A short report on progressOrganisational structureConsensusThe functioning of VCoin as a cryptocurrency requires two different forms of consensus. One is the cryptographic consensus enforced by the p2p application; the other is the social consensus that is created by those who hold coins and/or run nodes. In terms of
raison d’être, the social consensus must first exist in order for the cryptographic consensus to have any semantic meaning. All the machine “knows” is whether the sequence of 64 bytes at
this memory location is identical to the sequence of 64 bytes at
that memory location. The rest, as they say, is left to the reader’s imagination.
The social consensus is by far the more important. In addition to grounding the semantics of the blockchain, it's the wellspring of the much-vaunted “network effect” --- which is really just a weak way of saying “backed by people”.
The network effect is either i) monolithic --- more users on the network as a whole result in each one of them deriving more value as each additional user represents one more peer to interact with or ii) particularised --- more users of one type make the network more attractive for users of a different but complementary type, such as consumers and merchants.
Direction by social consensus replaces control by central authority :
“Unlike traditional currencies such as dollars, bitcoins are issued and managed
without any central authority whatsoever: there is
no government, company, or bank in charge of Bitcoin.” -
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/When it comes to p2p apps, the bottom line is that as soon as the source code is publicly released,
no-one is ”in charge” of
anything. The witticism “herding cats” doesn’t even come in to it; people are completely free to do as they like: run a node, not run a node; hold coins, don't hold coins; set up a foundation, a faucet, a business, promote the coin, fud the coin, set up webwallets, offer an alternative wallet design, provide off-chain features, pay to spam the blockchain, pay to clean up the blockchain, generously contribute to a faucet, mischevously drain a faucet dry.
The fact that there is no-one in charge is significant to US financial regulators. A couple of years ago
FinCEN made it unambiguously clear ...
A final type of convertible virtual currency activity involves a de-centralized convertible virtual currency (1) that has no central repository and no single administrator, and (2) that persons may obtain by their own computing or manufacturing effort.
So, “official”
this and “official”
that are meaningless in the context of a cryptocurrency because no-one has the authority to stamp anything “official”. Or rather, anyone and everyone has the
opportunity to stamp anything they want as “official” or make a claim to be “the official dev” but it carries no inherent authority, only that which it itself engenders.
How does anything ever get done?The thing is, a cryptocurrency is a discrete Open Source project in its own right and in Open Source projects, things just sort of get done. Or not. The psycho-social aspects are currently not terribly-well understood in a number of key areas, one of which is the motivation of contributors.
In the case of altcoins, it seems that the creation of the altcoin's peer2peer network also establishes a social consensus which behaves as a prototypal form of “Teal” organisation as described in Frederic Laloux’
Reinventing organisations.
The vast majority of Laloux’ thesis can be ignored as irrelevant, the real interest is in how the closely the core Teal Organisation principles correspond to those of an altcoin community. In the example below, strikethrough denotes a concept that has no meaning in the context of an altcoin, the remainder are relevant and it’s hard to deny their correspondence:
Teal SELF MANAGEMENT practices
- self organizing teams
coaches w/o P&L responsibility when needed- almost no staff functions
- coordination and meetings ad hoc when needs arise
- radically simplified project management
- minimum plans & budgets
- fluid and granular roles
- decision making fully decentralized (advice process)
- transparent real time information sharing incl,. financials
anybody can spend any amount of money provided advice process is respectedformal multi-step conflict resolution processfocus on Team performance, peer-based process for individual appraisalsself-set salaries with peer calibration, no bonus, profit sharing
Teal WHOLENESS practices
self-decorated warm spaces without status markers- clear values translated into explicit ground rules, ongoing values discussion
quiet room, meditation practices, team supervision, peer coachingstorytelling practices to support self-disclosure and community building- absence of job titles and descriptions to allow selfhood to shape roles
- honest discussion about individual time commitments
regular time devoted to address conflicts- specific meeting practices keep ego at check
- distributed initiatives taking
recruitment interviews by future colleagues, focus on fit with organization- personal freedom for training, focus on culture-building
- personal inquiry into one‘s learning journey and calling
caring support to turn dismissal into a learning opportunity
Teal EVOLUTIONARY PURPOSE practices
- organization seen as a living entity with its own evolutionary purpose
- strategy emerges organically from collective intelligence of self-managing employees
- decision making by listening to organization‘s purpose (everyone, large group, meditations…)
- concept of competition irrelevant (embraced to pursue purpose)
- growth and market share only important in as much they help achieve purpose
- profit as lagging indicator: will come naturally when doing the right thing
- inside out marketing: offer is defined by purpose
- “sense and respond” planning/budgeting/controlling
- no or radically simplified budgets, no tracking of variance; no targets
- “change management” no longer relevant as organization constantly adapts from within
- suppliers chosen by fit with purpose
- total transparency invites outsiders to make suggestions to better bring about purpose
- conscious sensing of what mood would serve best
The evolutionary purpose practices are a remarkably close description of the characteristics of an Open Source altcoin project.
In essence, altcoins are
de facto Teal Organisations created as a natural consequence of the distributed nature of the p2p app.
Despite the New Waviness, the broad-brush description of a Teal Organisation never quite loses sight of its utilitarian purpose: doing things better, more effectively, with a more complex set of values.
That’s not a bad philosophy for an experimental vehicle like an altcoin to adopt.
Cheers
Graham
