The Bitcoin Podcast #284-Julien Genestoux- Unlock Protocol
In this episode, Dee and Dr. Corey Petty cover the concept of micro-communities and how blockchain can help develop a micro-economy to incentives these micro-communities. Then they end the round table discussion with their bi-monthly debate on Bitcoin scaling and what will that scaling even look like for Bitcoin. The interview is with Julien Genestoux of Unlock Protocol, a new crypto-company seeking to address the economic problems of the publishing world with blockchain technology.
Links:
Julien Genestoux
The Best Hip Hop Show Around
So, what;s a micro-community?
Ha, the discuss integration to the website does work! A microcommunity (my working definition) is a small group of people that are brought together by a unified idea or behavior.
For example, most sub-reddits are micro-communities, they have their own language, inside jokes and memes, what they consider valuable contributions to the community (and the opposite), etc. I’m quite curious what literature exists about this, as I haven’t done digging but only rely on my personal thoughts on the matter.
That sounds about like what I was thinking as well. It’s not really new, except that crypto allows a sound (enough) money to be transferable in and out of the micro communities. There is a lot of lit on group norms and group behaviors, but I am not familiar with any surrounding small group/community money other than those for underdeveloped or impoverished communities.
My thinking is that crypto is really an innovation in community money for these microcommunities. In essence, exchanges are on and off ramps for people to be able to create their own unique groups with money that is persistent.
How small of a community can support a microcommunity currency? How much interoperability can exist? What proportion of the use needs to be actual money rather than speculative value? These are some questions that I’m interested in seeing emerge. Essentially, giving power of real money to some of these token projects.
This makes me think of an interesting question. How do you get people to use money? I’m having flashes of Starbucks gift cards and mcdonalds monopoly pieces and in-game currencies. Most of those are really about building a user base first, and then introducing them to a loyalty or utility-based secondary money to fuel and give benefit to their existing interest.
Short version: On first thought, digital money isn’t the killer app that will bring widespread adoption to digital money. Something else might, and digital money could be a way to fuel that adoption in smaller micro-communities.
Just brainstorming a bit here.