How ZenCash Can Get An Edge

What Sociology and Graph Theory Can Teach Us On Getting an Advantage in the community

Disclaimer

Because this topic is very complex I realized early on that it would have been a struggle for me to keep this article short while still communicating the central ideas behind the strategic suggestions I’m about to give. I still am doing my best to keep this article as short as possible. Bare with it please.

The Power Of Questioning

Asking questions allows us to make great discoveries. By asking what would happen when a government decided to separate religion from the state we were able to create America. By asking how human beings could fly instead of believing it to be impossible, the Wright brothers were able to create the first airplane. The same is true for Bitcoin and the blockchain. By asking how to dismantle large corrupt organizations both Bitcoin and the blockchain were created.

Questions help generate rebellions, new overarching believes and revolutionary activities. I would say that questioning is human’s most powerful activity. When it was honed upon society greatly changed. It shouldn’t be underestimated that questions have the power to revolutionize ZenCash. I must ask a question of strategy. So far ZenCash has been using the strategy that many of the earlier blockchains have employed. It generally goes in these steps:

Create a whitepaper Chat with the community and build it Launch the cryptocurrency Chat with the small community until it can grow more

While there’s nothing particularly wrong with that way of doing things, with the way the team is currently resourced with developer share, attention wise and monetarily, most of the top 20 cryptocurrencies have a cumulative advantage that would make the current strategy less effective over time. Therefore I decided that working on strategy would be the most important thing to talk about.

Strategy Requirements

What can ZenCash do to gain an advantage over all other cryptocurrencies? Upon doing research I realize that this is a very complex question to answer. Not only do we need to consider that the technical focus of the ZenCash project, we also need to consider resource restraints. There aren’t many full-time contributors, there aren’t huge corporations backing Zen, the name goes largely unknown throughout the community and Zen doesn’t have a massive market cap. Building the community and focusing on convincing miners to switch is a good start, as it’s found the most loyal following that could allow for a more intense strategy to be employed, but won’t allow Zen to reach a top 10 spot any time soon. Especially because Zen’s main competitor, Zcash, is doing the exact same thing on a larger scale.

A good strategy for ZenCash needs to meet the following criteria. I give reasons why along with them:

Needs to increase overall awareness of the currency

Reason: The more people know about ZenCash the more the value goes up, the more the value goes up the more money we’d have for active full-time developers.

Needs to gain overarching support from the general developer community

Reason: There’s a huge gap between creating an idea and releasing that idea. That poses problems because its harder to get feedback quickly.

Needs to be automatic and compounding over time, where there are many proactive aggregaters. People that contribute to the currency to help increase the pricing of Zen and clear incentive for them to do so.

Reason(long) : This creates a feedback loop that makes ZenCash more popular and advanced over time. The best example would be Ethereum’s smart contract technology. By creating a simple smart contract language that mimics Java and Javascript, then teaching people of all the major ways to benefit from both creating and using smart contracts, developers sought to create new ways of profiting from Ethereum. This came in the form of ICOs, but it’s going to manifest in many alternative ways such as Golem and Prism.

This creates a feedback loop that makes ZenCash more popular and advanced over time. The best example would be Ethereum’s smart contract technology. By creating a simple smart contract language that mimics Java and Javascript, then teaching people of all the major ways to benefit from both creating and using smart contracts, developers sought to create new ways of profiting from Ethereum. This came in the form of ICOs, but it’s going to manifest in many alternative ways such as Golem and Prism. Not all of that work is being done by the Ethereum foundation nor Consensys, but from 3rd parties.

Development needs to eventually become simple enough for an undergraduate computer scientist to be able to contribute with ease.

Reason: If the barrier to entry for this blockchain is too high many developers that may be motivated to apply a base level of skills might be discouraged to contribute. By having a low barrier to entry you both encourage developers that aren’t quite PHD level to contribute, and you encourage grey-hat hackers to find all of the vulnerabilities.

At the end of the day people need to have their hand on ZenCash more than usual. Extremely high volume.

Reason: Usually this means ZenCash has a use other than a store of value. The more volume it has the more likely it could be integral to everybody’s life.

It must be responsive to varying conditions

Reason: It’s impossible to accurately predict the future. Generally one can get at max 60% to 70% accuracy on a prediction with massive amounts of data. To effectively ensure more success a good strategic system needs to be able to adapt quickly at a grassroot level.

After doing deep research I’ve found a set of methods that would help 5 out of of the 6 strategic requirements. Each action would compliment the current activities and extend them well beyond what they currently are. They need some background knowledge to fully understand why I’ve bundled them into this long article.

The Cumulative Advantage

Duncan Watts, the mathematician, computer scientist and social scientist that did the mathematical proof for the 6 degrees of separation, aggressively researched how people behave in large crowds. He found that while individuals had their own preferences and ways of thinking, people acted very differently when introduced to a crowd.

