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The intention of this document is to outline contrasting viewpoints within Decred's community. The following phase will use the project’s governance system Politeia to inform, evolve and direct potential paths forward, some of which are outlined at the end of this document.

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Elephant

Decred. Forks in the road

The parable of the Blind Men and an Elephant is a story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and conceptualize what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant's body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the elephant based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. In some versions, they come to suspect that the other person is dishonest and they come to blows…

Introduction

Engaging, understanding and empowering different perspectives and varying visions is key to building successful, resilient and productive communities over the long term. In the existing tribalistic crypto-currency paradigm it is nearly impossible.

This document has been produced through a long and wide ranging discussion with Decred community members, stakeholders and external teams and aims to address the interests of the founding project team, contractors, miners, stakers, retail and institutional investors, future integration partners, and community members at large.

It is also considered through the lens of a prolonged bear market and therefore a more conservative stakeholder outlook.

The intention is to outline contrasting viewpoints, provoke discussion and maybe even slay a few sacred cows.

The following phase will be to use the project’s governance system Politeia to inform, evolve and direct potential paths forward, some of which are outlined at the end of this document.

Background

Decred has built a unique and compelling public benefit crypto-currency stack that enables:

  • Secure permissionless system to store and transmit value across digital networks.

  • Timestamping application that allows users to store hashes of arbitrary data.

  • Block derived treasury fund that scales in line with awareness and adoption.

  • Coordination of digital communities through transparent and efficient governance.

  • A minimally permissioned exchange system - the DEX (coming soon).

Decred as it currently stands has two key issues which are inextricably linked.

  1. Lack of new capital (and on-ramps for that capital).

  2. Lack of awareness.

Defining the issues

The two key issues are derived from both subjective discussions in the community forums and objective admission of a steadily decreasing coin price, in USD and BTC terms, over the last two-years. While many assets have rallied off their USD and BTC bottoms since December 2018, DCR has remained lackluster.

Decred is currently positioned as a superior store of value, so it is intuitive that the more consistent the decline against the market benchmark, the less compelling the positioning becomes to ‘smart money’. While it has been a narrative, that narrative has not yet been robustly backed up by fact.

Historical boosts to the coin price came with the announcements of Placeholder and Blue Yard’s investments. Both built positions during 2018, with Placeholder’s investment thesis in particular providing a clear and effective slogan for one of the project’s key differentiating features.

Placeholder

Existing project culture

Decred has best in class security, sustainability and adaptability but the existing culture acts as a barrier to more mainstream awareness and adoption and to being open minded about alternative use cases or implementations that might make use of the established infrastructure.

Existing forums for community discussion including Matrix, Reddit and Telegram, are not optimised for nuanced and cohesive discussions that expand the addressable conversation. In addition, the evolution of token based decentralised community networks makes the task of coordinating different groups in different geographies, demographics and cultures challenging.

The founding team and community is the greatest strength of the project - without them there would be nothing to build on, however change, renewal and a challenger mindset is key to the evolution of any resilient system.

The conflicts in the existing project culture can be understood with the following matrix. 

Decred Culture

The conservatives

This group is made up predominantly of the founding development team, core protocol engineers and community members who see Decred primarily through a monetary lens and regard the technological achievements and core infrastructure as an end in themselves.

In this camp’s view, adoption and awareness will come through fiat currency inflation and privacy concerns, among other ‘existing system’ missteps. The overriding view here is that economic collapse, societal unrest and rising inequality are the necessary dystopian progenitors to awaken new audiences to a ‘fairer financial system’.

For many in this camp, the timeline is as inconsequential as the result is inevitable, which makes debates that seek to broaden horizons naturally circular and unconstructive.

It’s the, Sit Back And Wait For The World To Come To Us approach.

The macro trends are there for all to see, but it is certainly not the only perspective, and not necessarily the most effective.

The progressives

This group believes that Decred has created the core infrastructure foundations to facilitate bold new thinking - with an inclusive, optimistic and innovative culture that can achieve more than just funding crypto-currency technology.

This is manifested in the ideas around DAOs, funding of research, projects and content that expands the addressable audience beyond the immediate crypto ecosystem. For the progressives this is the essence of the project and the reason for Decred’s technology stack.

This is not a platform approach in the conventionally understood Ethereum mold, but more an organisational evolution that seeks to empower a broad set of communities outside of the crypto-bubble under a scalable digital cooperative framework.

Depending on which side of the fence you sit, you could look at this as the glass half full vision, where problems with the existing status quo of finance, media, big business and government, alongside societal issues such as inequality, ecosystem collapse and disinformation are problems that can be addressed through a potent mix of emerging technology, human ingenuity and borderless collaboration that can unlock a wider ecosystem of creativity and aligned capital.

This is the Build The Future You Want To See And Adapt It To What Others Need approach.

