TORTOISES CROSSING THE DESERT
Dear Smeshers,
I am writing to you on a very special occasion. Our project Spacemesh has achieved a YUGE milestone — we have achieved in less than 8 months what was our desired goal after 12 months: to have over 1,000,000 nodes on the network, and over 1Eib committed. This is obviously only a small first step, and the larger tests of what we may achieve together as a community are still ahead.
Many of you have expressed concerns about our organic growth strategy. Why no marketing, listing on larger exchanges, etc? Don’t you want the world to know? Should we expect Team Spacemesh to remain small and idealistic? Don’t you understand the significance of network effects for super linear growth?
I’d like to use this festive event to provide an account of the logic guiding our decision-making process, and explain, for instance, our strange, naive conviction upon heading quietly into the desert some 6 years ago in a sincere search for a novel equilibrium. From the start, we focused our attention and efforts specifically on making sure we hold our public responsibility properly. On mastering the practice of keeping each other in check and true to our goal. Essentially: “doing the right things and leaving the consequences to code”.
We took this plunge with the conviction that, should we find our way over to the other side of the ‘desert’, everything would work out.
I know every instinct within you resists, living as we do in a man-eat-man world where the winner is supposed to take all, but where the “winner” is rarely if ever “the best”. But we here at Spacemesh are certain that there is a brave new game for humans to play, just around the corner. In fact, in some ways it has already begun. The existence of open source projects like ours is the living proof.
Those who seek to play together on behalf of “Team human have already begun to build a web of trust, a coalition of super agents committed only to finding higher form of equilibrium, from greater good perspective over any narrow interest. The management of the future as opposed to stumbling-down has already begun. And the very basics here must be, whatever rigorously increasing fitness, from greater good standpoint, as evolution has it, unlikely to be kept out, simply to serve incumbents narrow interest.
And so I’d seek to now convey to you today, why we continue to believe in taking the most infinite turn in every corner, being responsible before the future and modest with our abilities to command nature to our desires. And believe in the new game, of speculating on the dimension evolution would select for next, and stay out of consequences game (metaphorically, let the water go down and find-out if new lower point of equilibrium was actually discovered).
And if you don’t believe me: watch Spacemesh. Inspired by the possibilities for such a future, Spacemesh embarked on a mission to be the fairest and most decentralized cryptocurrency, “The People’s Coin”, that can be trusted and used by most everyday people worldwide. We haven’t reached that lofty goal just yet, but our recent milestone is an important step towards it. Towards a trustless, permissionless, freely collaborating future.
“Trustless” does not mean that we can get along without trust. On the contrary, trustless means “trust but verify” — the way to reduce the possibility for abuse so we can relearn how to trust each other. Because trusting each other is the only way that we can accommodate collective needs over personal advancement.
But trust is a fragile thing, especially in the crypto space. To live up to the trust of our community, and our trust in ourselves, we need to deliver on our technological aspirations, without making compromises on our core values in seeking “The People’s Coin”.
So in the new game we invite you all to play, we believe that rushing ahead for the sake of short-term advantages will ultimately make everything crumble.
Now, 8 months into this new phase of our collective journey, we believe that a higher standard of decentralization is very real and attainable. We could not have gotten here if not for our commitment to our core principles, and just as importantly, if not for the community which stuck with us through the desert.
Please see below for a rough timeline of how we expect the next 4 months to unfold, taking us from a jog to a run.
Thank you for taking this journey with us. We still have a long way to go together, but we know it will be worth it.
