Links
Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CugMdV-ArHE&ab_channel=Tellor
Project website: www.tellor.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/WeAreTellor?s=20
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/n7drGjh
Summary
A very long open-ended discussion on values and goals. The whole core team went through their own take on what they see in the future of Tellor, discussing the DAO structure as well.
Whole discussion
Nick: Hey everyone, welcome to the Tellor community call! This is the whole Tellor team. Actually, beside Brenda and Ben, who’s sometimes here. And Spuddy is not here. We’re working on getting the entire team here. This is Tellor week, that’s how we dubbed it. We just brought the whole team out and we are jiving on getting Tellor X up. We’re talking a lot about the different projects that everybody is working on, it’s really great to work with you guys in person.
Mike: Yeah, few of us haven't ever met in person before this week, so that’s important.
Nick: It’s not necessarily important in a decentralized ecosystem, but it’s super awesome. Today we’ll kind of have a...
Mike: We’re just trying to make it full screen so that we can see ourselves.
Nick: For the community call today, I don’t think we had any questions, but if someone on the chat has any questions, feel free to ping them. We’ll just have a very open-ended call here, we might even go around, and encourage participation. We wanted a lot to talk about just Tellor values and there’s the what are we building, but then there’s also the how and why. Those different questions. Mike, do you want to pick it up, or I can start.
Mike: Yeah, where to begin?
Nick: I can give the background. I think most of the people who are watching this call know the Tellor story, a little bit about how we were doing Daxia, but a lot of people on the team actually are pretty new to crypto. We’re not all crypto OG’s who got into the space then, the federal reserve or Bitcoin. People laugh and chuckle, but that was the original mission of crypto. We were creating a new money so we can get away from government and/or money. Since then, it kind of evolved from there. Bitcoin is moved on past this “just digital money” that isn’t controlled by the FED. Now it’s a store of value and it’s a way for people to democratize their wealth and things like that. Moving on to that, what is Tellor actually building? What are we enabling? And why are we trying to do that? It's the question. Early on we made decisions, we don’t just want to build something to build something. Of course, there’s a lot of ways in crypto, if it’s just purely about making money, or trying to get your coin get to the moon, then we probably would have just done a Binance ICO, shut down shop in 2020 and did it again 6 months later. You can do that and some people do that.
Mike: We were really anti- even using a token early on. Daxia had no tokens, and when we came to Tellor...
Nick: Because you didn’t want to seem like scamming. A lot of the tokens were just scams.
Mike: I remember when we first were like, “maybe a token does make sense”, like a gut check: “Is there a greed here happening?”. We checked our feet every step of the way. You know it does actually make sense to power the network by that token.
Nick: I think we are sort of part of the Ethereum ecosystem at the moment. Not that we necessarily have to align with anyone let it be an ecosystem or a group of people, but you’ve seen the values in the whole space shift as you moved from a lot of pre-2016 people being philosophically driven by all this stuff, while now you’re getting a lot more institutions getting on. Who obviously couldn’t care less about the values, any of these companies that are investing in. How do you make sure that what we’re building is going to be something of the future. We’re a DAO, what does that mean? Can somebody go and let Spuddy in? At the side door. If you know where the side door is. Sorry. There is this recent movement about what is a DAO. Why are we trying to build a company that’s a DAO? I’m talking too much already.
Mike: I mean, as we’re talking a little bit about the history of how we started, I’m thinking back and even with moving towards a DAO, it’s something that the seeds were planted for that sort of sentimentality, we didn’t need persuasion to move that route. We were always about growing the local community here in Fredrick, Tellor started, I met you (Nick) at a local Bitcoin meet-up, where we would bring people in to educate. A small room of people about Bitcoin mining, or what Ethereum development is like. Part of the early Ethereum community was about just a simple aspect of educating people about this ecosystem and about this technology and getting people interested. That’s how I started getting in this, that’s how I met you (Nick), this is something we were doing early on, and I can see that playing out in how we decided to grow our community, with an education focus, with engagement focus, by bringing the community in and getting their involvement. Come on in! (Spuddy) Speaking of our community, our community manager Shawn has arrived.
Nick: So, that said the values right now, they don’t have to be our values forever. We’re allowed to change, and kind of shift as things go, and how the company grows as well. This is what we call a core team, but there’s also a community aspect of people who are not in this room, and what they want to build. The token holders of the DAO. It’s always like a give and take. You’re going to be working on something because you obviously want to believe in it. A lot of the time people say we’re building DAO’s to get away from the shareholder model, so the old world, where you had these equity shareholders, and you have the employees who do the bidding of these equity shareholders. That’s not good because that sort of failed, because you always just drive towards this profit motive, and you can basically trash the environment and there’s a whole bunch of other problems that are pretty well documented. How do we structure the DAO going forward to make something better? To have something that actually can create something that last long term. That said, we’d like to hear what you guys maybe think, or some things that we should be striving for. Because you know, there was an interesting discussion recently on Ethermine for instance. If you guys saw some of that stuff. Ethermine, they’re not mining blocks, they include front-running. Because it’s not fair to retail customers, and they want to instill their values and what they’re doing. Is it a good thing? Maybe. Then you get into like, what you’re building, is it censorship-resistant?
