Korean Negotiations - Dirty Ballet

I'm entering into yet another Korean negotiation at the moment.

Korean negotiations always begin as an impossibility. Literally.

If you try to negotiate in Korea - bless you - at the outset you will most likely be told something like: "Sorry but for 'x' reason we need to do (the opposite of what you want) so please accept what I just offered you." Thus the dirty ballet begins.

The dirty ballet-phase of Korean negotiations is essentially a back-and-forth of you making your initial request over and over, and your counterpart making excuses, stalling and begging you to accept whatever solution is easiest for them to gain approval for.

It's key to maintain your composure during this phase. It's equally important to pay close attention to everything your counterpart say - particularly their excuses.

Sometimes excuses can be legit. Korean corporations are notoriously rigid, and unless you're dealing directly with a senior executive or the CEO, your counterparty will be hard pressed to deviate from the standard approach.

Luckily I'm dealing directly with the VP in charge of the Corporate HR Team at my prospective new company. With senior executives a firm yet modest approach is the way to go in my experience. Hopefully that holds true again this time.

Bias for Quality

A common criticism about the writings of immature writers is 'over-writing'. 

More mature writers tend to include only what is most essential or of the highest value in regards to what they're writing about. In terms of the quality of writing then, less is more.

The same critique can be applied to companies and businesses.

Companies that lack discipline tend to keep adding features, even if the earlier features still aren't quite right, on the one hand. On the other hand, truly successful companies relentlessly focus on getting each feature or function just right.

The exhaustive attention to detail for the sake of improving overall quality can be exhausting, and while advocating that more time be spent on an "old" issue may make you seem like you are fighting development, in the end it's always the right thing to do, because when quality issues arise later, you will be remembered as the one who initially pointed them out.

Back Online

Vacations are great, but they aren't great for everything.

Case in point: blogging. 

Traveling on the other side of the world, packed daily itineraries and sketchy wi-fi all wreaked havoc on my daily blogging.

I need to figure out a way to make sure I stick to my daily posting schedule over my next trip abroad at the end of December.

Now excuse me while I go battle this jet lag and oppressive Seoul humidity.

New Terra

With the continued development of crypto-currency and crypto related projects that are expanding the use and use cases of trustless digital value, I believe new terra is being formed in a new world.

Since this is a digital world, the naked eye is incapable of seeing these new land masses, but they're there.

A religion has already arisen within this world for Christ's sake.

Right now people - for the most part - are rushing to erect the same forms and structures that exist in the offline world in this new digital world. The fundamental value system of these existing forms and structures is rooted in capitalism, so by extension the singular value that currently exists in this new digital world is pure, unadulterated capitalism - capital value for capital's sake.

In the new digital world, just like the offline world, capitalism in and of itself has a surprisingly weak hold on individuals. This being the case, one of the key challenges and opportunities for the success of this new world will be how to set up a functioning value system that can keep existing users from leaving as well as continually attract new users.

Since this new digital world is essentially value-less, we can establish any value system we want. So what values should assume primacy?

Vander Ghinste & Sour Beer

With the steady rise in popularity of sour beers over the past few years, it's important to remember where these mouth puckering began.

Like with most good beers, some of the oldest sours have deep roots in Belgium - or Flanders to be precise.

The Vander Ghinste brown Flanders sour ale is one of the best sours out there, but it can be hard to find. Once you do get your hands on one and taste it, like all good Belgian beers, your socks won't get knocked off.

On the contrary, as with refined goods of all kinds, the Flanders sour ale defines the limits of what a good sour ale can be: sour but not overpoweringly so, with a silky light body and an effervescent array of tart and sweet dried fruit laced throughout.

Again, as with most things that happen to be refined, many people seem to seek 'lesser' sours out instead of the magnificent Flanders sour ales. After speaking with the bar tender at Portland's fantastic The Abbey Room about this, the reason isn't any clearer as to why that is the case, but I imagine a simple lack of marketing and advertisement are leading factors.

Anyways, that means more Flemish sour ale for me🍻

Oregon

I'm not sure if there is another state with as much of everything - and at such a high level of quality - as the great state of Oregon.

Oregon is spoiled with raw natural beauty. It's coastline is stunning. It's parks are large and unspoiled. It has gorgeous arid areas as well as steep yet walkable waterfalls lined by lush forests.

While Portland feels like the beating cultural heart, the truth is every neighborhood let alone county and city has it's own unique character, but on the whole Oregonians are as kind, accommodating and open as they come.

