A common question we get from our growing audience is “Where is your Whitepaper?” 🤔

Plus, many people are confused about our ethos here at Loom Network.

So, here’s the deal…

Loom Network doesn’t have a whitepaper because Loom Network is too busy shipping code.

No one emerges from a magic cave with a perfect understanding of what their final product looks like on day zero.

The best way to build a product (or any system, really) is to ship early, ship often, and improve iteratively based on the feedback of real users.

To give you a real world analogy…

If you look at a map of a major city like Paris, it looks ugly, disorganized, and very messy:

Paris looks like a messy spaghetti monster from the top

Conversely, if you look at a city like Brasilia, things look modern, organized and quite neat:

Brasilia looks nice, neat and symmetrical

From a design perspective — Which city do you think is better?

Where would you live if you had to choose?

Taylor Pearson brought up this example (which was originally proposed by James Scott) to highlight an interesting perspective on the evolution of systems.

The difference in approaches between Paris and Brasilia is oddly reminiscent of the nascent blockchain technologies being built today:

Though Brasilia looks beautiful and elegant on a map, the result in the words of one resident is that “the city center feels markedly devoid of life in plazas, where the pigeons far outnumber the people.” From the planner’s perspective, it should be better, yet, it’s less popular and worse. Similar to the best crypto networks, the best cities where people want to live (like Paris) are compelling from a bottom-up perspective, not a top-down one. Despite their unsightly appearance on a map, people actually want to live there and so the cities continue to grow and thrive. — Taylor Pearson (via Coindesk)

It’s the difference between building something with a perfect plan (Brasilia) — and letting something evolve organically (Paris) to serve the precise needs of people that inhabit it.

In Brasilia’s case, it’s all about centralized planning from the top down.

…and Paris is all about organic evolution from the bottom up.

At Loom Network, we are building the Blockchain equivalent of Paris, not Brasilia.

Technically speaking, this phenomenon is called Gall’s Law.

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system. — John Gall (1975)

So, why exactly is the analogy above important?

Because not only does it describe crypto networks in general — it is essentially the same approach we use to engineer and architect all of our products at Loom Network.

Instead of writing the “perfect” blueprint before building a product, our blueprints are in the form of minimum viable products that evolve organically based on real world data.

It’s the Blockchain equivalent of Derek Sivers’s campus walkways example where instead of making walkways at a new college campus, a professor suggested the idea of looking at where the grass is worn away (where students were naturally walking) and THEN paving those paths instead.

Instead of planning the walkways ahead of time— the walkways at Ohio State University were paved after observing the worn-out grass where students were walking on their own.

It’s the difference between a top down, centrally planned “perfect solution” versus an organic evolution of a system from the bottom up.

As Sivers puts it: