How to Explain an ICO to a 11-year old (and why you soon won’t have to)
The other day, I was asked to explain an ICO to an 11-year old. This one was easy for me as I have two sons, ages 11 and 13 … and we have been talking about crypto currencies for several years now and they are familiar with what we are doing with the RightMesh Token Generating Event (TGE).
I recorded a Whiteboard Wednesday on this topic too for the team (watch below), but I thought I would expand on this concept with a blog post too.
“An ICO is kind of like pre-ordering a video game before release. You read the description of the game, you see its trailers, you know it is going to be awesome, and you want to be one of the first ones to get it or play it… so you go online and pre-order the game either direct, through Steam, or the Xbox store, or somewhere like that. But the best part is, because you were one of the first to buy and commit to the game, the game studio includes some extra expansion packs or DLCs ‘just for you’ thrown in too [downloadable content].
But you know the best part? Because you helped support the project early, the game can be made even better. Knowing that the community wants that which they are building, the game studio can hire even more programmers and artists to make sure it lives up to your expectations. And then you become part of the story, and you tell your friends.
We are doing an ICO at RightMesh too [we are really doing a TGE, but understanding the differences are hard for most adults to grasp, let alone an 11-year old], but rather than launching a new game title, we are trying to make the world a better place by giving kids just like you free Internet, and apps, and movies, and music over any smartphone. Did you know that not everyone is as lucky as you?
Sometimes just connecting to the Internet is impossible in other parts of the world. We are doing an ICO and asking people to support our project because we want to give everyone an equal chance to connect and share. We believe this makes a better world for all. What do you think? When everyone can access the internet like you can, doesn’t this sound like a better world?”
Kids Today
So with that definition in hand, you should be able to make every teenager, or any youth that has grown up with a gaming console or PC, understand this strange new world we are living in.
But soon you won’t have to.
Why you ask? Because kids today will not question that money can be digital. They will not question the value of digital scarcity. This is not the Internet, social, or mobile generation. It is the generation that is coming after that whereby digital transactions are really the only transaction.
This past Christmas, the gifts that got my sons the most excited was a fake printed up gift card that would allow them to buy certain skins for Overwatch, Steam credits, and loot boxes. This is the world in which they and their friends live.
Last fall, I was over at my sister’s house in Germany and my 14-year old nephew let out a fairly-large scream from his bedroom. We were a little concerned until we found out that it was a scream of joy and not of terror. He had just unlocked a special skin for for one of his weapons in whatever digital world he was immersed. I remember him saying something like, “But mom, you don’t understand… it is worth about €70–80!”
Soon after, there was a knock at the door and his friends that he was playing with online had come over to celebrate with him and see his skin “IRL”. They were there for all of 5 minutes of celebratory high-fives before scattering back to their darkened bedrooms to live their digital lives, and back on Discord they went.
[A separate rumination filled with enough generalizations but the idea has not be thought about long enough for its own blog post… when I was growing up, boys hated being on the phone. They only were only connected for as long as it took to pick a time and place to meet. Girls on the other hand, would simply hang out and chat. Today this role has switched. Teenage/tween girls seem to be all about the instantaneous Snaps and Instagram stories — those brief moments — while boys are hanging out for hours and hours at a time. Something to think about.]
Generational Shifts
About 10 years ago, I was interviewing a relatively-fresh out of school grad for an account management position, and I pulled out one of my standard interview questions I had asked almost all candidates for the decade before that, “Do you consider yourself a technologist?” The reason I asked this specific question was that even though I was recruiting for a non-technical role, it was still a software company and a grasp of technology was always required.
The candidate replied “No”, and as I was making a negative notation on my checklist of questions, I asked a follow-up question…
“Have you ever built a website?”
His reply, “Well yeah… who hasn’t.” He then went on to tell me about the problem he was having reconfiguring his DNS to get his blah, blah, blah working, but his blah, blah, blah was not performing the proper blah, blah, bah and so on.
What I had spent years learning and still didn’t fully grasp, was second nature to him. This was the Internet generation.
When my sons and my nephew go to their job interviews in their not-too distant futures, and their prospective middle-aged manager who was that Internet 1.0 candidate I interviewed ten years ago asks of them, “Do you consider yourself a crypto-conomist (or some such question to see if they understood blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and this revolution we are living in)?”
I bet their answer will be “no”.
To them, it will not be a yes or no answer. It will just be.
John
CEO, RightMesh
