Links
Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-mpONjXrsk&ab_channel=Tellor
Project website: www.tellor.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/WeAreTellor?s=20
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/n7drGjh
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TellorOfficial/
Summary
From time to time, the team likes to sit together and discuss the projects long term goals, visions, values. This call was one of those, everyone present could share his/her take on the topic.
Whole discussion
Nick: Hey everyone, welcome to Tellor, I guess, it’s Tellor community call/Tellor values call. December 22nd, 2021. Last one before the holidays if you will. Next week we’re going to our normal community call, but it’s going to be like a year in review, so it’ll be a fun one too. Be sure to hop on that one and we’ll just, I think you guys will probably just go over the article, so we’ll talk about it. The big reason we wanted to have this call... we did this probably three months ago now, a little over three months ago with just the team, but we didn’t put it out and I wish we would have put it out because it was such a great conversation. We want to do it more often, it’s just talking about more of the why of Tellor, like why are we doing this, why are we all here, what is the goal we’re striving for, what do we care about, what’s our priority. Because you know it’s, we can just look like if you go back and you can go look at our community call from a year ago, the Tellor team and the Tellor community is made up of a whole bunch of different people. It’s awesome. We have way more people on the call, we have way more people in the community and it’s great and it’s awesome, but then at the same time you want to check yourselves as far as how are the values changing of Tellor, how are the people who we bring in adjusting it, how is the crypto space as a whole moving and changing what we want to do and what we can do. It’s because I want to have like that orientation to where we’re all going, but none of this is set in stone. If we change our values or something comes up and we want to focus on a different problem to help out, something different, or we feel like we could make a bigger impact in some slightly different way, like we can change.
Mike: We can use these periodic calls as a way to calibrate and check our feet. Here comes Ryan.
Nick: I don’t know how do we want to start it; do you want me to? I think we were talking about...
Brenda: Yeah, we’re going to overview? So, I mean the crypto, like yesterday.
Mike: We know what are our classic values. The ones that we were absolutely 100% sure we have.
Nick: It’s always really weird because you can say like “Oh, there’s decentralization”, and being a project that isn’t scammy, that doesn’t go after a lot of... there’s talking about the image, but I think you know as we were talking about yesterday, the three of us had a call about what to go over, what we talk about on this call. Okay, so let’s say we succeed in building a phenomenal oracle product, that goes on every chain you know, like what’s the ultimate vision for Tellor? Right now, it’s, we are the premier oracle, we have a network of reporters that’s robust, it’s decentralized, we have communities of voting, token holders on multiple different chains, the team basically isn’t needed because we have developers who are just donating time and working from the DAO and it’s this phenomenal product. What do we achieve? What does that get us?
Mike: And what values does that desire?
Nick: If that gets us a whole lot of money, that’s cool, or if it’s like we enrich a whole bunch of banks, that would not be cool. So, we want to make sure that’s not what we do and I would say if you look at basically our values and the way that we’re positioned here as an oracle product, we’re sort of a key infrastructure piece in the crypto movement as a whole, where our mission is almost tied directly to the mission of the blockchains that we’re building on and the projects that are building upon us. Whenever you look at, so we do succeed, that means crypto can succeed and whatever you look at; well, how is crypto succeeding nowadays? If our goals are extensions of the goals of crypto, then we rightly have to look at, okay, well, what are the goals of crypto and how those changed over time? Because I think they definitely have if you look at the original Bitcoin guys and you know the old folks that got in back with Ron Paul days and the pre-centralized exchanges where it was only... you were trading on a centralized exchange but it was still crypto based. It came from a lot of, there was this libertarian philosophy; we’re going to decentralize money, that was the big idea of it and then it’s sort of evolved.
Mike: It feels like we’ve gotten away from that.
Nick: We have, and that’s okay. Everybody grows up and becomes not a libertarian anymore, but I think at the same time, what is it? I think even in 2017, most of the founders of projects in 2017, they had those deeply philosophical roots, “we’re in it for decentralization”. Vitalik I would say isn’t necessarily a libertarian, but he’s into economics, he’s into this futurist politics to try and make the world a better place. Fast forward to today, the crypto landscape probably looks different. I’m sure most of you guys are out there even casually at all, a lot of NFT, a lot of art stuff, a lot of DAOs, DAOs are huge. And why are they doing that, and it’s much more anti-system in a way.
Mike: We’re skipping over, you’re not intending to skip it, but we had this DeFi focus, that I think was the big distraction away from some of the original core values of crypto in general and we’re seeing this new phase that I think is getting back a little bit to being anti-establishment with the DAOs popping up like crazy and just new ways to organize and collaborate and coordinate as groups and organizations.
Nick: And I think it’s super cool, I mean, it’s become much more about social organization if you will and we’re going to do things our way and we’re not going to listen to how we’re going to, how society wants us to do it. It’s amazing, I can think of a few founders of projects, we won’t say any names, but they should in the past, they would have totally gone and set up a llc or a c-corp and they didn’t do any of that, they just went and they’re like I’m going to go issue some tokens and we’re going to start a DAO. Basically, regulations have gotten to the point that it’s so cumbersome and confusing to comply that we’re just like, no we’re going to go do it our way and that is just awesome to me. If we can enable this world of almost rapid experimentation on DAOs and rapid experimentation with just economics in general, I think people have moved past the libertarian values of “oh fixed supply and sound money” and now it’s like let’s go print money and create. That’s super cool.
