The Importance of Names

Just like English begins with ABC, my mornings always start with AVC.com. And those comments.

The comment section on AVC.com is probably one of the most undervalued properties on the internet today. You have a collection of over a hundred steady commenters, most of whom are current/former CEOs, large corporate executives, startup founders/employees, sages, CEO whisperers, and other heavy hitters who are penning some of the deepest business insights around.

Presumably just for the Disqus upvotes.

And then there is JLM. I don't think any description of this legendary AVC commenter would do him justice. And he would agree with me more than I do myself on that (inside joke).

His comment yesterday was something special though. Fred posted about a leadership bootcamp that USV is offering to some of their smaller portfolio firms.

JLM lauded the effort since trainings carry the highest ROI in business. Then he made a suggestion: since Fred is imparting such high level, transcendental wisdom, the training course itself should have a name that conveys a similar sense of significance. Afterall, bootcamps refer to the training that 'boots' or new army recruits receive.

The money quote though went as follows:

"There is a fascinating story of how the Army came to call Special Forces Special Forces. It revolves around the necessity for the name to set it apart from the entire army immediately without being odd. It worked. The second you hear somebody is SF, you get it."

The power names hold is immense. Amazon's original 'J-Team' comes to mind, as does Samsung Group's now defunct (i.e. re-named) Future Strategy Group aka 미래전략실 aka 미전실 aka The Chairman's Office.

When we have the chance to name something - which, when you think about it is exceedingly rare - we should give serious thought to what exactly we are naming.

Anyways, just need to head over and read the comments, and then you will get it.

God Level

Dominic is one of my best mates at work. He is about five years older than me, but we let our language down and we speak like friends.

Everyday either before the bullshit, or in the midst of it, we make sure to grab a coffee together; well I get a coffee, Dominic usually gets a tea or a syrup-less juice.

We talk about a ton of stuff. Mostly though, we talk about all the 'what the hell' elements of our company, cryptocurrency investing, and life in general. He has a lot more life than I do since he already has a daughter and a Korean apartment all his own - "In the North" as he describes it.

The other day we somehow got on the subject of how difficult it is for some to have kids. It was particularly hard for Dominic and his wife when they were both living apart, him in Singapore and her in Korea. They would meet every month to...do the damn thing, but they weren't successful for the longest time.

One day his senior pulls him aside and asks him, point blank, if Dominic was serious about having a kid. He realized he wasn't all in. But then he thought on it. He loved his wife - they'd been dating since high school after all - and he knew there wasn't anyone else he'd like to spend the rest of his life with let alone have a kid with.

So he focused his mind and then cleared it. Dominic referred to this mind state as 'God Level'. And sure enough, a few weeks after his wife visited the next time, he received the call. He was going to be a father.

I've heard similar stories before, so there is definitely something to it. Achieving 'God Level' isn't just good for making babies either. Having a focused and clear mind makes you an unstoppable force in the office, or on the field, or on Twitter, or on your blog that no one reads;) It just makes life better.

So take a breath, question yourself, be honest, then let it go and move forward.

Dogfooding

So just after writing about 'dogfooding' yesterday, I discovered an amazing example running live on the Ethereum mainnet right now. It's called StakeTree and it is pretty special.

It fell into my lap as soon as I opened one of my favorite Monday morning email newsletters: Token Economy.

I am subscribed to about six email newsletters that I can't live without:

• Stratechery
• Hotpod
• Token Economy 
• 스타트업위클리 (Startup Weekly)
• Exponential View
• Benedict Evan's Newsletter

Up until today the first two newsletters were the only ones that let users pay them. And of course the only way to pay was with a credit card. 

Credit cards are sorta kinda convenient for users, but they are terrible for anyone that accepts them, since they have to eat multiple non-trivial charges for *every* transaction they receive. Not only is there a roughly $0.30 fixed fee, but there is an additional fee of anywhere from 1.5% to 3.5% of the total amount charged! 

Now the two gentlemen behind Token Economy (@stefanobernardi and @yanroux) have finally decided not only to give readers a way to pay them, but they made the bold move to eschew traditional credit card payments for ETH payments instead. StakeTree is a new Business-as-a-Tool (BaaT) that, simply put, is a smart contract-powered Kickstarter Drip on Ethereum. 

Those who want to support Token Economy, for example, need only open the Token Economy Drip fund page on StakeTree using their Cipher browser on mobile or metamask enabled chrome browser on desktop, enter their desired ETH suppprt level and click send. That's it. The StakeTree Drip smart contract then trustlessly ensures 10% of your payment is distributed to Token Economy each week for the next 10 weeks. The amount distributed and the drip period are also variable I believe.

