Synereo Weekly Update
Update Summary
This week, musician and bitcoin advocate Tatiana Moroz spoke about her journey into cryptocurrency and how decentralized technologies are going to be important for artists in the years to come. We discussed how to build out our community looking forward, and likely groups that we can reach out to in order to form creative partnerships. Finally, Dor discussed the differences between Synereo and Facebook, and how Synereo can offer a completely new, and better, experience.
Contents in Brief
0024: What happens with Quantum Computing?
0712: Tatiana about her history with cryptocurrency
1025: Listen to song “Heart of Gold”
1137: How will Synereo allow other artists to follow Tatiana’s lead in the decentralized space?
1378: Tatiana asks how Synereo is built
1390: Greg answers
1629: Integrating artist coins in Synereo
2045: Synereo availability
2325: How to get people on board?
2430: Jim about attracting FB-users
3227: Why should Synereo be better than FB?
4051: Current UI
4807: New Investor Deck
Detailed Notes
0024: What happens with Quantum Computing?
Early in the discussion, the idea of quantum computing was brought up, and how that relates to the blockchain. The above diagram explains how we’re more or less able to “program” the Natural world and that nature and code are not really that different. The Classical computational world is very programmable, and digital matter is easy to copy. The Blockchain mimics the Natural world in the sense of scarcity. Cryptocoins are unique and exist in limited amount. In the Quantum computational world, it will be different.
0712: Tatiana about her history with cryptocurrency
Tatiana Moroz is a singer/songwriter based in New Jersey, NY. She says that music is always about bringing a great cultural shift. Bitpay sponsored one of her performances in Tampa and they approached her to talk about bitcoin. In late 2013, she went to a conference about bitcoin in Atlanta and wrote a song to give more support for bitcoin. In Argentina she performed the song and it was a peak time for bitcoin.
Tatiana was well accepted in the community, and managed to create the first artist cryptocurrency. Without access to financial resources, she realized, artists were prevented from entering the industry at a level necessary to compete. A second point was the transition from MySpace to Facebook at that time. Losing friends and having to make new ones. Tatiana was astonished when FB started charging her money for posting to her fans. She doesn’t think crowdfunding is ideal, so she came up with the Artistcoin. You have a better relationship with your fans this way, and can do constant fundraising. Tatiana has also a crypto media marketing company and a show called “Bitcoin for dummies” in an effort to make bitcoin more accessible.
1025: Listen to song “Heart of Gold”
1137: How will Synereo allow other artists to follow Tatiana’s lead in the decentralized space
How do content creators like Tatiana promote their songs, and how that would transmit to her audience and beyond. Dor responds: the work that Tatiana has gone through, the prototyping work she’s done, is exactly what we would like to offer in Synereo. She built it up from scratch and collected pieces: how to issue the coin, how to sell it and how to deal with the fans from the network.
We want to make it very easy for an artist to issue his own coin, to give it a name and also to issue other types of tokens, like different types of rewards or badges. It’s easy to upload artistical work, to redistribute that art, and to license it in the way that you want. The artist can have a pre-sale for a show, charging fans only once enough sales have been made and the show was set following that. If there’s a certain threshold, say 500 people, then the concert can go ahead. You skip the process of finding agents and you can arrange all the tour facilities through the network.
One of the features of Synereo is to facilitate the connection between the content creator and the audience without a third party in between.
1378: Tatiana asks how Synereo is built
Are you a blockchain company and do you build on the bitcoin blockchain?
1390: Greg answers
Greg: We began with a content delivery network. How do you share content in with respect for privacy, security and economy. Then when we thought about it, and to make it self sustaining, we realised that the crypto currency provided an extra component. So we minted our own coin and started with a crowdsale.
However, we realized that the current blockchain technology won’t scale. So we’re cooperating with Ethereum to make the blockchain more scalable, by essentially redefining the blockchain itself. Greg feels that he owes this to the investors of Synereo and Livelygig, because this would be a possible concern. As a technologist he was enforced to address the scalability issue.
The blockchain where Synereo is likely going to settle on is going to be an amount of Ethereum 2.0 and Synereo technology (Proof of Stake called Casper redefined with the π-calculus in SpecialK).
The Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism has some significant problems. Greg stated if you take the Proof of Work of the blockchain up to the required scale then the heat from the computors hashing will melt the entire planet. So the first step is to get a consensus algorithm that works. Greg is working with the Ethereum group to provide a variant Proof of Stake that meets with the expected trust model, is censorship resistant, and doesn’t melt the planet in terms of the energy requirements. This is still under construction. That technology will be built on the Synereo stack for a variety of reasons. At that point it will be a new kind of blockchain. For now, people can work with the Synereo 1.0 offering, which will work with the existing blockchain technology, i.e. Proof of Work and with the current content delivery framework, that the existing social network employ.
1629: Integrating artist coins in Synereo
Can I integrate the coins of CounterParty or Ethereum into Synereo?
Yes, any coin can be integrated through an exchange mechanism amongst the coins. The problem of resilience is not there, because all amounts are registered on the blockchain. So even when those parties don’t exist anymore, you could go back to the last registered situation. The tokens don’t disappear. Anyway, CounterParty, and Omni will be around in the coming years, even if they’re not developed anymore. This way, Tatiana can sign up new artists using her Artistcoin with no worries. Coins can be exchanged quite easily.
Greg warned that unless there’s an alternative that provides scaling of the blockchain in the next 18 to 24 months, the current technology will entirely collapse. Everybody who’s involved should be very aware of that and you should behave soberly with this technology. Tatiana says that there is nobody sober in bitcoin. It’s an interesting time. It’s hard to see clearly sometimes.