Brenda: It’s not just like the money aspect of it, I think. DAOs go back or bring us back to a full circle of what was the original intent, why do we even want to decentralize things, why do we want to take power away from the few and sort of like distribute it among the immediate or it I think at the beginning it was more of like a very broad. Everybody under one umbrella versus now. Even though we’re going back to that value, it’s like we’re okay with thinking, well maybe not everybody falls in the same umbrella, but they can still have a decentralized source of or say in what’s happening and I think that actually we’re going into now is, I would say it’s closer to the original idea of decentralization not just in the terms of libertarianism Nick, but I think it actually goes back to that. I’m actually pretty excited to see that.
Nick: Yeah, I think like... Spuddy, thoughts? Let’s go around here. Besides the founders, he’s been a member of the community longer than everyone else, so we’ll go with Spuddy.
Spuddy: One of the reasons I can get fully behind what Tellor is doing is because we do care about things being decentralized at the core of the protocol and not having open access for everybody in the world. Everybody in the world having open access, if not equal access, because not everybody has money to start with or whatever. Another trend that I see in crypto is people talking about web3, and I think that we’re just talking about trends in crypto. The web3 trend is one that I don’t like, because when you say web3, then you’re comparing it to something that’s called web2, which is like Facebook. In order to make something better than Facebook, it doesn’t have to be very good, it doesn’t have to actually have a lot of decentralization, just have to go from something that’s entirely centralized, where the user is the product to got to something that is a little bit decentralized. Doesn’t necessarily mean that there is open access to everyone or full decentralization.
Nick: But I mean I think this goes into a central question; would you say cryptocurrency has to get mainstream adoption to succeed or do you think in the future that, because Facebook got mainstream adoption and everything like that, do you see, Tellor’s obviously an infrastructure block but even the people were that are building on top of us, do they have to ever get mainstream adoption for us to succeed?
Spuddy: I think crypto does have mainstream adoption. Not on a huge scale, but among people who would care. No, you know what, it doesn’t have mainstream adoption.
Brenda: I know you might say that it’s like mainstream adoption as long as it actually does have an impact to those that actually, like for us it’s fun, we’re building infrastructure that obviously we’re trying to make as decentralized as possible and then we hope it gets more broadly adopted, but in the end for some parts of the world this is just a bit. It’s just fun and for other parts of the world this is something that actually allows them to transact just because of the way their economy is going or maybe the way that their governments work, so for me it’s not so much about mainstream adoption but adoption in those areas and places where it actually makes an impact.
Mike: This brings up just the value that we were actually talking about yesterday in the office, which was, just thinking of our adoption, Tellor’s adoption as an oracle is the goal for us, to be adopted by every protocol out there and be on every layer one possible out there or just the ones that sort of align with what we care about. If we were just used by five, really awesome decentralized censorship resistant protocols out there you know, that really used us and we’re out there doing some good, would we feel like we’ve reached that goal? As opposed to deploying everywhere and being on the Solana’s of the world or you know...
Spuddy: I’m excited about building something that will last into the future and I think that protocols have to be decentralized and able to run by as many people as possible. Need to be able to run, need to have access to the stuff that makes it go, like the biggest number of people possible, you don’t have to have a data center, you can run Tellor on your computer that’s sitting on your desk. Just like you can run Ethereum on a gaming computer. When people have open access to the stuff that makes it go, then it’s decentralized and it can last long into the future.
Nick: Yeah, and Tally, I think you were going to say something, or just thoughts in general?
Tally: Yeah, I have a few thoughts, just at this point I think at least in the United States, definitely not on a world level, considering that I think at least half or 2/3rd of the world does not own a smartphone, but in the US, I would definitely say crypto is at least mainstream awareness level, but probably not at the point of instrument option. Another thought I had been the way I perceive a core value of cryptos as a space and it’s something that it’s somewhat like good goal, at least how I see that Tellor, but is a little bit difficult to implement in terms of the system that we’ve architected, I sort of see crypto as a desire to move away from capital as largely a competition or especially an unfair asymmetric competition among smaller players at which larger players, whales exploit and smaller players fight for scraps. Which is basically the architecture of the traditional financial system and even by extension, something like Facebook or Amazon or essentially, we’re almost living on field property, but considering the idea that...definitely consider fuel, property, but something that almost every algorithm decides how we use the internet, it’s decided within a 50-mile radius of San Francisco and what, like two billion people use the internet. To that point I sort of see, I’m personally optimistic about web3 in the sense that, I personally wouldn’t want to see a world where we would replace things like Facebook with Facebook that’s just community owned, because I think a lot of the attributes of Facebook are inherently negative, so I’m somewhat cautious about, some people’s interpretations of web3. I’d say the beauty of it that I see is that it’s an idea that is in the eye of its beholder and I think that’s a beauty of it as a formative early and to the merit of its decentralization, people can define web3 as they like it. Has no formal definition and it's how people relate to it is really a relation of its ability to be loosely defined, which I think is a property of decentralized movement. I lost my train of thought.
