# Competing With Non-Crypto Products Without Losing Crypto's Philosophies by Taylor Monahan (Devcon5)

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2020-10-09
- Duration: 19:49
- Topics: blockchain, smart contracts, distributed ledger, ethereum
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-kbTZkQERSaQ
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbTZkQERSaQ

## Description

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https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/5/competing-with-non-crypto-products-without-losing-cryptos-philosophies

Taylor Monahan discusses competing with non-crypto products and keeping crypto's philosophies in place. 

Speaker(s): Taylor Monahan
Skill level: Beginner
Track: UX & Design
Keywords: philosophy, ethics, general

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Learn more about devcon: https://www.devcon.org/
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Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. 
Devcon 5 was held in Osaka, Japan on Oct 8 - 11, 2019.
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## Transcript

hey everyone how are we doing today I know my team was out partying all night but it looks like you guys are all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed so let's get started this is gonna be a dark talk this is gonna get really really real I don't want to be clear like I think that this is a conversation that we need to have this is not me like burnt out on crypto or hating crypto like I love this space but I think that sometimes we're just a little bit too keen on patting each other on the back so we're gonna do something a little bit differently so I'm gonna go through these slides really quickly but basically in the beginning blockchains sort of emerged as the next logical step from the internet and the internet allowed people to transfer data transfer information and the block chains then are gonna enable people to transfer value and when we talk about value we talk about assets we talk about property we talk about money we talk about all these things that are tangible and intangible and Marc Andreessen recently had a podcast that was really great and he said that one of the original sins of the web like back in 1993 was that payments weren't incorporated into the browser and because of this so many people ended up relying on advertising which then led to you know all the data collection all the invasions of our privacy everything just being misaligned and you know the general state that were in today but the reality is that blockchains and the internet and any sort of innovations don't solve the human or the social problems that we have it doesn't create new humans it's just new technology and it's what we do with that technology that matters so technology can aid us but the reality is that people in general are never satisfied they're generally pretty selfish they're totally willing to impoverish others and it really manifests itself in greed and vanity and all this other stuff and we see this all the time in the space with I CEOs with the scams with the Fisher's with all of these terrible terrible things and you know when we talk about history we talk about the early internet days and then we look how crypto is evolving it's not going to be the same history never repeats itself but it does rhyme and so we can take lessons that we learned from the internet and we can hopefully maybe not make the same mistakes as we're building out this ecosystem so there's a lot of lot of really really big similarities between early internet and like early blockchains so small players are thriving there's not really a super commercially viable situation going on it's not really super organized and there's this deep-seated belief that we should decentralize and she's distribute that power and that we should share the knowledge but as we have seen the web actually enables more abuse of power and more surveillance so while we wanted to decentralize well we wanted to you know give the information and give the data and give the power to all of the people the reality is is that the web resulted in both the government and private corporations like Google and Facebook in beating our privacy constantly and so we should ask ourselves why won't crypto turn out this way the reality is is that when we look at block chains is a public ledger and anyone can obtain basically your entire financial history and then when you combine that with all the information that cops are going to have you know we're talking about healthcare dobbs we're talking about social depths we're talking about governance ops you have a huge data set just willing and ready to be mined and we want to make sure that nobody nobody is going to profit and benefit from basically [ __ ] us right we don't want that so why the heck does this even matter well because when I got into space I was excited to build something new I was excited to be part of like a revolution right I think everyone has their blockchain rabbit-hole moment and it's new and it's exciting and there's all this potential but there's also the real possibility that we're building the exact same system that we currently have and there's also the possibility that that system is going to be worse than the system that we currently have blockchain technology in itself is actually really interesting from a technical perspective but when we talk about humans we talk about people we talk about social issues blockchain is just a tool that we can use and it's how we use that tool that will determine what comes of it and if we aren't careful and this is by the way like the path that we are currently on we're gonna see more centralization we're going to see more intermediaries we're gonna see more information asymmetry we're gonna see more risk and whenever you have those things when you're ever you have a centralization of power and a centralization