concepts Archives

December 3, 2022November 30, 2022

The guy running in front of me

I can’t stop thinking about something lately. A friend posted a story a few days ago that reminded me of a different time. When I was living in Madrid, one amazing colleague of mine dragged me to her Triathlon club. By then I had already been seriously running for a couple of years.

She thought it would be great if a couple of colleagues joined her. The thing is, it was a first-class Triathlon Club (I believe it still is one of the best in the country). Meaning most of the people were great athletes. A bit percentage of them were elite.

Some were even part of the national team. I was in okay-sh shape, but definitely not prepared to be part of that. The team’s common conversations in the dressing room were mostly about training. Strict dieting, or mocking each other not to chicken out and target to finish the next iron man in less than 9 hours. If you know Triathletes, they are characterised by their… focus.

I struggled, I was at the very bottom of the team (in a team with people 10-15 years older than me). By far the slowest swimmer, for sure. The team was already big, and there was a list of people waiting to join. If you wanted to be there, you had to be really committed.

Saying training was exhausting is an understatement. Double sessions, 3-4 days per week, plus whatever you wanted/needed to add during the weekend. Plus competing. Anyway, I ended up staying for a couple of years. Lots of lessons and findings during that time.

The thing I remember the most?

This guy in the team. The first day I met him, was in the dressing room. He said hi to some of the guys and started getting changed. I didn’t pay him a lot of attention. Just headed to the track to start warming up.

We start rolling as a group and only then I noticed he had some problem with his leg. He was weirdly dragging one of his feet. Then we shifted gears. We were supposed that day to run a few KMs at our max speed. You know what? He killed it. He was, to my surprise, faster than me.

That’s what I remember more vividly. He never gave himself any excuse, he challenged himself with every training. He was physically at a disadvantage, but man, mentally? A fucking giant. One of the most inspiring things I have ever seen. True champion courage.

I never told him how inspired I was. How much I admired his determination. I am very grateful for all the lessons of that time. The coach never treated him differently in a noticeable way. He was just one more athlete he had to push to do his best. He was showing us the way.

Showing me not to take things for granted, and not to give myself excuses. To this day, when I run, I remember him running.

July 21, 2022September 16, 2022

Sense of Agency

Some concepts are pretty powerful. In the sense, that just being aware of them provide higher odds of succeed in life. Some are non obvious or even counter-intuitive. One of those is the sense of agency.

So, what is sense of agency and why is it important to have a strong sense of agency? it refers to the feeling of control over actions and their consequences. It is the feeling of being an agent, of a connection between our actions and the outcomes, when not explicitly thinking about it. Experiencing control over the outcomes. There are different theories that explain how it works and how we measure it. My take away for you is that its impact is transformational.

Your sense of agency is intrinsically connected with your context. In my case, moving from working in a big tech company to operating independently. As consultant and founder, provided a higher and deeper sense of agency. I had it before, I am not saying you can not have leverage in a company. My point that the output of your leverage; The extent of impact. As well as your perception of control are influenced by your environment.

It is literally one of the secrets of life according to Steve Jobs, “When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world-try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. But life-that’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it-you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.”

It is important for you. It is paramount when you work in a product development team. Instilling it in your team mates. Nurturing the feeling ownership in the different stakeholders. The impact they make, it is the way to succeed creating great products. It took me some time to learn this. How crucial is to create space. To encourage providing inputs for less vocal members of the teams. Cultivating that sense of agency and autonomy. For all the participants in the production process.

There are relatively extensive research around it from a psychological point of view. The mechanisms in play as well as the different evolutive motivations for it. One of my favourite concepts!

July 18, 2022September 16, 2022

A Quick intro to DAOs challenges

In the next essays I will write about Web3, in particular DAOs. I’ll share some of my findings and takes. Developed in the last years, doing consultancy. As well as being a somehow hardcore user of blockchain-based tech. Somehow I thought it needed a bit of context. At least for a part of the audience with a shallow experience around most parts of the web3 universe.

DAOs are particular entities, that face new operational paradigms. Some of the ones any traditional organization has. Some new and exclusive from this kind of organization. This will be a quick review of the challenges they face. There is a complete DAO stack that is surfacing to solve those particular problems. I’ll touch base in the next weeks about analysis of specific areas and solutions in the landscape.