Mike: It’s a really good point. I think we’re seeing, there’s more options out there in terms of blockchains themselves, and you’re having these new networks crop up and they obviously have their own scale and system of priorities and what they value and people can flock to those networks if it aligns with them or if it doesn’t, they can go elsewhere. I think that’s one of the things I think about the space in general, it’s providing the tools for these things to all crop up kind of like survival of the fittest in a way. Like the communities, the groups of people can decide whether or not they want to organize around a certain set of values or not and it’s, and you know the cynic in me is thinking that majority of people are going to organize around BS and they’re just going to rebuild web2. It’s going to be Google again. We’re going to vote it through.
Spuddy: Protocol that promises the biggest price returns...
Mike: Even if at in the exchange for real openness and decentralization, people might choose their base of instincts.
Tally: But I guess the last thing I want to say is, the way I appreciate Tellor as an organization primarily and also one of many reasons, but I think something that really sets it apart is, if you contrast with a project like Solana maybe, I don’t really like to name names, but you take Solana for example, and as I see Solana, it’s sort of a lot of NFT projects for example or things of that nature, the idea of, it’s been endemic, if you’re a business owner and you’re like okay, it’s been demonstrated to me that there’s an opportunity to, there’s a growing market and there’s space in the market, so I may not even care about what I’m doing, but I’m going to insert myself in the market hire professional managers and grow a business and fundamentally how we operate is nothing like that. If anything, I would say there are a lot of sacrifices made like oppositional to quick money, that we take every day, every week and every month. In terms of short-term and long-term decisions that better inform us, it’s an organization really devoted towards ideological development, like fostering new ideologies and philosophies about money and social organization as compared to taking advantages of opportunity for a capital.
Nick: For sure. We don’t necessarily need to get caught up too much in it, except to just check ourselves as time goes on, but there’s always the goal of something and there’s like what actually happens you know. You can have the goal to democratize some of this finance and make things more equitable, as I think even Brenda was saying, and then you can look at the reality of whether or not it’s actually happening. That doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t your goal originally, but it may have just played out differently and you have to check how it worked out. I think that’s happened with a lot of crypto, where you know we want to open up access to the world, but transactions are really expensive, so it doesn’t do that and then you want to make it so anybody can invest in protocols, well what’s actually happened is a bunch of VCs are making money... As long as you don’t lose sight of the goals and it becomes good. I guess thoughts from.
Mike: What’s this conversation.
Nick: This is Ryan.
Mike: That’s all right. Is anything cropping up for anybody as we talk? I mean we’re all over the place here, but what’s popping on everybody else’s head as they hear this?
Nick: We can go around.
Mike: Josh got something.
Nick: Josh raised his hand nicely.
Josh: Yeah, personally I’m really excited about the implications of what web3 can do, and honestly, I just think it’s a matter of and it’s a combination of multiple projects, multiple companies, like for instance yesterday I was at the movies and it’s the first time I’ve ever seen a crypto ad. It was crypto.com, and I know that they as a project are doing a lot, just to try to I guess spread awareness about web3 and crypto and stuff, like them buying Staple center to rename it after them and then just a whole bunch of other PR moves. I think eventually just once the public gets saturated with crypto-crypto-crypto, eventually people are going to be like “okay, what is this”, and people who are in the space in the capacity that we are laying down the groundworks for it, and I don’t know, people like us have a really good opportunity to be able to point the direction of whatever this flow of momentum is eventually going to be. Because I honestly think it’s eventually just going to be like how web2 and Facebook and all that stuff just started to grow and just become huge practically overnight. Obviously not directly overnight, but in the scheme of things over a couple of years all of a sudden Facebook went to having 1 million users to a billion users pretty quickly, relatively and it’s just, I see a similar thing happening with crypto. It’s just a little bit more of an uphill curve as far as education. I think that’s the main, it’s always the main barrier to entry, with weaponry is just education. So many people even that I talk to, because I’ve definitely came in as a crypto newbie, but the more people I talk about it the more they actually seem interested in and it’s just a matter of education I think and with that constant reinforcement from other companies and other projects.
Nick: I think where there’s a background noise.
Josh: Yeah, sorry about that. I think we’re just headed towards an eventuality where there will be some form of whether it’s completely democratized way that we view web3 or whether it’s some other type of compromised version of what we want to meet everybody’s needs, I think it’s an eventuality point and that’s why being in a company like this is super exciting, because it’s like laying the groundwork for all that.
Mike: Cool, thanks.
Nick: Going around, another person who’s been in Tellor a long time, dr Babs, thoughts? I mean, you came over from, you’re somebody who’s seen us work over a long time and then maybe the values were a reason you were attracted to come work at Tellor. I don’t know, but we’d love to hear of your thoughts.
MikeSr: For sure. I don’t know where do I start. We’ve talked about so much, but I know I’ve been around the team for a while and certainly learned a lot from talking with the team. Just become fascinated with the entire concept of crypto and the community, decentralization and I guess I think what we were talking about was back in the beginning, was what is good and is decentralization the goal? Is mass adoption the goal? I think there’s this question of is mass adoption of a decentralized system under a DAO that’s controlled by everybody, is that really a great thing? I don’t really know. What we can hope for though is that we get a bunch of... I guess that’s the fear is, that if whatever gets adopted by the masses is going to be centralized. I think what we have to hope for really, is that we can create these smaller communities with the infrastructure where it’s easy enough for the everyday people to get involved. I think that’s really where we have to focus. Just on making decentralization easy and usable for everybody, so it’s exciting to be part of, how to try to figure this out and to create something that’s actually good.
