Swarm Summer School ‘21, Day 2: Eknir - How to develop your tokenomics

uh we're going to our workshop by erinka hendrickson and to discuss how to develop your tokenomics so your intentive model within your application um vince as well you can introduce himself over even more of course he was worked on the incentives model of swarm and is currently the um one of the researchers at the swarm project i think are you alive i believe i am would you tell me you're coming through loud and clear yeah all right yeah then i'm live if you have any questions um during the talk please raise your hand and you'll be given the word to ask your question or to discuss with rinka the ideas about your project or the questions you might have about the presentation good take it away yeah so well thanks a lot for the introduction robert and thank you also for the opportunity to um to present here um first things off um i don't think i'm going to talk a lot about token economics specifically and that's because i made my presentation with this particular title thinking i would venture into token economics but actually while creating it um i realized that i did it so my presentation has opened quite a lot of space for for interaction so perhaps you know together with everybody who is listening we will eventually end up into token economics and that's good for me um but just so you know um i would like to talk about creating a viable project on top of swarm and basically what it means to have a viable project um all right so yeah a bit about me um robert already introduced me partly um so i've been working with the swarm project now for almost two years i think um i've been active as a product owner of uh of the bee projects and um yeah this is uh this is the first announcement i think but i will be starting up a research trek um with swarm so i'm really excited to uh to go and start that and yeah really think about uh all kind of things that are possible with foreman that i needed to do to do research on um but apart from that perhaps relevant for for this talk i do have a background in economics i started a bachelor in economics and business economics here in rotterdam and yeah so from that angle i also have some interest in in business and also token economics as we can do on the blockchain um so that's about me um here is what i want to talk about today um so when i was thinking about okay so what is a viable project on top of swarm i naturally was venturing into like e-business right because basically what we're doing here is continuation of that so i'll present you with a bit of history of the e-business also to give you a perspective on um yeah why and how we ended up where we are right now um there are highlights where scorm differs from a normal web they also make the bridge to what this means basically for your business or your project on top of swarm and then i'll dive into the main questions of uh yeah creating a viable project on top of swarm and that's it so let's get started with a brief outline on the history of e-business and yeah so in the 1980s a little bit early even but around that time uh basically the internet actually really started to emerge this is the first decade where personal computers um for being sold and by the way i might not be completely historically accurate right there might be people listening here say oh no maybe personal computer actually was earlier than that time or later but it's um i hope it's at least roughly uh accurate and then it supports the narrative which i want to bring here um [Music] which is that you know first we had the personal computer and the internet and they were being developed mostly by universities also by the military but it was really for exchange of information you saw projects where people were were getting in touch with each other they were exchanging information or projects to start and consecutive pds on on the internet and it was really this space where there were a lot of people and when i read about that time i think it's many ways it's a reminiscent to what we see right now in the cryptocurrency industry maybe that there is a lot of people with a very big vision on the internet and how it would would change our worlds basically um so we head into the 1990s um where basically uh the first entrepreneurs started to um to tinker with okay so if we have these personal computers and people own them what would it mean for for business so can i maybe sell my my products via the internet to people and it turned out they they could so in the 1990s they were the very first internet marketplaces and there were also a lot of investment capital coming in two into into the internet and again here you can see a parallel to what is happening right now in the blockchain industry but that's not the point of my talk anyways it's funny to see um so there was a lot of interest in people uh really believing in this power of the internet and really believing it would change the world and also believing that if they would invest money in the internet uh that this money would uh would return and it did for a while until in the 2000s early the dot-com bubble burst and uh why did it burst well that was because so much investment had gone into this internet business whereas actually most of the internet companies didn't have the revenue streams to support all of those investments and yeah this was realized of course sooner than later so all these internet companies which started in the 1990s many of them actually got bankrupt and the few of them survived and these are still the very big internet platforms which we know nowadays um but of course the investors after the dot-com bubble they got a bit frightened and they were like okay so now we really need to figure out a business model uh because you know it's just needed because we made a lot of loss on our other investments and we really don't want those you know companies which are still standing we really don't want them to uh to feel so it was a very big pressure from from investors to come up with um you know that the companies would have a viable business model and i i believe that also in that time really the game of online advertisements uh good pick it got so big because um companies and epic internet platforms they actually realized that by knowing a lot about their clients they could have very targeted advertisements which then would make their clients to spend more on their platform and uh so basically the narrative of uh the kind of the