People are as free to be as weird or "normal" as they want to be. And adults can really be adults here with an absolute over-abundance of the best restaurants, best breweries, distilleries, and dispensaries in the entire US. 

And books. Portland has a ton of books and book lovers. Of course there is Powell's Bookstores, but there are also a growing number of smaller, independent bookstores such as Mother Foucault's Bookshop (which I'm super stoked to hit up tomorrow). 

7/21 Off the Grid in Seaside, Oregon

We're just getting back from a brief respite in old school Seaside, Oregon.

It's a perfectly simple vacation town straight out of 1950's Americana.

We walked along the ruggidly beautiful coast, went on long drives and ate some fresh af seafood. 

Being back in Portland our itinerary is full of fantatistic eats, drinks and everything in between. Look for a more traditional update in a few hours.

Happy birthday!

Sandy Beaches

Seaside, Oregon is a slice of good ol' days America

I love the beach.

That's something I've never imagined myself saying. Despite frequent trips to New Jersey and Delaware beaches as a kid, I began to loathe the sand and the beach from high school onwards.

The reason seems absurd now, but I recall a sudden and all consuming hatred for sand sometime over the summer between 10th and 11th grade; specifically the uncomfortable feeling of being sandy. Especially sand shoes. They're the worst. Or so I thought.

Having just visited beaches in California and Oregon with my wife I can now unequivocally say I love everything about the beach. The inconveniences I remember now present themselves as delightful peculiarities. Everything feels slow - in a good way. And I guess I am now officially old.

The Happiness Gun

Live.
Be happy.
Make everyone else happy.

(Turn the screen you are looking at upside down - you'll see a gun. Also, like a gun, it's hard to pull the trigger on the middle action, but once you do your life will never be the same.)

Vacation Utterances

• Hi, my name is white sugar.
• Very drunk need ice cream.
• If the earth is 종말해 it'll start from the US.

Quality: Today & Tomorrow

Quality today: look at the label.

Quality tomorrow: it's in the eye of the beholder.

Mental Reset

Sometimes we all need a reset. It's been a hectic few weeks, and I am feeling burned out. Also a bit burnt, but that's from this wicked Cali sun.

A more substantial post is forthcoming, but tonight is for re-charging.

Cheers and prosperity everybody.

LA/PDX Trip

The daily post was for Saturday July 14th was skipped due to the fact that I was in transit on my way to LA.

I'll be in LA for a few days before heading up to Portland for about two weeks.

Updates over the next two weeks will vary in time of posting as well as length.

Be well everybody.

Just Desserts

Well I did the damn thing. 

Then drank with old friends. 

Till the early morn.

Walked home from the Twan.

Ran along the Han. 

Pulled myself up. 

Now it's time to take off.

To savor those just desserts.

With the only one who matters.

Big Days

When was your last 'big day'? You know, one of those days that could potentially change your life. Usually such days are marked conspicuously on a calendar or two. You usually know it's coming. You've thought about it. A lot. And then the time comes to do the damn thing.

Today is one of those big days for me.  The time has finally come to go big or go home.

And you know what I have to say? Bring it the fuck on.

Boom⚡

Via Negativa

A subtraction that stimulates a positive reaction.

That elegant little concept (paradoxically) provides so much food for thought...

Germinating Ideas

New ideas are like seeds. You can try to plant a raw seed of an idea into the soil of open social discourse, but your chances of it taking root in conversation are slim.

You could try to germinate your idea: Talk about it, in short bursts, consistently over a period of time. Then when you see roots emerge you can pot it amongst a small group of like minded thinkers. Water it daily with conversation.

If it is a viable idea, it'll sprout in each of the minds of those in your small group.

The next step is when you think it'll be ready to go outdoors and get introduced to the world🌱

Reputation: Present and Future

What is reputation? Reputation is how others perceive, review and judge you based on past actions. Are you good or bad? Do you do the right or wrong thing usually? Are you successful or not? Are you pretty or ugly? It's a pretty general thing that seems to be an essential, inescapable aspect of being human. And it can be applied as easily to places and things as it can be to people.

Reputation can take a criminally long time and immense efforts to build. That's if it's even possible to build at all. And what is the payoff of building a good reputation anyways?

Normally individuals aren't even able to benefit from their good reputations. All those Facebook users and their good reputations benefit Facebook directly by providing them with a valuable reputational data point that can be used to attract ad dollars. That said, some may argue that while individuals don't directly benefit from their good social reputation, they indirectly benefit by living in a better society or by being a part of a site that isn't bad (or something).