Nick: I mean, maybe, but at the same point I don’t want to be, it’s some of how my views have changed over the years and you look at is decentralization the best avenue in all cases? Because you can have decentralization of some levels, but then you can have even centralization within given DAOs or within given projects and still sort of be decentralized at the core infrastructure. You could say, if you’re doing on a more geopolitical level, what there’s like socialism and capitalism and capitalism is decentralized and socialism is centralized and it really simplifies things to say, well decentralized is always better in every sense. Well because there’s probably a lot of corporations that want to move everything towards privatization and it can lead to some negative consequences. It can be saying like which pieces of Tellor or which projects that we push towards and where it is centralized? We have to almost make sure that the outcome is the outcome that we want, not just a sort of blind dogmatic drive towards one thing or another, but... sorry Brenda.
Brenda: I think then one of the ways that I think I’ve used centralization and actually Tally you just said this, it’s like decentralization is actually a freedom of choice. Because we want what we want, we should be able to build it and then if another community feels differently and they want to be part of a chain that has two validators because they want speed and that’s what they value, then they should have the freedom to choose it and the way that I see how this hopefully builds up, there will be some unintended consequences, there will be some protocols that just go completely haywire, but this is all an experiment and I feel that it is, even general life like any type of endeavor that you begin, you obviously, I hope have the best of intentions and you have this goal and you drive through it or towards it and then if all of a sudden you went completely haywire and you just have to start over with a new protocol, with a new experiment and just tweak the way that you did it before. The fact that we can, if we can create an infrastructure where anybody and everybody can actually do that and fork and just rebuild, I think that’s an easier or maybe not an easier thing to do, but I hope that’s what we actually build as an architecture. So, that there is that freedom of people to actually follow whatever they want to do, because at the end of the day if you just want anybody and everybody has different things that they value, bottom line. Freedom of choice and decentralization, I think go hand in hand.
Nick: Call more people out.
Mike: You know they love that.
Nick: Will, I mean, Will’s another person who’s been around. I’ll call Will out because I know he’s fine talking. Oh, for those that don’t know of Will, I don’t think we’ve even introduced him on a call. Will is relatively new to Tellor, officially. He’s been building our websites for a long time and now we actually brought him on the team, so everyone, this is Will.
Will: A lot of what’s been said so far kind of echoes with my stance on it and talking about adoption and going... speaking of centralization, my Echo right now is talking to me. As far as where we are and there’s the crossing the chasm and how much educations needs to happen in order for people to understand that these protocols exist, and what they’re for and if they have a project in mind or they want to offer a particular service even knowing that they would need certain pieces of infrastructure I think is something that the greater swell of crypto understanding is aiding with. I think it is, we still definitely have ways to go, and in terms of it being as commonplace as Stripe is for payment processes, if you wanted to go start your own e-commerce store and you didn’t want to use an off-the-shelf product to take care of your payment processing, and there are other examples like that where if you want to do something it’s kind of understood, “okay, you need to have this piece, this piece and this piece in place” or you could use these particular types of pieces.
Mike: The value that’s popping in my head while listening to you, that is actually, because that’s what I’m, as we’re talking, I’m trying to think of what values term does this concept represent and what you’re describing is a new one that’s popped into my head, which is kind of this long-term approach or understanding and acceptance that we’re still really early and you know we’re not there yet and we have to just, we’re all in this waiting game. We’re waiting for everything to mature to get to the point where all the stuff we talk about actually becomes more usable and more widespread or more effective in some way and we’re all okay with that. Will we hope and we’ve always talked about having the long-term vision instead of this short-term chasing the market cycles thing, but was I accurate there and what I was hearing from you Will?
Will: Yeah, I think so.
Nick: No, but I think we had talked about it before, the whenever we refer back to the music example. If we are, say, the Napster of the world, or torrent software for instance, as far as you always have the option to go illegally download music, but most people just buy it so we’re like the fallback option, but in a way it’s sort of useful, because it’s a giant check on the music industry that says like if you guys get too expensive and too restrictive, I’m going to go legally download it.
Spuddy: I don’t understand paying for music at all.
Nick: Great, now I don’t, but you don’t even have to really download it.
Spuddy: That’s a core value for me.
Nick: You just get free and that’s like the invention of Napster, made music free basically. Because it forced music to compete with that. We could, if we create a sound money system, it’s not like normal money won’t exist, but there’s a giant check on governments to say “listen if inflation gets out of hand, or you guys do something we’re going to go over here”, and maybe that’s a worthy goal. How much of the market share do you even need to be accomplished?
Mike: Not much, I think.
Spuddy: If one of Tellor’s core values continues to be decentralization and into the future, we can go, whatever blockchain we put a Tellor oracle on, and our communities interact then, we can help share that value, sure we can help, maybe influence these other blockchains in some positive way that way.
