lore @optimism | ex: @coinbase | views are my own | what if it all worked out? 

good (in different ways): railgun, farcaster, polymarket, signal
bad (in different ways): pump.fun, Terra/Luna, FTX

The differences in what the app does stem from differences in beliefs in developers' heads about what they are here to accomplish.

I strongly disagree with Vitalik that pump is bad.

pump is a nascent form of content moving onchain — thereby letting it be valued and creating real value that can flow to creators and curators who can identify content value early.

there's absolutely things *around* pump (and other asset classes + venues) that are bad (e.g. people manipulating markets), but I think it's actively harmful to denigrate pump itself.

onchain creativity is good — and pump has been pioneering. thank you to @alon and team for their leadership 🫡

@base builder #001; onchain cities w/ OAK & city3

what valuable work do u think the ppl who make these tokens are contributing?

like what is the actual "content"? the name/ticker/image?

what's the actual content of a social media post? name/description/image :)

i also don't think most social media posts are very worthwhile expressions of creativity or should be tokenized

how does this rationale make sense? a 10% return is a 10% return; the price is arbitrary. this is the stock split argument; its financial engineering. what do you think these traders do when they build up enough capital; do you think they still wager a bunch of $0.10 trades? or would they move to invest larger sums? do you think its most beneficial to the artist to have a dozen menial traders in & out of their art pieces that inevitably abruptly exit, or would it be better to have a network token that they can reinvest their earnings back into? that their collectors can stake on your pieces to signal long-term alignment? share revenue? is it better that the artist receives $10 in weekly revenue on a bunch of bs trading volume that will inevitably end no where & adds no distribution, or a percentage of volume brought into the entire network? a large percentage of 1/1 sales? is the goal to attract swing traders or collectors? in this model, how does the success of one piece benefit the many others?

https://warpcast.com/itsbasil/0x82be667b

i think these are the sort of arguments i'd like to see steelmanned more

otherwise i find basil's takedown pretty convincing

you need billions of social media posts to get millions of good ones. most get 0 engagement. that's good and healthy. same thing for tokens.

I think of tokens as app data, because that’s what they are at the most fundamental level.

On Pump the coins aren’t just memes, they’re how the app lets you interact with content. Same with Dexscreener, Coinbase Wallet, etc. These platforms are just interfaces for engaging with this “app data.”

When you post content via @zora and it becomes a token, you’re enabling that content to move through financial apps. The content remains the same but tokens are the format that lets it plug into new contexts. Different types of tokens can represent different forms of content, depending on how you want that content to be used across apps.