Sam Blumenthal

When it comes to buying, more buyers can be validating. Unlike the rise of social vertical communities—a promising trend in its own right—the success of a shopatainment platform isn’t about fostering community and intimacy among a small group of fellow shoppers. Shopatainment is a numbers game, where seeing more shoppers purchase a product helps... See more

Crypto, and specifically NFTs (non-fungible tokens), can accelerate the trend of creators monetizing directly with their fans. Social platforms will continue to be useful for building audiences (although these too should probably be replaced with superior decentralized alternatives), but creators can increasingly rely on other methods including... See more

So the parsimonious mental model of an NFT based on what we’ve discussed so far is that it is a promiscuous and vacuous digital social object. A thing that contains no substance itself, not even reliable pointing properties, but has an identity and can be traded, transferred, mixed and matched indiscriminately with other things in a social context.

“That was the moment we realized that livestreaming was going to change everything,” Yuan said. “We were literally dealing with hundreds of customers, just three of us, addressing each customer’s sizing concern and questions.”

The Importance of Stories, Euphoria, Self-Expression, Sexuality & Generational Tension

Many DeFi advocates anticipate a future world of peer-to-peer uncollateralized lending on blockchains, allowing crypto holders to lend and cut out fees charged by banks for credit scoring, monitoring and payment. Good luck with that. Fintech lending holds some clues since the industry uses AI tools to make uncollateralized lending decisions, and... See more

Some are skeptical about the ability of digital currencies to emerge as a viable store of value in just a few years since it took thousands of years for gold to do so, and only after gold had been used for its intrinsic value for centuries before that. I don’t agree; such logic is too rooted in the past and does not account for rapid behavioral... See more