Crypto’s Killer App is Litter-ally Under Our Feet (2 of 5)
This is Part Two of CleanApp’s five-part series (Part One, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five) on why a litter/hazard reporting-response marketplace is crypto’s obvious, yet totally neglected, killer app.
The reason this wannabe Blockchain killer app remains neglected is because its development necessarily requires today’s Blockchain devs to go against some deeply held thinking on what represents an ideal Blockchain architecture.
To see the considerable overall Blockchain-systemic, social, and market-based value propositions in a project of this caliber, Blockchain theorists must temporarily suspend several supposedly foundational tenets of Blockchain development. This includes core premises surrounding decentralization, desirability of fully trustless Blockchain computing, game theoretical and utility-maximizing individual behavior, etc.
Assume Nothing/Question Everything
We’re not the only ones urging the Blockchain community to re-examine core assumptions. In one of his most popular articles, Why Everyone Missed the Most Mind-Blowing Feature of Cryptocurrency, futurist Daniel Jeffries posits that one of the most overlooked features of “crypto” is its ability to decentralize the distribution of money. We disagree and have done so on record.
If anything, Jeffries’ piece highlights that many great analysts still miss the most mind-blowing feature of crypto, which is why we still lack the elusive crypto “killer app.”
It turns out that not only is it possible to build so-called “trustless” networks around radically different conceptions of “trust,” “honesty,” “interest,” and “value” — but it may turn out that these alternative conceptions of trust are far more durable than raw computational trustless “guarantees.”
The mainstream’s inability to appreciate the core genius of the Bitcoin whitepaper is why the mainstream’s best solutions are just skimming the surface of Blockchain’s true range of possibilities.
To start getting hyperutility out of Blockchain tech today, we need to reassess core conceptions about trust and core assumptions about expected utility. We’ll unpack several of these assumptions in Part Four and Part Five, including key lessons for the broader crypto developer and analyst community.
Why Doesn’t Vitalik Say So?
More than anyone on Earth, Vitalik Buterin must understand that, at this stage of development, Blockchain devs must work together to give the world palpable material hyperutility, and fast.
In a famous December 2017 Tweet, when the price of Ethereum was skyrocketing, Vitalik expressly urged *all* “crypto communities” to take a moment to reassess where the community was headed. Buterin implored the community to actually achieve “something meaningful for society,” going so far as to warn that he would leave “the community” if it didn’t adjust course.
But in his difficult hybrid role of being the Bill Gates + Linus Torvalds + Tim Berners-Lee + Jimbo Wales + Vic Hayes and Satoshi Nakamoto of the Ethereum universe, he is role-bound to remain neutral while the rest of us figure out what that “something meaningful for society” looks like.
Vitalik doubtlessly knows what can be done, and what should be done (not necessarily the same thing, of course) with the Ethereum operating-system-like platform to start showing massive social gains. But:
the one person who has the most information and insight into the best “crypto killer apps” is paradoxically the one person who can’t say what they are; doing so would put Buterin in the unstable position of choosing winners and losers, telling the world which of his many children he likes best.
Killer App v. Killer App
So instead, the developer community is feverishly coding and speculating, often simultaneously. Every day we get news of this or that “killer app,” and then the ideas fizzle; alternatively, if there’s clear revenue potential, an idea can get incubated by different established players, often formalized into an ICO scheme and then “sold” to the market through different market mechanisms.
The way this process plays out today is fascinating. Success is measured by the size of a project’s Telegram subscriber base, the reputations or affiliations of core developers, and the degrees of network separation from even more influential core developer teams for large projects like Ethereum.
Because there are so many fraudulent projects, any time a small but growing project like Littercoin reaches out to “the community” to solicit support, a sick presumption of fraudulent intent is thrust onto the developer. This is so even for cases where the developers, like Littercoin or CleanApp, offer years of good faith efforts, peer-reviewed publications, and stainless nonprofit credentials as their reputational bona fides.
So to overcome the first mover advantages that current market incumbents enjoy, socially-oriented startups have no choice but to line up toe-to-toe against various crypto “killer app” candidates.
One must then engage with the “killer app” du jour — say, Jeffries’ idea of a Blockchain competitor to Kickstarter — to attempt to explain why at this point of BlockTech’s development, this isn’t the best use of the community’s limited resources.
Yet as an angel peer reviewer pointed out to us, this is a very high risk strategy because individuals like Jeffries enjoy high popularity in certain crypto circles; therefore, even hinting that a trending “killer app” might not be the best idea at present is tantamount to flowing against the stream.
Small socially-minded developer teams in the current Blockchain space operate under a veritable “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” set of dilemmas and tradeoffs. Cryptomarket volatility only adds fuel to this fire, as investors and competing developers seem to get a weird release from tearing small developers’ ideas to shreds every time the market slices at their fortune and they need a scapegoat.
Projects like Littercoin and CleanApp don’t have the luxury of “long runways” to cultivate Patreons, Telegram and Reddit followers.
Because the environmental and social problems we’re working to solve are so urgent, the tactics we employ are necessarily more blunt. These tactics might appear shameless, desperate, or strident to individuals with more delicate (or more traditionally corporate) sensibilities, but they are age-old guerrilla marketing tactics of calling a spade a spade.
Killer App Must Offer Hyperutility, Now
So, as much as we’d all like more crowdfunding (and yes, as a nonprofit, CleanApp needs funding like everyone else), Jeffries’ latest idea for crypto’s killer app is off point because it doesn’t offer radically new utility.
