Very nice summary kora.
Thanks Mac!
Here's part 2
PART 2
It's still too early to know whether ORA will succeed, or even whether ORA will get off the ground as an independent coin at all (rather than exist briefly just as a token on the NXT asset exchange), but I'm still confident the ORA experiment will be worthwhile, even if it's just because other people learn not to repeat some of our mistakes.
ORA History
I announced "Kora, a clone of Qora" on 22 May. This seemed like a good starting point for someone like me who is a supporter of PoS coins. I was NOT interested in promoting a straight clone of Qora long term, but as a non-developer I knew the tech direction for ORA was always going to be ultimately set by someone else, and my primary objective from day one was to make ORA a decentralised leaderless organisation from birth, and that meant handing over the tech decisions to other people who would be autonomous from me asap.
I am merely the catalyst who proposed the original idea to start a new coin, and I don’t have the skillset to design the perfect PoS coin, but I can assist people who might, and I am also prepared to put some resources into the ORA experiment.
The Game Plan
My first objective was to outline an appealing and credible road map - "Kora, the first clone of Qora, issued on the NXT AE while we wait for the source code". I'm quite proud that (afaik) my (K)Ora announcement on May 22 was the first time someone proposed publicly to issue a coin on the NXT AE. Due to our conscious effort to plan things properly and take our time getting the registration webapp right, some other coins actually did this before ORA (most notably NEM) but I'm 'claiming' the idea to issue coin assets on NXT AE was mine! I was more than happy when UtopianFuture borrowed from (K)Ora, as we are/were crypto brothers in arms after all!!
I also fully expected that many people would be cynical and critical of this approach, so I knew in order to attract a competent dev to help me design and develop the 'phase 1' registration webapp, I would need to pay a 'real' bounty in bitcoins, not just offer a 5% stake in ORA tokens.
My secondary objective (after the leaderless Starfish community structure) was to avoid any hint of ‘scammyness’. That's one of the main lessons we should have ALL learnt from crypto history by now IMO. Other things being equal, the coins that have the best chance of survival are the ones that gain 'acceptance' by people, and any hint of scam means almost certain death for a new coin.
People don't like unfairness, and if given a choice they will always choose a 'fair' option if it's available. The first mover *might* get a pass-card for some perceived 'unfair' elements like an IPO with a small number of participants, but any clones (even heavily modified ones with unique features) will probably die a quick death if the market (i.e. people, users, consumers) suspect there was/is something 'unfair' going on. Sometimes the perception of unfairness might be unfair itself, like the NXT IPO for example, which IMO was conducted openly and fairly, but in the end it doesn't really matter. If the community consensus opinion says a coin smells unfair it will probably die.
Perceived unfairness might be an IPO, or a developer premine that looks a bit too big, or a delayed start announcement that implies a possible secret ninja mine for insiders, or maybe some insiders had access to an optimised miner earlier than the rest of the community. Many previous coins have suffered from lingering smells due to these type of issues.
Fairness is good IMO because it’s ethical, and that’s an important goal for its own sake, but fairness is also a necessary requirement for success in an open market with low barriers to entry. Tenebrix died but Litecoin lives because Tenebrix was judged "unfair" by the market. Monero is more successful than Bytecoin, because people have judged Bytecoin has "unfair" aspects.
Fairness is a pre-requisite for community acceptance. Why is Lance Armstrong rejected now? His cycling achievements are exactly the same as they were before his admission of drug taking (he still won seven Tour de France races), so is he still the best cyclist in history or not? Most people would say 'No' because he took performance enhancing drugs, so it's not 'fair' to the other competitors, but in absolute terms he did come back from cancer and win seven times in a row, and despite the drugs, that's still pretty amazing.
The reason most people would disagree (Lance isn't the best cyclist in history) because humans don't like cheating, lying, scamming ... we don't feel good about things that look unfair. Sometimes we don't know the truth, or we don't have the option to reject the 'unfair' option before it's too late (a network effect has already cemented the 'unfair' incumbent), but when we do, most humans will go for the 'fair option if they can. This is not so much an opinion, but what I think is readily observed over human history.
When things are judged as 'unfair' trust is broken, and eventually things can become unworkable, and even those who previously benefited from the 'unfairness' often come to the point where they see that there own self interest requires fixing the most extreme effects of the 'unfairness'.