As I mentioned yesterday, the BaaT value is something I really see as taking hold in the short-term. @nieldr, the creator of StakeTree, is using StakeTree to crowdsource support for further development. That's dogfooding at its finest and he's already received over 6 ETH. Token Economy has received 5.69 ETH or almost USD 7,000 in under 24 hours! I really think that the StakeTree BaaT will be hitting a lot of home runs for a lot of people in the near future. 

The rate of development in the Ethereum ecosystem is quite amazing. Really useful, decentralized, trustless tools like StakeTree are starting to come to market now that are proving *We* will gladly pay gas to power the underlying network that enables these trustless dapps, but that *We* don't need intermediaries and middle-men taking large percentages of our money anymore. 

I cannot wait to *use* the many new BaaTs that are about to hit the market. If everything goes right, I think we will see an innovative blogging BaaT in the near future that will incorporate a very simple, but powerful cryptoeconomic incentive design atop a few dead simple smart contracts. It will be a perfect compliment (I think at least) to what the boys behind Cent have been doing. 

In the meantime, stay sluggin'.

New Blockchain-native Values

Times, they are a changing. How will these changes affect our values in the short, middle and long-term? Which values will be rewarded more as a result?

If you are involved with any cryptoassets or blockchain research, these questions probably sound familiar, if they're not already top of mind.

Below are a few examples of new values that I think we will see emerge in the not so distant future, as well as values that I expect to be rewarded more as cryptoassets and blockchain-native dapps take hold and spread across our daily lives.

• Paying for everything - including paying to be paid 
• Business as a Tool (BaaT) - *not* business as a venture - where value is created and controled by all users of that decentralized tool (the concept of 'dogfooding' or using your own product, will become more and more important)
• Preference for smaller, exclusive, economically self-sufficient, digital circles (in the smallest Swiss administrative divisio sense) around which will form membership that in certain instances will become more prized than entry into an elite country club for example
• Strong trend towards Tribalism/Community-ism in the digital world that will in turn begin to shape and impact the oranization of the physical world
• Immediate and intimiate connections with others will be expected (the line between digital identities and offline identities will blur, and as a result see increased societal validation for the former)

Saturday Shopping

My Saturdays follow a very loose, but usually pretty regular routine.

Wake up around 9am, have a cup of hand ground, aeropressed coffee, run + pull-ups, shower/get ready, long walk, book reading at whichever cafe is our favorite at the time, dinner, drinks, topped off by a walk home if we still have enough gas in the tank.

Yesterday the wife and I added two things to our normal itinerary: bookstore & camera shopping.

After finishing a much needed soul warming bowl of 국밥 at 광화문국밥 we stopped by Kyobo Book Centre's Gwanghwamun location and both scooped a few books. She picked up '플러피의 샌드위치와 수프' a nice clean, simple recipe book for soup and sandwiches by 오쿠무라 카요 and I got 'The Everything Store' about Jeff Bezos and Amazon by Brad Stone.

Since finishing Trump's 'The Art of the Deal' I've been trying to find my next book to dive into and I think I found it. I just need to quickly wrap up Margaret Atwood's slightly wry, very bleak, and extremely dystopian 'The Handmaid's Tale' on loan to me from a friend and colleague. (Happy New Year).

On top of that, we have been in the market for a new camera recently. A few years back I received a good enough Samsung point and click from work that my wife has really enjoyed. It's been amazing watching her learn how to take some really good pictures. Her Instagram game is pretty tight as a result.

But we have definitely hit a performance limit with that camera, so we agreed that it is time for an upgrade. Instead of a DSLR which I owned in the past (Nikon D90 with 18-200mm VR lens - a perfect combo that would still hold up today), portability and convenience are just as important as performance to us, so we set our sights on a good mirrorless option.

And the mirrorless market has really come a long way in a short time - there are some fantastic cameras out there. In the end though we decided on a Sony A7R III with Zeiss T* FE 55m f/1.8 lens.

On top of heading to Sony's flagship Seoul store on three separate occasions, Ken Rockwell's Reviews are second to none when it comes to camera shopping for the most in-depth, unbiased reviews around, and just as when I originally bought my D90 in 2009, it played the biggest factor in helping us decided on this camera/lens pair. Of course Youtube was also helpful for double and triple checking that decision.

Can't wait to see what kind of pictures we can snap with that bad boy when we pick it up early February.

FUMU

Acronyms are fun. They're like riddles that give you an easily reusable concept once you know what they stand for.

