Ethereum’s Moat Is Its Culture 🐊

Warren Buffett focuses on businesses’ moats. I focus on protocols’ moats.

The greatest insurance and sugar investor in the world—Warren Buffett—is really good at backing businesses that never change.

Here is his principle on investing:

“The moat in a business like our auto insurance business at GEICO is low cost. I mean people have to buy auto insurance so everybody’s going to have one auto insurance policy per car, basically, or per driver. And I can’t sell them 20, but they have to buy one. What are they going to buy it on? They’re going to buy it based on service and cost. Most people will assume the service is fairly identical among companies, or close enough, so they’re going to do it on cost, so I gotta be the low-cost producer. That’s my moat.”

This is why he is one of most successful and least interesting investors in the world. He backs the past.

Imagine being best friends with someone who loves Epstein’s island and dressing like this? That is why these men do not control our future. They are our past. Time to build open systems for everyone.

Personally, I like to play with projects that will change everything.

I want to back the future.

Backing the future is way more fun to me. It is the perimeter of human potential.

Protocols, dapps & tokens are reshaping politics, software & capital at astonishing speed. It changes the fabric of capitalism.

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What are the moats around an open source protocol?

If all the code is open source to everyone, how can you create any value? Well, the largest software acquisition in the world was RedHat, an open source company. Amazon makes extraordinary profits running open source code. When it comes to protocols, it turns out that there is a huge cost to growing a true community. It takes a huge personal and financial toll on all involved. In summary:

Open Source Code is free to fork & expensive to run

I think protocols like Ethereum—and the open source projects built on top of them—can build huge moats in a few ways:

🤓 Developer Service - Projects that need developers to work with them should serve their developer community. They should obsess over the onboarding flows of their code. The team should think about everyone from their README to their Twitter outreach. It should be a quick journey from “that project sounds cool” to “Wow, I integrated it so quickly!”. Dapp developers serve customers. Protocols serve developers. We must all serve each other with care.

If you are building anything on Ethereum show it to him at a conference, he will listen to you extremely deeply. That level of care is incredibly rare.

🫂 Communal Culture - Open Source is entirely Opt-In. The best contributions come from the unlikeliest places. You can have a full time team working all hours get absolutely schooled by someone in their spare time. The moonlight hours of a brilliant engineer can be more impactful than all the hours of an average one. This is why you need to create an attractive culture for high-potential people to join.

MIT thinks it can shake off the Jeffrey Epstein money & Aaron Schwartz suicide stain. It’s running out of time to prove it. https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/12/13/138651/ethereum-thinks-it-can-change-the-world-its-running-out-of-time-to-prove-it/

🪙 Financial Freedom - Developers of substance can work on anything they want. The demand for their brains far outstrips the supply. The early recruits might be pure missionaries but as the size of your army expands, you need to guarantee them one thing: enough money to start a family.

It is a primal need for all people who wish to continue the human race. They need the resources to survive in the world and pro-create. If you cannot offer a path to financial freedom, you will fail.

Microsoft did it. Google did it. Stripe did it.

Ethereum just does it 1,000,000x better.

That is why we are winning the recruiting war. People want tokens today, not options tomorrow.

Shares vs. Tokens

🏴‍☠️ Adventure Capitalism - Every wealthy person I know only wants one thing: adventure. They are totally bored out of their minds. If you beat capitalism into submission before 40, what the hell are you going to do with the rest of your days? You need a purpose.

If your children grow up around a retired bum of an angel investor, how will they be inspired to go out on an adventure themselves?

The great people. The people that actually leave some sediment behind after their body has rotted. The people that get after it. The people that win.

They want an adventure.

They have won the game of capitalism. Now they want to change the rules.

The Collisons beat capitalism early on. Now they are showing off their Stripes.

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What about open source wallets?

I believe the most valuable thing I can be working on is the interface between Apple & Ethereum. That currently takes the form of an iOS app that integrates the best of each community.

Apple : Ethereum

App : Dapp

Swift : Solidity

Safari : Balance

Today, Ethereum wallets are privately funded or closed source. Balance takes a totally different approach. We are community funded and totally open source from day one.

Our message is clear. Our new home is: https://balance.io

We will own a few things:

The Balance Brand - You cannot fork our reputation and logo. That is proprietary.

Developer Goodwill - We are building strong relationships with the next generation of dapp developers.

Cultural Care - There are lots of future cultural icons who will be launching tasteful tokens on Ethereum using our wallet.

These are just a few of the moats we are starting to dig. Water is seeping in, the depths are starting to form, and the crocodiles are ready.

We are preparing our castle for an epic battle.

Join us 🏯

https://ricburton.mirror.xyz/crowdfunds/0x9500b696F00AE82CA97d06379CF0A2b60B467040