Jacob Kowalski, in the film ‘Fantastic Beasts & Where To Find Them’(2016), is working in a canning factory and goes to a bank to get a loan for bakery. He shows the design of the bakery he is going to run and his paczki(a kind of doughnut by his grandmather’s special recipe) to the banker. The banker has no interest to it at all, he just asked “Mr. Kowalski, what do you propose to offer the bank as collateral?”. So, as we all know, unfortunately, Kowalski’s application is refused by the banker. The banker does not care about the talent what Kowalski have to make fantastic doughnuts, he only cares for collateral.
Same thing happens every moment in every day and in every corner of the world. I believe, one of the greatest tragedy in human race, is the underestimation of human value.
There is an old Chinese saying “冯唐易老，李广无封”, which comes from a poem from a famous Chinese poet Wangbo in Tang Dynasty. This saying has been handed down for more than 1300 years in China. Feng Tang and Li Guang are two famous talented heroes in Chinese history, they have done outstanding achievements but their value is underestimated in their time: they were offered very small official titles in their whole life regardless of their great talents and contributions. Many later Chinese intellectuals are often touched to this saying and even with tears.
No one will ever pay you what you’re worth. They’ll only ever pay you what they think you’re worth. Being properly valued is so important to humankind, the implications range far beyond just finances, into the realm of self-respect, self-confidence and dignity.
In 2006, I started my freelance work in a crowdsourcing website: Topcoder(http://www.topcoder.com). Topcoder is a competition based crowdsourcing website mainly in coding, software development, design and idea generation areas. In topcoder, if you want to earn money, you have to compete with other competitors around the world and submit the best solutions to a competition project. Only the winner and the second place in the competition will get paid from Topcoder in most of the cases. If you won a competition, not only you will get paid, you will get a higher rating in Topcoder. After several years of working in Topcoder, what surprised me most is, in such an intense competition environment, true talented members will emerge, and most of them are from less developed countries such as in Vienam, Pakistan, Philippines, Kenya, Nigeria and more. This makes me believe that there are talents everywhere in every corner in the earth, even in less developed areas, social bottoms.
January 21st, 2009 is not a date that Susan Boyle is ever likely to forget. It was the day that the shy, devout 48-year-old stepped onto the stage of the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre in Glasgow for an audition on Britain’s Got Talent. Or to put it another way, the day her world turned 360 degrees on its head. In front of the three-strong panel of judges charged with divining which of this year’s British hopefuls really did have talent, the singing voice of Susan Boyle turned out to be a watershed moment neither she nor anyone involved in the show could possibly have foreseen. It is now both her and the show’s defining moment.
Stories are often telling us there are undiscovered talents everywhere, and everyone is so unique. However, the reality is very cruel: there are prejudices and discriminations everywhere, that your race, gender, family, birthplace, social relations, social class that will determine your destiny. You must have seen so many talented, hardworking persons’ values are so underestimated due to these realistic reasons. This is probably the hardest problem in human race and is essential to most of the social problems. To get real talented person appropriate value estimation, is not only a finance problem, but about the self-respect, self-confidence, fair, just, dignity and fate of humankind.
Is it an impossible problem to be solved? Most of you may say “yes”, because this problem is so complicated and tough, that among centuries this problem does not get any tiny relief.
When the internet, web, social media and social network come to our life, in the beginning, some talented persons are truely discovered from those platforms such as youtube, Facebook and Instagram. However, quite the opposite, due to the information explosion, social media and social network is not a solution to reveal true talents, but make the situation even worse: nowadays the only chance for you to promote your talent is advertising, which highly increased the threshold.
Is it a dead problem? I once believed so until I found blockchain technology.
In 2008, a man named Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. After then, bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies are introduced. Bitcoin is an open, decentralized, distributed ledger crypto currency and the backend technology is called blockchain.
A blockchain, originally block chain, is a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked and secured using cryptography. Each block typically contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp and transaction data. By design, a blockchain is inherently resistant to modification of the data. It is “an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way”. For use as a distributed ledger, a blockchain is typically managed by a peer-to-peer network collectively adhering to a protocol for inter-node communication and validating new blocks. Once recorded, the data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without the alteration of all subsequent blocks, which requires collusion of the network majority.
How can blockchain do to human value problem?
You may find, the essential to the human value problem is human value is often judged by centalized entities such as person, company or organization. The judgement of your talents is often not objective by truth but by prejudices and discriminations. Take Kowalski’s story as an example, the banker does not care about Kowalski because he is just a canning factory worker. Because your talents are often judged by human not by truth, and is judged subjectively, so the results must be underestimation of your talents.
The best part of blockchain is: it can bring decentralization. Decentralization is so important to human value judgement because no one can control the judgment result of your true value and thus it brings objectivity. Another feature of blockchain is immutability. Immutability makes the data stored cannot be changed in certain circumstances.
By introducing decentralization and immutability, can the hardest human problem such as human value problem be solved using blockchain technology.
Why?
The experiences working in Topcoder inspired me, that, in an open, competition based, performance and result based, worldwide competing platform, one can prove his talents effectively and objectively without being affected by any human prejudices and discriminations. In other words, talents judged by human is often not accurate, we let an open and decentralized application to judge your talents.
