can help tokenize our core values in economic ways that can be shared.\n\nHonu is in some ways their proxy that we contribute to. A dynamic icon in a digital world that impacts the lives of these poignantly beautiful creatures and by default, all of us and the planet.\n\nI’m a marketer, natural food and wine enthusiast, Scuba diver, cat  lover, and very soft hearted toward the possibility that we can actually change things for the better.\n\nI’m also a realist to know that this is a first step, proof pointing the idea, the platform, our behaviors, and our needs as a society.\n\nI love this project.\n\nIt has some gotcha’s like all firsts, but it has a real heart and strong momentum. It is a natural flexing of the potential of the blockchain, and its success will provide direction on how to proceed with a host of other projects.\n\nI feel strongly that providing a way for incentivized communities to engage with conservation, education, our food supply, or urban homelessness, just makes good sense\n\nFor now, share your thoughts, spread the word, and please, do go to the auction page and join the bidding.\n\nHonu needs an owner. These sea turtles need a source to guarantee their survival over time. We need to step up as stewards of our environment.\n\nGo here and bid!\n\nA huge shout out to the leadership team that spearheaded this project: Cassidy Robertson, lead of the Kitties for Good and KittyVerse initiatives, Bill Tai, Sabine Schindlauer and Gokce Gizer of ACTAI Global and Gigi Brisson of Ocean Elders. Thrilled to be a member this group.\n\nTo Bill and the Bitfury Group, who elevated a global discussion of this topic and the auction with the participants at the Blockchain Summit in Morocco.\n\nTo Fred Wilson who turned me on to crypto and CryptoKitties back when, and broke the Honu story on his blog, and to Rachel Pipan of Bitfury, Jeff Carter, Tom Critchlow, Jennifer Lee Fader, The Eleven Hundred Agency, and the many organizations, investors, bloggers and believers who are sharing this story everywhere.\n\nBig thanks and keep at it!",
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      "title": "Inherent expectations of a decentralized world",
      "body": "The web promised us a new world.\n\nTwenty-five years in, it has delivered on a vast amount, created unfettered wealth and streamlined our world. Net net for the better certainly.\n\nAs someone who worked throughout this period from day one, building brands and markets, now working in the crypto space, there are serious letdowns from the former and dramatic expectations of what is possible to come.\n\nIt’s been well articulated how the decentralized protocols of the web evolved into a centralized stranglehold of the big five platforms today, monopolizing just about every facet of commerce and engagement.\n\nAnd how crypto, as basically open source with money built in, incentivized at a protocol level has the potent possibility of making this next phase, dramatically different. More decentralized, more democratic, and just better for a broader swipe of the world’s population.\n\nBut there are two layers of the promise of web 2.0 and under the radar possibilities of a decentralized world, that are still inchoate and not getting enough attention. And with all the easy mouthing we give to projects for social good, are still not getting the thought, creativity and investment they deserve.\n\nThe first is about economizing the arts, the artisans, the unscalable as part of the march towards a more literate and inspiring world.\n\nThe world has changed dramatically certainly.\n\nWork and its very structure has shifted. As you travel around, work in shared spaces, public parks with connectivity, you are part of the fiber of a changed world. More flexibility. More diversity. Greater specialization. Broadly distributed teams and a sense of possibility, of wealth, of intelligence, and collaboration.\n\nThis is the obvious.\n\nBut as a Humanities major with a long career in tech, a storyteller working in brand building and communities, the fabric of our lives is less influenced and uplifted by the arts than in the technologically primitive era that proceeded it. There is a case to be made that urban graffiti artists of the 70s had more impact on the cultural changes of the mainstream population than anything we have today.\n\nYup, artists like Keith Haring with spray cans painting the subways with more iconic importance that anything I bump into on my travels around in an always connected life on a daily basis.\n\nThis is just how it is, not simply a complaint.\n\nA possibility that our reality today where there is the potential of economizing communities, more flexibility in movement and work, more need for diverse sources of inspiration, that there arises a way to elevate the artistic and the artisanal with the rising tide of our society itself.\n\nThat the core truths of experiments like Black Mountain College can find root and be integrated into changes of today. They are not as yet.\n\nI’m interested to discover and participate in projects that are doing this today.\n\nHere are some posts on humanities as a key piece of our world, on the need for supporting the artisanal, and on Black Mountain College as a possible approach towards education.\n\nImportant stuff not to get lost.\n\nAnd true without bringing in the gross inanities of our government and its failures in supporting this core piece of our lives. Without that, this is still addressable and ours to fix.\n\nThe second piece of the web’s failure and the blockchain’s promise is reimagining the idea of non-profit and charity projects.\n\nHow we raise funds today to stem global warming, preserve a coral reef, establish game reserves, and close animal kill shelters—not to mention address education and homelessness—is no different than and more needed than it was three generations ago.\n\nWe have all the tools, little intent to do so it appears.\n\nThis has hit me hard.\n\nAs I look at the vast amounts of capital raised through tokenizing ideas and products—in the 10s of billions of dollars—I ask myself, how this congealing global community that is constantly rewiring itself, why we can’t tokenize intent for social good?\n\nWhy can’t we instantiate a currency of support and a platform of transparency that can not only change, but basically rethink the idea of charities, the concept of non-profit into something else?\n\nWhy we can’t harness the power of cryptoassets for art in the same way we can by fractionalizing ownership of the Manhattan skyline? Why we can find that piece of human intent that crosses tech, crypto, arts, conservation and science and redo, reinvest, rebuild an incentivized community of directed change to fix things?\n\nThings that the governments of the world won’t. Things that people want. That possibly with incentivized crypto communities and currencies we can at least start to.\n\nIn this piece of the unfulfilled puzzle, there are more rumblings than in the arts scenario. And projects that I’m getting involved in that I’ll be making announcements very shortly.\n\nBut for all of us, this post is a challenge. Not a slap in the fact but a nudge. A forceful directional push.\n\nIf  you give a shit and are networked with others likeminded or like bothered, what can you do to make a difference?\n\nNot just in politics but in the endless list of discreet problems, extinctions, inhumanities that can be most likely be addressed only in this way.\n\nGive this some thought.\n\nI think the responsibility for this all rests only with ourselves. Excuses accomplish nothing.\n\nWe are seeing the smartest people on the planet dedicating themselves to decentralized realities. These pieces are very much part of that idea of a better world.",
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      "author": "awaldstein",
      "permlink": "riding-dockless-scooters-on-la-s-west-side",
      "title": "Riding dockless scooters on LA's West side",
      "body": "I’m a long-term bikeshare and urban transportation geek.\n\nI first discovered Velib in Paris a decade ago, and as soon as CitiBike showed in NYC, I was in. Way before stuff worked well. Way before there were docks smartly placed throughout lower Manhattan, cross Brooklyn and river-facing communities in Jersey.\n\nI blogged about them back in 2013.\n\nIn the largest and busiest city in the country, they are part of our infrastructure, spawning an ecosystem of more bike lanes and a deeper partnership between bikes, people and cars on the street.\n\nBut in New York, we don’t have—as yet—anything dockless, nor anything like these electric scooters simply strewn around like flotsam on every corner and cranny in Santa Monica and Venice Beach.\n\nI’m hooked on them for this place.\n\nWhen visiitng not Ubering as much. Not using the hotel shuttle, just jumping on these things to go to meetings and dinners.\n\nThe scooter wars are well documented and old news.\n\nThe rivalry between the $100m-funded Bird and chief competitor LimeBike, and between both of them with neighborhoods, cities, community groups and the police is acerbic and ongoing.\n\nOne on hand they are simply a game changer for micro-mobility, on the other a huge early infancy mess.\n\nIf you haven’t used them, in LA you simply download the Bird and Lime apps, find one of the scooters anywhere, use a QRC code to unlock and ride.\n\nIt takes about 10 minutes to go from Pico and Main in Santa Monica to Rose in Venice, 5-10 minutes longer to Abbot Kinney. To Rose, cost is $2.20, around $10/dollars an hour. That route is a 20+ minute, $10+ Uber ride or a solid hour to walk.\n\nThey are already part of the culture here.\n\nThis morning at 5am when I was meditating on the beach to start the day, a caravan of surfers arrived carrying their surfboards on LimeBike scooters, with their dogs chasing after them!\n\nI can’t wrap my head around how dockless in general or these scooters could work in Manhattan but in LA they are natural to the landscape, serving a real purpose.\n\nThey are simply everywhere. Some in orderly lines, most just thrown around.\n\nOn the streets. On the sidewalks. People pulling friends on skateboards and one idiot with his baby in a carrier! Percent of helmets—very small.\n\nSo yes, users love them. And abuse them.\n\nNeighborhoods kvetch about the messiness. Municipalities are rightly concerned about the safety.\n\nThe scooter companies, acting in the tradition of Uber in the early days, are just doing it. Breaking rules, not asking forgiveness and literally rolling forward creating fans and a massive exhaust of ill will in their wake.\n\nWhat I know as a user though is that they are a transportation solution that needed to be here. In an area with too many cars, no parking, large distances and no public trans.\n\nSomethings just feels right and touches both a natural market and personal need. Scooters here are that, just as CitiBikes were in NY.\n\nAnd to be clear, in the beginning CitiBikes were a mess.\n\nBroken racks. No racks. Racks never filled. Racks overfilled. Customer service nightmares.\n\nThen it gets fixed, piece by piece with customer feedback and city participation.\n\nBikeshare doesn’t work in LA while you might think weather wise, it is a natural fit. The city infrastructure is not there nor is the commitment. Bike paths from Beverly Hills to Santa Monica or from SM to Malibu–never going to happen!\n\nBut scooters seem right.\n\nDockless as well as something that could be indigenous to a Southern Cal transportation solution. It isn’t near perfect for certain, but a short list of rules could fix 90% of the things that are broken.\n\nSome things just make sense cause they solve problems and make life better and more fun.\n\nScooters are just that for this place.\n\nThis is not a technology looking for a solution. This is a solution in its messy early infancy that is just not that hard to make right.",
