Up and coming West African Musicians and err.. Google – Which is the odd one out?

A dozen up and coming West African musicians and Google, which is the odd one out?

Well, you would have probably all guessed Google, it’s a no brainer.

The question is not that you picked Google, the question is why?

FINDING PARTNERS

Any time I am in front of a computer, even when doing something completely unrelated, I usually have at least one ‘node’ into the Handshake Blockchain open, so that I can take passive glances at what is going on in the world of WEB 3 DOMAINS.

For the unfamiliar, WEB 3 DOMAINS are a technology only a few years old. Instead of using the organisation ICANN as the root for internet domains, they use a blockchain.

This makes them decentralized, which makes it much harder for online activities to be snooped upon or personal data recorded. It also makes it impossible for a sovereign actor to take you down.

So, I had previously been in a bar restaurant discussing taking on a junior partner in exchange for equity in 9ja Cosmos. He is a final year overseas scholarship student in my home.  During the discussion he laboured on how he grew up with one of the artists in this articles feature image.

Something about his claims didn’t feel right. He made some comments which provided data which could be investigated. For example, both of them may have Yoruba names, but if one is found to have gone to primary school in Sagamu, and the other in Ore, how could they have been walking home together as primary school mates as claimed?

It doesn’t matter to me that the prospect has connections on a path to fame. What matters is that partnership involves trust, and if he can’t be trusted to be truthful about little things like this, what about big things?  A bit of ‘Due Diligence’ will reveal this.

DUE DILLIGENCE IN BLOCKCHAIN AND CRYPTOCURRENCY.

I like ‘absolute’ explanations for things. If water flows downhill if poured on the ground, theory of gravity explains to me why that happens. If someone pours water on the ground and it flows down hill, and they do it 100 times, this doesn’t offer me confidence that the 101th time they do it, water will flow downhill. It is the empirical proofs behind ‘theory of gravity’ which instils confidence in me that it will be so.

In the same way, I can’t listen to people that pull out silly graphs to show me what a cryptocurrency has done before, as some sort of predictive tool a bull market in that currency will happen again.

That isn’t to say that I’m a cryptobasher and call cryptocurrency ‘monopoly money’. Most of the nonsense about government guarantees over FIAT are fairy tales. The government bond embodied in its sovereign currency is only as good as its taxpayers continued ability to pay.

With many of even the most respected currencies in the world now running at a government borrowing rate in excess of their GDP, its now reasonable to question the collective ability of their taxpaying citizenry to pay.

Smoke and mirrors tricks with everything from quantitative easing, to fractional reserve banking, from sovereign government, through central bank, and on to commercial banks, and other market based actors, all give solid reasons why confidence should shift to other ‘value instruments’ as a trading tool.

Nevertheless, if FIAT is as flawed as many cryptobulls claim, then they need to justify rising cryptocurrency value by some other indicator except a comparison of those very same FIAT instruments.

If they want to convince me that Bitcoin is worth 25% more than it was worth six months ago, they need to show me that in an absolute sense, without introducing dollars or euros, or pounds, or yen into their justification. I don’t want to know what, I want to know why.

HANDSHAKE WEB 3 DOMAINS AND HOW THAT IMPACTS THE COIN.

I saw something today on Blockchain Council that said: ‘Utility NFTs are special. Special in a way that the scope of their potential is not limited to the title of a typical ‘digital collectible.’ When we talk about utility NFTs, we emphasize the word ‘utility’ because that is where the heart of this asset class lies. Precisely, utility NFTs refer to virtual assets that offer privileges, benefits, or rewards to their owners which are otherwise not available for use. They bestow upon a ‘right’ to extract a service or an advantage to the asset holder.’

I try to avoid using the acronym NFT because it’s quite often misused and a lot of people don’t have a full understanding of it, because they have listened to ‘misuse’ definitions. But I think Blockchain Council have something here with the ‘Utility’ concept.

