Sell Your Vision

Not down the river. Just with passion. So says Kevin Rose:-

As the founder of Digg it was my job to drive the product vision through design, development, and finally into the hands of our customers. As we grew in size (both traffic and headcount) it became harder to get alignment around our (6-month) product roadmap.

Common office chatter: “this isn’t scalable,” “this will take months to build,” “I’m not sure this will work,” “can you cut out this feature to save time?” “have we tested this in a focus group?”

It was my job to counter these doubts by selling the vision. This is something I failed to do. In the end I compromised on functionality, building the easier “me too” features that were standard in the industry, while leaving dozens of deeper features on the cutting room floor.

A team aligned behind a vision will move mountains. Sell them on your roadmap and don’t compromise — care about the details, the fit and finish. Only work with those that have (as Larry Page puts it) “a healthy disregard for the impossible,” and push everyone on your team until it’s uncomfortable.

Creative Currencies Chiasma: An Unmitigated Success!

I’ve written about a number of times before about trying to kickstart the discussion around digital currencies and particularly blockchain technologies throughout Scotland. Not because I believe in any way that I somehow have all the answers. But simply because I see it as a crucial topic for anyone who wants to understand an game-changing development that will inevitably shape the future of our society in a wide range of ways. 

Last week Edinburgh University’s Design Informatics ran the Creative Currencies Chiasma, a ground-breaking 2.5 day residential course focused on helping people to develop digital currency business ideas from a standing start. I was delighted to be asked to help out after previously speaking at a couple of the warm-up events. There’s no doubt in my mind that as a group, the participants really did something unique over that few days. I take little credit on that front though, full kudos must go to Chris Speed and Debbie Maxwell who designed and project managed the whole event under the Design In Action umbrella.

The event was unique (check out more pictures of the event here) because it handpicked people from a wide variety of backgrounds, mixing those with extensive knowledge of crypto-currencies with newcomers, locked them in a room for a few days and stood back to see what sort of new business ideas would result. With the added icing on the cake being the prospect of £20,000 funding being awarded to the best ideas.

The first night of the event kicked off with a great introductory talk by Chris as he explored the hidden potential in the flows of data (including money) through our cities, after which Patrick Stevenson-Keating gave a fascinating talk about his recent project at the Design Museum in London where he took on the task of re-imagining financial services using a design perspective. Some really great ideas there – how about a lengthy credit card that lets you pay more money the further you insert it into the card reader for example?

George Kelsey from RBS then spoke after dinner, mentioning that whilst he wasn’t a fan of Bitcoin itself (unsurprisingly, Ripple appears to be the current frontrunner for those within the bank), he remains completely convinced that blockchain technologies are going to change the world. Whilst we perhaps have differing views on the details in the future scenarios that could play out, I felt that was a pretty significant statement from an experienced bank representative.

After that, I gave a general introduction to Bitcoin to the group before we all decamped to another room to run through a blockchain workshop that we’d devised using a combination of lego, trading cards, stickers, Countdown and all manner of other ecosystem tweaks as trading conditions evolved! We’d tried running it out on a student class a few weeks earlier with great success. The ideas that they’d come up with after having their minds opened to the possibilities of having this secure, immutable record and programmable money were truly fascinating given the short time they’d been given. The same happened here, no doubt nicely lubricated by a few drinks. The attendees at the Chiasma didn’t disappoint with their thoughts on the future..

The evening then evolved into a further investigation of the potential for cryptocurrencies into the wee small hours. It shows what happens when you get the right people into the same room – I could tell that the level of engagement was going to be immense when the earlier dinner chat at my end of the table revolved around the existential threat of AI, drones, 3D printing and the re-engineering of the financial system….

The next morning, it was up bright and early to set up camp within the RBS Technology Solutions Centre. I certainly wasn’t alone I’m sure in feeling slightly strange ideating through concepts that could fundamentally disintermediate the banking industry whilst within the belly of the beast, so to speak. But I have to say that RBS were very accommodating and freely provided the location for the event – regardless of what their motivations might have been, it’s a genuinely step forward to see a financial institution engaging in such a positive way with the topic. This would not have happened a couple of years ago and it shows you just how far things have progressed in recent times.

The next couple of days were a bit of a blur to be honest. A healthy mix of education, unrestrained ideation and problem-solving with, very interestingly, many relative newcomers immediately identifying similar areas that have attracted more seasoned Bitcoiners over recent months as being ripe for the exploration of new business models. For example, some of these included looking at ways to rebalance existing financial inequality, strengthen a variety of communities, reward previously unmeasured positive behaviours, harness the power of smart contracts and transparency, cut through the jargon, track the providence of money and secure records on a permanent basis.

I’m not going to write anything about the ideas that were developed throughout the remaining time as each of the individuals involved in the teams that made up the eight final pitches now has the opportunity to work up the concepts into a more robust proposition before applying for further funding that will support future development. However, it’s worth saying that I was very impressed with the progress that was made. Bitcoin – and cryptocurrencies in general – are difficult to grasp. It’s one thing to turn up at a Bitcoin conference or a hack weekend when you have that background knowledge and you’re surrounded by people who are steeped in the culture and daily echochamber of the Bitcoin scene. But for so many relative newcomers to openly embrace the process of education whilst simultaneously grasping the immediate potential gives me real hope for the future in terms of the way with which such ideas will be able to spread.

With such a significant paradigm shift taking place, it takes a few brave organisations to stand up and provide a framework for others to coalesce around. It’s a vital role and full credit goes to Chris, Debbie and the rest of the team for pulling this together. I suspect those involved will think back to those two and a half days in a decade or so and then truly realise how lucky they were to be involved at this point in time.

Thanks to everyone who took part. Let’s hope we can do it again some time.

Respond to the Scottish Identity Database Consultation Today

tl;dr Go here, download the Respondent Information Form and submit this before Wednesday 25th February to say that the proposals require primary legislation and should only be put forward after full public debate has taken place around the issues given the fact that the proposals will fundamentally restructure the relationship of citizen to state.

It’s rare that I write something on my blog and ask people to act. But tonight is one of those exceptions.

A national identity card?

For many years, the concept of a national identity card has been put forward by various political parties around the UK. However, each time the topic has proved to be political suicide. Proposals have proved to be unpopular and consistently rejected by the electorate. Increasingly, as more people interact online, it’s become obvious that the risks of building up such a valuable store of information greatly exceed the potential benefits that any such scheme can deliver.

And yet, despite the general resistance to the concept of an identity scheme across the UK over the years, here in Scotland we face the very real risk that minor legislation that has been proposed to extend the functionality of NHS records will, in effect, have exactly the same effect by creating a national identity database.

I spent the evening tonight at an event organised by the Open Rights Group in Scotland who have taken on the important role of coordinating attempts to raise awareness and resistance to this legislation being enacted without appropriate levels of debate. The proposals come in the form of secondary legislation with a consultation period currently running under the slightly innocuous title of the Consultation on proposed amendments to the National Health Service Central Register (Scotland) Regulations 2006.

Legislation that has an impact way beyond your medical records

Before you go any further, I suggest you read ORG’s detailed response to the Consultation. The crux of the matter is this: if you live in Scotland, the chances are that the NHS already holds a record of the fact that you exist. But the problem is that this new legislation would enable the reference number that uniquely identifies you as an individual to be shared freely with another 100-plus Scottish agencies.

Why is this a big deal? The practical reality of the proposal as drafted is that it would create a Scottish identity database. We face a very real possibility that public bodies could then start to mine such data in order to build their intelligence about you in pursuit of ends that may directly conflict your own.

So, to use a simplistic example, seeing your choice of library books used against you when it comes to claiming unemployment benefit (too much fiction, not enough textbooks?) becomes a very real possibility. Or how about the fact that most people who undergo some form of addiction counselling would normally want that information to be restricted rather than being shared widely amongst thousands of employees across different organisations. And it’s not difficult to envisage a situation whereby a victim of domestic violence learns of the increased transparency about her personal details and therefore attempts to remain outside the health system with issues unreported in order to prevent an abusive ex-partner who works for a public body from tracking her down.

