The community is where Satoshi Nakamoto is weakest, and his community experience comes from the mailing list. He has a Bitcoin forum, characterized by an interest community with no interest relationship. This kind of forum is very similar to a WeChat group. The condition for a group to remain active is to have a good group leader and active members, the content of the articles must be rich enough, and there must be discussions. In the early days, the Bitcoin forum was an interesting community that also met this requirement. After Satoshi Nakamoto left, the forum fell into decline. In addition to no longer meeting the above conditions, there is also the fact that the technology cannot keep up and is not easy to use. The forum is full of volunteers, so it would be nice to maintain it. The technical community is not thriving either. Over the past 14 years, there have been about 15 maintenance personnel, and today there are only 4 people. Only the computing power community keeps improving because computing power keeps growing.
Without the power of Satoshi Nakamoto’s example, the cryptocurrency community sucks. It is said that the community wants to replace the company. The heart is higher than the sky, and life is thinner than paper. In theory, it is possible. Where is the way? Is it a DAO? Cryptocurrency popular DAO, a distributed autonomous organization without a single leader, a “starfish”-like blockchain organization. A traditional organization is like a spider; its intelligence is concentrated in the brain. If you remove the spider’s head, the spider will die. A decentralized organization is like a starfish. The starfish has no head at all, and its intelligence is distributed throughout the body. Once you knock off part of its body, it’s even possible to regenerate itself into a starfish from that part, so killing a starfish is much more difficult than killing a spider. This analogy sounds reasonable. Cryptocurrencies are full of beautiful stories that don’t work. Most of them started simple imitations without figuring out Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin. Because Satoshi Nakamoto is anonymous, the team is also anonymous. They believe that there is no actual controller of Bitcoin, so Dao has no actual controller that can be seen “on the surface.” Vitalik of Ethereum also participated in the chorus for this kind of DAO. It is unknown for what purpose, but it must be true that none of his Ethereum projects use DAO.
DAO may be able to be used in small and specific things, but some small things sound beautiful, and the possibility of success is not high.
The cryptocurrency community has not surpassed the level of Satoshi Nakamoto so far, and the gap with Web2 is widening. Cryptocurrency users are communicating turn to Twitter, Telegram, Reddit, and Discord. Similar platforms include WeChat, Tik Tok, Youtube, and Facebook. Can cryptocurrency community projects rank in the top 20 social or community rankings?
It has to be admitted that communities of interest cannot go far, and only communities of benefit and beliefs, or a combination of the two, can go far. The current successful community is the model of platform + big V + fans. The level of the platform is reflected in the intelligent algorithm. A good algorithm requires a multi-faceted understanding and analysis of the user’s characteristics. In contrast, WeChat has a multi-angle understanding of users, while Tik Tok and youtube do not have a multi-angle advantage. YouTube is a subsidiary of Google and has the advantage of sharing Google user data, thus may be reaching the level of WeChat data analysis.
From another point of view, YouTube is doing the best job of distributing profits. His policy is transparent so that the big V can know how much money he can get. These companies have an awe-inspiring understanding of their communities, and they represent the highest standards of our time. In contrast, the cryptocurrency community is still a child, full of dreams, playing games like a child. If the cryptocurrency community wants to grow, it is necessary to learn from the excellent companies of web2 respectfully. It is not impossible to surpass because Satoshi Nakamoto has left superior raw materials, but the small partners are too young to understand.
After studying the Bitcoin system, it can be seen that Web2 community enterprises have two problems:
1. Uneven distribution of profits
a). Shareholders do not create benefits and have been enjoying the benefits generated by early venture capital investment, and the management team has rich benefits. The Bitcoin system does not have management fees and shareholder returns; even project maintenance is done by amateurs. Only computing power is the beneficiary. Their competition is always that the person who contributes the most computing power makes the most profit and the strongest wins. There is no static shareholder. It doesn’t appear in any of the Web2 projects. Which of the current cryptocurrency communities embodies the idea of Bitcoin “shareholder” competition?
b). 3% of the Big V on YouTube took 85% of the benefits allocated to the Big V. The profit distribution of Bitcoin is based on computing power, and even the most minor computing power has the opportunity to benefit.
c). Users are contributors of benefits.
