1  # Vision
  2  
  3  Today, when you are first exposed to Status, you might see an instant
  4  messenger and wonder whats the big deal? After all it’s just another
  5  instant messenger right? What makes Status different and more
  6  importantly why should I bother working on it?
  7  
  8  If I had to answer in one word, I would say Decentralization.
  9  
 10  Now, that word might not have much meaning to you, it might even sound
 11  like a buzz word, but in our context, Decentralization has the potential
 12  to fundamentally change the way we socially organize and to rebuild the
 13  Internet as it was intended. With Decentralization, we are changing the
 14  very foundation of civilization, providing a new infrastructural base
 15  that impacts everything else above, from our greatest Institutions to
 16  our daily social interactions.
 17  
 18  Status is our gateway to this new world, let me explain.
 19  
 20  # Why I got into Ethereum?
 21  
 22  At the time of writing I am 31, I was lucky enough to be born in the
 23  developed world and am old enough to grow up in a world where internet
 24  and personal computing wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is today. I, like you,
 25  had a front row seat to the birth of the Internet and perhaps like you,
 26  I spent the majority of my childhood with networked computers. The idea
 27  of instant, cheap and global communications was a given, and this is the
 28  lens in which I viewed the world.
 29  
 30  It wasn’t long before I began to start observing my environment, we way
 31  we collectively decided to do everything, whether that was in school,
 32  seeing my parents jump through hoops around taxation, dealing with
 33  receipts, banking, voting, dealing with car registrations and even
 34  setting up companies. In time, all of which I would experience myself. I
 35  didn’t understand why things were like this, having an grown up with the
 36  Internet - all of it seemed senselessly tedious. Couldn’t we do this all
 37  online? Wouldn’t life be better if we could do this from the comfort of
 38  our homes? Imagine how much time we’d save\! and how precise things
 39  would be\! No more waiting in line, never-ending form filling or
 40  traveling great distances just to see a person who tells you ‘no’.
 41  
 42  This is my firsthand experience with a concept called **transaction
 43  costs**. It took me awhile to realize these monolithic, lumbering and
 44  inefficient Institutions was *actually the best we could do*. That all
 45  these needless jobs and their apathetic attitudes, these pens that
 46  barely worked, the paper torn from some rainforest were all just
 47  symptoms of operating the machinery of civilization. These dry, boring
 48  legal systems is what enabled us to collectively scale beyond tribes.
 49  They allowed us to build nations and are the very foundation of all our
 50  modern accomplishments, it allowed humans to begin to exploit the
 51  division of labour, maximizing the surface area in which we explore the
 52  natural world.
 53  
 54  In fact low [transaction
 55  costs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_cost) are so
 56  fundamental to economic growth, it is expected that just a 0.1%
 57  reduction in transaction costs quadruples a country’s wealth — the
 58  difference between Argentina and Switzerland. Source: [M Kovac and R
 59  Spruk (2015)](http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1744137415000077)
 60  
 61  20 years later, everyone in the developed world is connected to the
 62  internet, they have more powerful computers in their pocket, yet these
 63  systems are still largely unchanged, for the most part, people go
 64  through life thinking they are as constant and are as unchanging as the
 65  ground they walk on, or the air they breathe. Even with yesterday’s
 66  technology we could make the shift to digital world, but it seems our
 67  current systems are setup to expand their bureaucracy with minimal
 68  increases in efficiency. An attempt to scale with our population and
 69  demands. People are starting to see our institutions buckle under scale,
 70  their legitimacy is starting to be questioned.
 71  
 72  What more is the developed world only reaches a small fraction of our
 73  global population. The vast majority of trade is done in ‘dark markets’
 74  and the vast majority of people are in third world countries, their
 75  governments have larger corruption issues than our own. These
 76  populations are side-stepping desktop computers in favour of mobile
 77  first, are they to follow in our exact footsteps? How can we
 78  simultaneously upgrade our systems and provide them with modern legal
 79  technology which is corruption-resistant, cheaper, less bureaucratic and
 80  more efficient?
 81  
 82  Bitcoin, like most people, was my first taste of a paradigm shift. The
 83  first widely-adopted crypto-economic mechanism that provided the legal
 84  abstraction of money. It had effectively created Digital Scarcity,
 85  Bitcoin had provided a solution to the double-spending problem.
 86  Furthermore, it had created the Blockchain, a socially immutable
 87  database that could operate in hostile environments, the public domain,
 88  but with a fixed set of operations. Bitcoin had provided fair and
 89  inexpensive access for anyone wanting to participate and left a history
 90  that anyone could independently audit, a property that fades the action
 91  of book-burning of power regimes. It allows people to send value through
 92  the internet without an intermediary, without questions or gate-keeping,
 93  privately and securely - eroding top down control of institutions.
