In Berlin on June 17th Swarm declared a revolution. We stated our vision to restore to all people the power currently monopolized by the 1%, the power to participate meaningfully in the economic life. Unlike past revolutions, this is a revolution not to be joined, but to be owned.
Right now, all investment has a fundamentally hierarchical structure to it, a structure that privileges those who already have lots of resources and forces those at the bottom to ask them permission to innovate. Ironically, the laws allow people who have less money to walk into a casino or lottery ticket shop and spend their entire salary on gambling, but they do not allow someone to invest it in projects of real value.
We will fight for the power of free choice to be brought back to the people. Although there are legal constraints in many areas that prevent people from investing in a better future, the intent of these laws was to protect people from snake oil salesmen. Ironically, many of these simply managed to circumvent the law, now lobbying governments with money taken from those same governments while, at the same time, millions lose their homes.
Is this the best future we can build together? We believe that we can do better. We believe that we can allow each person to participate in a revolution of collective ownership, something that will radically shift the nature of human society. If the internet allowed free access to information and helped topple despots the world round, we believe that the collective ownership of our common future will create a global revolution of even more consequence.
To do this, the Swarm vision includes delivering three vital components. The first is cryptoequity. Cryptoequity delivers the full power of control to project owners and investors, allowing them to dynamically set the parameters that are best for their project. This includes both a share of profit and share of decision making power.
We believe that cryptoequity is to equity what cryptocurrency is to currency. It is a totally new technology that needs to be treated as such. We will spend our time and effort to ensure that it is treated as the promising new technology that it is, rather than simply fit into an old legal box. Although we will be forced to work across legal jurisdictions, we believe that the benefits of adopting these new technologies are immensely greater than working to resist them, and we expect many nation states to welcome and accomodate this, just as they have accommodated Bitcoin.
The second core feature of our platform is crowdsourced due diligence. The purpose of regulatory bodies is to avoid the manipulation of people via various scams. We salute this purpose, but we do not believe this necessarily requires a centralized system in order to do so. We believe that collective intelligence, empowered by well designed reputational systems, can combine to vet new ideas and allow them to rapidly receive funds. We will be revealing our full plans for this system at a special party in London on the 10th of July.
The third and major differentiating aspect of Swarm is that our technology allows us to distribute coins to all swarm holders. These coins may be:
(1) A percentage of some coin launched via the Swarm network (i.e. a share in a project)
(2) A coin that gives special access to types of information available exclusively to members of Swarm (i.e. a coupon)
(3) A coin that gives access to exclusive events (i.e. a ticket)
Swarm today is like a crypto-kickstarter offered via coins, with the intention of gradually introducing elements of cryptoequity as the legal framework is established for them. Because we do not know exactly what the future holds we cannot make certain promises to all particulars. But we can promise to work as hard we can to fulfill these offerings with the maximum potential.
We also believe that vested powers will seek to use their political ties to prevent this from being successful. This makes it imperative that we build rapidly and funnel the money we receive into building a large and resilient global network. No matter how much money we have, our enemies will be better funded and ready to use all of their resources to crush us. We must be resourceful and wily.
Our ultimate success is as up to you as it is to us. We believe absolutely that the positive energy that comes out of decentralized networks is reciprocal, that it will build up an ecosystem of increased potency and innovation that out-innovates traditional structures. This is because we are swarming together, with spontaneity and syncronicity, not simply fitting things into a spreadsheet.
If this appeals to you, we invite you to join us. If not, we ask you to stay away. The benefits of our network will be revealed gradually to those who participate in our vision. For those who prefer the old ways, you will never realize what it means to receive a GOLDTICKET.
In the Swarm it is all for one and one for all. We invite you to join us.
Yours,
Joel Dietz
Further reading:
Joel Dietz, SWARM: Dawn of Cryptoequity, Follow the Coin (http://www.followthecoin.com/swarm-dawn-cryptoequity/)
Joel Dietz, Goodbye VCs, Hello Blockchain, Quora (https://evergreenthoughts.quora.com/Goodbye-VCs-Hello-Blockchain?utm_content=buffer7d430&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer)
Joel Dietz, AppCoin Manifesto, Let's Talk Bitcoin (http://letstalkbitcoin.com/too-many-coins/)
Joel Dietz, Bitcoin Magazine, Why Crypto-investing is better than normal investing (http://bitcoinmagazine.com/13500/crypto-investing-better-normal-investing-users-guide/)
Joel Dietz (and David Johnston and Ron Gross), Value of Appcoins (https://github.com/DavidJohnstonCEO/TheValueofAppCoins)
Joel Dietz, Distributed Governance Whitepaper, Github (https://github.com/fractastical/distributed-governance/blob/master/whitepaper.md)