Running for Witness: Embracing the Crypto Life™

Dear Steem community,
Recently over coffee, a friend asked me questions about real-estate properties and businesses on the blockchain, seeing that I have been advising a few small projects over the past year. It was a long talk, but I'll try to summarize it. It has a lot to do with both Steem, Tau, and my decision to run as witness:-

There are plenty of unsolvable problems that no blockchains or any other technologies will ever be able to solve. For example: really knowing what's in the real world around us, from legal ownership to the things that I'm saying here in this post. Blockchains or any records of anything in life would rely on sensors (or oracles, human-beings, etc) to sense. But sensors ultimately require input, which is something that breaks trust since we can just provide kind of signal, true or false, as input. So relationships and social networks still matter in the end even if we are to use the blockchain as a trust protocol for meta-information.

Calling something smart-contract and printing data into it doesn't immediately make it trustworthy, obviously. So if an entrepreneur is going into the business of trying to shove things like identities and real-estate titles into a blockchain as proof-of-something in the real world, is it actually going to hold water if there are no massive communities revolving around it, using the platform's token as an everyday currency?

Just about every popular language out there is based on Turing-completeness, all of which are undecidable in nature. We can express and build anything that we want with infinite complexities. This phenomenon isn't only restricted in the realm of human languages like English or Chinese, but also in most programming languages like C++, Java, Solidity, etc. If you've wondered why our human laws and computer programs can sometimes be so unexpectedly buggy and insanely messy, then look no further beyond this problem with the meta-language that we've been using to intermediate our communications, which are all based on infinite and unrestricted computational complexity. This is why bringing this state of affairs into the heart of blockchain architectures may not be the best use case of the innovation all along.

Ever wonder why blockchain development time is slower than usual? Seeing that blockchains or decentralized applications are ultimately social platforms that aim to go beyond the downsides of traditional structures, I now think the choice of language might actually be a huge technical flaw that blockchain protocols ought to avoid inheriting. Solving this very specific problem may give rise to many first-time features that are socially useful. This is why I think Tau might very well be the giant leap in blockchain magic. If you've never heard of it before, check out their fresh new website at https://idni.org. Try some of the blogposts too, such as Tau and the Crisis of Truth.

So again, here we have a scenario where we may have poor choice in meta-language being recklessly brought over into the realm of blockchain protocols for the past decade. This is why building stuff on application-general blockchains like Ethereum, Tezos, and such typically consume plenty of time and resources, sometimes even prone to inspire the solving of unsolvable problems. Perhaps even moreso than the Internet bubble in the 90s, seeing that there are no centralised hands to tame the infinite complexities of the imagination and getting things done in some certain way that works for the mass market, so to speak. It's also difficult for users to find trustworthy applications, projects, and communities that are relevant to them. It's really a different ballgame when it comes to building a world of decentralized networks.. that works.

For me, it's getting clearer these days that it may just be way more convenient and secure to build on platforms that only deal with limited complexities such as Steem, even though any development on its codebase still works on the basis of turing-completeness. Fortunately, here we have significantly lesser problems to worry about: we're on an application-specific blockchain afterall, which is why it is much easier for development. Its simplicity is built around proven utility with some form of rigidity. With the upcoming Smart Media Tokens, developers and entrepreneurs can innovate around certain powerful ideas extensively without being dragged down by uncertainties.

On being a deviant.
With those points out of the way, I went on telling my friend that I thought I may be too opinionated to be an adviser for entrepreneurs looking into the blockchain hypetrain, as I couldn't even recommend anyone building on the popular platforms like Ethereum now. For fun, maybe, but I just can't recommend it anymore seeing that it's currently sitting at tens of billions in market cap, but only serving about 10,000 users a day in its decentralized applications. It's just still not good enough compared to our centralised counterparts.

So it is a bit of a killjoy for most developers and entrepreneurs when I recommend both Steem and Tau, blockchains that aren't ranking highly enough on Coinmarketcap to inspire confidence. It certainly has affected and limited my opportunities as a wannabe adviser and content producer in the space, since my investment thesis now mainly resides in these underdogs. But my good friend was quick to remind me that I might actually be giving the best unpopular advice that serious entrepreneurs need to hear. Am I?

I'm definitely not fudding here at all. Just speaking my mind. If anything, I'd recommend any communities with good sensible ideas to consider building on both Steem and Tau, even if that may entail waiting for the painfully long developments.

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Embracing the Crypto Life™.
So my buddy's pat in the back made me think that I should now just continue to pursue my interests 100% in this space, wherever it takes me. So what's this Crypto Life™ about? It's just a clickbait and it really just means me being invested in my investments. That's how it all becomes currency I guess. I think it's a powerful idea.

Cryptocurrency makes this a possibility. This is why Steem Power is still appealing to me as some unit of investment after two years more than everything else, although I think it could do way better with some modifications. It's just a hard conversation to sustain and keep track of at the moment. Anyway, if Tau works out well in the future, then we may begin to truly scale discussions and figure out better economic incentives. Perhaps even develop and deploy them easily. The better model will eventually rule the markets anyway, so no time will be wasted on debates.