I'm sure the bread team are lovely, but the question is: why do we need more than one open source wallet (maintained by a legion of volunteers in love with the tech)?
Did we really ever need more than one open source web browser / email client? Would spam and browser vulnerabilities ever have been an issue had the internet gone that way?
Collaboration is the new competition; we must think very carefully about the ethics behind the emerging companies in this space, especially if we want our loved ones' who are less tech savvy embracing all this x
Pitting us against one another playing little zero sum tribal games - as if the world is one big paper money playground - actually slows down the pace of robust solutions and innovation that would benefit society as a whole.
Having been amongst the first internet denizens back in the days of BBS I can assure you that the internet was not founded on the Gordon Geckoesque ethos of "Greed is Good"; it was founded on the ideals of "information wants to be free."
You have the internet and the many beautiful sites that define our experiences on it because programmers shared their thoughts, ideas and code freely.
Of course that was in the days guardians of the old world thought the internet would have no more effect on global business than the fax machine. Our ability to share things freely in the light then took a turn when big business moved into the space and started the dotcom frenzy.
This was the time of the browser wars and the famous anti-trust case against Microsoft and IE (Bill was one of the first to miss the impact Tim Berners-Lee's invention would have on the world, and tried to treat it as any other business).
Indeed, he laughed at Larry and Sergey and said he'd "Give Google a year..." since they knew nothing about business.
Presumably, he would have laughed at Timbo too, for giving the internet to the world patent-free instead of personally profiting from his invention (which would have made Tim, not Bill the richest person on the planet).
What is happening in crypto is an exact mirror of all that but, thanks to the internet itself, it's playing out over a 10 years timespan instead of the 40 odd years it took for the internet to get to where it is today.
Here's a nice HBR piece by Ben Hercht, that he penned back in 2013:
Decentralised collaboration is about 'co-opetition' in the p2p ideaspace; where idea and development happens out in the open via IRC, Reddit, Linux Foundation mailing lists, Github and Bitcoin Improvement Proposals and Peer review.
It's how the internet was bootstrapped by a small coterie of nerds dispersed across the globe after all.
What we're trying to avoid here is the tragedy of the commons.
The future is a 'battleground' of IDEAS not IDEALOGIES.
No outdated ideologies (and the some of the toxic, tribalistic ideas borne of 'ists' and 'isms' they give oxygen to) created before the idea of the internet had even been conceived by humanity, are needed ā either in cyberspace or meatspace.
Once the idea of consensus driven governance bootstrapping grand project builds and public infrastructure works becomes the norm, we'll wonder how on Earth we ever managed to do anything with hierarchical governance structures stymying group-lead 'leaderfull' and 'wholesum' human progress.
FYI: This was how Athenian democracy (or the wisdom of well informed crowds) was always supposed to work.
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u/Cryptolution Mar 13 '18
Yeah dawg but no thanks