Mona Lisa, the painting created by Leonardo Di Vinci is a subtle example of group irrationality. If anybody decides to visit the art museum it’s held in, they’ll walk by it and realize that there’s nothing particularly AMAZING about it. It is a skilled painting, everybody can’t deny that, yet it isn’t explicitly better than every other painting of that period. A normal observer would just dismiss the averageness of the painting by saying that they aren’t an expert, and therefore wouldn’t know why it’s so superior. The normal observer would just accept its superiority without knowing why. Though Leonardo Di Vinci was popular, he wasn’t extremely popular during the 18th century. In 1911 a random sequence of events played out.

As stated inside of Duncan Watt’s book Everything is Obvious:

“On August 21, 1911, a disgruntled Louvre employee named Vincenzo Peruggia hid in a broom closet until closing time and then walked out of the museum with the Mona Lisa tucked under his coat. A proud Italian, Peruggia apparently believed that the Mona Lisa ought rightly to be displayed in Italy, not France, and he was determined to repatriate the long-lost treasure personally. Like many art thieves, however, Peruggia discovered that it was much easier to steal a famous work of art than to dispose of it. After hiding it in his apartment for two years, he was arrested while attempting to sell it to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. But although he failed in his mission, Peruggia succeeded in catapulting the Mona Lisa into a new category of fame.”

The random event captured the attention of both the French and the Italians. The French were amazed by the bold theft and the Italians were captivated by the Patriotism he exhibited and the popularity rose among the two groups. Before returning to the French owner it was shown all around Italy helping it gain notoriety. Other people and groups began referencing the same painting over time for their own purposes. The main reason was that it was already inside of the general population’s psyche, which helped propel what ever message they were attempting to get across. Each time granting them better narratives, each time implanting the painting deeper into public psyche. Over time people just believed that the Mona Lisa is one of the best paintings of that time period without having much extra thought behind it. This is a very powerful feedback loop that repeated heavily over time propelling the fame of Mona Lisa. If this had happened with any other painting and not just Mona Lisa, that painting would likely gain the same fame of Mona Lisa. It’s very likely that the same things happened to all of the famous people and things like Facebook and even Shakespeare. Groups with a reasonable output and strategy timed at the right time were the ones that gained an advantage in many industries. People then generally — a word I’m going to use because there are always exceptions — circularly rationalized that the best in any given field “is the best because it has always been the best”

Engineering an Advantage

Seeing that Bitcoin, Ethereum and Even Zcash have the advantage right now makes it reasonable to believe that it’s impossible to keep up. They already have the media attention, corporate sponsorships and the lion-share of miners doing PoW. How could a smaller cryptocurrency keep up and get an advantage where it clearly doesn’t have one? Using concepts from graph theory, the Mathew Effect, and the hot hands concept — is a fun concept — can give us clues.

It’s best to look no further than growth hackers. Their role is to help a product grow its userbase and actually gain a cumulative advantage over time. Growth Hackers helped companies like AirBnB, Facebook, Paypal and Spotify exist today. Growth hackers use engineering might, special strategies and tactics to expand the number of users and application would have over time. The idea is that a self-perpetuating machine is built and nurtured.

Doing such a thing for cryptocurrency is slightly more difficult than a normal product. You need to think about how a magnitude of people with separate knowledge will manipulate the currency, all of the various attack vectors that could be created from upgrading the product, and the risk that would be created by bringing in too many users too early. You also have to think about getting enough skilled developers involved inside of the project quickly enough and what each of the other competitors will do to pull users away. On top of that there’s legal troubles and pump and dump schemes a cryptocurrency lead has to keep track of.

Here’s the thing, We can ignore a lot of these problems individually. As I’ll explain a little bit later in this article and more in-depth in a much later article, it’s impossible to measure every variable as a central and individual entity. The best option is to use bounded rationality so people in small clusters can find the best solution to different problems. This works much like how capitalism does, and will allow each group to not specifically have to care about every detail of the entire system. Instead local problems are solved. This brings me to the magical thing we can learn from basketball players, the hot hands phenomenon.

Hot Hands and Cumulative Advantage

Wikipeadia defines that Hot Hand Phenomena:

“The hot hand phenomenon is the sometimes fallacious belief that a person who has experienced success with a seemingly random event has a greater chance of further success in additional attempts. The concept has been applied primarily to sports, such as basketball. While previous success at a skill-based athletic task, such as making a shot in basketball, can change the psychological behavior and subsequent success rate of a player, researchers for many years did not find evidence for a “hot hand” in practice. However, later research has questioned whether the belief is indeed a fallacy.[1][2] More recent studies using modern statistical analysis have shown that there is evidence for the “hot hand” in some sporting activities.”

