This is a re-post from 2015 on my disappointingly upkept blog. It’s been a little over 10 years since winning the Future of Money Award design competition in 2013 along with my friend & colleague Craig Stover, and wrote this detailed explanation to show the thinking behind the concept. It’s a long, meandering, and somewhat comprehensive review of our process of developing our award winning entry for the 2013 Future of Money Award - BigShot. I’m reposting it here on Mirror, because in 2023, the future of web 2.0 platforms are increasingly uncertain; especially for dinosaurs like Tumblr that have changed hands and policies so many times. The future is on-chain, and what better way to embrace that future than to rehash old content?
The Future of Money Award Design Competition
In early 2013, a former co-worker, Craig Stover, and I entered the Future of Money Award design competition. The Future of Money Award had been running since 2009 and was “created to develop links between the financial industry and creative practitioners from around the world.”
Here was the prompt for the 2013 competition (living on as a memorial to the competition at the Future of Money Award website):
At my day job I’m a design strategy consultant; and I’m typically using my skills and abilities to develop human-centered strategies and criteria for the design of products, systems, and services. This usually involves some ethnographic-type research, interviewing people and observing them in their natural environments, coupled with secondary research of analogous situations, products, systems, services, and business models in order to generate a wide range of inputs. After all this data has been collected, this is synthesized into actionable criteria for design solutions. Lofty, I know.
The reason I mention all of this is because design efforts are (almost always) human-centered, focused on doing what’s best for people, and strive toward improving the human condition. On the whole designers are tasked with designing solutions which ultimately provide benefit to users, the center of which is making a product more usable. This is the reason this design competition was so appealing in the first place: an opportunity to design something to be used for nefarious purposes.
Craig and I began by meeting and discussing financial crimes of the present. Neither of us are financial experts, but the discussion was fruitful in that it yielded a lot of questions and some initial ideas around exploring alternative monetary and financial systems of the future.
In the course of this exploration, Bitcoin came up pretty early on as something we should explore to incorporate in our design. Researching Bitcoin we discovered Tmothy C. May’s Cyphernomicon, which details the principles behind crypto-anarchism. The Cyphernomicon was last updated in 1994, and contains a lot of really radical thinking and language still used today in debates around anonymity and privacy as they relate to the Internet (specifically Net Neutrality as of late). One area from the Cyphernomicon which really influenced our thinking was Timothy May’s original paper, The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, which explains how Internet technologies will enable a new paradigm in interaction where business can be conducted between parties without each other every knowing their true identities. Think about this for a minute, because this was written in 1988–where the Internet was still mostly for universities and government agencies–and here’s a guy predicting the use of the Internet for dead pools and an end to democracy through distributed information. At this point, we knew crypto anarchy, and more specifically Bitcoin due to it’s rising popularity, had to be part of the equation based on the dystopian and anarchistic portrait painted by Tim May.
The next stop on our journey was looking up just how anonymous the Internet can be by browsing the Darknet via Tor. If you’ve never visited the Hidden Wiki, I suggest giving it a try. You just feel guilty by visiting some of the pages, and it’s never been easier to get Tor up and running on your machine. Anyways, one of the most exciting sites we visited on Tor was a “Rent-a-hacker.” This site is exactly what it sounds like, an experienced hacker renting out services (for bitcoin, of course) ranging from a “Small Job like Email, Facebook etc hacking” to “Medium-Large Job, ruining people, espionage, website hacking etc.” A steal(?) at only 200EUR and 500EUR respectively. Rent-a-hacker isn’t the only site like this on Tor, there are many, one-off sites offering everything from discount iPhones to contract Killers. I’m not kidding.
At this time, the Silk Road was just coming into prominence, and I recall having the option to buy heroin from Afghanistan and counterfeit Michael Jackson CDs on the same page. Decisions, decisions. While Silk Road was doing a tremendous job of organizing products and being the “Amazon of Drugs” there was an obvious gap in the organization and convenience of the services offered. A lot of these service providers (if you can call them that?) were individual sites, I assume owner-operators, and likely out of reach for every day consumers (again, is this the word?) in terms of price point. And while the hacking and killing services offered were obviously illegal, their presence in 2013 didn’t exactly make them financial crimes, nor crimes of the future.
