Dear redditors (and whomever):
I found myself drafting several similar responses to quite a number of comments across several posts on the /r/nucypher subreddit. It's obvious that there's some hunger for individual perspective on this matter and about how and why we comment on reddit and twitter and such, so think of this as sort of a personal meta-multi-comment. I have screenshot'd a few comments, but my intention is to broadly respond to many of the comments on this sub, not only these specific examples.
I'm not writing on the NuCypher blog, as I normally might, because, as with a reddit comment, I want to be abundantly clear that these are my thoughts, unfiltered, unapproved of (or even reviewed in any way) by anyone else on the team. I alone take responsibility for them and expect that others on the NuCypher team will disagree with various pieces of what I'm about to say (just as we frequently do across social media and our Discord).
As a preliminary aside, if you are actually interested in a team perspective, attending our AMA on Monday (as I write this, that's the day after the day after tomorrow) is a must.
I hope that the first takeaway here is that my freedom to write such a thing off-the-cuff, without passing through a PR filter, is demonstrative of the independence we all have as a team. We develop in public and disagree often. We're a small, focused, cognitively and perceptually heterogenous team.
We do not march in lockstep, but instead collaborate through debate and resolution in full public view. So if there are issues or qualms with this deal (which of course is highly likely) you can count on a diversity of viewpoints rather than a single milquetoast corporate view.
In other words, if this thing goes sideways, you'll certainly hear about it, from me and others on the team.
So let me take some time to respond to commentary I've seen around our social and other media on this topic.
I don't know if I can say I have "insight", but for those of you who know me even in passing, I'm sure it's not difficult for you to imagine that I played the role of devil's advocate (if not full on doubter) throughout the discussions on this topic.
In fact, like many of you, I have had my doubts about every aspect of it:
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How to understand the economic relationship between KEEP and NU (given that nothing like this has ever been done, or is even possible in paleo-finance)
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The reward structure for operators who choose to sign for KEaNU and those who don't but still run an Ursula
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The effect on NU inflation (and whether it becomes rational for NU stakers to cut it off, and what that in turn does to the incentive structure of KEaNU)
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The name of the network (I generally don't like anything that appears as pandering, let alone to a celebrity)
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Whether to imagine subsequent threshold primitives on the "new" network
...and many more.
But like what I imagine will eventually be most people's position if they take the time to broadly consider the implications, I have come around to it. I think this deal is a wonderful opportunity for us (hereinafter, I'll use "us" and "we" to describe those of us with any sort of vested interest in the success of the network and token - buidlers, stakers, hodlers, etc.), and I'm just going to briefly tell you why.
The first thing I want to personally suggest is that we think of this as the natural and obvious sequel to WorkLock.
With the NuCypher WorkLock, we have each locked up an amount of ETH of our choosing, performed work on the NuCypher network, and reap rewards in the form of minted NU while also receiving our entire ETH stake back. No ETH changes hands.
The same is true of KEaNU as currently proposed: you'll stake NU to earn KEaNU and, at the end of your stake, receive all of your NU back, plus the KEaNU (or whatever we call it) that is newly minted along the way.
So in some ways this is a derivative WorkLock. However, it is substantially better than WorkLock v1 if, like me, you plan to operate a NU node regardless of the outcome of this proposal, because you'll still get the normal Ursula fees and rewards.
The ultimate effect of this is that NU stakers gain access to a revenue stream without losing access to the old one. If it fails spectacularly, NU stakers will be right where they started and no worse. On the other hand, if it succeeds, then NU stakers stand to be rewarded fairly handsomly for performing a task that the comparatively small KEEP fleet simply can't handle on its own.
The KEEP team have good ideas and they deserve to test them out on a reliable mainnet fleet. If tbtc2* (or whatever it ends up being called) is profitable (and come on, there's an obvious need), then NU stakers being first-in-line to mint KEaNU (or whatever it ends up being called) is a pretty stellar benefit.
The NuCypher and Keep teams can only suggest this idea; it's up to all of us to tweak, approve, or reject it.
The NuCyper and Keep teams are powerless to make this deal happen or stop it from happening. It's up to all of us as individuals to decide with a DAO vote. And like you, my DAO vote will be based on the merits, principles, and paramters of the proposal. If I don't like the final proposal, I will vote against it.
Every single parameter is negotiable - that's the decentralized governance nature of NuCypher. And "keep" in mind that our vested interests are similar to the rest of the community's: both the NuCypher company and each team member individually are hodlers and node operators too.
The names: "hard merge" and "KEANU"
These names are not written in stone. Heck, they're not even written on the blockchain.
The phrase "hard merge" isn't an existing concept, and I can't tell you I'm certain that it's a great descriptor. But consider that we did not want to use the phrase "hard spoon" (evoking, for example, the Cosmos Hard Spoon) because it's expressly not what we're doing.
What we're doing somewhat more closely resembles what Vitalik Buterin has called a "soft spoon" - two branches of a protocol running within the same blockchain. However, he described it as a compeitive divergence, when what we're doing is unified by the resulting asset.
And so really, what's interesting about this 'spoon', in network terms, is that...
there is no (hard/soft) spoon
No network state is copied. There is no minting bridge. There aren't even two logical branches of a protocol. It's really closer to a 'merge' in the version control sense: the complete history of states of both networks (ie, the txs in your wallets) persist, and a merge commit is added to reconcile the state under a single identifier.
Although I don't love the name KEANU, it was hard to argue against it once it occurred to me that it was a hillarious fit with the 'there is no spoon' explanation of this collaboration.
However, you'll notice that I always capitalize it "KEaNU": first of all, I find it clearer to see the "KE" and "NU". But on a deeper level, I like the idea of reading it in Latin as KE a NU, as if to say something like, "Keep by means of NuCypher".
See really, that's what's happening here: Keep needs to leverage the means (the nodes) at NuCypher's disposal, while NuCypher stakers have capacity to spare and, we think, will be happy to add this extra service and reap the rewards.
"But the price dropped ths week!"
I can tell you in no uncertain terms that the overarching motivation of the NuCypher team remains what it was when MacLane and Michael extended the offer to myself and Tux to become the first paid contributors: a recognition that the disservice of today's internet, to a wide swath of the world's population, especially in terms of access to empowering cryptographic primitives, is an enormous economic engine running at idle, awaiting the introduction of universally beneficial solutions.
If this vision still motivates you as it does me, then let me encourage you to find some deep breaths these days; don't let your mood be driven by the price of any one specific blockchain asset in any given two-week period.
About half my NU are locked in StakingEscrow for two years. I hope to provide PRE to many awesome projects in that time. So to the degree that this vested interest represents my motivation, I'm looking for long-term ways to make the network truly viable. This is the same reason that I've expressed frustration with some of the pump-bait posts that have gained attention here. And while I have your attention on that topic: I don't want to get into the habit of removing posts or comments from /r/nucypher. I love the liveliness and silliness we have going. But I also want to caution each of you that some of these pump-bait posts appear, to the best of my vision, to be propped up by sockpuppets. So be cautious.
But I want to make two other points about the apparent underlying economics regarding price movement:
1) The KEEP price has mostly gone up. Now, I don't know how you interpret this, but it suggests to me that the market views working with NuCypher as a very valuable and likely empowering thing.
2) It is also possible that some people have misinterpreted the proposal to mean that Keep stakers will be able to earn NU. This isn't the case. The only people who will come out of this with NU are people who started with NU.
3) More controversially: I simply don't view price decreases as a bad thing right now. Not for NU, and not for blockchain tokens generally. Let's remember that the price of the token doesn't only affect the value of our portfolios and market caps; it also determines the height of the barrier for newcomers to become node operators. In other words: lower prices make it easier for competent, enthusiastic operators to put together a large enough stake to run a node.
One of the truly pleasant aspects of working in a crypto-economic context is that, if invention and engineering are moving along at a satisfactory and productive pace, then there is some degree of inherent protection against the consequences of price motions in any direction.
Or to state my opinion even more bluntly: there is no possible bad price movement right now, given the quantity and quality of interesting things happening to and on our network. Consider: upward pressure gives us more plausible potential runway to #buidl new things. Downward pressure invites more people to our network. And stagnant prices help encourage everyone to stop yammering on about price action so we can focus more on engineering.
Phew. OK, this stuff might be difficult to hear, but I really think we need a reckoning here:
The matter of what the price is in any given two-week period does not even enter my radar as a motivation for decision-making about how to engineer this project. I hope that doesn't sound callous.
Maybe I'm just not a good capitalist. I don't know. But my motivations aren't reducible to a ticker price. I want a better and more humane internet. More reliable privacy solutions. The curiosity of what is possible with increasingly strange and novel cryptographic primitives and especially the cryptologies emerging from them. I think that there is real economy to be uncovered in these good deeds. And I work for a world in which this is the only rationale for pricing our token.
I simply do not care about whether things are a "good look for investors" - it's just not the way I think.
If you care to hear more about my personal motivations, I suggest this video of an interview I did while holding my guitar, perhaps listened to calmly with headphones and your favorite mild psychoactive.
We have spoken at dozens of conferences on every continent of the earth about the science, mathematics, engineering, usefulness, and crypto-economic implications of our work. Nearly every talk is either on our YouTube channel or on the channel of the conference in question. And even if you watch every minute of this many hour corpus, you know what you will never see? Shilling. Or braggadocious hot takes about the moonshot impact of any one decision.
And I can tell you: it is a joy to work on a team that forbears that stuff. I feel heartache for colleagues who work on teams that engage in rollercoaster politics regarding their token - it's something I'll never do. I need a calmer atmosphere that is welcoming of ideas that take a long time to think through and an even longer time to get right. I'm really proud of our team and especially MacLane - who is not only our CEO but has become a true friend - for the unyielding resistance in the face of temptation to speculate about lambos and moons.
But look: it's a two-way street. If somebody has genuine qualms about our crypto-economic assumptions, those are always welcome on any of our media. Poking holes in our contract parameters or our theories of human behavior is not the same thing as asking us when you can buy a McMansion with your Worklock stake.
If you're in this for the long haul like I am, the important factors to consider here are how NuCypher can deploy valuable threshold cryptographic primitives and how can we attract users to build on them. If we are putting our best and most sincere efforts into these fronts - and I seriously believe that we are - then short (or even medium) term price action becomes much less stressful.
To give you a sense of my day today: I had six calls on five different topics (and as some of you know, I don't typically do many calls), including:
- My intention to break ground with dnunez on a variant of batch granting / subscription-based Alice-Bob pairs (which is useful for several of the teams building on our network right now)
- The possible introduction of tendermint as a PBFT solution to create consensus around new, even stranger cryptographic rituals (you've perhaps seen me poking at this on our Discord)
- The prospects for using NuCypher for a novel type of human verification
It's an exciting time to be on this team and in this community. And I didn't even really work on KEaNU stuff today, which is arguably the most exciting medium-term prospect.
What I'm saying is: flow with the time that you're given, and don't let time, as expressed as the x-axis of a candle chart, tell you how to judge or understand the technological evolution of any specific project, let alone the emergence of an entirely new way of thinking about human connectivity.
When thinking about the role of time in the stresses of my life, I sometimes like to play the Song of Time (from The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time) on one of my tin whistles. Just now, as I was typing this, Fibonacci and I gave it a whirl (he's been interested in experimenting with my Laúd, which you see him playing, as a percussive tonal instrument).
I hope to see you all at our AMA on Monday. Come with questions! And if you don't mind, please help spread the word - here's a tweet about it.