Principles & Navigating the Storm

There’s always something going on somewhere in the world that’s “crazy” these days. As they say, change is the only constant, so it’s probably always felt this way to people in the moment. But, there’s an objective case that this is a unique era: >7.6 billion people + hyper-connectivity from the internet. Our world is full of complexity, reflexivity, and velocity that is unmatched in human history.

In the last few weeks, we’ve seen “crazy” situations of political, social, and economic unrest. Just in the US-centric news cycle, we’ve seen the storming of the US Capitol, deplatforming on, and of, social media platforms, and the Wall Street Bets/GameStop/Robinhood fiasco. Disinformation, inequality, and confounding changes are at the forefront of our collective mind. 

I’m known amongst my non-industry friends as a “crypto person.” In the last few weeks, I’ve fielded WAY more calls/texts from friends wanting to understand what this whole crypto/blockchain/decentralization thing is all about than ever before. Just like after the Great Financial Crisis and Satoshi Nakamoto’s subsequent work to create Bitcoin, people are searching for new answers to grapple with the changes and injustices they see in the world. 

Crypto and decentralization don’t automatically solve all the ills of society or the fallibility of humans. We have been diligently researching, debating, experimenting, and buidl-ing the tools and platforms to address the exact issues that we’re seeing play out though. We still see plenty of greed, power games, and tribalism in cryptoland. We’re not “there” yet, and never truly will be. There will always be unexpected challenges and tradeoffs in the pursuit of better forms of cooperation in a diverse, complex world. 

So, how do we weather the inevitable storms in this never-ending pursuit? Principles—establish values that are collectively held and inviolable that serve as a guide to navigate an uncertain future.

We’ve published our first draft of the Geo Web Constitution to attempt to do just that. It’s not much of a constitution yet (explicit governance functions and rules will come later), but it does lay out initial thoughts on the mission and principles that we’re founding the Geo Web Network on. Our principles are idealistic and probably a bit naive at this point, but we’d rather start from there than the opposite. We’ll continue to iterate through drafts, so these principles aren’t law yet. We hope the spirit of our intent resonates with the community and gives you a clearer picture of where we’re trying to take this network. If you’re interested in helping chart the course, we welcome you to jump in with comments, suggestions, & criticism—rule by decree will never be one of our principles.

On to the updates...

Technical

• Our testnet Cadastre (Metamask required, make sure you’re on the Kovan network!) is live with our initial Ceramic Network integration. You can now give your land parcel a name and link arbitrary web content via a HTTP(S), IPNS, or IPFS URI. This starts to show the potential “purpose” to owning land on the Geo Web. 

• Example Use Case: Last week I claimed essentially the whole Manhattan Financial District, renamed it r/wallstreetbets, and linked the Reddit page to it... because why not? Anyone visiting Wall Street and using a Geo Web browser would be taken directly to the digital epicenter of the meme stock resistance. Much cheaper to “own” Wall Street this way IMO, but still requires diamond hands (a sufficiently high For Sale Price) to maintain control of the parcel. Go buy the parcel if you’d like to see something else done with it.

Community

• Great stuff coming out of the team over at clr.fund. Their third matching round recently wrapped up, round 4 will kick off sometime next week, and ETHDenver will utilize a clr.fund instance to allocate $15k in prizes in the Open hackathon track. We haven’t pubbed our participation in these matching rounds because we shilled Gitcoin GR8 so hard, but we did receive some contributions/funds. Thanks for the support!
• ETHDenver, ETHDenver, ETHDenver.
• We’re working on a draft product roadmap to share publicly. We’ve kept admin necessarily light and nimble as we’ve developed the initial product, but it’s time to get a little more formal and communicative to help the community better see the Geo Web vision. The roadmap will lay out the epics we’re targeting in our march to mainnet in 2021.

On Deck

• Researching solutions for intra-parcel content linking
• Implement a limited Ceramic document hosting service