Others may point out that individuals can still benefit from their professional reputations. But just think about the work your average Joe needs to exert in the real world just to get credentialed, then to maybe get a job, then to maybe find consistent work they can do at said job, then the luck they have to have to maybe get recognized for what they've done up until that point to establish some sort of *localized* reputation. With all those 'maybes' it's kind of surprising that anyone is able to accumulate a significant reputation that travels well in the real world.

The recent rise of social network platforms has made it possible for more people to turn their average credentialed professional history into a portable reputation of sorts. That said, such "reputation" is clunky, relatively undifferentiated and still trivially hard to build. What's more, someone can have a great professional reputation, but be a social cancer, thus rendering professional reputation impotent as a meaningful social proof.

I dare say that it feels like reputation is basically unobtainable for most people around the world, and meaningful reputation - reputation that signifies something more than what it's ostensibly about - is even rarer. It's almost enough to make one think that doing away with reputation altogether may make the world better. Not me though. I think it's far more constructive (not to mention easier) to instead think of whether there isn't an easier way that could allow more people to build better reputation.

Although reputation isn't formally recorded on Cent, it most certainly informally exists. Every user that provides responses to bounty posts is in turn evaluated and judged by the invisible tastes and values of the Centian community. Since the top 10 "best" responses to each bounty post receive a monetary reward, reputation is simultaneously established, improved and validated, 10 users at a time.

In the context of Cent then, a user with a good reputation is a user who has provided value to at least one other user in the form of a response that accurately and compliantly responds to a bounty prompt or request. This sounds a lot like someone who has a good social reputation, but instead of directly benefiting others while only indirectly benefitting oneself, in the case of Cent, a user receives a direct monetary benefit for establishing and/or improving their reputation. Interesting.

What about professional reputation? Whereas professional reputation in the real world relies on a confusing array of proxies like records, certificates, recommendations, atomic evaluations, hearsay, CVs, and other things that sort of attest to some sort of professional reputation, the reputation of each Centian is very simple: It's every single payment they've ever received. And remember, they were paid for carrying out an action that was requested (i.e. work).

When payments can be received for performing non-trivial work that was reviewed and evaluated by a large number of one's peers, that are recorded on an unalterable blockchain and also happen to be forever linked to the original bounty deposit which is also tied to a specific prompt or request, there is no need to solely rely on proxies for reputational proof anymore. That means everyone is effectively free to establish and build out their reputation.

So then what next? Well, I'll let you answer that question yourself.

Getting Things Done

Thanks to a great share by Cam (for those of you who don't know he's the co-founder and CTO at Cent), I came across an efficiency hack that I can easily overlay on top of my note taking app of choice, Diaro.

In Matt Mochary's short but powerful 'Founder to Ceo' that Cam shared with the team, Mochary introduces the Getting Things Done framework espoused by David Allen in his book 'Getting Things Done: The art of stress-free productivity'.

Essentially this framework helps users simply categorize tasks into either daily or weekly review buckets. Next actions (i.e. short, atomic units if work), things you were asked to do by others and (my slight revision to the schema) things you asked others to do (instead of someday/maybe tasks) constitute the items you should add to the daily review work bucket.

In the weekly review bucket one should add agenda items for each person you plan on meeting with as you think of the item to talk about in addition to whatever projects or bundles of 'next actions'. The idea behind 'Agenda' is that you will be able to pull up that agenda list once you meet or call that person so you can discuss each agenda item all at once (as opposed to a spot-basis when you think of each item).

As you can see in the above screenshot I have added tags for each of those items (in addition to the team members that I know I will have things to talk about with) as well as a specific group called 'Get Things Done'. I did this so I can quickly bring up any items that need to get done (by selecting the group) and then if need be selecting each tag individually during either my daily or weekly review.

One super important tag that did not make it into the screenshot (or in Allen's official framework for that matter) is a tag labeled 'Finished' where I will tag every completed action, agenda item and talking point with as soon as they are completed so that I will have a running list of what I have actually accomplished.

Well, I officially feel like an old man now. Who gets excited about efficiency hacks? Anyways, I will put this bad boy framework to use beginning today, and hopefully provide an update sometime in the future about how it's worked out or not worked out.

Podcast of the Week No.11

Every time I hear Airbnb co-founder, CEO and head of community Brian Chesky speak I usually walk away chewing on some kind of new, novel thought.

