Weaving Cultural Fabrics With Tokens by Mark Beylin (Devcon5)

it's now day four of a very very long Def Con and of course it's 9:05 a.m. so it's great to see that some people are still alive and well thank you so over the last three three and a half years that I've been in the ecosystem you know I've seen this really wonderful group of technologists solving some really really challenging problems in distributed computing really with the goal of helping people transact together and self organize to help them about this you know this new age of the internet however in the process I think we've kind of gotten lost a little bit we've focused so much on the technology that we're building that you know we stopped starting to think about who are we solving whose problems are we really solving to begin with most importantly I think we've forgotten that the software alone the hard protocols aren't enough what matters at least as much is human behavior the soft protocols and the culture that shapes the way that they act so today I'm going to share a thesis that I've been developing over the last eight months after looking what's worked what hasn't in Bitcoin and etherium and in the plurality of coins we now see around us in our ecosystem I'm going to share the three main steps that I think are required to accomplish successful tokenized community building by telling you the story of how Bitcoin became this massive massive global phenomenon and we now see around us that isn't really going anywhere if you can build a token and if you can build a culture around that token and you could change the world so to begin I'm going to bring us back to 2008 with the original launch of Satoshi's white paper in it Satoshi outlined this protocol for self sovereign scarce money that was free of manipulation from central bank's or from any nation-state now at the time of course this school seemed pretty outlandish you know people had been living with fiat currencies that were printed by large institutions for such a long time that it kind of forgotten that anybody could create their own money if they wanted to all that really mattered was that they could convince other people of its legitimacy now a number of values were really interestingly embedded within that protocol that Satoshi launched for example Satoshi's view on the importance of scarce assets which we see with the 21 and hard cap on Bitcoin issuance or the importance of decentralization which he implies directly in the first line of the white paper with regards to peer-to-peer money transmission free of central bank or financial institution intermediaries some of satoshis values were implicitly stated in his actions as well Satoshi embedded a news article about the Chancellor in the Genesis block again signaling some of the motivations behind what might have brought him to build the network or also his pseudonymity signaling the fact that sometimes important work does have to happen from the shadows it can always happen in the light what's interesting is that now in 2019 if you ask a Bitcoin or around you what the values of Bitcoin are they'd probably have a long list that they could provide you despite the fact that very few if any of them were ever really stated explicitly by Satoshi Satoshi did a good job of embedding his values within the protocol without ever making them too explicit this ultimately served to benefit Satoshi's goal since leaving them less defined meant the people could still project their own values onto the technology depending on how it suited their needs best this of course has helped Bitcoin grow to the massive global scale we now see it at right now since fewer people might be excluded when they might disagree with some of the values if he had explicitly stated them however as with most things this has turned out to be a bit of a double-edged sword the vaguer the values were the more people he could bring into the community but this ultimately would come at the cost of social cohesion since eventually different factions which did have different values would need to come to disagreements and would require hard forks to overcome them this of course helps explain the continuously fragmenting nature of the Bitcoin community that we still see to this day nonetheless in publishing this paper Satoshi completed step one of the process that I think is incredibly important creating a goal that he would be pursuing he stated a set of values some explicitly most implicitly which have come to define the Bitcoin space together these goals and values became the lifeblood of the Bitcoin community and they continue to inspire and bring meaning to people's lives even to the these are the same values that brought me into the crypto ecosystem despite the fact that I'd never really used or contributed to the Bitcoin project very much at all the next thing that Satoshi did was to define a token Bitcoin which would serve as the globally scarce asset that he wanted to exist he defined the Bitcoin protocol a set of rules that we could all run on our computers which could help achieve this stated goal the protocol included a dispersal mechanism mining which rewarded individuals and the collective community for achieving their goal of having a payment network and ledger through the magic of Nakamoto consensus this was step 2 of the process whereby Satoshi created a focal point which embodied the goals and values that he wanted to achieve now I'm gonna take a moment here and define what I refer to as a focal point which is a little bit different than the way it's usually used in the real world but similar to the world's to the word shelling point which we actually use fairly commonly in the game theory space a focal point something that acts as a fulcrum around which people can organize all great movements have focal points whether it's a person a place a symbol an object an event a set of words or all of the above a good focal point