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      "body": "Hi! I am a robot. I just upvoted you! I found similar content that readers might be interested in:\nhttp://arnoldwaldstein.com/2018/06/shopping-cbd-california-cannabis-dispensary/",
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      "title": "Shopping for CBD in a California Cannabis Dispensary",
      "body": "The most significant changes in our culture, driving the largest economic impact, are entering the market in the most messy, rule bending and ambiguous ways.\n\nTrue of transportation (see my post on dockless scooters). So obviously true for crypto.\n\nAnd certainly true for legal Cannabis products and their potential to redefine the wellness and the supplement industries, not to mention the stoner segment.\n\nMy blog readers know that I’m deep into innovation in health and nutrition, and lately CBD and liposomal delivery systems. Though to date, the CBD I’ve been using has been a hemp derivative as I live in NY, not a Cannabis legal state. (Post here on CBD, here on wellness.)\n\nEnter this trip to LA, ending up shopping at the highly-rated Rose Cannabis Collective in Venice Beach.\n\nI expected a fully-formed LA experience.\n\nFriendly, green-smoothy ambiance. Whole Foods supplement presentation but with Cannabis and CBD products for recreation and health. Valet parking obviously.\n\nHa!\n\nThis spot on Rose, was a variant of pawn-shop décor, sanitized head-shop ambiance with a line-up for ID checks. Abundant security guards, and rigidly enforced no cell phone usage rules including zero tolerance for picture taking.\n\nCash only to boot, no published price lists though staffed with well meaning, partially-informed sales people with a surfer punk look and attitude.\n\nThe store oddly had almost no signage and zero catalogues to browse. You ask, they point. You ask again, they answer as best they can.\n\nSo, the process went like this.\n\nI asked for CBD/THC topical creams for pain. Went through the discussion of the percent’s of ingredients, and they pointed to a product. Info about the vendor, the process of creating the product, organic, the brand—nada.\n\nI wanted more, the salesperson wrote on a piece of paper and slid this across to me.\n\nI left, looked at the site, spoke with friends in the know and came back to buy.\n\nThe rub is that that the process is beyond stupid. The normalization of this product segment and technology almost nonexistent. The reality that there is an ATM in the middle of the room to get cash is incomprehensible.\n\nBut–\n\nThe end result was so worth it.\n\nThis product, a 1:1 THC to CBD pain salve is honestly off the charts effective. The company behind it reputable and somewhat transparent.\n\nThe process to get to this information and purchase–Pleistocene-era primitive.\n\nI also discovered that the margins are off the charts—a combo of early market complete lack of transparency, lack of regulation, lack of disclosure and deep consumer price gouging.\n\nThe legal Cannabis industry is obviously on fire, printing profits and creeping to over $12B this year.\n\nNo one has broken the numbers down to recreational vs CBD-based medicinal. No one is selling this in a creative way or to my knowledge, rethinking the retail experience.\n\nFrom talking to the people in the shop, there is significant confusion as to what they can and cannot do, a thin line between between medicinal and recreational, between real information and conjecture, and between what is legal and not.\n\nLegalization of Cannabis cross the country will continue to grow quickly. And it should.\n\nThe potential impact on medicine and a growing understanding of CBD is something that will change a lot of people’s lives. And drive economics for the states that do legalize it in a very big way.\n\nSome estimate this segment to be $100B in 6+ years.\n\nWith entrepreneurs figuring out how to make and sell products smartly, reach beyond the early adopters and stoners, that number seems way to small. With per purchase numbers above $200 per transaction, you won’t be able to keep investment away from this sector.\n\nPayment issues as well are going to change as there is simply too much money on the table.\n\nWith either the large financial players like Amex, Visa, authorize.net, PayPal and Shopify accepting transactions as they do not today.\n\nOr more likely, with a serious and studied crypto solution in place, the growth will dwarf just about any emerging industry currently in play.\n\nIn response to buddies from crypto payments space who are talking about their part in this, I asked the manager of this extremely busy shop about crypto. No one from the crypto space had approached them and they are a large affiliate collective with many stores cross the LA area.\n\nThis is an astonishing category change in its most nascent stage.\n\nOvertime, it could redefine parts of standard medical practices, supplements, retail, payments, and food. It is mushrooming today with almost nothing coherent in place.\n\nAnd the largest rub, is that this is of course state by state.\n\nUnless I literally smuggle the products back, I can’t take any of these products home with me.\n\nTruly the best and the wackiest of market times for the Cannabis industry.\n\nBoth crazy inspiring and laughably amusing.\n\nGo try this. For the products. For the experience alone even. It won’t disappoint.",
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      "permlink": "steemitboard-notify-awaldstein-20180602t204009000z",
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      "body": "Congratulations @awaldstein! You have received a personal award!\n\n[![](https://steemitimages.com/70x70/http://steemitboard.com/@awaldstein/birthday1.png)](http://steemitboard.com/@awaldstein)  1 Year on Steemit\n_Click on the badge to view your Board of Honor.\n\n\n> Do you like **SteemitBoard**'s project? **[Vote for its witness](https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=steemitboard&approve=1)** and **get one more award**!",
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      "body": "Appreciate it.\n\nAnother project was talking to me about using their token to fund this but hadn't thought about Steem. \n\nWill dig into both as I'm moving forward with this.\n\nThanks!",
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      "body": "This is a reality which is being built on Steemit by many groups and individuals. \n\n@youarehope being one example of an organization which has been effecting change the world over through transparent collective effort on steemit.\n\nAnother group working to improve the quality of life among the people of the world through the blockchain is @familyprotection. \n\nBoth of the above groups use SBD and Steem to fund projects which are changing the quality of life for people through Steemit.\n\nI am glad that you are thinking this way, we really need to create more groups working to create positive change in the best possible way. I look forward to seeing more of your posts and projects.",
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      "body": "My gut tells me that there is a connection between how we capitalize projects and the creativity we can exhibit in impacting results.\n\nI’ve been mulling over how this works, or could work, with crypto as the mechanism for both the raise and the management of causes for social change.\n\nIt’s clear that the platforms for raising and allocating capital today, and sharing results for most social good projects are inefficient at best.\n\nPeople, small and large donors alike, want to embrace their ownership in the results. They want to believe they are individually making a difference. Have complete transparency on how governance occurs and be informed, how what they contributed impacted change.\n\nAnd as important, to have this participation be inclusionary to a community that supports and builds on itself.\n\nThe platforms for this don’t really exist today.\n\nI’ve been thinking through whether the blockchain offers an answer and whether the idea of non-profits and charities is at a sharp turn of an evolutionary change.\n\nIs there really a way to fractionalize and economize our intent individually and have impact on an aggregate level?\n\nConcerns about the state of the oceans or the environment in general, the treatment of animals in kill shelters, the homeless epidemic or even educational equality are certainly global concerns with huge constituents of emotional supporters.\n\nLegal issues aside (and there are many). Classification of token issues aside (and they are more even), there is something inherently appealing and efficient about the intersection of crypto and any number of causes.\n\nMost importantly, behaviorally, I know that this desire to participate in a new way is innate, natural and real. And pent up to bursting for a creative approach to platform it collectively.\n\nWould I personally participate in buying futures through tokens that could fund changes through projects for things I believed in?\n\nHell yes, and so would many, everywhere.\n\nWould I be incentivized even more so if the blockchain was utilized to communicate back to me information how my contribution was used in a tamper proof, real time way?  Connecting the blockchain as both the platform for the raise and the network for transparency, communications and governance?\n\nBig yes to all.\n\nAnd is it possible to conceptualize a hybrid-governance approach, utilizing the blockchain for raising capital and communicating status, while centering decisions on traditional structures with a BOD? Potentially over time, discovering automated consensus processes to codify acceptance of projects funding?\n\nYup.\n\nEven in preliminary talks with friends, there are token platforms out there today who plan to support cause capitalization, reinventing current thinking of how ICOs are done now, with layered raises that piggy back on top of other incentivized platforms for change.\n\nI simply can’t get it out of my head. Both the real need for this and the very possibility of it.\n\nKnowing that the greatest platforms for change on a social level have come from pent up behavioral wants. The mass market pining for a new structure. And by the state of the world and the social noise around this, it feels like time.\n\nMaybe the blockchain holds a structure that this can be expressed on. I think very possibly so.\n\nThis post is an ask to my networks to share referrals to others thinking about it. Collective change requires communal input as I am getting more serious about this the more I dig into it.\n\nAnd as a pre-announcement of sorts, that I’m involved in a really exciting adjacent fundraising project that is using many of these pieces that will be public very soon.\n\nSo please—subscribe to hear of what is coming–and as well–contact me thoughts.\n\nThis is an idea whose time should be now.",