We kept browsing, and debating about how onion routing and crypto currency could be combined to create a future financial crime. At some point, craigstover made mention of crowdfunding with Bitcoin. It was at this moment that everything clicked and we stumbled into our future financial crime: anonymous routing, crypto-anarchy, and crowdfuding combine to form an anonymous platform for crowdfunding deviant behavior.
Designing for Evil is no excuse for bad design.
Once we landed on a vision of how the three key components of the platform might fit together to enable a future financial crime, we set about creating the materials to tell the story. Phase 1 of the competition involved creating a three page slide presentation that outlined the idea. Per contest rules, the three page presentation would result in a three entries being short listed to receive a stipend to produce a short film about their concept. If there’s one thing I pride myself in, it’s crafting a great presentation. And with Craig working with me I certainly felt confident would make it to the short list.
With both of us being designers, we crafted a deck of compelling visuals to tell the story of the confluence of technologies that would enable a site like BigShot, the debut of the service, and finally it’s rise to prominence and the nature of the crime that it enables. Feel free to have a look here. It’s a deck I’m very proud of, and it did indeed end up getting us on the short list.
What’s interesting about the slides and the project as a whole is that we don’t identify a single future financial crime, but by exploring the rise of a site like BigShot pose the question: How do you hold governments, corporations, and individuals accountable for the same crime? Whether it’s embezzlement, fraud, assassination, terrorism? Is there a specific crime for criminal conspiracies of a global scale enabled by crypto-currencies? It’s definitely an interesting question, and as time has marched on, I think it’s a question that is in dire need of an answer.
“Shucks howdy!” - The BigShot Brand
The name “BigShot” derives from the popular late 90s anime “Cowboy Bebop.” For those not familiar with the program, it’s the story of the trials and tribulations of a group of (very lonely) Intergalactic Bounty Hunters, colloquially called “Cowboys” on the show. One of my favorite parts of Cowboy Bebop is the show is a show-within-a-show called “BigShot” where bounty hunters can tune in weekly to get the skinny on what bounties are available for pursuit. The characters regularly watch the over-the-top program, and it serves as the primary source of leads.
At the time of our working on the Future of Money Award design competition, I was in the process of re-watching Cowboy Bebop. Browsing the Silk Road and looking up assassins for hire, it felt like I was wandering through a digital equivalent of the wild west; and despite purportedly being anonymous, the Dark web was shockingly accessible. In a world where everyone can be anonymous, shadows aren’t really necessary. The wild west feel and the accessible nature are what created parallels in my mind between our fictional crypto-anarchist crowdfunding platform and the idea of a publicly broadcasted television show for Bounty Hunters.
The BigShot branding I went with for version 1.0 (above) was inspired by the look and feel of sites on the Tor network circa early 2013, which largely resembled the web of 1999. Seriously, if you go to almost any site on via Tor it resembles a Geocities page from the late nineties. The logo was something that I imagined a hacker-developer type with limited visual design sensibilities might mock-up in either GIMP or Paint.NET. The result is the desire to create an air of sophistication via a system font like Times New Roman, with the slight modification by turning the “O” into a crosshair. This crosshair is meant to eliminate any notion of “good” that could come from crowdfunding and evoke the deviant nature of the users and projects on the site.
For version 2.0, I thought about the way in which the look and feel of the Internet has evolved over the last decade. While initially all system default fonts and elementary graphics (think IE6), the public Web became populated by graphic designers who made the jump to visual design and user experience design. Coupled with the evolution and adoption of modern browsers like Firefox and Chrome, this resulted in the birth of the modern looking Web. I attempted to emulate the look and feel of Kickstarter, a site which has a very Web 2.0 feeling, by borrowing not only the layout of the site, but also applying detailed textures (which are derived from the logo), fresh colors (Bitcoin orange and a range of greys), a modern open source font (Ubuntu), and a new logo. The BigShot 2.0 logo was inspired by Nine Inch Nails creative director Rob Sheridan’s work on the album artwork for NIN’s 2007 album “With Teeth.” The album artwork and associated visuals all have a “bleeding lines” look, which mimics the look of a digital image that’s being distorted through digital manipulation or is partially downloaded. The logo was created using a font named Distort Me from DaFont (I know, I know). Obviously an electronic-tech look, but the bleeding lines distortion of the letter forms into each other is meant to evoke that same feeling of the deviant nature of the users and projects on the site that existed in BigShot 1.0.