Mike: Which is another value of Tellor. If you lose one to gain another... but it’s cool, let them decide.
Nick: Yeah, you can decide, it doesn’t have to be purely censorship-resistant. If you’re purely censorship-resistant, but all you allow is money-laundering for Jeff Bezos, that’s probably not something that we want to work for.
Mike: What we’re saying is, the more we grow our community, the more we get new opinions, and there are already new people in this room, newish. New people in our community, they all have their ideas what the values should be. It’s an exciting thing, and it’s going to be something that we’re going to have to deal with, our values shifting having sometimes some pointed conversations about what directions we should go as a protocol, as a DAO. But that’s cool, this is why it’s so important how you build a community early on. Because if we grow our community really fast, full of just token speculators, that’s not going to be a fertile ground for this type of discussion. It’ll be all about how can we get the price to go up and not about anything more philosophical point of view. That I think is really important to us. So, we wanted to set the tone for the values, and then establish a foundation of people that are like-minded, and then turn it over and let it go where it goes.
Nick: I know someone did a lot of research on our values, Shawn actually, back there, who did a whole presentation on it last month. Where do you think the Tellor values are standing currently, what do you think we’re doing right?
Shawn: I think, a big idea that we talked about too is the ownership of your identity. Your digital identity, financial identity, or social identity. I feel that’s a big thing that we’re building towards. So, instead of that being controlled by a large Google or Facebook, it’s something that you have ownership of, something that is not monetized unless I give permission. Those are the big personal values that I think we’re voting towards for sure. The other thought that popped into my head is, and this is an open question, you know given the old entity structures that were corporations or stock quarters, what does success for a DAO look like?
Nick: I have my own opinions, but I don’t...
Spuddy: I think it’s participation, right? Like a lot of people participating in, that makes it successful.
Josh: I also think a culture shift, right? Because this whole thing is set up around an entirely new way to do money and an entirely new culture that surrounds that, so if you’re able to succeed with translating that to the regular person, I think that also helps with shifting.
Mike: I think it's even more basic, I think if you can just sort of exist and achieve stability over any sort of stretch of time, where the community itself is creating a product and self-sustaining themselves is like a huge victory for this brand-new way of organizing. Can Tellor, can we launch a new version of Tellor using the DAO? Can we survive the next year? Just in that and of itself is easy if we control everything, but if the community controls it, it becomes extra special because it’s not that simple. It could be like hurting cats sometimes, but if you have a good community then it’s sort of magical, if you see it working correctly. We shall see.
Nick: I mean, what kind of community would you guys like to create? I guess it would be like if somebody asked where do you see Tellor in one year, in three years? I mean like Spuddy and Ryan, you guys work on the community side a lot, what would you guys like Tellor’s community and what we’re building to look like in a year or in three years?
Spuddy: I want to see more conversations about Tellor and not TRB, that’s one of the things that I’m describing. I want to engage people more and I want to see more people engaged. Our Discord has been great lately. We have even just a handful more people becoming active members in the community and makes a huge difference.
Mike: Huge difference.
Spuddy: Oh, it’s been great. So, I want to bring more people in and see that and maybe who also want to talk about Tellor as an oracle not a token.
Ryan: Yeah, I think that’s like one of our strong points too, like those kinds of conversations are things that we’re able to talk about and you just even spur that discussion, there’s obviously a lot of, there’s no specific right answer for a lot of these questions but just the fact that we’re even talking about it. I think goes a long way for just the kind of knowledge base that we have here. Which I think that’s so to see that kind of conversation in the Discord and kind of drown out the TRB talk. I think that’s the direction I like to see as well.
Josh: I got something. As far as coming from a just general crypto newbie standpoint, what I’d like to see in the community, maybe I don’t know how we’d go about accomplishing this, but kind of like a nursery for those new to crypto, to kind of “here’s your starting point, if you’re new, if you want to understand the why”, so that way you can kind of curate the experience too and have the meaning behind it focused towards Tellor and the why instead of “is this token something I should invest in? What’s TRB’s price etc.”. You can literally almost curate the experience of anybody new and kind of get them excited about the purpose and the why behind all of it. Like I said for crypto newbies like me it would help just to be onboarded really quickly to be like “oh okay, this is why we do this, this is why we do that” and because there’s just so much information and misinformation. The community is based off of people who are wanting to just make a quick buck versus people that are actually trying to change something. If you’re just going into it without getting led with “this is good, this is a good space, stay away from this space, this is a better space”. Having that type of a community where you can just plop yourself when you first start, I think could onboard people really quickly to just the whole culture again. That’s kind of a cool thing to implement.