I like the way new situations create new types of problems. From time to time you have the opportunity to work on challenges that have a little background. You are an explorer in a new land and I find that appealing to say something.

My belief is DAOs will be WAY more impactful down the road than we can foresee now. Perhaps not in the actual form. In an evolved shape, resulting in overcoming today’s challenges. By learning about those challenges. About what kind of solutions are being developed around them. We can get a solid head start on understanding the future.

If you are familiar with what DAOs are, please, skip this part. I want to give a quick overview for someone who does not know what they are, providing a bit of context. Pretty hard to not know what DAOs are, but there is a world outside of our little bubble.

What DAOs are

DAO stands for decentralized autonomous organization. In essence, a group of individuals, aligned with a shared purpose. Using web3 technology to register its nature, rules and operational logic.

Smart contracts are at their core. They use blockchain-related technology to operate. Making use of web3 financial and operational instruments (cap table, treasury handling, tokenization of shares, voting mechanisms, ID management,…).

The autonomous part comes from it being a flat hierarchy org. Not connected to a central organization or institution. In theory, the members of the DAO. The theory implies fewer management layers. A learner structure. Value-based and with the consensus of its members being a driver of every workflow.

The first proponents of a decentralized structure go back to 2016. DAOs are relatively new, aren’t they? ergo a work in progress.

What challenges DAOs face now

They have a particular set of operational challenges. It will vary depending on what the DAO’s targets are. A social DAO does not have the same needs as an investment DAO. They will share some commonalities, regardless of the nature of their goals. Some of those challenges are:

Governance and decision making
Setting goals in a decentralized way
Handling the shared cap tablet, shared treasury, taxes…
Allowing participants to capture value in a healthy way
Keeping coherence and do not diverge from the original targets over time
rewarding contributions without encouraging pavlovian behaviours.
Incentivize engagement with the project, rewarding participation
Aligning resources with goals effectively
Onboarding and effective engagement of new participants

Defining business logic without a central structuring is challenging. DAOs are not only subjected to new dynamics and tensions because of their nature. They interact and live in the real world. They have to run and deal with trad organizations and structures. I find it extremely enticing to follow its evolution. Seeing new forms of organizational structures popping up is absolutely exciting.

Keep tuned if you want to know more about it. Something you’d like to know in particular? please, hit me up!

July 13, 2022July 4, 2022

Unstoppable Sites, how do they work

I have been playing this weeks with deploying decentralized applications. Doing a bit of analysis on the landscape. What are the existing options, the challenges they face and the stage of the different parts. What would be a decentralized web3. Moving some of my notes into articles.

How do they work now?

Let’s take a step back and check how the web2 works. You have a DNS, Domain Name Service, a service able to translate IP addresses into human-readable addresses (i.e. “yahoo.com”). When you ask for a site, your ISP handles that request. Routing it to the entity you are looking for and retrieving the packages said entity sends back to you (data).

All this game of interactions. Between your computer, the application you are using, your ISP, servers, etc, is abstracted. To create a more user-friendly experience.

Here you have a nice graph (not mine) of how all that works. It is of course a simplification, we have built a lot of infrastructure over the years to deliver a great experience (CDNs, containers,…). You get the idea.

How do decentralized domains work then?

How do web3 works? We have a similar problem. For starters, wallets have long, unfriendly addresses. Hard to memorize, share and prone to typing errors. We have Unstoppable Domains and ENS, Ethereum Name Service, whose job is to “translate” those into something easy to type and remember. Both allow multiple wallets in different coins (ETH, BTC, LTC, DOGE). As Well as add different records (content, discord,…). Allow you to point your domain to a site.

There are differences and similarities around how the registration process works. Price models, how ownership is handled, etc, but will not go there. The main difference between both services is their business model. ENS has a yearly payment structure, while UD has a one-off payment model. Not fundamentally relevant, but worth remembering.

The main caveat right now is that you need to use applications that work with said domain extensions.

The ICANN has not introduced those domain extensions in the standard. Regardless of how you host your site, your audience will still need a browser supporting your “special” domain (Brave). Alternatively, extensions that help you load crypto-related domains. It is very unlikely they will be incorporated natively in the future. Their creation and ownership are completely out of the control of the ICANN. A strong barrier to adoption, although not a definitive one.

What is the promise?

