Startups and DAOs are idea factories, constantly churning out new product or service ideas, and team members often wear multiple hats. As a result, organizations need workers who can plan and execute, constantly seek improvement, collaborate, and build community. Generalists build the machines that specialists will improve upon, and teachers are exceptional generalists.

Teachers are experts at creating and executing plans for small groups. In a classroom, they design their curriculum plan, condense it to daily lesson plans, and must manage their time effectively; they focus on ensuring that students learn and grow daily. This planning and execution ability translates well to the startup environment, where project management skills are critical to success.

Another strength of teachers is their ability to learn on their own. Teachers are autodidacts who constantly seek to improve their skills and knowledge. They investigate new teaching methods and technologies to help students learn more effectively. This passion for learning and improvement is critical in a startup environment, where innovation is crucial for success.

Teachers are resourceful and creative problem-solvers who continuously seek ways to improve their teaching outcomes. They steal ideas from anywhere that works. This design-thievery translates well to the startup environment, where innovation is integral for success. In addition, teachers are skilled at cobbling together a focused, cohesive experience for contributors from a hodgepodge of disparate tools. This is especially valuable in open-source web3, where customization is key, but can also be overwhelming without the right expertise.

Working with groups of people is another strength of teachers. They are skilled at managing classrooms full of students, parents, and colleagues. They understand how to build relationships, manage conflicts, and motivate others to achieve their goals. Their ability to work with groups of people is essential in a startup environment, where collaboration is critical to success.

Teachers are also experts at navigating community. They understand the importance of providing constructive criticism and encouragement to help their students learn and grow. This translates well to startup environments, where a strong culture of feedback and community can lead to a more productive and engaged team.

Finally, teachers are skilled at teaching people about tools, products, and organizational structures. They understand how to break down complex information into smaller, more manageable pieces that are easy to understand. This skill is invaluable in a startup environment, where new employees may be unfamiliar with the products and tools they will be using.

In conclusion, startups and DAOs need generalists until they have the money to hire specialists. Teachers are the ultimate generalists, possessing a unique skill set that makes them invaluable to tech startups. They are excellent planners, implementors, problem-solvers, expert communicators, and community builders. In fact, one could even call teachers... specialists.

Notes

iSpeakNerd is an educator, wordsmith, and DAO techie at Collab.Land. He does community education, documentation, UX, IT, security research, and helps with Operations and tooling for multiple DAOs. His background is in physical science and education.

If you liked this article, please support my writing and become a 1 of 10 patron by collecting this post as an NFT.

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Basic Security

1. Use a quality password manager

Securing online accounts with strong and unique passwords is number one. Passwords leak online via data breaches or can usually be easily guessed by hackers.

Unfortunately, keeping track of all these passwords can be a challenge. That is where a quality password manager comes in. A password manager can help you create strong and unique passwords for each account and store them in one place, secured by your single master password. This way, you only need to remember one password and never have to worry about forgetting passwords or using the same password for multiple accounts again.

Use a quality password manager.

2. Use 2FA everywhere possible

Two-factor authentication (2FA) adds an additional security layer to your digital life. With hackers running rampant, two-factor authentication (2FA) is a must. SMS-based (text message) 2FA is still a popular method of authentication, but it is vulnerable to SIM swap attacks. App-based 2FA is a more secure solution. Finally, using a physical security key for 2FA offers the ultimate protection.

Avoid copycat sites + addresses

3. Bookmark sites

In recent years, scammers have found an easy way to target unsuspecting victims through sponsored Google search ads. Using these ads, they trick people looking for legitimate websites, directing them instead to fake versions of those sites to steal their wallet contents. Protect yourself by bookmarking the legitimate version; then navigate to the site via the bookmark rather than using search.

4. Use the Address Book

The wallet Address Book is the web3 equivalent of a bookmark, it allows people to save approved addresses with a human-readable name. Later, when sending a transaction, they can (re)check the address before proceeding. Copycat sites with fake contracts will appear in the wallet as a 0x.... address and not as the named address that got saved earlier. This way, you can ensure that you only interact with addresses and contracts you know about and protect yourself from malicious smart contracts. Don't trust, verify!

web3 security

5. Install wallet warning browser extensions

One of the best things you can do to keep your cryptocurrency safe is to use a browser extension like Pocket Universe, Revoke.Cash, Fire, and/or Stelo. These extensions are designed to help protect users from malicious activity by decoding transactions ahead of time to provide real-time warnings about what the transaction is about to do in plain English. With the help of these extensions, you can have peace of mind knowing that your wallet is secure and that you're fully aware of its activity at all times. Know before you FOMO.

6. Revoke infinite approvals

I know what you're thinking now, "Well, I just won't sign any transactions then!" You can do that, but you won't get much done in web3 and it won't protect you from all scams either.

Even gasless message signatures can result in your wallet getting drained if you have infinite approvals on erc20s or have already given OpenSea approval to sell your NFTs. Little known fact, OpenSea uses the setApprovalForAll method, which means that when you allow OpenSea to list an item for sale on your behalf, it can do that for ALL assets from that collection (contract).

This is how the recent Kevin Rose hack happened, he already had approved those assets for sale; one gasless signature later, oops! OpenSea accepted the hacker’s 0 ETH offers for his NFTs.

Revoke infinite approvals using revoke.cash or etherscan.io/tokenapprovalchecker to protect yourself from this exploit.

7. Maintain assets in "wallet silos"

The single best practice a user can do is to maintain the separation of their assets by purpose into different wallets. Basically, as more money gets stored in a single wallet, you should be extra cautious and restrict what you use that address for.

High-value assets ("blue-chips") and large amounts of crypto should be kept in a hardware wallet, a VAULT account that is not directly connected to the internet. This is the least-accessed account, think of it as your safety-deposit box at the bank.

Your day-to-day funds can be kept in an operational wallet, a separate internet-connected account that you use to interact with trusted entities, be they dapps, exchanges, or people.

Finally, you want to have a third, risky "degen" wallet. This is the condom for all your other assets, preventing those untested NFT minting contracts, those unsafe airdrops, etc. from putting the rest of your money at risk. If you interact with the wrong contract and lose ALL the funds in this account, it shouldn't hurt too bad because your funds are elsewhere.... they are elsewhere, right? :|

https://twitter.com/BowTiedPickle/status/1618329470674538496?s=20&t=LkoCxWKMQHT68dj7v-bbbg

8. Delegate provable ownership

Tools like Delegate.cash and Warm.xyz allow proving ownership of vault-stored NFTs at a different registered wallet. This means you can safely connect your vault and degen wallets via a read-only connection. This is essential when meeting conditions to claim airdrops and mint NFTs. Scammers use those carrots to get people to connect their wallets and then drain them. With delegated ownership, you can prove you meet requirements indirectly and use a degen hot wallet to mint while keeping your high-value NFTs in a separate wallet.

Extra

Take the Bankless Academy security lesson to earn a non-transferrable NFT proving you understand.

Notes

iSpeakNerd is an educator, wordsmith, and DAO techie at Collab.Land. He does community education, documentation, UX, IT, security research, and helps with Operations and tooling for multiple DAOs. His background is in physical science and education.

This is essay 1 of 4 for the Bankless Academy Writers Cohort.

Be the change you wish to see in the world.

He meant that people should take action in their own lives to change things they felt should be changed. If the world does not conform to our expectations, we should take action to make it so.

The world has changed since then. The global population has 4x from 1910, and cities are ever more densely packed as we transform into the Information Age. People live more and more of their lives on the internet, interacting with thousands of people every day. But the human brain can still only maintain about 150 different relationships.

We exist in larger spaces with only the same limited capacity for relationships. So non-human behavioral incentives presented to us influence us more. Rational actors follow incentives, therefore designed incentives can change behavior. Web3 supercharges this cycle.

We can use DAO structures to crowd-source desired behavior changes. We can rapidly allocate value for influencing human action through on-chain democracy and even apply the results outside crypto. We can incentivize the change we wish to see in the world. 👏👏

Inhuman influence

Under conditions where people collide more but don’t have relationships with their collisions, the invisible influence of incentives drives humans to optimize behavior. If the optimization requires new behavior, we call it behavior change.

Incentives don’t require direct interaction between individuals to change behavior. Molecules in Brownian motion spread in random directions, like herding cats. Instead of containing random molecular motion, what if we could direct it instead?

