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visual art

augmented reality Metaverse / xR NFTs and digital objects visual art

·Jan. 8, 2021

Lessons for banking and finance from video game interface design

We’ve had this write-up in some various mental states floating around for a while, and better done than perfect. So treat this as a core idea to be fleshed out later.

Payments and banking companies should be looking at how people purchase and store digital goods and digital currency in video games. That experience has been polished over 40 years, and is what will be the default expectation for future generations.

For those interested, here is a website that collects user experiences of shopping across hundreds of designs.

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DAOs eCommerce marketing microeconomics NFTs and digital objects Social / Community visual art

·Jul. 4, 2021

Luxury and Fashion market structure applied to finance, NFTs, and DAO

Luxury and fashion markets are structurally different from finance or commodity markets in that they seek to limit supply in order to generate value. This increases price and social status. We can analogize these brand dynamics to what is happening in NFT digital object markets and better understand their function as a result.

We’re not cool. That’s why we’re in finance.

But people want to be cool. As highly social and intelligent animals, we want and need to belong, differentiate against each other, and negotiate for status. We create signals and hierarchies to create pockets of relational capital, which we then cash in for real world benefits.

Such mammalian realities are contrary to the economic rendering of the homo economicus, the abstracted rational agent making choices in financial models. In 2021, our financial models are waking up and instantiating themselves, becoming Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), spun up by DeFi and NFT industry insiders, and implemented into commercial actions onchain.

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decentralized finance NFTs and digital objects philosophy supply chain / trade visual art

·Feb. 8, 2021

Non-fungible tokens and crypto art (like Hashmasks) will create multi-billion markets for digital objects with financial features

This week, we look at:

Hashmasks, CryptoPunks, and other large NFT / crypto art projects generating tens of millions of USD trading volume
Perceptions of financial value, as well as whether it matters to have an “original” digital art piece relative to its digital copy
The intersection of collectibles with decentralized finance, and its collateralization, tranching, lending, and trading, as well as a view on 2021

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artificial intelligence big tech China civilization and politics Metaverse / xR visual art

·Jul. 27, 2020

OpenAI, backed with $1B+ by Elon Musk & MSFT, can now program SQL and write Harry Potter fan-fiction

This week, we look at a breakthrough artificial intelligence release from OpenAI, called GPT-3. It is powered by a machine learning algorithm called a Transformer Model, and has been trained on 8 years of web-crawled text data across 175 billion parameters. GPT-3 likes to do arithmetic, solve SAT analogy questions, write Harry Potter fan fiction, and code CSS and SQL queries. We anchor the analysis of these development in the changing $8 trillion landscape of our public companies, and the tech cold war with China.

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DAOs Metaverse / xR NFTs and digital objects visual art

·May. 3, 2021

The top 5 NFT trends for 2021, and current state of the NFT market

This week, we discuss the current state of the NFT markets, and our top 5 trends for NFTs beyond the initial hype:

Incumbent media NFTs and enterprise IP networks
Programmatic and generative art, and the blockchain medium
Digital Museums, DAOs, and the growth of the Metaverse
What it means to own the NFT: IPFS and multi chain support
Integration into DeFi and traditional portfolio management

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exchanges / cap mkts identity and privacy marketing Metaverse / xR NFTs and digital objects Social / Community visual art

·Oct. 6, 2021

User-Generated Finance and Cultural Financial Instruments, via Snoop Dogg, Dapper Labs, and $1.5B Decentralized Social

The structure of capital markets precedes the innovations that come from it. High frequency trading, passive ETF investing, SPACs, and crypto assets all telegraphed their value proposition before becoming large and meaningful in scale. We are now seeing a new market shape emerge, one that starts with community and builds up into financial instruments that are cultural and social. This analysis looks at the most recent developments in the overlap between decentralized social and cultural work and related financial features.

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central bank / CBDC digital transformation generational change mega banks narrative zeitgeist philosophy visual art

·Jan. 25, 2021

What 1840s “Free Banking” and the 1910s Cubist movement suggests about DeFi and economic machine evolution

This week, we look at:

The nature of innovation hubs, and how close groups of actors within a particular environment can be massively, fundamentally productive. Take for example the 30 million years of the Cambrian explosion.
The difficulty of experimenting with banking and money frameworks, the limits of traditional econometrics, and an overview of “free banking” in the 1840s.
How evolutionary theory can help us think about selection of economic models, and the hyper-competition and hyper-mutation that we see in crypto. DeFi protocols, like BadgerDAO and ArcX among hundreds of others, are experiments in designing different monetary policies and banking regime experiments in real time.

We have never before had such acceleration in the design space of the economic machine, subject to evolutionary pressures, built by a closely-wound nexus of developers. It is a fortune for the curious.

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artificial intelligence DAOs NFTs and digital objects philosophy visual art

·Jul. 22, 2019

What Finance can learn from the Evolution of Beautiful Artificial Intelligence Art

However, mastery is not immune to automation. As a profession, portraiture melted away with the invention of the Camera, which in turn became commoditized and eventually digitized. The value-add from painting had to shift to things the camera did *not* do. As a result, many artists shifted from chasing realism to capturing emotion (e.g., Impressionism), or to the fantastical (e.g., Surrealism), or to non-representative abstraction (e.g., Expressionism) of the 20th century. The use of the replacement technology, the camera, also became artistic -- take for example the emotional range of Fashion or Celebrity photography (e.g., Madonna as the Mona Lisa). The skill of manipulating the camera into making art, rather than mere illustration, became a rare craft as well -- see the great work of Annie Leibovitz.

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artificial intelligence civilization and politics Metaverse / xR philosophy visual art

·Jul. 3, 2020

White Obama made by Artificial Intelligence

What we know intuitively, and what the software shows, is that the pixelated image can be expanded into a cone of multiple probable outcomes. The same pixelated face can yield millions of various, uncanny permutations. These mathematical permutations of our human flesh exit in an area which is called “latent space”. The way to pick one out of the many is called “gradient descent”.

Imagine you are standing in an open field, and see many beautiful hills nearby. Or alternately, imagine you are standing on a hill, looking across the rolling valleys. You decide to pick one of these valleys, based on how popular or how close it is. This is gradient descent, and the valley is the generated face. Which way would you go?

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