Spuddy: Yeah, people are quick to give advice like “do your own research”, but that's terrible advice for somebody new I think, because there’s so much. There’s the amount of bad information drowns out everything that’s real.
Ryan: That's probably something we could work on, I think if there’s any criticism for the communities, we could probably bridge that gap a little more. You might come for the price but we want to get you engaged so that the price becomes less relevant than that, the protocol is more interesting to talk about.
Mike: We’ve talked about education being a key value of ours for a long time and I think that could be easily reflected in being in this space where people can come and maybe because they’ve heard about Tellor but they actually can learn so much more about the entire space because we could introduce them to the finer points of Ethereum and larger ecosystem. And you know the more they learn about our values, the more they also learn about the greater values of Bitcoin and Ethereum, if you’re in as well because we share the same ones.
Shawn: Yeah, jump off that to like for a good flourishing community I’d love to see, we explain what an oracle is and what it does, but also how people can build things with an oracle like Tellor, so having that I’d love to see a community member go back and forth like “oh I want to build this with Tellor, is this possible?” or “can I help Tellor do this?”. I think that’d be really cool to see, fun ideas pop up with Tellor as the key infrastructure which oracles are for watching.
WSG: So where does it come into play, defining how we differ from other oracles and let’s say there’s that newbie coming in, or just people coming into the Discord, like what level should we get, an open-ended question, but what level of.... Right now, we’re the underdog, let’s say versus ChainLink or something, like here’s their pros and cons, clearly defined, as a crypto newbie maybe this is why that’s important, this sort of the end game of what centralization can lead to with an oracle or something. Here’s why using us is good, this is why we’re better than one of them.
Spuddy: This is one of the first questions that people always ask. I can try to answer it completely, but they, you know people have to make up their mind for themselves what’s good and bad. I can’t tell them what’s good and bad.
Brenda: I think one of the pros is really like going back to why this even exists. In my perspective one of the reasons crypto in general exists is because there is something that was initially controlled just by a few that this platform actually provides a way for other people to actually play the same kind of games and in a cheaper way or it just provides this access to it. It’s still very expensive so let’s not kid ourselves, it’s not going to be beneficial for everybody, but it does open up the playing field for a lot of people to do a lot more things that before we’re just reserved for a very few people and when they come to us thinking about what’s the difference and what’s the pros and cons it really has to go back to the values why are you even in crypto. You're just here to make a quick buck, there’s nothing we can say for us, to change their perspective, unless they actually believe in the technology and what it can actually do and why it’s even decentralized. It’s inefficient and it’s expensive, why do you want censorship resistance, because you want to play the same games that other people have access to and it’s still going to cost money, but it opens the platform to a lot more people and the beauty of it is that it’s not controlled by us, it’s not controlled by anybody, and to get that point across. I think that it's going to take that people are open to actually seeing those type of values and valuing censorship resistance for that versus just for making a quick buck and not paying taxes on it.
Josh: I just wanted to point out that is there something in the chat that we should be paying attention to?
Nick: I’ve been reading it. It’s alauri asking us questions, he asked where do Mike, Brenda and I see ourselves in three years if the DAO is successful? And you know, we’ve talked about this. I think the greatest honor of any cryptocurrency is being kicked out forcibly from your own project. So, whether it’s like the early Bitcoin guys who, like Mike Hearn or even Gavin got some stuff last week, they try and make a proposal and the DAOs screw you. That would be cool like you guys just ostracized me at some point.
Mike: Remember me? This man exactly he doesn’t represent us anymore, they’re all grown up.
Nick: Some other people who haven’t talked, so Mike, you’ve actually known Tellor for probably longer than anybody else here, besides Mike, Brenda and I. What got you interested in Tellor, even in crypto in general? What do you hope that we’re building moving forward.
Mike: Probably actually I don’t even know if I’ve ever introduced myself or not.
Nick: To the community, you’ve been on the calls many times, so I feel like you’re always on the side-bar.
Mike: So, my name is Mike, and I’ve known Mike and Brenda and Nick for quite a long time, because my office was next to theirs for a while and my background is in real-time computing and chip design, but I always would see them in the hallway or see them at lunch wondering what they were doing. So, we’d go to lunch, I’d learn a little bit and it just seemed like they were doing the right thing going the right way of course. I was obviously, I learned from these people so I kind of have that their mentality is sort of built in because this is really my main crypto experience. But as far as what I’m hoping that we build, I’m just really looking forward to the community expanding out into other walks of life rather than just crypto and just DeFi and just pricing services because you know what we’re building is just capable of so much more. So, I’m looking forward to seeing someday Tellor pop up in areas that people might never expect because we’re answering questions that people have, that are providing useful information on the blockchain. So, I’m looking forward to seeing how all that pans out and what are their walks of life, we can find our way into.
