SAFE Network Hits the Mainstream

A few months ago, we were able to announce that MaidSafe had been acting as official advisors to the hit HBO show ‘Silicon Valley‘. The fifth season revolved around the startup trying to build a new decentralised peer-to-peer internet – sound familiar to anyone?

 

Cory Doctorow interviews Mike Judge (creator of HBO’s Silicon Valley) at the Decentralized Web Summit 2018

And now today, thanks to the eagle eyes of our global community, we’ve just found out that the SAFE Network also gets a mention in Disney’s new US Number 1 hit film ‘Wreck It Ralph 2: Ralph Breaks the Internet’. Check out the hugely familiar blue snowflake at the top of the screen below:-

Pretty cool, huh? As I wrote on the MaidSafe blog back in March of this year, my view is that these kind of things are much more important than simply being a ‘claim to fame’ and something to boast about down the pub with your mates. No, they are powerful precisely because they are ideas embedded deep within the well-worn but understood clothing of stories:-

“Significant changes in society are the culmination of many different factors. And it’s important to remember that every great societal change is preceded by the stories that first get created, shared and adopted by individuals. Stories bring people together, creating natural networks of individuals. They create the foundations that allow networks to grow and ultimately enable us to pursue goals collectively that are far greater than any one person can achieve alone. The pattern has been repeated time and again throughout history. And it’s a sign of the times that we live in that the focus of our obsession with the SAFE Network has now become the subject of a top-ranked TV show.”

So it’s nice to hear that story continue to grow arms and legs – this time round from Disney (traditionally the finest of all story tellers), in the form of the second highest-grossing US Thanksgiving film release to boot.

Plus it gives me kudos with the real bosses: the kids. I joined MaidSafe originally to improve the world that they grow into. We’re not at the destination quite yet – but we’re now driving through some pretty neat scenery… 😉

Different Twitter Uses

It’s been ten years since I first started using Twitter. It remains one of the most useful platforms for information discovery that I’ve ever used. And it’s been fascinating over the last decade to watch how different people approach it – before either loving or leaving Twitter for good.

I really like this tweetstorm from Michael Nielsen about his approach to using Twitter:-

It’s worth reading through. But in short, given the fact that you have total freedom of choice of who you follow and engage with, you only really have yourself to blame if Twitter isn’t one of the most fascinating places on the web for you. Of course, you’re not necessarily going to get into the depths of a discussion whilst restricted to 280 characters (an issue that’s definitely been alleviated by tweetstorms).

As Nielsen puts it:

“Intellectually, it feels collectively like having Nobel laureates in all disciplines hanging out in the tea room just down the hall. I can pop in whenever I like, hear them noodling, occasionally contribute myself”

“99% of our cities are dark matter: we know almost nothing of what is happening. Most of the people, conversations, and events that I would most enjoy I will never even hear about. Twitter changes this, in a significant way.”

“There’s definitely a place in life for good argument, a favourite pastime of mine. But with rare exceptions, Twitter isn’t it!”

“Many people I follow are unapologetically optimistic and idealistic, always working to make the world better. I find that infectious and buoying.”

I couldn’t agree more.

More Opinions, Fewer Facts

Social media opens up a world of communication and enables collaboration, as we all know. I’ve been thinking about this point from a recent Robin Hanson blog post in which he talks about how we tend to use social platforms these days:

“We more often forward what others have said rather than saying things ourselves, the things we forward are more opinionated and less well vetted, and are more about politics, conflict, culture, and personalities.”

Does that sound like a world that’s using technology to improve?

Pivot or Head Shot?

Last week, I finally got around to reading Nick Bilton’s ‘Hatching Twitter‘. The book explores the history of Twitter, including its  early incarnation as Odeo, a directory and search destination website for RSS-syndicated video and audio.  When it gradually soon became clear that the prospects for the business were limited, the search was on for a new idea…and Twitter was born.

Now, anyone who’s spent time around startups during the last decade or so knows about the cult of the pivot. As Tyson (Mike, not Fury) once said “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”. And often it’s just a simple fact that the amazing idea that you dreamed up with your buddies just doesn’t cut it when you finally ask people to pay hard cash to use it and find out things aren’t as you dreamed they might be.

But, contrary to startup mythology, maybe that rush to find a new, viable alternative for the business isn’t actually sensible. Quite the opposite. A couple of days ago, Fred Wilson raised the idea that perhaps a hard pivot is one of the worst things you can do – not only for yourself as an entrepreneur, but also for the investor for whom you are probably striving to save the business out of a sense of loyalty.

If that resonates with you, think very carefully. Using money you already have and a ready-assembled team is tempting. It’s easier than starting a new business from zero.  But you’ve now strayed into territory where people don’t care or worse, aren’t interested but content to tread water.

  • Your investors originally chose a different company to invest their money in than the one you now want to build.
  • Hopefully your current employees were hired because they were the best for Idea A. Can you honestly say they have the perfect expertise to drive the success of Idea B?
  • As an entrepreneur, you may have money in the bank to build the business – but you also own less of the equity. This is a problem because if you do manage to achieve success by knocking your guts out working hard over the years, you now have a smaller proportion of the spoils to look forward to – with the rest of the rewards going to those employees and investors who are unlikely to be the best for Idea B, as we’ve just seen.

At the end of the day, startup investors expect to lose money most of the time. Their rewards come from the fact that they invest in a couple of very successful ideas that provide a disproportionate return that dwarves that more than cover those losses.

So why persist if the mutual interest and enthusiasm has disappeared? Life is short – and zombie companies serve nobody in the long run. The head shot’s the way forward.

Bitcoin Black Friday – But Does It Matter?

It’s been an interesting week so far in the cryptocurrency community. At least, if the price of cryptocurrencies counts as one of your interests.

Headlines proclaiming a ‘Bitcoin bloodbath‘ have proliferated and certain websites have been freely updated with tales of impending doom. Meanwhile, the older hands in the Bitcoin (and the wider cryptocurrency) community have taken the downturn in price in exactly the same way as every one of the many (many) previous times – with increasingly vocal exhortations to buckle up and HODL…

I headed along to BBC Scotland this morning to give my thoughts on the business section of Good Morning Scotland over breakfast. I hadn’t been on the radio for quite a while and I’m not embarrassed to say that I still get a huge buzz from being on the radio. But, alas, 4 minutes is far too short a time to put across my thoughts coherently in any form of comprehensive response to the current price volatility.

Or at least: it may have sounded coherent – but I always end up thinking about just how many explanations I didn’t have time to go through that I would loved to have put out there to trigger a response (positive or negative) in those otherwise more focused on their daily consumption of cornflakes across the nation.

But let’s sum it up here. I remain hugely bullish about Bitcoin as a technology and as a rapidly accelerating (although not in any way guaranteed) store of value over the next couple of years in particular. It may, of course, fail. But if it does, it will return, in some way, shape or form – because the world now has a mental model for how an independent currency can bootstrap itself in an incredibly fast period of time outside the control of nation states.

As for the thousands of other cryptocurrencies: I’m convinced many of these will also be successful. However, at this early stage, I’m even more convinced that the signs are strong that many will not be.

And if you had to guess which ones fall into the latter camp, it doesn’t take a particularly sharp intellect to suggest that the group is probably going to have more than its fair share of representatives from projects that raised multiple millions of dollar in a 2017 ICO – a result of an almost perfect storm where we’re seeing:

  • a globally-distributed, 24-hour community of increasingly upset and abusive investors in the original ICO for whom delivery delays are unacceptable – with such delays being inevitable due to the vastly complex goals of many projects that in some cases were only imagined a couple of years ago (in which development is only now just starting in earnest);
  • inexperienced teams building crypto startups (traditionally a stage of company growth with a very high failure rate) that are also taking on far more regulatory and legal risk than is normal in the otherwise precarious startup world – (i.e. if you want to try raising the stakes, try messing around with other people’s concept of money before they’ve had the chance to apply their rules to raise any possible barriers to harmful competition against them);
  • founders for whom the incentive to slave away under extreme duress for the next decade or so has been removed – life-changing money has instead landed in their accounts at the start of the journey as opposed to at the end, so no more waiting until after a decade of hard slog to achieve a liquidity event (via an IPO or sale for example).

 

    Now, to be clear, I remain hugely positive about developments, a large number of projects and the general direction of travel. But it’s important that the public aren’t being misled by headlines here that do nothing to change the progress that is being made, by very many teams of individuals, all around the world.

My point here really is the same as it has been for a number of years now – that the money is not the story here. The focus remains as it has always been – on the technology and what it means to us all. The ability to coordinate human activity on a massive, global scale by the evolution of new incentivisation methods that spreads both knowledge and helps with the building of infrastructure that will push society towards a more equitable world of direct, peer-to-peer interactions.

It’s important that we all, each of us, gets involved so that we don’t inadvertently let others create a system in which we lose the power to innovate. And for those whose involvement goes no further than speculation on the price, so be it.

Because price is the best gateway drug there ever was to lead the masses on to the technology that really has a chance of changing many lives around the world – and for more than just those who dreamed they’d make a killing in a bear market.

Taleb & Naval

Just a quick post this evening to recommend a video that’s well worth the time.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Naval Ravikant are two of the brightest minds out there at the moment. So you know that when they sit down for a chat at a blockchain conference, things can only be ultra-interesting.

There’s so much in this video I don’t know where to begin. So you should probably just watch it yourself and see if your view changes on any of the many topics that they cover. It’s a common occurrence whenever you hear either one of these guys speak.

