17 Jan Symbol blockchain news update โ 17/01/22
Hope that your Monday is going well. Apologies for the lack of posts over the last few days, it’s been a busy time ๐ฌ Anyway, better late than never, here is today’s update!
Quadratic voting
This is an interesting one. I had never heard of quadratic voting before but then I had never heard of quadratic funding until last year either. Looking at the description and without going into any maths it looks like it allows you to vote based on the strength of your convictions. If you REALLY love a project ๐คฉ then you can use this weighting in your vote whereas if it’s more of a “meh, I guess it’s OK” you can cast a less enthusiastic thumbs up for the project. This is a simple but cool concept, it reminds me of those questionnaires “on a scale of 1 to 10โฆ”.
What does this achieve? Well it apparently overcomes some of the limitations of the wealthy getting what they want based on their holdings (this was the preferred method with NEM where voting was often based on account importance). This might upset the whales but in the end I believe that we should have a more democratic system where the entire community has an equal say.
Whale watching
On the subject of whales. This is an interesting question and I would love to see the answer! ๐
You can see from SymbolNodes.org (stats for NEM here) that there are 663 Symbol accounts with more than 1M XYM, 3,584 with over 100K and 14,082 with at least 10K. Some of the very big accounts will be exchanges and core funds and we don’t have information on accounts with balances of less than 10K but there is a significant number of large holders. I guess the same will go for BTC and ETH but I don’t know how they compare. I don’t have time to do a proper analysis right now but maybe this will go onto my list of blog posts to write in the future.
My guess is (although I am no economist) that the concentration of wealth will dilute over time. I could imagine that if for example, XYM hit $5.00 that many of the big holders would sell at least some of their holdings and that these would be snapped up by many smaller buyers. Back when Bitcoin was $3.00 I am sure that there were a lot of huge holders but I would imagine that as price went up this wealth was distributed significantly. If you bought in the early days and held it all until now then you must have balls of steel and I salute you. You would also be filthy rich and I am very jealous.
Community support
I think I upset a few people with this tweet but I will mention it again anyway. Please consider supporting people and projects you believe in by harvesting on their nodes. This doesn’t just apply to me ๐ there are loads of people out there trying hard to promote and develop on Symbol and it means a lot to know that the community support you.
Pull requests
I am sure that it would make Jaguar, Gimre and Hatchet’s day if they saw more people contributing to Symbol’s development. I would if I could but unfortunately, I can’t ๐ If you have the skills and some new ideas then maybe it is something to consider.
Hatchet life
It’s coming soon I promise! As you may have noticed I used funds contributed to the blog to buy 60 hatchet.life and asked Hatchet to write me a blog post. You can see the transaction here.
The article will cover the Symbol and NEM wealth gap and how this can be closed. I haven’t read the article yet but I am very much looking forward to it!
Be a hero
Interesting. I still don’t know much about “The Heroes” game but it looks like development is progressing and a set of starter NFTs are set to be released soon.
You can check out their channel on the XYM City Discord for more information and keep up to date with development.
More mosaics, please!
I realised that I hadn’t actually covered the story on Yozacoin and its distribution but if you want some here is the place to go:
I actually wanted to cover @toshi_ma‘s tweet as makes an excellent point on this. I guess mosaic value is what we make it and even if they are “worthless” sending them around will only increase network usage which has to be a good thing. Maybe consider making a mosaic and giving it a go yourself. I wrote an article about this last year and it is super simple to do in the desktop wallet – give it a go!
Also, offering mosaics seems to be a great way of increasing your retweets and follower counts! ๐
Don’t stop building (Hold on to that feelin’)
I have to stop getting songs in my head when I start writing a headline. Just a reminder from Hatchet that we need to keep building. That goes for the community as well as the team.
I actually started playing around with an idea at the weekend, more for personal interest and learning rather than thinking it would be useful. I tried to train a model to write bad poems with Tensorflow. It worked but really badly, although the structure was generally good and it even rhymed sometimes too. I think I need more training data so I shelved it for now and might revisit it in the future. Perhaps haiku’s would be the way to go ๐ค
The idea was to set up an automated system where if you sent e.g. 1 XYM it would generate a unique poem generated from a seed phrase/keyword sent in a message. It would then send a message containing the poem back to the address that payment was sent from. Maybe I will pick it up again at some point, I just wish I could get a week to sit down and work on something rather than trying to squeeze something into a two-hour time slot here and there.
Just for fun, a late addition – here’s what it came up with for the seed-phrase “why Symbol is the best” trained on the romantic poets Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley.
Of a reward through the world discenem,
And speck, a Truth's heart in all heirs of thee,
A household moon above his heart's despair.
A gift, the spoiling takes a were that newlected
Those musings or diverted, save that came
When all the excited spirit of ourselves,
Wandered by passion, what she insered,
Though with pride and the bosom of the night,
Or the night'd and the dead of which the voice
Of a sky-side, so sliming; 'tis the way
That break as close-between the spale. But if that few
She spirits the very pleasures be cheerful look!Web3
Argh, more empty jargon, what was web2 – did I miss that one? Anyway, web3 – it’s the next big thing!
Great to see this! @TrendStream was chosen to feature in this article as one of the 52 blockchain leaders surveyed to give their opinion on Web3 in 2022! He really is Symbol and NEM royalty ๐คด It was also featured on Yahoo news!
Take me down to the paradise (XYM) city
I did it again and it’s worse than the first one ๐ฌ. My brain, why does it play music all of the time? We are off to see Guns n Roses later in the year COVID permitting – I have a feeling that they won’t be in their prime anymore but saying that we saw the Rolling Stones a couple of years ago and they were awesome.
Where was I? Ah, yes – this is beautiful work from @bestgoldangel! It also carries an important message. Get yourselves over to the XYM City Discord channel and keep up to date with what is happening!
NFT-Drive auction
I reported on the NFT-Drive auction the other day and I think bidding had just started at the time of writing. The final hammer price on the artwork was 45,700 XYM! That’s a pretty decent sales price!
In case you missed it the first time around, here is the artwork that was auctioned.
The crazy world of NFTs
I get the impression that Gimre and Jaguar aren’t the biggest fans of NFTs which makes me think that they might be grumpy middle-aged men like me ๐
However, I think that this is a good point, NFTs without artists = overpriced trash. Luckily, so far at least, we see that there are many talented artists working to create unique pieces for NFT-Drive and this is where the value comes from. Personally, I would rather have art hanging on my wall (I only have one piece at home ๐ฅ) but I will bow to the wisdom of the younger generation and get behind the concept of NFTs.
QR codes
Quick Twitter poll – do you or do you not use the QR function in the Symbol wallet. I think I have done once because I had to but otherwise it’s a no from me. At least I know what a QR code is though – come on people!
Symbol comics
I am not much of a comic book guy but I do like this idea. Would be awesome to see this and even better a regular full comic book. I would buy a copy, might even get my wife interested in Symbol, she loves them and sci-fi and crappy cartoons that don’t make any sense ๐ฃ
Whaaat! ๐ ๐ณ ๐
Hahaha! This made me laugh, a lot. Sometimes automatic translation goes horribly wrong ๐
Winner!
Congrats to @umesetu2011 on your victory! I really love these Symbol car designs!
Thanks!
That’s it for today’s post – keep your eyes peeled for a Hatchet exclusive coming soon to Symbol Blog!
I’m a Symbol and NEM enthusiast and run this blog to try to grow awareness of the platform in the English-speaking world. If you have any Symbol news you would like me to report on or you have an article that you would like to publish then please let me know!
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