Nick: Then I wanted to hang over to Tim, you’ve actually been part of a DAO before I had a rare experience, like why did you come over to Tellor, besides a job and then what aspects of the different DAOs do you like and moving forward what do you think Tellor can do better as a DAO?
Tim: So, I came from Raid Guild, which is a DAO in the crypto space, for people who build things. So, we have clients that come in and want something built and Raid Guild has developers and designers. So, that was a great experience, I’m still in that DAO. So, one big reason I came over to Tellor was, I at Raid Guild, I was going through many different projects, over time and I kind of wanted to have the chance to just focus on one protocol or one little ecosystem, one set of protocols as opposed to just building something and then just not thinking about it again. Because I mean Tellor is a long-term type of thing, that just needs constant work and constant evolution. So, yeah, I wanted something I could invest a lot of time into and continue to think about for months so far and maybe years, whatever, but as far as DAOs go, I was always so impressed with how Raid Guild did work. It’s such a new thing. DAOs in general, but somehow the wheels keep turning and people come to them and they keep building stuff. I guess a good sign of a successful DAO is that you have participation from all sorts of different people creating things over time. So, one thought ahead for maybe a sign of success for Tellor would be if we see independent side DAOs popping up or something like that where those community members take it upon themselves to organize themselves together and maybe along the lines of what Mike was saying, if we see Tellor used for use cases outside of the crypto space. Maybe you could see an insurance, non-crypto insurance DAO could pop up that uses Tellor data, but it’s really for people providing insurance to farmers or... So, I think it would be a really good sign if we saw our community just taking the initiative to make their own projects and make their own league niches using Tellor along with whatever other tools there are.
Nick: I mean on Raid Guild though, kind of talking about this one, were there ever any projects you guys turned down because they didn’t match your values? Because I remember talking to Sam about this originally and you’re like what the question would be for us? We’ve got I’m sure some people saw mcdex is launching on Binance chain and you have other projects who are launching on Cardano, who are asking for oracles or on Solana and like is there any room for saying like they don’t fit our values? We don’t want to waste our time on.
Chris: So, Raid Guild and admission will judge people based on personality and values, right? I remember hearing about that admission to the DAO. They say the thing about the meme culture, if you don’t get the concept of Raid Guild in relation to Dungeons and Dragons, you’re not a fan.
Mike: I want to just piggyback on that, I know this is sort of jumping on your point now, but it’s just a perfect time. We listened to a talk with Solomoni talking about Molok DAO and how he’s got this openly pagan brand, that it either really really turns you off and you’re not interested at all or you’re like really really drawn to it and I think that sort of unabashed branding or just being proud of what you are, what you aren’t acts as a sort of a filter. The projects that get it and are going to be sort of attracted to you, and they are going to come to you more and the ones that aren’t good fit might stay away if they don’t get it. I think growing our ability to sort of who we are and express it openly very clearly is a move I’d like to see and we’re sort of still figuring out who we are. We’re doing a re-brand right now, that’s another step in that evolution but that’s a process. I don’t know if I just took over the convo. But your point about, do we as a community accept a project is on its head, it’d be interesting to see. It’s a little different with AmpleForth integrating Tellor into their protocol which is a much more of a major decision than it is just us providing a service to a project but what happened in that community was just like they were really opinionated and really interested and they still are. There's a cool process to see but I can imagine if that happened or our community spoke up and be like guys stop wasting your time with x projects.
Nick: I think you can do this as a centralized team, but then there’s also a point you ultimately want to become so censorship resistant that peopleare creating IDs and submitting for them.
Mike: And you don’t know who they are.
Nick: I think it happened in the past, somebody started tipping an ID and we have no idea what this is for but it’s super cool. Eventually you want to be similar to Ethereum, that was always the argument of Ethereum, once they put decentralized smart contracts people were like well what if you made a bounty to kill somebody. Should we the Ethereum community be held responsible? Or should the miners be held responsible? Ultimately, they started arguing you would never do it this way.
Ryan: Well, that’s the whole thing about the DAO hack. That’s been the whole ethos was like, the fact that they stepped in and kept and made a whole new fork that’s the one that’s been keeping the cloud, Ethereum has kept that reputation that it’s still the place to be for censorship resistance even though it’s literally built on the idea of censorship. That was just the beginning that it was so early on in the ecosystem that they knew how important it was to not let that kind of thing just dictate that hack to be a stain on the fork. So, it’s doing well I think, Ethereum is doing well. I don’t know about Ethereum Classic.
Mike: This reminds me of an idea that you introduced to me not too long ago, just the concept of thinking of Tellor as a public good. That kind of ties. If we create this public good, that’s really accessible and easy to just plug into without any hand-holding, then it provides the space for people to just use it and not have to go through any sort of process where they get approved by us or the community.
