The Need to Talk: AI as Antidote to the Loneliness Epidemic

Posted on by SB Fisher

Loneliness is an epidemic. It’s an epidemic that kills. It may be the greatest public health crisis of the coming decades, and, by its very nature, it remains hidden from most people’s view. Yes everyone feels lonely from time to time, but for some, loneliness is a disease that – even with their best efforts – they are not able to cure. For some people, sure, ‘getting out more’ may just be a case of overcoming bad habits, or taking a chance on a new activity. For many others, it’s a far more sinister and complex problem. Can AI help provide the solution?

Many sectors of society suffer from loneliness. Old people in particular often find themselves isolated, economically and socially, from the world around them. When people stop caring about what you have to say, and feel like your contribution to society is done, it’s hard to make new friends. It’s especially hard for those whose families have died or emigrated. They are left with no one in the world.

Those who suffer mental health problems like depression also find themselves fading out from the world, only to return to find that everyone they used to know in it has gone. The socially anxious may be desperate to make new friends, but the oppressive weight of their symptoms makes it impossible. LGBTQIA+ people often suffer extreme loneliness as their sexuality isolates them from the people around them, especially in cultures where such identification is taboo. 

Even young, mentally well, culturally conformant people might simply have no friends, even though they try, and even though they are likeable. 40% of 16-24 years say they feel lonely, a frankly staggering number. Loneliness strikes everywhere. Some people work every waking hour. Some people have to travel as part of their daily lives. Some people find themselves in a new country with a difficult new language. The modern era has broken apart the foundations of community that knit our little societies together for millenia. 

We humans are social creatures. Historically, humans didn’t travel very far – they barely got beyond the village. The social centres around which they operated – the baths, the brewey, the mudhif, chitalishte, Palace of Culture, and the village green – these local hubs have faded from existence, replaced by the seductive glow of tv screens. 

The rise of late-stage capitalism has siphoned people away from their nuclei and increasingly individualised – and isolated – them. The cubicle existence of the modern world, both in the workplace and in housing (with ever-greater numbers living alone), and the depreciation of the family unit, have created room for loneliness to grow around all members of society. We are not evolutionarily equipped to cope: our cells, our brains, our minds, our hormonal systems weren’t built to live like this.

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

The information age caused the problem, but it may also have the solution. The internet has certainly done much to help people find like-minded groups. Many slip through the nets, and this is where humanity’s next great wonder, AI, may well provide a cure. Chatbots are good at, well, chatting. If you need someone (or something) to talk to, the fact of the modern world is – if you can suspend your Turing-sensitive mind – you now can. 

Chatbots are now sophisticated enough to provide a good simulacrum of conversation, and they are adapted enough to be supportive, informative, helpful, and generally ‘there for you’. Almost every ChatGPT interaction ends with ‘if there is anything else you need.’ Well, some people just need it to be there and, provided Microsoft’s data centres don’t collapse, it always will be.

The powerful possibilities of this are not lost on researchers, charities, and campaigners. Many companies are now seeking to provide AI companions to provide emotional support to those who are vulnerable. One of the leading ones, Replika, promises an AI companion that is unique to you; it records your particular interactions, allowing it to target comforting and kind words, and to grow in understanding of your situation. 

The modern tech world is so often geared towards polarising us and driving us apart. This is a direction of travel that is only going faster with the advent of AI, with algorithms designed to sort us into camps and feed us the ragebait so we engage. It would be good if we could instead take a difficult approach, and focus on creating AIs that are compassionate, and algorithms that are built to bring us together. 

AI companions are a compelling antidote to loneliness, but we must be careful of overindulging in mimicry. Her, a movie which has only grown in cultural importance since its 2013 release, shows the perils of thinking of nothing else but this machine. In that movie, the titular AI was a more fully-fledged ‘consciousness’, but in this age of breached Turing tests – what’s the difference? Imitation companionship is close to the real thing: you still get to express your feelings. You still get someone – or something – else’s perspective on it. 

The best scenario is one where these AI companions map a route back to human-to-human relationships. Perhaps, as they become more sophisticated and more entwined with our lives, AI companions could be the jumping-off point for those with social anxiety or those who are all alone to begin to find like-minded people. An AI bot who someone spends their days talking to should know their interlocutor intimately and, with correctly safeguarded data controls, be able to perhaps ‘introduce’ them to others who feel the same way they do, and give them an opportunity to forge real connections in an increasingly unreal world.

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Tokenomics: A Guide For Crypto Beginners

Posted on by Werner

It’s 2024, the bull market is back (or nearly back), and all of crypto and Web3 is predictably awash once again with new projects launching amidst much fanfare from a horde of new investors and the influencers shilling them. It’s nothing new, and anyone that experienced the ICO boom in 2017 and the bull market of 2020-2021 can tell you that if you don’t know what you’re investing in, you’re going to be left with a big bag of nothing at the end of the day. 

You could have the best project in the world, but if you don’t get the balance right for example between how many tokens you give early investors and when they unlock, your cryptocurrency is doomed. 

A fundamental concept to figure out for both project founders and investors is tokenomics: the study of the supply, demand, distribution, and valuation of cryptocurrencies. Get it right, and you could be the new big thing, get it wrong, and you’re dead in the water as soon as you launch. 

Understanding tokenomics

Let’s talk about the basics before we jump into the pie charts. Even if you are ready to invest, make sure you first understand how a token’s model affects its short-term and long-term price action. 

Here are some essential terms to understand for new retail crypto investors. 

Presales: seed rounds, private rounds and angel investors

Most token models, regardless of their current market cap or utilities, began relatively unknown and required investments from venture capitalists, founders, or early adopters taking a huge risk. This even more so during periods of low market interest, like 2022’s bear market. 

Presales

Tokens are sold to a select group of investors before the public sale. This phase allows the project to raise funds and generate interest before the public launch.

Seed Rounds

Seed round funding is typically provided by angel investors, venture capital firms, or strategic partners. In the context of crypto tokenomics, a portion of the tokens is allocated to seed round investors, usually around 10%. 

Private Round(s)

Private rounds in crypto tokenomics involve the sale of tokens to a limited group of investors – often institutional or accredited investors – before the public sale. This phase allows the project to raise a significant amount of capital and build strategic partnerships. The allocation of tokens in private rounds varies, but typically it’s a smaller percentage than the public sale. Private rounds are sometimes split between private and strategic rounds. 

Public Round

In the public round, tokens are sold to the general public, often following a well-advertised launch event. This model aims to distribute tokens widely and build a community. It’s a crucial step in the fundraising process for a cryptocurrency project. During the public sale, interested individuals can acquire tokens using widely-used cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum. The public sale is essential for raising capital and fostering a sense of community among a diverse group of token holders. 

Here’s an example of a breakdown of Coin A:

Seed Round: Cost $0.03 per token (5% of total supply)

Private Round: Cost $0.05 per token (7.5% of total supply)
Strategic Round: Cost $0.08 per token (5% of total supply)

Public Round: Cost $0.12 per token (12.5% of total supply)

To compensate and return the favor to these investors for helping keep the lights on, tokens are usually reserved before the launch begins, often at a much lower price than what retail investors will pay during the ICO. However, these tokens are not just handed over with no strings attached, which brings us to our next topic:

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

Vesting schedules and token distribution

We don’t want early investors selling their tokens for a fraction of the price retail investors did: this would crash the price due to low overall liquidity. To prevent this, their coins are often released over time, on what is called a vesting schedule. In fact, when a coin is first publicly available during its ICO, a large majority of the full supply is usually still locked up until later, when more demand is present, or locked so it can only be received by common methods such as staking or providing liquidity to the token. 

To understand the distribution system of most tokens, let’s analyze the current degen darling, Solana (SOL), and how it was allocated during its launch.

Credit: Coinbase

Before you ask, SBF purchased his infamous stake in Solana for $0.20 per token during the founding sale, two years before the public auction began in March of 2020.

Notice that only 1.60% of the total supply was released during the ICO on Coinlist, but if we observe the chart below, besides staking rewards, very few new tokens were introduced to the market until December of the same year.

Credit: CoinGecko

Both early investors and ICO buyers consider the longevity of a token when they purchase a brand new token. If the team gets the proportions wrong, or plans to release tokens too quickly or too slowly, private and retail investors would consider the protocol greedy or even assume a slow rug pull (where the team fade away after raising funds) is waiting for them.

Cool story, what’s the takeaway?

When you’re looking up the tokenomics of a token, make sure you take into account the vesting schedule of that coin and plan your purchase accordingly. If you fully send a market buy order, but it’s the day before the early investor tokens unlock, how will your shiny new internet monies change in value? It will put you underwater immediately. 

This information is always immediately available on the project website, or the launchpad for both new and old tokens, so let’s cover what you need to be looking for before you start sprinting the first 100 meters of the 2024 bull market marathon. 

Green flags

Token disclosure: If there is missing data about how many of the tokens exist, how they are allocated post-ICO, the seed sale allocations, etc, steer clear immediately. This lack of information is common with scam and low market cap tokens, and it becomes an expensive lesson in doing your research if you impulsively buy newly tokens or random coins on trendy launchpads.

Supply and demand match up: even if the tokenomics looks great and there’s high demand, does the token actually have a use case? Will it sit in your wallet collecting dust until it’s sold later? Because if it is, that’s the case for everyone else as well. Functions such as staking, yield farming, and burn mechanics dictate how much of the supply is actively being productive or locked up, lowering the supply actively being traded.  

Team and community: Even if the token model looks promising and its use case is clear, are the community and team on the same page? A successful tokenomics model aligns the interests of the core project team with those of the community and early investors. This is hard to measure without going deep into the project’s Discord, Telegram group, or Twitter comments, but is time well spent. The difference between a hidden gem with 100x potential and a complete scam is often community involvement.

Red flags

Market cap is unsustainable: Have you ever looked at a token’s value and thought, “wow, this is criminally undervalued, why is that?” Immediately calculate or look up the fully diluted value (FDV), a key metric, which accounts for tokens still vesting or not yet active such as staking rewards or treasury holdings. 

Slow rugs or dishonest founders will try to mislead traders into thinking they’ve found a diamond in the rough, by gaming the system that ranks their token by market cap to appear undervalued. However, when you see a new token with an FDV worth a billion, tread carefully. 

Unclear use-case: Is it a gaming token, a utility token, or a meme? The use of a token will determine if its distribution model is thought out or copy pasted from DOGEcoin’s whitepaper. A gaming token that sold too much to seed investors? Prepare to fall down an escalator if the game doesn’t have enough players. A governance token that’s mostly held by founders or a DAO? Don’t expect your vote on proposals to be impactful. Consider if the distribution matches its use-case for long term success. And if you’re unsure, compare its model to one of a similar token.

Anon team: While it’s common in crypto for teams to protect their anonymity, this lack of transparency is also a risk that needs to be weighed carefully, as it opens investors up to new risks like rug pulls and just blatant scams. 

Remember

Crypto is about educating yourself and being your own bank. This means due diligence is paramount if you want to succeed as an investor or a founder.  

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Know Your Character – Decentralised KYC, SBTs and On-Chain Identity Metrics

Posted on by SB Fisher

Who are you? The first question of all encounters. You want to know who you are talking to, and where they are from. All exchange, linguistic, economic, and cultural, is built on knowing the other. It is the basis of kinship, and of civilization, underpinning all our social systems.

KYC, meaning Know Your Customer (or Know Your Client), is a legal requirement for all financial institutions providing services for their customers. They have to know who is the beneficiary of an account before offering their products. 

Why KYC is Important

When you open a bank account you want to make sure only you can access it. When it comes to securities trading though, the same is true. All financial institutions must be compliant with KYC regulation, which often demands customers to furnish their personal information.

The same is true for crypto. As crypto emerged as an asset class and millions began being traded, most governments were quick to ensure all CEX activities were regulated, and users of Binance, Kraken, and Coinbase et al. had to supply details in order to buy and sell crypto. 

Although this was to be expected, many in crypto were quick to abhor this threat of being ‘doxxed’. For cryptoanarchist and cypherpunk crypto users, the demand for personal identification was an affront to the peer-to-peer electronic cash system that was set to overthrow these centralised demands. 

Pseudonymity wasn’t a side benefit, it was the benefit of using decentralised ledgers. The attitude prevails today, with many ‘whales’ fighting to keep their on-chain wealth anonymous. Others believe in the sacred nature of privacy, and the promise of blockchain, implemented correctly and adopted widely, to build stronger data protection systems and individual access rights. More on that later when we look at decentralised KYC.

KYC is more than just overbearing governments ensuring tax dollar revenue (although that’s a big part of it). It’s about asking the question ‘who are you?’. Just as you don’t want to play in a poker game with people you can’t trust, and thus in a game you don’t know is fair, KYC ensures a level, legal, regulated playing field for everyone participating in the ‘casino’ of stocks, shares and crypto. And, despite ‘no KYC’ often promoted as a benefit to the crypto community (and it is), having KYC is a fundamental need for the processes of our modern society to work.

The Problems with KYC

The problem is, KYC solutions are expensive, inefficient, siloed, manipulable, and under threat from multiple attack vectors. Currently, KYC systems require the user to manually upload documents and sometimes selfies (every single time). That data is then stored on each individual company’s data servers, all of which have their own set of security issues, compliance requirements, and maintenance costs. Companies in control of such sensitive data can misuse it, sell it, or lose control of it to a hacker. Data is power, and KYC means you trust your data with a lot of unknown, unaccountable actors in order to engage with the modern economy.

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

Why Decentralised KYC Will Matter

Decentralised KYC is a method through which the blockchain could in theory store, secure and even broadcast a user’s KYC data to overcome these obstacles. A user could control their private data and broadcast it through blockchains integrated with financial institutions, meaning they don’t have to continually input their details and – more importantly – their details are not held by the financial institution. They can just check the validity of the KYC in a user’s wallets, which could be denoted by a Soulbound Token (SBT) issued by a trusted authority – say a national government. 

Through this method, a multi-layered problematic bureaucracy could be done away with in a single stroke. It would massively increase data hygiene and sanctity, and allow end users to simply sign transactions to verify that they are allowed to enter the game, while remaining pseudo-anonymous to everyone except the issuing authority. If the Revenue Service has issued you a tax resident Soulbound Token, you could instantly trade on any exchange without further KYC checks.

This ability to consecrate on-chain identity in a pseudonymous fashion is a powerful future-force for social engagement. Say you graduated from a university, you could be issued a Soulbound Token. Then, any future events for ‘Yale graduates’ could be ticketed directly through that token. 

You could use the same process for paying an inner-city congestion charge, or even crossing national borders. With widespread adoption of decentralised ledgers, this use of crypto as an access control token operates not just on a monetary level, but a systems one. A cryptographically-secure identity card that doesn’t tell anyone your name, only that you are legitimate.

You Are Your Wallet

It’s an exciting, if faintly unnerving, future. It’s not an enormous leap to consider how such centrally issued SBTs could be used to confer ‘status’ on individuals, permanently and irrevocably inscribed on-chain, married to an account-based money system like a CBDC that tracks exactly what you spend and where. For now, such systemic wiring of our bureaucracy onto the blockchain is a long way away. In finance, we will see the first movements. And KYC is exactly the environment where these decentralised verification and access control systems are being pioneered. 

Your wallet will eventually do far more than just hold your wealth. It will hold your entire life’s achievements. A single private key that is the access code to your life. A digital resumé of your soul, locked forever to your person. The benefits are legion, the implications a little scary, and the results life-changing. If you ever hear the question ‘what’s in your wallet”, you will answer “I am”.

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