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      "title": "The changing paradigm of storytelling in Hollywood and beyond",
      "body": "Once upon a time, Hollywood movies were where innovative storytelling lived and TV, the domain of romcoms, sitcoms, classic reruns, zany shit and channel changing crap.\n\nOne of the underlying themes in Ben Frisk’s new book The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies is that this norm has been turned on its head. A polar shift on where creative storytelling is happening today. And why.\n\nHow movie theaters are now the domain of massive franchises that can take advantage of the large format technology and a shared community around an event. With the mid to high-budget innovative projects moved to TV.\n\nOr, more precisely, moved to the domain of the new studios, Amazon and Netflix.\n\nBen does a terrific job of putting the confidential industry numbers and personnel dirt revealed in the massive Sony Guardians of Peace email hack in context.\n\nHe also touches on how the business model of telling stories impacts creativity and diversity of expression. How risk is rethought when the platform is digital, endlessly broad and data-mined, especially when success has nothing to do with how many tickets or bags of popcorn are sold.\n\nThis is the truly fascinating piece with cross industry implications and prophetic to a changing relationship potentially to how art, culture and business coexist.\n\nMovies in the traditional Hollywood system used a basic P & L where every project was evaluated on cost, return and risk before a green light to proceed.\n\nIt determined what got made and what we saw in the theater. And how stars got paid.\n\nNot with the new studios.\n\nNetflix doesn’t sell tickets, it sells subscriptions. Amazon sells toilet paper, refrigerators and now kale and coconut oil.\n\nOnce you move the profit model away from each creative project, the game changes completely.\n\nEvery piece of content yet another layer in the stack of diverse creative that feeds the massive needs for customer retention and acquisition for these now adjacent businesses.\n\nWhere you get Transparent as a bonus for belonging to Prime, along with an endless variety of entertainment types.\n\nThese new studios have no box office numbers, no marginal cost of watching for the customer, and for the most part, no target margin on the creative process itself.\n\nThey as well have massive data banks to mine and choose what to fund, who will create it, and who will watch it. And how many times.\n\nAmazon especially is changing everything in its path with its studio.\n\nThe writer and producer are more important than the director. The movie star interesting but not necessary to success. And with no box office numbers, there is no more longer payments for residuals, changing the comp structure to a flat often higher one-time fee.\n\nIn effect, this challenges the media model, kills the Hollywood profit and loss creative endeavor model, and merges creativity in storytelling as simply part of what is needed to hold current customers and bring in more regardless of what is actually being sold.\n\nIf I get innovative, streamed entertainment, 10-15% off all Amazon and Whole Foods purchases with an Amazon Prime credit card, why shouldn’t I do this?\n\nThere are learnings here that speak to the role of creativity and content, storytelling and ROI to business in general.\n\nThere are glimpses of truth that imply that you can commoditize the very value of a brand as long as you feed the true needs of your customers for stories and entertainment. Something a lot stronger to hold onto than the unique quality of your shoes or salad greens perhaps.\n\nAs I write this coming out of NYC Blockchain Week, there appears to be an unexpected analogy to the intersection of creativity and business model there as well.\n\nBusiness models until the last 3-5 years haven’t really changed in decades.\n\nFacebooks and Twitter are simply old-school advertising models bolted on top of technological innovations they have productized and data mined.\n\nAmazon and Netflix are, in effect, brand new business models, especially as they are using creative storytelling as the means to sell—well everything. Removing the ROI of the creative endeavor while elevating its absolute essential nature to corporate success.\n\nWith the crypto world, there is an abstraction of this connection between business model and the creative structure of the community.\n\nCreative capital raises. New structures of orgs. New manners of compensation and an entirely new model of business driven by token fluidity, not simply profit, loss and margins.\n\nI’m taken a bit by surprise here.\n\nI’ve blogged on the lack of innovation in business models as we have changed the game technically.\n\nWhat I didn’t fully understand is that creativity and storytelling on such a massive scale would be the loss leader that was an essential business piece once the model reconfigured itself. And that the thirst for endless variety in content would change Hollywood and the creative business in its wake.\n\nThat in the crypto blockchain case, while obviously different there is an analogous freedom in form that comes with new business models changing organizationally the economics of software development, certainly as well, a creative group endeavor with massive impact.\n\nThe takeaway here is that the shift in models, tangible in how Hollywood and their model of business has changed the face of how content is created and financed, is potentially part of greater change. One that will impact how we work, our creative endeavors and our culture that will roll down to every part of our lives.\n\nThink Differently has never felt so real as a motto for the future.",
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      "author": "awaldstein",
      "permlink": "thoughts-going-into-nyc-blockchain-week",
      "title": "Thoughts going into NYC Blockchain Week",
      "body": "NYC Blockchain Week starts today for me.\n\nBookended by events hosted by friends–Bill Tai at the Fluidity Summit and William Mougayar and Nick Tomaino at the Token Summit.\n\nThe week looks excellent.\n\nConferences, a solid group of meetings and I’m certain endless impromptu conversations. My friend Hue Rhodes calls the blookchain sector–the ‘Olympics for the world’s smartest people working on solving the biggest problems’. He’s not wrong about this.\n\nDeeply curious for the most studied and current opinions on the big four Qs: Classification of Tokens, Custodianship of Digital Assets, State of Regulations and Stable Coins.\n\nExcited about getting face to face with so many people in the trenches building stuff and this year, rolling out Dapps to the market.\n\nPrepared to be overwhelmed by a new crop of more powerful decentralized exchanges with every variation of custodianship.\n\nAnd bringing my personal agenda of topics that interest me professionally for my own work in the space:\n\nMy top five list:\n\nCyrpto-based payments\n\nI can’t shake my interest in this as an early market touching solution and example of market fit.\n\nI also believe that just as payments were strategic on the web (ala Stripe, Square, others) how this plays out in broader terms on the blockchain will be much more so.\n\nI view the Cannabis and CBD crypto payment solution set as obviously highly economic but also disruptive as it rolls into and changes the legacy payment/gateway space in the US.\n\nTokenzation of behavior\n\nThis is literally the trillion-dollar question for this sector.\n\nThe mass of disdain towards the lack of transparency and mismanagement of our data by Facebook and an overall malaise towards the legacy advertising model has opened the door to a decentralized social net in concept.\n\nWhat this really means? Is this really possible?\n\nIs by nature, behavior tokenizable?  This is the question that sketches out the roadmap for the future.\n\nCause-based crypto currencies\n\nThere is a lot of talk about the gestalt of tokenization. How it needs to play to a business model or behavioral reflex.\n\nBut—as Bill Tai points out–tokenization is also a communal act of support.\n\nI’ve spoken about how I wish Cryptokitties would incorporate nonprofit, social targeted support for closing kill shelters, focusing on adoption of sheltered cats. Bill has spoken about the idea of how endangered species can be supported through a Cryptokitty off shoot infrastructure.\n\nThis is generosity, not simply token integrity with community behavior and human social dynamics.\n\nIs it possible to tokenize and support causes—social good—through these project as an offshoot of community good will?\n\nUnpacking the mythos of token utilization\n\nMany thinkers in the space have been posting lists of how to evaluate the integrity of a token into the behavioral integrity of network.\n\nTruth is that no-one really knows and while thinking of the token as integral to the behavior of the participants, is a good start, the variations on this are still wildly divergent and inchoate.\n\nBy every one of these definitions, XRP is poor token design for Ripple as there is no correspondence between the token and the business model. Maybe so, but they have a negative customer acquisition cost by shadowing their service with XRP. And a larger disconnected market cap with the tokens then the business itself.\n\nInfinitely interesting, important and completely unclear.\n\nCommunity and market-based marketing\n\nHow we market to our communities, tokenized or not, and how we market to a broader-based world of end users is connected, but not the same.\n\nOr is it?\n\nHow projects that are built on community development dynamics extend beyond that group to the mass market (as in payments) opens up a critical discussion of how to design the brand, how to configure positioning and the very language around how we message and tell stories about who we are and what we do.\n\nContact me\n\nI am working in the space and open to discussions around these topics.\n\nDuring the week [email protected] or text at 408-497-8317 with links to who you are and the why of the contact are encouraged.\n\nSee you around the city!",