Nick: I think for me definitely one of those things what would be the future directions, same with whatever people talk about what are future directions of crypto. I wanted to be more privacy enhancing, I wanted to see more technologies to sort of resist whether it’s state control or state coercion or even corporate control or corporate coercion. That way you can move in those directions by building these open-source tools that allow that. That’s always what’s I’ve been hoping to do. But Lauren you’re the only one that hasn’t spoken yet.
Lauren: I guess I was just wanting to repeat what Josh said about education and outreach to new people because that’s something that I as a newbie in all of this would definitely appreciate a lot especially with all the research that I have been doing on my own, like whatever projects I’m working on there’s a lot that are very clearly easy to pick up on and they want you to join them and they want you to be a part of it and there are other ones that almost seem like they’re making it hard on purpose.
Nick: I mean you see, for context, we brought Lauren like a month or two ago, so you read the Ethereum paper two months ago and everything was brand new to crypto. Was there ever a why in there or were you curious on the why or did you look that stuff up? How did it present as you started to do your research?
Lauren: Well at first, I was just confused on everything, but that’s how you explained it to me when I first came on about our values as a company and how important self-governance and everything is to you and how you don’t want to make any decisions for the whole company, you want the users to basically decide for themselves. Eventually. But you were like “long term, I don’t even want to be in charge of anything, I want it to all run itself”, and I thought that was a cool idea to aim towards.
Nick: So, other thoughts guys? Where are we going?
Chris: I found out recently reading a book about Bitcoin that I thought this was really interesting. The string or the sentence that became the genesis hash for Bitcoin was a headline from 2008 about the Bank of England bailing out some bank. It’s the literal seed of this entire system in reference to the financial crisis. The impact that it had on lots of people including myself as a 10-year-old. That at least for me when I started here almost by accident, I thought that part of my identity had disappeared but rediscover it through the lens that the crypto space was. Also inspired by economic justice in a sense. Motivated by wrongdoing of a small group of people who were able to just simply get away with it and so I think at least for myself and I’m sure others on the team and others in this space are guided by the principle that we’d like to do it differently and distribute ownership.
Nick: I guess making the harder questions, like what things can we do better guys? Where are we failing and if these are sort of the goals and we all want the cultural revolution, the innovation, the distributed controls, the DAO. Where can we dig in?
WSG: How decentralized are we?
MikeS: I mean a lot of it has to do with providing good tools to users, to reporters and users. So, that they can go contribute on their own and just make it easy for people to make it easy. Team’s telling you.
Spuddy: There are a lot of people who can participate in the community, they could be reporters, they can do a lot of things, the basic first step would just be to take your tokens from the exchange and put them in a wallet on your computer and there’s a lot of people that don’t do that. I like to start conversations with people that.
Nick: I think we should push that way more. I mean that it’s a giant red flag for all of crypto. 90% of all these coins are sitting on Coinbase and Binance.
Mike: Which is why we can do this better, but we’ve begun thinking about ways to incentivize now that we’re moving away from just miners being this sort of stakeholders with the system to hopefully a broader audience. But how can we create new incentives, new ways for tier b holders? A new purpose for them to take their tokens off of an exchange and still participate even if they’re not super savvy as a miner/reporter has to be. So, things like the Tellor treasuries and these other things we’re openly exploring, like how can we incentivize because people work on incentives, some people have the whole values thing as well, but like you have to have both. It has to be something that jives with them philosophically, but also, “I don’t want to lose money by doing this, I don’t want to take unnecessary risks, because I’m uncomfortable with managing my own wallet”, there’s got to be also a sort of potential gain for them to participate and I think we’ve begun to think about ways we can do that. The cool thing about Tellor X is you guys are going to be able to make proposals about this as well and propose a way to mint new inflationary tokens that go to a certain group of the community for some purpose. I think that the ideas that you can come up with over the next few months are pretty open-ended but I think we need to do better, finding ways for people to get involved that aren’t just subset groups that are highly technical.
Shawn: I think an area that relates to that would be the bounties thing that we have now and then also like Tim and I were in online the other week, so that was like two weeks or something, the energy around that was really cool because people were incentivized. Because there were prizes and sponsorships and stuff which is fine, maybe Tellor can have something like that, that’s ongoing. Which is, the bounties, but the energy around doing something, felt really cool because that’s I think what we want to do, is have people we don’t even know building stuff with Tellor, like Tellor as an oracle, not TRB talk. I thought the energy around hackathons has been really positive so something like a community, where there’s something ongoing, I don’t know how we do it, but sort of set that incentive path up.
Mike: Yeah, because they get rewards by being involved in that are intangible as well, there’s the bounties but not everybody wins, but there’s the intangible thing that happens though networking and there’s usually a lot of educational efforts that you get by being involved in a hackathon and you mentioned this earlier but if we can also make the Tellor community this place where you gain these intangibles, even if you don’t hold a single TRB you come there and you can get value just by being there because we’re doing x, y and z kind of thing.
