Brandon Thorn
aka proggR/sgtgroucho
Screenshot shared by a friend confirming I remember ETH when it was just a whitepaper.
PS: You're welcome /r/uselessredcircle
Who Am I?
I'm a fullstack/blockchain/game dev who likes to play with new toys and experiment with zany ideas. Some interests include economics/finance, history, sociology/psychology, and communities. When put together, "socialcapitalism" has remained a core interest driving a lot of R&D projects.
What Drives Me?
I enjoy reducing complexity through analysis and lateral problem solving, but subsist off the act of meaningful and challenging creation.
I find our very existence and social development fascinating and from that fascination I seek to learn as much as I can about the world and ourselves every day.
The increase in information bandwidth and opportunity potential caused by the simple act of putting people together, along with the theory of multiple discoveries, make me dream of a new world where progress is deterministically driven forward through the power of a heroic community, rather than heroic individuals.
I strive to both see and create opportunities that allow me to reduce information asymmetry, and in doing so make the world a more fair and equitable place.
Ongoing Projects
- DEIT (2020) — R&D brand for decentralized experimentation and development. Pivoting toward adding fund management/trading uses of the brand as initially intended.
- Commonwealth (2023) — A model for a new DAO managed Fiat currency, which includes W3C DID compliant Identity and a DAO-of-DAOs oriented governance service layer.
The thesis is: Monetary Base + ID + Federated Bottom-Up Governance = The foundation for a socialcapitalism featuring Social Insurance 2.0.
- Shinyblocks (2023) — Inspired by Diamonds, Shinyblocks intends to encapsulate the ERC2535 spec in JS, while stretch goaling to supporting Hardhat deployments. WIP but still useful for simple smart contract interactions (used in most recent diamond-hardhat branch).
- Diamond Driven Development (2022) — A blog started as a means to capture the workflow/simplicity of ERC2535, has since become more general acting as the DEIT blog. Intend to spin "Diamond Driven Development" into its own brand.
- Unnamed TCG Project (2023) — Inspired in part by the power of AI tools, I've started scratching the surface on a lifelong dream: making a TCG.
- QuinteMusic/QuinteLive (2023, not yet launched) — Reviving a pre-COVID project to list and cover live music and musicians local to me (the Quinte, ON region).
Past Startup
- sourced.fm (~2012-15) — A regionalized social discussion community for music, built with a custom PHP framework called ChickenWire. Featured events and crowdfunding , while we (the team) also discussed how we could underwrite our "amplify" mechanic with smart contracts, prior to ETH existing. Like Twitter + Reddit + Kickstarter for local music. Built a small team around the idea and was included in a MaRS report on Canadian media (2014).
Past Projects/Experiments
- Gno.land Hacking (2023) — Includes DAO-of-DAOs prototype with self-executing Proposals. Linked from awesome-gno repo.
- Diamond Hardhat Starter Repo (2022) — Starter repo with Hardhat tasks and tests defined. Linked from awesome-diamonds repo.
- EVM Secrets (2022) — Implemented secrets sharing both with and without replay protection. Inspired and borrowing ideas from ERC712, but not fully compliant.
- SlimeBrawlyBrawl (2022) — Unity3D game inspired by Super Smash Bros made in a single player endless run style. Intend to launch, needs largely RC polish + store asset creation.
- DFM/dfm-min (2022) — Imagining Diamond Facets as operating similar to packages in other contexts, DFM aimed to be like NPM for ERC2535, while dfm-min was a minimized downloadable that would provision your diamond dev environment from your DFM compliant config, aiming to be the simplest means to spin up a fresh ERC2535 targeted workspace.
- Astro/Tailwind (aka Updraft) (2022) — Simple/reusable components made with AstroJS. Leverages TailwindCSS.
- Social Insurance 2.0 (2022) — Insurance as a unifying means to underwrite and secure social mobility, and redefine a sustainable social contract for the 21st Century.
- CMesh (2022) — Inspired by NATS.io, CMesh was largely an excuse to use Go for a non-trivial project. The result: a nascent new DID-rooted intranet concept? Will return to.
- OneBook (2022) — Terraform monorepo pattern project aiming to facilitate the most common hosting and app stacks for hacking at greenfield side projects with less friction.
- DEIT Accounts/Contacts (2022) — A full productivity suite made for crypto funds. Unreleased, but intended to launch separate accounting & contacts/newsletter verticals. Will be revisiting/revising as DEIT pivots toward active fund management. Python/Flask + React.
- Bottlecap/Deluge (2021) — After "reinventing money" with Fractional, I got thinking about capital flows, and aimed to develop a Bittorrent Peerwire Protocol inspired p2p capital flow framework called Deluge. Current form (Bottlecap) is a DEX crammed inside an ERC20 token resulting from a ~2 day hackathon. Bad code, potentially neat idea.
- Fractional Foundation (2021) — The project that would become the "capital model" of Commonwealth. A thought experiment/prototype for a new means to underwrite money.
- Op144 (2021) — Unity3D action RPG game inspired by Valheim built on a hexgrid and with APM synced to the music's BPM (144).
- CloutLegend (2021) — NFT minting and upgrading “game”. Simple ERC721 contract that takes in random user data, and mints an NFT from it with with “clout” and “legendary” status. Included an NFT-to-NFT "social network" and ability to gamble clout for "legendary".
- Chainlink Hardhat Hackathon (2021) — Implemented Chainlink VRF, Price Aggregator and API integration contracts and corresponding Hardhat tasks/tests.
- RoomSim (2018/19) — Unity3D project aiming to create a simple p2p virtual shared space, including p2p voice chat. Ie: the "Metaverse" before the Metaverse, but more useful.
- Morpheus (2018) — Crypto price scraper & signals generator. Python used to ingest candle data and run each dataset through all available TA functions. Intent was to leverage ML to help discover new indicator combinations able to predict price movement shifts.
- CosmoBots (2017) — A resource gathering, crafting and trading oriented RPG built as NodeJS Slackbots. Included a "contract" construct and mechanisms for p2p debt obligations.
- Random Hacking + Music (~2015-17) — Playing with tooling/ideas, often enabled by AWS (fully adopted in 2015), while creatively spending more time with music as an outlet. Most notably, "Collapsed Young" as sgt.groucho from 2016 (new sgt.groucho music coming).
- Yahoo! Pipes enabled ETL powered social (~2014) — As sourced.fm managed 8 regionalized proxy Twitter accounts, automated management of socials become necessary. Via a Yahoo! Pipes enabled system, we applied layers of logic and regex to sanitize regionalize feeds and reduce the process of curation and publishing to a few button clicks.
- Githubberment (2013) — A proposed Github rooted means to achieve version controlled legislative consensus development and tag-based civic engagement feedback loops.
- Newsasaur (~2011/12) — A tag oriented blog engine directly connected to a discussion forum, like HackerNews or Reddit paired with Blogger, similar to Hashnode.
- brandonthorn.com (2010-2011) — This very domain, forgotten about until re-acquiring.
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