After the Hunt — How to hunt a Mammoth Part II

6 min readOct 10, 2018

For those who are not familiar with our neanderthal friends, please check out How to Hunt a Mammoth Part I.

A Problem of Accountability

The hunt went well, very well. You, Ragnar, and your tribe of hunter-gatherers coordinated your skills, planned everything out, and that poor mammoth didn’t stand a chance. The mammoth meat is spinning on the fire that night, the kids playing around the tusks in the corner. Everything is great. These’s so much mammoth meat, that you and your hunters won’t possibly be able to eat it all before it goes bad. You notice a good number of hungry faces around the fire’s glow, faces who didn’t go on the hunt. You’d love to give them some of the meat, but since they didn’t contribute to the hunt, would like to get something else in return for it. There’s also another issue. Bob, who was on the hunt with you, steps in front of the fire, furious. In his hands, he’s clutching the stone ledger used to keep track of everyone. “Ragnar changed the ledger!” He shouts, angrily, “Ragnar made it so he gets three times as much as anyone else!” In the illumination of the fire, it is plainly written. You now stand. “Bob is a liar and a lover of sloths!” You shout, “The ledger always said these things.” Everyone starts arguing, jumping up and down, making it impossible to discuss anything. Bob at this point has totally lost it, shouting over all of the others, holding the ledger up over his hairy face. “THOSE WHO DO NOT LIVE BY THE LAW” He shouts, overly-dramatically, “SHALL DIE BY THE LAW!” He throws the stone ledger directly at you, knocking both you and it into the fire.

The Mammoth Meat: Who Gets What

Inscription on top of Ateshgah temple, Surakhany, Baku

So, it seems our poor friend Ragnar has died. How could it have been prevented? Is there a way to have a ledger that everyone can agree about and verify? Fortunately, the groundwork has already been set for us. As many of you probably know, blockchains are a thing. But what kind of thing are they? They are a stone ledger kind of thing! We won’t go too in depth into how they work, since many articles have done this before, but you can read more about them here. But for now what you need to understand is a blockchain allows Ragnar and his buddies to each have their own copy of the ledger. If Ragnar or anyone else changes it, everyone else will know, because it won’t match with their own versions. If Ragnar wants to change anything, the other cavemen will have to agree to that change. We call the rules on the ledger the “Protocol”.

Now for Problem 2. Remember all that mammoth meat? Ragnar and his pals can’t eat it all, but want something in exchange for their hard work. They could barter for it, but they’d prefer something that could be exchanged for anything they want. Something like a currency. The only issue is the Chief is very strict with how their currency, the Sabertooth, is used. Ragnar instead gets another idea. He carves out a small piece of their stone ledgers. Those who want mammoth meat will have to purchase it using these ledger pieces. To get these pieces, cavemen could exchange them for the Sabertooth currency, for other forms of meat, tools, or really anything. The other hunters are a bit confused, but Ragnar explains that what’s really important is that the exchange involves the piece of the ledger, which is then used to actually buy the mammoth meat. This way, he explains, since they all have much larger chunks of the ledger, the value of all their ledgers will go up. They can use pieces of their ledgers to buy things, but they also hold value, and are used to make changes to the Ledger Protocol. In this way, the ledger is both a currency and a form of ownership. If you still don’t fully understand, that’s fine. Neither do half the cavemen yet, but they’ll catch on pretty quickly.

Dawn of the Token

This is the second stage of our great Mammoth-Hunting plan. While some of our projects are fully volunteer-based, others will have team members interested in getting their own share of mammoth meat. This is where we will differ the most from similar platforms. While most depend on a complicated, centralized way of handling finances and equity, we want to give each team the ability to make their own rules. We understand that all projects are different, with different goals. Maybe some don’t want to hunt mammoths at all, maybe some want to hunt dragons. So we’ll provide a template for your own ledger, known as a sidechain, allowing your team the freedom to make whatever rules you want on it. This way, all your team has to worry about is your project, instead of building your own blockchain.

This will come in the form of ERC20 tokens. What’s great about these is they’re secure, with a whole community already dedicated to making sure it’s fast and reliable. And they’re based on Ethereum, one of the most widely-used decentralized platforms for apps (you might think of Ethereum as a currency, rather than a thing applications can be built on, but in truth, it’s both). When you interact with clients, either in terms of offering premium service or advertisements, the client will be able to purchase such services using the tokens that are generated. They will be able to get these tokens by exchanging them with some other currency: it can be Ethereum, Bitcoin, US Dollars, tulips, it doesn’t matter. What matters is, as a result, the value of the token will go up, because people are exchanging real items with real value for it. Those building the project will be issued their own supply of tokens, as agreed on when starting the project. Those who wish to join the team at a later date can be issued tokens in exchange for their services. Does this mean you have to build your projects on Ethereum? Of course not. Our platform will be built on an Ethereum sidechain, which is where the tokens will be issued and exchanged, giving you the freedom to build your own projects however and wherever you want.

Why it Matters

Many working on projects will likely want to focus on that, rather than how to issue equity. When a project is just starting out, most people with an idea can’t afford to pay anyone for it to be developed. This normally means having to work for equity, but this requires a lot of legal work, and many have to wait a long time before seeing any return on their work. With tokens, this is made much easier, and can be done for a group of projects, or done individually for each project. As soon as you are offering services, the token can be used, meaning workers get to see a quicker return than they normally would. It also makes funding much easier, without having to court venture capitalists, or worry about rounds of funding. Instead, anyone anywhere can invest in your company and see real returns on it. This is Stage Two. While Stage One is focused solely on crowdsourcing skills and time, the second stage is focused on crowdsourcing equity. With these two pillars of innovation working together, we believe we can create something truly incredible. The tribe is starting to organize, and the result of that coordination goes far beyond what they can imagine. It can lead them out of their caves.

Citation

After the Hunt — How to hunt a Mammoth Part II

Written by Jaeson Booker

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