Nick: Yeah, and I think I feel at some point we want to make a Tellor outreach program, because I was talking with Mike the other day, like of people we hired, I remember originally whenever we’re like, oh we want to hire people with similar values to us and now I look back and Mike and Brenda didn’t even have similar values to me. No one did and we’re all like working towards the same goal now. How many of you guys were Austrian economists libertarians? None of you, but it’s okay and that’s super cool.
Brenda: So, I wouldn’t say that our goals though were very different, we might come at it with different values for some reason, but our actual goal was actually very similar. It’s very odd, but it works and I think that is true for a lot of people. You can view things a bit different way, but want the same outcome.
Mike: And that’s going to be a microcosm of the experience of Tellor growing. You know, we’re going to have a larger variety and just varying opinions and it could get messy, but as long as we have something, some sort of unifying set of core values, that sort of keeps us all on the same track, I think that’s super pivotal, that we establish what that is, because as we grow, you can all of a sudden lose yourself. Josh, you’re talking about crypto.com and just this swell of crypto growing so fast and you mentioned Facebook, but would you say that Facebook has lost its way compared to where it was in the first couple of years of its existence? I don’t know, maybe Facebook never had any values and it’s probably true, but the experience of being on Facebook is not what we all came there for originally. We’re not getting that experience anymore and we want to make sure that one day we don’t say that about Tellor. Like “this isn’t the DAO that we wanted it to be”.
Josh: That’s what I think is kind of crucial and pivotal about this time is that, with just not as many users, there’s not as many people knowing about web3, there’s a chance for us right now to lay that infrastructure and just through I guess, precedence kind of keep laying the foundation of “no, this is what the space should be”. As long as we all have that core underlying value of decentralization, I think people will naturally acquiesce to the foundation that’s already in place. That’s what I think is crucial about right now. I think it’s essentially what we’re doing right.
Will: There’s some things about the Facebook example and as we talk about everything being an experiment and we have these sets of experiments that we learn from and apply and learn from. I think where we’re similar to Facebook is that they did the same thing. They were just driven by addiction and getting people plugged in, creating experiences that would keep somebody wanting that dopamine hit to come back, the likes, the engagement the feeling connected without truly being connected and they ran those experiments kind of to ensure that level of addiction. And they got a lot of mass adoption because of it, they have so much reach because they’ve tapped into that ability to keep people needing what they offer. But they did it through a bunch of experiments along the way and I think it’s as we talk about our experiments and knowing where we want to go as long as we stay positioned on what we hope to achieve, and not like what are our experiments are teaching us each way. There’s always going to be like “oh, nice, we learned this”, and as you apply those learnings what do you do with them, making sure you take a step back and say “oh, we actually have an ecosystem that’s doing this thing, is this thing intended, are we seizing this as an opportunity or is this something that has intended consequences or unintended consequences that we should be mindful of”.
Mike: And that’s cool about being open-source project, where everything’s in code and anybody at least the ones that know how to look at our code, but anybody can come and look and see what are our values codified in how we built the thing. You can actually look under the hood and point to like “oh no, you have an admin key, this doesn’t jive with what you say”. We don’t have, we removed our admin key, but that’s like a key example you could have when we had one, like it was open and anybody could see that and call us out. We called ourselves out in the long run, but anyway, you get my point. Being an open-source, this is something that crypto in general does really well, but being open-source and having to code out there, allows the communities to be more of that conversation. Be more at a peer level with the developers of the project themselves. Everybody can talk on the same wavelength because it’s all open and out there and on the table. You can check like “hey, are we doing what we say we want to do?”.
Brenda: It allows people to fork and tweak, going back to the experiment phase which is one of the reasons the space really like... if you’re not an open-source project, please be, please move in that direction. Anyway, sorry Spuddy.
Mike: And if not, fork when, at least make a proposal for a protocol change, that’s again something that we built in, that allows us to as a community share responsibility on how things change and develop in the future.
Spuddy: One thing that... I forget which part of the conversation I’m responding to, but you don’t see anybody in on crypto twitter or on reddit or in any of the forums, you don’t see anybody talking about the oracle problem anymore. There’s nobody discussing this is a problem, that needs to be solved....
Brenda: We solved it Spuddy... Just kidding.
Spuddy: Is that a project or is that... how did that conversation go away? Just...
Mike: NFTS, topic changed.
Spuddy: Tellor was created to solve, to be a decentralized solution to the oracle problem.
Nick: I think in a lot of ways too, it’s like nobody talks about solving the scaling problem anymore, as much it’s much more about what trade-offs are you willing to make to solve the scaling problem and then I think people are coming with oracles too, in realizing that it’s not that...
Spuddy: In the developer community...
Nick: Yeah, in the developer community for sure, it’s just like you know, the oracle problem is actually just about trade-offs, where are you willing to take some decentralization out and where you want, what do you need speed for, what do you need security for.
Will: An understanding of risk.
Mike: I feel like crypto and the crypto twitter folks, the crypto investors and traders, I think they’re satisfied with scaling, okay, this problem gets introduced, it spreads, people realize it’s a thing, and then new projects crop up with marketing saying that this is what they’re tackling and then everybody’s just sort of satisfied that...
Spuddy: They say there’s an abundance of marketing language by teams that say we have solved this.