I also added additional flourishes to the page, such as the fake media coverage (logos via Brands of the World) and took a photo of John Stewart and aged him by a few years in order to give the impression of being later in the decade. It’s the details that I feel sell the site as being a service that has picked up steam and attracted both more crowdfunders and project creators, and the mainstream media. Again, much in the same way Kickstarter has grown in popularity and scope with a more than a few successful projects over time.
When I think about the early days of BitTorrent brands such as the Pirate Bay and ISOHunt and other trackers, they followed a similar trajectory in terms of look at feel. Starting out sparse and utilitarian, almost un-designed; and as they grew in popularity their design and aesthetic sensibility increased to reflect increased consumer use and appeal. The growth in popularity and use is reflected by a growth in aesthetics and user experience, and in this way, we told the story of a fictitious site that has grown over time.
Also, I thought adding the tag line “The Original Anonymous Crowdfunding” because my logic was once BigShot reached a certain critical mass, there was bound to be copy cats.
There’s also a lot of little nerdy elements I added to the projects that I’ve never gone into too much detail about because I figure it’s something for the 1% of you out there who were living the same geeky life I was growing up in the 80s and 90s. If you know who FastJack is, then I’m pretty sure you’ll get the rest of the jokes in the BigShot campaign descriptions.
BigShot - The Movie.
When Craig and I found out we were shortlisted, we were two days away from heading down to Austin, TX for SXSW 2013. We were ecstatic, but we initially had no idea how we’d put together a video. After a little brainstorming and reaching out to a long time friend of mine, Brian Levin, we decided we could make a great video using found footage on YouTube and editing together a narrative using the copy from our presentation as a script.
After five days of furiously searching YouTube and sending an edit list to Brian, we had our video put together. I think it turned out quite well:
And we weren’t alone in thinking it turned out well, we ended up winning the Future of Money Award design competition. The most successful (read: award winning) design I’ve ever worked on is a fictitious website which would allow people to crowd fund criminal activity.
Two Years Later… (originally in 2015)
In the almost two years since winning the competition, I have since developed a strong interest in Bitcoin and mining has become something of a hobby. I’ve enjoyed the Bitcoin roller coaster from all aspects including buying, selling, and even mining. The third generation Antminer’s I’ve been using since September generate so much heat that I haven’t needed to turn on my heater this winter. And I live in Chicago.
Also of note, because of the competition, a London-based FinTech startup reached out to compliment me on the BigShot project, and asked if I’d take a look at their strategy for their bitcoin-based advertising service they were looking to deploy. This lead to some brief discussion about my doing freelance user experience design work for them, but nothing ever came beyond reviewing their initial pitch and explanation deck. I’ve used BigShot in a few job interviews in order to demonstrate strategic foresight and futures scenarios, and the ability to tell a complex story through multimedia. While it has certainly made a few interviewers uneasy, I know this project has landed me at least one real-world project. I can’t speak for Craig.
Perhaps most importantly, about 9 months after winning the Future of Money Award design competition in 2013, Forbes reported on the “Assassination Market,” which they cited as being “a crowdfunding service that lets anyone anonymously contribute bitcoins towards a bounty on the head of any government official–a kind of Kickstarter for political assassinations.” Sounds awfully familiar. While I figured it would take a few years for an real life implementation of a BigShot-like service to come to fruition, I was shocked to see it arrive so quickly. When I looked up the Assassination Market myself, for research, of course, I think what I enjoyed so much was the rough aesthetic of the site. It certainly looks a lot like BigShot, version 1.0 with minimal graphics, utilitarian interface.
That said, the idea was already out there, in both the concept of a dead pool, and our convenient, easy to digest video. While I’m not claiming credit or responsibility for the Assassination Market, there are days I certainly do wonder what reach the video had.
I’ll leave this piece with a twitter exchange between Anonymous twitter feed @anoncorpwatch and myself:
I consider that the Anonymous Seal of Approval.