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      "author": "awaldstein",
      "permlink": "when-scale-is-the-quotient-of-value-what-is-the-economics-of-things-that-don-t",
      "title": "When scale is the quotient of value, what is the economics of things that don't?",
      "body": "I can’t shake this quandary, nor make any headway into even defining an answer.\n\nThere is an overarching optimism that our current tech world has layered into our culture. That at scale, through community, we can begin to address some of the key issues plaguing our world.\n\nNot all of course, but within the blockchain and crypto community, the autonomous transportation and edge computing scenarios, and the urbanization of agriculture movement there is a light in the haze of overarching probems. A possibility that through broad connections, at global scale, solutions can be economized and the world, certainly our digital culture can be reimagined and rebuilt to a better end.\n\nI’m all in on this but I see a growing discrepancy not just in where we culturally put things like the arts in this world, but with the artisanal and stuff made by hand. By people, one at a time, for each of us.\n\nGo experience the crush of your inner city Green Market where more and more we want food grown by individuals and families.\n\nOr the industry reconfiguration to artisanal, natural hand-made wine that populates the best and the most local shops and restaurants.\n\nOr the endless brands making stuff—a hand-made rocking chair that will outlive the person who buys it. The jams and bread, candles and cookware, even the restaurants where we eat.\n\nStuff made by people, for us, with business models that simply don't work.\n\nSoftware may have eaten our world, but with greater economics and the free time inherent in new paradigms of work, more of us are driven to consume, appreciate and love the things that by their very nature are made/cooked/delivered by hand.\n\nIt is their very naturalness, wholesomeness, and human touch that is their value. And unscalable by that very nature.\n\nThe concept of local is the usual answer.\n\nIf you take the local geographies around our dense population centers you do naturally get circles of artisanal people and brands servicing them. Tomatoes from Jersey, Maple Syrup from Vermont and so on.\n\nBut, even though the math of supply and demand doesn’t work in this scenario, the economics of supply doesn't as well for the artisans. That is the piece that I can’t think my way through.\n\nWe all know that when we eat out at our favorite farm or roof to table spot, that at many spots in the supply chain of labor, this is broken for the workers. As the people in the kitchen and invariably the farmers as well are not making a living wage. And the market and margin forces make the model broken at its core and seemingly unfixable.\n\nIt's this discrepancy, the broken economic chain between our lives economized and made better through tech and redefining work, and the lack of solvency in the lifestyles of the people that make the very things that we want to consume.\n\nThis discrepancy will I bet have its analogs in people’s wages that stuff the packages I get from Amazon and the artisanal-no-longer brands industrializing their offering and adopting larger manufacturing processes.\n\nThis is less a complaint and more a realization that through all the things we are fixing, the economics of the people making the stuff we love is out of the equation. Orphaned but a reality nonetheless.\n\nI don’t have an answer.\n\nI have thought endlessly and challenged people more expert than I in crypto economics how items and people that can never be scaled can be economized more equally within that paradigm.\n\nI know that tech will solve some of the parts that artisans fill today especially in the farming arena, but that is a creeping infrastructure improvement not necessarily addressing the human factor.\n\nWhile this issue is not getting solved in the near term, I believe that being aware of it drives acknowledgement of its importance, and that awareness is always the first step to any solution.\n\nThis is not at all connected to the lament that tech will change the world and remove jobs.\n\nIt is about how value systems are connected to scale generally and how to create economics for things that don’t so we are all a bit richer, healthier and better for it.\n\nDamn--if companies are starting to figure out the near impossible task of how to build stable crypto coins, we should be able to make some progress on this simpler but critical human factor.\n\nFood for thought for all us.",
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      "parent_permlink": "crypto",
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      "permlink": "crypto-s-inherent-optimism-is-a-social-good-in-its-own-right",
      "title": "Crypto’s inherent optimism is a social good in its own right",
      "body": "Belief is the most powerful agent for change there is.\n\nIt is front and center in the market’s embrace of a reconfigured world on the blockchain, where work, money and our social order have been reimagined within a tokenized society.\n\nThis is a bit hyperbolic and aspirational I admit.\n\nBut it is as well somewhat true and formative to the market reality of what is coming.\n\nThis cultural phenomenon is like nothing I’ve experienced, dwarfing the optimism and excitement that we participated in at the dawn of the web in the 90s.\n\nIf you don’t go to crypto and blockchain Meetups, you should. They are the true Petri dish of this cultural change.\n\nA month ago, in Santa Monica, I sat in an all day Saturday crypto Meetup. Some speakers were quite brilliant, some simply misinformed, some hyper-enthused cyber-punks spouting Libertarian absolutes, headlined by a local comedian now a crypto investor.\n\nThe audience was a crazy mix of developers, job seekers, developers, 20-somethings trading alt-coins and high-fiving each other. People from their teens to their seventies anxious to learn and feel connected. The most optimistic group I’ve stepped into since the early days of orgs like the Computer Game Developers Conference in the 90s.\n\nThe mood of the room was an anything-is-possible mantra, collectively self-empowered. A group introspection on how each person could contribute, change how they work and make the world a better place.\n\nIt’s the same at Meetups everywhere. Some more technical, some more investing based, some simply a happy hour at a Manhattan rooftop bar for ‘crypto believers’ and even a blockchain hiking group in the Adirondacks.\n\nI love this.\n\nCrypto as an idea and its social impact on what our lives could be has galvanized and refocused an era, not simply a niche or tech population.\n\nIn the process, it is instantiating a massive heterogeneous and inclusive community of enthusiasts that includes just about everyone. Cross work segments, age brackets, background, status, race, gender or nationality.\n\nIt’s overplayed to call this a democratizing revolution, but in actuality, as a cultural concept, it is just that.\n\nThe size, the enthusiasm, the inclusiveness of this will transform the market. It will elevate marketing as a discipline to a community-based model by its very dynamic, shifting the power of brand creation from established bohemeths to an innumerable number of smaller platforms and brands each jostling for a piece of this wildly horizontal community.\n\nWhat’s crazy is that this energized positivity has already evolved to a community-based global movement. In advance of productization of the technology itself.\n\nThe possibilities of a crypto incentivized market are easy to embrace as an idea but not at all simple to build. This is really inspiring, but really hard shit to figure out.\n\nIt will take more than a village.\n\nIt will take all of us–game theorists, cryptoeconomic experts, mathematicians, legal visionaries, creative marketers and content creators, and an army of developers, new gen community strategists, and artists to memorialize our experiences along the way.\n\nNot to mention a massive population of forgiving, energetic users willing to change their current behavioral habits and their favored platforms to try something new.\n\nThere are no experts here. The next generation of knowledge will be created by this first generation of people that are doing something completely different today.\n\nThere is a self-actualization piece of the community puzzle as well.\n\nBy its very definition, the panache of this space eschews triviality and easy answers. But it liberates the reality of possibilities to literally reconfigure our world in unheard of, unimagined ways.\n\nThat’s the promise. The collective belief and cultural optimism that tokenized platforms for social change carry with them.\n\nWhere every one of us is qualified to participate in some fashion, making each person in effect a contributor, a beneficiary and also ultimately responsible.\n\nThis is the transformative social power of crypto and the blockchain.\n\nAnd why through all the craziness, the crap of the fraudsters, the insane fluctuations of the currencies, it is a net positive.  Because the process itself is forcing us to be more collective, more positive, more focused and more inclusive.\n\nThat’s the definition of a community at its core.\n\nThe reason why as a long-game play, this is well worth digging in for the ride.",
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      "author": "awaldstein",
      "permlink": "taking-on-new-advisory-projects-in-new-ways",
      "title": "Taking on new advisory projects in new ways",
