Wednesday, March 3, 2021

What Nano can learn from the R number

COVID-19 is one of the most deadly diseases to hit the human population in decades, because of a simple natural mechanism - virulence.

It is an awful event, that has cost millions of lives and destroyed many millions more through debilitating disease. This is a damn tragedy that will shape us all for many decades to come.

We must all learn from this event. We must try to bring some good things out of it, including an appreciation of community and togetherness. All that death and suffering must not be in vain.

Luckily, the very bad and rapid spread of COVID-19 can teach us how to rapidly spread a good thing like Nano too. Nano can be one good thing to come out of all this awful, awful mess.

I recently worked with an Epidemiologist / Mathematician friend and I saw great parallels between the spread of COVID and the spread of Bitcoin. We can learn these lessons in spreading Nano.

Here's a BBC excerpt:

"The R number is a way of rating coronavirus or any disease's ability to spread. R is the number of people that one infected person will pass on a virus to, on average. Measles has an R number of 15 in populations without immunity.

That means, on average, one person will spread measles to 15 others. Coronavirus - known officially as Sars-CoV-2 - would have a reproduction number of about three if no action was taken to stop it spreading."

The goal

The goal here is to create a number of summarised activities that when put together will exponentially grow Nano's usage. Once I have feedback on these activities from the community in the comments, I will create a short summary of these tasks as recommendations. This is a long post, too much for most people, but I would urge you to spend a little time reading it - and providing your thoughts. The r/NanoTrade meme's are more fun, but this may be worth it for you financially, if it works out.

Why we want Nano to spread

We want to be wealthy.

We know Nano is fair money. Many monetary systems have failed huge numbers of people of all classes, all around the world, who have not seen any material gain from their efforts for decades. Economists know this and they don't have an answer. Everything has gone up in price: housing, food, energy. While wages have stagnated and savings interest rates are a joke.

It's a slow bleed of our value. Globalisation compounds this, where inflation is exported around the globe and wage inequality creates situations like Venezuela. People in rich countries send their surplus fabricated paper dollar bills to poor countries and they send back tractors and clothing.

In a time where productivity, efficiency and automation has also gone up incredibly prices should be level or even coming down. Everyone instinctively knows something is not right. It comes down to fiscal policies that have been flawed since Roman times and down to one word: Debasement.

One dollar in 1980 would now be worth $3.40 when adjusted for inflation. People don't mind inflation, because it makes them feel rich. The house you own is now 3.4 times the price it was in 1980, congratulations.

Except each brick in your house has not got 3.4x bigger and there aren't 3.4 times as many bricks. It's just that the same bricks just cost 3.4x as much because there are 3.4x the number of dollars in the economy! The bricks of the next house you buy will also cost 3.4x as much. Just ask people trying to buy in to this inflated market what 3.4x inflation feels like.

But what about wages you say, surely we all have made more money because we have been more productive? Well, some credible sources say that wages have completely stagnated (https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/) and the extra productivity value and wealth generated has probably gone to the 1%. The facts seem to bear this out.

Nano's value

I would argue Nano's value has not changed in five years, 1 Nano = 1 Nano. But the dollar has dropped in value against Nano as people move more value into Nano, because its a better place to hold your value.

A $1 can of coke 1 year ago cost roughly 1 nano, now you could buy 5 x 1$ cans of coke with 1 Nano and that trend will probably continue.

Debasement has cost us all dear. There are various reasons for it, with many clever ways of masking it like fractional reserve banking, lending and quantitative easing. Nano, like Bitcoin is a retort to that fiscal policy of stealing from everyone and giving to a few.

Nano is here to fix that problem and give us all access to fair value. Nano is needed to get us to a better financial future and start to redress that fundamental fiscal inequality, it's not a total answer, but it's a good start (and don't expect the people who operate and understand this to roll over by the way).

Nano's R value

We currently don't know Nano's R value is (the rate it spreads person to person), although it could probably be calculated or inferred by looking at the active wallet adoption over time. The higher it is the better. I would estimate it to be just over 1 and increasing. The growth of this sub, if the accounts are all genuine, is a great indicator.

If we can get the R value up to 2 or above for Nano consistently, that means if everyone in this sub, all 75.5k members spread Nano to 2 people in the next week and those 2 people spread Nano to another 2 people each within a week and so on, within 17 weeks Nano would be in the hands of 9,895,860,500 people. Nine point eight nine BILLION people. There's not even that many people on the planet! (perhaps we can get some reddit bots to open accounts to take up the surplus ;) ).

Such is the power of exponential numbers.

We have already seen with WeNano spots that Nano can spread very quickly and has no barrier to adoption like BTC did in the early phases (when many huge businesses dropped BTC because of fees). IMO there are only a few inflection points that will tip Nano to become a global currency. There are many arguments made for that to happen, but I wont make them here.

Nano, as we have seen with this sub, can 'infect ' people with enthusiasm for it. In fact Nano can often generate too much enthusiasm! :D which then leads to the rejection and even the failure to consider the innovation or the growing decentralisation by crypto people who 'think they know the flaws in Nano' (spoiler: they usually don't).

If the Nano community can understand what helps it spread and how to spot immunity to it, then we can all understand where our efforts are best focussed, leading to the exponential growth of the protocol. In the same way that performing certain activities with COVID will accelerate or slow the disease spread, performing certain activities with Nano can do the same. nano's R value will massively benefit from not arguing with BTC maximalists on reddit, but spend the time explaining and sending Nano to that good friend you haven't spoken to in 3 years instead.

Summary: We could influence the Nano's R value by designing the experience that people have when they encounter it, meaning they are more likely to spread it. This effect could make Nano explode in usage and popularity.

Nano as a small word network

There are many theories behind how viruses spread, but my favourite one is that CODIV-19 is a Small World Graph that respects a Power Law (https://www.zdnet.com/article/graph-theory-suggests-covid-19-might-be-a-small-world-after-all/).

What this means : it operates in the basis of clusters and outliers that connect to other clusters. The immunity of my cluster may be high and my ability to infect many people may be low, which means the virus will die out in my cluster (e.g. nano in r/cc). The R value in my already immune and heavily censored community would be VERY low, so the transmissibility of the Nano protocol is low.

But when I travel to a place where there is no immunity like r/arduino, I become a super-spreader. The R value there is high because there is no immunity. Someone moves to another cluster from that cluster I just visited with the same enthusiasm and approach and the process repeats like hot ash in a wildfire, floating to touch new ground and start new fires. But even there, people may be immune to 'crypto' as they see it as a scam or for drug barons or just a dumb way to lose money.

I think we could confidently now say that some (most?) of the existing cryptocurrency community has become 'immune' to nano, in that they have either heard of it and dismiss it (they are maximalist immune), they actively attack it (because they are supporting a competing currency), or they love it and are here on this sub (they are infected :) ).

Summary: if we focus on spreading Nano to new, fresh communities, they will not be immune to it, it will spread more rapidly and gain exponential adoption.

We have the perfect tool too. WeNano. More on that at the end.

Cryptocurrencies as competing virus strains

Think of all of the cryptocurrencies currently in existence as competing virus strains. You can probably classify them with the following elements:

- Credibility

- Profitability

- Enthusiasm

- Principles/ideology

- Usage

I have split the headings here into rationale and tasks that I think would help to create a viral effect.

Credibility:

The genius move from the Bitcoin community was to call everything else 'shitcoins', with a religious like zeal. That would be similar to the inventors of CYCLADES an early network packet switching community calling all other protocols "shitocols" and shouting down any further development, which would have meant we would never have had TCP/IP and no internet.

But what the shitcoin meme did, was build a herd immunity to other similar systems, forks, rip off's etc. They destroyed the credibility of every other cryptocurrency before it had even been thought of. It is still a very effective strategy.

That is the privvy of the first dominant strain. It can do this becasue there was no competition, it could infect everyone with the ideology that there is only one solution to this problem.

Nano's credibility will become stronger over time. it is 5 years younger than BTC and has still got to 'prove itself' even through it is doing millions of transactions a day and has a better decentralisation metric already. :/ BTW: Yahoo was around much earlier than Google.

Task 1: Don't compare Nano to Bitcoin or even mention it. Prove Nano is credible on its own by telling people that the tech is spread all over the world, it has never gone down in 5 years and is already processing millions of transactions per day already on a network that could be powered by a single wind turbine.
Profitablilty:

Profit in Nano is indirect. you can prove this to someone by saying that the value of nano will stay the same because there will never be any more of it in the universe, but the price of everything else will collapse against it eventually.

The $ value of nano has gone up because the value of the dollar is collapsing against it, not because Nano is doing some funky magic DeFI metric to calculate some gnarly staking return. Nope, Nano doesn't need to do much to get a better dollar price, it just has to wait, as history has already proven that is a good strategy, just ask your estate agent.

Task 2: Prove Nano is profitable by explaining it is a fixed asset (or 'hard money' if people are that savvy). Comparing it to other fixed value assets that have gone up in price over time like silver and gold. But explain unlike silver and gold you can hold it in your pocket and spend it like cash. As it goes up in value you can buy nicer things without having to do anything, you can literally see your profits as physical things in front of you. If you don't want to lose out, just replenish the value you spend as soon as you like.

