TL;DR:

The purpose of this post is to evaluate the concepts and features of Web3 which pulled me deep into the rabbit hole. There are a lot of topics outside of number go up which I think are important, but I’ve highlighted my current top five conviction drivers in this post. In summary, I think:

• The ability for an individual to transact is a requirement to experience any basic human rights. If corruptible centralized authorities are able to exclude individuals from the financial system, all other rights are at risk
• Web3 has an opportunity to more optimally and transparently program incentives. I believe this will increase motivation, productivity, and outcomes for workers, token holders, and network participants
• User self sovereignty is a spectrum, but Web3 provides an opportunity for users to be highly self sovereign on the financial system axis with minimal relative effort
• I think one of Web3’s biggest bets is if we can reconfigure how organizations operate and challenge the composition of an ideal workforce. There are always exceptions, but historically companies have charismatic and / or authoritarian leaders on top and checklist workers on the bottom, often leaving the intellectually curious go-getters feeling trapped in the middle
• Retail banks are not delivering for their customers. TradFi is understandably focused on high net worth individuals, corporations, and investment funds. I think it’s time to set retail users free

These are my opinions. If you have a different perspective on any of these topics or there are different topics which you find to be more compelling arguments for or against Web3, feel free to reply to the companion TWEET to this Mirror post. I’d love to hear about them, #Learning.

My high conviction reasons to join the Web3 community

As I descended into the Web3 rabbit hole, I was asking myself is Web3 and Crypto inevitable? What basic concepts do I need to embrace on a leap of faith in order to buy into the hype? I was searching for a few foundational reasons that would make it prudent for me to invest time and money into the ecosystem. Here are a few useful philosophies and general thoughts which got me to the settler level of conviction about the ecosystem.

All human rights are derived from financial rights

I live a pretty regular life overall. I am not too politically active, abide by laws, and generally just try to be a good citizen / neighbor / husband / father / friend. I think the risk that any centralized authority tries to infringe on my rights that I’m passionate about is very small.

However, I do realize that my individual experience is a privileged one and I know that there are many people who’s rights are violated every day in the US and globally. I think we all deserve and should defend the ability to protest perceived injustices and the opportunity for due process. Even if our non financial rights are not under attack, if our ability to participate in the global financial system is blocked it becomes virtually impossible (in a modern economy) to experience any of our rights as global citizens. I won’t try to define the universe rights, but I don’t think that’s necessary to support the point that financial rights are paramount.

How can you eat if you can’t purchase food (or land to farm, seeds to plant, etc.)? How can you live without paying for shelter? How can you organize a peaceful protest without purchasing paper for fliers, filing permits to protest, paying for transportation to the protest location, etc. How can you reasonably participate in due process without clothes, transportation, etc.

I won’t try to source the originator of this position as I’m sure it goes way back, but @punk2529 has highlighted this concept / risk on a number of occasions and it resonated with me. See THIS POST as an example.

6529's view is that once you lose the ability to transact, all other rights are cosmetic only as you can't implement any of your other rights without money.

Now, I’m not personally doomsday prepping, going off grid, or looking over my shoulder in a state of paranoia. That said, a decentralized financial system seems like a necessary step in the right direction to check centralized authority. I don’t expect that the decentralized system we get will be perfect on day one, but I think it’s an important hedge to have.

I also don’t think that all people must ONLY utilize a decentralized system in order for a check on power to be effective, partial use will still be an effective hedge. I personally hope to move nearly 100% of financial activity onto a decentralized blockchain system (to remove nearly all friction from commerce) once the system has withstood the test of time and the network governance apparatus has been battle tested. I can’t think of a compelling reason to give custody back to a traditional financial institution (assuming continued Web3 user experience improvements and no degradation in security) given the technological improvements I’ve observed thus far in my Web3 journey.

Two recent events which illustrate my concerns on this topic are the Freedom Convoy in Canada and the US freeze of Russian foreign currency reserves. I’m not taking a political or legal position on these events whatsoever, but my point is if two of the most developed democratic central authorities in existence are ok with freezing and seizing financial assets without due process, what next? This authority was imposed on essentially the widest range of financial system participants possible, from individual everyday people who made small donations to a protest in Canada all the way up to a nuclear nation state.

