I don't know about you, but I'm getting real tired of seeing all of these web2's enter web3 but only looking to turn it into web2 as much as possible. Okay weird sentence so let me elaborate a bit more on that.
If you've followed TechCrunch on Twitter in the past you'd always get these "new start-up "raises" x million for their idea" and "company x raises x million more in funding round b for their product at an evaluation of x billion", you may have been wondering how many normal people are involved there other than possibly being employed and earning the average amount a person in that line of work would. I suppose there are some companies that also offer "shares" to certain employers but that's definitely not the norm.
Now we're seeing all these tokens do pretty much the same thing. New tokens, even blockchains are being launched with initial funding coming from VC's, angel investors often even just being sister companies of bigger ones all mostly going to funnel profit to a few. I'm not even going to get started on the equity shares the company/founders give themselves compared to these VC's but if it's already quite enormous at the start and these VC's are just getting a tiny portion of it for their initial early and cheap funding, you can maybe imagine what that will mean for the public who think they may be getting in early once those tokens hit the exchanges on a paid listing, with the exchanges being part of the initial investors often themselves.
Where does that leave the public? Where does it leave the fairness we once strived for?
I remember when the shittiest shitcoins would get blasted on forums for there even being so much as a 10% premine and this most likely was also a reason many ignored Steem back in the day and rightly so, except for a few who stuck with it either way due to its uniqueness and potential. Luckily a lot of that unfairness is now gone with Hive but it feels like the people lost most of the power after that era when the "real money" started to come in.
I'm even seeing galleries become walled gardens in #web3 too where you have to attain a certain hype until they'll accept you to mint works on their platform, take a cut from you and who knows what goes on behind those curtains since power is held by a select few.
Something people don't seem to grasp is that power will eventually always be misused. It's something I've talked about in the past concerning Reddit and their centralized database that is unknown to outsiders. You can't know what's happening there, who's pulling the strings to feed you information they pick and choose. When Elon took over Twitter, one thing I loved about that is that he started publicizing the shady things that went on there before his acquisition.
Things like employees doing backroom deals on who gets a verified sticker. Imagine that, you're paying an employee a bonus just so he can unfairly push you in front of an unknown waiting list to give you a verified sticker that may increase your influence on the platform. Something you'd think the employees should work in their regular working hours towards ensuring as many who deserve the sticker get it. Aside from that all of the censorship and soft-shadowbanning by not allowing certain tweets from certain authors to trend or get visibility because someone else asked them to.
Now stop for a moment and wonder, do you think Twitter is the only place this happens on? Out of all the platforms, employees and attention that's directed towards them there must be an insane amount of shady activity occurring daily because the hidden actions on #web2 infrastructure allow it to happen.
Now I'm not saying #web3 is perfect, there's plenty of abuse the tech allows to occur here too, things like wash-trading through sock accounts, hacks and scams, etc. Right now though it seems like most projects that enter the space look to just drain as much value as they can similar to how they've been doing in forever on web2 at the cost of its users/fans. While you some times get a chance to be an investor in these projects now in #web3, that chance only seems to be made of smoke and mirrors when the intention was never there to provide something of long term value anyway.
I don't know, I just think we can do better and I'm a big proponent myself of creating value from fair early distributions. Some other projects in this space give me hope that I'm not the only one, for instance @threespeak and the way they did their SPK distribution to Hive holders. It's cheap, it allows you to buy back into your own token if you want more of it, it gives HP an added value proposition and when things start to take off no one can point fingers at you cry unfairness cause you've mostly bought your own tokens and put money where your mouth is. Something that can't be said for 99.9% of projects out there, just holding doesn't count if you've started with a massive premine/"team allocation", doesn't matter how you try to soften it by schemes like "team only gets 1% every month, guys, don't worry".
I'm quite over it but the general market doesn't seem to be and the ICO craze has shifted from the early days to another similar method where the odds of regular folks being able to invest and see nice returns has diminished and gotten a lot harder, way harder than it need to be considering what this tech enables if done right and most importantly done with the right intentions.
It's really great to see other Hivean's see the importance of this issue. It really is what distinguishes Hive as web3 from other web2.5 (so called web 3) systems. They will all be regulatable at some point or another. Hive and SPK Network wont be regulatable, but by the community of Hiveans themselves.
The idea is fair governance token distribution. All start off minining the governance token from zero.
You provide value to a decentralised DAO, you get funded in return. You build project, when utility comes in you launch your own DAO. The community votes to fund your team to keep building if you did a good job and met your promises.
This is the true way to use a decentralised funding method to build a decentralised project without strings attached VC money that will use community memebers as exit liquidity. It also ensures that all parties incentives are aligned as no one is using any one as exist liquidity and no one is in the token for quick pumps and profits.
Its what we are doing on SPK Network and it's working, so this is not theory. It can be done. It means the video storage layer and its infrastructure will be ownerless and regulated only by the community and the people who provide value to that community by running infrastructure.