What many researchers have found is that while the hot hand phenomenon isn’t necessarily true when counting the number of scores each player gets. The hot hands phenomenon does still indeed happen. It does easily occur while observing the number of passes and assist each team does over a season. The researchers found that the more a player or team passed the more likely they were to pass later on in both the game/ season. The hot hand didn’t necessary apply to scoring for each individual, but the number of collaborations they did. Here’s the amazing statistic: If we look at the top NBA Teams in 2016–2017 season we’ll see that a huge portion of the highest ranked teams also passed and assisted each other the most. In fact, the number of passes and assist directly correlated to the rank of the team. The top team in the Western Conference (Golden State) passed and assisted the most, and the top team in the eastern conference (Boston) passed and assisted the second most. If you look at the correct charts you’ll see that this correlation is pretty consistent with the rank of each team. The only exception being the teams that have many “Star” players on them, where the common strategy is to have people that are 100% the best in their position playing each game, then passing is considerably less incentivized.

I find that this is a two fold reason:

If a player doesn’t have openings to score or wouldn’t be able to score effectively given his skills and/or circumstances. That player decides to pass the ball, temporarily confusing the surrounding players, therefore creating more openings. The ball would then be inside of the hands of a player that has a higher odd of making a basket (55% is an amazing odd). If not that player would continue the chain until that odd is considered more likely.

The goal is that the chain would continue until the odds of making a basket reaches 55% compared to hypothetically 25% under normal circumstances. If this continues each time it’s time for a given team to score they’re more likely to score each time. Passing increases the odds of making a basket each time. This is largely the case when both teams are relatively equal in skill.

If we take two groups of friends that have an equal capacity to work, where each member has a specialization and specific point of view, we’d see that the friend group that helps each other more probably accomplishes more overall. That’s because each time a given specialization is necessarily for one friend’s problems that can’t be easily solved by another person, they can get assistance from another friend to solve the problem. Assistance and helping other people can be more controlled than getting guaranteed wins and successes, and that activity can lead to more wins and successes.

How can that apply?

This entire section is about utilizing this concept and the concept most major companies used over time.

They use and ride existing networks to get more of a following. Examples:

Paypal — They did payments for Ebay to acquire users

AirBnB — They let early users share their hosting ads to craigslist

Spotify — They used Facebook’s API to show the song friends are playing on the sidebar

Facebook — They moved between highly connected schools to enjoy their powerful social networks. If two schools happened to have a high relation to each other via business and/or research, they would go to those schools back-to-back.

They assist the people they need to propel their service

Google — worked with various browsers to become the defacto search engine and offered help with web standards and very complex web development

Amazon — helped book stores sell their inventory on-line before taking the market entirely with their own book production system

Microsoft — Worked with major manufacturers to make sure their operating system was compatible with hardware.

Here are 5 ideas to utilize their strategies for ZenCash:

We utilize undergrad and masters computer science students

College students have a lot of free time. Time most adults don’t usually have because of varying responsibilities they have. Because students have free time they’re more likely to be able to contribute reasonable work if they know how.

We split ZenCash into multiple components. Instead of having everything inside of one place we create a separate library for each major piece of the cryptocurrency. For instance, we separate the p2p library and work on that separately. It would allow contributers to work on parts that make up their specialization.

Some college students actually have professional level knowledge in specific domains like networking or complexity science. By guiding them on ways they can contribute, some actually will.

We create tutorials for students

By going through teachers and tutors and presenting ZenCash related tutorials those teachers and tutors will propagate those tutorials to potentially skilled students as learning material. That would bring students to the project.

We rebuilt components of ZenCash with Python just like Ethererum has with PyEthereum and DevP2Pwe rebuilt components of ZenCash with Python just like Ethererum has with PyEthereum and DevP2P

Python is very easy to read and has a relatively low barrier to entry because of it. If you have problems with speed you can easily utilize C++ libraries with Cython to speed necessary segments, much like the library Uvloop has, which can sometimes help yield better results than competing platforms. The development times would be a lot shorter and ZenCash can get feedback faster.

ZenCash could also get better access to college students that want to help out but can’t

ZenCash creates a huge list of use cases that outside parties can reference

Some outside parties will create apps about such use-case scenarios. In doing so the value of ZenCash will grow exponentially.

How are these ideas related to Cumulative Advantage and the hot hands phenomena? While forcibly getting more developers is hard to do, and hoping that developers that are proficient in networking, C, cryptography and overall blockchain tech would stumble onto contributing to ZenCash is hard as well, we’re doing something similar to basketball teams that rank the highest in their number of assist. We’re giving others more capacity to contribute, separating the problems contributors would solve — making it easier to make small incremental changes –, and helping an idle resource (students) boost their resume and grow their skills. Hypothetically that would being more students to ZenCash (even just a small percentage). We become an aggregator of multiple developers and get more work out faster. This can be elevated to aggregating proactive communities over time to develop ZenCash at record speed.

It pays to be the blue guy in the center

I understand that this article was somewhat long. There’s still many things I need to cover. Things like python development methods to convince developers, I still need to explain the limits to this approach and explain what bounded rationality really means. Those will be be coming shortly after. Please bare in mind that these articles take a while to create. As I narrow down the process to creating them I reason that it will take me about a week to create each article, with the hope to make them more insightful and mathematically and logically rigorous over time.

PEACE!