Community Is Not Marketing: How Real Crypto Communities Are Built

Decentralized Communities Are Poised To Change The World

I started thinking about communities in 2003 when I acquired Bolt.com, which grew to be the largest social network before MySpace. I was the first person to call Zuck and offer to buy Facebook a month after he launched. I wrote this Wall Street style research report about Facebook in 2010. I was on CNBC dozens of times talking about Facebook.

When I saw the crypto light on June 29th, 2017, what I saw was, for the first time in history, we had a tool to solve for the community. Previous to crypto, the world had worked by some guy at the top running everything, and everyone underneath him ~100% of the time.

Over the years, as I continued to focus on community, I’ve developed a simple set of ideas to help people better understand community and build systems to optimize the effectiveness of communities. And I start with, what does “community” even mean?

1. A Community Is An Ecosystem, Where When It Works, Everyone Gets More Out Of It Than They Put In

Now that we have a definition of community, we can provide further context:

2. Two People Is The Atomic Level Of Community

We’ve all been in two person communities where 1+1 equaled 100. That’s why:

3. If You Live In A World OF Community, You Live In A World OF Abundance

Once you start a community, engagement is the main metric to focus on re the health of your community. I believe:

4. You’re Either Growing The Engagement OF Your Community Or Your Community Is Dying

I was a Facebook bull until their engagement went down for the first time in Q4 ’17. Facebook said their engagement went down for the 1st time because they decided to try and stop users from doing the #1 thing they like to do “… reading fake news.” Their engagement started going up again three quarters later thwn they started pushing fake news again.

My fifth pillars of community is my biggest insight into community.

5. A Community’s Growth Is Highly Correlated To “Value Delta”

In other words, a community makes something for community members at a cost of “X”. Community members get that thing, and values it at “Y”.

The larger the Value Delta, or the larger the difference between X & Y (i.e. “Y minus X”), the bigger the community can become. Thus, it makes sense, that the biggest communities in the world are the things with the biggest “Value Delta,” and we have a name for those things. We call them “religions”.

I learned about Value Delta when I was running Bolt, and we gave badges to members who completed specific tasks. Those badges would scroll around a member's profile, confirming status in the Bolt community. About 10% of our 23 million members would do anything (e.g. interact with advertising) to get a badge. It didn’t cost us anything to create a badge.

We’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of our knowledge of optimizing the community. That why I believe that:

6. Nobody Really Knows Anything About Community

We need to solve for two things to optimize community, token economics and governance & consensus. And in the 8+ years I’ve been 24/7 crypto, we’ve made very little progress on either one of those things.

But I remain optimistic about our ability to learn about community. And as we get smarter about communities, and as the tooling for community gets better, I believe that:

7. The Ability Of Two, Or 10, Or 100 Communities To Work Together On A Common Cause, Will Change The World

It feels like many societies are struggling to care for their citizens. It feels like many governments aren’t even trying to address the real problems their citizens face. We’ve come to appreciate that laws really don’t exist. All there is are people in power who determine right or wrong.

Now we have a toolset to solve for ourselves. To me, bitcoin is just a community, governed by a system of immutable rules. And other blockchain-based communities are developing, with their own set of rules.

And as the tooling gets better, as we’re better able to align incentives to produce specific outcomes, communities will work together to produce desired outcomes that make the world a better place for community members.

We’re at the very beginning of this community-driven journey. The only thing I’m certain of is that however these ecosystems develop, they won’t look anything like anyone thinks they will.

This article was written by Lou Kerner, Advisory Board Member at CoinDepo and a recognized voice in the digital asset space. The analysis shared here represents his independent perspective on the evolving crypto landscape.