This, in our mind is true web3, not web2.5 like the other pre-mine, pre-seed, ICO, CEO company lead projects out there that are destined for regulation ultimately, especially if they are dealing with speech and communication or content storage. The weak point is their pre-mine and excessive founder stakes.
If these web2.5 communities knew better and had the capabilities, they would fork out their founder stakes and move to a new chain (like we did on Hive).
We talk about this a lot on @cttpodcast with @theycallmedan and various guests. There are so few people in the industry that understand this and so many are going down the same route as the ICO boom with their web2.5 projects. I guess true decentralisation is a new paradigm and as such is almost completely counter intuitive to most web2 thinkers and current, self proclaimed "crypto influencers". (These influencers should be called out imo, we have everything we need including actions and built projects to win every argument on a moral and technical basis in debates against anyone in the industry, including the highest and most mighty). Most of the people who really should be getting it by now, still somehow don't.... maybe it's conflicts of interest from having bought and persuaded many others to buy pre mines....
Many of the so called crypto experts are really doing their followers a disservice by not exploring this issue. It really is one of the leading issues in the crypto, web3, and Network State world for the foreseeable future. Many will end up disappointed from not addressing this issue early on or prior to their projects starting.
Hive should be the place where this issue is explored and exposed IMO.
For more of our content that talks about this issue in more detail, you can check out this cool shorts and clips channel that @bil.prag (https://hive.blog/@bil.prag) has worked hard to set up for us. Feel free to use any of the clips and shorts to help make your points on other web2 and web2.5 media sites:
It won't be long before all the bullshit gets completely wiped off the map from not only regulators, but also legitimate projects. None of these scammy WEB2 products understand how the attention economy works. They think they are going to get "first move advantage" when all that's going to happen is that someone will move in and undercut their entire business model.
Say what you want about Mark Zuckerberg, but at least he actually knew what he was doing. Remember Facebook back in the day? It had no ads and it was free. He spent years acquiring the userbase. All these WEB3 masqueraders aren't even good at properly setting up a WEB2 platform, let alone WEB3. It's very obvious that they will all fail miserably in the end. In the meantime, they provide a nice placeholder for risk to see what works and what doesn't. They are cannon-fodder.
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I would not be that optimistic. They have perfected the manipulation of the masses via instant gratification. Do you think they will let go their power on the minds that easily?
What I am saying is that crypto will have the monopoly on mass manipulation and instant gratification. If you have the option of getting paid every two weeks $30k a year and getting paid every minute $50k a year, which job you gonna pick? If a crypto network is helping you succeed in life x10 times more than the government, who are you going to trust?
Fiat, government, and corporations are going to become a worse and worse proposition over time. I think we can agree on that. Crypto is going to become a better and better deal over time. I think we can agree on that. If these two things are true then the attention economy comes into play. People will give attention and trust to the system that offers them the most benefit. That's just basic capitalism, and the legacy entities will not be able to compete or scale within such an environment.
Makes sense. But unknown is how the establishment/big companies will react. Currently they are dumbfucked and not reacting at all as it seems (still in the ignoring phase) or only pathetically (Meta´s "Libra"). But if more and more people choose crypto, they will change to panic mode. And then we will find out what they are capable of, in worst case they bribe the regulators to ban any true Web 3.0 (e.g. declaring any business not having KYC as illegal). Not saying, that it is likely, but possible.
I think everything you said is extremely likely.
But we also have to realize that there is no such thing as "the government".
There is a full spectrum of government and rulership: at least 200 of them.
We've also seen that it's just not possible to ban.
Everything in crypto is borderless, and the borders are digital and unguarded.
Getting a "banned" token into a KYC token won't be very hard, especially when people are motivated.
In fact those types of backdoor moves will just be built directly into the infrastructure.
We also have to wonder just how effective that flex is going to be.
Governments trying to exert a high amount of control when they are at their weakest?
Seems unlikely that's going to work.
They will flail around like children having a temper tantrum.
They will cause damage like people within a riot.
But none of that actually changes the situation in their favor.
It's just another page in the story of strife.
If we look at the countries trying to hard ban it like Nigeria...
We can see the ban basically has zero effect.
Nigeria is one of crypto's best friends.
The more I learn about Nigeria the more I'm like holy shit what a hard life.
These people are extremely motivated, and they all speak English.
The ban is meaningless to them.
Take higher education for example.
We can already see that it's being undercut by the infant versions of the new AI that's being launched. What happens when AI, 3D-printing, crypto, and other technologies being to merge at the center of the biggest technological advancement of mankind? What happens when crypto networks will pay users to learn? All legacy colleges will collapse instantly. They've all been increasing tuition and the price of everything for decades. It's a bloated and corrupt system, and its days are numbered. Now apply this to other industries and even government. It might take 20 years, but governments are going to implode from this coalescence. The smallest and most corrupt ones first.
I totally agree with you, but your last sentence says it all really
How many people are truly going to have the right intentions to begin with. Look at FTX or whatever that bullshit was. Everyone thought the guy was a genius because he was giving away millions of $ to other people. They didn't even stop to ask how the money was actually acquired but assumed he was doing it with the right intentions. This is why due diligence is so fucking important these days. I never buy into hype because there's a good chance it's just smoke and BS.
