#Blockchain and Web3

[cryptosocialnetwork]

Focus.xyz – Redefining the Creator Economy with Web3

Welcome to the future of social media. Focus.xyz isn’t just another platform—it’s a revolution. Built on the powerful DeSo blockchain, Focus empowers creators to monetize directly, build communities freely, and own their content without middlemen or platform fees. 🔥 Why Creators Are Switching to Focus.xyz

1. 100% Creator Revenue: No Cuts, No Catch. Say goodbye to heavy platform fees. With Focus, creators keep 100% of their earnings, from tips and subscriptions to premium content unlocks and even custom token launches.

2. Post-to-Earn Model : Every post can earn you real crypto rewards. Focus incentivizes quality engagement—your content isn’t just liked, it’s valued. Some posts have earned up to $1,000.

3. Complete Content Ownership : p Your followers, your content, your rules. Built on a decentralized blockchain, Focus gives creators full control and ensures censorship resistance and permanence.

4. Private & Secure by Design Focus enables anonymous posting, end-to-end encrypted messaging, and decentralized identity. Engage with your audience without ever compromising your privacy.

💡 Perfect for: Influencers tired of being demonetized. Educators and experts are monetizing premium knowledge. Communities and DAOs are looking for secure social engagement. Web3-native creators wanting real crypto-native monetization.

📈 Built for Viral Growth Referral Rewards: Invite others and earn from their activity—perfect for community builders. Engagement Bounties: Discover top content creators and get rewarded. Early Mover Advantage: With $75M in early backing from names like Coinbase, Sequoia, and a16z, now’s the time to grow with Focus.

⚡ Focus.xyz vs Traditional Platforms Feature Focus.xyz Twitter / Instagram / Patreon Platform Fees 0% 10–40% Content Ownership Yes (on-chain) No Anonymity & Privacy Full Limited Native Crypto Payments Instant Often restricted Creator Token Support Yes No 🎯 Join the Creator-Led Movement Don’t just build an audience—build your own economy.

👉 Start today: https://focus.xyz

👉 Follow and earn: Post. Engage. Get rewarded.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How a billionaire’s mediocre pump-and-dump “book” became a “bestseller”

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho

I was on a book tour the day my editor called me and told me, "From now on, your middle name is 'Cory.'"

"That's weird. Why?"

"Because from now on, your first name is 'New York Times Bestselling Author.'"

That was how I found out I'd hit the NYT list for the first time. It was a huge moment – just as it has been each subsequent time it's happened. First, because of how it warmed my little ego, but second, and more importantly, because of how it affected my book and all the books afterwards.

Once your book is a Times bestseller, every bookseller in America orders enough copies to fill a front-facing display on a new release shelf or a stack on a bestseller table. They order more copies of your backlist. Foreign rights buyers at Frankfurt crowd around your international agents to bid on your book. Movie studios come calling. It's a huge deal.

My books became Times bestsellers the old-fashioned way: people bought and read them and told their friends, who bought and read them. Booksellers who enjoyed them wrote "shelf-talkers" – short reviews – and displayed them alongside the book.

That "From now on your first name is 'New York Times Bestselling Author' gag is a tradition. When @wilwheaton's memoir Still Just A Geek hit the Times list, I texted the joke to him and he texted back to say @jscalzi had already sent him the same joke (and of course, Scalzi and I have the same editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden):

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/still-just-a-geek-wil-wheaton

But not everyone earns that first name the same way. Some people cheat.

Famously, the Church of Scientology was caught buying truckloads of L Ron Hubbard books (published by Scientology's own publishing arm) from booksellers, returning them to their warehouse, then shipping them back to the booksellers when they re-ordered the sold out titles. The tip-off came when booksellers opened cases of books and found that they already bore the store's own price-stickers:

https://www.latimes.com/local/la-scientology062890-story.html

The reason Scientology was willing to go to such great lengths wasn't merely that readers used "NYT Bestseller* to choose which books to buy. Far more important was the signal that this sent to the entire book trade, from reviewers to librarians to booksellers, who made important decisions about how many copies of the books to stock, whether to display them spine- or face out, and whether to return unsold stock or leave it on the shelf.

Publishers go to great lengths to send these messages to the trade: sending out fancy advance review copies in elaborate packaging, taking out ads in the trade magazines, featuring titles in their catalogs and sending their sales-force out to impress the publisher's enthusiasm on their accounts.