The above pattern seems very natural; is there something wrong?
2. There is no unified interest between the project party, big V, and users
Users will love Big V but not necessarily love project parties. The project party’s services for users are all for getting the benefit of users. The direct benefit is that users subscribe; the indirect benefit is that users watch advertisements. Will users consider themselves part of the community? Who does the user belong to? Die-hard fans belong to the Big V, and the sign is that I will follow wherever the Big V goes. But more cases belong to the platform because users have to watch a lot of big V on a platform for convenience. The most famous Trump has 80 million followers on Twitter. He runs a true social media with only a few million followers.
We have not heard users claiming to be YouTubers or WeChater, but there are Bitcoiners. Bitcoiners have a religious fervor for Bitcoin. The Bitcoin community has a better foundation than Web2, and we look forward to this day. Why it can do well, apart from equity competition, another reason is that the interests of Bitcoin users, programmers, and miners use the currency as a link.
That is a tie advantage that the web2 system does not have.
Many social platform projects that distribute money to users have been unsuccessful because they do not have the competitive advantage of Bitcoin’s computing power. How to ensure quality without competition? The competition of Big V is the key to the success of Youtube, WeChat, and Tik Tok. Some reading software gives readers money, which is a good idea, but the amount is too tiny to impress readers. Simple cents are not as good as shares (coins), and in a lottery, the common bond impresses users more.
After learning about Bitcoin, we know what the new generation community should look like:
The new generation of communities should embody Satoshi Nakamoto’s ideas of “equity,” competition, and benefit ties. Up to this point, it is only a community of benefit.
The new generation of communities must have goals worth fighting for. Goals are not illusory. They are beliefs, but they are different from religious convictions. Although the Bitcoin interest community is not doing very well now, Bitcoin has faith-believing that Bitcoin is the currency of the future. The reason is that legal currency is too bad, and anyone with a bit of brain knows that money is getting less and less valuable. In the community of faith, Bitcoin has a foundation.
Just imagine If the current YouTube community will have faith？
The new generation of communities also needs leaders to lead everyone in building the Tower of Heavenly Passage. The so-called decentralization of the community is destined to fail.
Of course, the interest community is not useless. The interest community has created Bitcoin, which shows its strength. Community of interest is an advanced method worthy of vigorous adoption by government agencies to strengthen discussions on relevant policies and avoid closed doors. Believe that the power of the market is better than yourself; this is what Satoshi Nakamoto wanted to say but didn’t say.
There are three types of communities, interest communities, benefit communities, and faith communities. Interest communities are generally not easy to last long, and there is competition among benefit communities. How should the belief community be summarized? Since I am not religious, I can’t tell without intuitive feeling. Vulgarly speaking, striving for a goal is also what we call belief.
The series Summary
Satoshi Nakamoto gave four reasons why Bitcoin was successful, three of which were external reasons, and he was very humble. This article adds 4 contributions to him: Gaming, Transparency, Automatic, and Community, and it does not fully summarize the value of his thoughts. Satoshi Nakamoto hopes that human transactions should be cash transactions and there should be no currency bubbles. From the practice of cryptocurrencies, his solution can solve the central bank’s excessive issuance. It can solve the bubble-free lending after the bank is on the chain, but it has not been realized for micropayments.
I started to be skeptical about Bitcoin, and after years of study, I got to the point where I could explain the meaning of the Bitcoin title and thought I could understand Satoshi’s idea – to realize the Bitcoin standard. I proposed a specific plan to realize the Bitcoin standard in response to this idea. Interested readers can move to chainless.hk, where there are all related articles.
My evaluation of Satoshi is Prometheus, who stole Skyfire, which made an excellent start, and then cross-chain, stablecoin, Ethereum, and other projects enriched Satoshi Nakamoto’s thinking.
Based on the achievements of cryptocurrencies, the time has come to realize the Bitcoin standard.
