Crypto Ideologies, Part 2: What is the End Goal? – MyCrypto
Unfortunately, none of these things are actually measuring our goals or our success. If we want a system where power accrues to the individual rather than an entity, we need to find ways to measure that.
Additionally, when we are too focused on “more people” and “more transactions” and “more money” we lose sight of what makes us most valuable.
We will end up competing with the existing products in the existing system (Paypal, Venmo, banks, etc.) and, in doing so, we become part of the existing system.
Giving the users a choice between Paypal and Venmo isn’t really giving users a choice. The blockchain is supposed to do something more.
But, because we are competing with these products and we are tracking metrics like users and volume, we will focus on our design, usability, and adoption rates in order to make numbers go up.
Things that we are familiar with (e.g., logging in with a username and password) are simply more usable than things we aren’t used to (e.g., AHH PRIVATE KEYS!). If we identify that as the thing preventing adoption and then solve it by creating a central login system, that would mean we no longer provide a system where a person’s access to their money is not reliant on the existence of a single company.
We have sacrificed decentralization and autonomy and self-sovereignty in order to share fancy user-growth graphs. And because we don’t have a “decentralization” graph, no one will notice the numbers going down on that end.
The fear is that if we all do this enough times, we will end up reproducing the same system that we purport to attack. People still won’t really have a choice, they will just have Paypal, Venmo, and Chainpal. We will have still failed.
Our products will not succeed if we don’t utilize the differentiating features the blockchain enables. We need to create new value that isn’t accessible in the existing system. Think less about competing directly and attempting to beat others at their own game and think more about what makes you unique already.
Usability, design, and availability to the middle class or western world are not issues in the existing system. Those have long been solved by a pile of products.
Instead, where is the asymmetry of power? Where is the asymmetry of information? Where are those people who are living without access, without insight, without consent, and without choice?
How can we create products that solve their issues? The real value of what you build is solving people’s problems, not digger a deeper moat than Venmo.
For all the disadvantages new technology has, one benefit is that it inherently grants you a competitive advantage. The fact that blockchain doesn’t rely on a single-point-of-failure is, inherently, more valuable than existing products. Even if our design sucks, we still are better than the existing products in that way. Capitalize on that.
Published at Tue, 29 Oct 2019 17:57:24 +0000
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