Even the advance can be a way to signal the trade: when a publisher announces that it just acquired a book for an eyebrow-raising sum, it's not trumpeting the size of its capital reserves – it's telling the trade that this book is a Big Deal that they should pay attention to.

(Of all the signals, this one may be the weakest, even if it's the most expensive for publishers to send. Take the $1.25m advance that Rupert Murdoch's Harpercollins paid to Sarah Palin for her unreadable memoir, Going Rogue. As with so many of the outsized sums Murdoch's press and papers pay to right wing politicians, the figure didn't represent a bet on the commercial prospects of the book – which tanked – but rather, a legal way to launder massive cash transfers from the far-right billionaire to a generation of politicians who now owe him some rather expensive favors.)

All of which brings me to the New York Times bestselling book Read Write Own by the billionaire VC New York Times Bestselling Author Chris Dixon. Dixon is a partner at A16Z, the venture capitalists who pumped billions into failed, scammy, cryptocurrency companies that tricked normies into converting their perfectly cromulent "fiat" money into shitcoins, allowing the investors to turn a massive profit and exit before the companies collapsed or imploded.

Read Write Own (subtitle: "Building the Next Era of the Internet") is a monumentally unconvincing hymn to the blockchain. As Molly White writes in her scathing review, the book is full of undisclosed conflicts of interest, with Dixon touting companies he has a direct personal stake in:

https://www.citationneeded.news/review-read-write-own-by-chris-dixon/

But this book's defects go beyond this kind of sleazy pump-and-dump behavior. It's also just bad. The arguments it makes for the blockchain as a way of escaping the problems of an enshittified, monopolized internet are bad arguments. White dissects each of these arguments very skillfully, and I urge you to read her review for a full list, but I'll reproduce one here to give you a taste:

After three chapters in which Dixon provides a (rather revisionistd) history of the web to date, explains the mechanics of blockchains, and goes over the types of things one might theoretically be able to do with a blockchain, we are left with "Part Four: Here and Now", then the final "Part Five: What's Next". The name of Part Four suggests that he will perhaps lay out a list of blockchain projects that are currently successfully solving real problems.

This may be why Part Four is precisely four and a half pages long. And rather than name any successful projects, Dixon instead spends his few pages excoriating the "casino" projects that he says have given crypto a bad rap,e prompting regulatory scrutiny that is making "ethical entrepreneurs … afraid to build products" in the United States.f

As White says, this is just not a good book. It doesn't contain anything to excite people who are already blockchain-poisoned crypto cultists – and it also lacks anything that will convince normies who never let Matt Damon or Spike Lee convince them to trade dollars for magic beans. It's one of those books that manages to be both paper and a paperweight.

And yet��it's a New York Times Bestseller. How did this come to pass? Here's a hint: remember how the Scientologists got L Ron Hubbard 20 consecutive #1 Bestsellers?

As Jordan Pearson writes for Motherboard, Read Write Own earned its place on the Times list because of a series of massive bulk orders from firms linked to A16Z and Dixon, which ordered between dozens and thousands of copies and gave them away to employees or just randos on Twitter:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7emkx/chris-dixon-a16z-read-write-own-nyt-bestseller

The Times recognizes this in a backhanded way, by marking Read Write Own on the list with a "dagger" (†) that indicates the shenanigans (the same dagger appeared alongside the listing for Donald Trump Jr's Triggered after the RNC spent a metric scientologyload of money – $100k – buying up cases of it):

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/books/donald-trump-jr-triggered-sales.html

There's a case for the Times not automatically ignoring bulk orders. Since 2020, I've run Kickstarters where I've pre-sold my books on behalf of my publisher, working with bookstores like Book Soup and wholesalers like Porchlight Books to backers when they go on sale. I signed and personalized 500+ books at Vroman's yesterday for backers who pre-ordered my next novel, The Bezzle:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53531243480/

But there's a world of difference between pre-orders that hundreds or thousands of readers place that are aggregated into a single bulk order, and books that are bought by CEOs to give away to people who may not have any interest in them. For the book trade – librarians, reviewers, booksellers – the former indicates broad interest that justifies their attention. The latter just tells you that a handful of deep-pocketed manipulators want you to think there's broad interest.

