In the last few months I have had a chance to dig deep into blockchain, from the technology to the regulation to the governance and tokenomics. Little did I know back then that I would meet the most engaged, positively minded community.
The first thing I discovered is that the crypto community is nothing like the tech community. Most people building and funding serious blockchain projects are not doing it for the money, they are doing it because they believe deep down in the power of self-governed communities to change the world for the better. This is also why so many burners are into crypto, the spirit is the same.
Of course there are people looking at it from a purely financial perspective. But I think I can say now that they are not those that lead that movement. They are just followers. Those that matter are ambitious, they are revolutionary, they live crypto to the point of being decentralized themselves. What most call being nomad, we call being decentralized. What most call a remote team, we call a decentralized team.
If “disrupting” XYZ was the leitmotiv of startups, “decentralizing” XYZ is the one of crypto. Just like tech founders of the old internet days cared about changing the status quo, crypto founders today care about fixing things. They don’t think so much about money as they do about impact. There is this magical, candid feeling in crypto that we can actually make a difference, that despite the hyper centralization of wealth and power in the past 20 years, a new world order can emerge.
I also learned that tokens are in fact not about currency. They are about creating incentives for people to form self-governing communities, behaving in a way that is beneficial to the group. Tokenizing a product doesn’t necessarily mean accepting crypto as payment: it means designing a product around the token so that the token dynamics make the product better. It’s basically about combining behavioral economics with product design. If you are a product manager, designer or entrepreneur, you must get into that now.
I have not been so excited about something since I started doing Artificial Intelligence 15 years ago. I really see now why people are saying blockchain will change the world. I get it. And I now believe it too.
Aside from converting my fiat money into crypto, I have also been working hard with my team to decentralize everything in our upcoming consumer product, Snips AIR. We are doing it because existing voice assistants represent everything that’s wrong with the internet: they use open source software but don’t contribute. They centralize all our personal data in one place, making us all vulnerable to mass surveillance and hacking. They exploit and monetize our personal data without giving us anything in exchange. They steal our privacy and the one of our families. They exploit developers without caring about their future, asking them to publish their products on appstores before arbitrarily kicking them out.
Decentralizing voice assistants is how we can fix that. By processing data on device, we don’t need to send it to the cloud. By using a blockchain to decentralize machine learning, we can reward users for their data, without ever actually access it. By using a token to power an appstore, we can let the community decide what can be built and by whom. Basically, Snips would know nothing about its users, nothing about their lives and have no say in what people can do with their assistant.
If you want to support our vision, and help us destroy the bad AIs, join our community at makers.snips.ai !
🚀
Rand