Why do I feel nauseated every time I hear the word community anywhere near the word crypto? It should not be like this. Something is wrong with me.
When a crypto project starts, isn’t that what you want? Isn’t that the most important predictor of future success -- the community of supporters, developers, enthusiasts, believers? Isn’t the community what it is all for?
It is! It should be!
But still… my guts… it hurts...
What is going on here? I need to understand it for myself. I need to get to the bottom of this.
Let’s do it. Let’s do it now.
Deep breath.
One more.
Let’s figure it out.
So, what is community?
Hey, Google?
“Community is a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common.”
So far, so good. No symptoms.
It sounds quite innocent. Let’s say: the Vancouver community. I am part of it. It is nice to know I am.
We moved here 23 years ago. We moved to the city we liked. We dreamed of moving here. We read a lot of articles; we watched a lot of videos; we knew where we were heading to. We liked the city. So, the Vancouver community is simply the people who live here and love the place.
Did we join the community? That is a good question. We became part of the community. It simply happened. We moved in; we started living and working here. We did not sign any “community declaration”; we did not promise anything to anyone; we did not even know anyone from the community.
What about the second part of the definition: “having a particular characteristic in common”?
Again, there is nothing scary here. You can call a community any group of people with a common characteristic.
My wife is a teacher. She teaches. You can call people who teach the teaching community. All is good so far. How can you become a member of this community? Easy. Start teaching! I love teachers! It is such a noble profession. What a wonderful community it is that helps our kids grow!
When my wife started working as a teacher I was so proud of her. The only negative thing was, she was forced to join the teachers’ trade union. For some crazy reasons, you are not allowed to work in a Canadian school as a teacher if you are not a member of the teachers’ trade union. I do not understand how such a thing is legal, but it is what it is. You have to sign all their legal documents and obey all their rules; otherwise, there is no place for you in the school.
Interestingly enough, the leaders of the union always refer to themself as “we, the community of teachers”. But what a different community it is! They are active; they demand; they decide; they rule.
Here! Right here my guts hurt!
Of course, the trade union leaders act on behalf of all the teachers. Of course, they have their best interest in mind. Of course, for any decision, they can show you a very democratic process and the best practices. They claim to be only the voice of the community. But the truth is -- they only exist because the system they built does not allow ignoring them. Do you want to teach in school? Then you do what they say.
Let’s get to crypto. How did I become part of the Bitcoin community? In a sense, I just moved there. I did not tell anyone; I simply started mining bitcoins. Since I was too late to the game; I could not mine much, so I decided to purchase some. It was not easy. I remember sending my money to a Japanese bank, with little hope to get anything back for it. But after a month or so, I had a few bitcoins in my wallet. From that moment on, I have been a member of the bitcoin community.
I had a similar story with Ethereum. I mined Ethers starting from block one. I even became part of the Ethereum developer community! I found a bug in one of the early versions of the geth node. The program did not treat key storage properly on Mac. It was a very small and funny bug, but I found it and submitted the fix.
But what I see today is very different. Very, very different.
More and more projects I see behave like trade unions. They are all organizing and managing their communities. And you cannot do much if you are not part of those communities.
Unfortunately, not many people have such a sensitive stomach like me, so they eat whatever the leaders serve.
I think I can help you train your digestive system. If you hear something similar to the following, hold back your appetite.
- We are a community-driven project
- Before you proceed, confirm you signed our declaration of decentralization. (This is the funniest one.)
- Our community controls the token distribution.
- In order to participate in the air-drop, you have to subscribe to our Telegram channel.
- We have openly elected validators. You can become one if you convince the existing validators to give you enough staking tokens. If not, then the existing openly elected validators will continue mining new tokens for themselves.
- We will be decentralized later.
Do not get me wrong. I do not claim that they are all bad people. Not at all! There are many nice people in trade unions, too. They all benefit from being in the union, and they do not think they are doing anything wrong.
And do not get me wrong in a different way. I do not claim that all such managed projects will fail. Not at all. Some of them will be successful. Some will be very successful. I just do not agree with their definition of success.
For me, crypto is our chance to overcome centralization. We have finally found a technology to push back the most dangerous and brutal dictator of the world: collectivism. Crypto is our way to push the decision-making point back from the community to the individual. And since every decision in crypto comes with the 100% key holder responsibility, the whole crypto saga has hope.
Crypto is not for all. Crypto is for everyone.