I'm certain that Dixon – like me – feels a bit of pride at having "earned" a new first name. But Dixon – like me – gets something far more tangible than a bit of egoboo out of making the Times list. For me, a place on the Times list is a way to get booksellers and librarians excited about sharing my book with readers.

For Dixon, the stakes are much higher. Remember that cryptocurrency is a faith-based initiative whose mechanism is: "convince normies that shitcoins will be worth more tomorrow than they are today, and then trade them the shitcoins that cost you nothing to create for dollars that they worked hard to earn."

In other words, crypto is a bezzle, defined by John Kenneth Galbraith as "The magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it."

So long as shitcoins haven't fallen to zero, the bag-holders who've traded their "fiat" for funny money can live in the bezzle, convinced that their "investments" will recover and turn a profit. More importantly, keeping the bezzle alive preserves the possibility of luring in more normies who can infuse the system with fresh dollars to use as convincers that keep the bag-holders to keep holding that bag, rather than bailing and precipitating the zeroing out of the whole scam.

The relatively small sums that Dixon and his affiliated plutocrats spent to flood your podcasts with ads for this pointless 300-page Ponzi ad are a bargain, as are the sums they spent buying up cases of the book to give away or just stash in a storeroom. If only a few hundred retirees are convinced to convert their savings to crypto, the resulting flush of cash will make the line go up, allowing whales like Dixon and A16Z to cash out, or make more leveraged bets, or both. Crypto is a system with very few good trades, but spending chump change to earn a spot on the Times list (dagger or no) is a no-brainer.

After all, the kinds of people who buy crypto are, famously, the kinds of people who think books are stupid ("I would never read a book" -S Bankman-Fried):

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/29/sam-bankman-fried-reading-effective-altruism/

There's precious little likelihood that anyone will be convinced to go long on crypto thanks to the words in this book. But the Times list has enough prestige to lure more suckers into the casino: "I'm not going to read this thing, but if it's on the list, that means other people must have read it and think it's convincing."

We are living through a golden age of scams, and crypto, which has elevated caveat emptor to a moral virtue ("not your wallet, not your coins"), is a scammer's paradise. Stein's Law tells us that "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop," but the purpose of a bezzle isn't to keep the scam going forever – just until the scammer can cash out and blow town. The longer the bezzle goes on for, the richer the scammer gets.

Not for nothing, my next novel – which comes out on Feb 20 – is called The Bezzle. It stars Marty Hench, my hard-driving, two-fisted, high-tech forensic accountant, who finds himself unwinding a whole menagerie of scams, from a hamburger-based Ponzi scheme to rampant music royalty theft to a vast prison-tech scam that uses prisoners as the ultimate captive audience:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

Patrick Nielsen Hayden – the same editor who gave me my new first name – once told me that "publishing is the act of connecting a text with an audience." Everything a publisher does – editing, printing, warehousing, distributing – can be separated from publishing. The thing a publisher does that makes them a publisher – not a printer or a warehouser or an editing shop – is connecting books and audiences.

Seen in this light, publishing is a subset of the hard problem of advertising, religion, politics and every other endeavor that consists in part of convincing people to try out a new idea:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/04/self-publishing/

This may be the golden age of scams, but it's the dark age of publishing. Consolidation in distribution has gutted the power of the sales force to convince booksellers to stock books that the publisher believes in. Consolidation in publishing – especially Amazon, which is both a publisher and the largest retailer in the country – has stacked the deck against books looking for readers and vice-versa (Goodreads, a service founded for that purpose, is now just another tentacle on the Amazon shoggoth). The rapid enshittification of social media has clobbered the one semi-reliable channel publicists and authors had to reach readers directly.

I wrote nine books during lockdown (I write as displacement activity for anxiety) which has given me a chance to see publishing in the way that few authors can: through a sequence of rapid engagements with the system as a whole, as I publish between one and three books per year for multiple, consecutive years. From that vantagepoint, I can tell you that it's grim and getting grimmer. The slots that books that connected with readers once occupied are now increasingly occupied by the equivalent of the botshit that fills the first eight screens of your Google search results: book-shaped objects that have gamed their way to the top of the list.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy

I don't know what to do about this, but I have one piece of advice: if you read a book you love, tell other people about it. Tell them face-to-face. In your groupchat. On social media. Even on Goodreads. Every book is a lottery ticket, but the bezzlers are buying their tickets by the case: every time you tell someone about a book you loved (and even better, why you loved it), you buy a writer another ticket.

