On The Brink with Castle Island - Eric Wall on Eric's Orb (EP.417)

Episode Date: April 17, 2023

Eric Wall is a cryptocurrency researcher, analyst, critic, and investor. In this episode we sit down to discuss the creation and premise of his new project, the Orb.  What is the orb? How did the orb come about? How to bet on the human capital and reputational growth of individuals Why previous social tokens failed What does the orb entitle you to? Why the orb is not a security Harberger taxes and their implementations so far How harberger taxes create better allocative efficiency Harberger taxes and domain names The problem with social tokens as a way to invest in people Why an obligation to a single holder is better than one to many holders Eric's feud with the Hex community and how the rb could solve this Possible orb failure modes Possible AI issues with the orb Why orb issuers have an incentive to provide value to holders The possible role of orbs in venture capital How the orb could disrupt expert networks How to parameterize the orb The significance of the orb animations Further reading: Orb.land

Hello and welcome back to On the Brink. I'm Nick Carter. Today we're sitting down with Eric Wall, well-known cryptocurrency analyst, investor, and sometimes critic. He's jumping into the arena now with a project called the Orb, which is a tokenized claim on someone's time or resources. This follows in the footsteps of the social token phenomenon, but it has several key differences. One of the most interesting features of the orb is it's inclusion of a harbager tax mechanism. which is one of the first times we've actually seen this employed in a real world experiment. I'm very excited to see where Eric takes this project and we'll be following the auction of the first orb at orb.

And this was a fascinating conversation. Let's dive out into it. Eric Wall, welcome to the show. Eric Wall, known to many, man of many talents. Your Tappert Wizard Number Two. I don't know how you beat me in this. the Taproot Wizard hierarchy. I'm number three, you number two. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Well, it helps being one of the founders usually gets you a faster seat. Yeah, that's true.

So we're here to talk about, you're known for so many things, but today we have a very specific topic of conversation, which is the orb. Right. So that's what we're going to be covering today. We're not going to talk about Iota, ripple, hex, none of that. We're not even going to think about. hacks today. That's going to be hard. We're going to talk about harborder taxes and something that you have created known as the orb, a crypto economic experiment. So tell us, what is the orb? Yeah, so the funny thing is that you know me as someone that's mostly critical of things in the cryptocurrency space. So it's it's kind of unusual that I come across an idea or a concept that gets my brain racing with excitement. And in the cases where I do find something that I find

genuinely exciting, I can be relatively sure that you're going to be kind of excited as well. Or if you're not excited, at least we'll have a good discussion about it. It's very unusual that I'm super hyped up about something and it just falls completely flat. We've known each other for long enough that we sort of understand each other's framework for thinking about stuff in the cryptocurrency space. So the orb is it actually started, it started when I began thinking about NFTs for the first time. And one of the tools that people recommended for thinking about NFTs were think about in-game items. Think about, think about World of Warcraft, think about Diablo, think about what you have in your magic item bag and think about the digital items that

you have there. So I was thinking about that and I don't know, before I got into crypto, like before 2011, I was super deep into World of Warcraft. So I was, I played a monstrous amount. I played an extreme obscene amount. Like even if I become 100 years old, I'll have. I would have spent single digit percentages inside World Warcraft. That's how bad it was. This sounds like Vitalik's origin story. What happened to Vitalik was they nuked his, they nerfed his elf or something. Yeah, they nerfed his drain life spell, which was a completely overpowered spell that

Warlocks had. And he didn't like that the game developers had control over how his character, like, they can changed his life basically with a with a stroke of a key button so he wanted something that was more that radicalized him they should never have done that it changed i mean it changed the world who knew but were any of your spells nerfed in world of warcraft yeah they were a lot of them they changed the cool down but you're more flexible yeah i i i adapted than Vitalik. Right.

So the thing, though, with NFT, so inside World of Warcraft, you have a magic item bags, and there are different categories of items. There are items that are one-time use. Then there are items that are just like vanity items that you can't do anything with. For example, you can buy a gold ring

in World of Warcraft that costs 100 gold, and you can't do anything with it. It's just in your bag. You can sell it, but you can't do much else. than just looking at the item. So that's sort of the analog to art, what we're doing with NFTs, mostly in crypto today, bored apes.

They're just pictures, right? But the most interesting item that you can have in your magic item bag are not the static rings or just boring items. They're not the one-time use objects either. The most interesting items that you can have are the ones that have a use, so that you can click them,

They have a cool down and they have a recurring use. So they stay in your bag forever. You can always use them. You just have to wait until the cool down before it becomes ready again. So those are sort of the most attractive items in World of Warcraft. And so when I got into the NFT space, what I thought, okay, so let's imagine that like my NFT wallet is a magic item bag in World of Warcraft. what do I want to have in that bag?

So in the same way that I want something that's reusable, that has a utility, I want the same thing out of an NFT. I want something that amplifies my life, something that I can use in real world situations that is useful to me, like genuinely useful. So I always found bored apes, pictures, art to be like a curiosity, to be, you know, a nice first peek into the NFT space. but I've always expected that someone would eventually do something interesting with usable utility-based NFTs.

And it's kind of surprising to me that we've gotten this far in the NFT world in crypto and that there aren't, like people don't generally have usable NFTs. I see people collecting like POAPs, these proof of attendance certificates. And I see people collecting pictures like profile pictures. but I don't I haven't seen any reusable like recurring use utility based NFT so that's been a concept that I've been thinking about for a long time and I have this I have this a particular moment that also happened to me well actually happened a few years earlier when I met the I met Georges Constantopoulos I think I'm mispronancing his name

fellow Greek yeah it's it's a Greek So I met Georgeos in the crypto space. It's a well-known guy these days, but I met him when he was an independent layer two researcher. So I met him at the consensus conference in New York. He was one of my followers at the time. He didn't have like a big name or anything. And he wanted to sit down and compare Bitcoin layer two, so the Lightning Network, versus Ethereum layer two solutions.

And they didn't really exist anyone at the time. So he was working as a researcher on plasma, which was sort of a layer two in development that didn't really actually materialize. But so I sat down with him and he started explaining, first of all, he explained how plasma worked to me for the first time in a way that I could actually understand it. I mean, as Bitcoiners, we've heard about plasma for a long time,

but it was very like, we used to call it vaporware. We didn't actually think that it could be a thing. But he actually explained it in a way that was intelligent and that I could grasp. And then we began comparing the Lightning Network to Plasma. And we wanted to think about the different characteristics of this layer two. So Lightning, for example, it's channel-based.

