* A photo taken while writing at the Tai Po Railway Museum.
p.s. I have always loved Taipo, even more than my hometown Shatin. Many articles for this newsletter were written in Taipo. As I write this, a massive Category 5 fire is raging in Wan Fuk Court, Taipo, a place I often pass by. The fire is fierce, tragically causing twelve deaths and numerous injuries, which is heartbreaking. I would like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the firefighters and all parties providing support. I hope the fire can be extinguished soon to prevent further casualties.
I am not very fond of festivals in general, but I really like Thanksgiving, or at least, I like the concept of thanksgiving. To put it plainly, festivals and birthdays are just excuses, but as long as we remember that “every day is a good day”, we might as well make good use of these excuses.
I have always been grateful to the participants in the LikeCoin ecosystem. With Thanksgiving as an excuse, it’s the perfect time to give back to everyone by airdropping Ether and LikeCoin to the cultural guardians who have published books, supported works, or at least registered an account on 3ook.com—yes, whether it’s writing, reading, or curating, it is all about preserving our history and culture in life.
Below are the process and some details of this airdrop. From the clues, you can more or less appreciate how far blockchain and cryptocurrencies, especially Ethereum and LikeCoin, have come on the journey of genuinely entering civil society beyond speculation, and how far they still have to go.
- First, let’s reveal the results. You can log in to 3ook.com and click on the account page to see if you have received “unidentified” LikeCoin.
👉 3ook.com - The first step of the airdrop was to ask a colleague to work late exporting the Ethereum wallet addresses, in CSV format, of users who upgraded to the LikeCoin v3 ecosystem through four main channels:
- Users who logged in to 3ook.com with wallets like MetaMask, Rabby, etc.: 833
- Users who logged in to 3ook.com with email-embedded wallets: 1,632
- Users who upgraded their books from Liker Land to 3ook.com: 203
- Publishers and authors who published works on 3ook.com: 69
From the above, the ratio of users logging in with traditional wallets to embedded wallets is approximately 1:2. The former are users who were already using a wallet because of LikeCoin v2 or other web3 applications like DeFi before encountering 3ook.com. The latter are either novices or users who, despite having a wallet, prefer a web2 experience and choose to log in with email.
- There was a small amount of overlap among the users who upgraded through the four channels. I imported the four CSV files into Google Spreadsheet and deduplicated the data, resulting in 2,528 unique wallet addresses. In the six years of LikeCoin v2’s journey, Liker Land, the predecessor of 3ook.com, accumulated over 30,000 users (defined as having an ID, email address, and LikeCoin in the wallet $> 0$). In other words, less than 10% of users have upgraded from v2 to v3.
I’d like to FOMO a bit—I Fear Of You Missing Out—the migration period has only 66 days left. Please seize the opportunity to upgrade your LikeCoin and NFT to v3, lest you be left behind and incur losses.
👉 Upgrade to LikeCoin v3
- I set the airdrop amount of LikeCoin at 208 LIKE, so that every user can try out the basic functionalities. I suggest first depositing 100 LIKE into the storage vault to earn yield while acquiring 100 voting power; then, stake 100 LIKE on a book you recommend. Staking is a form of curation; your 100 LIKE can help the work get discovered, and you will receive a share of the profits when the work is sold. After trying out the two major new features, Deposit and Curation, 8 LIKE remains, which is the exact amount of the first LikeCoin “red pocket” sent out in 2018, introducing many people to cryptocurrencies for the first time.
👉 Tutorial on LikeCoin deposit
👉 Tutorial on LikeCoin staking
The 3ook.com documentation provides tutorials for deposit and curation. Additionally, we will demonstrate both features again at next month’s community call (in Mandarin), specifically on Monday, December 1st, at 18:30 THT/HKT. You can join at meet.google.com/ndv-fbfx-cat or watch the YouTube livestream.
👉 Community call - Besides LikeCoin, I specially sent 0.00002 ETH to each user. Please don’t blame me for the low amount; this is not for getting rich (though it might be your starting point for striking it rich), but to facilitate operations and transactions by paying for gas fees. I calculated that this is generally enough for several dozen transactions.
The total airdrop amount for all users is 0.05056 ETH. Interestingly, I remember when I first taught Blockchain Sociology at the Civil Academy in 2019, the “loose change” I gave each student to try out was exactly 0.05 ETH. Who would have thought that six years later, the same amount could be used for over two thousand people, and converted to fiat currency, it would be enough to cover the tuition fee for the course. - There are many tools for airdropping. I chose the CSV Airdrop attached to Safe Wallet, which is why the airdrop appears to come from the Safe Wallet address instead of the usual ckxpress.eth. This is a feature, not a bug; I did not want to transfer money to thousands of people from my frequently used wallet.
Although guiding Muggles onto the chain is a good deed, my wallet has been flagged as high-risk more than once because I often do these silly things. When the algorithm thinks you look like a scammer, you are powerless to defend yourself. This world often punishes good people. “A clear conscience fears no accusation” is nonsense; “A gentleman doesn’t stand under a collapsing wall” is the way to go further. - Any tool can airdrop from a new wallet address. I chose Safe Wallet because it is reliable, free, and I am more familiar with it. Although having an AI write a small tool might be faster and simpler, when it involves real money transactions, I’d rather take a little more trouble than use a tool without a security audit or that is untested.
Using Safe Wallet to airdrop ETH to 2,528 people on the Base chain, due to the complexity limit per transaction, I had to split it into eight transactions, with a total gas fee of 0.00022321 ETH. When airdropping LIKE, I was a bit more experienced and completed it in seven transactions, with a total gas fee of 0.0001185 ETH. In other words, the total gas fee for the entire airdrop was 0.00034171 ETH, which is just shy of one dollar. It is no exaggeration to say that Ethereum is not only 99% cheaper than when LikeCoin started in 2018, but also a hundred times more convenient. - During the airdrop process, Safe Wallet provided the following reminder, alerting me that all 400 recipients were wallets I had never transacted with before, and over 90% had only made very few transactions.
However, the fact that the vast majority of recipients are fresh wallets proves, conversely, that sending LikeCoin and Ether can facilitate this group of users to take their “baby steps” and unknowingly transition from Muggles to web3 citizens. - I can afford the 0.05 ETH required for the airdrop, but the total of 525,824 LIKE posed a challenge for me. I’m not feigning poverty, but my LikeCoin was either already staked or still in v2 awaiting unstaking, making it unavailable immediately.
Frustrated, I remembered that before the v3 upgrade, I had deposited nearly 20,000 USD worth of LIKE/USDC into the Uniswap liquidity pool. So, I withdrew one-ninth of it to cover the cost, and while I was at it, I also claimed the earned transaction fees of 133.95 USD from this period. A rough calculation shows the annualized return is about 11% plus, which is much higher than I expected.
- I can afford this airdrop amount and don’t mind covering it, but it would be more meaningful if LikeCoin DAO funded it. Also considering the goal of having users newly arrived at LikeCoin v3 participate in governance, I specifically raised LIP-101 proposal, asking the community to ratify this airdrop and approve the corresponding allocation. Since the airdrop was “act first, report later,” I will only claim reimbursement for this expense if LIP-101 is passed. Otherwise, I will cover the airdrop amount myself.
👉 LIP-101 Proposal
It is important to note that only users who have already staked and acquired voting ballots before the proposal submission can vote on LIP-101. Otherwise, they can only participate in new proposals submitted after their staking. This is one of the core designs of LikeCoin v3 governance, a topic I will elaborate on later.
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