 94  
 95  Then Ethereum came along, replacing a fixed instruction set and minimal
 96  scripting language, moving away from “stored procedures” and replacing
 97  it with a Turing complete Virtual Machine. With Ethereum, the Blockchain
 98  became a world computer, capable of running Smart Contracts (arbitrary
 99  code), for a price. This incremental innovation opens the flood gates on
100  what’s possible with Programmable Money.
101  
102  We are witnessing the birth of a new trustless medium in which to
103  execute not just code, but law in. We’re giving anyone who is willing to
104  participate fair access to not just create new policy’s that can be used
105  between friends, but to create new ways of socially organizing that can
106  be deployed instantly and used globally, creating mass movements. We’re
107  moving into a world where agreements we join are not just default’s when
108  born, but contracts we enter into voluntarily, we can reclaim our
109  sovereignty.
110  
111  # Why Status?
112  
113  But for any of that to happen, we need to make this technology
114  accessible and ubiquitous for the people, as it currently stands it is
115  largely dependent on a technologists skillset. That’s where Status comes
116  in. Status goal is the mass-adoption of the best **public** Programmable
117  Blockchain, at the time of writing, this is Ethereum mainnet. Private
118  Blockchains gain their strength by resting on the existing legal
119  infrastructure, while this approach has its merits, private chains do
120  little to move civilization forward and stagnate the redesign of systems
121  that approximate and surpass our existing institutions.
122  
123  If Ethereum is a World Computer, then Status aims to be a Operating
124  System, or Window Manager. It is the visual expression of the Ethereum
125  network, a user-friendly interface between people and machines alike (as
126  Ethereum makes no distinction with it’s address identifiers - Smart
127  Contracts are first-class citizens).
128  
129  Status provides a way to find and transact with DApps and users.
130  
131  We are a mobile-first experience, as of 2014 more people are on
132  smartphones and more time is spent on smartphones than laptop/desktops -
133  smartphones are the new personal computer. Status originally started as
134  Web 3.0 Browser, a ‘Mist for Mobile’, and is currently expressed as an
135  instant messenger, as a third of all time spent on a smartphone is
136  within an instant messenger, and instant messengers have the highest
137  amount of monthly active users, this allows us to increase the surface
138  area of adoption, allowing users to interact with Ethereum on a daily
139  basis.
140  
141  Status should always adapt to how humans interact with their personal
142  computers on both the hardware and software levels, this includes the
143  inevitable change from Smartphones to Mixed Reality devices.
144  
145  TODO and as such we should be striving for the best user experience
146  possible, some guiding principles
147  
148  But Status is more than a product, it is an experiment in organization.
149  
150  # Moving away from Product, to thinking to Networks
151  
152  Of course, at the time of writing - designing, developing and shipping a
153  high quality Ethereum client is our first and foremost goal, but this is
154  just the expression of a belief in public Blockchains. This belief
155  exists in our collective minds, and together, our collective forms a
156  belief network.
157  
158  This belief is mass adoption of a public Programmable Blockchain, or
159  Ethereum, and as such is not bound to Status as a product alone. Our job
160  is to strengthen and grow this network, create the means on how to
161  govern it and give birth to new Networks, just as the Ethereum network
162  has given birth to Status. This is the strength of open source
163  development and permission-less participation.
164  
165  Forks in open source are something of a misnomer, instead code should be
166  viewed more like cultural text for an ideology. ‘Forks’ represent a
167  shift in thought and give rise to new networks of belief.
168  
169  Open source projects historically have had a hard time to fund
170  themselves. Often they are carried by pure belief alone by a loose
171  collective of people who found each other through the internet. Often is
172  the case they must support themselves by support and consultation (which
173  disrupts and distracts from original belief), or depend on donations
174  from supports. If successful, maintainers may find their demand and
175  complaints outstrip their ability to offer support, there is simply no
176  means to scale with their users, except to encourage more developers and
177  work on it fulltime, but we all have lives to maintain.
178  
179  Tokens offer a way to commoditize beliefs and incentivizes software
180  users to have an active role in the software governance and evangelism.
181  This has interesting side-benefits, we hypothesize this will become
182  network effects on steroids. If you’re having difficulty with this
183  concept, take a common currency, such as the USD, this is only valuable
184  because both parties believe in it, there reasons may be varied, but all
185  stems from it’s legitimacy, or it’s belief in the value of that coin,
186  even though today this is increasingly becoming backed by debt, rather
187  than any tangible store of value.
188  
189  Our role is helping find and testing forms of decentralized governance,
190  to recreate typical functions found in organizations and adapt them to
191  work out in the open, in hostile environments.
192  
193  # The Future
194  
195  Discuss the Fourth Industrial Revolution (fulltime jobs thing of past,
196  freelancers), paint potential imagery of the future.
197  
198  # Meaning and Values