is something that draws people in it gives them an example that they can look to when they want to see how the community manifests itself in the real world my favorite example of a focal point is the disco ball at a party which usually marks the center of a dancefloor now if we bring it back to Satoshi the disco ball was Bitcoin and the underlying protocol was the dancefloor the substrate upon which people could actually use the solution to do the activity that the community originally set out to exist by creating these two things he turned this theoretical idea into something defined something practical something which existed in the real world something that people could hold onto having money that was free of central bank control was now possible in publishing his paper Satoshi seems to have hit the sweet spot around the hardness of his focal points which are just solid enough for people to grasp on to and be drawn towards but still vague enough that people could project their own use Intuit as they saw fit if one believed that the protocol could help them achieve some goal which of course is still different depending on who you ask then they could purchase the token and or run the protocol to the benefit of both themselves Satoshi and the broader community what was really happening whether intentionally or not was that Satoshi was creating a culture culture is defined by the ideas social behaviors and customs of a particular group it's incredibly important that the early members of a given community action actually act in accordance with the values that they expose it isn't just enough to talk the talk for example by removing himself at the earliest possible moment Satoshi made sure that his actions embodied the the core value of decentralization that's so critical to the existence of Bitcoin the cool thing was that Satoshi had done such a good job of actually passing on that culture and those values to new followers that even though he disappeared others actually began to take the reins and continue to embody and shape the culture first we saw people like Gavin Andresen and Andres Antonopoulos who continued to lead the development of the core protocol and the cultural movement around the token we had companies like bitpay and coinbase which popped up whose Express mission it was to bring Bitcoin to the masses you had forums like Bitcoin talk events like the North American Bitcoin conference meet ups like Satoshi Square which created spaces for people to congregate to share ideas to feel human connections with others who shared their goals and values events like those continue to be critical critical for focal points for the creation of any culture as I'm sure many of you guys sitting in the audience can understand after the last three days we've had at this wonderful event now when we think of onboarding new users for Bitcoin in the mainstream culture there was a pretty big one in the last decade thanks to the Silk Road you had this great path to onboard new users if anybody wanted to buy drugs in the 2010s the easiest way usually was using Bitcoin in this way even if you didn't care at all about decentralization self sovereign money or any of the rest of the goals and values you could still make use of what was being built as a third party observer and consumer a similar Avenue existed for those in the finance industry who saw an opportunity for this massive massive wealth creation by trading Bitcoin again this created a new entry point for people to be drawn in and discovered what the community was all about importantly some of those people who were brought in would stay around long after their original motivations had faded away these were the people who cared the most about the movement at its core of course this often happened in waves the bear the bull would bring in lots of new people and then the bear would take many of them out however the cool thing is that just like waves crashing on the beach which pull back the dust and the silt leaving behind only the heaviest of stones the most passionate people the ones with whom the values resonated the most have still stuck around that's why the most prominent people we meet in the crypto ecosystem are often the ones have been around the longest there are just the ones who've stood the test of time while their peers have either decided to take profits or realize they simply didn't care enough to continue devoting their lives to the movement we're all in this was step three of the process and in my opinion the most important of them all building a culture it's important because it accomplishes two main things number one is it brings in new people to the ecosystem and number two is that it brings in new money now bringing in people to an ecosystem is obvious you know a fairly self-evident if you can aspire people with what's possible then there'll be more people willing to complete tasks in exchange for the token in question such as running a Bitcoin miner in 2009 when the tokens really weren't worth that much similarly you'll have people who are willing to perpetuate the culture yelling by Bitcoin that anyone who's willing to listen by bringing people in you'll also have people who see value in what's built who are willing to actually use the solutions that we're creating people understand the merits of the technology that we've developed and will derive benefit from them in the real everyday lives finally by inspiring people and building a commitment to the cause you create a really necessary economic force haughtily without Hato culture Bitcoin would likely be worthless people would dump their tokens at the first sign of changing winds hollow culture at its core is this mutual agreement by the community to fight back against the Bears - all agree that the future state of the network is still going to be better than the current one and like many things in the world this became a self-fulfilling prophecy if