Plasma is not channel-based. You don't need liquidity to transfer assets. And in the conversation that I had with him, it sort of became clear to me, which was very, very surprising, seeing as he was new in the crypto space. He'd spent two years in the crypto space, and I'd spent like six years, actually eight years at the time. So the fact that he was asking the more piercing questions in our conversation and that he was thinking more intelligently about the makeup of these protocols, informed me that I was speaking to someone who was considerably smarter than I was, a faster learner, and someone who would ultimately be more successful than I was in the crypto space. So a few weeks after that, what's his name, Nathaniel Wittermore?

Do you know that N-W-N-L-W? So that guy, he wrote a question on Twitter where he asked, who's the up-and-coming stars and, like, name a name of a person who, an up-and-coming star in crypto who's going to be way more well-known in three years than he is or she is now and george's like just i think i remember that thread yeah i think i remember that i think i might have come i need to find it i think i might have said someone too yeah and i might have been wrong yeah so he he his name came to me like so i name dropped georgias there and it was turned out to be a fantastic call uh he's now the ctio of paradigm uh a couple of hours of george's

George's time in a critical moment, like when a protocol is getting hacked, can save a protocol hundreds of millions of dollars. There was actually a case where Samson and Georgeos, there was an ongoing hack that was happening like a white, and they got in, they jumped on it from a white hat angle and rescued hundreds of millions of dollars of assets that would have otherwise been, could have been stolen. So that's how valuable George's time is these days. That's how fast he became one of the best programmers. He's the CTO of paradigm. And what strikes me is that that, you know, I've been a cryptocurrency investor in the space for a long time.

But the primary alpha that I had in 2019, it wasn't telling you whether or not it was Binance smart chain that was going to be the biggest alt layer two. It was actually the biggest alpha call that I had that had most conviction in at the time. was actually Georgios. I knew that Georges was going to make it big, but there wasn't really any way. So one thing that has been a little bit frustrating is that you have this extreme alpha insight, but there's no way for you to actually,

like, the only thing that I got out of it is that I made a good call in Nathaniel's thread. There was no other way for me to benefit from that insight. So, and the nice thing about it is that it's such a generalizable thing. So you don't have to be a cryptocurrency expert to know that someone in your surrounding is an up-and-coming star that's going to make it big. So I think that, you know, from an investment perspective, if you're a speculator, you want to make it in the stock market, understanding equities, understanding the stock market, understanding the valuation at which

you can buy an asset at, you don't know how much of the future potential of that company is already priced in or not. But when you're dealing, with people in your surroundings, you know whether or not this guy has way more potential than he's currently being, like his potential is not being realized at all. You know that about some people. You can tell from, you know, that they have no cloud. No one really knows them. It's something that, you know, every one in, every person has someone that they know is going places. And you don't you don't need tons of financial context to understand that this is currently an undervalued asset. For example, if you're if the only thing that you do,

you have no financial understanding whatsoever, but the only thing that you do is that you're swiping around profiles on tech talk and you come across a profile that has a very low follower count, but they produce super interesting content. They are hilarious, they are beautiful. They provide just the type of content that you are an expert at enjoying. So it's a very generalizable thing. And bringing these two things together, the idea that you want an NFT that has a recurring use case and that you want the value of that NFT to be tied to an up-and-coming, you know, a specific individual that you think is less valued today, that they're.

are going, then they, than what they are going to be in the future. So when you combine those things, you get the orb, basically. So the orb in World of Warcraft, like there are many orbs. They're usually magical and they usually have some type of magical attribute to them. So there's orbs of teleportation, for example, in World of Warcraft. So the orb that I've, you know, that I've constructed, this sort of brainchild that I had that I talked about, for the first time in 2021, is it's a reusable item. And the way that it works is that,

so I will create an orb that's called Eric's orb. The person who buys this orb can, on a weekly basis, use the orb to ask me, ask me a specific question that I have to give an answer to. So if you own the orb, what you own is you own the right to ask a question that I have, promised that I'm going to provide an answer to. That's that's pretty much it in a nutshell. So it's a way to invest in someone's human capital, but it's also a way to

get and to become entitled to a stream of ongoing services from a specific person. So you will be the first orb. What is the form factor? How do people engage with you once they own your orb? One of the things that, uh, one of the herd level, that we've needed to solve with this orb concept is, you know, how are people going, how are people going to trust if I just say, you know, buy this NFT and I promise you that I'm going to answer you, answer your questions on a weekly basis. That's, I mean, that's a promise that someone can give. Like, how are you, how are you going to value such a promise? How are you going to make sure that the person actually lives up to that promise? That's, that's sort of

the important thing to solve here. And so the way that I've solved it is, well, number one, I've made sure to stake a lot of my reputation on the fact that I'm going to deliver on this promise. So I do that by talking about it a lot. It's something that I've, that people can hold me accountable to because I speak about it in so many different medias. I mean, I've written a blog post about it. I talk about it on Twitter a lot. But still, I want to make sure that I show a deeper level of commitment to it. So for that purpose, I thought about, let me create like a really, really good website for this. Like let's create a front end for this that you can see that I've spent considerable resources,

actually hired professional web designers on making an extremely intuitive, user-friendly interface. And I've also gone so far that the orb itself is actually an artwork. So the orb, I've hired WebGL animator. So if you know anything about 3D animation, there's 3D animations that you can run inside of browsers, and they have extremely good reactivity, so you can spin them around, you can zoom in, and they're very much alive inside.

These artworks are very much alive inside the browser. So I've spent considerable resources in creating sort of the artwork that represents the orb, and then I have a website that's also I've spent a lot of resources on. And then how it actually works is that, well, you go to the website. If you don't currently own the orb, what you will have to do is that you'll actually have to buy the orb in order to use it. So it's only one person at a time that can own this warb. It's a one of one and there's only one owner. And the way that you use it is that,

well, you sign in with your Web3 wallet. So you'll sign in with your Ethereum wallet and then you can bid on the orb. Once you've bought the orb, then you'll have a dialogue box. that allows you to on a weekly basis type in a question the way that we've constructed is it is that the the question can only be as long as a tweet so you have 280 characters to type in your question and once you hit enter or you have to sign you have to sign actually this question request with the with the signature from your wallet that question is then broadcast it's hashed and a hash of the question is broadcast and put on the blockchain

And then the Ethereum blockchain in this case. And then I have one week to respond. So I have one week's time to type out an answer. And my answer can be as long as I wanted to. And I can include links, any content that I want. And then I have to press enter. And this response also gets hashed. And I need to make sure that that hash enters the blockchain within a week's duration.

So I have one week to provide a response. And because we both hashed the question and the answer, with the clear text, you can always prove that my answer existed at a particular point in time. So I can always prove that for every question that I've gotten, I have answered within a week's time. So there is no other like crypto economic element that forces me to respond. that it's ultimately a trust-based asset. However, there are recurring revenue streams. We can go into that. We can talk about the, there's another element to this,

which is the Harburger tax, which is not a punishment. If I don't, if I happen not to honor the orb, it's not a punishment if there's no punishment if I don't honor the questions that I receive. But there is an ongoing incentive. There is an ongoing tax that is, paid by the current owner of the orb, the current holder of the orb that is paid to the issuer. So the primary incentive is a like economic one to maximize the value for the orb. And the way to maximize the value is to provide good answers, presumably.

So let's let's let's talk about the harbager tax. Is this the first implementation of a harbiger tax in an actual live? sort of crypto primitive. Are you aware of any others? I'm only aware of like tests and experiments. So there's there's a website that you can visit that's called this artwork is always for sale.com and it shows you an artwork that you can always buy the artwork. So it has a price. You can always buy it. And the way that it works is that so let's say that this artwork is for sale for 10 ether, you can buy it, but the caveat is that once you've bought it, you need to provide a new sales price. So you have to define the price at which you're willing to

sell the same asset for to the next buyer. So you can buy it at 10 ether, but then you have to be ready to sell it for 12 or 15 or 20. And what prohibits you, so the interesting thing is that the thing that prohibits you from buying the asset and then setting an asset, astronomically high sales price is that you have to pay a percentage of the new sales price as a tax on an annual basis. So if you buy the artwork for 100 ether, if you buy it for 10 ether, and then you want to sell the next sales price that you're willing to sell it at for 100 ether. And the Harberger tax is 10%. That means that you're going to have to pay 10 ether per year in order to be able to hold on to that artwork.

If you don't pay it, it means that the artwork becomes foreclosable, and it goes back to the issuer. Well, exactly what happens if someone doesn't pay is not actually a parameter that's defined in the word Harburg attacks, but basically you lose the asset. And then in our protocol, how it worked with the orb is that it goes back to the issuer of the orb. They can sell it again if the person who bought it isn't paying the Harburg attacks. let's do a little quick refresher on Harbinger taxes. So this is an economist that came up with it,

which the last name is Harbinger. I don't know what his first name is. This concept was popularized in crypto circles by Glenn Well, I think, who's kind of in the vitalic orbit. And the idea is, if you think about real estate, people end up squatting on it and you end up with socially less optimal outcomes where if it appreciates dramatically, people squat on it, or, you know, domain names, I think another example, it could appreciate dramatically. People squat on it. It's hard to achieve

the outcome whereby the property ends up in the hands of the people that are deriving the most value from it. So the harbidger tax is an attempt to achieve a more socially optimal outcome whereby there's allocative efficiency and the property ends up in the hands of the person that most values it. And so as the holder of this asset, you can ascribe a value to it, but you do have to stump up periodically

and pay a tax proportional to the value that you've determined for the asset. So if you're not driving a ton of utility for it, someone else takes it out of your hands. Now, I guess the problem is that for something like actual physical property, you don't really want to be putting your house up for perpetual auction because you don't want to be moved out of your house at short notice. But with something like the orb, it's not that, you know, you're not, you know, it's not

that costly for you to be selling the orb on to someone else. Right. So in this case, you end up with the outcome that whoever most values your commentary and analysis and feedback, they end up with the orb. And you're also guaranteeing a kind of churn, a kind of turnover in the asset because it's always up for sale at the right price. Yeah, and it's interesting that you mentioned domain names

because this idea of bringing in Harburger taxes to the orb concept was proposed actually by Nick Johnson, who's the founder of the ENS protocol. So he's the founder of the most popular domain name service protocol that runs on Ethereum or that runs on top of any crypto system. So I'm assuming that in ENS, you know, you'll have your Nick.Eath, Nick Carter.Eath. You also want to avoid squatting of domain names there. But I think that the thing that they probably struggled with and the reason that they couldn't

implement it in ENS is probably that, yeah, but people don't want to pay like very high taxes on just to own their domain names. So it's just, you want to reserve your domain name, you want to have it, but you don't want to pay, like regular people don't want to pay really high amounts just to have their domain name. So it's something that I believe that they have thought a lot about, but ultimately it didn't make sense for them. But the fact that they had thought about it so much made it very easy for him that when he

saw this orb concept, where it's kind of different because it has. has an ongoing utility all the time. Because you're getting an ongoing utility as an as the, I mean, if you're just owning a domain name, you don't feel like you're getting ongoing value every day. Well, maybe you are to some extent, but it's much more clear in the in the concept of the orb because you're receiving new answers, you're asking new answers, you're engaging with this item that you have every single week. So for that reason, it just makes more sense in this concept. So he pitched it to me and I thought about it. And it made immediate sense almost instantaneously.

And I think that that's probably the concept, like probably the addition to this idea that I think is going to make the word really interesting. Because not only does it provide churn, as you put it, which prevents squatting. I think the word that you used for it in another comment was vibrancy. It's not only a matter of avoiding squatting in this. case the the real interesting aspect to this is that as the provider of this

utility on an ongoing basis it's very nice for the issuer to also have this as an ongoing revenue stream you don't rely entirely on royalties you don't rely on someone like the the you're orb getting transferred between users you don't rely on that as a source of revenue the orb has a built-in revenue stream so it's you're not going to be waking up and feel like oh shit, I have to honor this orb commitment that I made a couple of years ago that I'm not getting anything out of. It's the same guy asking me the same question all the time, and he bought it for some ludicrously low price, and it's just been squatting the orb since then. You're getting actual

revenue from the orb every single day, and because it's a harburger tax, it means that the highest bidder always owns the orb. So the person who can't pay the highest harburger tax, is always paying the Harberger tax. So it maximizes revenue streams for the issuer, and it makes sense for them to pay it because they're receiving an ongoing service. And it's obviously very attractive for the issuer as well, because in the orb, we still have royalties.

So every time that the orb changes hands, that's a revenue stream. But even if it doesn't change hands, you also have the ongoing revenue stream from the Harberger tax itself. So it's a way of matching the value that's being derived from the holder of the orb with the value that's being handed back

to the issue of the orb. So nobody feels like they're being shortchanged, basically. Yep, pretty much. So there's some interesting other case studies of ways to invest, quote, unquote, in other people's human capital. None of them really worked. So infamously, there was BitClout.

And then there was this notion of social tokens, like Raleigh was a platform, which I think just recently closed down, where people could issue social tokens. But the problem there, I think, was that it was very unclear what the obligation was to the holders of those tokens. I'm not sure there really was one. And to the extent that you'd maybe codified by saying, oh, okay, well, let's say I'm a musician,

I'm going to make some money on my music, and then I will dividends. that those returns back out to the holders of the token that starts to look like a security. So none of them really works. So tell me your journey looking at these alternatives and then how the orb contrasts with them. Yeah. So BitCloud is a good example. I think Rally is similar.