You may not fully understand what it means. I will explain this concept to you by some examples.
In 1977, China has resumed the colledge entrance examination. Though colledge entrance examination is often criticized in China now, it has truly done great contributions to the success of Chinese Reform and Opening. Every student can have the oppotunity to go to the best universities in China such as Tsinghua University, Beijing University and more, only by their scores in the exam. It brings true talents to China and is relatively fair. In 2005, China has started Civil Service Exam, which will select the Civil servants and government officials openly and fairly. The colledge entrance examination and Civil Service Exam, in result, greatly promoted developments of China.
Once your talents are judged by an open, wide, objective, fair, performance and result based, competition based activity, even your full potentials is not discovered, you will benefit from it eventually. Open and fair will bring opportunity, and opportunity is the key to human value problems.
Thus I started a new career from a project named Digital Credit. Digital Credit is designed using a brand new blockchain architecture by implementing POA (Proof of Ability) actions(such as challenge, competition, test, teaching, posting, ranking, achievement, contribution, review and voting etc.) to create a decentralized, trustworthy, easy to use, immutable, autonomous digital credit community and application platform. Community or application members can apply for loans or crowdfunding, sell tickets or even get a reward from Digital Credit by their credit database only based on their own, genuine talents.
To build a decentralized and immutable digital credit database of members by the performance and result of open, world wide, objective, fair, competition based actions like challenge, competition, test and contributions, Digital Credit will be able to build a community and application platform that can solve many existing human problems. One of the most important problem is the human value problem.
For example:
In modern investment area, most investors are unprofessional, and it is very difficult for them to identify those professional investors and conduct “follow-up” because they have no way to effectively verify investment levels of other investors.
Investor’s investment ability can be verified in Digital Credit. Therefore, investment is no longer a difficult task, thus ordinary investors only need to follow up the “guru” for investment.
For example, holding a long-term, regular investment competition to evaluate performance of investors (assuming the use of simulation investing environment to assess the returns of participants), and regularly rank the participants’ investment performance (eg, weekly, monthly, quarterly etc.) Because the investing performance is automatically verified by the system, its investment performance and stability can be effectively verified by the system. In such investment system, it is easy for ordinary investors to find those who are professional at investment by their investment performance in competitions. Those professional investors can obtain greater returns by launching crowdfunding, lending, and selling tickets (sharing their own investment decisions).
In a decentralized, immutable, fair and objective community, human value is defined only by truth, performance and results. If members’ talents are genuine and verifiable, some other problems can be solved as well.
In current internet crowdfunding area, especially ICO, it has been criticized more severely. The main reason is the lack of verification of the authenticity of ICO fundraiser’s project and the lack of verification of ICO team’s ability and authenticity.
Crowdfunding and ICO in Digital Credit will have ability/skills requirement to fundraisers and their teams, and this capability needs to be verified by the Digital Credit system. (You must participate in the POA actions, and it is only possible to obtain the ability evaluation through the ability rating, such as participating in the challenge, competition and test.)
Digital Credit has relatively strict requirements for ICO. One of them is that for ICO crowdfunding tokens, Digital Credit will not assign all tokens to the ICO initiator at one time, but will be distributed in stages according to the progress of the ICO initiator’s project. The pre-designated milestones of the ICO project will be reviewed. When the ICO project fails to achieve the milestone goal, or if there is a long-term lack of progress or project stagnation, subsequent token allocations will cease.
If a crowdfunding or ICO party has breached the contract or engaged in fraud, Digital Credit has corresponding penalty measures.
Not only in the business areas, in non-business areas such as poverty problem, refugee problem can be solved by means of Digital Credit to provide a fair, trustworthy, objective platform to every member.
Digital Credit will build such a community and application platform based on EOS.IO(There will also be a compatible version build by Ethereum as well). EOS.IO has a lot of features such as free usage, low lantency, good performance and role based managements that will make the implementation of Digital Credit easier and more effective. Digital Credit will also utilize the BigchainDB and Tendermint to build its decentralized credit database. To simplify the development of decentralized applications based on Digital Credit, a decentralized MVC framework will be build by Digital Credit which will allow cloud deployment of applications.
Digital Credit will distribute its ERC-20 based tokens named DGCT in Ethereum, and the token sale will be started in June 2, 2:00 AM GMT time. Most of the tokens will be distributed to community for the use of award community members or as prizes to ability proving actions such as competions. Digital Credit has also publish its white paper in Github: White Paper(https://github.com/digitalcredit-io/whitepaper/blob/master/WhitePaperv1.0.md) and lauched the website: http://digitalcredit.io. Digital Credit is planned to launch the official version in August, 2019.
Imagine that, if Jacob Kowalski joined the Digital Credit community and has proved his fantastic doughnut making skills to Digital Credit, will his loan application be refused? Will he have to go to the bank to get ridiculed?
Digital Credit will definitely a great project not only an antidote to finance problems, most important, it is an antidote to great human problems such as human value problems.
In the end, I will end up this article by another famous Chinese poem by a Chinese famous poet named Gong Zi Zhen in Qing Dynasty: “我劝天公重抖擞，不拘一格降人才。”What means that “I suggest the God to rejuvenate the world not to underestimate the value of talents”.