Over the past year Helium has been the single most effective way to evangelize crypto to my friends.
The reason?
Financial use cases are hard to grasp and uninteresting to people without financial backgrounds.
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Bitcoin is hard to explain because reality is most people don’t even understand the purpose of gold outside it’s use in jewelry and electronics.
In many ways Bitcoin just seems like a pet rock.
DeFi while somewhat easier to explain because people use financial services, is still hard.
The second you start talking about market making, derivatives, synthetic assets, etc. you lose people.
It’s all very abstract.
But a community owned wireless network (Helium)?
Surprisingly much easier to understand.
Everyone can imagine what that is because it’s literally a physical network.
Plus when the framing is about earning HNT through running infrastructure for a community owned wireless network vs investing, it takes people’s guard down.
Not everyone has the risk tolerance for token investments.
But many people are interested in additional income sources.
The active participation is also extremely effective for driving home how these decentralized networks work.
- Digital goods and services are created through incentive systems that coordinate people to create them.
The takeaway?
It is very possible that what drives mainstream interest in 𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 and 𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐩𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 in decentralized networks outside pure speculation will come from applications outside money and finance.
Along this line of thinking, even if a token does implement some kind of fee capture it’s much better to reinvest those earnings rather than distribute as dividends.
UNI implicitly does this by not extracting fees from LPs (fee switch off).
This industry’s obsession with dividends is a backlash to the useless utility tokens from 2017.
Yes it’s important for tokens to have the potential to accrue value.
But earnings potential is not the same as dividends.
One of the more thought provoking essays I’ve read on Ethereum in a while.
In short Ethereum wins not by challenging nation states head-on for monetary supremacy like Bitcoin, but by growing its own digital economy until it surpasses that of the dominant sovereign powers.
“History teaches us that there’s only one viable method for a challenger willing to replace the current monetary reserve: it has to grow its own economy till the point it matches, and eventually surpasses, that of the main global power of the moment — currently, the U.S.”
This is a mental model I’ve long agreed with as well.
Bitcoin - a digital challenger to gold
Ethereum - a digital challenger to sovereign jurisdictions
Bitcoin : Digital Gold :: Ethereum : Digital Economy
What’s most impressive about fair launched projects like $YFI and $SUSHI is that they were both able to create billion dollar enterprises in just months without a dime of upfront investment.
Blockchains fundamentally collapse the costs of launching and scaling networks to zero.
Decentralized computing infrastructure is powerful.
Blockchains are shared public infrastructure, and if you design the right set of rules and incentives on top of them, users and capital will self-organize to create novel institutions that are global, open, and permanent.
This is why so many people in DeFi are excited by $YFI.
It is the best example of how blockchains collapse the costs of launching networks to zero, and provide the foundation for truly grassroots, internet native, self-organized institutions.
Bull markets tend to attract people who are here to get rich quick and get out rather than people who care about building shit that people can actually use.
I’ve thought about this a lot, mostly when talking to my friends who are completely divorced from everything happening in DeFi and crypto generally.
Sometimes it does just seem like it’s all speculative financial games (Bitcoin can even feel this way as well at times).
“Community” can also sometimes feel like a bunch of passive participants constantly asking “wen moon?”
But seeing teams and other protocol contributors who are committed to building projects that actually matter and will create real value for people always keeps me optimistic.
That said if I had to project 2 years out, how confident would I be that Maker won’t be disrupted on all three of the lending, synthetics, and stablecoin fronts?
Maker is resilient and battle tested, but Lindy effect only goes so far if Maker is fundamentally flawed.