Enthusiasm:

People love using Nano. I love sending it to people. I love the instant nature of it and the fact that people go, "OH, whats this thing, will it make me rich?". Maybe :D Enthusiasm is infectious and if people can see you are genuinely enthusiastic about the future of nano then they will feel bullish on some level about it too.

But a warning. People hate know-it-all's or people who bore them with evangelism. There are plenty of criticisms that can be levelled at Nano, some of them genuine and very credible. I personally don't like people who blindly believe something is foolproof. Nothing is infallible. Nano could still fail. But the realism of the risks do not deter me from what I know about a fantastic technology that has a chance to change the way the world works for everyone.

Task 3: Be very enthusiastic, but be very humble too. Explain why you have invested time and effort in learning about Nano, then stop. This will avoid people 'switching off' when you are being enthusiastic. It's also better to tell people that you have 'discovered' something and they should educate themselves because you genuinely think this is going to change a lot. Better than having them moan at you because they sold their house to invest in Nano in a bear market.

Principles/Ideology:

The ideology is very very strong for Nano and personally the thing that I think will win over BTC maximalists in the end. The fairness principles are also very strong. A lot of crypto is sold on the better way of doing things, with out providing a better way to do things. The principles are easily undermined when someone comes along with a billion dollars, or a company that can exploit the market volatility like exchanges do.

There are very few principled coins in existence. I won't list them because that's not the point of this section. It just is good to remember that Nano is strong in both areas and this may attract many communities that otherwise would dismiss Nano.

The biggest feature is the distribution. It was not sold for profit early on, it was given away on the principle that the value would come from it's usage alone. This is a very egalitarian ideal and chimes with many groups that have similar ideologies of fairness and fair money.

Task 4: Explain Nano is fair money, it was distributed fairly and has no fees. Meaning anyone in the world can use any amount of it, without penalty. Explain that it will always be like this for Nano as that is a founding principle. Explain that the community is very generous and often gives Nano to people for nothing to help them try it out.

Usage:

This is the killer app. The usage of Nano is amazing. But you can't use it in many places YET. Many other cryptocurrencies are being used around the globe, with usage rising in Asia amongst token models that are supporting services and economies. But all these apps and services are usually being used to prop up a fiat currency model that doesn't address the key problems of debasement. There are questionable long term issues for these systems too, as they have not fully explored their economic models.

The UX of Nano is so amazing that it will win out over many other cryptocurrencies. It is already being used hugely and this will become apparent when users of Nano start outstripping the users of Crypto as a whole. I'm pretty confident they will.

Demo, demo, demo. Demonstrate use cases, wherever you can. Use the existing things that people in the community create, support nano efforts to adopt by spending and replacing on that item or service. The more usage there is, the more services there will be.

Task 5: Get people outside your group of friends or family to demo Nano to someone outside their friends or family. Help them Use WeNano to set up spots every week if you can afford it, in places you have tenuous links to. Reward them for setting up spots by donating to those spots. It could be some poor areas you grew up in, a local coffee shop in your home town, a great music venue, a local hackspace.

As an icebreaker, ask someone you know outside your immediate group of friends " where would be good to set up a WeNano spot and give away some crypto? ", when they ask "what is WeNano?" then BAM fire off your script. Try and get them to do the same. The idea is you want them to get enthusiastic and demo it to someone else.

Say: if you get three new people they know to send you 0.001 Nano each then you will give them 0.1 Nano as a bonus.

Thanks for reading this far, hope it was worth it and please comment and the tasks :)

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TLDR:

"if we understand why cryptocurrencies spread, we can design Nanocurrency to spread like wildfire"

- Task 1: Build credibility in new places and avoid being drawn into 'crypto' people debates. Explain to new people it has never gone down in 5 years and is already processing millions of transactions per day already on a network that could be powered by a single wind turbine.

- Task 2: Explain if it goes up in value you can buy nicer things without having to do anything to help it go up, you can literally see your profits as physical things in front of you, because Nano is usable for payments.

- Task 3: Be very enthusiastic, but be very humble too. It's also better to tell people that you are lucky to have 'discovered' Nano and they should educate themselves.

- Task 4: Explain Nano is fair money, it was distributed fairly. Explain that the community is very generous and often gives Nano to people for nothing to help them try it out.

- Task 5: DEMO Time! GOAL, do such a good job that people outside your group of friends or family will demo Nano to someone outside their friends or family. Say: if you get three new people they know to send you 0.001 Nano each then you will give them 0.1 Nano as a bonus.


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