one of my favorite smart contract experiments was Proof of Weak Hands 3D POWH was a transparent Ponzi scheme. 10% buy and sell tax that got distributed as a dividend to existing holders it was marketed and defined as a Ponzi. everyone knew this when they bought. so it became sort of a gambling game and commentary on the crypto market generally this was the crypto winter of 2018. almost everything was down massive, inflows were low, opportunities were bare. this was one of the few places with real activity. the contract had millions at peak (DeFiLlama says over $10mm) definitely from the 4chan /biz/ sector of crypto. the memes and shilling were insane. that group was heavy into Chainlink which had pumped massively despite being rough around the edges, that community was a good place to be for crypto natives. direct onchain participation, experimentation. early "money legos." precursors to DeFi which was a big part of the runup in 2020 onwards. plus just chaotic fun

an update for my fans. i'm going back to work as a principal software engineer took some time off, found enlightenment, got ripped. promised my wife no new business ventures for a while, so here we are i feel like Rip Van Winkle who went to sleep and woke up in a new world where the old software engineering job is dead so what's my edge now? still more domain expertise than the models in most areas. for now. tick tock my most valuable tool/IP isn't my personal stack anymore. instead it's a context system i built and curated datasets that i feed to agents ive built context harnesses for small, underpowered local models which work well. offline, private, etc. not highly valued (yet?) but feels like token and hardware optimization could/should be valuable i've built intuition around what needs my attention vs what to hand off entirely to agents. if the dev workflow has humans as the bottleneck, then there's still alpha there i manage engineers. which involves managing how they manage their agents while i manage my agents get busy living or get busy dying

massive loopholes and open questions regarding liability and AI agents you can decentralize and/or anonymize the creation of software 2023 crypto + AI bubble you had "fair launches" and truly autonomous agents attributing fault to an actual person might be impossible

you don't hear about OpenClaw anymore because "claws" didn't work as long-lived AI personal assistants i found OpenClaw useful and built specialized agents that i still use daily, but i run them with PicoClaw to save tokens (OpenClaw's token overhead is massive)