If there are balanced and objective accounts of these two events or other similar events, please do share so I am better informed.

Programmed incentives = programmed intelligence

I subscribe to the quote most frequently attributed to Charlie Munger

Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome

This topic was expanded upon and mapped into the Web3 context (from my perspective) by Karl Floersch on the Bankless podcast (around 20:10 mark)

Crypto allowed us to program money, programming money means we can program incentives, programming incentives means we can program people

I personally believe that human intelligence is the most powerful known force in history. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) may challenge my belief, but not yet. Human intelligence can harness forces which are extremely powerful (e.g., filling sails with wind to find new worlds, the converting the sun’s fusion reaction to energy via solar, organizing open and closed circuits to create computers, etc.). I think the ability to better program human intelligence for desired outcomes is progress.

A top priority when performing diligence on companies over the course of my career (both in a support consulting capacity and more directly as a private equity investor) is to understand what the incentive structures are at a company and consider how incentives influenced human behavior, impacted historically observed performance, and may impact future performance outcomes.

A simple example to illustrate. A board of directors may want to incentivize new customer growth and gross margin expansion.

Once these goals are communicated to the executive team, executives may begin to change the definition of what is a “new” customer and now consider a new division of an existing customer as “new” in the incentive calculation context. Or, they may just focus the sales team efforts on finding new customers to the detriment of existing customers. Both may artificially increase new customer growth and improve incentive payouts, while not necessarily improving performance.

Similarly, as new products are rolled out and / or new vendors onboarded, the executive team may make the case that new cost categories are actually more of an overhead cost not directly tied to product creation or service delivery. This may increase gross margin expansion artificially and improve incentive payouts, while not positively impacting business performance and enterprise longevity.

I have observed this directly throughout my career. There is definitely a spectrum of behavior that ranges from exactly what the board intended to outright nefarious activity, but my personal view is looking for that edge is pervasive and often detrimental to long-term performance and societal progress.

Additionally, the impact to me personally has been at best imperfect. Below the C level at many companies incentives are typically designed as discretionary. It’s common to have some OKRs or KPIs that are loosely aligned to incentive payouts, but there is often a broad catch all of “subject to business performance”. As an employee, it’s hard to get excited about focusing on the “right things” with loosely defined incentives, multiple opaque caveats, and no history of clear correlation between performance and incentive outcomes.

Does this risk go away entirely in Web3? I doubt it. Humans will always try to get an edge and incentives are hard to program. Will it be tougher to game and more transparent? I hope so.

The fact that tokenomics are programmed on chain and that everyone involved in a project (not just C suite and capital providers) can buy, hodl, and sell is a huge improvement in my opinion. If tokenomics are well architected and understood, the project team should be optimizing project development and growth towards the max outcome. Token holders and / or citizen governance voters can force changes to tokenomics or fork a protocol if a different direction is expected to be more optimal. Iterate, iterate. And with more activities occurring on chain, individual contributors should be better positioned to tie compensation to measurable metrics which they themselves can influence and observe on a daily basis.

Self-sovereignty is a spectrum

Balaj Srinivansan references a mental model to illustrate an individual and / or cultural trilemma as it relates to power and authority. Simplified, I’ve interpreted the trilemma as:

• Sovereign - The individual does not require permission or help
• Sympathize - The individual (privileged) must compel themselves and each other to surrender to the mob (less privileged)
• Submission - The individual must surrender all rights and liberties to a central authority

Both Sympathize and Submission result in surrendering control to others whereas Sovereign maintains control at the individual level.

In practice, this trilemma is evaluated by anons countless times every day.

I’ll attempt to illustrate with home energy, for example.