That's sort of what happened in South Africa in the lead up to when apartheid ended, and the white community had a referendum to decide whether to continue negotiating with the black majority to change the South African constitution, and effectively end apartheid. The referendum was passed with a 68% majority! It would be nice to think that 68% of white South Africans in 1990 voted based on ethical and humanitarian considerations alone, but I think it's safe to assume *some* white South Africans voted 'yes' despite their own 'prejudiced' feelings because they finally accepted that such an 'unfair' system like apartheid was broken, and would never be accepted. The 'unfairness' would eventually make South Africa 'unworkable' as a society and as an economy. I think many whites voted in favor of 'fairness' not from the heart, but from the head. I've been to South Africa a few times and met many wonderful people on my travels, black & white, and that's the impression I got from talking to South Africans about that period in their history.
Many times I've seen NXT'ers saying similar type of things to NXT IPO whales 'distribute your stake, it's in YOUR interest to improve the distribution, you will destroy NXT if you are greedy and think you can keep 5% stake of ALL NXT' etc etc Many whales have probably done just this, sold NXT motivated by something other than their own profit. To try and keep NXT 'workable' - Distribute or Die!!
I think most crypto activists agree that a pre-requisite for a crypto coin's success is acceptance, and a pre-requisite for acceptance is a collective judgement of "fairness" by the market (i.e. the coin users) for the processes and culture around the coin, and that includes the initial distribution. IMO NXT and Qora both had "fair" IPO's, but the consensus of the market is *probably* the opposite, that both IPO's were too small and so 'unfair'. NXT will probably 'get away with it' based on having a first mover 'pass-card', (similar to early bitcoin miners), as the network effect has already started to cement the first movers into their dominant positions.
Qora??
With Qora things might be a bit different though.
If the Achilles heel (rightly or wrongly) for NXT was the initial distribution, why did Qora repeat the same mistake with an IPO for only a small number of initial shareholders? That 'error', combined with some early 'pumping' frustrated me, as IMO it was obvious an early price pump would only burn early investors when the price fell later, and Qora obviously had so much more promise compared to most other alt coins, and Qora was so much more than just another clone coin.
That’s what got me off of the couch as an arm chair critic and into the game so to speak. I decided to put my money where my mouth was and see if I could spark a new coin into life based on some of my main opinions & ideas as to what makes a successful coin 'work'.
So ... my game plan when I posted my announcement on May 22 was:
- Find a dev to make a distribution webapp
- Pay him/her a bitcoin bounty, because that's fair to them, and so that hopefully gives me the best chance to get a quality applicant
- No IPO, FREE stakes - avoid any hint of 'scam'
- The registration webapp prime directive - "make it fair", so people accept the outcome - FREE stakes, long time period to register, lots of advanced warning, ant-sockpuppet measures, use common-sense to solve problems
I think we probably got a few sockpuppets but overall Mac Red (the webapp dev) did a marvellous job! Paying a 2 bitcoin bounty to Mac was a great investment in ORA, and since then he's gone on to make many other contributions to ORA (like setup our forum oraforum.org, and organising his own giveaway), plus he's involved with planning, offering new ideas, and providing opinions and feedback on all other aspects of ORA. Getting a great guy like Mac Red involved with ORA early made me look much more 'credible' than I otherwise would have (hopefully), and that then snow-balled into making ORA look more credible, which then made/makes it easier to attract more high quality people. People are the key!
A fundamental lesson I've had confirmed by my experiences with ORA so far is the most important ingredient for a successful project is the quality of the people involved. You can always debug a buggy program and put out a new version, and most users will forgive you for a few tech inconveniences and delays, but you can't debug a person if their character is shown to be wanting in some way. If people suspect something 'dodgy' is going on it can be fatal, even if the suspicion turns out later to be false. Mud sticks, and 'scammy smells' linger! Many coins have obviously suffered from this problem in the past, and avoiding this (if possible) for ORA has been one of my prime objectives.
I think ORA can have great tech too, but at this stage the most important thing has been getting good people involved. A small group of honest, motivated, active, and community minded people is the basic foundation for any project, and if you have good people involved at the start you can start BUILDING something worthwhile! You can even delay some of the BIG decisions around the tech, and you can still start building community trust around the people. That's probably still an assumption at this stage, but I think ORA will prove it is right. People make communities great!
ORA has only attracted a small group so far who are actively doing things, but they are ALL really good people - exceptional people - so I'm SUPER confident we can build something “interesting” together, and I’m also confident we can attract more ‘exceptional’ people as time goes on.
After 5 months I think that’s what I am most happy about - the quality of the people who were interested enough in what I was talking about trying to do with ORA in the middle of May 2014, who ended up putting in some effort & taking some risks to get involved and help me! Without active committed people who actually care, ORA won’t succeed, but that goes for all other crypto coins too!
I feel very fortunate that i was able to attract great people who actually care about doing something 'interesting' and worthwhile with crypto currencies & blockchain tech!