Menlo One Token Sale Success Part 3
We’re happy to announce the completion of our token sale. Menlo One is making a framework to make decentralized applications faster, more user friendly, cost effective, and easier to build. The ONE™ Token is a utility token which powers all of the transactions within our framework. Over the last 12 months we’ve been building software and selling tokens. This is our story.
Part 3 of a 3 part post.
Part 1: Token Sale Metrics
Part 2: Retrospect
Part 3: Why decentralize anything in the first place?
Why decentralize anything in the first place?
In the midst of all the hype, it’s easy to lose sight of what blockchain is really all about. Centralized systems simply don’t scale. Governments, banks, and even cloud web servers were designed to serve an era of humanity before we we’re all to closely connected. Many think we’ve already entered what Ray Kurzweil calls the Singularity.
Until now, we needed to trust small, powerful groups of people with the task of running the world because there was no other way. There simply isn’t a need for centralized banks anymore. I would argue that even the the nation state as we know it today is obsolete. Relying on a small number of people to always do the right thing for their customers or their citizens has burned people in the past. We’ve already entered an era where private interests wield more power than even governments. What I find troubling is the consolidation of power with technology companies like Google, or whichever company might be the next Google. That unchecked power poses a threat to our way of life. Mark Twain said history doesn’t repeat but it rhymes. If the the nightmares of the 20th century can teach us anything it’s that absolute power corrupts absolutely. As we develop increasingly sophisticated systems which can hurt and imprison people, we need equally sophisticated systems to liberate them.
Blockchain technology enables people to make decisions, organize, speak, and share without anyone’s permission. The use of this technology to transfer money is just the beginning. As wealth is concentrating with an increasingly smaller number of people, blockchain enables people to tap into previously inaccessible sources of value. Converting electricity into money is just the beginning. If we use it right, blockchain promises to bring about a radical global societal transformation, but if we don’t, it might just turn out to be the world’s least energy efficient casino. We need to start unlocking its potential, because the powers that be have recognized blockchain as a threat to their dominance.
The mission of Menlo One is to make censorship resistant applications which have no single point of failure as consumer friendly as the status quo. We want to see a version of Facebook where people’s privacy isn’t being violated, or a news outlet that a government can’t censor, or a credit system which doesn’t exploit the poor. After that wave of applications, we want to see people using blockchain to innovate on the roll of local government, voting on how to spend money and where to build roads. People could use blockchain to unite to crowdfund a clean energy solution, or fund a cure for cancer. The possibilities boggle the mind.
We want you to use Menlo One to build the next runaway hit app that captivates the world, and we want you building it on a decentralized blockchain. We want you to focus on the business problem you have to solve, not the nuts and bolts of the technology itself. We want to help you transform the world for the better, because the future is counting on you… and because it’ll be a tremendous amount of fun.
If building the tools with which people are going to use to transform global society sounds exciting to you, we happen to be hiring. We’re looking for developers, product managers, marketing professionals, business developers, and enterprise sales, but only those who are free thinking semi-radicals who can focus their energy like a laser to solve micro level problems without losing perspective on the macro level outcomes. We’re proudly a distributed team, so location does not matter. Please contact us at satoshi at menlo dot one if interested and tell us how you think decentralized software systems are going to transform the world.
