Cryptogeeks, unite!
Today my company Way Network is launching its first blockchain based prototype. Proudly presenting: Cryptogeeks.Berlin along with the GEEK token — now live on the Rinkeby Ethereum testnet! Cryptogeeks.Berlin is the first token-curated list of trusted blockchain experts and enthusiasts and we are starting with the community in Berlin. It’s the place to connect with inspiring peers, to present your hot new project to the local blockchain community, or to find potential co-founders and investment opportunities.
How it works
Step 1— Run the MetaMask browser extension on the Rinkeby test net and click ‘Start’ on cryptogeeks.berlin. Enter a username along with a short status and photo to share whatever you want to share with the local blockchain community. You are now visible to other blockchain enthusiasts in the city. If you want to come back later, register with an email address and password.
Step 2 — If there is someone who looks interesting to you, start a chat conversation and see if they are up to meet for a crypto discussion over lunch, a beer at a meetup or an evening walk along the river bank!
Step 3 — Now comes the tricky part: If, after the interaction, you believe that the other person is legit and actually a valuable member of the community, leave a signal to the rest of the world by endorsing her. This endorsement is a transaction on the blockchain, but it does not cost you anything except the transaction fee and some of your time. The strength of the endorsement, though, depends on the number of GEEK tokens you own. So if Bob owns 100 GEEK and he endorses Alice (who may or may not own any token), Alice’s reputation goes up by 100. If Bob has no GEEK token, his endorsement will not affect Alice’s reputation. In the UI we provide, the list of Cryptogeeks is then ordered by that reputation.
Step 4 — Thus, if you want to make endorsements and thereby curate the community, you should get some GEEK token! You can acquire them by sending Rinkeby test Ether (https://faucet.rinkeby.io/) to our contract at 0xBAa593E9C1f11BbcfA4725085211D764eEC26592 through the interface on the app’s profile page (MetaMask needs to be running for this page to work). This is a linear curation market bonding curve based on the awesome code of Billy Rennekamp and Slava Balasanov at Relevant.
When you endorse someone you increase that person’s reputation which makes her appear higher up in the ranking. The more Ether you have invested into the community and put at stake, the more curation power you have. If token holders do a good job at transferring reputation only to those who actually deserve it, the community becomes well curated and the position in the ranking becomes a valuable signal: Users who want to meet new people in the blockchain community will look at this reputation to decide who to interact with. GEEK tokens then gain in value because they give the power to decide who gets that attention. The mechanism thus incentivizes token holders to go out of their social comfort zone, meet new people in their interest community and leave valuable signals that help other users filter and match.
The GEEK challenge
Of course at this point, since we are not yet using real Ether on the mainnet, the GEEK token will not accrue actual value so the mechanism described above is still entirely hypothetical. Also, with our small user base, the attention one gets by being on top of the list is probably not worth too much at the moment. We want to raise the stakes in this game and are prepared to give our users everything we’ve got: our time, our skills and our community resources! Therefore, the three Berlin-based Cryptogeeks with the highest reputation after one month (i.e. on July 14th at 8 p.m. CET) will get an NFT that endows its owner with 10 minutes of attention on stage at our Curation Markets Berlin meetup to present or ask questions, effectively using the collective intelligence of our community.
Moreover, the three most reputed geeks can choose to spend quality time with our core team members: A trip to another world with Vasileios, a romantic Italian open-air dinner with chef Gianluca, or a 2-hour motivational life coaching session with myself (ehrr).
The big picture
Ranking humans with cryptocurrency token signals? With or without silly prizes — WHO ON EARTH WOULD DO THAT?! Only complete blockchain nerds. And that is why we are starting with this particular community. In the blockchain scene of Berlin we found a creative and non-conventional crowd that is open to experiment with truly new forms of social organization. Of all people in the world, YOU are the first ones to grasp the benefits of decentralized curation, data ownership and network democratization. We want to learn and iterate with you to find a way to actually reap these benefits. All theoretical discussions and months of research in the curation markets/TCR rabbit hole could not convince us that this is an entirely stupid idea. There are certainly thousands of things to improve, bugs and directions to go, but reading more won’t help — we need real-world feedback from YOU now. We are also cleaning up the code base in order to publish the repository and allow anyone to contribute to this open source project.
Once we have fine tuned the mechanism and understood how to engineer a first decentralized social discovery community, we can expand to other social circles and enable them to launch their own token eco-systems each with its own rules for curation. Social blockchain technology has the power to overcome the trust and information barriers that usually prevent valuable communication between you and the strangers that you are constantly surrounded by in an urban environment. We envision a world, where you can look at this crowd and know immediately if there is someone you should include in your life’s story. After exactly one year in the arena of entrepreneurship, I can say one thing for sure: I would never have gotten to the point of actually launching a product, without the brilliant people I have met and included in my story.