The thing about these previous experiments is that they issued these tokens as a currency, almost, in the creator. So there were tons of different coins, lots of people could buy them. And so the obligation was from the, well, first of all, you're correct that there was really no clear obligation. But if you wanted to provide, like if you as the creator wanted to provide value to your token holders, then you were incentivized to provide various perks. But it's, I think it's difficult. Like, for example, how BitCloud did it was that they started actually, they allowed trading for these. currencies even before an influencer had even decided that they wanted to be a part of this experiment. So both you and I, we had people that were trading our BitCloud currency for tens or hundreds

of thousands of dollars, even before we could even decide, like, well, how am I even going to, how am I even going to think about providing value to that group of holders that now have invested in our tokens? It wasn't, it wasn't consensual. Like you didn't, as a creator, you didn't opt in. they opted in for you. Yeah. But the difficult thing is also that even if you wanted to opt in,

you had an obligation to many, many users. So their approach was more like you cast out a net to your audience base and you collect as many of them and you try to provide some diffuse value to this group of holders. The orb is like spearfishing compared to net. It's one. I think that where these experiments gone wrong is that, it's just too difficult to understand which type of value am I going to provide

to this gray blob, this audience base that I have. If you can instead just focus on, can I provide value to one user? Can I do one service to one user on a recurring basis? If I can do that, that's something that I think most people feel that they can do. Like, yes, I can give good answers

on a weekly basis to one person. And that's valuable. You get direct insight to my latest thinking on subjects. I will provide detail answers to you because both you and me, we receive tons of DMs. We don't have time to filter all of them. Most of them just goes unread. Once we read, we don't have time to give long answers. I just give less than one sentence answers to people just to say yes or no, basically.

So the idea that you would sit down with a person and answer them in detail what your latest thought saw on a subject, I think that's valuable. And that's a value that I would feel, like I'd feel comfortable with that. I know that I have time to take out of each of my week one time, sit down and answer one question. So that's a value that I don't feel scared about providing. So I think that the way that this war becomes potentially more interesting is that I think, it's something that everyone feels that I can deliver on this like I can I can take this concept I can deliver on it and I can stand by the value that I provide I know that I can do this and I'm not going to disappoint the person who's holding it

so I'm not trying to you know capitalize on my entire audience base by taking some money from all of them and promising them some vague patron like perk it's one specific value that I provide to one user so it's not like it at the same time like this is not this the orb is not going to make you insanely rich but it it also doesn't it also means that you won't actually have to make any sacrifices on your time like you're not going to have to give up being a fund manager I mean one of the reasons that people are interested in nick carter is because nick carter does what he does you don't want a person that just rerouts their entire personal attention to try to provide value to this community of holders so if it's just one

small thing that you can do on the side. It's it's way more clear what the value actually is. It becomes less speculative. I think people will be more interested in issuing them and people will be more interested in holding them. And the other thing that I think is really interested in interested that I think is really interesting with this concept is that when you go to Twitter, when you go to someone's social media profile and Twitter, Instagram, there's one thing that every profile shows you the moment that you click on it. And what it shows you is a follower account. So it shows you how many followers does this person have?

So I think that inherently, platforms that do well have some element of, like there's some status that you can signal through your account. If you provide a lot of value on a platform, then it's reflected in a value that's associated with your account, be it follower base or something else. And that's, I think it's in the BitCloud and Rally, examples it's sort of like you said the value that is it's it fluctuates a lot right it depends on what exactly is it that the influencer the creator provides

to his audience base that can vary greatly between different profiles but if we focus on standardizing what exactly are you supposed to do with your orb so in my example I'm just answering a question so we are going to create different variants of the orbs but we will try to have very category specific obligations. So if I'm providing an answer each week, then so that's the Q&A orb. That's one type of orb. And you can, by looking at different people in the ecosystem, you can see what is the Harburger tax fee to own Nixorb versus Eriksorb. If Nixorb is three times more expensive, that means that people are paying. Like, people are ready to pay three times more for Nixorb than they

are for Eric's or because Nix words are inherently more. valuable. And someone like Craig Wright, if he comes in and, you know, he, you know, tries to position himself in the industry as someone who's extremely knowledgeable. But if people pay 10% for Craig Wright's orb that they do for Nix Wharf, that's a clear market signal on whose word is actually interesting and important. So that's another reason why I think that Harburger taxes are extremely beneficial to this concept, because, yeah, the orb is always held by the highest bidder. So you get this, you get very clear market signals. There's no squatting involved. It's the clearest way to like price a consultancy hour or price the value of someone's word that I've thought about.

And so I've never, I was never interested. I actually have a tweet about BitCloud that I don't condone the experiment in any shape or any fashion. But I do want to create an orb. I don't, I don't have any interest in BitCloud tokens, but I want to create an orb. And I think there's also just something inherently appealing with, just the meme factor of having an orb like it's a magical item i i think sort of the conceptual thing i i think people just like warbs also it's something that people want to yeah herbs are cool yes spheres are better than cubes overall very true better to hold very true our hands evolutionarily

are optimized to hold spheres and not cubes very true about it i think about it i think this is It's interesting because you're proposing new economic mechanisms for a, so that part's novel. And then the actual product itself is pretty established. You know, the notion of an expert network consulting. You know, I'm sure you get in bounds from GLG, these kinds of expert networks all the time. I certainly do. And so that part's established. There's no question that an hour of someone's time or whatever the form factor is, is worth something if you have expertise in a particular domain.

