And given the consequences of not finding a solution could be huge, I think we need to diversify and have these kinds of investments. If you saw a significant increase in the interest in the project among the most capable people

In the long-range history of life, the transition from biological to cultural evolution was an event of transcendent importance. We became aware of its importance only recently, as a result of the discoveries of Svante Pääbo and his colleagues. The transition caused a reversal of the direction of evolution from diversification to unification, from the proliferation of diverging species to the union of species into a brotherhood of man. We see a small-scale example of this transition in the recent history of racism. Until recently, racism was a force of nature favoring the diversification of species. Humans traditionally hated and despised people of a different skin color. The natural evolutionary consequence would have been the division of our species into three new species, one pink, one black and one yellow. Only in the last few centuries, a strong reaction against racism has emerged, inter-racial marriage has become respectable, and the cultural unification of our species has pushed us toward biological unification. This is a small step in the long history of the transition of human societies from incessant warfare to brotherhood.

In ad-based models, revenue is generated more or less uniformly regardless of the fan’s enthusiasm level. As with Substack, NFTs allow the creator to “cream skim” the most passionate users by offering them special items which cost more. But NFTs go farther than non-crypto products in that they are easily sliced and diced into a descending series of pricing tiers. NBA Top Shot cards range from over $100K to a few dollars. Fan of Bitcoin? You can buy as much or little as you want, down to 8 decimal points, depending on your level of enthusiasm. Crypto’s fine-grained granularity lets creators capture a much larger area under the demand curve.