Welcome to the birth of a new digital marketplace

Wind the clock back three decades. Pick a random kid off the street and ask them what they want to be when they grow up.

I’d bet a hundred dollars on them saying “Astronaut”.

It would just make sense. The shuttle missions were still in full swing and Tom Hanks had charmed our pants off in Apollo 13. By 2000, we had a permanent fucking space station in low-Earth orbit, with astronauts and cosmonauts breaking bread in microgravity.

It was hard not to fall in love with the idea of life in zero-G.

Today, if you did that same exercise, you’d get a different answer. Kids are still interested in stars, sure — but they want to be YouTube stars. YouTube wasn’t even a thing until 2005, but it’s captured the hearts and minds of children just like the space shuttle did.

Technology is weird that way. It doesn’t just change the here and now: it changes the whole arc for what we aspire to become.

Nowadays, it’s not even clear you’d want to “become” any one thing. No: it’s the age of the hustler. You pick up fares on Lyft for a few hours and hammer out Monday’s article for Substack the next. You pull a freelance web gig on Upwork, drive over to that house you were planning to flip next month, hit that gym where you trade hours of personal training for consulting on SEO optimization, and collapse into a shivering wreck when you roll back home thinking sometimes life is too much grind and not enough rise.

But then you do it again.

We are individualist creators, bargainers, dealmakers, and promoters. And technology is going to carry that spirit into the next century.

The future will be home to a grand serverpunk bazaar — and I’m going to show you how.

In 2008, a bunch of overconfident gamblers crashed the global economy and made many of us very angry. One of us was so angry, in fact, that they anonymously published a 9-page white-paper on how to completely sidestep a system where you’re forced to trust in century-old financial institutions that clearly didn’t deserve it.

This was the birth of cryptocurrency.

Over the years people have started treating these currencies like dutch tulips, sure, but many of them are still at their core a giant fuck you to the Wall Street powers that be.

It started with Bitcoin, which lets you trade and settle transactions without needing to to trust anything except the integrity of a network and the validity of computer code (which, yes, is still a stretch — but is still probably better than trusting a gang of suits).

To record and settle transactions, computers running Bitcoin software listen for transactions, write them up into a “block” of new records, and then do a bunch of work vying for the chance to have their block added to the global ledger that everyone shares.

This Proof of Work ends up consuming more electricity than some nation-states — but the new trustless economy doesn’t start and stop with Bitcoin. Cardano and Ethereum, among others, are making of use of something called Proof of Stake — which is basically just a “put your money where your mouth is” method of writing new transactions to the blockchain. You get the chance to write to the chain as long as you own some of the currency: if you own 1%, you’ll write 1% of the time and get a reward for doing the work each time.

This can lead to some very lucrative opportunities.

What happens when you have currency but don’t exactly have the technical know-how or resources to start running a node in one of these massive global financial networks? You have the power to write transactions and get rewarded for that work, but it’s sitting there unused. That’s a problem.

What people might naturally do here is pool a bit of their money together and then delegate it to someone who knows how to stake it. This is called a stake pool. Once rewards are paid out, the person running the stake pool splits it up and pays it back out to the folks who put up the funds.

This might happen in a variety of ways, but in my opinion, Cardano does it the most thoughtfully. In their system, delegating the money in your wallets to a stake pool is a first-class notion of their protocol. Their vision — and what is happening before our own eyes — is the growth and expansion of a competitive marketplace, where stake pool operators all over the world are running nodes and trying to convince the average Joe to delegate their currency to them.

Which bring us to our intrepid entrepreneurs, and the stake pool zoo.

The Cardano stake pool marketplace is as vibrant as it is weird — and there’s a reason why.

The main thing you want out of stake pool is the chance of getting rewards on your staked currency, which means you’re looking for stake pool operators who can keep their hardware running reliably, who don’t take an unfair cut of the rewards, and who you can reach just in case something goes wrong.

There are a lot of ways to reassure you of those things.

Garden Eden personally pledges $5 million worth of currency into their node, so you know they’re serious about collecting rewards on that bad boy. This means high server uptime, a supercharged connection, and a continuous source of power. Anybody delegating to them will probably see those same reliable rewards. Plus, they offer educational content on how to run your own pool — which is kind of dope.

But wait, what about the Dawn pool? It’s run by a dude who’s been contributing to free and open source software for years — plus, he’s published an investment strategy guide to help people out in this strange new world. Maybe that’s a trustworthy bet?

Wait, hey, what about this whole bunch of pools that donate a portion of rewards to charities? That might be even more convincing!

The world out there is rich and varied. In a perfect competitive market where the major factor in differentiation is branding and personality, it’s almost designed to be.

And you can help keep it that way.

You’ve got an old PC rig collecting dust in storage, and you buy fresh SSDs and an Ethernet cable from your local tech shop to get up to spec. You hook that up in your garage (which you don’t use anway), start up a block-producing node, and start staking your money — but to get more shots at writing blocks and collecting rewards, you need to convince a couple of other people to join you. You start a Facebook group and your friends hop in. Over the course of the week, you’ve got a nice operation going.

Or, wait, no —

You’ve been working on your off-the-grid hideaway in the middle of the wilderness. You’ve got so many solar panels that your batteries can’t even hold all the power you generate. Instead of letting it go to waste, you boot up a lightweight laptop and start up a Cardano node. SOLAR’s going to be how you show up on the ticker tape. The folks on eco-Twitter eat that shit up and hop into your pool, and you mention they can hit up your Telegram group at any time if they see issues.

Or maybe —

You notice that a shopping mall’s construction crews have engineered a neglected, abandoned room that nobody uses. A development company threatens to nuke your apartment and evict you and you decide, fuck this, and take back control over your life by just moving into this spot and hooking up to the free power supply. A couple of friends loan you a server rack from back in the day and you plug in, setting up a Cardano node. You drop into IRC channels and after-hours anarchosocialist forums and tell people to join your pool, get paid, and fuck the system. They do, even though they know you risk getting shut down any day by the local property enforcement department.

Or how about —

You’re a student at an art school. You set up a server in a sculpture like you saw they did at the Hochschule für Gestaltung a while back.

It’s a masterpiece of steel, bronze, silicon, and cable. You consider minting an NFT to mark its creation, but first you use it to host a node. Your Instagram followers, inspired, ask if they can join your pool. Of course they can.

You’ll only take a small fee.

The new side-hustle is the hustle of the stake pool operator, and you can make the responsibility your own however you might imagine.

But it’s not just for you. Yeah, it can be lucrative, and you can help others cash in on rewards, too. But the important thing is, the wider this marketplace is, and the more people involved, the more decentralized it is.

No one party can have a lot of power when everybody’s trying to get in on the action. We already have a situation where massive institutions are muscling in and starting up metric assloads of nodes. They are sitting on a lot of money, and thus can gain a lot of power.

Binance has already set up god knows how many pools. And who knows what the other exchanges are up to?

That is unacceptable.

You — the individual maker and doer — can take that power back and make some cash while you’re at it. The system is engineered so that the more of a hustler you are, and the more self-interested you are, the better it works.

Individuals and their social communities need to be the centers of this new serverpunk economy, but that means we need to step up.

So. When are you getting started?

Resources

Full disclosure: I definitely own my fair share of Ada, and yes, I want everyone to join the network so that its integrity is maintained. (I mean, a price bump wouldn’t hurt either, if you know what I mean — but that’s not exactly what I’m going for).

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Source: https://medium.com/geekculture/the-grand-serverpunk-bazaar-bfff3d914869?source=rss——-8—————–cryptocurrency