The cypher-punks

Decred’s focus on public benefit technology and on not utilising paid media is in line with the stated ambitions of the cypher-punks, who advocate widespread use of cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a route to social and political change. Bitcoin was a dream of many in this movement and it shouldn’t be surprising that a large part of the core development team and community are motivated by the mission of challenging the establishment, burning down the system and rebuilding from the ground up. For some this hope is an explicit guiding principle - for others it is just another part of the project’s curious culture.

The investors

Sitting sometimes uncomfortably alongside the cypher-punks are the investors. Again this is a broad church ranging from institutional funds, to day traders, fundamental analysts, populations looking to protect against currency inflation and of course the crypto bros. Decred manages to keep much of the price talk to a minimum and steers clear of conversations that could be seen to be hyping the coin without substance - sometimes to the chagrin of the more financially focused. It is interesting to see that much of the recently approved work on Politeia and community output has focused on research and on-chain analysis, seeking to bolster DCR’s credentials as an investment opportunity to traders and institutions.


Balancing all four perspectives is essential to the success of the network, but unsurprisingly finding common ground can be hard, since people are motivated to work on very different areas, judge importance against their own biases and even communicate in different mediums and on different platforms.

Decred’s core values

Decred’s constitutionally defined focus on building public benefit technologies is a direct response to the unprecedented power of today’s tech giants and as a result the project has decided to forgo traditional digital marketing techniques such as paid media.

In general this approach sets it in stark contrast with other crypto-currency projects that rely on more traditional marketing initiatives, partnership announcements and mainstream press and PR, all of which help hype the coin price and enables token rich projects to implement a buy vs build approach to community and product development.

For some these self imposed restrictions unnecessarily hamstring the project’s potential to market itself, whilst for others this decision is based on values that are a key part of its DNA. The project continues to pay for promotion at certain events and has used paid media in the past, illustrating a continuing ethical schizophrenia that can confuse messaging.

Whichever side you are on, the decision to avoid paid media has fundamental impacts on the approaches available to use digital media to further the project’s awareness and path to new capital, whilst also providing creative constraints that necessitate alternative approaches, methodologies and perspectives.

With good governance, you can have any vision you want.

Creative constraints and limited resources demand innovative approaches and out of the box thinking that can drive organic interest and demands a show not tell approach, by conceiving and creating interesting stuff that is uniquely enabled by the Decred stack.

The project team created Politeia as a product that could become machinery of the state - a permissionless governance system that provided a more accountable and transparent mechanism for direct democracy than existing systems. There have been continuing discussions about Politeia’s value beyond the core project - with the aim to see established organisations and even governments, adopt the technology. However the issue is once again a lack of awareness of the system’s capabilities - including the recently finalised Request For Proposal (RFP) module.

Although it has demonstrated its capacity to debate, approve and reject the funding of research projects, content production and marketing, it has not yet been tested as a system to question more nuanced aspects of the project.

By debating messier questions around product positioning, purpose and implementations, the project can dog-food its own organisational technology, testing the capacities of the community and its competing cultures to govern and potentially evolve different visions, without splitting the core project into tribal factions, diluting network valuations and confusing newcomers as was seen with Bitcoin’s various warring communities.

Bitcoin tree

In the process, this would objectively demonstrate Decred’s claim to be a better Bitcoin and signal its potential as revolutionary organisational architecture for sustainably funded community networks and beyond.

Politeia experiments

According to Wikipedia,

the process of the scientific method involves making conjectures (hypotheses), deriving predictions from them as logical consequences, and then carrying out experiments or empirical observations based on those predictions.

Currently Politiea’s system is very much seen as a binary outcome, with proposals focused on gaining a yes vote from stakeholders and rejected proposals signalling the end of a team or individual’s interest. So far no proposal has considered rejection to be a useful outcome in itself, nor considered that there are ways to use feedback to inform and evolve a series of connected proposals - an approach which feels more congruent with the machinery of the state philosophy.

The following outlines a series of conjectures which serve to illustrate how the art and science of community development might come together with this process to demonstrate the system’s untapped potential. The examples are not intended to be chronological nor exhaustive and depending on feedback may ultimately result in independent or connected strategies.

Outcome 1: Cultural evolution

In this view there is an acceptance that business as usual isn’t working and that more progressive approaches and ideas are needed to address the core issues facing the project as detailed at the start of the document.

There are a number of ways this path could proceed through Politeia, ranging from limited iteration to full scale repositioning depending on evolving feedback from stakeholders.

Experiment 1: Community RFPs

Development of ground up community efforts that make use of the RFP product stack. Until now the prevailing wisdom is that this would be useful in the sort of contractor run-offs that were seen in the market maker and PR proposals.

An alternative approach would be to use the RFP process, alongside a targeted strategy to solicit responses from creative talent from around the world who respond to a clearly articulated brief that seeks to bring alive the project’s core values and connect with emotive subjects such as privacy, democracy, freedom of speech in a human way.