Incentives are soft redirections influencing behavior without putting up walls to block actions. For example, we could reward individuals for depositing recyclables in proper bins on the street. This immediately granted reward could later give credit on a utility bill. Individuals can choose not to recycle, but the optimal choice is there.

We allow people to choose and have ownership of their choices, but incentives increase the value for the individual for one action over another. We direct individual action (random movement) towards a single action that will benefit the whole; incentives create a channel to keep the majority moving West.

For example, we want to reduce carbon emissions. Tax credits show a measurable effect on electric car purchases. We can add economic value to bolster individual decisions while still allowing everyone to have autonomy.

Deciding on incentives

Token communities like DAOs are structures for deciding which behaviors to reward. Research shows that positive rewards drive more behavior change than punishment. Game systems simplify reward systems and we see the gamification of everything.

Token incentives have been used for user or liquidity acquisition, but that is not the only use. Regenerative Finance seeks to use financial means to reduce carbon emissions and regenerate the Earth.

Many organizations in web3 align with ReFi. These Impact DAOs allow token communities to vote on how to allocate their capital as incentives and change human behavior. They are vehicles for crowd-sourcing behavior change.

Gamification and web3

Gamification and theming fun experience point systems for task completion provide the instant reward that cements relationships between actions and rewards. But if rewards are useless, then the whole system falls apart.

Web3 is bursting with tokenized point systems full of utility. Crypto tokens can be directly financialized through creating liquidity pools, borrowing or lending, or trading.

Web3 is the next iteration of the gamification of workplaces. Incentives + rewards for work AND voting structures to flexibly realign those incentives over time. Work, earn tokens, financialize them in DeFi, and vote to incentivize behaviors with more tokens.

Above anything else, rational actors follow the incentives. Incentives drive behavior, especially as humans collide with each other more online. Design incentives to reinforce behaviors that will result in the desired outcome. Web3 allows us to crowd-source and democratically decide on the best ideas for achieving those desired outcomes. In short, DAOs unlock the ability to:

Incentivize the change you wish to see in the world 🌍

Notes

iSpeakNerd is an educator, wordsmith, and DAO techie at Bankless DAO. He is the creator of Fight Club’s contributor onboarding process, is the Content Director of Bankless Academy, and helps with Operations and tooling for multiple DAOs. His background is in physical science and education.

This is essay 2 of 4 for the BanklessDAO Writers Cohort

Except this is 1873, not 2022, and the internet hasn’t even been imagined yet. This is the era Mark Twain called the Gilded Age; Gilded means that an object is not made of gold (golden) but merely surfaced with gold to give the appearance of grandeur. The term came to symbolize the period when capitalists became enormously wealthy at the expense of the increasingly impoverished lower classes.

The Gilded Age of American history was a time of unprecedented economic expansion as mechanization powered by coal and oil became the norm. The technology powering factories and assembly lines had never been seen before.

Oil, steel, fertilizer, and dynamite vastly increased worker efficiency and expanded what could be done. The great railroads were laid down across the United States, when great opportunities existed for those Industrial Capitalists bold enough to seize them... and when the word Capitalist became an epithet. A class spoken of in anger, fear, and envy – becoming known to the world as Robber Barons.

These industrial corporations, the largest economic entities in America, swallowed competition, gorged on hoarded resources, and devoured the economic landscape. If they could not eliminate their competition, they conspired to form trusts to keep prices high and themselves on top.

2021 has seen the US wealth concentration surpass the peak of the Gilded Age. The Industrialists of old produced goods through industry, requiring control of land to extract resources like iron, coal, and oil. The mega-giants of tech today do not strive to control the land. They seek a different prize in the Information Age, data.

They produce services derived from direct access to the mountains of data each person on the internet litters along their path. It’s freely available for anyone to process, but what good is raw information? It must be rendered, and no one can compete with the behemoths in data processing power. So they continue to extract insights from monopolized access to the marketing insights of processed data to sell targeted ads fired like guided missiles, exploding dopamine in our brains, screaming “Buy now!”

Big Tech has accumulated massive wealth by exploiting the data produced by using the information network of the Internet. By operating as monopolies, the tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook have reached the reckoning. It took government intervention to reign in the corporate excesses of the Gilded Age, will the time come again?

