3 For 3: From the Earth to the Internet

Inspiration Friday #2

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Welcome to another Inspiration Friday! Week #2 will be a little different than last week. I am not sharing quotes from books, but rather some really fascinating articles I read this week. Some are a little technical as I’m diving into the crypto world, but all very interesting.

Gardening

The first article is not technical at all, though. Tay and I have been doing some gardening this summer! It’s going really well too! We have cucumbers, tomatoes, sunflowers, tons of peppers, a cantaloupe, and even a couple pumpkins!

The one issue we’ve had is our watermelon and zucchini have died. The watermelon produced one little watermelon which rotted before growing up. He was so young :(

We at least got a good 2 or 3 zucchini’s, but recently they started to turn yellow and rot the second they sprout. I did some research and found some answers in this article. This article was really insightful because it gave several reasons why it could be happening and some possible solutions to fix it.

https://pender.ces.ncsu.edu/2020/03/why-are-my-squash-rotting/

Long story short, I think we might have been watering it too much.

I don’t know if we will ever know for sure because after I read this our dog, Merlin, decided to trample the zucchini, nailing the final nail in its coffin.

The World Internet

The next topic I’ve been really interested in is crypto. One of the hard things about the crypto world is that there is a lot going on, it is moving really fast, and there are a ton of new vocabulary words to keep up with. It gets really confusing even for a techy person, haha!

I’m learning about how to best invest into this new economy, but also how to utilize the technology behind it all. It’s all super fascinating and hard to grasp. 

One thing I think will be really interesting is this concept of a decentralized internet. Most people forget that when we talk about the “cloud” we are really talking about Google servers, Amazon servers, or some company’s servers. The decentralized internet would not run on any one company’s servers, they would just run without control of a company. It’s mind boggling!

I recently discovered another cool connection to the decentralized internet too. I’ve been reading a book called Scythe that takes place in the future when humans have eradicated all diseases and even eradicated death and aging. Essentially everyone can live forever. The twist to the book are these people called Scythes who are the only people capable of taking life in order to keep the population balanced.

That’s neither here nor there. The interesting part is that in the book they have a new internet called the Thunderhead (instead of the cloud) which just runs itself. No one controls it; it just exists.

It’s scary how similar that is to the ideas behind the decentralized internet we’re already talking about today. I’ve been doing some research into how people build applications on the decentralized internet. I thought this article was a really cool walkthrough of how to create an application that will actually run on the decentralized internet! It is pretty technical, though.

https://medium.com/dfinity/building-a-front-end-dapp-on-the-internet-computer-55985f0a595b

NFTs

Another thing I’m really interested in within the crypto world is how I can use it when I am ready to publish my first short story!

I’ve been looking into these things called NFTs. Non-Fungible Token. You can think of it as a unique token that cannot truly be copied.

NFTs are not really that new of an idea. The Mona Lisa can be considered an NFT. Thousands of copies of the Mona Lisa exist, but only one of them is the original.

Today, with blockchain, we have the ability to create digital NFTs that can raise in value as the popularity of the token does. In regards to a book, it would be similar to a first edition signed copy of a book. But in a digital way.

My thinking is I could give out one of these special unique digital tokens when someone pre-purchases a copy of my book. It would be this unique token showing you were one of the first; you got the original copy. 

We’ll see.

This article gave some super insightful strategies on creating NFTs when it comes to publishing a new book.

https://www.writerontheside.com/nfts-for-authors-how-to-launch-a-book-using-nfts/