Instead,
Crypto’s “killer app” is one that gives users maximum utility with minimum effort, on previously inconceivable micro- and macro-level scales, achieving so much obvious good that its structural and value propositions become unimpeachable.
A Killer App is Offering Hyperutility, Already
As we’ve hinted throughout, there’s already a working prototype of this type of killer app — none other than @Littercoin/OpenLitterMap (OLM).
But an immediate WARNING follows: to appreciate the full potential of those links, to really unpack the many profoundly original value propositions made possible by OLM & CleanApp, one must approach these Blockchain horizons de novo, as much as possible.
Before assessing @Littercoin’s viability, we strongly recommend that you finish the rest of this series. This isn’t self-promotion; it’s a serious bit of intellectual guidance. Without the context that we are taking lots of time to develop here, a read of OLM materials is akin to dreaming up Netflix prior to there having been Napster. It’s certainly possible, but without elaborating and showing the constituent parts of the conceptual matrix, all one sees is a utopian vision scripted into “proof of what happens when developers can’t afford designers” (paraphrasing Littercoin founder’s own words).
If you take the time to work through the Littercoin case study with us, you will still get that utopian vision; but you’ll also be able to see hundreds of hard revenue models (each with the potential of maturing into its own market); you’ll see the future of CivicTech operating on several possible sectoral and functional planes; you’ll see what your home life will look like in just a few months, and how quickly it will change over the next years.
All that, as they say, and more.
The reason we’re so adamant about the need to adopt a de novo review stance is that we suspect not even OpenLitterMap appreciates the full potential of what it has given the world.
Even though we’ve been working on these problems for five years, everyone at the CleanApp Foundation knows that we’re only at the earliest stages of our own understanding regarding the full potential of crypto. This is why it is so important to tread carefully, methodically, and collaboratively.
So, let’s get caught up to speed. It’s mid-June 2018, and right now, Littercoin ($LTRX) is similar to the original Bitcoin whitepaper in its infancy, bouncing around Reddit, Twitter, and back again — propelled by its indefatigable “Satoshi,” an Irish visionary in the figure of Seán Lynch.
With the youthful bravado of Hemingway, the humanism of Nelson Mandela, and the eco-consciousness of Jane Goodall, Lynch wears his Irish-green credentials on his sleeve. A quintessentially Irish sense of humor helps to round out the edges:
Putting aside humor and sincerity of purpose, is Seán Lynch really giving the world its first glimpse of ubiquitous crypto? The answer is … yes!
This claim will get multiple detractors, caveats, qualifications, provisos. But unlike any other crypto project to date, @Littercoin has succeeded in humanizing “crypto” and rendering it universally, globally accessible.
Like other forms of true genius, the idea is contagious. Littercoin is so seemingly obvious, you start to see Littercoin every time you see a crushed cigarette pack or an overflowing trash bin.
@Littercoin/OpenLitterMap give prima facie utility in every scaled dimension of the Littercoin blockchain, from locating individual pieces of litter to macro-planar trend and diffusion analytics.
We know that lots of Blockchain projects make similar claims of super-utility.
Where Littercoin breaks new ground is translatability — being able to easily explain the awesome potential, and residual challenges, of Blockchain tech to folks who may not know a bit about computers, nor want to know anything about the back-end processes.
People hate litter; people love money. Littercoin aligns these interests transactionally.
Because the underlying problem it’s solving is so universally pervasive, Littercoin is remarkably easy to scale-up conceptually — even among total newcomers, complete neophytes to crypto.
This is one of the several reasons why Littercoin is the “killer app” the rest of the world will get to know crypto through: Littercoin is the clearest illustration and easiest explanation of the virtues of Blockchain tech. Period.
Unlike any other use case, Littercoin actually shows huge billion dollar markets to ordinary people who might have previously just seen trash. Because ordinary people see trash everywhere, mere knowledge of Littercoin forces them to now see potential Blockchain treasures everywhere, and not just in the litter/hazard reporting context.
This is why Littercoin is the ultimate Blockchain gateway, and why every Blockchain developer should learn about it and support it.
Next, the markets being described by OLM/CleanApp aren’t just possible because of Blockchain advances. Littercoin shows billion dollar new markets that are solely possible on the Blockchain — casually answering the question that has riddled blockchain developers and market analysts for years, “Yes, Blockchain, Blockchain, Blockchain, but what can be done with Blockchain that can’t be done with regular money or existing data structures and processes?”
For starters, how about token-izing and monetizing not just “trash,” but torrents of trash-related data — chained to particular producers, points of origin, reporters, locales, constitutive materials, time-frames, incident rates, likely diffusion patterns, and hundreds of other variables.
We’ll pause here to let you take a breath and reflect on what just went down.
What you’re feeling is normal. It’s called a paradigm shift.
If you’re experiencing goose-bumps, feelings of euphoria, FOMO, welcome to this wildly exciting frontier at the intersection of CleanTech, CivicTech & CryptoTech.
If you’re not feeling this yet, perhaps you’d benefit from a short detour to Google, our friendly Data College, to brush up on how “data is the new currency” and how data about trash, yuck, could be even remotely valuable.
In our next installment, we’ll tackle our biggest question yet:
If not even Littercoin can fully appreciate the scaled potential of what it has given the world quite yet, what’s the best way of unlocking that as-yet unrealized potential?
If you think you’re ready, please leave all of your assumptions about Bitcoin/Blockchain/Ethereum on this page. Seriously. Then click forward to Part Three.
If your head is still spinning and you want to go back, here’s Part One.
