The Origin of Matataki’s Name
As mentioned above, after adding many features such as “fan tokens” and “stores”, it is no longer appropriate to use the name of “smart signature”. As a result, we rebranded the product. Instant Matataki is the Japanese pronunciation of 瞬き, which literally means wink. This name comes from Tmono. It is a pun that represents the Andromeda Shun in Saint Seiya, it also represents those moments of inspiration that are fleeting, implying the tacit cooperation between people with consensus.
Ideas come and go quickly, sometimes they stop and stay — Feng Yun’s Blog
About DeFi and Dapp
Previously there have been many articles bad-mouthing Dapp, and being optimistic about DeFi. Indeed, DeFi is the only segment that has achieved rapid growth in the past cycle, but on hindsight, shouldn’t DeFi be a subset of Dapp?
Therefore, the Dapp mentioned above is mainly in the field of blockchain games.
I will talk about my own views of DeFi here. Literally speaking, our industry was built on the basis of DeFi since the beginning of its birth. Be it payment, monetization or even the lightning network, all of them are literally DeFi.
In fact, there is no consensus on the definition of the term in a narrow sense. Last month, on a Panel during DeFi.WTF in Osaka, every Panelist defined DeFi differently. Here, I prefer to use TinaZ’s point of view, which regards DeFi as a meme created by our industry practitioners. In Dovey’s words, “DeFi is the concept of self-rescue on Ethereum after the Dapp concept went bleak on Ethereum.”
Faith Towards the Token Economy
To talk about the token economy, we should first understand what token is. I have been thinking about it since I participated in the token economic design competition held by Fenbushi Capital last year. I was only enlightened when Tony used the “wave-particle duality” of light in the physics world to describe the “currency securities duality” of the token in the Stargazers group chat. This view has since been further developed here: Currency Revolution: Combining Commodities, Securities, and Currency in One: “Super Carrier” Binance Cryptocurrency (BNB).
I still have the idea of “progressivism” in my heart, from the time I came across Bitcoin till date, I never thought that there would only be one currency in future, or a world dominated by a few currencies. I believe that in the future, it will be a world in which all kinds of flowers bloom, all schools of thought contend, and all kinds of ideas coexist. There will be thousands of varying types of tokens with different functions.
At present, mainstream blockchain + social products, without exception, will issue their own platform currency to capture the value generated by the creative content of the platform users (Steemit, Matters, Voice, Lichang, Bihu). Will this value capture form a new level of exploitation? Are they just transferring exploitation from the platform itself to the early investors of the platform currency? Vitalik pointed out these problems in his blog article “On Collusion” in April this year.
These kinds of experiments, attempting to reward quality content creation in a way that goes beyond the known limitations of donations/microtipping, are very valuable; under-compensation of user-generated internet content is a very significant problem in society in general (see “liberal radicalism” and “data as labor”), and it’s heartening to see crypto communities attempting to use the power of mechanism design to make inroads on solving it. But unfortunately, these systems are also vulnerable to attack.
— Vitalik Buterin, On Collusion
The greatest difference in Matataki’s design is the token subject being transferred from the platform to the users.
Throughout the history of human society, it has always been the elite minority who master and define the economy and culture. They are citizens of Athens or the Chinese gentry class. The freedom of speech has always been a luxury. With the hope of the imperial examination system, the scholar-bureaucrats gradually disintegrated, but the culture itself, even the language and the writing itself have not been popularized. Among the 14 major events listed in the investigation report of the Hunan peasant movement, there is a section devoted to culture.
In China, only the landowners were assumed to be educated, and the peasants were not. However, the landlord’s culture was in fact determined by the peasants.
— Hunan Peasant Movements Inspection Report
This cultural monopoly began to shake a little after the invention of printing. It was not until the invention of the Internet 30 years ago that it was completely changed. There was a long period between the invention of printing to the emergence of journalism. Further, when the Internet first came into being, it was the privilege of a few institutions and hackers to be able to set up a home page independently. This situation did not get popular until the concept of Web 2.0 was born. It started off with people being allowed to write articles on blogs. Later, Twitter allowed you to say a few sentences. People call this kind of content UGC (user-generated content).
UGC has not only changed the form of the Internet but also changed the form of human society. The freedom of speech has been transferred from the elite to the public, and the social form of many countries has also changed as a result.
Although there is UGC being able to be seen by others is yet another big issue. In the beginning, these blogs were displayed by editors’ recommendation, but the freedom of speech in essence still lies in the hands of the elites — until the birth of the RSS. Although RSS died out eventually, its spiritual core, which is people’s right in deciding what content to pay attention to, has been preserved in subsequent product design.
Hu Shi in “liberalism”, quoted a poem by Wang Anshi:
The brake that was shaken by the wind is breaking my head.
The brake was shattered and I’m not the only one hurt!
I do not blame the brake as it was not its own choice.
He believed that the freedom understood by ancient China was the right not to be bound and restricted by the outside world.
In my opinion, however, besides the freedom of speech and the freedom of attention, we need a third right, the right of coinage, which corresponds to three dimensions of freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of choice and economic freedom.
One Day World will not run advertisements in the future (not to mention soft articles and implanted ads). I encourage you to become our member, which costs 30 RMB per month. This will allow One Day World to achieve actual invincibility by enabling us to write unique articles in this post-scarcity era.
— One Day World
Why doesn’t “bu niao wan ru yi” (Lawrence Li’s Zhihu handle) run advertisements? Why would more members make One Day World invincible? This is because the lack of economic freedom will deprive us of the freedom to think.
Thirdly, with the development of consumerism, consumers have a greater room of choice. People’s need to express themselves has become the first consumption factor after satisfying food and clothing needs. Instagram becomes mainstream, everyone is a form of media. Internet-virality takes place in place of brands and Tik-Tok is more popular than celebrities. With the development of society towards extreme individualism, individuals need to face the loneliness as the survival subject. This requires real property ownership and data ownership, which is the basic condition of “equality in life”.
—Three Irreversible Mega Trends Spurring Me to Be an Entrepreneur, Dovey Wan
10 years ago, it would be hard to imagine that we would show our daily life on the Internet. However, today we can hardly refuse to use social software. With the explosion of information density, it becomes more difficult for individuals to get attention. “In the past, horses and carriages were slow, letters were far away”, representing “loneliness”.
Since the stone age, human beings have been living in groups. In order to eliminate this loneliness, we have to broadcast our status on social networks. Eugene Wei had a deep insight into this phenomenon in his long article at the beginning of 2019 and came to a conclusion that is pessimistic in my opinion — everyone is a monkey seeking status.
We are all status-seeking monkeys — Eugene Wei, Status as a Service (StaaS)
I think the social capital defined in Eugene Wei’s article refers to personal influence.
Is personal influence a good subject? I don’t know, but at least it’s better than isolated content. The market is eating up the world has such an illustration:
Hayek made such a parable in his book, The Denationalization of Money:
Since free competition is the most efficient in the market of general goods and services, why can’t free competition be introduced into the monetary field? Hayek put forward a revolutionary proposal: abolish the Central Bank system and allow private issuance of currency — free competition. In this process, we will discover the best currency.
— Hayek, The Denationalization of Money
Such competition is happening constantly in today’s Crypto industry.
Blogs and video sites have eaten up news, magazines, and television, and the sharing economy is eating up the hotel and taxi industry. Bitcoin began to challenge currency, and today’s DeFi sector has begun to nibble part of the business that originally belonged to banks, pawnshops and securities companies. We have reasons to believe that social networks will have to be eaten before markets can finally eat the world.
Source: Crypto New Media
