Web 3, nature conservacy, crypto-somthing, blockchain? So this organization appears to be buying land to then put in the hands of stewardship organizations. One of the places being bought under this scheme is Traditional Dream Factory.
Their plans and ideas seem sound, I just don’t understand the crypto part and tokens and what these are supposed to accomplish as opposed to something like traditional shares or just write everything down on a piece of paper?
Is crypto ultimately just an ultra complex way of record keeping here?
I would really appreciate your opinions. In terms of activities and spaces, a lot of the TDF setup is very close to what we would like to build, so I try to study and understand different ways people organize such projects.
TL;DR: your assessment is correct. It’s just a complicated (and energy intensive!) way of keeping track of things.
They’ve got this little commune thing going on and they want a way to keep track of people’s contributions to community. Because they’re blockchain nerds, they reached for their favourite tool and gave it a hippie name: “carrot”.
The idea is that every time you do something that’s good for community, you get a carrot, and then you can later use those carrots to get stuff. Basically they invented a currency that’s only valid in their community, and rather than just issuing coins, they’re doing everything digitally.
Now a brief bit about the technology
This digital system uses something called the “blockchain”, which is just a MASSIVE file living on hundreds (thousands?) of computers around the world. This file is like a bank ledger: a record of things that happened. Think of it like a text file:
Now imagine that it’s hundreds of millions of lines long, and every time anyone in the world gives anyone money, that list gets a little bit longer.
“But how do you make sure that people don’t start tinkering with the ledger?” you might say? "I could say “Alex gives me €1000000”. Well the files are kept in sync by this protocol where all participating computers do complex math to prove that they haven’t edited anything. Everyone else does the same math, and so everyone’s results should be the same. If your math is different, you’re ignored. This is why transactions can take as much as a few hours or even days to go through and gobble a shittone of electricity. Awesome.
This is basically where Bitcoin came from.
After that was a thing, a bunch of other nerds got together and built Ethereum (same tech, different computers doing the work, so it’s a different ledger), which uses the same technology. Ethereum however introduced this thing called “smart contracts” though, which are tiny programs that are baked into the chain (ie. they codified into this Great Big File That Everyone Has so they can’t be changed). Smart contracts are simple instructions:
That
1234567890relates to something in the real world, most famously a URL, which is where you get those NFTs that everyone was crazy about for a few months. Bob can give Sarah $1,000,000 and this would enshrine that Sarah ownshttps://somwhere.ca/picture-of-cat.jpgand then she can go around and say “I ‘own’ this picture”. Then one day that website takes the picture down and Sarah realises that she paid a million dollars for a record in a text file.Each transaction on a blockchain (Ethereum, Bitcoin, whatever) costs money, which you pay in that chain’s currency, and that’s where this all starts to make sense. If I can get you to buy my “magic internet money”, then I’m selling you that currency for actual money.
So, back to your question about this commune project.
Putting on my “trust the person first, but only once” hat, it might not be a scam. The website certainly makes it look like they want to build a Solarpunk enclave. Maybe they’ve opted for a convoluted financial system 'cause they’ve been drinking the same kool-aid as all those crypto-bros out there trying to sell me their latest fake internet money. Maybe this made sense to them rather than issuing metal coins or even just maintaining a PostgreSQL database publicly. Either way, it’s a dumb idea and totally unnecessary. If you do decide to participate, watch for the moment they try to force you to buy their tokens with real money.
Also, you probably haven’t seen the definitive take-down of blockchain technology yet. It’s long but solidly the best piece of criticism of the tech I’ve seen.
Full disclosure: I bought into Bitcoin way back when it was cheap 'cause I was fascinated by the techology. Then I learnt how it actually worked, and how it absolutely cannot scale to be anything useful, so I just held onto the coins I had. I cashed out to the tune of about €40k. I absolutely would not recommend “investing” this this stuff. The domain is ripe with scammers and the project has no legs. It’s long past the point of experimentation and is now at the stage of trying to drag more suckers in. Don’t be that sucker.
I appreciate you taking the time to write this up.
I used to have some Bitcoin before I understood how it really worked. Got out because all the scammers before I understood how it really worked. Now as I get involved in community projects, and crypto stuff creeps up everywhere, I feel like I have to understand what’s going on in the background (the environmental issues, the pointlessness of it) to help others not fall for it.