The proposed model does of course brings with it certain efficiencies. But the reality is that the risks of potential misuse arising from the collection of such information are huge. By creating a comprehensive list of personal identifiers, we create an environment within which the temptation to use such a treasure trove of information for irrelevant or minor uses will inevitably grow over time.

I’m not going to write more about the privacy debate here. There are plenty of well-rehearsed arguments from plenty of people who are far more eloquent than I can be who have written fantastic pieces detailing the risks of implementing similar systems over the years (I recommend reading Wendy Grossman’s excellent SCRIPT essay on identity cards from 2005). But I did want to point out the following:

The massive risk of centralisation

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my time spent with decentralised systems around Bitcoin and the blockchain it’s this – design a system to protect value by putting everything within centralised locations and restricting access and you inevitably end up with a system that will always – always – act as a red flag to hackers.

The more valuable that data (whether it’s money or personal information), the greater the incentive to attack it once it’s stored in one location. We’re not there yet but blockchain technologies will solve this problem ultimately I’m convinced.

So we have a database – now what?

The question here isn’t necessarily whether or not we trust our public bodies to use such collected information for good. The question is whether we trust their defences to be 100% secure from any breaches (either internal or external). To save you the effort, I’ll answer that now. No, we can’t.

Whether we believe the future intentions of governments to be noble or not, the problem is that once such information has been handily compiled into a database, it cannot be somehow decompile so it will remain permanently at risk of being accessed by others. If you need an example, consider the fact that centralised security didn’t turn out so well for those world-leading experts in cyber-security the NSA did it?

Is the technology up to scratch?

The general consensus is that the technology systems utilised by the public sector in Scotland are lagging behind those in use down south. Not a good foundation to use for the storage of the crown jewels, as it were. If the NSA weren’t able to protect their own confidential data, I’m not convinced that the powers-that-be at Holyrood will be able to deliver a system that’s more successful in some way.

Have certain politicians changed their minds?

ID cards were rejected by many different politicians when the last serious attempt was made to introduce them a few years ago. That includes the SNP who are currently backing this legislation. Back in 2005, the Scottish Government actually published a paper on Identity Management and Privacy Principles (revised in October 2014) which explicitly stated that public bodies must avoid sharing persistent identifiers when it comes to identity. Yet that is exactly what is proposed in this model. Have certain politicians forgotten their previous position on this issue? Or are people simply not talking to each other?

Respond to the Consultation

This is in no way a comprehensive post that details all the key issues. It is, however, I hope a timely one in the fact that it is important for as many people as possible to both learn about the proposals and the fact that the Consultation itself closes in under a week. Regardless of your views – pro or anti – this is not by any stretch of the imagination legislation that should go through a democratic system without a wider public debate being held. It has the potential to fundamentally redraw the boundaries of citizenship within society and it needs more people to become engaged. This is not simply a Scottish debate. It’s inconceivable that if such a system is introduced in this country that it will somehow not be adopted south of the border at some point down the line.

Please do. You can respond to the consultation here.

How The Blockchain Removes Excuses

Check out this short video with Chris Ellis on the excellent IamSatoshi site. It’s only 5 minutes long. Chris has long been an insightful commentator and active participant within the scene (see the World Crypto Network and his recent World Passport). If you’re still struggling to understanding why the blockchain is so significant, watch this and see if this helps with the concept of timestamping.

Chris makes the point that the blockchain acts like gravity in a way. It helps the ever-increasing mountains of data being produced to maintain internal consistency by ensuring that important information is now timestamped using Bitcoin’s distributed network. Or, to put it another way – anyone now has the ability (for free) to record important documentation on the blockchain in a way that doesn’t reveal the details as such but simply the fact that it existed at a particular point in time.

This timestamp concept is crucial. We now have an open free system that anyone can access which represents the truth. Anyone can confirm whether specific information existed at a particular point in time. A quick search can confirm that the majority of the network was fully cognisant of that fact. And as a side-product, we automatically prevent the fabrication of claims around the sequence of events that are all too common in our current systems.

