Start With Crypto-Why
Digital Sovereignty and Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle
The Golden Circle Premise
Simon Sinek’s famous “Start With Why” TED Talk introduced many to the Golden Circle, a 3-step model of organisation behaviour that describes how to foster attractive and effective leadership.
By starting with Why and achieving clarity in motivation, the How (process) and What (product or output) is more likely to attract people (partners, followers, employees, customers) who are magnetised by the organisation’s cause and beliefs. Apple, for example, achieves brand advocacy because of their WHY rather than their WHAT.
The Golden Cryptocurrency Circle
Is it possible to apply the Golden Circle principle to cryptocurrency technology? Is it possible to gather some form of “leadership” insight if we created blockchain architecture based on the Golden Circle?
I believe we can.
How about this? Cryptocurrencies reintroduced the libertarian value of Individual Sovereignty over centralised bodies of authority, like banks, like governments.
The Individual’s sovereignty values of Privacy, Identity and Property are only made possible digitally because “value” has been successfully programmed and test on a trust-network.
In other words, an internet of money (like Bitcoin) allows a basic digital sovereignty skeleton to be modelled using the Golden Circle.
- We should start with Privacy. This allows an individual freedom to choose (without influence) an ethos. Privacy allows us a quiet space away from prying eyes, to articulate our digital modus operandi. We need a space to find our meaning.
- Next is Identity. (funnily, it’s not first because we need meaning to inform our identity). Digital Value Identity is the expression (in coin) of what we stand for. This could be our choice of Wallet, Cryptocurrency, Platform, a future “thing” not invented yet.
- Privacy + Identity = Property, what we own or what we produce. It’s our digital expressions. Right now, many people equate this to outputs in the ‘real’ world like fiat currency. But in the digital/blockchain world, this can be so much more.
So to recap, from a digital stance, cryptocurrencies help promote our individual sovereignty by protecting and automatically enforcing our privacy, our identity and ownership of property — on a network that has trust programmed in its DNA.
To me, this is much more compelling. If it was possible to envisage and build a world where we could connect EVERYTHING to some form of online existence then we need value to be translatable and relatable back to our humanity.
That’s why we need a digital, cryptocurrency version of “Start With Why”
What We Got Instead
Compare my hypothesis to what we got instead this year (2017) in the cryptocurrency land.
Much of the focus has been on how the technology behind cryptocurrency can be used to improve, reinforce or replace institutional structures and processes — especially in Banking, Finance, Insurance, Supply Chain, etc.
We got got sucked into the fiat vs crypto debate. We found ourselves going crazy over ICOs and institutional investors getting involved in derivative instruments.
And while the price of BTC/USD continued to defy gravity like Space X rockets, hardly anyone is USING cryptocurrency. What we got was this:
I am sure there is strategic validity and legitimacy in crowdsource financing of blockchain development. But we’ve gotten crazy on ICOs to the point that the market is full of entities trying to “centralise” some gap in the market.
It’s also quite apparent that despite the technology, we (the individuals) have nothing to trade (ie. use cryptocurrencies) on this digital landscape — not yet.
And no, I’m excluding the speculative transfer of funds from fiat to crypto and ‘hodling’. That’s boring. What I mean is that we’ve not yet truly defined our individual sovereignty in a way that’s structured so mere mortals can understand it. This needs to change, and I believe we can Start With Why.
The Sovereign Individual
There are a few exceptions where cryptocurrency technology has been used to digitise the sovereignty of people, environments & spaces, even nations.
Bitnation, (http://bitnation.co) for example, is a complete voluntary digital jurisdiction or blockchain of sovereign entities, including citizens, nations, embassies, allies . People can sign up and create their own nations.
Cryptocurrencies such as Monero, Verge, Spectrocoin & BitBay all have privacy & anonymity as their foundational ethos for their algorithms and already, the interest is growing and it’s reflecting in their price.
Since Bitcoin et al, have proved that digital money is possible, then next result is that the Sovereign Individual — as a BRAND, can be made real but only if it’s structured.
Here’s my 2nd attempt at Starting Cryptocurrency With ‘Why’:
1. Ethos Layer (Why)
The Ethos layer should be more than just a White Paper for yourself. It’s about structuring the next layers on what you believe about your worth to the digital world. It can even be represented by actual tokens that you will hold long term as a commitment to that cause.
2. Value Layer (How)
The second layer is your special sauce, represented by cryptocurrencies that symbolise “How” you process your worth into reality. As an example, currently I would include Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dash, Iota and Verge in this layer. In other words, these are coins that fund the special sauce.
3. Identity Layer (What)
This token layer stamps transactions of your individuality (eg. property or product) with your identity but converts it to the right Value token based on some intelligent set of Smart Contracts. It’s also a layer that is extremely easy to use and implement. Wallet design is paramount, easy to navigate, easy to interrogate and echos the ethos and value layers of your sovereignty.
Pie In The Sky Today, Real… Soon-ish
I don’t necessarily know which of my 2 versions of Digital Sovereignty is useful or effective. They are just thought experiments.
Version 1.0 advocates for Libertarian rights as the construct for each token layer. Privacy layer as foundational, building on Identity tokens creating Product tokens for individual product or outputs.
Version 2.0 is something I find compelling, because it attempts to construct a digital Brand.
For example, my identity coin is Vlad Soriano Coin (VSC). It is the public token for all my dealings and would act as an aggregate instrument of identity in the same way that the Dow Jones is an index of the top 100 American stocks on the NYSE. In this example, my VSC (Vlad Soriano Coin) would contain my Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dash, Iota and Verge coins and a layer of Smart Contracts would exist such that if I paid for groceries it would use Dash and if I sold consultancy I would receive funds in Verge or Bitcoin.
Current technology doesn’t yet allow seamless and automated processing of what I’ve described but I know various wallets & protocols (eg. such as Polka) are in current development to enable cross blockchain communications.
I would hope that the next 2 years will see advancement in crypto technology to be able to piece this structure together.
