Rick Latona (@ricklatona) • Hey
OG .com domainer that invests in DeFi liquidity pools, high-quality Ethereum & layer 2 tokens & protocols, and occasional NFTs.
Publications
- I'm getting increasingly attacked by spear phishers. I've been able to fight them off, but damn. My phone, watch, & computer all just had password change notifications go off, & then I get a phone call from "Apple Support" asking me to verify a PIN so they could help. Um, no!
- It was great meeting so many punks while at DevconVI in Bogotá and building closer connections.
Punk holders are just the greatest. The brunch was one of the best networking events.
- t feels like the whole crypto market is having prewedding jitters. You know you want to marry the beacon chain but at the last minute your boots are shaking.
- What will you be doing during the merge?
- The Merge
- Me: stay the course. Hodl ETH until the end of the year.
Also me: GMX just keeps going up and FOMO is a real thing.
- Worst restaurant name ever? I just spotted a restaurant in Spokane, WA USA called Sushi.com. Do I get rewarded in tokens if I eat here?
- Top 9 lessons an OG .com domainer has for ENS domain buyers.
I've been buying, selling and monetizing domains for 25+ years and here's a thread on some things I've learned that may help .eth buyers.
1) Brands don't want to be generic. Marriott didn't buy hotels(.com), although they probably wish they had. Marketing managers learned in school to NOT be generic. These companies spend billions building a unique brand. Upstarts buy generic to compete with established brands.
2) Most brands won't be held hostage. These companies have been shilled .nyc, .asia, .etc for decades and they aren't going to be bullied. You may get lucky but odds are you won't. Also, don't think their lawyers can't find you.
3) There are very few middle-value names. You either have a good name or you have shit. Learn to tell the difference. Your shitty names won't ever get offers and you'll renew them until you die or give up and let them expire. Save the money now by avoiding shit.
4) Avoid names you aren't willing to hold for decades. See numbers 3 above and 7 below. Domaining is a long-term game. If you fail to flip quickly, you need to dig a trench and play the long game so avoid anything you aren't willing to hold for the long term.
5) If you can afford it, you want category killers. Category killers are the best name you can own in any category, e.g. loans.eth. Names like quickloans.eth have too many other alternatives like rapidloans.eth which make them harder to sell.
6) Be willing to walk away from deals. Don't get emotionally attached. You may think that the deal in front of you is a once-in-a-lifetime deal but believe me, there are 10s of thousands more of them. Save your bags for another day.
7) On average, 1% of your portfolio will sell each year to retail buyers. Experienced domainers live and plan by this well-established metric. We don't know yet the averages of .eth names but I suspect this number will hold up. Don't confuse wholesale flips with retail buyers.
8) Beware of carrying costs. You are going to have to renew the 99% of your names that don't sell. If you have a big portfolio of shitty names, my bet is that your sales will be less than your renewals and you will lose money. Think twice before registering 2500 shitty names.
9) Remember that your buyers have alternatives. Even .com names can be registered ENS addresses. Of course, there are #unstoppabledomains and other options. Your buyer may get a category killer in another extension over your shitty .eth.
- The Rise of Lens Marketing
How should we use Lens to market ourselves and/or our products and services? Who will make money from it and how? How is it different from other forms of social media marketing? Here are some of my thoughts.
I’ve been following Lens since Stani announced it but I don’t think I realized the true potential until after ETH CC in Paris and I had time to process conversations with people like @bradorbradley of Lens’ growth team and @joonatanlintala of @phaverapp.
I’ve been in the internet marketing biz since there was one and it has long been said that content is king and traffic is god. Regardless of the platform, the best practice is to create good content, but then you still have to get it seen to convert that into traffic.
Many dapps will be built on the Lens Social Graph & these various dapps are content distribution channels. Your content will live forever not just where you post it but on all other Lens dapps that don’t curate it out. That has a profound effect on one's approach to marketing
Content & curation are an app level problem, and an opportunity. Phishing links & spam messages will be a major problem. I’m sure services that provide tools to dapps to assist in curation, as well as user feedback to help identify offending messages, will all come to pass.
Most posts are just links to news articles. It's people farming tokens. You have to break through that noise. Some dapps will filter out noise better than others so if you focus on good content, it may be more visible on a dapp that isn’t the one you used to make the post!
In SEO parlance, this will also lead to “buried links”. As the years pass, you will have links in content that will drive traffic long after you’ve forgotten that you made the posts. Be mindful, that some links will be dead links if you change your website. Think ahead.
