MBO, Right Clicking, and Growth Hacking

Opens April 18th 2023 to talk about the MBO, right-clicking, and growth hacking, showing a tweet mocking Cardano for lacking the project support that Polygon Labs offers builders.

Cardano, like Bitcoin, is a decentralized protocol nobody owns, unlike ecosystems where founders pre-mined boatloads of money for a customer-service role, so it is self-bootstrapping.

He and others anticipated the need for a Community Fund, the treasury holding 1.5 billion ADA, and that CIP 1694 and the MBO create the rails for the community to decide how much growth-hacking support to fund.

The community could vote to fund an official Cardano ecosystem group as the first point of contact for builders, but that IO was never given the mandate or money to do growth hacking, only protocol design and engineering.

With the MBO and treasury the community can create an official entity with an endowment and KPIs like 500 NFT projects or 100 dapps, which is the point of DReps and 1694.

Recounts the right-click incident where someone made an NFT of a picture he owns the copyright of and his likeness without permission, then expected him to pay for art derived from his own intellectual property.

The artist did not mind because a million-person Twitter account boosted their collection, and he did not mind since he releases things under Creative Commons, arguing there is no free lunch.

Cardano is not batteries-included, and like Bitcoin nobody curates it, so if you want something done you rally people, which is why he advocates CIP 1694 over anarchy.

Others advocate independently, with DCSpark pushing CIP 38 and Paima for layer 2 and the Foundation pushing other things, a coincidence of wants that is how decentralized ecosystems work.

Lists competing treasury uses like client diversification, wallet standards, quantum resistance, roll-ups, data availability, porting Catala or OpenLaw for a legal DSL, and a legal defense fund.

Says when people complain that IOHK will not save them, he has no authorization to take treasury money, since it is a decentralized protocol with a centralized ecosystem.

To win at NFTs Cardano must be the best at complex experiences, exploring Marlowe combined with ChatGPT for an AI-assisted DSL to make NFTs, and innovating on long-term pains like NFT IP and governance.

Argues NFTs should link to organic-demand markets like the metaverse and GameFi rather than the collection of the week, and that DCSpark's progressive stateful NFT idea gives a business-model advantage.

The point of a treasury and voting is the wisdom of the crowds over self-appointed custodians, citing a nameless project that raised 4 billion dollars whose founders walked away and were fired by their own ecosystem.

The Messari Q1 report shows Cardano's best quarter ever, though building is still hard, a KPI to fix through better incubation and acceleration funded by the treasury.

The MBO as an aggregation point, citing a Voltaire working group with the Foundation on wallet standards distinguishing certified from uncertified wallets.

Proposes bringing wallet makers like Nami, Typhon, Exodus, Flint, Lace, and Eternl into a working group to create a certification standard as a CIP, then using treasury bounties to incentivize getting certified.

Standards are only as good as participation, so a wallet standard with only two wallets is a failed standard, and the same applies to NFT standards like CIP 60 that need a working group.

IO tries to be a good actor with a big CNFT Con presence and a 30-by-30 booth, sponsoring the Cardano Summit and Web Summit, and supporting community projects like TxPipe and Blockfrost while being one voice among millions.

An increasingly hostile anti-IOG group limits consensus-building, pointing out that when Lace launched simple and growing as promised, they called it a compromised product and then played the victim.

Predicts those critics will likely become DReps under 1694 and vote against everything he proposes out of personal distaste, the good-with-the-bad reality of decentralization.

Calls the next six months the most pivotal in the project's history, the birth of a new government unlocking the 20 percent of block rewards and transaction fees sacrificed into the treasury rainy-day fund.

He wants to use Cardano for the developing world, per his 2015 TED Talk vision of one fair world financial system, building RealFi DeFi apps and onboarding millions rather than worrying about the protocol daily.

IOG could have an infrastructure subsidiary improving Hydra and Mithril, but his bigger passion is use cases, and the mission is not done until microfinance rates fall from 85 percent to 10 and everyone has economic identity and is their own bank.

Points to July's Capstone workshop in Edinburgh for 1694 and says Cardano will be more decentralized than ever by year-end, while trying to convince the independent Edinburgh Decentralization Index to measure Cardano.

Hopes Cardano ranks in the top three or five measured after Bitcoin, as a North Star to improve resilience and understand failure points.

Says that which you measure you can improve, and that Messari tracks utility and transaction volume so a government can set expectations against metrics.

Argues most Western democracies have false governance where you pick from pre-decided candidates, and that no US president ever presented objective metrics and a strategy with two-year accountability, because measuring would make them accountable.

Decentralization separates protocols whose architects actually cared from those who pretended, and that 1694 gives a working government and MBO but you must program the giant robot and tell it where to go.

Quotes Benjamin Franklin's a republic if you can keep it, saying 1694 and the MBO only work in proportion to a tireless group's participation, and closes with Paul Harvey's now you know the rest of the story.