Forbole First Meetup

Thank you all for joining the first meetup of Forbole 🙏

I have longed for this opportunity: introducing Rai stones to layman. From Rai stones to bitcoin, then to Ethereum and smart contract. Then to Cosmos, IRISnet and the internet of blockchains. We also talked about staking-as-a-service and digital asset management. Finally we talked about decentralized web and its implications. When we explained more, we know how much we don’t know. This was a wonderful learning experience.

The target audience for this meetup is our layman friends who realize the potential of blockchain but don’t know where to start. From our experience in the last 20 months in blockchain space, we learned that we should not waste time on skeptics. As a decentralization pragmatist, I want to help more open-minded people to embrace blockchain, especially in a city like Hong Kong which is wealthy and well-developed but also conservative in adopting new technology.

A friend asked me privately for my view of certain new blockchain projects. To me, it really requires some insights to spot the future winners. But it is easy to spot scams: we can just assume all new projects are scams, and prove they are not. You can explore the real deal blockchain influencers on Twitter (they are not on Facebook or LinkedIn). If you don’t know who to follow, you can check who I follow and then check who they follow. You will gradually see the dots and the lines. When you are approached by potential scammers, check the Twitters of those scams (and their key persons) and see who care about them.

I know there is echo chamber effect but you will be fine. There are a lot of opportunities in blockchain space, and hence there are far more scammers. For people who come from Greater China Region like me, we need to admit the reality that the US and Europe are leading the research and development of blockchain technology. There are not many people can invent a brand new protocol from scratch. As I can observe, most of the so called protocols you can find in Greater China Region are the copycats of other prominent projects from the US or Europe. They bet that they know more than their audiences in the region and they win in most cases.

Blockchain is about decentralization, openness and censorship-free. This is far more than computer science and investment or speculation. This is about the enlightenment of people.

We need to say more no than yes. Subjectivity is a good thing as there are too many scams while we have too little time.