dominant business model on the internet being advertisements uh was born and you know up until now i think this whole narrative um it got really big so advertisement is really what drives the growth of the internet the growth of the many of the big companies on the internet right now even the data which basically is underlying the possibility to do this very targeted advertisements is being quoted as as the new gold but what i would like to bring home here to you is that advertisement as an e-business model is really not the only option so this was an option which um you know the group of entrepreneurs and the groupon investment investors basically um focused upon after the birth of the dot-com burglar and it's being seen i think right now really as you know kind of the only way of doing business on the internet and making money on the internet maybe not the only way but it's really the most dominant way and it's usually what's new entrepreneurs when they think about starting a business on the internet what they think about either you know they just want to do advertisements directly themselves or they just want to grow so big so that they can be adopted by one of these other big internet molochs um and you know they have um have their profit that way by basically selling the company and selling the data that the company is gathering but you know it's not the only option i just want you to remember that however we of course have to be creative um because if we cannot follow what most of the people are doing if we want to do something else it really requires a strength of character and it also requires creativity to come up with what's them and me also i don't have the rights all the answers here so that's why we're here together on the summer school to learn from each other and the reason why swarm is interesting in this context is basically that swarm forces us to rethink and the reason why that is the case has to do with basically how swarm is being built up from the ground up in a fundamentally different way than how the internet as we know nowadays has been built and i think this naturally goes into my second topic of my talk which is where swarm differs from the normal web and i hope that you have seen it but in the announcement for my talk i asked everybody to watch the video um which was recorded at efcc about months ago in paris and here i explain what swarm is and i think if you consider to start a business or if you have a great idea and you want to use swarm really the first thing that you should think about is okay so what is this thing that i'm having here so it's important to [Music] dive into that yourself even if you're not so technical because swarm is many things and uh swarm is different than the standard architecture that you're having nowadays so i have my own ideas about what i believe uh swarm is best at or what i believe would be great to use form for but above all i think that swarm it is a possibility to do things differently we need to do things differently but it's also a possibility and because of that even from within the swarm team we might not have the ultimate knowledge of where swarm is going to be placed best and to get that ultimate knowledge i do believe it's important that you know what swarm is what kind of stack you're dealing with and if you have ideas about how you would use this tech please reach out to us and please let's have this this conversation about it um okay so recommended talk if you didn't watch it anyways i will briefly touch upon what is important for this conversation and um that is like to highlight where swarm differs from the normal web so this is a very very very basic representation of how internet pages are being served to you nowadays and um it's what we call the client server uh architecture so the client is uh you know here it's a laptop or it is a mobile phone or there's anything that's the consumer or that a person controls and when i'm requesting let's say a wikipedia page um basically what my device is doing is sending a message to a server and this server is being uh owned by the wikimedia foundation in this example and uh it understands what i'm requesting and it sends back the response via this uh this internet protocol and it sends it to the client so that my browser can display um you know the page about robotics to me maybe i'm interested in that so this is basically how web pages are being served nowadays and we had the example of wikipedia but i think it's important to realize that whenever we have any platform built on on top of this architecture that the server is always controlled by one entity and this is usually a for-profit corporation well not in the case of wikipedia but i think this is you know it's just one old anomaly here because most of the time these are for-profit companies that are owning this server and that wants to do something with that power that they have right so this surface they have a lot of information they not only store the data that has been served in the response but they also store a lot of data about the clients who is accessing what and yeah this is basically the power that these servers have and with this model that is underlying the web my argument is that basically anybody who wants to start something on top of the web doesn't have another possibility but to have this this you know this power to you they need to control the server so the power will ultimately be theirs whether they want it or not and whether the client wants to not just inherit to uh the architecture of the web nowadays okay um swarm is fundamentally different as i mentioned but you know also not too different right so it's just one picture different and that's because swarm can also be depicted as a virtual server so here we are the real server and here we have a virtual server and what does it mean virtual well it basically means that it's um that it emulates the functionality of a real server but that it is not a real server right so it's a network of computers who collaborate together and who jointly can uh answer a request from the client with a response right that's that's what swarm does it's one way of visualizing sperm and that's the way i would like to look at swarm for the sake of this presentation because this difference actually has a lot of consequences first of all the content is not only not anymore owned by one server so what i mean with that is that previously in the client server architecture the server always had to store