      "body": "I’m reimagining how I want to spend the next phase of my working life.\n\nRethinking and restructuring my advisory business to suit the changes in how communities are becoming more and more markets, the criticalness of viable brands at earlier stages and where I can add the most value to clients and the most interest and learning for myself.\n\nThe How of it\n\nStructure is akin to content and value in advisory work.\n\nI’m moving to retainer and equity-based, longer term, more participatory roles. Within crypto incentivized DAOs or companies there are many options depending on structure.\n\nIn communications, community design and marketing, the real magic happens over time, with iteration and with deep engagement with the process.\n\nTaking two-three projects, either as a stand in CMO or BD leadership role pre-team building or as a strategic consultant/mentor working with and building out teams. One-quarter to one-third time is optimum. Larger commitment of time drives longer period projects.\n\nI want to make a difference. This is the right structure for that.\n\nAreas of interest and expertise\n\n-->Cryptoeconomic community projects\n\nMy focus is community, market development and growth, in community communications strategies and brand configuration as the need to touch the market earlier comes into play.\n\nCommunity and clarity are obviously part of an ICOs success but my strong bias is not about the raise, it is about community, the brand and first market touch points. Post or strategizing for the raise (ICO or VC), or airdrop models are the core of my interest in this very nascent arena.\n\n-->Platforms for health\n\nFocus is on direct to consumer, brand and communications strategies for new areas in the wellness and supplement segments. A deep subject interest and expertise in what is happening with liposomes, genomic customization and CBD derived supplements.\n\n-->Reimaging the food supply chain\n\nI have long been interested in answering the question: \"How do we feed the world without killing the planet?\"\n\nI believe the answer is focusing on in-city supply chains and vertical farming for food production and distribution.\n\nI've owned and operated a wellness food company in the past so know cold the status quo and what needs to be rethought both brand and distribution wise.\n\n-->E-commerce brands\n\nAgainst all (Amazon) odds, I think that brands with a clear product vision, community understanding and an authentic brand can and are competing against Amazon and Walmart successfully.\n\nFrom conception to $100m in revenue is my experience realm to date, bringing strategic guidance to community and brand development from a strategic communications and brand development perspective.\n\nThese areas will invariably intersect.\n\nHighly likely that crypto will inform, some if not all of these. As well delivery systems will most likely be direct to consumer or alternative cross them all.\n\nMy expertise\n\nI’m a hands-on operational and strategic thinker with a background of building companies and markets from the dawn of the web to the beginning of the crypto era.\n\nWhere I want to work is where I add the most value:\n\n-Strategic communications and brand design\n\nCommunity design and management\n\nBusiness development strategy and partnerships\n\nMy background speaks for itself.\n\nMy thinking out loud for over a decade on my blog is the blueprint for my thoughts\n\nLooking forward to talking.\n\nContact points:\n\[email protected]\n\n408-497-8317",
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      "body": "Hi! I am a robot. I just upvoted you! I found similar content that readers might be interested in:\nhttp://arnoldwaldstein.com/2018/04/how-we-get-to-who-we-are/",
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      "permlink": "how-we-get-to-who-we-are",
      "title": "How we get to who we are",
      "body": "I spent the weekend doing an inventory on myself.\n\nNot the standard business influencers list of heroes, what they taught me about work and perspicacity. Not the normal stuff that is important to the daily pace of life like heath, nutrition and travel.\n\nBut the inputs and outputs, the lenses of my personality that are formative to who I am as an individual.\n\nNot that necessarily define me, but inform my beliefs and more so, my perceptions of how I organize myself in the face of the world. The core perceptual structure of ‘Why me?’ when I approach projects or anything new I want to tackle.\n\nI think most of us agree that we are an amalgam of the diversity of our interests. And that, as much as the depth of any expertise, is the overarching characteristic of our value.\n\nIt was a fun process, starting with a long laundry list of likes, boiling it down to a few that while randomly diverse, feel just right.\n\nMy baseline perceptual self\n\nI am very much a product of my Black Mountain College inspired, interdisciplinary educational background. I was taught to see the world as a fabric where theatre and films, philosophy and modern poetry, architecture and liberal arts are the fingerprint of a life, the true pulse of our culture and the core meaning of our times.\n\nWhere artistic behavior, personal, community and market dynamics in general are intertwined.\n\nThese are the glasses that I see through each and every day.\n\nArt as an iconic lens into expressions of beliefs\n\nThe walls of my apartment are a living pastiche to my love affair with New York, pop art, cities and urban life, and the world seen through the eyes of master iconographers.\n\nWherever I am, from Lisbon to Seattle to Venice Beach, I see a world through the patchwork perspectives Keith Haring, Lichtenstein, Jim Dine, Donald Sultan, Margaret Bourke-White, Eisenstaedt, Feininger and others.\n\nI filter the world and my work as a marketer as the capturing and sharing of iconic expression that has one foot in the history of art and ideas, the other in the belief that something new is always ready to be discovered.\n\nClassic Hollywood as the shape of storytelling\n\nI grew up cutting school and retreating to the dark and cool of movie theaters and classic films. The history of Hollywood as my view of an immigrant’s dream. Of the frame by frame exposition of internal self from Capra to Fellini to Bergman to Spielberg and Eastwood to an obsession with today’s small screen episodic innovations.\n\nI’m a writer not a filmmaker but to me, the best of words, the trueness of narrative, the power of a communications strategy is visual, emotional and built on a connected dream that movies at their best, epitomize.\n\nThat pop culture adopted by the masses and formalized in art is what the world is truly made of.\n\nWine as a window into culture, people and place\n\nAlmost a decade into learning, blogging, network building and understanding how natural approaches to making these fermented beverages have created an ethos of taste and a counterpoint to everything that is technological, frictionless and scalable in my life.\n\nThis is what grounds me. So much ado about something that bucks the trends of the world yet holds it together.\n\nThis is what lets me get off a plane anywhere in the world and have a community of pure interest waiting for me from people with a common bond and passion.\n\nMy family as the baseline of my ethics and belief\n\nI’ve blogged endlessly on how the core ethics and liberal stance of the lower middle class New York immigrant heritage is more and more the baseline of my beliefs on hard work, civility of discourse and acceptance of diversity.\n\nIt is some 115 years since my grandfather got off a boat from Russia at Ellis Island, yet still a formative piece of how I decide what is right and wrong.\n\nSo—\n\nI woke up pondering how this all works for me.\n\nWhy from my earliest days as an adult, I took these studied interests and focused a career on finding the human part of tech and the entertainment industry, building brands and communities around where the newest technology informed expression of the most core human needs and wants?\n\nHow this fingerprint of myself impacts the focus of my work today.\n\nHow it lets me learn to love what is happening in the crypto world not for the economics but for the community of people and ideas it is platforming and inspiring.\n\nI think it is the very reason of it.\n\nThe very thing that lets me take the crazy advances in tech and science, the amazing tactical platforms we have at our disposal and personalize them to my own use.\n\nWe are nothing less than the richness of our own perceptions. It’s what makes us interesting and valuable.\n\nI believe if you take this personality of influences, add the formative experiences of your work world, your continued passions towards learning and embracing change, shake well, you simply get a much better self.\n\nWe may all not be fortunate and talented enough to create art that lives beyond ourselves, but we do get to determine what matters to us, how we live and what we do.\n\nThat’s a big win.",
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      "author": "awaldstein",
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      "title": "Crypto, Cannabidiol and Cannabis",
      "body": "This is a case study on the disruption that is coming with the collision of our legal system, the stranglehold of the payment gateways, the demands of the health, wellness, CBD and Cannabis markets, and crypto-powered digital cash.\n\nAnd a significant Trojan horse, gateway-market opportunity to capitalize on an underserved market as a leg in to what I think could signal a possible shifting of power in the credit card and payment infrastructures in the U.S.\n\nHere’s the storyboard of market forces as I draw it.\n\nCrypto payment/digital cash blockchain projects talk about the unbanked in vertical industries like Cannabis ($10B/Y) as the low hanging fruit for a first in underserved market segment.\n\nIt is both much larger than they talk about, broader in scope, just in its very early infancy and highly strategic in the long game.\n\nToday there are eight states that have legalized recreational use of Cannabis and some thirty that allow it in some fashion. This number will most likely triple or better within a decade as a legal business today operating outside of the banking system.\n\nBut Cannabis is only part of this puzzle and while the largest now, I think simply a leg into something even larger in the future.\n\nMy interest and work in the wellness and nutrition world has drawn me into the benefits of CBD or Cannabidiol which is different (bear with me please) than Cannabis/THC which is a cannabinoid. Both can be derived from Cannabis but the medicinal supplements the use CBD are primarily derived from Hemp.\n\nCBD is not psychoactive (doesn’t get you stoned), is legal though murky way, for sale most everywhere and has a host of attributes for disease treatment from depression to arthritis, is in many beauty and sports medicine supplements, sprays and topicals.