The promise is to have a decentralized web. Meaning your site infrastructure is not dependent on private entities, but organized in a way that your content would be theoretically more resilient. Your data cannot be taken down, disappear or be regulated.

This would enable to have always available information, reliable. Escaping the censorship in authoritarian governments. We all know the dark side of said promise as well, the dark web, the uncontrollable spread of fake information… Aspects not limited to a pure societal rejection, but also having strategic value. Being susceptible to manipulation according to particular interests. Weaponizing information is not new, but the scale and reach are.

Another aspect to take into account is that complete anonymity is not possible. Even not providing your personal information when registering. You are still leaking details about your wallet, IP address, etc.

The elephant in the room is they are still pretty much centralized. As they are now at least. First, you need the central organization (ENS, Unstoppable Domains) to provide the domain. You also need a said entity to allow the association with a particular coin or asset. Second, you still need a third-party browser or extension to route to your domain. Meaning that, as example, Brave could tomorrow decide to block your particular site and no user will be able to easily reach your content.

Great teams are working on providing the other (more significant) significant parts of the equation in an almost decentralized shape (message routing, container resolving,…). Making it possible running on-chain applications. I promise I will write more about all the work done by the IPFS and the Internet Computer protocol.

February 23, 2022March 13, 2022

Proof-of-stake

I am writing it for my father, or at least that is the idea. Explaining complex concepts, to someone that does not necessarily have the same background or technical acumen. I got a lot of questions about my line of work, mostly related to tech or logistics of how I operate daily (aka, “yes, you are paid, but what is that you do exactly? how is your day at work?”). So I’ve decided to write about those. Disclaimers about the technical validity or accuracy of my affirmations.

What is proof-of-stake (POS)?

It is a safety mechanism to prevent abuse of a system. The most popular application is to cryptocurrencies. It is actually a solution to a somehow faulty solution, Proof-of-work (POW). Proof-of-work is a similar mechanism, based on increasing the cost of interacting with the system artificially. In PoS, instead of demanding a costly computation to participate, participants stake the coins they hold. The more coins they hold, the higher the possibility for them to interact (validate).

Lets’s take a step back. How do we prevent people from interacting maliciously with a system where said interaction has friction closer to zero? By adding friction artificially. Asking to solve a problem that is difficult to find, but easy to verify. It adds the right amount of effort to dissuade malicious attacks, keeping it functional.

The idea Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor come up with in 1993 were quite beautiful. It was adopted in the famous foundational Bitcoin paper by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008.

How does proof-of-work work?

Bitcoin is a distributed ledger. Information is stored in blocks, where every piece can be viewed by all participants in the network. It has a caveat though, without a central authority to verify if a transaction is real or fraud, how can you trust it? It needed a mechanism at its core to resolve this validation process in a decentralised way.

So, we have a blockchain (a distributed database), miners (nodes in that network, computers) and transactions we want to record in a way we can trust. When a new transaction occurs, a puzzle is given to miners. Miners compete to resolve it. Once the first one to solve the puzzle, the others verify the solution is right. If it is okay, the transaction is recorded and only that miner is rewarded. We have a system decentralised (multiple verification nodes), autonomous (as soon as the incentives are economically efficient miners will keep operating) and trustable.

How is the puzzle? It is a mathematical problem. The kind that can only be solved by trying one solution after another. They try to guess a 64-digit hexadecimal number, called a hash, that is less than or equal to a target hash in SHA-256, Bitcoin’s PoW algorithm. Not a hard problem, but one that allows for no shortcuts. Speed of processing is more important than being “smart”. This is an oversimplification and there are TONS of nuances around it (how the difficulty of the problem increases over time, probability of reward, POW algo…).

What is the issue then?

On one side POW is by definition costly. In terms of energy, hardware, infrastructure. It has raised real concerns about it being the best possible use of that energy. On the other side, participants (miners) are prone to maximise profits, regardless of the network. There is no incentive to improve the network. Bitcoin or Litecoin are still running on a PoW method.

Proof-of-stake is the proposed solution. Instead of having all participants compete, it assigns the option to create the block randomly. The amount of mining power depends on the amount the participant holds, assuming the more coins you hold, the higher the incentive to keep the system running. Miners or validators are rewarded as well, but they have to lock their tokens up in order to participate. Risking losing them if they are being malicious agents.

I hope it is clear enough. It passed the Dad test. Quite literally.