Thesis & Dysmorphia Interview

Opens November 15th 2023 with Hoskinson interviewing Matej and Marina, founders of Thesis & Dysmorphia, publisher of the largest scientific survey of the Cardano space.

Matej explains he is a kinesiology and physiology PhD from Croatia who was in the Cardano NFT space as a hobby and wanted facts rather than the daily churn of opinions.

Matej's team started the project in August 2022 and published the results a month before the interview, researching the demographics and reasons people are in the space.

Matej's team chose the NFT space because they knew it best and how to build a community, a good starting point before broadening to DeFi and startups.

The design ran two things at once: Thesis the research paper and Dysmorphia the NFT project used as its own case study, giving them all the data from the beginning.

Hoskinson notes four sentiment categories, holders, general public, founders, and moderators, calling moderators a surprisingly essential ingredient of community building.

Is surprised the study covered participants' mental health on page 33, a topic he feels acutely as a recipient of Twitter criticism.

Matej says founder mental-health struggles became a meme in the NFT community, so they asked every role about the stress founders endure.

Other hot topics: how many rug pulls people experienced, roughly two to ten, and how many wallets and alt accounts they use.

The methodology of an OG group and a whitelist group across 47 NFT projects, differing on whether they received free drops.

The study proved the OG group getting a free NFT participated more than the whitelist group who still had to pay to mint.

The surprising public third group grew over time, showing early supporters are not who stay, since new supporters join because they value the work rather than a promise.

The founders stayed undoxed with pseudo red flags to test how anonymity affected trust over the year.

Found participants cared less about the founders being undoxed over time, judging what they did over who they were.

Yet the general-public survey had half say doxed founders are very important, a gap between what people say and what they do.

Hoskinson points out the most popular cryptocurrency still has an undoxed founder, so actions speak louder than words.

Matej gives the headline finding that people are primarily here for money, then tech, then life experience and community, while founders cited life experience first.

Is surprised 50 percent still cited money even in the July 2023 bear market, and wants to rerun the survey in a bull market to compare.

Hoskinson notes people often come for the money but stay for the philosophy or the community, a recurring theme across the 47 projects.

Matej reflects the community became a second home blending online and real life, with plans forming to meet members in person.

The page-64 limitations: an anonymous longitudinal design over 10 months could not track the same individual across 15 time points, and they want a wider audience than 450 people.

Hoskinson calls it a self-improving flywheel and suggests a Catalyst proposal, offering cryptographic tools like AnonCreds and verified NFTs to prove set membership and uniqueness without doxing.

Ties those tools to CIP 1694's problem of how a DRep polls its delegators with verification but without doxing who voted.

The two-person team plans to apply for Catalyst Fund 11 to continue, including surveying university students globally about Cardano awareness.

Shows the 82-page PDF published as an NFT with its hash, linked to a companion Forkit platform that visualizes the survey data interactively.

Hoskinson relates it to his friend Stephen Wolfram's design goal for Mathematica of making everything computable and interactive, and calls this the first rigorous NFT research of its kind in the industry.

Invites them to Intersect, noting the study gave him his first Cardano approval rating at 85 percent while the Cardano Foundation scored about 18 percent among the NFT sample.

The researchers plan small one- or two-question sentiment checks on Forkit so any entity can gauge community feeling to prioritize roadmap decisions.

The name: Thesis from his PhD alt account, and Dysmorphia from Marina studying Snapchat dysmorphia, the disorder of heavily editing one's own image.

The collection imagines people becoming their NFT traits as profile pictures replace real faces across the space.

Hoskinson shares the psychological impact of being called fat and of unflattering MidJourney deepfakes of him circulating in the media.

Recalls liking the Cardano Villages NFTs until Josh Miller told him they rugged, and says he collects small scale models like his grandfather's train dioramas.

Imagines a metaverse where you spend more time as your NFT avatar than your real face, like how Snapchat filters become who you are.

Pivots to open science, saying he hates closed journals and the peer-review process even after nearly 200 papers, and that computer science has it easier than other fields.

Blockchain is the best ground to change scientific publishing by making research accessible and properly crediting authors, and Matej had his paper peer-reviewed by a Cardano whale with a scientific background.

10 to 12 papers propose journal systems via smart contracts that give real credit, versus journals hiding science behind subscriptions for a century.

Praises them as pioneers who did not ask permission but built it, calling crypto the Field of Dreams where you solve frustrations instead of complaining.

Closes noting AdaTom and Nudes minted the first Cardano NFT, a science paper on smoking marijuana, and vows to publish IO's research papers as NFTs on Cardano with an open standard via Aggelos.