the content themselves in order to give a request but with swarm with this virtual server the content is not anymore owned by one server what's more i would argue that the definition of ownership of content as we know nowadays is not even applicable to swan right it's form as this funny way of ownership where whenever you upload something to the swarm network it's not really yours anymore and it's also not really owned by the net you know it's maybe owned by the network but the network is not owned by anybody the network is this collaboration of computers who all independently collaborate and it's decentralized so it's not really one entity i can point to as this entity is owning the network so because of that whenever you upload some content to the network um you know it's not anymore owned by the server but it's also not really owned by the upload so that's interesting and [Music] from that kind of there are consequences actually from that because [Music] in the client server architecture whenever let's say facebook wants to do an update and the users don't agree with that particular update [Music] the users don't have a choice but to accept that platform yes or no or if facebook is showing advertisements to the users and the users don't want it don't want us at first because they don't like them well they either have to take it or leave it literally in the case of facebook but on swarm whenever content is uploaded to the network this content is you know in the public and swarm in that sense is immutable because the content and sir won't change anymore but of course we can still do updates in swarm which is by kind of referencing the old version and then creating a new one but it's not that one entity exclusively can do such updates right it's really that anybody who wants to make a copy of one instance and basically create a new one so fork the running instance of this application can do so and that's also because the content is not anymore owned by one server also the development of that content development of the platform uh can also not yeah it's not only up to one entity to be cited and i think that's really powerful and it's a super powerful concept that is yeah inherently um inside swarm which you understand if you truly understand how swarm is different than normal another very interesting thing is that the application provider does not anymore needs to maintain a server right so in the client server architecture whenever i wanted to host a website i need to run my own server to host that website or nowadays in the web too i would ask amazon to host my server but then i will have advertisement and i will subject all my users to the analytics of amazon which i might not want to do but if i host my application of the swarm i don't anymore need to maintain a server and what is most important is that whenever my application becomes popular if i were to host my own server and i certainly have millions of users of my server my server might crash right unless he had amazon but if i host my application on top of swarm and my application suddenly becomes very popular on top of this one actually i'm in a very fortunate position because that means that the users of my application will pay for its persistence and i don't anymore uh needs to pay for the process myself because the application will stay afloat in the network because the chunks that make up this application are very popular right so also from this point um i believe it has far-reaching consequences um but more on that later um and then the third point which kind of uh you know is the conclusion from the first two points which is that the developers have much much more freedom whenever they develop an application to perform i think it's much easier to bootstrap something on swarm it's also much easier to go through the growth phases form because this infrastructure is provided by you by swarm and also because and this may seem a bit counterintuitive because if you don't anymore really own the platform yourself and it also means that the platform can start taking a run on its own which in the kind of normal way of thinking may not be may not sound very good but if your goal is not to create a platform and has have as much power over it yourself as you want which i hope is not durable but if you want to have a platform which has maximum impact that is actually a very good thing if people can fork the running instance of your application and just go and build really something that's that has the most impact and not necessarily something that is controlled by you yeah um okay so um oh very nice and well um give me a question okay so but what does this mean for my project uh how do i make a viable project on top of swarm and here when i was preparing um this talk for myself i actually found that i fell into a trap and i'm curious if uh you guys will fall into the same trap no worries if you don't but i would like to know maybe three people can tell me what they believe is a viable project and joshua i know that you are you can give the mic to people i don't have zoom in front of me but if you can do that so please raise your hand if you dare to answer the question yeah maybe your first robert in your opinion what does it mean to have a viable project fireball in the sense of well i would say if it's i was self-sustainable meaning that um [Music] in the future there would still be it would still be maintained um so that it's it's let's say uh if i want to be able to if i want to invest my time using the application i want to make sure that i can continue to use it as long as i need the use the premise of the application so it's also why companies sometimes choose for a risk reverse solution with support and uh that could be a uh one of the arguments to call something viable i would say okay okay so self-sustainability and and and and the assurance that whenever you invest time in it now it will still be around uh in some time especially if the application will be part of a stack which of which other parts will depend and and how the sustainability is done by the altruism of developers or my payment model wouldn't matter as much to me but i want to make sure that for the future i'm still able to use it okay okay interesting so maybe somebody else can also answer i see petra so i think maybe to minimize down to four four requirements for viability of a project i think that it's got to have the ability to set some expectations in the user about the use case and it