Mike: Right, and that same thing happened with the oracle problem. You had like 10 oracles pop-up and then I think that the community all got satisfied, well I guess it must be solved. There’s enough people working on it, we don’t know the difference between any of them and that’s fine.
Spuddy: And when I google it the first thing that pops-up is somebody saying that it’s solved now, because of my solution.
Mike: Right. The power suggestion.
Nick: Yeah, let’s call more people out. Well, I’m going to call out somebody in the community. Who’s not even part of the team. Daryl. Anything you want to say? Daryl is not part of the team, but he’s heard about Tellor, so enjoy the call.
Daryl: What immediately comes to mind is that different solutions are going to require different value sets, and so it kind of depends on what solution you’re trying to solve and maintaining your integrity with your core values as you pursue that solution is going to basically, shape that the world around you and the people who adopt your solution. So, there’s the thing about decentralization that kind of you don’t really know where it’s going to go and you can’t really control that people vote with their attention, they vote with their effort and their time and so I mean if you’re trying to, if you’re seeking to provide a useful solution it has to be useful to a certain group of people and I guess targeting your audience and then finding out what they value and then crafting a solution that would fit for them is kind of what you’re going for. Especially in this where it’s kind of the wild West, you don’t really know people are just hopping all over the place, like you were saying with “oh, we got a solution to this problem”, but do you really? Do you know is it really any good? How do we know and how long does it take to find that out? So, we’ll see, I don’t really think there’s a need to stress over where it’s going to go at this point. I think the communities as they become stronger are going to branch off and do their own thing accordingly.
Mike: Thank you. You brought up something that made me think. What, how would Tellor have looked if we asked users what they needed and built to their requirements, like from the get-go?
Nick: Basically, you would just look like ChainLink. You would almost try and forego the facade of decentralization. I mean ChainLink goes through a lot of effort to make it look like you have more nodes, just run the nodes yourself, and then you have to be a centralized oracle service.
Spuddy: Take responsibility for feeding me data.
Nick: Well, that’s what people want, they want, I’ll send you 100 bucks a month and you send out a smart contract and then... That would be if users, a lot of users don’t care about decentralization, that’s what a lot of them might be fine with.
Mike: I know somebody could probably quote Steve Jobs here, but he was, he had the sentiment, I don’t know exactly what he said, I’m going to butcher this, but it was the idea that “no, your user doesn’t know what’s best for them”, you know what I mean. Trust that you know what’s best for them and build to that thing and then they’ll come to you and it’s almost like showing sort of leadership in a way.
Tally: Yeah, I definitely agree. Especially in an early industry.
Will: What was it, Ford said like “if I asked people what they wanted, they’d say faster horses”? It’s kind of like that. The flip side of that too goes kind of back to experimentation and having a background user experience, like “you always want to ask the people what you want”, when you’re building an mvp, you always want to get that feedback, you always want to understand the real-life problems people are having. You don’t necessarily have to ask them for what their solution would be, but you definitely need to know what their problem is and it’s not so much a function of asking a community for them to brainstorm their own fix, but it is asking the community to know kind of what is your problem, what do you run into, like why is this a pain point and from that, that’s where that leadership comes and says like I’m connecting all these dots, that’s where innovation is. It’s connecting the dots and building something that solves that in a way that you know people feel an ease of pain from, like relief from and that’s kind of the recipe for adoption, that’s the recipe for evangelists. Because you have these people that their lives were fixed because a certain thing works better, they didn’t know how to fix it themselves and somebody else came along and did it for them and yeah, it’s kind of wrangling of both of those camps. Listening to people from the very beginning but listening to the right kind of things.
Mike: That goes back into the waiting game and the long-term approach, because sometimes you have to wait for the user to either educate or some like technology to just get developed in a way that allows you to both handle their pain points, stick to your guns with how you want to solve these problems and it’s not always aligned.
Nick: Lauren, thoughts from the stars? What do we have?
Lauren: I got the sweatshirt and everything. Something that a few people touched on was the next era of technology, having values or whatever and I think that any set of technology like that can’t exactly have its own inherent values and just kind of reflects who uses it. So, for example, I think sometimes crypto might get a bad rap because some of the people that are loudest about it online don’t necessarily have the values that we do, so I’m just thinking, on twitter there’s these NFT guys that are talking about how it’s so great to be in that future of the internet because for the first time you can display your status online, which I would argue is probably one of the worst things about the internet now and Facebook and Instagram and things like that. I talk to a lot of people now who know that I’m involved with this and they’re like “oh, isn’t that the worst?”, and I’m like yeah. I think that’s the worst personally, but there’s this whole other side of it, where people with different values than that are kind of making their own projects and going about it in their own way and that’s a future worth looking into.
Nick: It’s always really hard to say, like you know some projects might not have their own values, there’s Ethereum, and always had the problem, whenever people said “you can store anything on the blockchain” or you can create anything on the blockchain, and the question regulators always ask is what if you made a contract to kill someone. Yeah, you know, and then would you as a community allow that? It’s like, as a base set of a community, you can. You want to be so censorship positioned that you can’t take that offline, but then, what’s your job? Do you censor it as a community and I think there’s just, it does come into though. You still can have values I think as a community in sort of who you’re supporting, who you’re helping to actually build some of these things you know. Whenever, even if you’re looking at Ethereum versus say a bitcoin, you know they’re relatively similar technologies, but just the ideas and the values that have molded, were sort of instigated by the communities. And I think even with Tellor, even if the underlying protocols have roughly similar technologies, you can still have values built into one.