Josh: It was kind of a little bit off topic but I had a question because especially involving the conversation around community and stuff, most of that stuff happens on Discord right now, right? This is not necessarily Tellor related but I definitely think it’s part of the larger picture of crypto in general as far as what is being done, because it sounds like right now crypto is kind of like starting to want to make that move to getting away from the institutions in place, that are more archaic as far as this space is concerned. What is being done creating like a decentralized Discord, how can we kind of do the same actually? How can we make a community that’s literally 100% in the new paradigm so that way it’s not half-half? One foot in, one foot out kind of a thing and I don’t even know if the infrastructure is there to be able to support that yet, but I was just wondering is there a direction going like that is there something being done?
Mike: I forget, the creator of Discord is involved in crypto, twitter and there was a thread not too long ago talking about ways in which Discord could decentralize more and go that route and I forget the details of it but it was I remember thinking like that’s awesome that the guy’s even thinking along those lines. Being that...
Nick: And I mean was it signal or was the other messaging app like telegram, but some people, some communities have tried moving over to signal. It’s always just, you know, if people are familiar with telegram, they’ll join their communities or if they’re familiar with Discord, they’re joining the communities. It’s always a question about how closed off you want to be, in a lot of ways, because sometimes you know, if I went to a website, they’re like “if you want to come see your community chat, go download the signal app”. I’d be like yeah, no thanks. I would be like there’s no way and now I’m downloading this thing and there’s a really big incentive for me to go do it.
Josh: That’s like with the recent cc conference, with Vitalik talking about wanting to start branching out blockchain technologies in general for not just having it financially focused or maybe having like a decentralized social media or decentralized whatever you can know find an instance for. I was just thinking that, oh and Tim was talking about this too as far as having like your own Ethereum address view, your handle online like it’s your wallet, it’s your email address, it’s your everything.
Mike: It’s one login.
Josh: Exactly, so I feel like that could probably take care of a lot of that because you wouldn’t have to download anything like that, a specific address that’s specific to you. Almost becomes like the key that unlocks access to any one of the other platforms that are available to use that.
Nick: Yeah, a lot of people are working on that.
Mike: You’re bringing up sort of the future of crypto and I think that I was talking about this sort of there was the ICO era, and it was the DeFi era. I don’t know if it’s over, but that period of time has changed into the NFT era, and what’s next? I think a big value of ours is being, we haven’t mentioned, but being sort of nimble and fast moving, and trying to be as future proof as we can, and we’re trying to tackle that on a technical level with bytes data, and you guys could talk more about that than I can. But being ready as a project, as a protocol, as a community for the problems of the future, or where the space goes, if it moves and there’s this huge era, that’s around decentralized identity and social networks and stuff like how do we fit in that world, and just being aware of that. I think that even if we can’t really be aware of it because you just have to react how do we build a community and a team that is just able to be that nimble on our feet and I think that’s something that we really focus on.
WSG: In terms of building out and making ourselves better in terms of our specific values, like decentralization, what can we do to clearly define how we’re progressing in that. Can we eventually, like, we don’t know who’s reporting these values and what-not but do we make a role, like you’re a reporter, who is going to be our reporters. It’s going to be like these FPGA miners, and then like a couple other legacy people. How do we get more people and let you know we’re also on boarding those. Let’s say newbies or whatever, how do we get people to pony up 4+ grand to essentially become a reporter? I’m also just thinking if we have things like that are clearly defined, it helps a lot when we’re trying to build the tools, we’re interacting with Tellor. Right now, it’d be very helpful if we had a better idea about who our users are really going to be, because you’re constantly building the new implementation of Teliot. It’s like so many design decisions it would be helpful to be “we know these several users in a Discord who are going to be reporters and here’s how they want to use it”. That kind of thing. That’s hard and we’re working on, but yeah, just like a clear. What are the ways that we can clearly define who are.
MikeS: I think it’s important and it’s essentially marketing. I mean all the different arms of the Tellor network and who does what and why. We’re looking for reporters, those incentives need to be clearly laid out for people, right?
Spuddy: I’ve been telling people that “yeah man, you should be a reporter because it’s going to be profitable for you” but I don’t know any figure to put on and I can’t.
Nick: But it might not be profitable.
Spuddy: No, it’s not going to be profitable for everybody, just like mining is not probably.
Nick: But I mean it’s not because... there’s things that we can strive for as goals and values and then there’s also what the reality is that we’re going to be fighting against. I mean this is, Spuddy knows this better than anyone, this is mining 101, like every network wants, you want every single person in the world to be running a crypto miner to decentralize your network, in practice you’re fighting against basically economies of scale that say, you know people in China stealing power are going to mine for free and then it’s not going to be profitable for anybody else.
Spuddy: Whoever can take the smallest margin of profit is going to control it and so you know.