of risk you're gonna end up basically dead or in a really really really really [ __ ] situation and back to like how I started this talk right like if we're not honest with ourselves and what we're building and what we're trying to achieve and how we're going about achieving that we don't have accountability we don't have accountability to each other we don't have accountability to ourselves and we don't want to sit around and pat ourselves on the back because we overcame some design hurdle or some regulatory hurdle you know especially when overcoming those hurdles was done basically by centralizing things right like making sacrifices making compromises because as we all know death by a thousand cuts is still death so it doesn't matter if we got our heads just chopped off right away or over time it just degrades and we make compromises and we make sacrifices the end result is going to be the same and if we are building this beautiful nicely painted Lego castle but it's made of [ __ ] eventually that Lego castle is going to erode and the [ __ ] is going to be the foundation for the world that we and our children and our grandchildren live with and we're gonna have to live with ourselves knowing that we helped create that future so what exactly is the angle what are we trying to achieve why are we here I can tell you this the centralization is not an end goal it's not a value proposition it's just the centralization right it's a feature it's a tool it's a means to the end but it's not the end goal just because you made something decentralize doesn't make it valuable we want to centralization because it can lead to this distribution of power and it can lead to a single entity not having power and not having the power to amuse us if I think about what I want this piece to achieve and what I want sort of like the the end goal to be what success looks like this is what I came up with as a very general sort of globally applied goal it's a big goal but I think that everyone can take this and sort of narrow it down to their own product or what they're building or what they're doing or even just their personal day to day lives I want to help create a system where power naturally occurs to individuals rather than central entities and the reason for this is that if we're able to succeed at this then we can just naturally have power going to individuals we can distribute that power more equally we can give the people power to consent we can give people more choice we can start aligning incentives and by the way this doesn't mean that this will happen right it just means that it's more like to happen like we're going down the right path at that point and when we talk about success and winning and what we're trying to achieve we have to also keep in mind night you are what you measure and what I mean by that is that if you are hyper focused on some metric you were you will become that metric and you will succeed at increasing decreasing whatever that metric is and a perfect example of this is reducing crime so we have all these things and all these metrics on crime but it's very hard to tell and a lot of research shows that when people are hyper focused on quotas and reporting crime and monitoring the metrics and stuff basically less crime gets reported but there's not less crime right those are two separate things and so when we're talking about the blockchain we're talking about crypto we're talking about our products these are the things that we're measuring right now right we're measuring market cap worth measuring price we're talking about daily active users we're talking about transactions for a second we're saying that my coin beats your coin right these are the things that were hyper focused on but if you think about it these aren't measuring the success because remember success is a system where power naturally occurs to the individual rather than in these central entities and nothing on this list measures that success so we need to figure out a new way to measure what we're doing and measure whether we're being successful and evolve from there my biggest fear is that if we're to focus on this money aspect and more people more active users all of this stuff we're gonna end up hyper focus on competing with people like PayPal the bank's venmo etc and we're gonna basically sacrifice and make compromises with decentralisation so that we can improve the design we can improve the usability we can compete with them on that front but then are you really competing with PayPal are you really providing a user choice are you really providing these are a new system right because for me PayPal verse venmo isn't really giving the user a choice though the same thing with a different name the blockchain is supposed to be more than that I really don't want to see this ecosystem go down a path where we end up reproducing a system that we so vehemently attack so just a hammer this point home there's not like usability design availability to the middle class availability of the Western world right these are not issues like I can use PayPal I have a bank right those aren't problems and if you're trying to solve a problem then you should probably go over to the other column and look at things like where the asymmetry power lays where the e symmetry of information lays where's the lack of access is it in San Francisco is it in Silicon Valley I don't think so okay where's the lack of insight where's the lack of consent where's the lack of choice solve those problems because if you're only going to compete with usability and design you're basically going to be an existing product in the existing system competing with an existing product in the existing system not in the new system that we're trying to build so to be a little bit more optimistic well how do we do that right we're we're do we need to go how do we get from where we are today to where we are tomorrow and it's a quite simple when you put it like this obviously it's much harder to execute successfully but basically you want to find a problem you want to solve that problem then get your solution in the hands of people and then you change the world and it's really not easy okay and getting like one of the biggest things right now right is getting users getting people getting people that aren't in this space to use our products to understand our products to understand this world etc and so things that make adoption easier okay use cases duh solving really common problems making things easy to access making it a fun experience that people can enjoy and people can experiment with and especially if they can experiment with little to no risk and then just general awareness right so how do we get our message and our philosophies and our values out to the bigger broader world and prove to them that this stuff is actually worthwhile and at the end of the day there's no technology that is gonna solve these problems right they'll help solve the problems there'll be the tools that we use but people like me like you like anyone who watches this ever you guys have the ability to solve these problems because at the end of the day the problems are trying to solve our people problems there's social problems or human problems the technology is just we just have to evolve it and we just have to use it with everything that we know and we love to actually solve the human problems and make the world a better place and some of the most important things when we think about adoption yeah so we want things to be easy to use yes we want things to be fancy yes we want things you just want all the users right we want the graph that goes like hockey stick up into the frickin atmosphere but how do we do that and one of the most interesting things about sort of social change and how people and culture like evolves over time is that collaboration education and like shared vision shared experience are all really really common so when people work together when they're personally invested in something when they understand the vision when they understand the philosophy when they understand the underlying stuff they therefore are really empowered to help out and join the cause and then over time the entire sort of system the entire society slowly changes and this is not an exhaustive list but one of the things that we've seen historically is things like narratives and storytelling and rituals are like so common right this is how information got passed along in the dark ages and this is how information still gets passed along today so we should be focused on things like that we should be focused on our communication we should be focused on creating shared experiences with people that are maybe not a hundred percent like us and we should share our optimism and we should share a belief and we should share examples of why this is useful and we should get people excited in the same way that we're excited I don't want anyone to ever underestimate the value of sharing our values because a lot of times we want to abstract things away right we want to not let people know how the sauce is just made but especially in the early days and as we're building it's very powerful to share our philosophies to share our vision to share our passion because those people can also help us build right it's not us first them it's like us and then there are also us and that's where the power really lies and lastly honesty and open discourse are probably some of the most powerful tools that we have and some of the most powerful things that we can do at conferences like this where us the current US situation is together and in person it allows us to be accountable it allows us to be honest with ourselves which then in turn allows us to be honest with each other and in turn makes our products a lot a lot better alright okay two minutes so that was my talk but we have some freaking so super exciting news Ambo our mobile application we just launched a huge update to iOS Android is like literally coming out the door this week we have new tokens we have new Fiat on ramps we have new designs everything is better the liquidity is like through the roof now it's amazing the design like really they did a just a great job I'm super super excited they've been working so hard and then my crypto we have like a whole new freaking thing okay so if you guys know my crypto it's a wallet interface thing but typically when you arrive at our site you like doing action like you want to send you unlock you send and then you go away and that's it right so we're gonna change that up a little bit and we're gonna give you a dashboard and the dashboards gonna have a breakdown of all of your stuff so you have all your tokens across all of your accounts and these accounts are any account on an EVM blockchain thing so if you're young Courtley Rob's ten if you're in classic I don't know if he needs it coin is still a thing but it's there if it is and you can check it out right now I paid it on that crypto at home it's a little rough around the edges but we are like literally pushing commits every single day and we're super super excited and then we also redid this and assets flow and it's freaking amazing because it just works and you can just send from any account and any asset from any account directly from the interface and a vineyard designer is like literally amazing and click the whole thing on its head and it just works it makes sense and I love it and our team has literally been at this conference pushing commits and I'm pretty sure they're pushing that's right now to get this ready for you so please go to beta know my crypto comm use it love it report bugs to us every like literally just tell us anything we want to make this amazing we want to make this better and we want to make it better for you all and how you use our product and thank you and I love you and I did not even go over time [Applause] you