Kara Swisher released her talk with Brian at the recent 2018 Code Conference on her Recode/Decode podcast channel [here] and I'm still chewing on a new concept I learned listening to Brian: Community marketplace.

Airbnb has a community of over 3 million passionate space sharers. All around the world. And over 2/3 of them only list on Airbnb. That is an incredibly powerful locked-in base of users. Can you imagine what you can do besides sharing spaces with that community base?

The possibilities and execution of ideas related to those possibilities is exactly what Brian is focused on. It was interesting to listen to him talk about 'experiences' just one of the ideas he has on how to pull on and grow that powerful community.

Cent also has a strong community. It's still small by Airbnb standards right now, but users are passionate about the product and some are consistently providing sincere responses. Imagining what may be possible when we grow those users into an army of consistent and sincere responders is pure gas to the fiery passion I have for this project.

My Running Mantra

I guess you can call it my running mantra, but the saying that I repeat over and over as I run is this: Practice - practice is carrying and conducting oneself in solidarity; solidarity of course being the basis and foundation of social reason.

It's a very ancient phrase (or fragment to be precise) attributed to Heraclitus that I came across while reading Gadamer.

Thinking of practice in this way makes clear, for me at least, how logic is something that's common to all. It also highlights the tragic ignorance of many who seem to act as if it is something unique to them.

All of us Centians, by bounty posting and responding, are practicing at living, having fun and (in a small way now) making a living in the digital world where logic holds sway in the most definite way. So keep practicing, and Cent on👊

Work Bounties

Work bounties or work-based bounties are still top of mind for me.

One of the most important things one can do when trying to spread new ideas is nail down the basic concepts and definitions of what you're trying to talk about.

So here is my stab at trying to clarify the concept of work bounties: Work bounties are a specific type of bounty where the bounty poster is expecting specific and relatively undifferentiated responses from a non-trivial minimum number of responders (e.g. product feedback, polls, surveys, simple sequences of digital work, referral/affiliate link usage, etc...).

Stats on Work-based Bounties on Cent

You may remember my stab at classifying the types of bounties that we've been seeing on Cent over the past 10~11 months where I broke down bounties into three specific types (work-based, semi-formal, and playful) in this blog post [here].

These days work-based bounties, or bounties where the bounty poster is expecting specific and relatively undifferentiated responses from a non-trivial minimum number of responders (e.g. product feedback, polls, surveys, referral/affiliate link usage, twitter follow boosts), are the type of bounties that have me most excited.

They have me so excited because it feels like the first instance where a broader community (i.e. those not already on Cent) can easily join the Cent community and instantaneously see the value that the Centian community can provide. That and they are putting a decent chunk of change into Cent.

So I went back and looked through all the bounty posts made over the last 100 days or so and found some interesting stats. Over the past 100 days a total of 36 work bounties worth $953 were posted on Cent. Of those, 23 work bounties worth $507 were posted in the last 30 days alone, so they are definitely catching on (thanks in no small part to the amazing work @pavan has been doing).

We got great feedback (e.g. shout outs on Twitter) from 6 projects that posted work bounties, but we also received some constructive feedback asking for more control or better responses. The numbers and responses are definitely a good sign, but far from optimized. It'll be very interesting to see what kinds of decisions get made about these types of bounties heading forward.

Wanna be a Crypto CEO - Read This

Charles Hoskinson of IOHK published an interesting piece looking at the crypto space (like all of it) from the perspective of CEO.

There are a ton of irresolvable conflicts and tensions that any crypto CEO needs to be aware of and make tradeoffs that they may not feel 100% comfortable making, just because they may be put in a lose-lose situations from time to time.

You should all check it out [here] but I will share some of my favorite quotes from it below.

"The point of our movement has been to develop better tools to identify when and how we can remove middlemen we don't want; not to blindly kill all middlemen for the sake of killing them. Centralization or federation can dramatically reduce costs, improve efficiency and sometimes is necessary to improve privacy.

For example, Lastpass [a centralized product] provides a great solution for me to manage my many, many password, but doesn't actually have access to my passwords. I'm sure such a solution could be decentralized, but I don't see a point. Replicating an encrypted dataset, which I could already store locally anyway doesn't improve my security. It just seems to drive up costs and reduce user experience.

And frankly there are hundreds more examples. Abstracting my point, it's not about decentralization; it's about control. People want more control over their data, identity, reputation, assets and commercial relationships. Decentralization is a tool that can be used- with other tools- to achieve these ends, but isn't an end in itself."

