Best of jacob.energy on Kiwi News
Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
8 stories from jacob.energy have been shared on Kiwi News since 16 May 2023, with 29 upvotes and 7 comments in total. The latest was shared on 28 July 2025. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- AI+
Crypto and AI are complementary technologies, and minting AI-related work onchain offers a way to address the attribution and value-capture problems that AI is exposing in the current internet. Minting lets information be bought, sold and verified as an asset, while training models makes it remixable and usable. Examples include Robbie Barrat's 2018 AI artworks, the first mints on Superrare, and Holly Herndon's raw singing model, which was minted on Zora and auctioned for 15 ETH in 2022. The New York Times is suing ChatGPT for billions of dollars over training on more than 100 years of journalism.
- Predicting Provenance
The author argues that prediction markets are zero-sum, which makes niche bets hard to place, and proposes NFTs as a positive-sum alternative in which artworks capture forward-facing provenance. In the illustrative example, an artist paints a 2025 alien-visit prediction over the Eiffel Tower, sells editions for $100, and the paintings could gain value if the prediction comes true. The piece also suggests standardized prediction NFTs could let people trade on predictions without finding a counterparty.
- Forks are good
Nouns' built-in fork mechanism is presented as a breakthrough for DAO governance, letting any Noun holder exit into a new DAO with equitable treasury backing. The first Nouns fork was designed by the Verbs team and lets holders hand in a Noun for a forked version, with each Noun backed by about 36.6 ETH from a treasury of roughly 28,000 ETH. The Fork DAO received over 14,000 ETH, and forked Nouns keep the same public-domain art while the fork adds features like No Veto, no Nounders rewards and built-in Ragequit.
- Patronus Problems.
Problems where you expect someone else to solve them for you, which Jacob calls "patronus problems," are best solved yourself, even when that expectation seems reasonable and you doubt you can. The idea draws on *Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban*, in which Harry believes his late father has returned to save him with a patronus charm, then travels back in time and realizes he must save himself. Jacob says this way of thinking has been surprisingly useful in both personal and professional cases.
- Free and Valuable
Crypto can solve the internet's longest-standing problem, the tension between free distribution of information and the cost of producing it, by creating a market-based value system for information. Under this proposal, anyone could coin their content, which would then be freely accessible while being traded in open, permissionless markets. Creators would capture value through the coins they own, platforms through showing the right coins to the right people, and consumers through owning coins for content they find valuable. Zora, which says it has spent five years building, states its mission as building this free and valuable internet.
- Hyperstructures
Hyperstructures are blockchain-based protocols that the author describes as able to run for free and forever, without maintenance, interruption or intermediaries. The article defines them by five traits: unstoppable, free, valuable, expansive and permissionless, plus credibly neutral and positive-sum. It cites Uniswap as an example that would keep running if its team and website disappeared, and says owners can hold a fee switch that could be turned on by a vote. The article contrasts these with platforms like Opensea and Coinbase, which go down with their operators.
- Predictions
The majority of societal value will be onchain over the next decade, according to this list of high-level predictions about Onchain and crypto. It predicts that most internet prices will shift from fiat to crypto denomination, and that self-propagating memes will see Dogecoin-level returns above $Bs. It also claims crypto will act as an alternative IP system, letting content and ideas capture venture-scale returns without corporate structures, and that Uniswap will serve as the medium of exchange while ETH remains the store of value.
- Onchain
Jacob argues that "onchain" should become the standard term for things available on or performed using a blockchain, much as "online" describes the internet. The essay defines it as an adjective and adverb, contrasts onchain with offchain rather than "web2 vs. web3" or "centralized vs. decentralized," and proposes writing it without a hyphen. Listed benefits of putting content onchain include verifiable provenance, public accessibility, permissionlessness, and permanence for as long as the underlying blockchain exists. The essay also predicts that over the coming decade the majority of societal value will move onchain. It cites a 2020 tweet by Balaji as an illustration of the "on disk, online, on chain" progression.