has to fulfill those expectations if it doesn't do that consistently across the process then obviously it's not going to be adopted i think it needs to be discoverable to users because if they can't find it they're not going to use it and it needs to be accessible to those users when they try and discover it because if they try and utilize the use case and for some reason there's a failure in the process itself then they won't return afterwards to try and use it again but but with those four i think you get everything right so what you're saying you're really more thinking about your users and you believe that the project is viable when you know basically the expectations of your users are fulfilled when they get your users can find your project and you know when they can use it right i believe that's viable project yeah yeah well i agree that's that's a very useful narrative okay maybe one more person the mean time i'd like to point out by the way that the economic stock you mentioned earlier on on ethercc can be found by the link which casper shared in the chat if someone else wants to view it later we'll also share it in the discord channel it's not a talk on token economic by the way there's a talk on you know what is one fair enough you touched on it um so if anyone else would dare in the meantime i have another question by the way uh also from one of the participants if you'll take the question is is swarm adult friendly in other words could we build an adult app on sport well who would stop you know what i'm sorry okay yeah i mean like you can do there's there's not really in swarm you can upload anything you want and yeah so i think you can do this okay um so i will go to um to my presentation again to continue the narrative um [Music] and maybe i owe your explanation because i said that i found myself in a trap here and i found myself in a trap because um i was thinking about the business model and uh that is also why explicitly i um i first had the title of my of my talk how do i create fireball business models form and um [Music] that's when i started to think about the business model and i just noted for myself that whenever i started to think into business model basically my mind went into this box and i think this is just for yourself important to realize it's the power of language and the power of concepts that whenever we talk about the business model at least when i do talk about business model i immediately think about revenue about users about vc funding about all this kind of stuff which i feel made not necessarily what we need for fireball projects so that is the trap i found into myself and i just want to tell you you know like with swarm being something completely new um if we really want to find the killer use cases on top of swarm i believe we need to think outside of the box and that's why the use of concepts such as business model at least for me um it provides lib it is it is limiting me um so maybe interesting for yourself to just pay attention to um so i wanted to share that because yeah this is what i wrote down you know a viable project okay so i create a company which will have a certain expected revenue so that i can maintain myself my company right so that's a perfectly valid business model um i'm not you know saying it's bad um but thinking this way i feel it's it's thinking inside the box and you probably will have quite a hard time um trying to apply uh you know like a common way of doing business on the planet server architecture on top of swarming that's because in swarm you know you as the entrepreneur won't be the owner of the platform once here so you'll give up a lot of power that's that you have if you are normally owning a server and because of this it it may be difficult i'm not saying it's impossible but it may be difficult to come up with ideas that satisfy one um um it's actually what has been done very commonly it's so i create a company and i apply for vc funding so that's venture capital funding where angel funding so people who are wanting to invest money in your company and it doesn't matter whether you have a revenue stream uh or an expected revenue stream in the future yes all that matters is your narrative doing to the investors and if your narrative is good enough and if you can convince your investors that in the future you will be profitable you will get vc funding and then from that point onwards the people who invest in you will try to get more people to invest in that as well so they can exit and there will be another round and roll around for another round and that's basically how it can happen that's really big companies like for example twitter i'm not even sure if twitter is profitable nowadays but it wasn't profitable uh i think two years ago um so this is based on this idea that um you know if we invest in the platform this platform becomes big and many people believe that eventually it will become profitable and that's how basically a platform can stay afloat and can grow very big without even revenue inside right so that's a second model and also the second model so basically both bottles are sustained with the advertisement way of doing things so in the first thing when you sell advertisements you can have real revenues and the second one you don't you need to have free revenues you only need to convince your vcs that you have a very big user base and you will be able to do analytics on your user base or sell it to other companies and with that narrative uh many companies actually get fizzy funding and they might even eventually be sold to google right as an exit so these are kind of the two two ways and use those ways first of all when i started to think about the firewall business models and i was also thinking about the first one and the first one i think is also pretty common and i just have this idea about the social entrepreneurs so it's it's really something i think even mark zuckerberg right he set up a platform doing a lot of good for humanity right he just wanted to have facebook where his classmates from the university could sign in to and he could share birthdays and all that you know great things and uh but you know he needed to pay for his operation cause and i don't know if this is really how it happened with mark zuckerberg right but it can be that somebody who has this very human idea about doing something good for the world is setting up an internet business but eventually because this person is owning a server and the server you