Michael, thanks for your questions. You’ve asked about twenty layered questions so this isn’t the ideal place to answer them without writing another essay or three. The short answer is I have answers to all of these questions but they are not all things I am prepared to talk about just yet. I would suggest joining decstack.com where you can see for yourself who is behind these things.

As for things like the laughing monkey and the cicada (not a fly), they are not something for branding to the masses. Nor is the white paper for mass consumption. In the first place, very few folks in the world understand it. It is for a technical audience and a particular mindset. The symbols and paper are designed to attract the types of minds that are interested in coding a project like this.

Chris Dixon, investor in Coinbase and other Bitcoin projects, spends a lot of time talking about how the folks you need to fire up a project are not the folks you need later, etc, etc. Bitcoin early on was perceived nothing but a bunch of thieves and anarchists. But it takes a different mindset to build a new technology and believe in it, then it does to work on it later. In a startup you need may need a designer who feels physical pain when something is a millimeter off, but you need a different type of designer when the company has 5,000 people. Same here.

I feel like you are leaping way ahead to talking about replacing passports and branding the project. The white paper gives a lot of good answers, as a does the original white paper.

The simplest answer to your questions is that Cicada is about building the necessary infrastructure for a decentralized net. After that, the way you market it is by building a killer app that people want to use. You sell them the app. They don’t care about what is behind it, so the privacy and security is simply a gift.

Thanks for writing.