As I sat there at my desktop clicking away to maximize my yield for the nth time…
…a thought occurred to me one day:
what if people were offered the incentive to earn yield, instead, by performing activities of daily living or contributing to public goods and services?
I had realized I probably didn’t want to earn a living this way for the rest of my life. While I was certainly grateful for the opportunity to experience the life unlock enabled by this new technology, I began to question my place in this evolving relationship between labor and capital. I had attained financial security and freedom from the golden handcuffs, but I found myself playing the same game yet again…
I had grown to deeply despise the contemporary practice of medicine; but history appeared to have rhymed as I found myself at it again, clicking away at the screen.
Fortunately this was not the first time, and for that I was thankful. The search for maximizing yield had insidiously turned into a dopamine hunting expedition, just like it had nearly two decades ago…
…in the realms of RuneScape.
So inevitably I began to contemplate…what was the point of all this? Of course, it was fun to make the “numbah go up,” but not at the cost of emulating a dopamine fiend.
DeFi
I was all-in to Decentralized Finance – DeFi – home to the wildest financial innovations in the world. A community of brilliant developers and builders had discovered the secrets of modern-day alchemy: they figured out how to convert digital packets of information into economically (non) fungible and composable Lego blocks of money.
Like water.
Quite literally, Ether’s properties are analogous to that of water:
To me, this mirrored the qualities of Neurotransmitters and opened a Rabbithole to closely examine how the network resembled the brain.
Immersing oneself in this experience is like entering a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). It unlocks for anyone in the world the ability to earn virtual money but with one key difference: this digital form of value can support sustenance in the physical world. This collective realization led to the emergence of Play to Earn:
Lessons from the Past
The era from 2004-2007 is dubbed the “golden age” of RuneScape (now known as Old School RuneScape; OSRS) by various players because the game was f2p (free-2-play) and not play-to-win, among other reasons. While there was a paid members’ version of the game, proof-of-work was necessary for the membership to confer any advantage in both the p2p (pay-2-play) and f2p version of the game. I.e., players gained access to new aspects of RuneScape but were required to manually train their character, level up skills, and acquire new items.
It was a simpler time before we had mobile gaming devices, Twitch streams, Discord, and the multitude of tools available today at any gamer’s discretion. But nonetheless, the PvE (player-versus-environment) game had community. Players were generally friendly and cooperative with each other, as they were aligned together in the pursuit of gaining “experience points” in order to level up the many skills available:
Because there were no cheat codes to level the character up, players were required to efficiently allocate their time and attention. All six neurocognitive domains were engaged: Executive Functioning, Complex Attention, Language, Learning and Memory, Psychomotor Function (e.g., mouse clicking expertise; avoidance of conditions like Carpel Tunnel; etc.), and Social Cognition (coordinating with other players; theory of mind). This is neuro-cognitive because our brain networks adapt functionally and structurally by way of neuroplasticity.
Such is the Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake that paid intangible dividends to many former (or current) players who also find themselves in Web 3 today. RuneScape oriented players to skills like farming, mining, smithing, crafting, fishing, cooking, woodcutting, and other domains that one would not encounter in the modern world. The completion of quests required forethought and organization, and experientially introduced players to the concept of optimizing yield; i.e.,
“I have a limited amount of time on the computer, so I need to make the most of it.”
It also familiarized players with free market trading…
…and centralized trading:
It further acquainted players with the Darwinian laws of nature in the Wilderness, where the game turned into PvP (player-versus-player) and players enjoyed “pking” (player-killing):
In hindsight, this was essentially training for Web 3.
Rug-Pull
But perhaps the most valuable lesson was delivered in the form of a Rug-pull. In 2007 at its peak, RuneScape had over a million member players worldwide. However, tensions were mounting due to the growing concerns around real world trading (RWT). According to Jagex and a non-trivial portion of the player community, bots (autoers/gold-farmers) were used to collect gold pieces (gp; the in game currency) that were sold on secondary markets for fiat currency. This was allegedly ruining the game for many players because the game had inadvertently become pay-to-win. If in-game items could be traded for real world money, then what incentive would remain for anyone to play when others could conceivably “cheat”?
Sadly, this led Jagex to modify the game in such a way that it eliminated the very thing that made RuneScape worth playing: the Wilderness. In addition to regulating “unbalanced” trades of in-game items, player-killing in the Wilderness was also eliminated as it presented an avenue for real world trading (a player could “kill” another player to collect their loot, in exchange for fiat currency in the real world).
When these changes were implemented on 12/10/2007, riots broke out:
Many players, including myself, quit the game following this change. It is estimated that the company lost the equivalent of nearly $3M in annualized revenue from the exodus. Though Jagex likely had the best intentions in mind, the outcome was an unfavorable one. And as Vitalik also learned this firsthand, it appears the Web 3 community similarly finds itself rejecting the pangs of centralized regulation today.
Instead of Jagex vs. the RuneScape community, we have the U.S. Treasury and S.E.C. vs. Crypto/DeFi/Web 3.
But this time is different.
Gamifying Life
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) has changed the game. Simply stated, DLT enables the verification of events in a peer-to-peer manner. On the Bitcoin blockchain, this event is the exchange of value, or settlement. On Ethereum, these events can include value exchange and smart contract execution in a peer-to-peer manner. From a systems level perspective, this can be conceptualized as another layer in the “stack” that introduces a new degree of freedom – the number of independent variables or parameters of a system, which in turn will enable independent motion in new directions, and effectively new outcomes and possibilities.
Consequently, smart contract execution in a peer-to-peer manner has enabled the emergence of new layers which themselves feed forward reflexively to generate new layers. This is often why it is difficult to predict or even fathom the range of outcomes possible with such persistent innovation and iterative improvement.
So what might come next with the integration of hybrid smart contracts?
Nothing can be completely automated, and Confirmation of Real World Events with Verifiable Data will require the input of humans. Given the constraints of this reality, we can leverage hybrid smart contracts by empowering each individual to, for instance, facilitate the confirmation of daily activities.
We can enable each person to “mine” his/her own data and “level up” in the game of life.
This opens up the gateway to incentivize full-scale life skills rehabilitation; Proof-of-X and [Verb]-2-Earn.
https://mirror.xyz/bhau.eth/crowdfunds/0xb4aEA15FAaaB7A108AcD26bA060eA9127e5A88cf
Concluding Remarks
I like to tie crypto/DeFi/Web3 back to the United States Constitution and Declaration of Independence because that is the original code that made all of this possible. I’m no legal expert or constitutionalist, but the significance of these documents was thoroughly impressed upon me when I migrated to this country at an early age. And it is abundantly clear why these exist in the first place – to uphold the Bill of Rights and each person’s right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness that are currently being threatened.
Imagine if:
- Jagex had addressed RWT by facilitating value exchange related to in-game items or characters in a bottom-up manner by recruiting the community, instead of alienating a large portion by unilaterally asserting top-down control.
- Our esteemed leaders collaborated with Web 3 users to understand the space, instead of ignorantly lobbying to stifle innovation.
- OSRS analogy - imagine if they actually attempted to leave tutorial island.
Imagine if our systems worked for us, instead of the other way around.
Community Ownership is the missing ingredient. The colonists left Great Britain for the Americas to create and build a world that they could own. They had stake in the future of this new society and the exciting directions it would lead. Skin in the game was necessary for alignment of incentives, motivation, purpose, and self-actualization.
Such incentives are missing today for the generations of tomorrow.