So you're not reinventing that part. We know that there's value there. And that's something you can do on the side. You don't have to abandon your day job. You don't have to start catering to legions of token holders or anything like that. You can deliver that value one to one easily. No question about that. But the interesting thing is to make it crypto-native.

put it on chain, have real-time pricing, and put in this mechanism such that, as you say, this vibrancy, it's shuffling between many different holders potentially, because as someone's interest in use, maybe transient, it expires, naturally gets sold onto the next guy. So I guess that's where the exciting part is. Yeah. And look, from my point of view, this is such a no-brainer product that I'm almost upset that it doesn't exist yet because I think that you know you have tons of NFT entrepreneurs and I'm not an I'm not an NFT entrepreneur like I'm not an entrepreneur like generally

speaking well you might be now yeah I'm between the orbs and the wizards yeah I'm history books are written maybe you'll be known your previous work will be forgotten and you'll be known as an nfti guy who knows right but so but I've never I've never intended like I'm not a person in crypto that's trying to come up with new ideas like this is not like my next product in a series of failed experiments or successful experiments even i've mostly just been a critic on the sidelines of most projects i've been investing and criticizing mostly my critique with this is that i'm just upset that this thing doesn't exist yet

so i how i tried to make the orb happen initially was that i wrote this blog post and then i tweeted about it. So I tried to get people excited about the, I put some concept art. I used like an image editor to make it look like an item in World of Warcraft. I called it Eric's Warb and I tried to get people excited about the idea. And my, what I wanted out of that was I wanted some entrepreneur to take that obviously amazing concept and then go create it in the wild, actually launch it. But no one did that. And it's been stuck in my head for like one and a half, like almost two, years and no one has created an orb yet so it got to the point that what actually triggered it was that okay so I promised I you made me promise that I wasn't

going to talk about hex but I have to make I have to mention it briefly here so that the hex can I love hearing about your hex miss oh really I think it's just for your own mental health so the so the hex community actually by the way so I'm currently sitting in the apartment that is paid for by the hex community. That's sort of an interesting. You need to give us more of an explanation. Yeah. So I mean, so because I'm, you know, a critic in the cryptocurrency space, I will call things the way I see them and it usually gets me on odd ends with particular cryptocurrency communities and one of the most like intense and annoying communities in the cryptocurrency space is the hex community.

So I've been a critic, one of the sort of OG critics of the Hex Protocol for a long time. The relationship that we have between each other is that I sort of love to hate Hex and they love to hate me. So we've just, you know, there's just been an ongoing banter between me and that community for a very, very long time. And it's gotten so far that, you know, this community is just crazy about, an opportunity to dunk on me. So, you know, I made a bet, like, publicly that I said that I think that the price of hex has reached an all-time high. It's only going to go down from here.

And, of course, it triggered them immensely. There's, like, thousands of people that just wants to be to prove me wrong and wants to capitalize on, like, actually shoving my face in the dirt and proving me that I'm wrong. So one community member bet me $20,000 that the hex price was going to reach a new all-time high. And he also actually allowed me to escrow. He sent me $20,000 to escrow, which made, because the hex price was so far away from its all-time high, all I had to do was buy hex for $3,000.

And then I took the rest of the $17,000. And I just paid for like my dream apartment in Portugal. So I am in this apartment. I'm still like answering this, these hex messages. Like I'm getting dunked on by the hex community. But at the same time, they're also paying for. for my lifestyle. Anyway, so it sounds like a very healthy relationship you have with them.

Yeah, I mean, it's turning, it's turning like harassment into a revenue stream. Into an apartment. Yeah. So I feel like they're this bet like the person you made the bet with is not familiar with options pricing. I think that he wanted the internal clout of the hex community of be the guy that put up put his money where his mouth was and made Eric Wall. pay up a lot of money for being wrong. Even if, like, even if I could hedge it and just

instantaneously profit from it, I think that he just wanted the internet cloud. Like some people are just going to see, oh, now Eric paid. Yeah. That's priceless. So, yeah, so that's what he paid for. Internet cloud's priceless. Yeah. And also, I mean, the hex community, some of them that got in super early have like an abundance of cash that they don't know what to spend it on. So some of them will spend it on stupid things like bets with people like me. So anyway, that community is constantly trying to nerds. Their problem that they have is that they are always trying to decipher the word of Richard Hart. So Richard Hart promises to develop protocols and tools for the hex community, but he's been delaying for years.

There's a thing called pulse chain that hasn't come out in years time. is always delaying and their entire financial future is dependent on actually understanding the tea leaves that Richard leaves them on his Twitter page. And so they sort of rely on me to decipher. This is like interest rate trades deciphering Jerome Powell's statements. This sounds like the exact same thing. Pretty much. So they rely on me to decipher the word of Richard and they know that I can easily be triggered

into Duncan on Richard and tell why what he's saying is bullshit. So for example, Richard will talk about like some bug in an Aragon client or something like that in the testing process. And they don't know what an Aragon client is. So they need me to come in and say, Richard's talking about this. And this is why Pulse Chain is going to be delayed for another three months. Like they want that advice, but they're too, they don't want to actually tell me that, like, Eric, can you please come and explain this situation?

So what they're saying is like, you probably don't know what this means. Like you're too stupid to understand what Richard is saying now. So I know that there's immense demand for me to come in a pine about on this topic. So in that moment, like recently it happened this Christmas, I thought about like if this entire hex community could just go by my orb and then they could ask me a question on a weekly basis, they can just like pull in, they can buy it in the form of a doubt. create the hexdow, buy my orb. They can outbid anyone. So for that reason, I just, you know, I got so frustrated with the fact that the orb concept didn't exist yet.

There was no tool for me to do this. I couldn't auction off a recurring consultancy hour that I just, you know, said to myself, okay, well, if no one else is making it, then I'll have to go out and do this. And one of the other interesting things with this project has been that, So all the development for the org, like the website, the smart contracts, I haven't paid. So we have an entire protocol, like an entire orb smart contract written in solidity that's been audit. It's been heavily tested and looked for bugs inside a protocol.

There's also a user interface. All that, like this is months of engineering work that has been done. I haven't paid a single dime for it because the way that we do it is that, the Harberger tax and the revenue that comes from the auctions and the royalties all go into a smart contract that has a splitter function that divides the revenue to all the people that have been contributing to bringing the orb to life. So that's another thing that I think is interesting. If you want to create an orb and you want tons of things built for this orb to make your orb launch be very special, you can just make the Harberger tax and the

revenue from the auction go into a smart contract and the people who helped you make your orb will trustlessly have a stake in your in your future revenue like zero x splits so i have the only reason i know anything about hex is because we're friends and so i'm very upset about that um so i you know i wish that i'd never heard of x but unfortunately i hear about it all the time second comment is this not a failure mode of the orb whereby your orb ends up in the hands of an adversary

a rich adversary that wants to make your life hell and ask you annoying questions on a perpetual basis how do you deal with this possible failure mode yeah so well

if you really really don't like getting questions from this community that you think is harassing you you can always, like, not answer. Like, you can decide I'm not going to answer these questions. It's going to reduce the value of your orb tremendous. Like, that's going to tank the value of your orb,

but maybe it doesn't destroy your reputation in the public sphere still, because you can say, well, this community that was harassing me got a hold of this item, and I didn't want to do it, and this is why I didn't honor my promise. Like, maybe people won't think less of you because they understand what happened. So that's one way to get out of it. The other way would be to buy it from that community to just pay more. So you'll have to buy it from them at the price that they're willing to sell it for. And then you can retire the war or sell it again.