Many of these globally distributed creators would have pre-engaged audiences and fans and so the organic reach would be assured, with creative independence and trusted and transparent funding driving interest.

A good example of this RFP approach was the user generated feature film Life In A Day, where a global community provided the original content that was then cut together by a top tier production team.

Life In A Day trailer

Contemporary ideas can evolve this idea - encouraging a wide network of people to contribute content to experiments with data sets and neural nets, such as with Xander Steenbrugge's work.

This should hopefully demonstrate how the technology stack can be the foundation for bringing great stories alive and demonstrating the power of the blockchain system for crediting and protecting contributions, whilst simultaneously engaging new users, reaching communities organically and differentiating in crypto market and more broadly.

Experiment 2: Hybridise the culture

Much as the hybrid PoW / PoS approach to Decred’s design attempts to balance machine intelligence and human intelligence, so this approach seeks to hybridise the culture of the project, using the existing DAO infrastructure and treasury spending to separate the funding and governance of two key areas.

  • Core development infrastructure and documentation / education.

  • Storytelling that connects with communities by bringing alive the project values.

As noted earlier, this is not a platform approach per se, it is instead a way to demonstrate both Decred’s core technology capabilities (self funding, self governing, timestamping, alt implementations of Politeia) and a division of expertise that acknowledges that the skills needed to connect, build and empower communities are very different to those of building core crypto-currency technology.

Experiment 3: Repositioning

This strategy is unlikely to be approved by stakeholders, but it is worthy of debate, since there are many alternative views in the project and even Bitcoin’s narrative has changed consistently over its lifecycle. In the event that the store of value positioning is deemed to not be cutting through or that the project has potential to gain mindshare with a different positioning then it is worth considering how else Decred’s design might provide compelling foundations for. 

Outcome 2: Business as usual

The rejection of any submitted proposals that test the existing positioning, or deviate from the already approved contributions around onchain and crypto research, content production and PR would be a strong indication that stakeholders are comfortable with business as usual. Perhaps certain topics might be debated again in the future, but as a signal it would likely close off certain avenues of exploration in the near term.

In this example the community culture continues under the stewardship of a trusted founding team and community, with the expectation that external factors such as central bank policy will drive a flight to secure, unforgeable, unseizable store of value assets such as Bitcoin and further to DCR.

This is a perfectly rational long term narrative and is very much the status quo view - such as a status quo view exists in this rapidly changing space.

This is neither definitively good, nor bad, it is just objectively defined as the dominant cultural conviction.

Outcome 3: Friendly Forks

Decred is designed to be crypto fork resistant, such that any move to launch another competing variant chain would fail due to the existing PoS coin-holders and PoW miners creating barriers to that approach.

However an open source code fork aimed at leveraging and expanding the good that exists in the core codebase would be appealing and in this instance, the community could become a core support system and parent of the new child chain instead of a blocking element.

It is an additive and adaptive model wherein the general principles of the main project – in this case the strength of the community voting, timestamping and funding systems – are built upon to enable an advanced and specialised set of use cases that can appeal to niche communities both within Decred’s existing culture and outside it. Decred as mother

Most established crypto-projects, including Decred can trace their origins to the Bitcointalk forums.

In this example Politeia would evolve Bitcoincointalk’s role as the birthplace of Bitcoin’s offspring, providing a transparent, censorship resistant record of an emerging hereditary line. Stakeholders would have first visibility of the proposed chain and would be able to see first hand how the project could benefit or tax the existing core development team or roadmap and also serve to attract community or developer support.

Decred family tree

This path provides an opportunity to both incubate a new project into a specialised entity with its own community focus, economic policy, treasury funding model, hashing algorithm, launch strategy and the ability to keep connections to the baseline community and monetary system whilst expanding the network effects of the whole project family.

DCR would potentially continue to be held and staked by the child chains and drive use of the underlying infrastructure such as the DEX, helping to provide a stable medium of exchange and connection to the parent codebase.

These child-chains could experiment with economic designs that offer a defi alternative, enable a meme factory or maybe even a decentralised World Health Organisation.

Each would chart its own course, connect to its own community but still benefit and drive use of the core infrastructure, as well as being uncensorably connected to the mother.

Next steps

This document exists as both a discussion piece and framework from which a series of upcoming Politeia proposals will be derived. Further insight from the community and wider ecosystem is welcomed.

About Decent

Decent enables community networks that are funded, governed and owned by the people they represent.

Our experience sits at the intersection of digital storytelling, community development and emerging technology, with a core focus on projects that benefit the public interest.

Our partners have co-founded or led:

Since 2015 we have been researching and investing in a range of crypto projects that have focused on addressing three key areas — governance, sustainable funding and the public good.

Decent began contributing to the Decred community in late 2019.

About

The intention of this document is to outline contrasting viewpoints within Decred's community. The following phase will use the project’s governance system Politeia to inform, evolve and direct potential paths forward, some of which are outlined at the end of this document.

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