This journal is an English translation of “絆についての考察“.

I heard the word "Kizuna(絆)"(bonds) in the neighborhood. We have a word that is rather intended to make fun of things.

When I learned what happened, I thought it was a great name. I felt it was a great idea.

Japanese people like “Kizuna(絆)”. As a virtue, they value human ties more than money.

No, in fact, money is important to all of us, but with peer pressure, we are forced to say that it is more important, a problem that occurs frequently among Japanese.

We have to give specific names because we can't start without them, but this topic is about CNP (Crypto Ninja Partners) and the surrounding NFT community.

What is “Kizuna(絆)”?

Some NFT collections, including CNP, are called “Kizuna collections”.

The concept of Kizuna was given its name because of the unique rules that exist: "Holding(diamond hand) is justice," and the "no-sell" atmosphere.

There is daily controversy (and occasional flames) on Twitter about this.

This article is intended to examine each of the issues in the "Kizuna" controversy, their causes, and the ideas of both sides.

TL; DR

1．We consider that what Mr. Ikehaya, the originator of CNP, wants to create is a cultural sphere that "values the utility of the NFT (e.g., the experience brought by the NFT) more than its price.

2．The main point of contention is not "centralization or not," but rather the controversy of whether it is different from the fundamental idea of crypto.

3．The controversy is caused by the fact that we have a financial instrument aspect to the NFT, and if the CNP were not an NFT, there would not have been a problem.

4．There is no denying this atmosphere of "holding is the justice" and "not to sell".

Facts and Data

In his Voicy, Mr. Ikehaya discusses the following.

The following excerpts, the content has not been changed but converted to the style of writing.

"You are free to sell NFT. Even I have."

"Selling is like inconveniencing the community for your own benefit."

"You have to live with that."

"I can tell if you sold it or not by looking at the blockchain. I look at that stuff quite a bit."

"In short, money, or value. It shows how you deal with it."

"The value you get is not the value you create, it's the value everyone else is creating."

"It's the efforts of the community and management that are adding value, and it's not good manners to let that go unchallenged."

"I don't have a problem with you selling it if you need it at all. You are free to sell."

When I first heard him speak, I thought he might be contradicting himself a bit, but he also speaks this way.

"I'm not of the philosophy that NFT is dry, that it's something you trade and increase like stocks or FX."

"I pay my respects to those who have been involved in the past and those who are watching over us now. I think this is the interesting part of NFT.“

"The humanity part is tied to the economic part. This is interesting.“

"I don't think the author or the management would like it if you buy it and sell it right away, or if you resell it on Mercari. I want you to understand this. I think you understand."

Now, the Voicy above can be summarized as the following thought.

1．NFT is not a trade based on price, we have to place more emphasis on community value.

2．You can sell it, but if you only look at the profit and sell it, you may be judged as having no respect for the fact that the management and community have added value to the project.

This means that, as with regular commodities, resale (in this case synonymous with profit-taking) is rationally deprecated.

This state of "not selling to each other" is described as "Kizuna(絆 - bond)", and the CNP, LLAC, PanDAO, etc., to which this out-of-place rule (the only in-place rule in crypto is smart contracts) applies, are considered Kizuna collections.

Now, to sum up what I was thinking at this time in one famous phrase is:

”Why NFT?”

Perhaps those of you who are reading this have felt some of it.

The NFT, such as the CNP series, in effect represents the right to participate in the community. In layman's terms, it is a membership card. This is a typical use case for NFTs.

This type of NFT has basically endorsed the act of resale, but CNP is culturally innovative in that the Founder explicitly denies this.

The initial usefulness of NFT was that it allowed authors to receive fees in the secondary distribution market without any problems, and that it was easy to manage because it allowed tracking of purchases and sales.

Since he completely denies it (and it sounds like he does even if he doesn't), I can't help but feel a contradiction in my personal opinion as to why he built this community based on the NFT.

Under these conditions, he certainly would have been better off operating as a regular online salon, and this controversy would not have arisen.

At the time of the launch, NFT and Metaverse were the most talked about buzzwords, so one could speculate that it was to capitalize on that buzz, i.e., as a marketer, but this is not certain.

Pros and cons and their arguments

It is obvious from the fire what the issue is that causes the flames, but often there is a smattering of misguided criticism that only looks at the surface.

The "centralization" theory is the most prominent one.