I believe we have three important points that must be essential for evolution;
First: Create value with fair distributions.
Second: right intentions.
Three: Transparency and dialogue.
Many good projects are lost due to lack of transparency and really listening to the participants' opinion.
I have been following particularly more assiduously. your posts in the last few weeks and the posts from liotes.
It is very interesting to see someone doing this movement to have an engagement seeking a team evolution.
The way I see it, web3 requires a complete paradigm change in order to actually work, on any scale. In other words, we have to consider the psychology of it, not just the functional mechanics.
People are deeply resistant to change. The first automobile was on the road in 1886, but it wasn't until the 1930's that you really just had cars on the roads. The first mass produced mobile phone was on the market in 1983, but many people still had land lines "just in case," 30 years later. Same holds for the advent of the Internet, itself.
Point? Even after they get past initial resistance to change, most people try to use the new like they used the old. Heck, many of my customers (granted, quite a few of them are older) buy online, but still request paper invoices, which is a pre-online thing.
Web3 will be great, but we have to work past the underlying psychology of Web2, which has its roots in scarcity, which leads to fear, which leads to greed, which takes us right to the doorstep of what these ostensible "Web3" projects are doing.
And sorry, I don't have a magic pill for changing a psychological mindset. Time, perhaps, is our best friend...
I don't think Cars and Cell phones were about resistance to change so much as they were about the technology being ready for mass consumption. Sure, you could buy a car in 1886. If you were rich...but roads were crap if you even had anything that could be called a road. And good luck finding fuel. And the cars were crap too. A horse was more reliable, faster and cheaper.
And sure, you could buy a cell phone in the 1980s...if you were rich and even then the coverage was crap...and you had to carry something that weighed 10 pounds. And sound quality was crap.
Sometimes there is resistance to change but sometimes the technology just isn't ready. That's true of crypto today. Yes, ridding ourselves of centralized exchanges and managing our own wallets may be the the future but until there is an idiot proof way to prevent people from losing their keys AND keep them secure, etc. then it will never truly be mainstream.
No new technology is ready for mass consumption immediately. DVD players took over a decade to catch on with the public because 1) they were too damn expensive for the average person to buy at retail, and 2) most people were still married to the bucket seats at the local theater.
Change isn't about adopting new technology. The technology, in virtually every known case, is the vehicle to change. Cell phone usage required a shift in thinking about communications, but the technology itself wasn't the driver. People slowly began to realize that a phone could be more than just a phone. It could be an entertainment center and a multi-tool communication device rolled into one. Instead of just talking to people, you could text with them, watch videos, play games, listen to music, and a lot more. It's not just a phone anymore. It's an office you carry around in your pocket, with practical everyday uses. But many of the features you currently have on your phone came from customers asking for them. Originally, all you got was a phone that you had to flip open to use, and something they broke.
Web3 is on the horizon. If we're patient, it will be better 10 years from now than it is today, and more people will be using it.
History tends to repeat itself, regardless of technology... it's typical human behaviour... 😔
No matter what we are talking about, 95% or even more will be garbage. Only a small percentage of projects will actually bring value and aren't just constructed to extract profit.
They're wolfs in a sheep's clothing and many users fall for it. Things are still fairly new and many don't understand the difference between the two. These bad actors have rotten the space and new comers will have to thread with a keen awareness to find the real thing.
"shittiest shitcoins" i feel you mate🙃 This got me😄
I am totally up with this. And it's nice that with coherence people from Hive (a real Web3 decentralized blog) are talking about this and proposing solutions.
Designng tokenomics for many projects, the style I always try to go for is a suitable release schedule to avoid tokens dumping, creating incentives for token holders in the style of Hive, but of course, with other functionalities in terms of educational platforms or social trading platforms.
On the other hand, token distribution should be fair and avoid dumping damaging the latter investors or seed investors.
Usually, when I am also involved in the management sides of the project, we cap the maximum participation of single investors to the Seed or PRivate phases, to avoid too much centralization of the token possess and usually, we do no give away too much equity to VCs or institutionals because they are often just interested in speculating, while the project needs also network and support from investors.
So, we structuring projects in a form where the company itself is structured in the form of a DAO, where also the stakeholding becomes more distributed. Not every jurisdictions allow to do that, but where we can, we do it.
And last but not least, also the projects I design usually have web3/DAO concepts inside, meaning that decisions for the development of the game/project go under the votation of the token holders or governance-token holders. So, the community is really taken into account for the next decisions and deployments. It's a sort of free survey that the company can conduct to understand where to invest more or less.
Here is one article of mine about some principles I use for tokenomics.
https://ecency.com/hive-167922/@mikezillo/my-strategy-to-create-and
😣 sucks, but that's how it goes.. unfortunately!
There's just too many rug pull exit scams out there for the average person to know how to pick a winner :( ... Without the thousands of scams we could get some serious funding put into quality projects like Hive and the Hive based projects.