Lens marketing services will sprout to help market products & services, engage with customers, & reach new ones. Someone reading this could decide to start one now & start approaching companies now. This is inevitable as these companies exist for all other social platforms.
The major social platforms all had early winners who were the first to master the content angle. Who will be the early Lens Stars? It will be those that were the first to master the new skills. They will have a sizable advantage because they will have a huge head-start.
I imagine those that create good content on Lens now will be early recommendations for new Lens users and will grow their audience the fastest. The time to act is now.
- Ethereum’s Risks and Disclaimers - If I was to invest in a company I’d want to know the risks so I thought I’d jot down the known risks related to The Merge. Here’s a 🧵 of things that could go wrong separated by execution risk and design risks.
Execution Risks are related to the clients as they have fresh code that hasn’t been battle-tested and have no "Lindy Effect". The strategy is to have client diversity. Clientdiversity(.org) shows the share of clients. What's the worst-case scenario?
1) It would be bad if one client had 66% of staked ETH. If that client had a bug, it would lead to a finalized checkpoint that included the bug and there would have to be a manual intervention. In other words, it could lead to a dreaded hard fork. Right now Prysm leads with 40.8%
2) Also bad would be a client with >50%. >50%, could control the fork choice rule. With that, recent history could be rewritten because they would have the dominant chain. Everyone would follow the dominant chain and the rest would roll back to the last finalized checkpoint.
The good news is that it doesn’t require manual intervention but the bad news is that it would require a deep re-org. It could lead to double-spends or real problems with DeFi dapps.
3) Not as bad - If 1/3rd was one client, you could still disrupt finality. Remember, Prism is at 40.8%. At least 2/3rds need to be online. The finality gadget is an improvement over POW. There is not going to be a need for 6 confirmations to avoid reorg like in a POW chain.
In proof of stake, you have economic finality. If 2/3rds confirm but the other 1/3rd do not, the 1/3rd could get slashed. Meaning, that the owners of ETH staking with the client with the bug could lose some of their ETH due to slashing.
Potential Design Issues
4) Every block proposer on the beacon chain is known in advance. An attacker can observe the peer-to-peer validators and associate an IP address with them. They could then observe the validators and when it is a validator's turn to produce a block, they could DDOS that validator to prevent them from producing the block. That could lead to severe disruption on the Ethereum chain. It could be in the interest of one validator to DDOS another validator to earn MEV. It’s up to the validators to have fancy networking setups to protect against DDOS attacks. It’s likely that large staking pools will be prepared. Home validators, not so. A more permanent fix would be "secret-leader-in-action". It would be a way for one observing the chain to not know who was going to propose the block next. This will come in a future upgrade (estimated 1-2 years after the merge, but it will be expedited if attacks are frequent).
5) Concentrated pools such as LIDO control huge amounts of staked ETH. If an attacker could take over a large pool and try to rewrite history, it would lead to mass slashing. It’s a self-healing system. It is called a safety attack. Because the attackers would lose their ETH, it is a major deterrent.
6) The other type of attack would be a liveness attack. This boils down to censorship. If an exchange has more than 50% of the stake and they decide that they didn’t want certain transactions to go through, they could censor them. In this case, it would require humans and a governance vote to slash them. Also important is the perceived safety and liveness of the chain. With LIDO having a huge percentage of the staked ETH it causes perceived weakness which isn’t good. We need Rockpool and others to gain market share.
There is also a mechanism to do a forced ejection. This means that instead of slashing and taking Coinbase’s ETH which would cause their customers to lose all of their money, they could simply force them out of the beacon chain and “unstake” the ETH. They could also apply a timeout (for example lock the ETH for a year), and they can do a mix, a timeout, and slash a percentage. All of these things would require a governance vote and human coordination so it wouldn’t be good.
Thanks for reading this far. I wrote this as much for me as for the reader, to check my own enthusiasm. Most problems have solutions. The DDOS attack vector seems the most worrisome.
Credit Justin Drake as I pieced this together listening to his interviews.
- If you are building on lens and are looking for investors, DM me. I'm on the hunt for exciting new projects and entrepreneurs.
- For those attending ETH CC in Paris this July 2022
- I might have to jump into #AMPL if @AmpleforthOrg keeps dropping. These rebase tokens are all about the percentage of supply you can control. It's not there yet but it is looking more and more attractive.