Notes

Author

iSpeakNerd is an educator, wordsmith, and DAO techie at Bankless DAO. He is the creator of Fight Club’s contributor onboarding process, is the Content Director of Bankless Academy, and helps with Operations and tooling for multiple DAOs. His background is in physical science and education.

Post

This is essay 1 of 4 for the BanklessDAO Writers Cohort

Title image created with MidJourney AI

Intelligently-themed naming systems help DAOs to develop an identity, help DAO project champions to differentiate among contributor types, and help keep things fun for contributors!

Context

Names are needed

Names communicate meaning and nuance; names reflect culture; names create identities.

Look at fan groups for names: Critical Role fans are Critters, Arsenal fans are the Gooners, and the Raiders have the Black Hole.

Names create insider culture, helping people and groups to develop a shared identity. Insider culture should not be used to exclude (they're not ______), but rather positively affirm identity formation instead (we are ______).

Bankless Names

Bankless DAO has two types of roles, financial and social. L2 is the only role that communicates anything about a contributor’s social or experiential capital, hard-earned through past contributions.

The L1, L3, L4 Bankless DAO names are sexless, bland, and don't communicate anything about those roles beyond the hierarchy of numbers.

Good names communicate the general purpose of a role.

• ex. Guild Coordinator, Ops Guild Apprentice, Notion Nerds, etc.

Levels help

• Tiers of contributors allow project champions to differentiate who has the experience and alignment to pick up tasks freely (permissionless system) versus who should be asked to apply for tasks (permissioned system).

  • Project champions could be anyone from the higher tiers.

• Gamify it and give contributors a path to grow along, similar to L1/L3/L4 system for Bankless DAO.

Keep the names consistent

A consistent theme to names helps everyone remember the purpose and hierarchy of roles intuitively.

• Think of job titles:

  • worker > manager > owner

We want to use a naming system to differentiate us from typical hierarchies. Experiential differences are to be embraced, not avoided; we can even have fun with it!

• Think of videogames or fantasy games:

  • A wizard might level up

    • mage > arcanist > archmage

Each higher tier has connotations of more experience, the names function as a signal of experiential and social capital. (check out the Eight Forms of Capital for context)

Expandable systems

A theme provides natural ways the naming system can expand while maintaining some connection to each role's actual purpose.

Fight Club can lean into the fight theme:

• contributors = "Fighters"

• contributor levels = weight classes

• other roles in a boxing match:

  • Fight promoter, fighter manager, coach, venue owner/promoter, announcer, ring girl, referee, cut men, etc.

• Some ideas:

  • A project founder might become Venue Owner

  • An Ambassador could be an Announcer

  • Workstream leads become Coaches

  • Discord Mods/Admins could be Referees

The theme provides an extensible system for roles in the organization.

Names at Fight Club 🥊

Fight Club contributors are renamed Fighters in general and have their weight class denote their amount of contribution (and a signal of their social and experiential capital).

Fighter Levels

This system is based on boxer weight classes; I understand that heavier =/= better in actual fights, but let's apply superficial videogame logic here.

If heavier == better, then you want the most CAKE possible to feed your fighter and gain weight. It uses theming to help contributors remember their levels and how they level up (become more trusted, more access, etc.)

Remember: contributors = "Fighters", contributor levels = weight classes

• Flyweight (no NFT)

• Featherweight (Black Glove NFT) (25 task points)

• Welterweight (50 task points)

• Heavyweight (150 task points)

• Sumo (300 task points)

How to Level Up

Fighters start with Fight Club (post-mint) as Flyweights (guest contributors), earn CAKE to trade in for a membership NFT, and level up to the next weight class.

The system described here is designed for projects whose members hold NFTs, but it could be easily applied to a fungible token project with amounts of tokens held representing similar contribution levels.

The point system implementation using open data and web3 technologies is outside the scope of this post.

Collect this post + Subscribe for more, coming soon™.

Notes

iSpeakNerd is an educator, content creator, and DAO techie at Bankless DAO. He is the creator of Fight Club’s contributor onboarding process, is the Content Director of Bankless Academy, and helps with Operations and tooling for multiple DAOs. His background is in physical science and education.