At lunch yesterday I learned a new acronym that is kinda perfect. It describes brilliantly a very specific instance of corporate absurdity.

Every office has at least one or two terrible co-workers. Just nasty folks that everyone is rooting for to fuck up so they can get fired. But often - for whatever reason - those nasty folks have some pretty powerful connections that, directly or indirectly, lead to HR. So that when they do fuck up, instead of getting their asses handed to them, they get shuffled out into a different project or part of the organization, which more often than not is an actual or perceived promotion.

This is a 'Fuck Up Move Up' or 'FUMU' (pronounced: Foo-moo).

Shame & Disappointment

Working in Korea as an expat can be tough. I have one colleague though whose situation is probably one of the toughest I've seen. He is a true professional though. For two years he put his hard hat on everyday, and tried to slog his way through the bullshit. He hoped - we all hope - that maybe things would start to change if he kept fighting the good fight working like a professional. And sometimes, rarely, we really do help. That is, after all, why they say they needed us when they hired us in the first place.

The other day though he asked me to lunch. I knew what was comming, but I asked if he'd mind if a mutual friend of ours joined. He said he would mind. Since I'm the overseas HR manager of a specific product division and he works in an unrelated corporate function our relationship has always been more casual than professional. But over the past half year or so I have become his unofficial HR rep. So I knew this was obviously going to be a working lunch.

Refreshingly lunch was a lot more positive than I had been anticipating. When many people decide to quit, they make up their mind months or years before they actually end up giving their notice. In the time leading up to 'the announcement' they often become caustically critical and bitter about everything. My colleague probably quit 9 to 12 months ago, but now he was finally ready to make it real.

After he told me he was ready to make his decision official we ended up using the rest of lunch talking about the timing of his notice, the proper channels to go through, how the severance and pension refunds would go - standard HR stuff. Ordinarily his function's HR would have handled this, but as they don't even have an ounce of professionalism, that was obviously out the question to begin with. And then he hit me with it. He wasn't angry. That feeling passed a while ago. No. "Now," he said, "I just feel shame and disappointment."

All I could do was nod.

There wasn't anything more I could do or say either. The only thing I know is that there is so very much more work to be done to ensure others don't end up feeling shame and disappointment. A high bar I know. Mostly I need to double down on influencing the right people so that spots open up for the right people to come in and effect broader changes (in terms of mindset, managerially, and procedurally). That's worth fighting for, at least for the time being.

Human Proof of Work (PoW)

I saw a tweet the other day that - for some reason or other - I didn't 'heart' or re-tweet so I couldn't find it to reference, but has still nonetheless stuck with me.

The basic gist of the tweet was this: Graduating and receiving a diploma from university is the human equivalent of Proof of Work. It signals to others that you were able to literally put the time and effort into something and can be trusted in some way now that, before receipt of that document, would have been perceived as higher risk or not even considered at all.

Although the poster was drawing a direct link with the consensus mechanism for Bitcoin, I was reminded of my late Great Uncle John. The last summer before heading off to college I was visiting his beach house down in Rehobeth, Delaware.

He and I were chatting when he asked me if the rumors were true that I was heading to Pittsburgh in the autumn to study. I replied yes, and then he put his hand on my shoulder, looked at me with a serious expression (which was out of character for a man who was *always* laughing) and he just said: "A degree is just a piece of paper to prove to others you are willing to put some hard work in and stick around for a little, so make sure you get one."

It was a simple comment, but so many people stil believe that which I guess makes it profound. I can appreciate that profundity, but like many these days, I just can't help but feel that such an expensive and time consuming PoW model is no longer necessary anymore - there are far cheaper, much quicker and more varied ways to verify the same thing.

Anyways after seeing that tweet and thinking about Uncle John, I started to think of some other human PoW examples besides 'graduating from a 4 year college' and I came up with this list:

• Growing Twitter followers organically
• Climbing the corporate ladder
• Building up Reddit reputation
• Earning regular avc.com upvotes
• Attending church regularly
• Creating a successsful newsletter
• Having a baby with your spouse
• (Feel free to add more)

These are all things that people can do that, whilst difficult and time consuming, tend to result in regular, consistent recognition if not outright admiration from others.

So then I got to thinking, which PoW examples could be changed to a human equivalent of Proof of Stake? How different would those examples look after switching to PoS? How many more people would benefit if it was not only much easier to accomplish something, but if that accomplishment would also provide an equal if not better reward or response from others?

There are many daily activities in many peoples lives that could be accomplished with a fraction of the effort and time, but still provide a similar if not better result as the traditional PoW activity. And this is where I think a lot of Dapps are going to find extremely broad adoption by allowing an easy but powerful way for anyone to stake their reputation, wealth or confidence in order to quickly and efficiently do work that gets them the results they need. I have a few ideas cooking myself that I hope to share soon.

If you are curious about this stream of thought, I recommend you check out the article by @twobitidiot on Medium entitled “Skin-in-the-Game Coins” and pay particular attention to the section on 'Token Curated Registries' which is essentially a human PoS consensus design architecture.

Source: https://medium.com/@twobitidiot/skin-in-the-game-coins-da0afdfdc650

Living Economics Experiments

I read the Nathaniel Popper piece that appeared in todays NYT, and as always it was great. The man regularly offers up the most entertaining, unbiased perspectives on the frothiest, most exciting sector since the dotcom boom and bust.

When I read something good, there are usually a few lines that I end up re-reading a few times. That way they end up sticking with me long after I close the tab or shut the book. This time was no different.

I have been thinking a lot about the simplistic power well designed cryptoeconomic incentive architectures will be able to wield lately, so my red hot embers were stoked when I read, "..virtual currencies are all living economics experiments, testing how different sorts of incentives create different behaviors."

It is precisely this economic incentive aspect of all crytpoassets - not just cryptocurrencies, but cryptocommodities, cryptotokens, and cryptocollectibles as well - that I think will start to draw more and more attention to itself and away from the ICO bubble that is starting to slide down the slope of a waning crecent moon.

Currently Bitcoin, with its own carrot and stick incentive strucure built into and around the Proof of Work (PoW) consenus mechanism, is the first, most prominent example of a cryptoeconomic incentive architecture performing in the wild, but as Nathaniel said, "...these incentives don’t always work as expected. That uncertainty is what makes it so interesting to watch — and to report on."

From out of this uncertainty I believe that there are many more low hanging fruit of much simpler and more easily approachable incentive structures that people will start to look for, adopt and actually use. A good, but still incomplete example can be found in a Dapp called Cent.

Cent offers a dead simple concept: any user with an email and ethereum wallet address responds to questions or posts.  Based on the portion of upvotes their specific response receives by the community, they receive a corresponding share of the original bounty that was attached to the prompt or question as a way to incentivize responses in the first place. Super simple, and it works, er, sort of.

But it is still early days, and much, much more is still left to come. So stay plugged in my friends.

Insight into the Korean Crypto Ban on Foreigners

So yesterday I published a little #tweetstorm over on Twitter (@bread_krumbs) about why, seemingly all of a sudden, several exchanges have issued statements saying soon they will prohibit *all* foreigners from making fiat deposits into their exchange accounts.

It has been well received over on Twitter so I thought I'd re-post it here as well.

Check it out below, and feel free to follow me for more Korea-related musings.

0/ I'd bet money that Korbit will claw back their prohibition on fiat deposits from *all* foreigners that was announced over the weekend. The same goes for any other exchange that issued/plans to issue a similar ban.

I'll explain.

1/ According to Korbit, their announcement was issued in order to comply with government guidelines. No mention of which one though, since various pieces of the government have made several announcements over the past month or so.

2/ So I did a little homework. Luckily the government has a useful site (정부24) that lets you search official government announcements and reports.

I ran searches for: 가상통화, 가상화폐, 디지털 화폐, and 디지털머니 (both spaced and unspaced variants).

3/ The searches returned a little over 50 unique releases dating back to 14 July 2014.

Only about 8 releases or documents attached to releases contained the words 외국인(foreigner) and/or 비거주자(non-resident).

The first release to include those words dates to 13 December 2017.

4/ That report contained the first public guidelines to regulate crypto in Korea. On the foreigner issue it said:

"...measures should be taken to ban non-resident(foreigners) [비거주자(외국인)] from transacting [on Korean exchanges]..."

https://www.gov.kr/portal/ntnadmNews/1273333

5/ A summary of that meeting report was released the same day and contained identical phrasing: "...measures will be taken to prevent non-resident(foreigners) [비거주자(외국인)] from opening new accounts and trading..."

https://www.gov.kr/portal/ntnadmNews/1273342

6/ On 28 December 2017 three releases included mention of a ban related to foreigners:

1. [보도자료] 가상통화 관련 관게차관회의
2. [보도참고] 가상통화 관련 금융권 점검회의
3. 가상통화 거래 실명제 실시...거래소 폐쇄 특별법도 검토

Only 비거주자 are subject to the ban in 1 & 2 (외국인 was omitted even), but the third is less clear...