Nick: But that it’s not a bad goal to want to design the thing to try and get more people to do it. You’re still fighting against that and you’re always going to be fighting against that, even whether it’s staking and the massive amounts of money that are going to be pouring in from wall street or whether it’s hardware miners over in China you know, you’re fighting against this sort of economic reality. I think that’s important that we want to keep fighting against it but you also want to design the systems that way it works even when that happens. Even if all the miners are over in China in Bitcoin it’s due to the fact that they have to buy ASICs, that are basically door-stops afterwards. They're economically incentivized not to break the network and it sort of works and we can still use it even if the goal is to decentralize it.
Spuddy: So, for little guys who are, even Tellor miners now and I think this is going to be true for reporters also, there’s going to be times when there’s an opportunity to jump in and make a buck like when all the reporters who are sure controlling everything you know, they don’t have 100% uptime, so if you’re paying attention a little bit, there’s going to be an opportunity. And if anybody’s watching this, and you want to be a reporter, we’re going to, we can help you.
Nick: When I think with Tellor X especially, there’s going to be a whole lot more opportunities, like building it more of those manual data queries and more things that take some time and effort and a little human touch.
Spuddy: The big operations are also like a big ship that can’t turn really fast or you can go to your computer and you can fire up the newest thing they might have to write a smart contract to do what they do.
Chris: Keeping the Ethereum parallel, so while not everyone can mine Ethereum, there’s also validation of the chain, which is just running a node and it’s like without parallel, like everyone can do it and Vitalik everything hear him speak, he’ll talk about wanting more and more people to do that. Unfortunately, gas stinks, so like good luck. But with that parallel in mind, I think one thing we could work on is, what you can do with the network running software that does not require money, so that’s not only not profitable or profitable, but it’s just like money neutral, and find ways where people can participate. In that vein...
Nick: I would say that’s a big failure of Ethereum and Bitcoin in general, is that nobody runs nodes. You know besides people who offer run nodes for other people to pay to use.
Chris: It’s like if we haven’t found that role yet for people that isn’t monetary, it’s a good thing to investigate I think for sure.
Ryan: That’s why the why is so important because it’s like, you’re not just reporting just to get profits reporting because you’re providing this data that’s not native to the blockchain, which is interesting to me, for maybe if I had a computer running and providing this kind of data for people to use in a censorship-resistant manner, I would feel pretty cool about it. I wouldn’t necessarily need the profit to incentivize me, I know that’s not realistic for everybody, but just that to hone in on that aspect of being this source of information is pretty cool.
WSG: It was talked about earlier, a good way to talking about contributions, like how to contribute other than being a reporter or whatnot, just within the community and creating some bounties about creating a source of data that people can use within Teliot clients and stuff. And how do we expand the reach of our bounties right now, they live on the website we post about them, but I don’t know like Bitcoin grants, and there’s like other bounty platforms that people use a lot.
Chris: Community members have to go through us to create a bounty?
Nick: Yeah, because it’s through the website now. But I like the thing with Raid Guild, you have like a title or you’re like a mage or something and then you get points you have to gamify it. Maybe like even one of the best examples of decentralized ownership was early Wikipedia or like Stack exchange for instance. These people run Stack exchange for free basically.
Chris: Or like Quora and Yahoo answers. Youtube comment sections.
Nick: There are these non-monetary things I think that are super important. So, maybe we can think like maybe there is an aspect of Tellor moving forward and becoming a better DAO by creating better incentives, but then maybe we need to just think more about like say “no, you can’t make money doing this” and just being open about it and how do we incentivize them without making money on it. Maybe that’s something.
Mike: If you’re clear about who you are and who you aren’t, you’re going to attract the people that like you know, what I’m actually more interested in this sort of social credit of being labeled a Tellor mage because I’ve done x, y and z. I’ve posted this many comments in the Discord, alright, I’ve voted this many times, you know, you can keep track of these numbers and create some sort of reward schemes or I don’t know title schemes or anything that’s fun.
Nick: I mean maybe that’s like the opportunity you have because like you feel anything that has a lot of money to it ultimately gets taken over by wall street and corrupted and you know the people who you attract are not the best so maybe the real answer is trying to take as much money out as possible out of the critical tasks of it. So...
Mike: You’re going to have people that are just like, they’re going to be holders, they’re not traders, they’ve bought TRB because they dig it, they’re going to hold on to it forever and if they feel like they can be part of the success of their token, holdings going up because they’re involved in sort of day-today of the Tellor community I think that’s attractive to a group of people for sure.
WSG: I mean even like you know we don’t want to be like alright, yeah, we’re seeking users who are just concerned about TRB rather than Tellor. Even just being a little bit more fanatical about our values and like yes, look we’re going for this beachhead, we’re getting a lot of resistance, just talk about the sort of politics of crypto a little bit more. There’s active resistance for us to get new projects and stuff, and like new users, so talk about that and we’re waging a battle here and we need this and we believe that once we get that beachhead there is going to be a significant, so it’s like this is our Normandy.