need to have a very big infrastructure because your platform is extremely successful um you need to think about a way to cover the operation cost and all the investors will hear and see about your big platform and they will get on board and with investors on board it may be that gradually the original intent of the platform is lost and it's because most of the investors and definitely not all of them but many investors when you invest in your company the thing that they are actually interested in the end is return on their money and return on the money you know it just means that we need to think about the standards business model and again comes in this power of language so if you have a business model you need to do things in a certain way and then let's do things that was successful in the past and maybe we should sell at furthest ones to cover up for or something like that right so i believe this this also happens uh quite a lot so you know these are kind of original ideas about the fiber project um but i do believe that swarm basically breaks this conundrum and that's because it relieves startups from maintaining the infrastructure and um [Music] yeah so they you know they they don't have to maintain the infrastructure and um i think this is double yeah yeah okay so you know starts doctors basically don't have to maintain the infrastructure anymore um so that means that as a startup it's much easier to just focus on the impact that you want to have and you don't need to worry about a lot of survey costs which are going to come when you partially become successful because that's where swarm takes care of and yeah i just want to stress that viability does not necessarily mean having a business model or having like a traditional business model but of course your project needs to be viable um but i'm going to advocate actually against um a business model because i think that having a business model implies kind of thinking in the old way at least for me uh and i feel that this thinking in the old way it brought us where we are and i think as humanity nowadays we do have a lot of problems um but luckily we also have an abundance of resources and we have really this global communication literally at our fingertips right at our keyboard and i think that these world's biggest problems can be solved and we are not that far away basically um and you know having a business model also means having a beneficiary right if you have a business model you have revenue streams or you have an owner and this owner is will be the beneficiary of all of that and i feel that doing it in this way uh it also styles the possibility for collaboration because think about you know your friend starts a business and he's earning maybe 3 000 euros a month with that particular business and now we ask to you okay so maybe uh could you please help me and do you want to help him for free if you know that he's the beneficiary of this company i probably wouldn't i probably would at least ask a share of that right so it's really a barrier for collaboration and now think about this friend who is really excited about what he's doing about the impact he's going to have for his worlds but he does not necessarily have a revenue stream and new zealand's not positioned in this way where he will be the ultimate beneficiary whenever whenever this platform is becoming successful and then this person asks hey erinka you have skills and i think that you can help me with that do you want to help me and i will probably say okay sure i mean i have an hour every evening that i want to spend on projects which i love and i think i would be very happy to to help you on your course um so that's just something to think about um and it's also something you know for yourself because i feel that nowadays the world and we are always trying to push startups into this direction of having a business model right in every boot camp and everything you will have to think about this and i just want to let you know that maybe we shouldn't right and also to strengthen you in your belief that maybe you don't want to think about this right now because you just want to have impact and in order to have impact i don't think you necessarily need a business model so um but you of course need to be viable and that's why i'm going to define viability in my way and i think that viability it just means that you as a person need to have the energies to start to continue and have impacts right if this energy is there and if you can somehow maintain this energy um maybe people will take along and the energy will become bigger and yeah i think that that for me it means viability um and yeah that's also the end of my talk so i would like to end with asking you what makes your project viable and that's it thank you edinka i think that's a good question to ask this is also a moment actually to pitch that so um anyone would like to share how their efforts uh have been or what how how your project uh be different in the sense that would your project or does your project have a business model or does it a relinquished one in the sense that rinky just described please let us know and feel free to raise your hand because we noticed with the the rise of the shuttles projects and the incentives around it that there is a lot of options in the room to define alternative forms of uh compensation or even non-compensation by the way um how did you rink and get to the conclusion that i wouldn't let's say never would need to be a business model and said how did it require what were the prerequisites for you to get there okay um well you don't get me wrong i'm i'm not necessarily against having a business model but yeah as i explained uh whenever i was making my presentation and the presentation was based on the discussion with you you know we're thinking about startups let's try and help them making business model and that's basically how i started to make my presentation and i just noticed for myself how limiting it is to think about the business model and um i have seen firsthand you know even swarm right so swarm doesn't have um a business model in the traditional sense right we do have ideas about how we want to stay viable in the future um but if you think about a traditional business model it's not a model that applies to swarm and swarm is already existing for seven years and for seven years we managed to to create the energy and to get the energy going somehow and i feel that in the blockchain industry i see many