\n\nWhile numbers are hard to come by, I’ve heard from multiple sources that within the last 3-5 years it has grown from almost nothing, hitting the $5-600M number last year selling into the $6-7T wellness, health and beauty market and the $100+B supplement segment.\n\nThe reason you are most likely using this ingredient and don’t know about it is the legal murkiness around it that is well outlined in this excellent post by Claire Mccormick in Beauty Independent.\n\nIn 2016, the federal government classified CBD that comes from marijuana as a Schedule I narcotic, lumped in with heroin. And with our very own Jeff Session verbalizing his war on cannabis, by association only, CBD from Hemp is guilty.\n\nNot guilty legally but the payment gateways—credit cards, authorize.net, Stripe, Square—if they know you are selling CBD-based products are refusing to service your transactions, or sporadically charge crippling fees and have seized funds with little or no recourse, including bonds posted to guarantee payment.\n\nThis rolls downhill by association that if you are selling beauty creams with CBD not only can’t you process online with credit cards but many other services including your insurance and credit will be impacted directly as you go on published lists of illicit companies selling questionable products and likewise become a credit risk as well.\n\nSo—CBD, a proven scientific (and yes I use it) ingredient is now lumped in with THC, porn and firearms. And the majority of companies simply don’t tell you or list that you are getting it in your skin cream for example, except by innuendo. And still, it is creeping up to a $1B/Y biz in a few years.\n\nThis story and opportunity not just about the unbanked buying pot-laced cookies or chewing gum before you jump on the lift at Vail to ski the back bowls stoned. This is as well not just about the entire breadth of the supply chain of the cannabis industry.\n\nIt is also about CBD as an ingredient that is in spite of everything, is turning into a huge market in the umbrella wellness, supplement and genomics businesses. And understand, it is not just about CBD, it is about the market and the today small companies that sell it along with other products into the mass market.\n\nHow does this pertain to crypto?\n\nThe truth that we have all learned about crypto-based projects are that the garden variety replumbing on the blockchain follow-ons are invariably a mistake.\n\nWrong because the true utility of these solutions comes when you reimagine the industry and market itself, not bolt on decentralization or tokens. And invariably the work required to configure an application is not simply a point one, but broader by definition encompassing the larger segment it plays in.\n\nSo, with the Crypto, Cannabidiol and Cannabis conundrum.\n\nI’ve spoken with people in the crypto payments space and all of them acknowledge the Cannabis market as a low-hanging fruit for a stable coin transaction system.\n\nI also know that adjacent industries like supplements and wellness through CBD means that this is not just about recreational pot, it is a Trojan horse for an unbanked, unbranded, unacknowledged need for a new payment system cross these multi-Trillion dollar adjacent markets. When the large companies start gobbling up the CBD-based supplement and beauty companies, one transaction system will be needed cross all the lines.\n\nIt may start with a way to transact at the pot shop in Aspen but has legs into a competitor to authorize.net and Stripe, Shopify and PayPal.\n\nAnd while I presume that the digital cash players are talking to alternative platforms providers in the Cannabis niche, I am pretty certain that this is not the case with the CBD, and greater wellness and supplement industries.\n\nThat’s the story.\n\nHow often do we have this roaring market pull in spite of every possible obstacle and still have a common good as the goal?\n\nThe product, marketing, biz dev, and communications upsides here are the stuff of dreams.\n\nIf you are an expert in the niche pieces of this murky puzzle, I’m interested in connecting.\n\nI am as well currently accepting clients at the intersection of these areas.",
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      "body": "Hi! I am a robot. I just upvoted you! I found similar content that readers might be interested in:\nhttp://arnoldwaldstein.com/2018/03/community-communications-crypto-2/",
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      "body": "What is it about crypto and the possibilities of rewiring seminal pieces of our world on the blockchain that has refocused so much of our attention on something that is still in its infancy?\n\nFor myself, it’s about the dynamic shifts in community and communications.\n\nCrypto as a cultural and technological revolution will redefine large components of our financial and working lives.\n\nBut equally as profound is the giant evolutionary steps happening in the foundations of community and how we create, communicate, market, and manage them.\n\nBeing part of these changes as individual behaviors morph and group dynamics restructure themselves is what draws me in.\n\nCrypto-based networks in this early stage are community-driven by design.\n\nGrounded in the behavioral dynamics we experienced in open-source software models, but with a contextual shift where you economize the protocols themselves, democratizing the model and making the community in many respects, the matrix of the market model itself.\n\nWe don’t really understand what this means as yet, nor how it will play out.\n\nBut the questions are clear:\n\n-When a protocol itself is tokenized, does our behavior interacting with it change and how? Does a sense of openness and inclusion deepen or lessen as work becomes economized within the community itself?\n\n-When we interlace both vision and economics into the dynamics of the community does the very nature of the network morph in some unforeseen manner?\n\n-Who is the customer and what is the common language when developers, investors, early customers are all part of the same community, the same channel digesting the same content?\n\nThese are obviously the key questions you address when you create the incentives for the community, design marketing and communications strategies to support it.\n\nWhat’s fascinating and a bit unnerving at times it is that the pieces of this grand puzzle are clear even though the shape of the image they create is invariably not.\n\nThose of us who have been building communities as stepping off points for markets know that there are key components regardless of the vertical or even the platform.\n\nWe all know that community simple happens and is not something that can be purchased or manufactured. That it happens in spite of as much as because of any platform. And there is a built-in anomaly in every community that demands both strong leadership and correspondingly the preeminence of individual freedoms of each member for it to work.\n\nMost critical that by its very inclusiveness, community structures drive a sense of ownership from those who participate. Breeding tolerance, engagement and forward-looking strength.\n\nThese core truths are the foundation for whatever is to follow. For whatever tokenizing this dynamic entity creates and changes as it finds its pace.\n\nRegardless–there is a correlation between the depth, the vitality, the messiness and emotional scale of these crypto communities and the potential success of the projects they support.\n\nWhether you are raising funds through an ICO. Or post the raise. Or in one of many hybrid forms, the truth remains the same.\n\nWithout a vibrant community that shares a vision and passion, you will almost certainly not succeed even with a successful raise behind you.\n\nAnd within this new community structure, the rules of how we market, communicate, even publish content are not really that clear. There is no one that has this down pat with any proven methodology within the context of an incentivized community.\n\nSome projects are both building and managing their communities really well. Inventing methods of almost in-network meme-driven marketing built on over communicating as a strategy, inclusiveness as a poise with a humble naiveté as their overarching personality.\n\nSome are driven by an overtly raw honestly, redefining the rules of consensus and light-touch leadership as they go.\n\nMost are simply not doing it well.\n\nUnable to understand that developer relations and marketing are one and the same at this stage, missing that community management and communications strategies are not separable.\n\nThis is a new frontier.\n\nAn added layer to community when incentivized, and sense of discovery about how this will affect actors across all the groups that make up that network and community structure.\n\nIt’s what makes me believe that the heady promise of crypto and the blockchain could actually come to fruition in some fashion. I believe in technology but I trust in community to at times get it naturally right and redefine itself to the tasks at hand to the best interest of all involved.\n\nIt is also requiring that we reimagine marketing, not from blank slate certainly but interwoven tightly with community management. Where content publishing gets redefined as an interactive process. Where language and message creation inform both the depth of engagement of the developers and possibly the degree of comfort of the potential end use.\n\nI don’t know how to describe this other than an episodic, community process inclusive of messaging and storytelling, communications and community management wrapped into a new form. One unique unto itself as it is not searching for an outside media model but self-sufficient potentially by the economic potential of the network or community itself.\n\nWe lived through lots of platform changes that have rejiggered the rules of communications, changed behaviors but none where a technological framework has challenged social and economic pieces of how we live and how we behave quite as profoundly as these crypto incentivized communities.\n\nAnd certainly, none where how we market is built not on the platforms that we create but on the communities that are creating those very platforms, consuming what they produce, and profiting directly from their success.\n\nNever has what we don’t know, been so profoundly formative to what we have to do.\n\nMarketing has always mattered when understood correctly, been responsive to its market and applied with nuance and openness to change.\n\nToday this is more true than ever.",