Mike: So, it’s like we are David in the David and the goliath story, but we’re afraid to actually come out and say we’re David.
WSG: It’s like for those, like on our Discord we have our channel where it’s like okay, go over there if you want to talk about price, but it’s like if we’re consistently like we believe in this, because of our values, hold on to your TRB because we believe things are, we believe we’re going to be around and it’s like...
Spuddy: I’ve definitely been really quick to swap people away when they want to talk about the price of TRB and I got to reel that in a little bit for.
Ryan: Sure, we’re just like hard to your TRB-shirt.
Mike: Just to steer the conversation back to where it’s like “hey man, it’s not about the price it’s about storming Normandy, you Tom Hanks?”.
WSG: Realistically, if we get that beachhead, get a bunch more users, do you think the price is going to take a dive? We don’t have to be like “yeah, it’s going to moon, let’s go”. We believe we’re going to gain users and here’s why, here’s why we believe it all of our tools, are trying to enable people to do this in a decentralized way. Yes, we’re going to be around, here’s the pattern, make your conclusions.
Josh: It’s just like trojan horses, like “hey, if you’re worried about the price, the price will go up, if you just join this community and start growing it”.
WSG: Start just well, it’s like we don’t have to be like Spuddy’s saying, if you’re coming in here, we’re not unfriendly to you if you’re just concerned about price and there’s going to be some people who are concerned about price, and also think the project is sick and for its values.
MikeS: I’d like to say something before the meeting is over because it seems like at least all of us here in the room for the first time, almost all of us, it wouldn’t be right to go without acknowledging obviously values and goals are important and we share a lot of them, some of us have different values and goals, but that’s really not why we’re all here. It’s not enough to get us all here in this room together. When you think about it, it was really Mike, Brenda and Nick that a long time ago created something from scratch, that didn’t exist and became a decentralized network on the planet that created not just the values and goals, but other incentives that we have to be in this room to work and have the luxury and the privilege to be able to build this even more. I mean I for one am just thankful for that and I think it’s really an amazing, I’m fascinated by how the whole thing just came to life.
Nick: So, we’re going to congratulate you. You wrote code and there’s prince money. That's pretty cool. No, but thanks for saying it, it’s awesome just to have everybody here too.
MikeS: So, the values and goals are great, but you know incentives are a little important too, so yeah, that’s really as much as we’d like to think that was our only motivation.
Nick: Well you got to be able to support your families and you got to be able to know all be here it’s just part of life, in reality you know, like we could, I’m sure we would all be you know helping save kittens or the environment or something more than this, but this helps pay the bills too, but you know at the same time there is an aspect to the old Google, don’t be evil saying and you want to be working for a company that or be part of a community that’s actually building something you believe in.
MikeS: And it did happen by staying true to your goals and values, right? Change them along the way, which I’ve seen from the very beginning. I’m impressed with that.
Nick: We don’t want to ever become too rigid that something that I’ve sort of pushed against is, like there’s the old Bitcoin rigidity, where the community members will slowly change out or whatever but the code stays the same and that’s the one thing, I’m willing to change the code if we need to fit our values, if it’s not working. We just making sure that we’re all building something and we’re proud of it, we want to keep building it that’s all. We’d rather talk about it than get to a point, like a lot of projects, this was you know like a say live on you know like Maker DAO for instance. Literally their whole team is all of their founders quit because it’s sort of the project started moving the wrong way and it’s like how can you prevent that? Obviously, you want the protocol to kick you out at some point I say, but you want it to be as much as possible moving in the direction of something that is what you like and especially all of us are... like all of you guys like or within the first two years of a project, if you were at Ethereum the first two years, you’re all like complete OGs, so it’s going to hopefully in five years looking back everyone will be like wow, you were employee number four. That’s a little bit crazy, so yeah, there’s definitely something to say with making sure you keep the values and moving forward because that’s what we’re building and then to me at least it seems like the projects that are not compromising other values are doing the best. Anything else guys? Last thoughts?
Brenda: Thanks for all the feedback, guys, I’ll be there by lunchtime. And Spuddy, if they continue to ask about the price, you should always tell them join in, get the price high enough to kick us out. They can do that.
Nick: Anyway, thanks everyone for watching this was super fun time. After we plan on doing the values calls once a quarter, so we’ll probably keep doing these and this I mean you guys haven’t realized they mean the fact that we’re doing this is demonstration of a key value of ours and the fact that this is an open conversation and we’re posting it on YouTube.
Mike: We didn’t practice this.
Spuddy: I challenge all of you watching this, point out a more open company that’s encrypted.
Chris: Our website is open-source, who else does that?
Nick: Alright, well thanks everyone!
Brenda: Bye guys!