everyone had believed that Bitcoin was likely to fail it probably would have failed but if you could get everybody or at least a critical mass of people to believe Bitcoin would succeed then it would at a certain point it stopped mattering what the naysayers thought because the movement was simply too wide to fail and of course this is now what we see with Bitcoin and central bank's admitting their defeat to its permanence next it's important I think to talk about the relevance of bringing in external money to the ecosystem and highlight the unpopular opinion that traders are actually incredibly important to what we're building while it's all very well and good to have a token and great to have people willing to earn it while completing tasks ultimately it doesn't really matter unless the tokens are worth something eventually people do still need to cash out and pay for their power bills in their rent unless our community can be entirely vertically integrated all the way down to the bread we put on our tables in the rent we put and the roofs we put over our heads people eventually still need to spend money outside of the ecosystem this is basic macroeconomics the money flowing out can't be bigger than the money flowing in sometimes the money flowing in will be for altruistic reasons like donations sometimes it'll be because people need to buy a token to get utility out of the network and sometimes it's simply that people have faith in that what they're doing might eventually be in their best interest however most of the time people just want to turn two dollars into three and in my opinion that's okay because their speculation is still necessary while we figure out how to correctly create and capture value so to recap these are the three key steps to building a tokenized community number one choose a set of goals and values and state them explicitly so that they can attract people who will with the mission making sure that the actions of the early members embody those values number two create a token in a protocol which embodied that mission and effectively reward the activities which help the community achieve its goals and number three and in my opinion most importantly create a culture which perpetuates itself infecting the minds of people around the world by capturing their hearts and inspiring them with change so this might seem like a done deal right you know the play books already written we can all pack up and go home right unfortunately as we can fairly self-evidently recognize there are parts of this which remained very much unsolved for instance look at bitcoins token dispersal mechanism how efficiently did it really reward people who contributed the most to its creation and propagation versus the vast number of Free Riders who happen to buy in early and hold for long enough to become millionaires has too much value been generated for too few too early so that the remaining 99.6% of people who won't even care and what about culture how well is it done to inspire people who are in technologists or who don't have a pre-existing distrust for the institution's around them how well does this culture perpetuate itself rather than maligning the original vision of Satoshi so in my opinion these are the three main problems which still exist for us to solve today and what's really exciting is that we can actually start solving them right now in the etherium ecosystem number one if I have a token and I have a set of goals how do I intelligently disperse those tokens either in protocol or outside of the protocol to help achieve my goals personally this is something I've really been interested in for quite a long time and when I actually found out a project called bounties Network to try and solve number two if I have a token and a platform that creates value for people how do I capture some of that value to sustainably maintain the inflow of money into the ecosystem and number three if I have a set of goals and values how do I intentionally create a culture that embodies them that draws in as many people as possible without messing the necessary social cohesion these problems are admittedly quite hard most of them have to do with humans with an understanding of how people behave and how people think these are sociological problems they're not technological problems and while this might worrisome thankfully we have events like this one which bring us together and help us build a culture and so we're increasingly seeing that developers in our ecosystem are waking up to the fact that they don't have all the answers that the hard protocols are only half the story that scalability doesn't matter if we don't have users and that the soft protocol protocol developers are still needed to aid our mission if we're gonna make crypto the global phenomenon that we want it to be so for anyone sitting out there in the crowd with a set of dreams or some goals you really want to accomplish I encourage you to think big and to be intentional about the way you build a culture around your movement it might be the most important thing that we can do thank you [Applause] one of the values that I think is really important is giving people credit an attribution when they help there's a long list of people here I'm going to go through who actually without whom this talk wouldn't have been possible Joe Luba and Jesse grew shack and eat at hope Simona and Corwin my teammates and cofounders of ake Singh Joe bender Eva Balin of course my mom and many many more who helped me actually come up with many of the ideas that are in this talk many of the actions that I'm talking about weren't mine and I think there's a lot of other much smarter people in our community who already know that this is this is the case but with that I think I have two and a half minutes so if anybody has any questions I think there's a mic in the middle of the room otherwise I'll be around to chat about this at length [Applause] you