7/ Article 3 included the promise that new speculative demand (e.g. from foreigners(외국인) generally) would be blocked by introducing identity verification systems to exchanges.

This detail doesn't alter, but adds to Releases 1 & 2.

https://www.gov.kr/portal/ntnadmNews/1286463

8/ However, a shoddy article in the Segye Ilbo (2 January 2018) claimed the Korean gov hadn't defined foreigner(외국인) nor when restrictions should be carried out causing confusion amongst exchanges that led some to ban foreigner trading.

http://m.segye.com/view/20180102004847

9/ On 3 January 2018, in a release addressing numerous errors in the Segye Ilbo article, the gov stated:

"Once the scope of the restriction on foreigners is set it will be implemented since banks are already able to determine if a foreigner is residing in Korea or abroad."

https://www.gov.kr/portal/ntnadmNews/1292917

10/ WTF.

Between 12~28 December 2018 the government was clear that trading restrictions for foreigners will be limited to non-residents.

So Korbit's proposed prohibition on deposits from *all* foreigners seems to be due to the confused 3 January 2018 release.

11/ As this proposed prohibition seems to stem from a single release written by a confused and/or tired public official, I feel it'll only end up applying to non-resident foreigners.

But one can't discount Klownism - the funny way logic seems not to apply here sometimes...

The Art of the Deal

I have been reading 'The Art of the Deal' by Donald J. Trump (with Tony Schwartz) for about two weeks now and I'm just about finished. Normally, with a book as easy and entertaining to read as this I would have finished in 4~5 days, but I have really been drawing this reading out. It has just completely defied my intially low expectations, which after reflection I realize were unfounded in the first place since everyone I've met who has actually read the book has had nothing but positive things to say about it.

What has surprised me most are the many, many insights into Trump's decision making process that seem to very clearly explain why he says and does things as president in his very unorthodox and un-politicianly way.

To be clear before we go on, I have no horse in the race of American politics - I have never been registered to vote nor do I plan on doing so, perhaps until it is time for me to run myself - but I have been observing Trumps involvement in politics with a detached interest for a while now. The starkly polarizing reactions that Trump seems to elicit from typical Americans - the die hard supporters versus those who see Trump as the second comming of Hitler - should cause anyone who has a properly functioning brain to want to find out a little more about who this polarizing figure really is. And what better way is there to do that than by reading or listening to the mans thoughts. Thoughts that - crucially - came from a time before he was a politician, because, well, you just can't trust anything a politician says.

If there is one thing that seperates Trump the politician from every other politician, it is his seeming indifference to bad press. It wouldn't seem off base to suggest that Trump seems to thrive off of bad press. When Trump was pursuing the construction of the Trump Tower, he described the resulting controversey and negative publicity thusly: "Even though the publicity was almost entirely negative, and there was a great deal of it, and that drew a tremendous amount of attention to Trump Tower. Almost immediately we saw an upsurge in the sales of apartments. I'm not saying that's a good thing, and in truth it probably says something perverse about the culture we live in. But...controversy, in short, sells."

 A few years later when Trump was receiving resistence from New York City politicians despite making numerous offers that he would like to offer his help to rebuild the Wollman ice rink instead, he made the following observation: "If there's one thing I've learned from dealing with politicians over the years, it's that the only thing guaranteed to force them into action is the press - or, more specifically, fear of the press...Bad press translates into potential lost votes, and if a politician loses enough votes, he won't get reelected. If that happens, he might have to go out and take a 9 to 5 job. That's the last thing most politicians want to do."

There are many more instances where Trump makes comments specific to particular deals, or offers up thoughts on what seperates good businessmen from bad ones, or explains how he chooses people to lead projects (the best and most competent, regardless of experience) that offer a window into his actions and decisions today. In particular his thoughts on family then, help explain his preference for installing many of his immediate and extended family nembers in high positions today - something that isn't exclusive to Trump in the history of the presidency, but something that receives a lot of focus today. "There is nothing to compare with family if they happen to be competent, because you can trust family in a way you can never trust anyone else."

We are all human, and Trump is no different. If you have an open mind and are curious about why President Trump seems so different, I highly recommend you pick up 'The Art of the Deal' and give it a read. Thanks to this book I'll be focusing more on what I think the long-term goals Trump is focusing on are and evaluating him on 1) the necessity and importance of those goals and 2) if he actually achieves those goals or not. I will look for potential angles that could explain how his punking of the media could help serve some tactical purpose of helping to move the goal-posts closer to the end zone of those goals. And I know it'll be interesting too, because as Trump puts it: "There is no typical week in my life."