Meanwhile, I've got to go get ready for my book tour. I'm coming to LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, Calgary, Phoenix, Portland, Providence, Boston, New York City, Toronto, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Tucson, Chicago, Buffalo, as well as Torino and Tartu (details soon!).

If you want to get a taste of The Bezzle, here's an excerpt:

https://www.torforgeblog.com/2023/11/20/excerpt-reveal-the-bezzle-by-cory-doctorow/

And here's the audiobook, read by New York Times Bestselling Author Wil Wheaton:

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_459/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_459_-_The_Bezzle_Read_By_Wil_Wheaton.mp3

[youaredebtfree]

Chapter 1: Spark From You Are Debt Free — a deeply personal NFT project using handwritten love letters and AI-generated art to fight economic violence.

This isn't just a visual story. It's a promise in motion. Ten chapters, no royalties, total anonymity — until the day I tell her: You Are Debt Free.

Created to fund freedom from predatory debt, this project turns love, pain, and resistance into art on the blockchain.

Explore the collection: https://opensea.io/youaredebtfree

[lawblocksai]

What kind of document would you automate first?

➡️ NDA ➡️ Rental agreement ➡️ Freelance contract ➡️ Partnership MoU

Drop your choice below Let’s see how Law Blocks AI can simplify it for you.

[solafast]

Miners are securing Bitcoin ⛏️ We're building the future of memecoins 🚀

Why mine blocks when you can launch your own token in seconds and earn rewards with Solafast? No rigs. No stress. Just pure crypto energy ⚡

[insightdaily]

The Rise Of Bitcoin Animation

[sharpeconomy]

𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐞’𝐬 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨𝐤𝐞𝐧𝐬. You’re still deciding whether to start the streak 😶 Don’t be that person🫵 𝐎𝐧𝐞 𝐭𝐚𝐬𝐤 𝐚 𝐝𝐚𝐲 = Daily progress + Rewards. The streak won’t wait. 𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐲𝐨𝐮?⏳

[cryptozupid]

🚨 REWARDS UPDATE 🚨 6/19/25

Bitcoin mining rewards received for 6/19/25 totaled 11,136 Sats from a computing power of 561.88 TH/s with an energy efficiency of 20 W/TH ⛏️👾

#crypto #bitcoin #bitcoinmining

https://gomining.com/?ref=IGIIN

[priavteumglobal]

🔒💸 Welcome to the Future of Finance: Meet Privateum Global 💸

Decentralization isn’t just a buzzword — it’s a movement. And Privateum Global is leading that movement.

We’re not your average crypto project. At the core of Privateum is community-owned finance — powered by the PRI token. That means real voting rights, real governance, and real use. From secure peer-to-peer transactions to a full private marketplace, PRI isn’t just for trading — it’s for living.

What sets us apart? ✅ Full KYC/AML compliance ✅ Built-in privacy features ✅ Access to credit services ✅ A global network of holders, partners & doers ✅ No centralized control – the community decides

If you believe finance should be private, fair, and in your hands — you're in the right place.

🌐 Explore more at privateum.com 🔗 Follow us on social media for updates, community vibes, and crypto freedom.

Facebook Instagram X YouTube TikTok

[cryptomadesimple]

🚨 What Is a 51% Attack? And Should You Worry?

Blockchain is secure… but it’s not invincible. A 51% Attack happens when one group controls more than 50% of a blockchain’s mining power, allowing them to:

❌ Rewrite transactions (double-spending coins!) ❌ Block other users from making transactions ❌ Undermine trust in the network

🚀 Why does this matter? ✅ Bitcoin is too big to be attacked – but smaller blockchains are at risk! ✅ This is why decentralization is key – no single group should have too much power.

📩 Do you think crypto networks will always be secure? Let’s chat! 🔁 Reblog to spread awareness!

[mdriaj]

GOLDEN Diamond Dog 1/1 NFT

👆👆👆🔥 Just dropped a 1/1 luxury NFT masterpiece!

💎 Golden Diamond Dog – Fully wrapped in gold, with diamond teeth, gemstone eye & pearl earrings. A symbol of digital royalty.

🎨 Only ONE exists – live now on Polygon!

