Lately I've been pretty busy, so haven't put aside much time to write. However, things have now settled down at work and with my hobbies, so it is worth giving an update.
Early last month Luke Smith posted a video lamenting the fact that recipe websites are incredibly bloated. Between the ads and the endless pages of life stories, it would be worth having a simple website that hosted recipes and nothing else. Fortunately, recipeasly.com provided just that. Unfortunately, their business model consisted of scraping recipes and images from other websites. Aside from the issues of rehosting copyrighted material, food bloggers stood to lose their ad-revenue, and so mobbed the creators. In response, recipeasly was taken down.
Rejecting all that free press (whether good or bad) seems a waste. So I immediately bought the recipeasly.org, .net, and .ca domains and set up a website of my own. So far, you can search recipes, browse by category, or via an image gallery. Each recipe also includes a printable index card. In the upcoming weeks I'll add a submission form, a rating system for each recipe, and possibly comments. Since I started, Luke Smith has also put up the site based.cooking. However, I don't care if my cooking is "based" and Luke is generally opposed to JS, so there is plenty of room for both our websites. As a way of marketing my site, and to ensure each recipe has a photo, I may hold a photo contest in the future with a cash or cryptocurrency prize.
Speaking of cryptocurrency, I've also spent a fair amount of time reading about the Basic Attention Token (BAT) since Brave released their new roadmap. This is in part because the price was steadily increasing. For example, the figures below demonstrate that the daily returns and volatility (averaged over each month) of BAT have steadily increased in recent months. Moreover, after a long period of underperforming relative to bitcoin, BAT has been outperforming since the start of 2021. As such, I managed to buy a fair amount at $0.68 before it shot up to $1.30.
However, I am more interested in the long-term use cases for BAT, and likely won't sell for the next few years. As of today, Brave now has 29 million active users and user growth has been incredibly steady. Since January 2019, users have increased by 124.92% per year, as indicated by log-linear regression. Moreover, this increase is extremely reliable, having an r-squared of 0.9877. In other words, 98.77% of the change in user numbers is accounted for as an exponential increase over time. If the current trend holds, Brave can expect to have 69 million users one year from now and 155 million in two years. However, with the upcoming release of self-serve ads, a decentralized exchange, and the ability to pay for goods and services in BAT, my estimate is likely conservative.
I've also been spending a good deal of time researching IOTA, as a fast, feeless, energy efficient network that scales limitlessly will be necessary for the future of cryptocurrency. Moreover, I'd like to set up a sensor network in my community, and IOTA seems like a promising platform for such projects. However, this is a topic for a future post.