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      "body": "I’m smiling at myself as I write this.\n\nBlogging creates a record of the randomness of your thoughts and how pieces of your life evolve over time as you feel compelled to write about them.\n\nMeditation and mindfulness as its aftereffect is one of those for me.\n\nI started meditating consistently about a year ago, using Headspace as a daily ritual to start my day. In my writing chair with samthewondercat on my lap at home, in quiet spots when I travel.\n\nI have a natural propensity for falling into meditative spaces with a technique developed years ago when treatment for an illness required that I find a deep concentrative and safe spot that I could remove myself to and encapsulate my thoughts completely extant from the reality of the situation.\n\nMeditation, especially partially guided meditation that I practice, was a jumping off point from that with a series of tools and processes that you consciously practice. And when successful, a resultant overall poise that happens not only as you learn to navigate internal space but also as you move these learned notations into daily life.\n\nTo be clear, meditation to me is the process of sitting in silence, mindfulness the place I find when I’m successful in allowing myself to see the impact of the process on my overall state of well-being for myself, my habits and at certain times interactions with others.\n\nMy drive for wanting, even needing this, is connected to a confluence of things in my real life.\n\nAging and my sense of relevance towards my own profession and productivity. The ongoing need for constant learning and balancing pattern recognition of my own experiences with the incessant shifting of norms in technology and culture. The reality that poise and calm, not stress and movement engender knowledge and surface inspiration.\n\nAnd that most simple and most powerful fact of all—that the littlest things create the largest changes over time.\n\nNot suddenly but as tools and approaches. As the way, we reach backwards into comfort zones being at peace with ourselves to tackle stuff we aren’t familiar with. In our current world, where everything is crazily shifting, the skills of noting in the process of observing the ease or difficulty of becoming mindful during meditation becomes increasing more relevant and more useful to me.\n\nTo be clear.\n\nThis is not about religion. Or spiritualness for me in the slightest bit.\n\nIt is about the state of mindfulness that I can call on. That I am slowly learning to harness a little bit each and every day.\n\nIn physical moments when surfacing calm triggers a more flexible space. As recently at the top of an impossibly steep ski slope where I shouldn’t have been but was able to conjure up a poise that was neither bravado or stress, just calmness to move on forward. Or approaching a room full of people where I will be front and center. Or when faced with leading a decision-making process where there are no good decisions.\n\nBut more important to me, in those miniscule but telling personal steps I take, as when I examine the why of stuff that stops concentration and hinders productivity of things I really want to do, but fall into wasteful patterns.\n\nOf addressing with a nuanced and logical light the laziness of making excuses, the lostness that I feel sometimes when the details of some new technical process mushrooms to obviate the importance of the greater task that comes from tackling the impossible nits of it all.\n\nI find that when I lay out the tools on the table they seem quite facile and small.\n\nThe ability to scan my body from head to toe with x-ray precision to find the outline and shape of my own body as a reflection of my personal self. The core meditative action to note things within the process of navigating space, not judging diversion or wandering as bad, simply being aware of it.\n\nAnd most important to me, being able to use this comparison of personal notations in different states as a way to acknowledge and motivate. For example, when I obfuscate my focus when something is hard to write or encapsulate, I’ve started to scan myself and note how I feel when I break thing down and push forward against when I lazily let it slide.\n\nSmall things learned through hours of meditation that are in effect super powers that I can call upon.\n\nWhat continually amazes me is that mindfulness, in my way of harnessing it, is not about lack of self, it is about harnessing my self. Using tools learned navigating internal space applied to thoughts and decision making in real life that we are constantly called on to make as we grow and change.\n\nWho would have thought I’d be writing this? Or more important benefitting from this in such formative ways.\n\nMe the hyper kid and aggressive and anxious young adult back then to—well me today—still the same in many ways but channeling something to be more productive and self-observant and self-controlled without rigidity to process or preconceived self-image.\n\nAnd mostly, as we all age, to embrace time as both fleeting and if we wish—as I do—to make it bend to our advantage.\n\nLooking forward and channeling where we came from as energy motivating us to feel excited with the yet unknown.\n\nIf you’ve never given this much thought, never spent the time to think about the tools to navigate inner space as ways to make focused life more productive, I suggest giving it a shot.\n\nWorks for me.\n\nAnd the more I work at it the more it does.",
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      "permlink": "how-do-we-market-crypto-and-the-blockchain-to-consumers-or-do-we",
      "title": "How do we market crypto and the blockchain to consumers? Or do we?",
      "body": "I’ve been mulling over whether as we start to rollout blockchain-based and crypto-economic solutions to the broader market whether the platform itself will matter to the end user.\n\nWhether the language around crypto and blockchain has already entered the mass market vernacular and how this will inform how we position these applications to consumers.\n\nA couple of years ago when early discussions around crypto were more nuanced, less emphatic though equally abstract, there was an early adopter community that believed beyond facts that this was a disruptive change agent for just about everything. And an opposite side that hadn’t really done the work as yet to think critically about the why or why not.\n\nCommon ground in these talks was that to the end user in most cases the blockchain was just super smart plumbing and that the ineffable benefits of decentralization would be invisible to the end user couched within an app. And by default, when companies got around to branding products for the marketplace, the platform would simply not be part of the customer connection.\n\nWe were just plain wrong.\n\nNot in the power of crypto and the blockchain by any means. But in the accelerated acculturation of these terms into the consumer mindshare. Into mass market awareness if not understanding.\n\nNone of us could have foreseen the crazy ride of 2017 where everyone was talking about and trading Bitcoin, Eth and Alt coins. Where your Uber driver, wine shop owner and bar tender, and everyone in between, had heard of the blockchain regardless of the fact that the tiniest minority truly understood it any level.\n\nThis is fascinating from a pure social anthropology perspective where in a space of 18 months or so, the world became name-recognition aware of Bitcoin, Eth and blockchain with almost no mass market information leaders. With way more interest that knowledge. And even amongst the developer community itself, widely divergent opinions of what this is all about.\n\nThis unique situation where the terms have entered the common language regardless of clarity of definition, is highly informative to how we roll projects out that will touch true end users, not just developers or coin speculators.\n\nHow we communicate with customers, how we build perceptions around brands is based on the intersection of who we are and the why of our products with assumptions of what the market believes or is familiar with.\n\nThink for a second about selling some sort of payment app or banking solution to the unbanked of the world, a target for a few of the early projects starting to touch the market.\n\nWill the brands of whichever app the unbanked end up using to move money across country boundaries or store value be simply a bland Venmo type of utility?  Or will its source in the crypto world end up being informative to the brand itself and part of the reason in the customers mind why they choose it over another?\n\nOr whether normal folks buying coins on platforms as dramatically distinct as Coinbase and MyEtherWallet  understand the different between them (one centralized, one decentralized) and how this impacts the cost, ease of use and security of either one of these solutions?\n\nThere is always the marketing argument that end users don’t care about anything but utility.\n\nInvariably this proves untrue, a lazy rush to simplicity and accelerated category commoditization. I believe the very opposite will prove true in this case.\n\nThis is a wondrous and unique tangle of broad-based misinformation. Potentially the greatest storytelling and brand communications opportunity of an era.\n\nInvariably building a brand, the core expression of who we are, defines the communications language to what the customer believes they are buying. It bridges that gap between reality and perception, us and them.  In tech solutions especially where change and iteration are constant, brand is the instrument (along with community) that engenders empathy and patience with solutions that are invariably not without issues early on.\n\nThe marketers reading this will debate the ageless whiteboard conundrum around how laborious it is to educate the world and raise the polemic around whether it is easier to create a new category or clarify or change the existent one.\n\nWe simply need to think differently.\n\nThis is not the 90s or early 2000s. We can’t simply avoid market awareness or put an E before Commerce, Digital before Communications or Online before whatever.\n\nThe power of this revolution is that it captures the imagination and amplifies the awe of what we can accomplish.\n\nYou can’t growth hack it into existence. You can’t buy the communities to support you. You can’t fake it.\n\nWelcome to the next era of marketing and communications.\n\nWhere communications is the core of marketing and brand an essential element of community building and market success.\n\nWho would have thought that the Satoshi whitepaper would not only change how we think about companies, commerce and communities for social good, but also the language and the dynamics of marketing itself?\n\nIf I sound inspired, I most certainly am. As should we all.",
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      "title": "Thoughts I'm taking into 2018",