people who get a lot of energy from an idealistic perspective so they have the personal energy because they believe in what it means for themselves and for their project and they can tag along many people with that energy and we have open source basically you can contribute open source and i think that you know if you don't have to maintain a server um it is possible not necessarily always to think about money because if you deploy something on swarm you don't need a lot of money to maintain your infrastructure so you can just keep that out of the equation for a while and [Music] i think that there will always be a possibility to maintain yourself as well because like let's be real anybody will need to do the groceries but i think that if you're working on a project that is having a lot of impacts um [Music] no you'll find people who will be able who will want to sustain you in your endeavor i don't think that will be a problem yeah if you have problems with that you know just speak up and you'll probably find somebody to help you maybe petra does i see your hand raised that's right so i think for for me uh i'm coming from the perspective of being part of an institution almost a business that's been viable for over a decade uh there are so many people involved in the community that in fact we had a major disruption this year along with kovids and all the lockdowns and everything that's been going on politically here in the united states for the last year and a half our cto and ceo the same person uh who has been standing in the way of blockchain development on our platform uh for several years now finally stepped down and left a huge vacuum but the community rushed forward to take up the parts that they were responsible for and we've been struggling but in a very short turnaround of a couple of months managed to get the business up and running again completely migrated our entire website did a whole bunch of things in the last several weeks really intensely but with a huge amount of community input because the will was present to keep us moving along i sort of uh because we were meeting those expectations because they were so well defined because people uh were constantly like seeing us in their life they were drawn in to make those impacts happen i guess uh from a startup perspective trying to get the the ball rolling you really have to reach that moment where you've exceeded the competition that's inherent in the market on the other side i'm trying to develop this project with nfts and content and licensing and distribution which is the business model that i'm coming from in entertainment and what i've discovered is that there's an enormous amount of individuals in the markets in entertainment in games in a lot of these places in it who have been told that uh blockchain is a failure that it is normally enormously consumptive of resources there's all kinds of myths myths that persist in in the commercial space about blockchain projects that say oh it's just it's just evil it's just wrong but on the other side i'm actually inside of a lot of economic groups and uh industry groups where i know the people who are speaking and i can see who they're connected to and i know what projects are uh nascent in in the in the economy and in the markets and i know that there are a large number of individuals working at large corporations who are perpetuating these myths to the customer base on the outside but at the same time are working together with the people at their corporation to develop these projects so what that says to me is that the amount of competition at this point in the evolution of uh smart contract technology especially distributed web web 3 is immensely competition driven right we're still somewhat dependent on aws to some degree in order to launch a lot of these projects uh dows exist and are proliferate proliferating but the core infrastructure that they're utilizing uh outside of a couple of smart contracts and bonding pools in in limited reaches of the ethereum space uh or in other uh you know side chains uh or other blockchains um you know is like discord or other centralized services which obviously uh result in the the solution that the large corporations have total visibility to the conversations and the developments ongoing they extract whatever insights or developments are available for them to get out of those processes they take them back into their closed factory silos where they develop uh faster with more resources and more advertising and more revenue because they've already got the vc and they've already got the viable business come so so my question is sort of like how do we overcome that sort of loop uh where uh you know i t new new ideas and innovations are going to be captured by more competitive larger organizations that have the level of organization to be able to control their resources against you know the the sort of uh freeholders in the open source development space who may or may not have the level of uh integration amongst themselves organization amongst themselves to be able to form a real opposition to those forces i i guess that's my question well that's uh there's a lot of impact there um [Music] so yeah no worries um so i think first of all you know like in this whole decentralized ecosystem and you know let's call it the blockchain ecosystem right like i kind of wanted that even though we are not really building a blockchain but i feel that all we are doing uh right now there are many projects active in this space and um they are independent projects but what i personally feel whenever i go and meet people i think that we all have the same goal and that's basically to create a space where people can can interact with themselves being humans which is not necessarily tied to the power structures uh which are inherent in in the current world and i feel that those power structures um very large play are also based on money and on uh many of those things which basically keeps those power structures uh in place nowadays um and yeah we aren't there yet right so if let's say the big epic battle would start tomorrow um you're right it's saying that um you know people currently in power they they are better organized i mean not better but they're very well organized they have a lot of power they have a lot of financial resources but i think if you look at the blockchain ecosystem we have a really strong vision and there are you know there's such a rapid development ongoing and i think that