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StartUp is a TV Series that ran from 2016-2018 for 3 seasons with 10 episodes each. I have seen first two seasons a while ago, and just recently watched the third season. This post is not intended as a review on StartUp in general. My only focus in this post is on how it failed to properly understand and present the idea of decentralized networks in finance and social media.
Spoiler Alert: While I don't intend to tell how the story unfolds, this post will/may contain spoilers.
The show has a top quality acting, picture, and overall cinematography. I would assume such shows would cost a lot of money to produce. My disappointment is how it fails to conduct a proper research to what decentralized finance and decentralized networks mean and how they work. I would assume such research wouldn't cost much compared to what is normally spend in producing quality TV Series.
This reminds me a story I have read/heard in the past, how the CEO of AOL was trying to explain internet to its investors and investors remained confused and kept asking - "Who owns the internet?"
If you remove the idea of decentralization from StartUp and consider it as any other tech startup, the show is ok to watch. It does have other interesting stories. However, the core story of the series revolves around "decentralized finance" and "decentralized social network". Wouldn't anybody expect at least an attempt to be accurate what those two concepts mean?
The storyline of the series is that three strangers: a banker, a gang boss, and a hacker end up working together to create a decentralized finance solution called GenCoin. Throughout the show it is clear that everybody knows that bitcoin exists and what it is. But somehow this GenCoin idea that hacker has been working on and building suppose to be a solution to bring financial tools to millions of unbanked people.
So, my first problem with that story is, why would you need another solution when there already is a solution for that - bitcoin. We are lead to believe that GenCoin is should be something better or different. That leads to the next problem.
GenCoin seeks funding from venture capitals, otherwise for some reason it can't or won't happen. This is a huge problem. A decentralized solution, would not need venture capital funding. That would defeat the purpose of the decentralization from the start.
Failing to secure such funding, they end up getting some funding from criminal entities. At this point I am thinking the purpose of this show is to present decentralized solutions as something criminal in its core. But also, I a thinking the producers are just incompetent on the topic.
Towards the end of the second season GenCoin is a successful project that is making a lot of money to all parties involved, including criminal entities. But the season ends by the founder of GenCoin gaining access through backdoor to some financial documents which she turns over to an FBI agent, and it leads arrests and running out of the country of the criminal entities. This news results in GenCoin going to zero. lol ok.
The third season focuses on Anarknet, supposedly a decentralized social network that was created along with GenCoin. But when GenCoin went to zero, somehow Anarknet survived.
In presenting Anarknet, they show it as a social media network website. But also they present is as something as a dark net, where people can sell and buy illegal items. Wait what? So it is decentralized network, accessible to everybody via normal website, and anybody can buy/sell illegal items?
The founder (hacker) leaves the country into hiding in Cuba because of what she did at the end of the season two which brought GenCoin to zero. Now Araknet is thriving with the rest of the team. They have a legitimate company, nice offices, big team of programmers, 50 million users, etc. The network as multiple sites for market, social, chat, etc. But also, this network is somehow decentralized? Hmmm. Ok.
Not only this network is decentralized, but it is mainly used by terrorists in Syria to buy weapons. The gang boss who now became an entrepreneur and a Co-CEO of this Araknet, left his past. But when he goes to check on his previous gang fellows, he finds out they have upgraded their street business to online and selling all kinds of illegal stuff on Araknet. Lol.
None of this is making sense.
Now, NSA figuring out that terrorists buying weapons on the network come to Araknet and demand some data. The team is like nope, it is a decentralized network. Can't do even if we wanted to.
It gets even crazier when the story goes to show that they actually can. One of the co-CEO asks a coder to write a "police protocol" that would return the list of suspicious conversations and activities on the network. The code works as intended and returns some results which contain someone ordering a hitman on their network.
Anyway, the storyline keeps going even crazier, portraying things that have nothing to do with decentralized systems in reality.
So this company Araknet is a centralized network, can't be anything else based on how they presented it. Yet they scream and cry that it is decentralized. It can't be. They are the only ones who have full control over the network. At the same time Facebook and Google are mentioned multiple times as centralized networks, while Araknet is not. So dumb. These people have no understanding of how decentralized networks work.
Moreover, towards the end they deploy an update to the network. Hmmm. A company deploying update to a decentralized network. Nope, doesn't work like that. While this update is being deployed, a NSA mole inside the company manages to send a virus to the network. The virus wipes hard drives for more than half of the users of the network. Omg! So decentralized!
There are many more bits of stories crazy like this that make zero sense for decentralized networks. It just shows how bad of research they have done on the topic. Alternatively, I can only conclude the intend was to present decentralized solutions as something only used for criminal purposes.
They had a great opportunity to present a great story that could have been a great success. Either due to incompetence or a purpose to misinform the audience they couldn't explain what decentralized networks are.
In decentralized systems there are no companies that control everything. There are many players in the system, that no one entity can have sole control.
Decentralized systems are open source, that the code is available to all participants to review and contribute.
Decentralized systems are transparent.
StartUp has failed or intentionally misinformed its audience in regards to what decentralized financial solutions are with their GenCoin. They also failed or intentionally misinformed their audience about decentralized social networks with their poor presentation of Araknet.
If you have watched the series, let me know what you think in the comments.