Hi everyone,
As investors, we enjoy news that comes from the Big 3. We need to taper our expectations and understand that true adoption will come from the community. Waiting for B2C solutions to be provided may/may not produce results in a timely fashion.
Thanks,
Philippe
Thank you, Phillipe, I’m glad I tuned into this as I’ve been eager for any news on Voltaire, the DC fund and the proposal process (when submittable!) and it was heartening to hear where your heart and mind are in the process. Great video.
I wrote up some thoughts on what you brought up regarding community projects being the catalyst for adoption, and figured I’d share it with you and the community fresh- pardon anything that should’ve been edited out, and thanks for reading!
What connections are going to gain Ada wider adoption? Is it corporate B2B partnerships coming in with a large number of users? Or is it going to be a bottom up process where small businesses, collectives, communities, etc build on cardano and bring their people along?
In the B2B world, the average user does not have a strong connection to the business partner. On the grassroots level, the average user has a stronger relationship with the producer. In the former, there is not much that connects avg users together or unifies them in such a way as to collectively raise their status- they are there for a good deal, access to common products built in a commodity system. In the latter, the user is present to be a part of a unique supply chain (for example). At their best, they hold a set of values that connects them to like individuals around the globe. And where there is shared value, shared stake, there is potential to make Think Globally Act Locally a scalable reality.
As Emurgo seeks partnership with big business, the Cardano foundation is cultivating relationships with sovereign powers, which promises to onboard millions of individuals at once. Progress has been made in Ethiopia and Mongolia, though we don’t hear a lot about them recently. The opportunity to build a national economy from the ground up in an open-source, decentralized way before e.g. China can move in with its state-run global digital currency is not to be ignored. But, can we rely on heads of state–vying for power, thinking short-term, desperate for fast liquidity— to ignore China money in favor of a more bold and (in light of China’s spreading influence) defiant move on behalf of one’s constituents with the goal of increasing their individual financial sovereignty?
I think that for cardano to realize its dream of being a decentralized platform for the People, a financial operating-system for the world, the community needs to stay focused on finding and funding (and if you feel the calling, building) the right community projects rather than leaving it up to e.g. Emurgo to onboard the right businesses or the Foundation to contract with the right governments. As Phillipe said later in the video, these types of partnerships are likely going to be business for IOG not necessarily Ada anyway. dApps and dapp-like things, on the other hand, need Ada. I hope that Emurgo and the Foundation can connect their dots. But it is my belief that the community is going to lead the way to the dream of banking the unbanked and, more ambitiously, rescuing dominion over our collective fate from the selfish few and back into the hands of the reponsible many.
That is why the Foundation putting $10mil into the D.C. fund is a powerful act. I believe that, should Cardano live to see the success that it’s engineering deserves, this $10 million will have proven to boost real adoption compared to a similar expenditure in the b2b or sovereign space. I love that Charles is matching DC funds for podcasts. It’s the benevolent money in the space that is going to help projects get over the initial hump [and podcasts seem like a great place to start since podcasts are a great way to connect the right people and get the experts and community to work together to make things happen.] I digress.
If the D.C. fund spurs outsized activity on the platform as I’m predicting it will if the community plays its cards, this should translate to, not stand in opposition to, more big business partnerships, more pressure from citizens on governments to facilitate mass adoption. We can make a play for a corporation’s dispassionate users or for citizens compelled by their government, And let those people represent cardano to the wider world. But when we make a different play, a play for users that are excited about what cardano makes possible for them and their communities-- when they start to see how the platform can help them access markets, solve problems, create opportunities, then they are truly bought in. Then we can leverage these real users and tell businesses, “hey if you play with us, you can access all these people, and they’re paying attention. We recommend you come to them with something good.”
I am not a DC-maximalist. I don’t denigrate the other approaches and I, selfishly as an ada hodler and future IOG investor (when public!), wish them all the success. I am not without bias, as I have a dream of wiring the regenerative economy with Cardano, and I will submit a proposal to the D.C. fund asking the community to help in that project. I don’t have an ear with big business or heads of state. But I have an ear out for the big story that history is telling us, and it is moving into a story of grassroots empowerment, connection, de-globalization, de-centralization, re-localization, stabilization through community and real value, inter-reliance. Don’t get me wrong, the empire will consolidate as much power as it can, but if we make it out of the century in peace then it’s thanks to democratization pushing power to the edges.