swarm having this decentralized data storage is a very critical piece um in this uh yeah in this in this in in this development um [Music] so you know com to come back directly to your question uh which is um what was it again but i think um you asked okay so what what can we do against that um i think you know we're doing everything right now with developing swarm and with like developing so many other uh projects that are building towards that mission um we are just not yet there uh but we are coming there credibly and if you believe in that mission you can build your project on top of this uh this infrastructure and by doing so you're not only creating a cool project for yourself but you also help the development of this this whole space and basically create the world in which you want to live so that's one thing and the other thing is i personally believe that always just strong vision and mission prevails so um it's like kind of this david versus goliath myth um you know i think you also know that david didn't yet won because he is smart because you know the big giant goliath uh you know everybody was afraid for him but in the end uh it was just not such a smart uh fellow but uh yeah that's that's kind of how how i see it i hope this provided an answer to your question probably not to uh to answer that i uh if you give given the talk by elat verbin before you see that from the point of view of him as a co-founder of lunar ventures and also from the point of view of melanie ryback with her non-profit ventures initiative from the talk yesterday i do believe we are on the brink of the societal as a paradigm shift from where the powers that well finance uh move towards that the shift may already be in motion so um by choosing for a structure in both software terms but also um let's say governance wise i think you might already be ahead of the curve by choosing for this path the way yeah we could describe it i hope so and um you know it's really a paradigm shift and the funny thing is that if you are inside the paradigm you will not be able to imagine how it is outside of the paradigm and and that's i would say the definition of a paradigm shift is that suddenly people realize oh we can do things differently uh what i what i personally feel and i'm actually thinking about this a lot lately it's just the definition of money and money having such a very dominant force in our society nowadays like if you really if you think about it this is what drives everything it basically what what causes you know a lot of things good and bad in our society and i think that money is just another thing compared to a business model you know it has a lot of connotations and when money is involved and many things change um but but really like do we need it in the current form um i definitely think in the current form not right money is completely whacked out of the context with all the quantity fine and easing and and stuff but uh yeah it's interesting and i also think that's that we are you know we need a paradigm shift and and i hope that that we are at the brink of paradigm shifts and how this other world will look i don't know let's yeah a question from gregor yes and what could you describe a paradigm shift from moving away towards aligned incentives well maybe gregor if you ask the question do you have some ideas yourself he means moving away from the zero-sum game uh comparison towards collaborative games oh yeah yeah yeah of course um i think a zero is some game it's it's you know it's inherent in this idea of you know it's basically what i spoke about right so a serious some game i mean it's not really what's there in the current paradigm but uh but normally i feel that the paradigm is okay is i if i have money or invest money i will get more money and then the zero-sum game is if i get more money then you don't get it i don't think that that's really the case because actually the current paradigm is if we all care more enough about ourselves then in the end the whole greater good for the society will be achieved and that's basically adam smith right who said that and i think that's very very strong uh you know uh story that is in our current society um but um yeah collaboration so um i think that indeed collaboration is is extremely important and that collaboration you know it's made possible uh by things like a collaboration on on a much bigger scale right because that's basically what we're talking about not just talking about collaboration between um robert but we're talking about collaboration of whole nations and i think that this collaboration it's possible like we have so much power with our computers and with the technology it's just that in the current way of doing maybe it's just not efficient enough uh or it's not credible enough but if we have smart contracts and if you have technology and we put it in in a wise way i think uh it could be would it help if that would be trustless collaboration petra asks no i think there's always trust involved but i think it's really important that the channels on which this collaboration is being built are trustless so that basically means that let's say a nation state decides tomorrow to uh to start collaborating on facebook right i'm just saying stuff like netherlands decides let's forget all our normal infrastructure and let's just do everything on facebook you know like if the netherlands starts doing that for 10 years eventually facebook will realize huh netherlands you know they do everything on our platform and that's maybe try to influence a bit here and there right and i think that is something that will always happen whenever you build something that is so powerful as collaboration and you build it on a platform that is owned by somebody or some entity this entity will try to gain influence on that one way or another so that's more how i would like to look at trustless in this context i think that's that's kind of the base layer in which we build stuff should we trust us which is why we have blockchains which like why we have swarm because on top of a blockchain we can create this collaboration but on top of a centralized system that enforces smart contracts i don't think we can do it because uh sooner or later this centralized entity will realize the power it has and start abusing it thank you yeah i see there are no further questions i'd like to thank you for the presentation and the workshop thanks for the interesting questions i think the question part was was good yeah