With the technology, everyone on the planet now has the potential to access to the same information that was previously restricted or incomplete that they need to be fully informed about a variety of decisions that they will inevitably make in their lives. No more pulling the wool over other people’s eyes.

On a basic level, that means that a charity for example now no longer has any excuse not to record events on the blockchain in order to build cast-iron proof of its activities – and expenditures – at a later date. Seeking such a level of accountability should prove to be uncontroversial when it comes to looking at any charitable organisation. However, during the next few years the promise of the technology is that commercial organisations will be required to show publicly whether they are willing to adhere to the same ethical standards.

On a higher level, the power to share information fairly across space and time on the blockchain means that the balance for power within societies will also inevitably change. You’ll often hear the argument that Bitcoin can do little in the developing world where food and running water remain of greater importance than fancy new currencies. But Chris’ point is that this is an over-simplification. The reality is that the very information that will be captured on the blockchain is of crucial importance and should not be under-valued. Whoever controls the information controls the system. Such control impacts on the beliefs, actions and freedoms of those within that society.

The promise of the blockchain is that such transparency and accessibility of truthful information on a global scale will inevitably reset that position.

Spurious Correlations

A fun one tonight. In an age where the sheer quantity of data being produced continues to accelerate daily, we’ll increasingly get more powerful insight into the world around us and our behaviours in it. But we also have to be careful not to jump to conclusions.

As many a good quote points out, statistics can be notoriously unreliable. For example: “Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital”. Or how about: “Then there is the man who drowned crossing a stream with an average depth of six inches.” Etcetera.

There’s an amusing website that points out the spurious correlations between various datasets. For example, did you know that the number of people who drowned by falling into a swimming pool correlates with the number of films Nicolas Cage has appeared in? No? Well, how about the fact that the age of Miss America correlates with the number of murders by steam, hot vapours and hot objects?

The last word must go to Thomas Sowell: “One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten.”

 

Fiat Currency Stash Hacked (Again)

Interesting to read today that possibly up to a billion dollars have been stolen from a range of banks in a sophisticated and coordinated attack by hackers that started in 2013.

It’s even more interesting however to hear that not one single bank has, to date, stepped forward to admit that it’s lost cash. And that the attack might even still be taking place today.

We hear criticisms so often within the digital currency ecosystem that imply that Bitcoin (for example) has inherently inferior security. Yet the reality is that whilst some early stage startups within Bitcoin have struggled with inexperienced leadership as they scaled, the so-called safe and traditional sector has struggled at least as badly over the years. In any organisation where your model is to pool valuable resources (in this case, cash), you effectively wave a big red flag and the reality is that someone somewhere will either try to steal it or they’ll negligently misplace it.

As I often mention when I give talks about Bitcoin, it’s worth remembering the (perhaps apocryphal) response of prolific criminal Willie Sutton when asked why he kept robbing banks.

“It’s where the money is”, he replied.

That’s the centralised system we have at present. Time for a change?

Emojis Matter

Emojis and emoticons seem to have become increasingly widespread over the last few years. I have to admit – I’m not a huge fan myself. But I can 100% see why they’ve become so popular. After all, who within Bitcoin doesn’t like ToTheMoonGuy?

With access to technologies becoming increasingly commonplace (SMS, tweets, Facebook interactions), we’re communicating more frequently but using far fewer words in each exchange. And within these reduced mediums, one well-placed emoticon can easily convert a vicious personal attack into nothing more than comical banter between friends.

It’s interesting to watch how society is starting to deal with this evolution in language. Ignoring the cost implications of the technologies that have in some cases been misunderstood (a woman in Scotland racked up an extra £1,000 bill as a result of her emoticon addiction when she failed to realise that each emoticon message was being charged as a picture message by her mobile provider), they are now assuming more formal significance.

There are reports of juries being directed to focus on the use of emoticons in written evidence led in court. We saw it happen in the recent Silk Road trial of Ross W. Ulbricht for example. But the difficulty here is that there is no standardised usage yet for the symbols. Usage of emoji can vary between two individuals or within certain communities so it remains a challenge for outsiders to interpret at this stage.