• I currently receive energy from a regulated utility and have limited to no backup power. So, in the trilemma model my dot would be very near the bottom left hand corner as I’ve essentially given all power and trust to an authoritative entity.
• I could install a solar array on my roof, install back up batteries, etc., and move further toward the bottom middle.
• I could also lobby and protest to pressure regulated utilities to move to 100% renewable energy, which would begin to move towards the center of the triangle or ultimately towards the top.
• But in this example, to be fully energy self sovereign, I would need install solar panels, industrial batteries, back up generators, a large natural gas or propane tank, etc. And, hope that nothing breaks (I don’t know how to fix any of these things). This seems like a lot of work and still requires some points of reliance on other parties.
• I think it’s prudent to explore some of the options to hedge towards sovereignty, but I don’t think most people have the financial resources or general interest to move the self sovereign direction much at all as it relates to energy consumption.
• Also, it would be quite silly and inefficient for everyone to go fully self sovereign and not participate in an operational energy grid / network which enjoys the benefits of scale. So we all make these tradeoffs.

The reason I think this mental model is relevant for Web3, and most specifically for a crypto based financial system, is that with the various networks (Bitcoin, Ethereum / EVM equivalent, IBC, etc.) the required sacrifice or perceived hurdles to achieve individual sovereignty for all participants on the network is relatively low, in my opinion.

If global citizens agree that we’re going to use these networks as mediums of exchange, everyone has the right to self sovereignty with minimal effort. Additionally, those that don’t care to be self sovereign can choose to work with a centralized entity to custody their assets and the anons assume the risks of freeze or seize (no different than the current risks of freeze and seize with traditional financial institutions).

Generally, I think we should all be looking for optimal tradeoffs where we can be self sovereign so we don’t continue to surrender control to others. I’m optimistic that Web3 will provide a low sacrifice sovereignty vector for anons relative to other possible vectors (seeking energy sovereignty, food supply sovereignty, education sovereignty, etc.).

Balaji discusses the Trilema at 0:51. Tim tries to ask the question I am still trying to figure out (what is the right amount of sovereignty?) at 1:29. I don’t think Balaji ends up delivering a direct answer, but he does touch on it around 1:35 and 1:45.

Be the change you want to see

My Dad was recently reflecting on his career and helping me think through how I want to spend the rest of my time. He said something that has stuck in the back of my mind ever since:

There are people who NEED to lead, people who NEED to follow, and people who want to be the change.

To me, this statement attempts to categorize all people into three narrow definitions, which is suboptimal, but I think of it as a spectrum. However, I think the people who want to be the change end up being more of a silent minority because they simply want to make progress and not be distracted by all the noise.

As I’ve progressed to increasingly senior roles though out my career, the conventional wisdom I’ve received at multiple points in time is that you MUST become a “leader” and “get out of the details” to be successful. I’ve perceived that being a political animal becomes very important in the conventional “leader” role, much more than getting your hands dirty and executing or simply leading by example. I’m not personally against taking on leadership roles, mentoring young anons, and navigating some political challenges…but it’s not my native skin. This has been my experience and I try to be honest with myself about who I am am who I’m not. Blindly trying to to become a conventional wisdom manifested shell of myself has never appealed to me.

To me, Web3 seems like the best scalable platform to amplify those who want to be the change. If you NEED to lead, to have power, and to have control…you probably won’t thrive in Web3 (or the version of Web3 I’m hopeful for). If you NEED to follow, to be told how you use your time, to be force aligned with superiors and don’t seek out symbiotic relationships with mentors, or be told what causes and purposes are important…you probably won’t thrive in Web3.

I’m hopeful that Web3 will amplify the global value of the builders, the creators, those that don’t expect people MUST respect them, and those that don’t simply submit respect but seek out mentors who want to earn it. This is my hope.

TradFi is not delivering for retail customers

At least not for me. I’ll explore this topic in much more detail in a future post, but simply put I can’t stand the retail banking user experience. I think retail banks were a great improvement relative to cash under a mattress or gold bars in a hole in the back yard, but Web3 has improved on a lot of fundamental features for retail users and I’m optimistic many more compelling use cases are on the horizon.

I plan to be a settler, help me find the right trail

In summary, I’m optimistic that Web3 / crypto can have a real impact on society and I want to contribute in the best way possible. It appears that we’re heading into a bear market and I plan to be a settler here, not a tourist.

What are the high conviction reasons you’re a Web3 settler? I want to hear about them in the replies to this TWEET or in my twitter DMs (@rasmuky).

About the This Web3 Life collection:

About rasmuky: