The Future of Human Curiosity (OSS)
Human life similar to human curiosity is nonfungible. The future of human curiosity is decentralized and open source.
Since mankind fell to earth billions of human beings have passed through this earthly dimension, yet not one of us has been the same. We are all created equal yet there will never be a human that is the same as you. We are as unique as our fingerprints. Our nonfungibility is by cosmic design. It fuels our social intelligence and drives our species' curiosity. The over-ambitious desire to be different from who we are in search of joy and happiness is like running away from yourself.
We are more alike than different and more different than the same. Our relationship to technology as a society is also nonfungible. Uniquely different yet correlated. The human relationship with technology is always shifting multiplying and dividing. The social and technological relationship between centralized and decentralized (private, sovereign, censorship-resistant) technology is actively being reshaped by the open-source software technology movement. Despite many centralized actors leveraging decentralization, this remains a David and Goliath narrative.
Curiosity is our first teacher. Our mother's womb provides the perfect environment for these first lessons in curiosity. This is our shared nonfungible experience. The womb determines the fashion and makeup of our final design. Mother earth is the second teacher. Fore it is mankind that was taught the name of things and then set the value of things in the physical world. Man's creation of language to communicate these values is a miracle. How we communicate with each other is the ecology of our existence. Our curiosity for one another is interwoven in our communication and is a testament to our evolving family and community values. These values are what fuel the evolution of our species. There is a limit to how absolutely alike we can become to each other. And there is an intangible limitation on how much we can actually change the human being and who we are as a creation. We are of the greatest design. That incentivizes us to learn from each other.
My brother and I visited my grandmother in East St. Louis before going to see my Aunt in Pasadena Hills. Which happens to be the only place in the country with 24 municipalities in a 4-mile radius. It's my first time visiting and spending this much time on the St. Louis side of the river. My brother and I sat and talked with my Aunt and her husband about family, food, politics, and current events. I found myself still reflecting on the conversation I had just had with my grandma. While at her home visiting, my brother reminded my grandmother of a story she had once told him. It was about the first time she saw a car. I imagine seeing a car for the first time is similar to the first time certain people heard about cryptocurrency, NFTs, crypto art, DAOs, and stablecoins. The curiosity value was mind-blowing. At least for me, it was.
At 6 years old my grandmother lived in a part of Mississippi that was far from town. One day, she saw something extremely strange while standing on the porch. It was a moving object approaching from far away. It was on the dirt road leading to her house. She urgently ran to get her grandmother to report what she saw and how strange and indescribable the moving object was. She rushed her grandmother out to the porch to explain the strange phenomenon. Her grandmother looked up the road and calmly told her it was a car, a Ford Model T. Her grandmother told her a few Ford Model T cars were driving around town. My grandmother expressed how amazed she was to be one of the first to see a car. Until then, she had only seen horses and wagons on the street.
An interesting thing about curiosity is that curiosity is a muscle best used when exercised. I imagine it was much easier to nurture a healthy and curious imagination before HBO and the internet.
NFTs (non-fungible tokens) is the next generation of the internet. The decentralized, open-source software revolution was pioneered by Bitcoin. Nonfunigble tokens will absorb insurance, healthcare, education, arts, entertainment, travel, etc. You will be able to purchase travel insurance and a few Ghana travel tokens in the same crypto art wallet but perhaps different decentralized NFT exchanges. Purpose-driven tokens require communities. These communities will be disruptive to the social science of cultural values similar to how cryptocurrency disrupted money and assets.
https://youtu.be/3_8CPpVaaGA?t=762
The next generations of tokens fuse digital experiences with the physical real world. NFTs will offer us an opportunity to reset how we see and value community, public goods, and everyday transactions. It will decentralize living costs, decrease leisure costs, and propel us further into a long-awaited cultural revolution.
Decentralized open-source software is here to stay.
Tokens offer renewable rights to access value and participate in economies of choice. The choice of alternate economics is social monetary freedom. This is no small thing. The evolution of online interaction and commerce tells the story of how we arrived at the decentralized, open-source software revolution. It's a narrative about the interplay of information economics and human coordination.
Evolution of the Internet.
- Web 1 - Mass Communication (Hello World) -Information Economics
- Web 2 - Interactions (Frontend Revolution) -Platform Economy
- Web 3 - Stewardship & Access (Backend Revolution) -Token Economy
(Source; Sherwin Voshmgir TEGG, Token engineering presentation in 2019.)
Tokenization of economies is a new interdisciplinary science for designing simple and complex, social-economic systems. Sherwin Voshmgir is a leading voice in token engineering.
Voshmgir explains the narrative of the internet lifecycle as stages of evolution. In Web3, we are witnessing information economic freedom from platforms. Information becomes decentralized and managed by the host and the guest who both can move around the internet freely. These newly acquired data rights present a broad list of challenges for conventional business and governance models. Data freedom presents an array of solutions and advantages for sovereign citizenship and other real-world applications.
Simple Token Systems.
- Represents assets
- Enabled access rights to goods and services
Simple Token Systems can be described as access to things that are already available in the same financial context. Ex. security tokens and utility tokens. Simple tokens require significant legal engineering and their success normally depends on centralized regulation. They can be fungible or nonfungible.
Complex Token Systems.
- Generic token systems
- Purpose-driven tokens
Complex Tokens Systems require considerable economic engineering. ex. Bitcoin and Ethereum are examples of purpose-driven tokens that enable new coordination solutions by enabling a peer to peer transactional communication. Complex tokens procure a new type of value creation.
https://youtu.be/hyMMl33w1z0?t=203
(Source; Shermin Voshmgir, DeFi Summit London, September 2019 at Imperial College.)
Tokens have been around for ages in different forms and fashions. Simple tokens can be fungible or nonfungible. Yet complex tokens are evolving decentralized open-source technology. Complex tokens have the means to conquer insurance, health, travel, and gaming. Complex tokens are the next wave of "token-mania". Digital token assets are no longer defined by restricted values. A decade after Bitcoin we are now discovering the token economies that blockchain technology uncovered.
What is next for NFTs, DAOs and stablecoins. The best from NFTs and stablecoins are yet to come. The rate of change is a factor that is often mislabeled as the change itself. While change can seem instantaneous, the rate of change varies and determines overall change. Like the technology function in economics, the rate of change in open source technology increases exponentially. Where we end up will be where the best curiosities carry us.
We are positioned at the dawn of token engineering. The next generation of token economies will solve human-centered transactional, economic coordination problems like travel agents, Uber, Airbnb, and Instacart. these centralized models will face off with their nonfungible decentralized competitors. Fee-based economies will migrate over to token economies to leverage the social-economic incentives of DAOs and NFTs, self-sovereign identity (SSI), DIDs, and stablecoins.
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