But if they're going to buy it back, then you're sort of in the same situation. From my perspective, I mean, I go into this situation knowing what I'm offering. And I don't care. Like if it's the hex community, I mean, I've already been answering. their questions because they sort of trigger me into doing it on like a daily basis. So this would be like a weekly basis. But still, the reason that I thought about it for the hex community is that at least it forces me to rate limit myself. I can at least focus on just answering that one question per week. So it's actually going to sort of decrease harassment from my perspective because

I can just point them to the orb. It'll be a easy way for me to just cancel their harassment and say, well, if you have a question, go by the war. So for me, it's like a protective shield in a way. So second possible failure mode, how do they know that your proof of work is genuine? How do they know that these are your words that you're coming up with if you put real thought into it versus just running it through a large language model or something like that? Yeah, so the large language model point that you make is pretty interesting here because when, when I started to sort of make the orb more concrete a couple of months ago,

I actually put as a in the terms for the orb that if there is a large language model that can be trained on me after five years that whose answers are almost extinguishable from my own real answers, then I'm allowed to after five years to just set the answers to the large language model and have that reply instead. So that would like instead of saying after five years it doesn't work anymore, I sort of made a smooth landing and said that the large large language model can respond instead. So I put five years there. In five years it'll be possible.

But already now, like it happens so fast from chat GPT's initial like entry to the scene. There is already a chat GPT. like bot that is trained on my Twitter history and medium post and you've all you you've tried it out as well i have one as well yeah gbt nick right yeah pretty good yeah it's pretty good it's like a slightly more liberal version of me it's like a more leftist version of me but it so you know that part's not realistic but the rest of it is it's like exactly me yeah so i think there's there's two ways to think about this either you think that the orb is going to like the the concept of the orb is destroyed because people won't be able to distinguish real answers from fake answers,

and people will be lazy and just put chatbots to give answers for them. Or you can go the other route, and you can make it so that every time that you're interacting with Nick on his DMs, you never know, and he doesn't give you any promise that he's not going to use a large language model to answer you, and he doesn't have any obligation to you not to use a large language model. But the orb could be where he promises that I'm actually going to give you an answer. And the way that you could make that at least, like that you could make that more authentic for at least maybe another year or so, is by providing some video proof. So you cannot, you can, we are in the process of making a platform that will have the ability to capture a video from you and then we'll take a hash of the video that goes alongside with the answer so that you can always verify that this was actually like read by. Nick himself. I mean, you could still be reading your own chat GPT based answers.

And you can, and if you're sure, you could also, you could also, you could create a text to video model. Yeah. We have those now. Yeah. There's so deep fakes also. It's like an arms race against AI. Yeah. So I mean, at the end of the day, at the end of the day, there will be answer. So what you can, when you're asking questions, you can ask things that Nick hasn't expressed an opinion on and where there's a new event that is very like something that just happened where a large language model hasn't had time to like train on enough of input but there's also like it's it's the it's the promise itself I think that the the the credibility of a person like if you take what's his name Logan Paul that got into he got into he got so much flack from

Coffeezilla because Logan Paul had an NFT project that he didn't deliver on. And yeah, what was they like Crypto Zoo? Crypto Zoo? I can't believe I even know this. Yeah, so they were supposed to I wish that I, my brain wasn't full of you so I felt like that. Yeah. So this was something that Logan Paul promised his users that he was going to deliver on. He was going to build some crypto sue and then they bought eggs in CryptoSoo and ultimately they didn't deliver. And Logan Paul in this case was able to hide behind, you know, this was a project,

we had multiple contractors, the contractors didn't deliver, like he could hide behind a bunch of different factors that went into him not delivering on his promise. The orb is such a, like, there's nothing that you can hide behind. If you're using a large language model to get out of having to give answers, or if you were not answering your questions

on a timely fashion, or if you're just giving bullshit answers, that's you not honoring your words. orb. That's you neglecting a very simple promise that you gave to your followers. So it'll be like the most surefire way to drive your reputation in the ground because it's something that we log it on the blockchain. It's nothing that you can falsify. It's not, you can't even get your, it's not like the internet archive. You can't even get your this shittiness behavior of yours. You can't even get it removed. It's it has the same data availability guarantees us the hash is imprinted in in the blockchain. It's

itself. So we're trying to make that this is a promise that you're giving. It's your word, right? And if you can't even honor your orb, what are you worth like as an individual? If you can't even honor that, like who's going to trust you? So I mean, this is a way for you to, yeah, this is a way for you to put a promise out there. It's a way for you to put out the promise to the world and show that you can deliver on that promise. So I'm, you know, I'm thinking about like, years from now, you know, people are going to say, like, that person doesn't even honor his orb. Like, it'll be the worst thing that you can say about someone, that they won't even honor their

orb. Such a simple thing, right? And also, there's just, there's the market value of the orb, which reflects the value that the recipient is receiving. So that will be a quantitative measure of how good you are at honoring the promise. Yeah. And it ties back into, like, the status, right? If you're very proud of having the most expensive word in crypto, which you might actually, you might be one of the top.

I think that your award would like in crypto be one of the most valuable ones. That's just me being a fanboy. I like to think so. I like to think so. I don't know. I'm more vibe space. It's not like I give people like hardcore technical advice though. So I could see mine being top quartile maybe.

Yeah. But you have like very cross domain expertise that you can give. an all-encompassing opinion about a subject that, you know, you have a lot of tentacles in the entire industry overall, in macro traditional finance and in crypto, that I think makes your ultimate opinion about something also very valuable than someone that is just super specialized. But I think, you know, there's going to be, like, another person whose orb could be immensely valuable is someone like SAC, SACX-X-T. Like, take 30 minutes out of your time, look at what happened, like what happened in this, like go look at the blog.

and tell me where are my like can you help me locate my assets I think that Sachs were might actually be more valuable than either one of us because he provides you such direct quantifiable value it's actually another thing that I so another thing that I like to think about is so who who is the war going to be most valuable to so in my case it might be the hex community but another thing like another another another entity that may get extreme value, even if it's just like 30 minutes each week, would be like in my case, and I think in your case also take a cryptocurrency fund. Like take a cryptocurrency fund that don't

have, that have, you know, a lot of resources, but and they have a good deal flow, but they don't have like an industry insider to actually opine. So is this a good project to invest in? So let's say you're a sort of a traditional fund and you have. have the ability to invest in eigenlayer or something like that. Now you want to know like what are people in the ground in crypto actually saying about eigenlayer. So having Nick's orb, just so that Nick can sort of condense the entire intelligence of the cryptocurrency industry and say, well, you know, I had good things about them. That's going to be worth a lot to a cryptocurrency fund. Like let's

just go through like they can even show your list. These are 10 prospective crypto investments that we're about to make. Tell us, tell us two of these that we should avoid. Like, that's really, really valuable. So it'll be really... I mean, that's exactly how these... That's how the expert networks work today. I mean, I actually personally don't do them right now, but I get pitched all the time for GLG and stuff like that.