People are thirsty for solutions, and the solutions that will emerge will not look like the solutions to 20th century problems. They won’t look like the solutions to 2019 problems we see in the news. They will emerge where few are looking- on the edges. And as they stack, they will continue to push more power to the edges, and generate a feedback loop that ensures that progress will continue to scale.
I invested in Ada because I want to live in a world where Cardano is home for the people-to-people economy. In turn, I am putting my focus on the use-cases of the operating system that I want to see in my world. In the end, it isn’t just about adoption- it’s what mass adoption makes possible. As above so below.
How many failed Nation-plays can Cardano weather? How many business partnerships can e.g. Emurgo release with great fanfare only to fizzle out? The question of where we the community focus our hopes and dreams is an important one to consider.
I don’t spend time following any other crypto projects, but from what I see of our community, it is on very strong footing. There is an ethos of kindness, candidness, intelligence, patience. We can do great things if we pull together in the spirit that the engineers, leaders, and teams that build cardano have done, we will move mountains.
Excited for the time when the answer to #whenvoltaire is now!
Well said.
Thanks @philpa!
Charles announced that on 9/7 (a week from Monday!) they will begin accepting submissions for the DC Fund. Earier in the summer, he said that they would start by making an official announcement about the submission process… I assumed that this announcement would be then followed by a period of time to allow community members etc. to form their proposals accordingly before submissions began… If the floodgates open all at once, does this give a leg up on proposals that are submitted earlier, that are sitting right now, ready to ship? Can the community see submissions right away (after the submittable vetting process)?
If we are going to help empower community members who don’t have a strong background in crypto/cardano to bring their novel ideas to cardano, it would behoove us to make the submission/voting process more widely inclusive, and this would require some period of time after the process is made public. Otherwise, the news may just echo in the ecosystem- it may only make sense to those that understand the tech- and not ring out widely as it should.
Cardano is, for whatever reason, ignored, demonized, attacked from the wider crypto community as a whole. It’s akin to how Ron Paul or Bernie Sanders are treated by the mass media. The crypto news sites, podcasts, etc aren’t going to do the work of letting the wider world know about how great a milestone the DC fund is. It is going to be the cardano community’s responsibility to find people outside of the cryptosphere, people with great ideas, doing great work in areas that the platform can empower in 2021. So unless we as community members get the word OUT and help make the process welcoming to the outsiders, I think we’ll see a lot of projects that are developer-driven instead of real-world driven and we will miss a huge opportunity.
So let’s as a community make the most of this milestone. Let’s use it as an opportunity to explain things like: the benefits of proof-of-stake over centralized mining, voting, smart contracts, etc. Let’s get lots of relatable and exciting ideas on the table for the DC fund, things that the outsider can understand and get passionate about (enought to buy in and Vote). And let’s make sure that the proposals can be sorted and searched with ease so folks interested in “supply chain” can find what they’re looking for and the people interested in “non-fungible tokens” go where they need to go, for instance. Hopefully, Submittable will make all this possible, but it’s too important to leave to hope!
Let the cryptosphere stay obsessed with personalities like vitalik and gavin- and let Cardano make its appeal to the real world.
I’m not sure to be honest. We were supposed to hear updates at the end of July. I’m looking forward to hearing more details of what goes into the process. I’m also looking forward to seeing how this evolves into a decentralized voting process. Submittable isn’t revolutionary when it comes to crypto and won’t utilize blockchain in the voting process. This will just be a temporary solution to begin voting.
Hi there!
Pls help me to the following:
Where is the appropriate forum to presenting an idea-proposal for Voltaire, specifically a voting system?
Let me present, in brief, the so called ManifoldVotingAlgorithm, or BalancedVotingPower. The algorithm is based on three pillars and accordingly in three descrete, autonomous and dynamic partitions of the voting power of each community member.
More specifically, the triple quantity/quality vote comprises of:
So please, give me directions how to proceed, in order to present this Voltaire proposal timely and at the right place. ty