"Mr. Ikehaya himself developed the above theory, clearly limiting the way other holders handle the NFT", that's the theory they have.

but we have a few points that could be refuted.

First, Mr. Ikehaya is not the leader. As an organization, it is a DAO, and Mr. Ikehaya himself does not control everything. (However, it can be said that Mr. Ikehaya effectively reigns at the top as a charismatic figure, and we have many people in and outside the community who agree with this.)

And it is not limited. You can sell it. (But no respect, apparently.)

At any rate, that is not the essential point of this issue. Let's get to the main issue.

The issue in question is whether the philosophy of the “Kizuna” is different from the underlying philosophy of Crypto.

Remembering Crypto's Roots

The first cryptocurrency was Bitcoin. The idea of crypto can be learned by unraveling this Bitcoin.

Satoshi Nakamoto subscribed to an ideology called CypherPunk. The place where he published his Bitcoin paper was also initially a mailing list of people of this ideology.

In the CypherPunk Declaration, we have this sentence.

We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence.

Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can't get privacy unless we all do, we're going to write it.

In other words, to protect privacy from large organizations, in this case countries and large corporations (GAFAM is often cited), they write the code for the program, disseminate and run the software, and accomplish this without “central point”. This is called.

Developing from this, we have an important motto that indicates this orientation in the Crypto world.

”Don’t trust, Verify.”

Look at the code and use logic to understand its protocols. Don't trust them, and always verify for yourself that there is no problem. We have to verify for ourselves that there is no problem.

In other words, don't believe things without evidence, and we have always valued this motto in the Crypto.

Now, the essential point of contention in this case is that the ideology of CypherPunk and Mr. Ikehaya's earlier ideology and its method of operation are quite divergent.

Let me explain a little.

We have this philosophy of CypherPunk on the flip side: "We cannot bind the parts that are not composed of code, no matter what we do with them”.

Their philosophy is based on the premise of network effects that are shaped through software on the Internet, which makes rules based on protocols, or program code.

As the saying goes, "Code is Law." We have nothing to bind the user except the Code.

In terms of NFTs, this is how smart contracts are written, how the blockchain works, and so on.

If we have a mechanism that allows us to sell, we can always sell.

In this ideology, the assertion that "we should not sell" and that "experience, utility, and history are what we have value in" is incompatible in any way.

In Mr. Ikehaya's project, rather, such rules are virtually non-existent, and there is only an atmosphere in which it is forbidden to sell, which effectively means that people have been created who want to sell but cannot.

It is easy to imagine that crypto-native thinkers would object to this reality, saying, "That's not right.”

How to think and deal with it

However, the author believes that there is no need to dismiss this out of hand just because it differs from the underlying philosophy.

As I said before, there is no law other than the Code, but it is also a way of thinking that says, "You can make rules outside of the Code, but they will not work perfectly.”

After all, we have the right to do what we want.

We have the freedom to give people the option of not selling, which is a kind of virtue, but if the Founder wants to spread his ideas to the culture, and if that is his core product idea, I think that is fine.

And we have the freedom to do so whether the users of the product care about this or not. Whether we agree with it or not, we have the right to sell it as we wish.

I consider this culture of kizuna to be a secondary and natural phenomenon that is the result of a kind of Japanese mentality.

As Mr. Ikehaya himself described it as a "village," we have a tradition that is unique to that community.

Those who want to stay can stay and those who don't can leave.

Postscript

If there are those who cannot sell because they will be cut off from the village if they sell, we do not think they need to worry too much about it.

In reality, the Kizuna cultural sphere is only a very small part of the actual crypto cultural sphere. Seriously, a very small part. The NFT cultural sphere of the crypto world is probably about 20-30% of all crypto cultures, but this Kizuna cultural sphere, which has only developed in Japan, is only about 1/1000th of that size. We have, in other words, literally a village.

What reason do we have to dwell on it and say that we have been cut off from it? The world of fucking funny crypto is still wide open and the information and content is growing rapidly. Why don't you go find your next hobby?

It is too much to be regretted that you, who can rather put your passion on the line, should end it all in that village.

You can go back to searching the wider world. Just like you did when you first found NFT.

(Translator's postscript)

Recalling Mr. Ikehaya's activities as a Crypto influencer before he launched his NFT collection, I think it is not unlikely that the CNP floor price will suffer the same fate. Then again, he will probably leave the NFT village and look for a new world.