And that's exactly what they asked me about. And that's worth to them like $1,000 an hour. It's bananas. Yeah. And those GLG, I'm not, you know, the... In this case, like the orb, it has a... it's it sort of condenses all the market participants for your value into one single asset. And it's, so you will get better market pricing for this like publicly tradable asset that anyone can bid on than like GLG.

They're in there and they're trying to, most of these cases are trying to take a big cut. In this case, like there's, it'll be like a small platform fee of like single, single digit percentages. But in GLG's case, I think they're probably trying to take like 50. or more. They're trying to capture as much as they can. So another thing that I think about, like this, these orb assets, like, do you remember, do you remember during the ICO boom? Every single crypto project wanted to have an advisory board where they listed the best advisors in crypto. So you would see pitch decks and all of them had like, you know, Vitalik or Zachimani on or like some, some big shot.

person in crypto that they were trying to they were basically trying you in the crypto space these projects are trying to collect these advisors as if they're Pokemon's basically and you want as many of them as possible to show on your pitch deck but in reality like in some of these cases uh metallic was as an advisor on an ICO advisory board but the only thing that he did was like yeah you know i'll i will answer like you guys i like your project but and i i i like you guys but and i i i suppose that I can like in some of these cases he hadn't even said that he was going to advise them he just maybe answered questions in in discord or something like that so when you see that someone is on the advisory board you don't exactly know okay but how much of their time

are they actually committing so you know I would be I would be willing to go as far so far as to say that if you have instead of having an advisory slide in your pitch deck that just list a bunch of names, if you have Nick Carter's orb and you have Italic's orb and you have Zachomanian's orb and there's just one of those and you're the startup that actually has those assets, that's going to be more credible for your company than, you know, any advisor's light that you can possibly think of because you're the one startup that has this asset. So I think that startups for sure, like you can raise around at a pretty high valuation if all you have are like the like five wharps from from really, really, really.

insightful people in the domain that you're trying to build products in. So I think that like startups for sure, they will raise VC capital to buy your orb. For sure, I think, I think, I think they're going to do that. So, well, first of all, thank you for making us the domicile of your orb coming out party. I feel like this is your first long form orb conversation. It is. Second of all, when, when orb, when are you actually releasing this thing? I presume yours will be the first. The plan is that by the time that this podcast goes live, my orb will be up for auction,

or either it will be up for auction or it will be like a couple of days before the auction starts. So hopefully by the time that you're listening to this podcast, you will be able to visit orb. And there you will see the first installation. of this concept will be my orb and then after that I mean who knows whose orb is going to come next maybe there will be a next warb yeah I think they might I'm just I'm probably less tolerant of like some hostile community getting their nasty little mitts on my orb and asking me horrible questions

okay well every week so I feel like you have more of a tolerance for this than I yeah so this is where the Harburger taxes come into play, right? So I'm going to, so for my orb, I'm going to set the 10% Harburger tax. And this is because I think that people are like, they know by, they know bidding on an asset in an auction. They know that what they're paying this amount. But if then it's like you're going to pay 50% of that value per year, then they're like they might feel thrown off in some way. So I want for the first warb that goes live will set like a Harburger tax that people can understand. But there is not that there is actually nothing that prevents you from

setting an extremely high harburger tax so that the orb price itself will be so just holding on to the orb for like three months will cost you more than the orb price itself if you set like the orb harburger attacks to like a thousand percent so you could if you want to avoid squatting what you can do is that okay so set the harburger tax to a thousand percent they go and buy your orb right and now they have to they have to pay on a monthly basis they have to pay the entire value of the whorb. So just by you sucking in Haraburger tax, you can collect that value,

and then you can buy back your orb from them. You can buy it back yourself, and then you can retire the orb. So if you set the Harburger tax extremely high, in your case, you're not going to be in the situation where anyone can come and cannibalize your time for months and months and months.

Yeah, the parameterization is really important. You can basically induce different types of holder behaviors based on how you set the parameters. Exactly. So, and this is what, because different orbs will have different Harburger taxes, they're, the market value that they sell for will fluctuate immensely, like, depending on, like, if you, if the, it's basically like real estate, right? If the interest rates are extremely high, then the, the price of the property will be low.

If the interest rates are at zero, then you'll have, like, in Sweden where, like, the, the house prices are like many, many, like, many, like, like tens of multiples of your yearly salary, right? So the sales price for the orb itself is not going to be like the metric by which you determine the value of an orb. The value, the metric that you'll judge it on will be based on how much, like what is the monthly payments that you make on an orb? In our cases, it will actually be per block.

So the orb will, value will be extracted from. the holder to the issuer on a per block basis. So you'll actually see like the value streaming from you in real time. Is that efficient to do to remit the payments on a per block basis? Yeah, because it's all, it doesn't actually require an on-chain action. It's just the contract itself measures based on timestamps how much you can withdraw. So what, what, so how the Harburg attacks works is that you'll have to fill it up. And this is one of the reasons that we had a WebGL animator animate the orb is to sort of explain this concept in a visual way. So the orb itself is a hollow sphere. And the sphere is filled with a liquid. And that's what we call the orb juice. And if you

fill, if you charge the orb with juice to cover a year, like a Harburg attacks for an entire year, then the orb will be full of liquid. So you know you don't have to worry, the orb is not running out of juice, but then every second, every month, the juice level is going down and you will see, oh shit, I'm running out of the harbor juice. I need to fill it up again. So you'll see like a tank, like a liquid tank inside the orb. And then the other aspect, like the how long you have to wait until you can use the orb,

that we configure with the glow. So when the orb is glowing a lot, you can see, oh, it's usable. it's time for me to click the orb and actually trigger it. And then after you used it, then the orb is sort of dull looking. It's just like has no glow, no nothing. So that was one of the reasons that we really wanted to animate it because I think that if they see the orb like glowing and having liquid inside of it, they know that the orb is healthy.

The orb is ready to be used. So that was one of the reasons that we put a lot of resources into making a visual representation of it. What's the maximum amount of time you can pre-fund an orb for? So there is no limit at the moment. But if someone buys the orb from you, like let's say you fill it for 10 years, and then someone pays the price at which you were willing to sell the orb at, then you have the ability to now withdraw the juice that was in the orb that you haven't used yet.