2045: Synereo availability
Can people try out Synereo at the moment?
You can stand up a node right now, but it’s not really user friendly yet. The new UI will come out at the end of February, which lines up with our equity sale through BankToTheFuture. Tatiana offered her service to make it a good pre-sale.
On the same platform, several applications can be made. Like Livelygig for freelancers.
Musicians have been working in a setting of freelancing for a long time. The priority is applications first, and platform second. It’s no use to create a wonderful platform that nobody uses. Meanwhile we’re working on a broader vision, a transition to a platform based on self-determination. The new kind of communication that the Internet offers, gives us new opportunities for organisation. But then the people have to trust these communication tools, which is not the case when these tools are in hands of centralized, hierarchical organizations like FB or governments.
We are rapidly engaging in a global political and economic situation, so we’re building the corresponding platform up in stages. To begin with, a low risk platform for content distribution. The second level of risk is work (to get money for your work). Another use could be dating. Along the way people will trust enough to use it as a means for self determination. The first two releases (Synereo Social network and LivelyGig) are in line with that plan of adding applications with increasing levels of risk.
2325: How to get people on board?
In February we’re inviting alpha-users and then there will be a steady stream of improvements after that. In fact there’s no choice. We need a different kind of network. Nobody wants to go back to the time of walking to a physical bank, to do their banking. The same is for blockchain technology. We want to keep this kind of trustless, censorship resistant mechanism for exchange of digital assets. So we have to get this platform.
2430: Jim about attracting FB-users
Jim brought up a suggestion for attracting FB users by having plug-ins which will handle identity and privacy issues better than FB. Doing it like that, they will not even know that the plug-ins are part of Synereo, and gradually they will discover that they don’t need FB.
Tatiana asks: When I’m on FB doing my stuff, how do I integrate them in Synereo? Jim responded that it has to do with social login. So when you login into just a random website you can login with your FB credentials and then you give that site all your personal information. But instead of using FB, you would use Open Identity. Ultimately that would mean a kind of single sign on, where you decide what information is given. Greg added that the FreeTrust project integrates with Synereo but it is not the same as Synereo.
The decentralised and distributed philosophy is being taken to heart in the way services are organised now. So there will lots of different services that provide different notions of identity and different ways of to get a bridge from one network to another. There are standard plug-ins and standard API’s that make it possible to import your FB-contacts or email contacts, and invite those people to Synereo. That has been a game that is played by social networks for over a decade. That’s a fairly standardised approach.
But the most compelling approach is to attract the thought leaders of a certain social network. For example known musicians that operate in a social network. The hope is that they come on board, because their values are in line with Synereo. And then their followers/fans will also come on board, because those artists will release their content on Synereo. Then you start to build a network with that.
In short, we have to provide features for users that make it compelling to use Synereo. The first thing is that people, and their content will have value; value follows content. Whereas FB steals all the value from the transmission of content, FB users don’t directly benefit from their content additions. FB is mostly sucking out the monetary value from those communications. That means that over time this becomes unsustainable. Until now, users have been satisfied because they have this big need of connection. People are realising now that connection is not the only thing to this social network experience. Part of this experience is that you are compensated for your attention, that you’re compensated for the work that you put in. Another part is that you trust the network. The only way that you can trust the network is that you are engaged or involved in the network. If the people are the network, if it’s a public utility then they can trust the network in a completely different way.
3227: Why should Synereo be better than FB?
When it comes to explaining the differences between Synereo and Facebook, the answers are very clear. Sometimes people ask how Synereo plans to bring people over into its system.
Usually, what Dor explains to investors is that Synereo’s community outreach will happen in three stages:
- Early adopters come on board before the full application is out. privacy advocates, cryptocurrency enthusiasts, people interested in the collaboration tools inherent in the system, those who seek the greater control mechanisms our platform provides, and developers/hackers who appreciate that our system is open-source and very extensible.
- Over the medium term, many of the applications being built on top of Synereo will begin their operations. There are two main benefits these platform will provide, one that’ll be immediately apparent and one that’ll only be relevant in the long term. The main and immediate benefit is that these applications will be in creating sustainable economies where the participants themselves retain the value of their work rather than providing a significant portion of it to the interface provider.
People that want to communicate and collaborate together and reward each other. Like musicians. It’s a decentralised FB, Google, AirBnb, Uber without a third party. - In the long term, Synereo is going to have a major advantage in terms of user experience and the type and variety of user interfaces that will be available to users. It is now common knowledge that Facebook et al. are completely unwilling to improve the experience of their users or to grant them any measure of control that hurts their bottom line as it relates to acquiring data about them or selling their attention to 3rd parties. Synereo’s platform does not have this issue, paving the way to many new types of interfaces, and even applications, that are simply impossible to create under the current conditions of the ecosystem.
It will be a platform to develop other applications on.
Tatiana refers to Bitlanders.com
Julian is interested in Synereo because he thinks this is the way to improve on the experience of other social networks.
4051: Current UI
You can try it out here.
You can decide yourself what you want to see by selecting channels (left) or sources (right) in the upper box, whereas FB decides what you’re going to see. The UI of FB is very sophisticated because it is being developed by a very large staff of developers. So Synereo has to compete on new features that are more compelling to people and that FB is never able to provide. We’re coming back to our points: decentralised, you’re in control of the network, privacy, autonomy. If you have defined your feed, you also want to share that feed with others.
That’s all for this week!
Originally published at blog.synereo.com on January 16, 1220.
