The Concept of Legitimacy and ICON

This will be a short series of posts that seeks to provoke thought, discourse, and ultimately action.  My final post in this series will be the introduction of a new source of legitimacy that my team and I hope to bring to the Icon Republic.  Now on to the issue at hand…

Vitalik Buterin released a great article on the concept of legitimacy which admittedly I can add little color to, so I won’t attempt to do so here.  But I think his conclusion—after he completes his conceptual analysis on legitimacy—ought to be of great interest to the Icon Republic, namely that the scarcest resource within the space is not value, rather it is legitimacy. Legitimacy here is defined to be a pattern of higher order acceptance.

But this is not where the deep dive into the concept of legitimacy ends.  Vitalik goes on to consider the garnering of legitimacy to be a series of coordination games in which we, as a collective social enterprise, look to one another to determine large-scale acceptance.  Further, Vitalik posits a few theories of how a substance obtains legitimacy.  One can obtain legitimacy via process, performance, merit, brute force etc.

How about a theory of legitimacy not considered here?  Sometimes, and this seems to be quite rare akin to a black swan sort of event, legitimacy comes out of nowhere, seemingly in a vacuum.  I call this legitimacy via wonder.  Wonder because there seems to be no other qualitative or quantitative element by which we can determine the source of legitimacy.  Gamestop, for example, obtained legitimacy via wonder.  One guy came up with a thesis, people then began to believe in it, and finally everyone within that niche community decided to buy in.  But that was only the cause of a few multiples in price action. 

How about the force of nature that brought about the torrential increase in price to astronomical heights before coordinated intervention took place on behalf of the brokerages?  People, all around the world just jumped on board, wondering where the price could go, wondering where global collective grassroots action could take them against the financial machine.  And they soon found out precisely how incredibly powerful collective action truly is; how powerful legitimacy via wonder truly is.

And crypto knew about this phenomena before the broader market figured it out in Gamestop.  We’ve had Dogecoin for much longer, and Bitcoin before that.  But where does this leave Icon?  How much higher order of acceptancedoes the Icon Republic have relative to a Dogecoin or Gamestop?  Or how about more reasonably, an Ethereum?  On a relative basis alone Icon has .384% of the amount of wallets created thus far in comparison to Ethereum.  If market cap is any indicator of the network effect thesis in valuing a blockchain protocol (as it pertains to user population), Icon is currently undervalued as—at the time of writing—its current market cap is 2x lower than .384% of Ethereum’s.  And this has been to the great ire of the average Iconist for years: why a project with so much hype and promise has failed to deliver on price action since its inception.  

But is ire misplaced here?  Much of the frustrations I’ve heard online and in telegrams have been attributed to the lack of marketing coming out of the foundation.  But I think this is a red herring.  Development has been steady, and the Icon Foundation has been transparent in their promise to deliver true interoperability to date.  So where exactly is the deficit in legitimacy within the Icon Republic? I posit that the legitimacy deficiency in the network currently resides amongst present day “active" P-Reps, and their lack of development.

Who are they? And what are they doing within the space in order to be considered a value-add to the Icon Republic?  It goes without saying quite a few of them are working diligently to complete road maps that have definitely added value.  Parrot 9, Rhizhome, ICON DAO, Bet, IAM, and ICX Station are to name a few.  But what about the rest of the lot?  Never-mind those outside of the top 22 Public Representatives…what are every single member within the top 22 P-Rep list doing today to add value with the delegation they receive?  After all, the delegations aren’t some meager food scraps here; we’re talking about thousands of dollars a day on node rewards.

Some have focused on marketing, while others run various vote-buying schemes whereby on average 50 percent of node rewards are returned to delegators.  The worst of the culprit seems to be those that actively advocate against the Icon Republic, and the foundation itself, challenging them on their priorities.  It’s odd behavior, to say the least.

Vitalik is right, “legitimacy is a powerful social technology and we should use it.”  The Icon Republic has so much potential, and I’m excited for its future, but we need to call a spade a spade here and clean up the Republic and rid it of rent-seeking nodes.  If we are to achieve that legitimacy via wonder, which I think we have a good chance at, we need to begin first by looking inward.  We need to realize that no amount of marketing and branding will force adoption at scale.  We need to keep our heads down, continue to build with product-market-fit in mind, and let the project speak for itself.  Only then will we garner the higher order of ance needed to ascend to those levels we’re hoping for.

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