Hello Shareholders!
I talked for an hour with Abhishek Kumar on his podcast and he did some nice editing and posted it today! He led me deep into the origin stories of KmikeyM…
In my last email I asked about going to a holiday party and that was rejected. As the COVID cases continue to rise I also cancelled a trip to the Crypto.com arena to my first NHL hockey game. So far (knock on wood) I haven’t contracted COVID and as the omicron variant continues to soar it’s a bit of a return to “indoor life”.
Season five of the shareholder poker tournament just wrapped up (do you play poker?) and after playing a lot of online chess I’m starting a new experiment:
Chess Lab
One of the benefits of the new voting system is creating subsections for experimentation. Chess Lab is an experiment in collaborative gaming. Can the collective intelligence of the shareholders win a chess game? Let’s find out!
Oh, and remember that if you want automated updates for Chess Lab you have to turn on notifications (your choice of email or text message).
January Challenge
You can also vote on the monthly challenge for January:
🚫 Dry January
📚 Four Books
💪 3x Workout a Week
🚴♂️ 500 Miles
🌱 Vegan
📹 Weekly Livestream
New Job!
I just started my new job! I’m now the Community and Creator Evangelist at Roll, where we are building infrastructure for social currency. Roll believes that in the future it will be much more common for people and organizations to create their own money. This will accelerate the development of digital communities that are less tied to a specific platform. Personally, I find the idea incredibly exciting, as it enables people to recreate almost the entire feature set of KmikeyM using various crypto tools.
Obviously there is a long way to go. Cryptocurrencies are not easy to use, gas fees are high, and there are risks when dealing with immutable blockchain technology that forces the end user to have more expertise in security than is reasonable. I’m still very much of the shareholder endorsed opinion that there is a huge promise of crypto but the high technical understanding and lack of safeguards increase the risk. I really like that Roll helps with both those issues! But of course it is still the early days (which is part of why it is so exciting).
When KmikeyM started I was working at Panic, and I’ve usually had a full time job while being a publicly traded person. But a lot of the new shareholders have joined while I was freelancing, and I’m sure some of you are wondering, “How will KmikeyM be different now that Mike has a job?”
Probably not much will change. I’ll probably be talking about more social tokens as that is what I’m working on all day, but the same primary rule for KmikeyM will still apply: Anything I would normally ask my friends advice about will be a shareholder question.
As part of my first week at Roll I’ve been diving into the product and talking to creators who are launching their own tokens within their communities. As a publicly traded person it feels like I have “peers” and it’s nice to be able to offer some perspective on having a community of shareholders/token holders.
Some Links
Friends and shareholders of the band YACHT sent out an email newsletter explaining their concept of nüvies, which they see as new form of media that exists within the shell of a blockbuster movie.
Max Read’s newsletter Read Max is the most pessimistic writing I enjoy.
Back in 2016 I created a new form of Collectible Chess I called Chess 2.0 but I just found out from Claire (her newsletter Wild Information is fantastic) that there a long history of alternative chess pieces!
That’s it until 2022. I am not sure why (considering the current state of the world) but I’m optimistic about next year. I think that, if nothing else, it’s going to be really interesting, possibly even fun on occasion? But hey, I’m an optimist. :)
Profitably Yours,
K. Mike Merrill
PS: included below is some additional writing for the Insider Information subscribers, which is the optional paid version of this mailing list. If you’d like to read a bit more personal information and the archives you can become an Insider here: