Welcome back, Pilgrim! Here’s what’s happened in town since you’ve been away…
Around Web3
The Real Potential of NFTs: “Prof G” Scott Galloway is not known for being bullish on web3, so this open and honest explainer is that much more interesting 🤯
Christians and the Metaverse: Awesome interview with a member of MissionDAO articulating his balanced viewpoint and vision for Gospel outreach in the metaverse. 🕶
Meta and the Metaverse: The Corporation Formerly Known as Facebook released their plans for a metaverse, including an eyewatering 47.5% “take rate” from digital sales. There was…some response. The Defiant lays out the issues and brings a balanced analysis. 🤑
Financial Protestants: Well this one should be interesting to all of us. A well articulated comparison of the emergence of Bitcoin and blockchain to the printing press’ effect on the Protestant Reformation. ⛪️
Semper Reformanda Twitter List: A hand-curated list of believers in web3. If you discover anybody we don’t know of, let us know! 📜
Project Spotlight | Web3 Simplified
Last time, the landmark we added to our map of Christians in web3 was the artisan’s cottage where Patrick Bezalel and his team are busily working away on the Mehtaverse. This issue, we will pencil in a growing library filled with useful texts for explorers in search of knowledge. Enter SeanSpecie.eth’s growing resource, Web3 Simplified. The decentralized web is filled with new technical terminology, slang and cultural references that can be intimidating for a seasoned operator, and discouraging for new entrants. Web3 Simplified provides exactly what the name implies: a dictionary and FAQ filled with no-nonsense, jargon-free definitions for some of the common terms and concepts you’ll need to know as you explore this space.
Web3 Simplified also offers an inexpensive paid course on NFTs with practical advice on how to get set up as well as dangers to avoid. The library of resources continues to grow, including a Youtube channel with short explainers. As the space explodes and the helpful guides available here grow alongside, you’ll want to revisit Web3 Simplified often to build your knowledge and stay on top of fast-moving trends. So many “resources” like this end up being just transparent shills or not reliable enough to be a one-stop shop, but the foundation that SeanSpecie has built here think he has something special here, a genuine community resource that we can all reference and point friends towards for years to come.
DAOs Are Our Heritage
(Reprinted from the Scholar’s Edition)
Community Contributor | JohannesTalbotus
The ability to build a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, allows a community of believers to leverage time-tested techniques to organize people, invest resources, and create value within Christ’s Kingdom. As we see old institutions and systems of the world failing and the trust that girds them eroding, we should work with whatever tools and technologies we can muster to fill the ensuing void with new systems that glorify Him.
What is a DAO?
DAOs have been touted as the “next big thing” phenomena in the world of crypto and Web3. The Ethereum Foundation provides an official definition of a DAO as “an internet native business collectively owned and managed by its members.” For a somewhat more practical definition, DAOs are a community Discord server with a shared wallet. Web3 influencers and experts are calling 2022 “the year of the DAO” and implying that the early adopters in this space will see growth and returns similar to NFTs and dog tokens of 2021. But there is one problem – it is increasingly difficult to define how DAOs can be so influential or what creators can do to unlock their potential.
That is not a roadblock for the Web3 crowd. After years of watching new currencies return astronomical profits for investors and watching jpegs sell for millions of dollars, this community is comfortable with the notion of saying “I don’t know how, but this is going to be big!” For each of these technologies our community should seek to build rather than purely speculate, and we should strive to grasp the “how” of DAOs. A huge chunk of this is to dig into the actual technical aspects of each DAO under investigation. But another part - one that can give us a broad picture view and help those not as programming-centric - is to mine for historical analogues. What if we could create a mental model to judge the structure and use case of individual DAOs, or even grasp the implications of DAOs in general? How might we go about building a successful and functional DAO ourselves? I propose that these insights could be uncovered by studying certain examples in history. Specifically, I propose we study… DAOs.
Where have we seen DAOs before?
Building an organization which is decentralized and autonomous is technology-agnostic, and we have seen such organizations in the past operating under many different names and in many different contexts throughout history. I believe the creators of modern “Web3 DAOs” can be far more successful (or at least get a jump start) if they learn the lessons offered by the proto-DAOs of the past. To borrow a framework from Chris Dixon and Balaji Srinivasan, innovation tends to follow cycles of bundling and unbundling, constructing and deconstructing (separate from the Marxist tendency towards destroying), centralizing and decentralizing. These historical cycles should not be viewed as a pendulum swinging from centralized authority to decentralized autonomy. Instead history is better approached as a kaleidoscope fractally reorganizing society and cultures as tribes settle into cities inhabited by specialized guilds, cities become nations strengthened by trade between unique industries, and nations form empires ruling through local and semi-autonomous governors and generals. This flow is both continuous yet drastically unique from one moment to the next.
Through this motion of bundling and unbundling, there have been many times when people have organized themselves within a framework of decentralization (governance distributed across many entities) and autonomy (the condition of self-governance) - i.e. DAOs. Nothing about the philosophies or incentives motivating a “decentralized autonomous organization” is inherently tied to the crypto space or Web3-native technologies. Therefore we can look to pre-Web3 DAOs to inspire and inform the structure and governance of DAOs today. What Web3 technologies and the cryptocosm do enable are new tools to optimize the impact of DAOs into the future, if only we can apply those tools correctly.
How might we learn from DAOs of the past?
I want to explore various proto-DAOs through history, glean insights from past cases, determine what has worked, decipher what has caused organizational failure and collapse, and distill our findings into actionable insights for believers looking to build DAOs today. Each of these case studies will be viewed as a potential model so that we may adopt and adapt the lessons of history to build DAOs in the Web3 world of today.
What can we learn about coordinating business ventures to positively impact a community from 20th century Chambers of Commerce? How did the fraternal organizations of the 19th century build and maintain a sense of camaraderie across the country and around the world? What caused the Hanseatic League to grow to dominate Baltic trade while remaining unaligned to any kingdom, and why did they eventually lose the trade war to the Dutch Republic? How did nomadic tribal groups form armies to raid and trade with their more settled imperial neighbors? Studying these examples can boost us on to the “shoulders of giants” as we move to build organizations within the crypto space.
For each case study, I want to highlight a counter example which helps to illustrate the model and build upon it. Importantly, we should not reduce this study to “autonomous good guy vs. authoritarian bad guy.” Sometimes centralization serves a key purpose of aligning actors to achieve a goal - there is a reason why militaries are not organized as democracies. For these examples which we explore in opposition to historical DAOs, I will use the framework of “the State” proposed by David Graeber and David Wengrow in “The Dawn of Everything,” specifically as an organized body which encapsulates administration (equating that with centralization), territorial control (authoritarianism which reduces autonomy for external actors), and coercion (authoritarianism which reduces autonomy for internal actors).
Through this journey of exploration, I hope to uncover truths and experiences from DAOs ancient and modern and to provide a foundation of knowledge (and even inspiration) for anyone with the tools and talents who feels called to create in the future.