“Daddy, but where’s Donono?”, which of course was the brother of the magical sparkly unicorn, Donini who was flying around the meadow in my daughter’s bedtime story throwing sparkly rainbows around and singing “I’m a sparkly-rainbow unicorn, all daaayy long!” to the tune of “I’ve been working on the railroad”.
At that moment, only a few days ago, I reflected on the whirlwind that was 2018 and why I work so hard on Verus Coin, not for lambos or to be a bank’s solution to money, but so that we, the people, can all have a better future and be more in control of our lives and information when future generations and my children grow up. I believe that for this to happen, we need decentralized public computing systems, run, controlled, and audited by the people who use them, and those of us who can, owe it to our own and future generations to build these public systems now from the decentralization technology, which began with bitcoin, and that too many in crypto abandon amid justifications of their own personal enrichment.
The Verus Coin Community has become like a second family to me, and our decision to fork as the last major event in 2018 was to support the community’s broad request for a do-over on the manner in which hardware miners joined Verus Coin. I hope and believe that this step, and the algorithm we created in the process to better equalize different hardware both contribute towards the Verus Vision of true decentralization, and with such a seamless fork, the smoothest I’ve personally ever seen or experienced, what a way to cap off an incredible year!
One year ago today, Verus Coin, its blockchain, and its algorithms did not exist beyond a vision of what might be. We close 2018 with a very strong worldwide Verus Coin community, arguably the most advanced consensus algorithm in crypto, the only one we know of with mathematically provable 51% hash attack immunity at this time, working solutions to nothing at stake and weak subjectivity, and now with VerusHash 2.0, a more secure blockchain than ever, maybe than any other. I was thankful for our prior decisions on security that we didn’t have to factor 51% attacks into our plans for a community focused solution during this fork.
I have no doubt that the world will increasingly use blockchains for electronic money, to track supply chains, assets, and corporate datastreams, and I am sure this use will spawn many new solutions and applications over time. These applications are all part of human progress, but to me, they are somewhat independent of the true societal potential of crypto at this time in history. The real power of crypto, which I know that we believe in as a community, and which we work to realize on a daily basis in Verus, is being part of a truly decentralized system across the entire participating community, no matter how large that community grows, each according to their means * effort, each rewarded by a system that tries to express fairness at the heart of its protocol, a community full of contributing members mining, staking, earning bounties and sticking together to make the future, supported further by the non-profit Verus Coin Foundation with the only goal being to use its mined and staked coins expressly to realize the Verus Vision.
In past roles I’ve had in the software industry, I have worked to build systems that learn from your behavior, that run your applications, that track how profitable you can be for advertisers, that provision applications for you through service providers, and more. In all cases, I worked for the profit of a few, creating technologies that I feel are being increasingly misused today by their intellectual property owners, as they transform from the idealism of freeing people and making a better world for all to simply making a profit for shareholders.
I believe that the world needs a system like what Verus is becoming, and as we close 2018, a very difficult year by many accounts and on many fronts, I am thankful for the sense of accomplishment I can enjoy by serving a community that values both the Verus Vision and my contributions towards realizing it.
The world needs public systems of money and services that can adapt in response to and along with the worldwide community using them. The Verus launch, May 21st, 2018, began an exhilarating journey that demonstrates what is possible when people refuse to accept that solutions to challenging problems cannot be addressed one by one in a working system, adapting and improving constantly for the community who run it and whom it servers. If designed properly and adapted as needed in a consistently decentralizing way, the only limit to the growth of these public systems and services are the number of people who use them.
Entering 2018, I did not know that I would work on Verus Coin, let alone lead its development. I had a vision of how our societies could leverage -public blockchain decentralization to solve some of the most difficult challenges we face, but I did not know if or how I would have an opportunity to be part of a community building such a system. I want to express gratitude to the Bitcoin Developers, the Zcash Developers, the Komodo Developers, specifically jl777, and the Verus Coin community for providing an incredible foundation and ecosystem within which all of our contributions can make a real difference.
As I look forward to 2019, I have many goals, and one of the biggest is for us to reach the next level and realize much of the complete Verus Vision. I appreciate the fact that I do that as part of a growing, healthy, and vibrant Verus Coin community and more broadly a crypto community, most of which still stands for the values in crypto that attracted me in the first place. One thing is for certain, you will never create or follow any specific plan, and adaptation is the key to survival. This goes for families, projects, communities, and efforts to change the world. I look forward to an another amazing year filled with the beautiful chaos of creation as we make a better future together, one with truth and privacy for all.
Happy New Year!
(*tagline contributed to the Verus Coin community by community member @mammothine and students)
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