"Modern communication tools are incredibly good at keeping us all connected and informed, but they are useless for promoting empathy, building real relationships or proactively communicating implicit concerns."

"In a way, I think this gives some justification to the enormous market capitalization we [crypto] are seeing alongside the cult like enthusiasm. From a practical sense nothing has been produced by Bitcoin or any other project to justify a cumulative valuation greater than some of the world's largest companies and even countries. From a social view, how much is the freedom to re-imagine the entire fabric of the world's marketplaces worth?

Money and governments are artifacts of promises and future commitments. They don't actually exist, but the belief in their power is what actually gives them power. It seems the belief that Bitcoin is worth a 100 billion dollars or that one social contract is superior to another is all that is really needed to actually realize it.

Thus to all future leaders of our space, I'd like to say separate your objective from subjective, clarify relationships as well as understand conflicts of interest and stick to your principles even in the face of conflict. And try to have fun while riding the roller coaster, it's sure to be an exciting journey."

Notes on Zcon0 Keynote Panel: Cryptocurrency Governance

I've tidied up the notes that I scribbled down while watching the great Zcon0 keynote panel, and I think they're worth a share.

For me personally, Vitalik stole the stage, but the other panelists Zooko, Jameson Lopp and Jill Carlson, not to mention Peter Van Valkenburgh (the moderator) all shared some great thoughts.

You can check out the talk [here].

And here are my notes:

• Decision (Change) Function Theory of governance - top down, bureaucratic, corporate (it's better if there is a precise process that as much as is possible is a function that has to have some outcome).
• Coordination view of governance - for any potential set of arbitrary choices 'a' and 'b' (e.g. protocol changes) depending on what 'a' or 'b' might be 'a' may be "better" than 'b' or 'b' may be "better" than 'a', but the group will be better off if they all choose either 'a' or 'b' instead of being split between both and/or not doing anything.
• Many equilibria within the 'coordination games' that get played benefit from coordination (e.g. see 'a' vs 'b' protocol change above).
• Within coordination games you get these equilibria where if there are an arbitrary set of norms and expectations - that can be precise or imprecise - for how people arrive at decisions (e.g. tend towards picking 'a' or 'b' protocol change) it makes sense for any one person to follow, or a sort of pressure to conform is in play, which in turn leads to those norms becoming stickier over time.
• The real subject of blockchain governance ends up being what all those 'coordination flags' end up being "stuck" over time.
• There is strong demand for governance rules that can avoid the need for large bureaucracies. 
• Within coordination games, you have many individuals making individual decisions, but because of the underlying architecture/design of what we're making decisions about, there's a strong incentive to align around a common decision.
• We need to design protocols in a way to prevent opportunities for super-linear resource allocation (e.g. someone with 2x more of money/token they are able to return 2.1x return).

Degree for the Internet

On Cent's Telegram, Summers Haley left a comment suggesting that setting up a TCR (Token Curated Registry) could be a useful way of helping to improve the quality of sorting on Cent. TCRs are definitely going to be super interesting, but I'm not sure if their time has come yet, particularly when it comes to a project like Cent.

As it stands, industry incumbents and those with established reputations/credentials stand to gain the most by getting their name on a TCR, but the incentive(s) to join any TCR is unclear as of now. Also the politics and management assumed by TCRs seem to contain a ton of slippery slopes (e.g. determining who should be kicked off, deposits withheld, etc...).

For a much larger number of individuals around the world lacking such reputations/credentials, even if they have something unique to offer, it seems a bit cruel to demand they deposit something (that they probably don't have).

That said, the social signal that those lists can and will broadcast is super interesting. And what kind of signal would they broadcast? For individuals, getting their name on a list would probably be akin to what diplomas have done for decades: signal that one has what it takes to follow a set of arbitrary rules for a non-trivial period of time, perhaps with some specialized knowledge to boot.

Cent sort of does this already with the leaderboard. Users are ranked based on their 30-day earnings. Behind the rankings though is an ETH address that's basically a record (or proof) of work they put in and got paid for. Instead of a diploma that is a signal of some future potential, the Cent leaderboard generally, and the work that individuals do specifically, provides proof that users have been able to consistently draft responses that are sincere enough and of a significant level of quality to get paid based on the validation and approval of their fellow Centians.

Proof of being able to consistently do something with sincerity and at a sufficient level of quality in the digital realm: that's basically the equivalent of a degree for the internet. If there isn't value in that for any individual who puts work in on the internet, or for the site or organization they belong to, then I'm not sure I know what's up and what's down anymore.