So you can charge it for as long as you like. If you want to fill it for 100 years, you know, we're going to have a front end that it's going to tell you, like, maybe stick to two years. because Eric hasn't promised to honor his orb. Eric hasn't promised to honor his orb for more than five. So what are you doing filling this orb without much juice? So we'll give you user interface guidance. And there also be preset options.

Like when you're buying the orb, we'll recommend that you, at minimum, charge it with two weeks so that you don't just buy the orb and then it automatically runs out of juice and then I snatch it back from them and then I auction it off again. So we can do a lot of stuff to guide the user from the front end. So as the issue of the orb,

the parameters you can set are the refractory period for how frequently you're answering questions and what the cool down is. So if you don't want to be bothered, you can set it longer. You can set the harbidge attacks. If you want it to turn over more quickly,

you can set the tax higher. and you can, I guess you can set like the terms of service of the orb. So like what is permissible to ask you and what the form factor of your responses is. Exactly. So that's one thing. You can define what type of questions are you, is it a free for all? Can you ask anything and I'll answer anything or are there limitations? So for example, in my case, the limitation that I will have is that I'm not going to answer

you where I am physically at this particular moment or what my address is or what's in my bank account. So no personal sensitive information. But that's sort of the only thing. There's also, maybe there's, I mean, also like, I'm not going to tell you what's how the finances of the Starknet Foundation are, like obviously things like that. Those things I want to answer. I think people can sort of figure that out for themselves, but, you know, I want to make it clear. But then the other thing that you'll be able to play around with is privacy also. So this is a more subtle nuance, but it's been one of the things that we've had to think the most about, actually, when we've been designing this protocol. It matters a lot. Like, can people ask you

questions that aren't visible to the world? And are you then answering these questions only to that person? And, or do they always have to give public answers? And can you also also only provide public answers. So the way that we've done it with my orb is that there's a lot of control, right? So the person who asked the question can decide whether or not they want a private or public answer. And if they receive a private answer and they're not happy with it or they just want to bring it public for whatever reason, then they can, they can, the person who received the answer can make it public. Then the other trick to it is that, okay, what happens when the war changes hands? So the way that I've done it in my orb is, with my orb is that if you,

you buy the warb you actually have the ability to reveal past answers so the the questions are always public in my case you can always see the questions that have been asked but the answers can sometimes be private but if you buy the warb you have the ability to reveal a particular answer and the reason that I'm doing it that way is because I want people to scroll through the list of previous questions and see like oh damn I wish that I knew what he said there like I really really wish that I because what if it was something like do you think that fdx is insolvent and it was one one week before before they went belly up and that's a private answer and you can't see it and you really really want to know so then you're incentivized to go buy the orb and you'll have the ability

to reveal that past answer so that's those are parameters that you can play around with maybe you're not comfortable with like new orb owners being able to reveal all your past answers to the world maybe you just wanted them to be able to reveal it to themselves I mean In reality, it's sort of the same thing because they can always screenshot what your answer was and prove on the blockchain with the hashes that that's what you actually actually said. The element, the sort of aspect to this that has required most of fine-tuning is the privacy to these questions and answers. Well, Eric, I can't wait to purchase your orb and ask you ridiculous questions that you will be forced to answer at the cost of your reputation. and possibly to issue a Nick orb. We'll see.

We'll see what your experience is like. Yeah. And I'll decide. Yeah, I'm a little bit nervous, you know, what it's going to sell for. Like, I put all the, you know, time and money into this. Yeah, actually, I was going to ask you, I was going to ask what your prediction is. Where do you think your orb trades two weeks after issuance? Yeah.

I'm going to, you know, I'm going to say 10 ether. 10 ether. So with a harbidger tax of 10% per year. Yeah. So what does, like $18,000 is what I think that someone may pay. Like that's a lot, but I think, you know, because this will be. Well, but you can quantify it though, like because your refractory period is two weeks, right, for your orb? No, one week, one week.

So I'll answer a weekly basis. So you get 52 answers a year. Yeah. So if it's 10% and. it costs $18,000, so it's $1,800 a year in tax. Yep. That only amortizes to $34 an answer for if it's a weekly cooldown. So that's pretty reasonable.

That's pretty reasonable. If you assume that the, if you're not including the sale value in the amortization. So I think that's, that's a decent price. Yeah. And it's still, from my point of view, that's $34 that I'm not getting from the community when I'm answering their answers right now. So it's, it's mostly, you know, there's, there's also the, if, if, if someone puts a very high sales price for this and then someone else buys it, then that's a 10% royalty tax that

also goes to me. So, you know, I'm not expecting actually that the first auction and that Harburger tax is going to, that that's going to be the ultimate be all and end all of my revenue stream. as people can read these answers and come up with more interesting questions to ask, the more orbs that we set out in the world, people will understand what's the most value. Like, for example, here's one thing that you can do. So let's say that you think that Eric's answers the value of that is more than $34 a month. You as the current war holder, you can decide to auction off the right to use your orb slot to the highest bidder.

There's a particular week where Eric's word is an extremely high demand. There's someone that's just dying to ask, because you can sort of see from the track record that Eric is, like in my case, I will honor like almost every single question. So if there is something really annoying that you want to ask me that I'm not answering on Twitter, maybe you'll pay $500. So you as the orb holder, you actually have a yield, right? You have a yield that on a weekly basis, you'll be able to auction off my weekly answer slot, right? So if the end, if the market decides that this particular week, it's more than $34, then, you know, each week will be whatever the market prices at.

So I'm not expecting that it's just going to be like $34 because that's what the first purchaser bought it at. I think that there's going to be a market fluctuating phenomenon that people learn to respect. All right. Well, we have to leave it there today. Eric, orb. Dot land. Yep. Is that where we were directing our listeners?

Yep. Orb. That's correct. And thank you for coming on. I'm excited to do it again soon. I can't believe I've been doing this podcast. I've 400 episodes of the podcast. Jesus.

The first time you did it. Jesus. Well, congratulations. I don't know what's going on here. Congratulations. Yeah, I can't wait to quit. By the way, the name of the podcast is called On the Brink, right?

Yeah. Do you think that we've passed the brink soon with the banks collapse? Oh, yeah. we're well we're yeah we need to rename it to over the brink yeah the brink is we've yeah we've crossed the brink long ago yeah that's a good point because on the brink you know it's obviously a call back to the bitcoin genesis block but the kind of the point was like we're on the brink of a transition to a new market regime and i think we're past it that's exactly right so we're we're we're renaming it now okay effective today all right awesome well thanks for

having me, Nick. Okay, Eric, this is great. This is great. Look forward to seeing how this trades. All right. Thank you. Bye-bye.