      "body": "The best habits often become traditions and create value through the act of doing them year after year.\n\nThis is certainly true for the yearly wrap up post that I’ve been writing since 2009.\n\nThis year feels different in some telling ways as usually it is technology that has shaped my year as that is the pulse of my life to a large degree and my livelihood. And certainly, the tech shifts this past year have been profound.\n\nBut today, the important things are more personal, more internal. More about me and how I manage myself in the face of change rather than change itself.\n\nAnd more about my relations to my communities of interest and friends and how I can contribute to them more significantly.\n\nFive that matter to me.\n\nComing to grips with the State of the Union\n\nToo much of my time this past year has been spent reacting to politics. Wasting too much of my time being reactive emotionally and angry.\n\nI’ve found a more peaceful and productive way to deal with this.\n\nNot with the status quo certainly but with an acknowledgement of core beliefs that drive my decisions of what is worth my time or where tolerance is warranted.\n\nThe first is that ‘No end can ever be used as a justification for an unethical means’. And second, ‘those without a moral compass have no place in my personal world’.\n\nI’m simple done with people who don’t operate within these core tenants. I see nothing lost by cutting ties with aberrant philosophies and apologists that mouth them.\n\nDiversity of thought does not include the morally and ethically bereft. There is nothing to learn from them.\n\nCompartmentalizing my personal focus\n\nWithout prioritizing my physical health, my mental balance and personal productivity, nothing else truly matters. Without them, I’m less use to myself or those who matter or depend on me.\n\nIn the face of increasing distraction, these are my core blocks of time I give to myself each and every day.\n\nCarving out time for exercise and nutrition, meditation and cognizance of my inner space, and daily productivity is at the top of my everyday list. There are few emergencies that disrupt these buckets of focus and self-improvement.\n\nThis is a somehow about the micro/macro dichotomy as well.\n\nThe micro—what which I personally do and can control–is a far more productive focus for me to have impact on the broader macro elements of my world. Working on me is my best shot at making a difference to the greater world at large.\n\nEmbracing crypto as a fuel for imagining the impossible\n\nI took the plunge into crypto thoroughly this year though the bug hit a few years earlier.\n\nThe profit of trading coins aside. The craziness of ICOs aside. The rejiggering of capital markets aside. Those are not why this inspires me so.\n\nIt’s more personal.\n\nThere is a giddy optimism innate to crypto economic gestalt that the impossible is indeed doable. When you open the potential for personal empowerment as a manner of economizing change in a new market economy.\n\nI also harbor a growing excitement that this reimagining the world will include lionizing the arts and literacy along with the technological and economic shift.\n\nI’m all in on this.\n\nWe need fuel to do the impossible and this is working for me.\n\nComing to grips with our individual market relevance\n\nWe all need to deal with our professional relevance regardless of where we are in life.\n\nThe hyper accelerated rate of change in the tech world in some ways levels the playing field.\n\nRelevance is something that each of us is challenged to bring to the market each and every day. We are challenged not to be special team experts as much as fitting our true expertise into the context of the shifting paradigms that we all work on.\n\nThe contextual relevance of what we contribute is the new acid test.\n\nIf everything is in flux except the very nature of our value to each new circumstance, this in actuality democratizes value itself as contextual.\n\nWe are just getting started\n\nOn one hand, the utterly unimaginable is now a near-term possibility.\n\nAutonomous and flying cars. AI systems self-learning algorithms. Global markets economizing themselves on the blockchain. The actuality that each individual could own and control their own identity and data.\n\nThis is sci-fi stuff of less than a decade ago.\n\nOn the other hand, it is clear to me that we are just barely scratching the surface and that everything today is prep for the real work ahead.\n\nAI honestly is in its very early infancy, more about computing power than intelligence.\n\nThe understanding of the science of our bodies is at the very best case, primitive with the most serious diseases that plague the world, uncured for centuries.\n\nEven nutrition, for all its advances over the last decade, is just starting to be recognized as science.\n\nWe are not at the end, we are simply just getting started.\n\nThis breeds humility. And opportunity. And possibility. And optimism.\n\nI wish all of my community a great New Year and a terrific start to 2018!\n\nI’m raising a glass of to change and opportunity for all of us.",
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      "title": "Can we tokenize behavior?",
      "body": "Crypto as an onramp for reimagining our world and reinvigorating our excitement for change is my single most important takeaway from this past year.\n\nIt takes you down deep rabbit holes of learning. Stimulates unfettered imagining. And somehow instills a sense that anything is possible.\n\nSome of what crypto promises seems obvious, or at least possible from a market perspective.\n\nLike the inevitability of collective micro-ownership of commodities like real estate, art, storage, even energy. These feel natural to the innate structure of the blockchain itself and more important, the possibilities of crypto economic market evolution.\n\nSocial behavior though is something else altogether.\n\nThe idea that you can incentivize human behavior, tokenize social communities is something we want badly to be true, yet the hardest to truly visualize.\n\nAs we built the current social infrastructures over the last decade, we learned that they platformed existent, often latent behaviors. Giving grease to the niche, the local and the obscure, making them global as communities and memes by their very ease of access and use. Broadening connections cross people and shared beliefs everywhere.\n\nWe also learned that bolting on social to existent platforms and compensating groups for activities like viewing videos, invariably didn’t work at all.\n\nThere is a grounded naturalness inherent in behavioral socialization that simply couldn’t be stimulated no matter how well programmed or marketed.\n\nThere are undeniable reasons why we want to believe that the social nets can be rethought within a crypto economic framework.\n\nBlockchain technology as a platform for change simply inspires the possibility of this. And consequently, a large number of the hundreds of white papered ICOs are premised on the inevitability of socially-incentivized networks.\n\nThere is obviously as well a techno-cultural backlash against the status quo where the Facebook model monopolizes attention, repurposes personal data, driving corporate profit under the legacy belief that without advertising, there is no way to support the internet.\n\nWe collectively want this reimagined.\n\nWe want to believe that Facebook can be challenged. We want social democracy along with the financial decentralized possibilities that the very economy and secure identity potential of crypto, in abstract appears to promise us.\n\nThis is a tough one to calibrate with reality as both historically and experientially this is counterintuitive to the facts. Certain analog behavioral truths remain sacrosanct regardless of platform dynamics.\n\nReading scads of ICO white papers which assume this is reality simply because it could be is not enough.\n\nBut there’s a kicker here.\n\nWe need to step back and rethink how true innovation happens.\n\nIf you submerge yourself in the library of everything being written about crypto, you get the sense that we are recreating our transportation, financial, security, credit, marketing and other industries in a better, albeit decentralized fashion. Replumbing with better pipes.\n\nThis is the wrong way in I think.\n\nCrypto envisioning at its best smacks of how the creative community approaches the arts. Where we consciously let ourselves suspend disbelief and in that meditative space of emotional connections, find natural truths and emotions in completely unfamiliar realities and couplings of peoples and ideas.\n\nThis idea is emblemized in what my friend Hue Rhodes spoke to me as a game-theory driven world where our emotional nature gets rewired along with the quest for new intellectual possibilities. Where as he put it, this is an audition for human behavioral evolution where we, as actors, perform in uniquely non-obvious ways.\n\nI wonder whether my questions of whether we can tokenize social behavior or communities is the right one.\nWhy bother to recreate Facebook on a new platform? Why start with efficiency as the first foot forward?\n\nIf you look at some of the early but functioning experiments like Steem.it or the prescient writings of Nick Szabo, you realize that thinking differently is not an option, it’s what is required.\n\nThink not of how to replumb or rewire the world, but how to create the environment where interactions can be different, social, within a new economic order.\n\nThe creative palate of the crypto economies and communities, may just be the economies themselves and the behaviors that are incubated and normal within them.\n\nMaybe a more useful way to rethink a world without a media model driving social communities and tokenized behavior is not something as primitive as compensation for emotive responses. But a dynamics perhaps where exchange is rethought, value is rejiggered, and socialization finds a different expression where the ‘them’ becomes the ‘us’ and brand ownership and consumer intent are driven by a different script.\n\nSince the beginning of time, artists and humanitarians have created stages and codes of beliefs to act out social experiments to evolve culture past its own restrictions.\n\nIn a sense, crypto economies are part of this trend but with the powerful and unique twist of economizing them in collective ways.\n\nThat’s a dream I think worth waking up to\n\nNot the mundane presupposition of making emotions transactional, but a contextual shift to make emotions and community dynamics more natural within an economy that supports the individual first, not last.\n\nFood for thought moving into the new year.",
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