I don’t really have any firm conclusions on this one way or the other to be honest. But I’m interested to see whether we will ever reach a stage where the meaning behind emoticons (or their descendents) become genuinely standardised. Or will the development follow that of the written word or currency, where to date the world has shown itself to contain enough niches to support entirely separate versions. My instinct is that we are a long way off a common language using symbols.

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The Problems of Long-Term Digital Archiving

I imagine that backing up and protecting data is a pretty standard concern for most people these days (note: I don’t however mean that we’re all actually doing something about it however). But for anyone who has collections of family memories on either backup hard drives or such consumer-friendly cloud services like iCloud, those risks have obviously been identified already.

Yet the reality is that it’s still unlikely that the precautions that we’re taking today to preserve this data is going to be sufficient in the longer term. Whilst the first paper that we’ve discovered (from 2nd century China) has survived to this day, what are the chances of a stash of your favourite JPG’s surviving for hundreds of years? If so where and how will they be indexed?

And, even if we do manage to preserve such a collected human history, as Vint Cerf has just pointed out, there’s a very real chance that we might end up storing a vast amount of data with absolutely no idea what that data actually is. Or to put it another way, we might have created a file using Photoshop but that fact – together with the details of the software used itself – is then lost over the passage of time, rendering the data useless in the future.

There’s an interesting proposal to carry out a type of X-ray analysis – whereby a snapshot could be taken of the digital environment in which the file was created (i.e. the software, the computer model, the operating system etc) in a way that could then be easily checked far off into the future. However, the sort of business that carries out such an essential service would be one that would have to survive for hundreds of years. That’s not a sort of business that we’ve ever seen to date.

I can’t help but think that there’s a blockchain solution for this in some way.

 

How Facebook Means The Internet For More People

I’ll save my update on what has been an amazing few days being immersed in building ideas for blockchain businesses with the Chiasma until I can do it justice.

Instead, here’s a fascinating story that shows just how powerful Facebook is becoming in some developing countries. To summarise, it transpired to those studying survey responses that there are millions of Facebook users in Indonesia have no idea that they’re using the internet. Indeed, the majority of respondents in Nigeria, India, Indonesia and Brazil all agreed with the statement “Facebook is the internet“.

Of course, Facebook and others have been instrumental in building the foundations for this ubiquity, with Facebook Zero focused on providing access to those with only basic phones and the provision of Facebook-only data plans in India, for example.

But the reality is that now the platform is so important that regulators and public bodies can do nothing other than engage with citizens where they are – namely on Facebook. And whilst the gradual exodus continues from the open web to a closed proprietary platform, we continue to move further away from the original benefits – and intention – that powered the original concept of the internet.

Open Source Tractors

I think my mind’s pretty much overheated today – albeit in a good way. It’s been an awesome day of working with a range of talented folks from across a range of disciplines – and in particular so many different designers – exploring ideas for ‘creative currencies’ as part of this Chiasma. And it’s been an absolute delight to watch so many people start to appreciate the power of blockchain technology.

Of course, it’s precisely because of the fact that Bitcoin brings an environment of permissionless innovation that’s proved to be so crucial. By introducing technology that pulls down those constraints that have previously excluded so many enquiring minds from searching for a better solution, suddenly the potential for improvement becomes indisputable.

So I thought I’d share a short piece from another sector that indicates the disadvantages of closing systems – and how this can ultimately harm the customer that you’re trying to delight. This article is a fascinating explanation of the fact that farmers are no longer able to fix their own tractors. The key point here is really that farmers are increasingly driving around massively expenses pieces of machinery in the form of tractors which are controlled by, in this case, John Deere who restrict the owner’s ability to carry out repairs without their permission.

A strong business model (at least for one side) I’m sure you would agree. However, the far more interesting side to this now is that there is a movement by farmers to develop open source tractors.

Check out Marcin Jakubowski’s talk on the Global Village Construction Set.