Time Horizons

“People thinking 5 months out arguing with people thinking 5 years out.
Story of most major debates on crypto twitter.” - @twobitidiot aka Ryan Selkis

Ryan actually cited @RyanWatkins_ as the source of the quote and I want to do that too because I think it’s so spot on. 

This dynamic isn’t just true of arguments on Crypto Twitter, but crypto product development cycles, markets, and a whole lot of the non-crypto world including politics, economics, career choices, and relationships. 

One of the fundamental sources of disagreement in the world, including in our own heads, is differing time horizons.

In these sorts of situations, there isn’t really a right answer. It comes down to managing necessities, uncertainty, values, and goals. 

I attempt to have a low time preference, so that finding the optimal balance between now vs. later is done with the fewest constraints. (And I do think “balance” is almost always the way to go—see Convex and Concave Dispositions for another lens to understand differing worldviews.)

This battle between time horizons is present in every decision we make on the Geo Web. The loudly announced arrival of Meta née Facebook into the space (even if we knew they were already spending billions on AR/VR) quite honestly has been a catalyst for me to tilt more towards the here and now.

Metaverse talk is everywhere. People are snatching up virtual land at skyrocketing prices (with dreams of huge windfalls). Network effects (not ours) are accumulating.

We’re never going to sacrifice our core values of public good and permissionless innovation. We’re still confident in the core mechanic of partial common ownership being the key to bootstrapping a positive-sum, sustainable AR layer of the metaverse (and beyond). But, we need to ship. 

We need to enable real use cases, builders, and users sooner rather than later. We need to learn about, tune, and develop our network feedback loop. One result is that we’re likely to get more aggressive in using our small treasury (all thanks to generous donors!) to accelerate and expand our product development even though we’re still in a testnet. (Hit us up if you have an idea or skill set that could use funding!)

Luckily this urgency is aligning with relief on our biggest blocker to-date: availability of ETH L2 roll-ups. Aribitrum and Optimism are rapidly iterating and improving their optimistic roll-ups. Starkware has entered the full zk roll-up race (albeit not an EVM-based solution). We’re teed up and awaiting zkSync 2.0 testnet availability. We WILL be able to launch on a network in early 2022 on a network that values decentralization and permissionlessness the way that we do. We no longer need to make a “5 month” decision that affects our 5+ year outlook. That is super exciting, but it also means the pressure is on to not over-calibrate to the far future on all the other (hopefully reversible) decisions that we have to make. It’s time to go!

Technical

• We’re exploring implementations of partial common ownership with periodic (monthly) instead of continuous auctions. This is a big UX change and has its technical challenges, but we think it’s important for long-term adoption and investment. There’s just some use cases for digital land and for some people where an immediate land transfer is catastrophic. Check out the forum topics here & here.
• We are experimenting with Ceramic and different media types to enable new types of Geo Web experiences. This first one allows for streaming .mp4 videos in VR from a Ceramic stream. This isn’t integrated to Geo Web parcels yet but will be. (https://github.com/Geo-Web-Project/geoweb-experiments/pull/1)

Community

• Our Gitcoin grant is still going strong into the final week (ends on 12/16)! The grant is showing that we’ve maxed out our matching bonus, but there might be something funky going on with the estimated calculation there (governance docs say the max match is 1% of the pool). Either way the support has been amazing, and we are so grateful for all the people that are supporting our vision for an open metaverse!
• Check out the PartyBid for ETHbot vs Moloch Showdown. You can contribute to public goods funding while getting a fraction of a badass NFT (not financial advice; dyor). It's the final level of Gitcoin’s Greatest Larp series of comics, NFTs, and Moloch slaying. 
• If you haven’t applied to ETHDenver get your app in ASAP! The Ethereum/Crypto world has grown so much since the last in-person version that they are bound to be strapped for space. This year hacking is going to start (virtually) in January and BUIDL week is going to be jam packed with learning and events in the week leading up to the main event. 
• No blog next week because Cody and I are going to be hanging out IRL. We’re going to maximize our time on the whiteboard and also attend RadicalxChange’s 2021 Annual unConference on 12/17. We’re super excited to learn from and talk with the whole RxC community! 

On Deck

• Continue research and spec’ing periodic auctions
• Attend the RxC unConference
• More experiments with media types and browser functionality

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