Shares vs. Tokens
Incentive engineering is hundreds of years old. We keep inventing new ways of keeping record. The token is the latest evolution in that effort.
One question I like to ask people is:
Would you like to live 100 years in the future or 100 years the past?
It is a simple way to reveal if they have any concept of human history or if they are still stuck in their personal present. The last 100 years have been nothing short breathtaking. Look at the progress humanity has made:
My sense of society’s progress is routed in two things: co-ordinating and sharing. We started communicating through grunts and now we have satellites. We used to gather around wood fires and now we build nuclear reactors to warm our skyscrapers. Humans used to scrape calories out of rotting carcasses and now we drink oatmilk lattes. When it comes to co-ordination, we have made truly incredible progress.
We are just getting started with sharing.
Stone Tablets, Fortran Databases, Microsoft Excel, Ethereum’s ERC-20
We have progressed from double-entry book keeping in the Venetian streets to protocols
The world’s wealth is recorded in fascinating ways. We use accountants, auditors, database administrators, and institutions to keep track of who is owed what. We use this data to convert capital into human action. If you have the right database entries in your name, you can exist on planet earth without fighting for your life. You can simply transfer some of that data to other people who will do anything you want.
The majority of wealthy people did not create their success. They inherited windfalls or tailwinds from previous generations. The database entries were passed down from hard-working parents to softer children. This allowed people with no economic sense to wield vast amounts of economic power. A fascinating and stultifying state of affairs.
Nevertheless, humans found ingenious new ways to create wealth that did not pay heed to our past. Technologists in California started to realise something important:
Capital shared early is the most powerful drug in the world
If you want people to get out of bed earlier and go to bed later, try giving them some capital
Very few people I know own compounding capital that will change their lives forever. You know when they do. They feel like they have discovered some kind of secret. Their wealth is building at such an astonishing rate that they do not know what to do with all the money they are making.
Exponentially compounding capital is a hell of a drug. Seeing something you own increase 10x, 100x, 1000x, 10,000x is transformative psychologically and spiritually. It changes you. Forever.
This is the secret of Silicon Valley: sharing.
The 8 men below founded Fairchild Semiconductor in Mountain View, California. They co-mingled their energy with the capital of Arthur Rock and formed one of the fastest-growing companies America had ever seen. They shared in the spoils together.
They are known as the Traitorous 8 for leaving their former employer and beating him.
This place was the petri dish for Intel which then became the bedrock of the personal computing and internet evolutions. What did each wave of companies kept doing to steal team members from the previous winners? They shared the stock of the company.
These shares changed the incentives of society. People started owning the upside they were creating. I am not talking about hippy co-operatives that try to make a living by sharing a few pigs and rotten cabbages. I am talking about co-ownership of the most explosively profitable technology companies to ever exists. This is incentive engineering at its finest.
What humanity figured out was how to share. Finally, for the first time, people were owners of exponential capital. It is really impossible to overstate how powerful that is.
Capitalising Communities is how you radicalise them rapidly
Vitalik was shunned by the Bitcoiners and so he created his own trillion-dollar digital cult
What I love so much about Ethereum’s founding story is how messy it was because of how psychopathic some of the people were. Vitalik has publicly admitted many times that many of the people he chose as “founders” were absolutely useless melts who he had to shun.
Nevertheless, Vitalik pushed on with the people he could. The collaborated together to build an open source economic protocol that could support simple scripts. Along the way, a cult was born out of a small community of believers who did not label themselves “founders”. Vitalik rewarded hundreds of these people with his valueless Ether. He shared his capital with his community. It would go on to compound his protocol and his people’s wealth exponentially.
Ethereum did not have a founding team, it had a founding community. A broad set of people who believed in the mission and were willing to work on it for months without pay. People sacrificed their time, energy and sanity to get to the genesis block.
Tokens are winning the compensation competition
If you are a smart engineer or designer, you should not be earning stock or options
Money is issued by governments. Stock is issued by corporations. Options are issued by startups. Tokens are issued by protocols. You choose your own economic adventure.
The longer you refuse to accept tokens as a form of compensation, the poorer you will be. Your friends who do choose tokens over options and stock will be infinitely more economically free than you. That is because they are submitting to the will of the ERC-20. It commands you to earn it. It wants you to feed it. It wants you to earn it. It wants to be spread more widely. It is engineering you, you are not engineering it.
The ERC-20 token standard is the new standard for humanity’s compensation competition. If you are not earning tokens, you are being left behind.
If your wealth is not being described on Ethereum, you are missing out.
If your labor is being co-mingled with people in a company, you are using old technology to try and secure wealth for you family.
If your energy is being described in a database controlled by bankers who want to financially rape poor people with fees, you are asleep at the wheel.
Do you want to earn some tokens?
The Safari Wallet community will be rewarded with tokens from future wallet distributions
Every wallet that uses the Safari Wallet community’s technology will be expected to pay tribute in the form of tokens. The distributions of Safari Wallet should do this to keep the people who contribute to the project happy and align incentives.
Balance, the first distribution of Safari Wallet, will do this.
Join us: https://discord.gg/safari-wallet