Decentralizing Access to Opportunity

Intro

If you lived before the internet, you might remember a time when opportunities were location dependent. A time when the US was dubbed the land of opportunity, and many were flocking there in search of a better economic situation, one that gave them more opportunities to prosper.

Access to opportunities, historically

Up until the 20th century & the introduction of the steam engine, it used to take from 6 up to 14 weeks to cross the Atlantic. By 1907, this was slashed down to 4.5 days, and yet further slashed by the introduction of commercial trans-atlantic flights.

Instead of days, crossing the Atlantic would now take you less than 10 hours, but the one-way ticket would set you back ~3k$ in today’s money. Since then, most improvement was in terms of prices, but the main issue remained…

You know, the whole inconvenience of having to leave your family, or completely disrupt their lives to relocate and build new lives...

It seems like we had remote work for a long time now, but it wasn’t really a thing just a decade or two ago. While some companies probably were allowing some of their workers to work remotely some days, it was far from the norm. Sites like LinkedIn, Twitter or UpWork were just getting started during the first Internet boom.

During the first internet boom, you still pretty much had to relocate to the US to be able to:

• Work for most companies building on the internet

• Invest in companies building on the internet

So, here’s our thesis:

The most important thing that the (trust minimizing technology known as the) blockchain (and applications built on top of it) will decentralize, is the access to opportunities.

This is bigger than the opportunity to work for someone or run a one-person-shop; Web2 platforms already gave us that. This is the opportunity to invest.

• To invest your time in a project, and earn a stake.

• To invest your money in its token, traded globally.

Ethereum gave us a taste of what was possible:

• If you worked on Ethereum, you earned Ether.

• In the Ethereum crowdsale, it didn’t matter where you’re from. What mattered is that you had the means and the desire to contribute.

Why now?

There are multiple reasons this wasn’t really being done before.

Prior to the blockchain, tokenizing a project required tremendous amounts of trust in the project administrator (and their residence country) as it would leave them in full control over all tokens and their minting. Want to use it for voting? Build a system you need to trust. You want your token to be tradeable? Build your own exchange. A lot of work; more importantly, still requires infinite amounts of trust.

These things are increasingly possible now. Thanks to the DAO frameworks like Aragon,  DAOstack or Moloch, you already can manage funds & vote on the direction of fully digital organizations without needing to trust people. Currently they aren’t good for much more than that, but will soon have a full suite of tools allowing anyone anywhere to easily start & manage organizations with strangers over the internet. How cool is that?

Conclusion

Web3 is the Web of Opportunity. The Web of breaking down barriers & allowing people to decentrally coordinate around creation of socioeconomically useful things at a scale we haven’t seen before. A Web in which users aren’t just exploited for their attention, but recognized and rewarded as co-owners of the platforms they use & contribute to.

Who are we?

At MetaFam, we’re working hard to make this future a reality as soon as possible. We don’t care where you’re from or school you went to. What matters is that you’re aligned with our purpose, knowledgeable or able enough in something, and willing to help. For that, you’ll be able to earn yourself a piece of (our instance of) MetaGame. Or even become known as one of its founders, depending on your effort.

If this is your first time encountering us; MetaGame aims to be the coordination layer and a suite of frameworks & knowledge to build & operate this new, decentralized world.
A real-life role-playing game. A layer 2 for life. Your home in the Web of Opportunity.

Learn more through our website or wiki, then join us on Discord - don’t worry, there’s links to it everywhere.

Appendix

With a bit more of author’s bias here, let’s get into why access to opportunities from anywhere is important, how it relates to the current situation the world is in & how it might play out in the future.

Why it’s important to be able to access opportunities:

• Not needing to completely change your life & detach or disrupt other lives just to access opportunities is obviously a big one.

• These big cities tend to be expensive; you can literally buy a house somewhere less central for the price of a few months of rent in San Francisco.

• These places are usually closer to nature so tend to be more beautiful. The air is fresh, there’s no commute, people tend to be happier, less stressed etc.

Obviously, there are downsides to living in smaller places, especially for younger people. But they are somewhat mitigable and beside the point of this article.

I’ll give you more reasons for though, pertaining to why it matters right now:

• If you bought a house somewhere less centralized instead of paid rent, you wouldn’t have to worry about your landlord in times like these. 

• Rural areas tend to produce their own food; comes in handy during busts in the global economy & supply chains.

• Finally, it’s not like global plagues happen often, but when they do - you’re heck of a lot safer & less restricted in places with lower population density.

COVID-19 was brought to my area about a month ago. We have been socially distancing for a few weeks, and today was the fourth day with no new cases. Now, I don’t live in a village. Pula is a 60k people city, but with a population density of 1k people/km2 versus New York’s 10k people/km2 - it’s not hard to predict where the virus will be more successful.

Overall, when shit hits the fan; smaller, more self-sustainable communities are a lot more resilient than big hubs with millions of people.

Future

Finally, it’s not far-fetched to conclude that the economic shockwave that follows this pandemic will send a wave of people plugging out of the global economy and building local, more self-sustainable economies. Especially if they’re still able to also earn over the internet.

This might lead to proliferation of rural areas but also regeneration of some of the previously neglected urban areas. Small plots of land & rooftops might turn into gardens. Huge long-abandoned halls of Detroit might turn into vertical farms etc.

Point is, each economic crisis inspires us to building decentralized, self-sustainable ecosystems & makes us more resilient to the next one. So that’s something 🤷‍♂️

Hope you’re alright;
love you,
peth