Mike: Like personalities almost. But thank you Lauren. Other people we haven’t got to. Tim, you’ve been quiet.
Tim: Yeah, a big thing that really draws me to this space is, the ability to try out different forms of social organization. I guess before blockchain was invented, to try out a new money, you had to either be a government or take the risk of trying to create a company that can create a money and probably get shut down. Or to try to create different types of organizations before, again you would have to create some kind of strange legal structures I guess and now like anyone who can code a little bit can try to write some new type of organization. It enables people from all over the world with different perspectives and people that see different needs to try to fill, to meet those needs and that’s cool. So, along the lines of Facebook and twitter, they used to have... twitter had some API that a lot of people used, people were building businesses off of this API and then they shut that down at some point and then so all these people are building things off of that, they shut down their businesses. And then another great thing about this space is that you know, if some protocol wants to shut down anyone using that, can just continue to keep using that protocol they were using and they can just fork a protocol that is taking a bad direction and just keep going in the direction they want to go with. That kind of provides a backstop to us, kind of like the Napster example in the music industry, we have a natural backstop in that it’s easy to, relatively easy to just fork each of these protocols in the web3 space and make slight alterations.
Mike: So, you’re saying like the example of these alternatives keeping the big players in check. Just the fact that, a fundamental aspect of these projects are, that they are forkable, because you know anybody could just copy and paste it and start something in their own way, the fact that we have that looming... I don’t know if you want to say looming, but like that threat is always there, so that we have to make sure that we keep in check or we don’t get too greedy or start doing something the wrong way.
Tim: Yeah, exactly. It’s much easier to fork Tellor than it is to fork Facebook, which is not all sitting there out in the open. One other thought that crossed my mind in this discussion is I saw like a tweet yesterday from Jack Dorsey about how web3 is controlled just by a couple rich organizations like Andressen Horowitz, which seems like that’s somewhat the case, but I guess one thing I note about Tellor is that we don’t have that VC backing. And also, any project that makes it, that’s great, people maybe a small set of rich people come about, because of that, but then again you can still create new protocols and new communities can pop-up around that to create new more decentralized protocols.
Nick: Yeah, I mean, you were in RaidGuild, you’ve taken part in DAOs, do you feel controlled by Andressen Horowitz Tim?
Tim: No, not at all.
Nick: I mean, same with Tellor, it’s like, I don’t feel controlled by any VCs, and I think there’s a big difference between, the VCs made a whole lot of money off the space and a whole lot of, but I said VCs scammed retail and made a whole lot of money that way, that’s a whole lot different than the developers and the projects themselves are beholden to VCs like the code’s all open-source, like nobody... at least the majority of it is. So, yeah. I thought it was funny.
Tim: Some people over there doing that, doesn’t really affect us over here, now we can keep doing, we can keep marching forward.
Sean: I think that’s a good point Tim, around the organization of people, that’s how I see it, even thinking there were like most people worked on farms in the early 1800s, then maybe factories, then corporations, that’s like very simplified view of it, but still today most activity is done through corporations like Facebook, Microsoft, Google... So, in that way I think there’s a lot to come for, like decentralized, or DAOs. However, people figure out how to organize themselves to capture economic activity is the big thing. That’s going to shift I think and it just made me think because, like Tim said, if you know someone wants to fork a project, they’ll be probably small but a ton of applications, but the biggest pieces will be, like I don’t know, maybe the protocol layers like Ethereum, or Bitcoin. So, I think there’s just a ton to evolve, but all centered around how people organize and where economic activity happens.
Brenda: Something that scares me about DAOs is that they’ll end up being like the same board of directors at some company you know. Like right now, how many of you actually vote on your stocks when you get those emails, they tell you have to go vote on something?
Nick: I don’t think any of us own stocks besides you Brenda.
Mike: You're the stock whale.
Brenda: Whatever. But that’s what’s scary about DAOs though, it’s like if everybody just, what are we calling, you defer your vote to somebody else, it’s going to be like five people driving the entire DAO and I think that goes back to when this is down or even as we go moving to a DAO, we want to make sure that the community becomes involved enough and that hopefully resembles our values enough and has similar goals for the long term. So, that when we are actually not part of it, that is not like two or three people just saying what’s going to happen and not even allowing the voice of the community to be heard, but that’s you know I don’t know, maybe that’s just...
Mike; I don’t know how we solve.
Brenda: I know that maybe that’s just how it works, but hopefully it just takes longer or it’s enough time between that happens. So, that people can actually just decide to fork and go their own way, but that’s why it’s so important, you know.
Tally: It’s definitely an important component. I’m just really thankful that technologies like discord are available, because they really help to engage in the human component.
MikeSr: I think maybe the answer to that Brenda is just to keep DAOs as small as possible, so you can have the tiniest group of people, that cares about a certain thing and if you think about something, know real communities like a neighborhood or a homeowners’ association, these people care, it’s where they live, it’s a small group of people. So, I don’t know, maybe that’s the definition of success, when a group like that of everyday people can organize and you know pool their money and their resources and vote on things that they care about. Then the question is what technologies, what you know properly decentralized technologies can they use to do that? I don’t know of any other way besides keeping things small, because when things get big, crazy things start to happen.