Drinking from the Firehose

I heard a comment on a podcast a couple of weeks ago that has really stuck in my head. Seth Godin was asked how he deals with the feeling of being overwhelmed (i.e. with too much work to handle). He put it brilliantly:

“Drinking from a fire hose is a really bad way to get hydration”

In the way that only Seth can, he then sums up precisely how crucial it is to get the signal-to-noise ratio right in your life. He doesn’t spend minutes/hours scrolling through the constant Twitter or Facebook updates; he doesn’t go to meetings if at all possible; nor does he spend time watching TV.

He points out that people tend to go to 3 – 6 meetings a day – so it’s no surprise that they then feel overwhelmed by the work piling up in the background. Whereas the reality is that most meetings aren’t actually necessary – a short email would have the same effect…

In other words, being stressed out from being too busy is a systems problem. Seems related to this point that I retweeted earlier today:

How many of us end up auto-consuming YouTube suggestions for hours on end? Reading through Twitter updates in search of that one golden nugget of a post, seeking knowledge or outrage (or ideally both)? And how much time can we each honestly say that we spend with the levels of concentration that allow us to do deep work?

So if things are a bit hectic, maybe you need to start avoiding those water cannons and start pouring your own drinks.

Surveillance Car Capitalism

Tweet of the day:

If you stop to think for a second about what the most likely future outcome here is on the current trajectory, things get pretty scary, pretty fast. When it comes to data there are very different concerns and goals flying around, caused by the misalignment of incentives between individuals and businesses.

The next decade is going to see a huge acceleration in digital data exhaust trails from each of us and the problem around ownership of data generated from the use of cars alone has the potential to be huge.

Last year, Intel suggested that it would only take one million autonomous cars to generate the same data as three billion people.  In other words, one car generating 4,000GB of data based on just one hour of driving.

The answer certainly doesn’t lie in the hands of the car manufacturers. And it’s hard to believe that the regulators will be able to truly fix the issue directly either. We need to fundamentally reimagine how data is secured and controlled by each individual. And I think I might just know how we can do it…

(And here’s something I wrote four years ago about the same thing…progress seems slow – until before you know it, it’s in the rear view mirror and everyone’s made the decisions)

Fast Bach

You’ll often hear people complaining about the pace of modern life and the fact that things just keep getting faster. Turns out that’s true of classical music as well – or at least Bach in a recent survey:-

“The labels found that modern recordings of the work have shaved off one-third of the length of recordings from 50 years ago, quickening by about a minute per decade.”

That certainly backs up the evidence that pop music is getting both shorter and faster as the attention span of the audience continues to shrink.

You might not get a huge amount of leeway when it comes to changing the delivery of the classic pieces of classical music. But it seems as if the same constraints don’t apply with popular music. So if you’re writing disposable pop and want to make your new songs stand out, perhaps what you should actually be doing is thinking about slowing them down.

Is Science Getting Harder?

I came across a fascinating article (‘Science is Getting Less Bang For Its Buck‘) published today by Patrick Collison (Stripe co-founder) and Michael Nielsen (Researcher at Y Combinator).

The suggestion is that despite a constant increase over the past few decades in both the amount of funding and number of career professionals focused on scientific research, the rate of new ground-breaking discoveries is, contrary to popular assumption, in fact slowing down.

I have to admit, I’m not entirely convinced by the method they used – surveying top scientists who were then asked to score the importance of historic scientific discoveries. To be fair, they do point out the limitations of adopting this approach. But the questions that the results raise are particularly interesting, because it makes you think about some follow-up questions, such as:-

  • If many of the most significant discoveries have been made (e.g. Einstein’s general theory of relativity), then is all we’re doing now looking into the details of these previously-discovered ‘lands’ of knowledge?
  • What justification is there for continuing to pour money into scientific research if the results are actually getting worse?
  • Are we actually becoming less productive as humans overall (as espoused by economists such as Tyler Cowen in ‘The Great Stagnation‘)?

My instinct (which could be entirely wrong) is that a lot of this comes down to two things. The first is that with every passing year, the requirements to become truly expert in almost every scientific field becomes that much more onerous. There’s just more information flying around and being layered on top of previous data. Which in turn makes it very hard to assess the true impact of discoveries as and when they’re made.

And my second point is somewhat related (and also hinted at in the article). It is impossible to assess the current state of the art without being subtly influenced by your own approach towards progress. For the pessimists out there, it’s always easier to believe that most of the major discoveries in human existence have been made and we’re more likely to be successful in optimising what we have rather than seeking to make brand new major discoveries.

However, if like me, you are more optimistic about the future, you’re more likely to believe that discoveries are still continually being made on a regular basis but that with so many more potentials combinations of research outcomes throughout our connected, data-swamped society, the time for some of the most impactful discoveries is likely to take longer, as good ideas now may have a longer journey out of the lab before they can bubble through to the popular consciousness.

Take a read through the article and see what you think. I have to say I’ve got no idea how Patrick has time for such things whilst also running a billion-dollar startup…If you’ve not heard much about him before, I definitely recommend following him on Twitter and checking out any of the podcasts where he chats about his influences (the Farnham Street episode is a good starter).