[oriondepp]

Orion Depp : in Rio de Janeiro , White Shirt on Boat at Grad School SOLANA, SUI Ecosystem Crypto Project Advisor, Former Bain Consultant, Wharton, USC MBA

(c) Orion Michael Depp – Co-Founder, Master Ventures Institutional Investment Management, SOLANA, SUI Ecosystem & Crypto Capital Markets Advisor, Wharton, USC MBA, Former Bain & Co IPO Management Consultant, First BNB Binance Analyst 2017, 30 Under 30 Entrepreneur CNBC.

Orion Depp, Orion Michael Depp, Orion Depp Crypto Advisor, Orion Depp Institutional Crypto Fund Manager, Orion Depp Crypto VC Venture Capital Fund Manager, Orion Depp Crypto Capital Markets Advisor, Orion Depp Crypto Community Growth Strategist, Orion Depp Bain Management Consultant, Orion Depp SOLANA Advisor, Orion Depp SUI Blockchain Specialist, Orion Depp Aptos Advisor, Orion Depp Binance BNB Analyst, Orion Depp Coin Listing Specialist, Orion Depp Coinbase Listing Advisor, Orion Depp Binance Listings, Orion Depp CoinList, Orion Depp Bybit Listing Consultant, Orion Depp OKX Listing Expert, Orion Depp IEO IDO Advisor, Orion Depp Tokenomics Expert, Orion Depp Blockchain Business Advisor, Orion Depp Crypto Influencer.

Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), Binance Coin (BNB), Ripple (XRP), Cardano (ADA), Polkadot (DOT), Avalanche (AVAX), DeFi, NFTs, Crypto Trading, Tokenomics, Crypto Insights, Metaverse, Digital Assets, Blockchain Development, Web3 Technology, ICO, IDO, Crypto Events, Crypto Exchange Listings, Crypto Community Building, Airdrops, Staking, Decentralized Finance Projects, Crypto Fund Management, Crypto Trading Signals.

Source: instagram.com

[simplystaking]

So You’re Holding MATIC… Now What?

Stake It. Here’s How.

Let’s be real - crypto winter has taught a lot of us one thing: if your assets aren’t working for you, they’re just sitting there doing nothing.

If you’re holding $MATIC (aka Polygon), here’s some alpha you don’t want to ignore: you can stake Polygon and earn passive rewards just by delegating your tokens. No mining, no trading, no daily check-ins.

And yes, it’s real.

We just dropped a full guide that walks you through everything you need to know: https://simplystaking.com/polygon-staking-guide

What’s Polygon Staking, and Why Should You Care?

Polygon is one of the most widely used Layer 2s on Ethereum - and it runs on a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) system. This means the network is secured by validators, and you can support them by staking your MATIC with them.

In return? You get a slice of the rewards.

It’s like helping the network run - and getting paid for it.

Here’s What You’ll Learn in the Guide:

What exactly Polygon staking is and how it works

How to avoid the common traps (like sketchy validators or hidden fees)

What kind of APY you can expect from staking MATIC

How to actually do it - using our Simply Staking dashboard, which makes the process almost ridiculously easy

How to monitor your rewards and unstake when you want

It’s a simple read, no gatekeeping, no fluff. Just straight-up crypto utility.

Why It Matters in 2025

Let’s be honest - staking used to be confusing. Now? It’s easier than ever.

You don’t need a node. You don’t need to give up custody of your tokens. And you don’t need to be a Web3 dev to do it.

If you can use MetaMask and click a few buttons, you can stake Polygon today.

The earlier you start, the more you earn - and the more you help keep the network decentralized and secure. It’s a win-win.

TL;DR?

Holding $MATIC and not staking it? You’re missing out.

Polygon staking = passive rewards + network support

We wrote the ultimate guide to help you start, safely and easily.

Read it here → https://simplystaking.com/polygon-staking-guide

Reblog if you’re into staking. Like if you’re earning those sweet MATIC rewards.

[lawblocksai]

Here’s what legal teams are learning:

➡️You can search any contract in seconds ➡️Files stay tamper-proof with blockchain ➡️ Signatures are 100% valid & secure

That’s the Law Blocks AI way.

Dive deeper → http://lawblocks.io/blogdetails/in-house-legal-teams-choosing-law-blocks-ai

[solafast]

🚨 319 BTC scooped by Metaplanet. That’s $26M in one move.

Meanwhile, you're still thinking about launching your coin? With Solafast, it takes seconds — not millions. 💥 Start now. Build early. Grow big.