Introducing Immutable: A New Way to Explore Blockchain

Blockchain is hard. “Immutable” is here to help.

“Immutable” makes no assumptions about your knowledge of economics, finance or computer science. This is a resource built for newcomers, by a fellow newcomer. It is an alternative to parsing dense white papers and fanatic investor communities.

Here at “Immutable” my belief is that the best way to learn blockchain concepts is by example.

Together, we’ll approach blockchain technology by learning about the startups building it. We’ll wade into the subject through the use of case studies, exploring the market sector by sector.

You’ll learn to view the market through the lens of an investor, leveraging companies, and products you’re already familiar with as a guide.

From this starting point, we can start to understand how their blockchain counterparts are changing the game.

Most blockchain engineers, entrepreneurs and investors I talk to every week refer to their entry into the space as ‘falling down the rabbit hole’.

Whether it was decentralization, tokenization or high returns, they found themselves digging into the subject more and more until they crossed the event horizon. They fell down the rabbit hole and into a new world of opportunity. But many who wish to dive into blockchain have the opposite experience.

Instead, these newcomers find themselves in a world more akin to what Alice actually found in Wonderland — a series of wild events and dizzying new ideas.

I don’t believe in rabbit holes.

The reason the Alice in Wonderland idiom is such a good description of the dive into this space is because the experience is all-consuming. Without structure, you end up researching in every direction at once. Without a starting point to use as a reference you have no foundation to build upon. Without either, you’re forced to build your own approach — and this is where most burn out.

To newcomers in this position, I separate the ecosystem into two distinct worlds: one of Value Creation, and one of Value Capture.

The World of Value Creation

The World of Value Creation belongs to the engineers, developers, and entrepreneurs. These participants are iterating through new paradigms of cryptography and economics at breakneck speed. Their philosophical positions are staked through whitepapers and GitHub repositories. They live in an open-source environment where a new contribution could revolutionize the space in months, not years.

The World of Value Creation operates as an inverted Tragedy of the Commons. The network gains strength from the exchange of knowledge and value. This creates a meritocracy of ideas. A group of developers can ‘fork’ existing projects and infuse it with new ideas to create something unique without disrupting the original project. Each project becomes stronger through this process because their shared value creation is a tide that raises both ships.

The World of Value Capture

The second world, the World of Value Capture, belongs to the funds, investment banks and retail investors who deploy capital into the blockchain ecosystem. From small-cap investors holding on for dear life through massive volatility swings to technologically sophisticated arbitrage strategies capitalizing on that same volatility, capital continues to seep into the space daily.

It is in this world that you’ll find the most challenging dialogues on the state of the blockchain economy and the value of its companies, but these debates can come soaked in subjectiveness. This subjectivity is noise crowding the signal.

Problem 1: Barriers to Knowledge

The rapid progress of the World of Value Creation amplifies the noise in the World of Value Capture. Each new advancement by the community adds complexity; each new wrinkle of complexity adds to the knowledge barrier new members must climb to find clarity.

There is often this kind of barrier when investing in emerging technologies.

Network effects were a staple of many unicorn startups of the past decade. A network effect occurs when a service or product becomes more valuable when more users use it. They create barriers to entry for challengers, and barriers to exit for users.

The potential of companies like AirBNB and Uber become more clear with network effects in your mental model toolkit. Without it, the mechanisms powering the Sharing Economy would be invisible. Onboarding new mental models allows you to slice through complexity and view broader horizons.

But network effects are a single bullet point in the toolkit a blockchain neophyte must build to find clarity in this market. Add to this list topics such as regulatory stances, economic incentives, or governance models, to name a few.

Why is it so hard to build these mental models on your own?

Problem 2: Noisy Signals

Put yourself in the shoes of a newcomer to blockchain for a moment.

You’re trying to figure out the differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum and you keep coming across the terms Proof of Work and Proof of Stake. These topics seem central to how these coins operate, but you’re not sure where to start.

How should someone in this position try to assess a topic like Proof of Stake? The resources available to them come through 3 sources:

1) The startups themselves (who are incentivized to promote themselves)

2) Critics from the same industry (who are blinded by status quo bias), or

3) Investors (who are incentivized to speak to the virtues of their positions)

These resources rarely achieve clarity because they present their argument in isolation. It forces the reader to learn about topics in separate silos of information. They can only understand the value of each position by context inferred from the other silo. I’ve struggled with this repeatedly as I’ve attempted to expand my own knowledge of this space.

It’s difficult to understand the benefits of Proof of Stake without knowledge of Proof of Work. It’s difficult to fully understand Proof of Work without reading Satoshi’s original Bitcoin whitepaper and supporting writings. Through a cross-referencing of these topics a level of clarity is finally achieved. There is no abstraction, no wading into the pool; there is only a dive off a cliff.

Why is this the case? Can mainstream approval and adoption of a platform succeed if Getting Started resources require 50+ hours of study?

Introducing: Immutable

“Immutable” aims to be a resource for catalyzing this learning process.

It will start from a base of existing knowledge to lower the barrier to entry. Instead of learning from a self-referential set of concepts, we’ll build a new resource from knowledge of existing startups. Using existing frameworks we can abstract away the complexity and subjectiveness of the market.

We’ll start with familiar startup models and build out our mental models until we’re ready for concepts like:

• Tokenized securities
• Prediction markets
• Smart contracts
• Supply chains

I’ll cover the blockchain market, sector by sector, cutting through the noise to deliver an objective analysis of how these startups are succeeding — or failing — at disrupting the status quo.

Our first series will be diving into SteemIt, a spiritual successor to Reddit and Medium that hosts a decentralized platform for rewarding content creators. Read our first post here!

“Immutable” is also hosting a collection of Mental Models to help pick up the concepts powering the startups we discuss.

Any particular companies or sectors that you’re curious about and want us to explore? Bring it up below or send a tweet my way, @TOBtheCreator, and I’ll add it to our list!