Brenda: Definitely. I guess we will try to keep our community as involved as possible between now and when we actually turn into a DAO.
Nick: Owen or Ryan, I know you’re not on cameras, but if you had anything there...
Owen: Yeah, my internet is a little trash right now. You guys are putting out so I don’t know if I am. It’s basically my satellite dishes made out of clam shells. I collected on the beach, but yeah. Overall, I’m just happy to be in a space where a lot of general work chat and building is going on in public. I mean, there’s been a lot of comparing to Facebook, what do you mean even. Just to play devil’s advocate, Facebook there’s a lot of animosity, but you know it serves about three billion people, which is like over a third of the entire world population. It’s providing a lot of marketplaces for people to sell their goods and conduct their daily business, that’s a lot of monthly users. And you know, Facebook doesn’t have, I don’t see Zuck doing in the early days, like values calls. Anything like that. Or having a place where the community can just say “yo, the software you’re putting out sucks, please improve”.That’s why I’m happy to be here in general. As things grow bigger, I mean, what was mentioned earlier, you know, can we actually have some sort of structure, where outside of a few people who control this tool that is used by tons of people? I don’t know until we get like open-source neuraLink, or whatever, but yeah, as long as we have it open-source, and just continue having these kinds of things that I’m pretty hopeful for the project, and tools that it develops I mean. Going back to Facebook, react, is used by tons of people, and that’s built by them originally and a lot of good things have been made by that, I’m assuming.
Mike: Final word for you Ryan, you got to wrap this all up in a bow.
Nick: And you can’t be a Facebook apologist, like Owen.
Brenda: Hold on, hold on, hold on. There’s Tamsay too. He hasn’t talked.
Nick: Yeah, Tamsay, if you want to talk, please.
Tamsay: Yeah, sure, for the first time, I guess. So, it was interesting to hear everyone’s thoughts. For me, I was actually complaining the other day about this; so, how can we interact more with Tellor and with the community. One of the things we, I mean, Ethereum will have to come to a certain point where it’s cheap enough for people to actually start participating in everything. Because, okay, we have votes occasionally now, maybe in a couple of weeks, months or whatever, but once we would like to vote on more things, or decide things, then those costs add up and eventually you could run into trouble that maybe a lot of people cannot or don’t want to participate. But other than that, I really enjoy being here and even though the community is still getting more active, because as we can see it does get more active on discord, I really hope that we will get to a point that we will have these big chats and discussions on discord about everything really. Even though I’m not that technical in crypto and programming, I do like to read what the developers are doing and what they are discussing. And yeah, that’s more or less what was not really said until now. I also was nodding a lot during everyone’s thoughts, because I do agree with a lot of you guys.
Nick: That’s awesome, thank you for coming.
Brenda: Oh Ryan, I’m sorry, you get to wrap things up.
Ryan: Can you guys hear me? I’m in the car right now.
Mike: No, you sound good.
Ryan: I think the theme that I’m getting from this overall talk is, I mean it sounds like web3 is a big topic and one of the main points that I wanted to make was just like kind of piggybacking off what clamdad or MikeSr said, was that the web3 technology is essentially allowing us to kind of create these communities and allocate resources much more efficiently than web2 is allowing us to do. Web2 is just very much communities built on centralized platforms, but now we’re able to essentially create tokens and mint them in, make them work in a way that works for the community specifically, and so that it doesn’t also affect other communities. One other thing that recently popped up, I don’t know if you said it, but I thought it was interesting how the mainstream adaptability of Tellor doesn’t necessarily directly correlate with the community size of Tellor, because it’s open-source. The tight-knit community of Tellor kind of operates on its own, right, and the adaptability of the code and the software itself will take on a life of its own, so I just think that’s an interesting dynamic, that I didn’t really thought about, I think I’ll leave it, that question open.
Mike: Well, it’s definitely, it’s been over an hour. Just want to thank everybody for showing up and sharing your thoughts and this was really cool, we had some community members here, and our team is growing really big and we talked about some big ideas, there’s no really end point in this discussion I think. It’s just something that’s an ongoing process, that we need to do regularly, like we mentioned at the top of the call. Let’s not wait too long to do this one again.
Nick: Yeah, and I think next time maybe we can take a look at how we’re actually doing almost. We can have some retrospect on, “okay, we’ve been alive for a while, are we accomplishing these goals?”. We know from this call we’re sort of focused in a way, but you know, let’s look back in three months and say how’s it going. Is crypto getting better? Are we still moving towards the same things or do we need to move but yeah.
Brenda: Daryl, Tamsay, like the community, call us out in three months. You know what we’re trying to accomplish now and hopefully we get closer to it.I’m sorry, what?
Mike: Spuddy’s saying they do call us out.
Spuddy: They call us out all the time.
Brenda: I’ll continue by doing our next call.
Nick: This was awesome everyone, thanks everyone for coming, thanks everyone for opinions, if you have more comments on the discord, let’s keep the conversation going as long as you guys want, and yeah, Merry Christmas everyone. See you next week, bye.