I consider the term ‘utility’ to mean ‘things created and minted to  a blockchain that are capable of offering more than just <being> ‘ They have to be more than just ‘the coin’.

With the advent of AI generated digital art, we didn’t get anything really better than the coins. It became the same thing dressed up differently. People were not buying them through appreciation of aesthetics, they were buying them in the hope they would appreciate relatively, again, against the dollar or some other FIAT, no different to the motivation to buy cryptocurrency.

Web 3 Domains started off with limited application due to lack of interoperability with existing systems though for the most part, this is down to legacy architecture, and other blockchain projects not seeing interoperability as important.

This is gradually changing. Projects are coming out of GitHub that are improving the usability of Handshake Domains. Development work is being done with Skiff to create email systems that while decentralized, they are capable of engaging with accounts in the centralized ICANN world should owners choose.

This is what I expect to happen on blockchains, that the products and services operating on them are actually evolving. If people want to explain to me why one particular coin or the other is worth more than it was six months ago, this is what I need to hear from them, not dollar exchange rate analysis.

RISING MUSIC STARS AND WEB 3 DOMAINS.

Now back to how I began. As I was researching the artist my ‘partner prospect’ claimed to know, I decided well, since my node is open, I might as well check out if their name was taken.

It was.

I then checked some articles on about a dozen rising West African music stars. Nine of them (those pictured in this articles’ feature image, were registered.

These are upcoming artists. While certainly of notoriety, they will not have huge corporate machines built around them like decades old global mainstream sellers such as U2, or the estates of the late Michael Jackson or David Bowie.

They have not had the benefit of establishment of Angélique Kidjo,  Awilo Longomba.  Youssou N’Dour.  or late and greats – Fela Kuti and Prince Oliver De Coque.

But their names are registered in this latest iteration of the Internet.

Speaking with Juveniall two days ago, he said, well, while he’s made his own arrangements, it’s not proven any of his peers actually registered their names. Any fan could have done it.

While this is true, from the point of the technology of 9ja Cosmos Ecosystem reaching mainstream, it doesn’t really matter.

The Handshake Community in which 9ja Cosmos participates at the turn of the year now stands at over nine million top level domains issued. It is reaching into every business and community sector in every part of the world.

So what is the contrast with Google?

Well, unlike these artists, Google hasn’t exploited the advantages integrating our technology has to offer.

Meanwhile, integrating Web 3 technology into browsers and search engines alongside legacy ICANN conformance isn’t difficult.

Many browsers these days are actually built on top of Google Chrome Engine, which is open source. These include Microsoft Edge,  Opera, Vivaldi, Comodo Dragon, AVG Secure Browser, and Brave.

Brave already integrates all Web 3 domains that ‘live’ on the Ethereum ecosystem. So if a much smaller company like Brave can do it, then for sure, Google can.

The thing is, on the Ethereum ecosystem, there is ‘.eth’ itself, Unstoppable Domains has about 7 or 8 TLDs and with a handful of other TLD operators, its being generous to round it up to fifteen.

The Handshake ecosystem has passed 9 (nine) million Top Level Domains – No comparison! Even the ICANN system, which has been operating since around 1994, only has about 1500.

Google could have been integrating on this at least, since some point in 2021, and once the traffic is captured, work on a monetizing strategy. Perhaps then, they would not have needed to fire twelve thousand workers!

So with twelve thousand industry experts with nothing new to do, and 9 million top level domains available for integration, each one of those 9 million capable of becoming a ‘dot com’ all on its own; and…. an open source Chrome Engine just out there, available for anybody to use…

if I was Google, I would be afraid, VERY afraid!

Meanwhile,

 9ja Cosmos is here…

Get your .9jacom and .9javerse Web 3 domains  for $2 at:

https://www.encirca.com/handshake-9jacom/

https://www.encirca.com/handshake-9javerse/

Refs: (all accessed 23-25 /01/2023

blockchain-council.org/nft/utility-nfts

nordvpn.com/blog/chrome-based-browsers

coinmarketcap.com/currencies/apecoin-ape/