Hello Eden community! My name is Andrew, colloquially Ursa, and I’m a US male from California born in the early ‘90s, who has a long term girlfriend and two cats: cheese and flapjack. I’m an EOS Genesis account holder gm3dgobzgage and I’ve been interested in EOS ever since I realized I couldn’t run my cool Dapp idea on Ethereum unless every transaction was a financial one, and I’ve been obsessed ever since I realized that EOS’s feature set is robust but simple enough to put literally everything that should be on a blockchain, on a blockchain. I have ideas for blockchain health insurance, a blockchain well regulated militia, blockchain intimate consent, all sorts of things, but Ethereum couldn’t accomplish any of them, because many of the transactions are non-financial. EOS can, and that’s why I’ve been following it since 2017.
I’ve been playing drums for 21 years and along the way I’ve been a recording engineer, live sound guy, festival organizer, drum builder, touring drummer, session musician, drum teacher, record label owner, and recording studio owner. I’m a good drummer (probably in the 85th percentile of pros in the sd area), a decent sound engineer, and not particularly good at any of those other things. I have played in lots of bands, including Weatherbox (in which I was the 5th band member named Andrew), Amerikan Bear, Monarch, Ocelot, Featherstone, The Surrealistics, Tan Sister Radio, Ditches, Hail hail, Second Cousins (for one show with 3 days notice and one practice), Color, Szasz, Cameron Holland, and a few others. I say these things as a means for communicating the fact that I’m a real person with diverse interests who is excited about the Eden community, and I want to spark conversation and help contribute to the community with ideas from a realm most members likely don’t come from.
I’m quite interested in alternative political systems, including a particular interest in ranked choice voting, because of its potential for allowing easier challenges to partisan power structures. After learning of Dan Larimer’s proposal for the political playoffs, I have largely abandoned my enthusiasm for RCV and now tell everyone who’ll listen about the political playoffs instead of ranked choice voting. I heard about Eden soon after I learned about clarionos, although after contributing a logo that didn’t get used, I felt like there wasn’t anything useful I could do for the project. EdenOS, however, seems like a project I could actually be useful in. Earlier today I saw a Twitter link to this forum, and now here I am!
The idea of a political (consensus for you blockchainers) paradigm, which solves the game theory of voting by aligning everyone’s interests, and which prevents capture by powerful or moneyed interests, sounds too good to be true. And it might be. But the simplicity and effectiveness of the political playoffs process is too exciting for me to pass up participating in. And although I’m more of a Chomsky libertarian than the more Rand-ian libertarians that seem common in the crypto space, the ethos of the community is aligned with my own core values: freedom from coercion, and minimization of entropy.
I want to be a member of Eden because I think I bring some cultural diversity to a very niche community. My musical social circle is surprisingly (to me) far-reaching, but has very little overlap with the crypto community. This offers a much more realistic mechanism for growth than trying to convince BTC maximalists to pick up some EOS tokens. More importantly though, my experience working in teams whose members were often in passionate disagreement, often with me as mediator, and who were working under financial and temporal pressure (recording studios are not cheap), has given me a knack for negotiation that I think would be very valuable in helping achieve Eden’s goals.
I’ve been in a band with two singer/songwriters, a band with a singer and guitarist who were dating and then broke up, as well as a band with a singer who has schizophrenic episodes, and that’s not to mention that anybody who is egotistical enough to stand onstage in front of a bunch of people and blast them with nose is probably going to be difficult to work with. That is to say, the teams I’ve been in are probably more unstable than the average dev team. Because of this, I think I can contribute my mediation experience and help be an effective team member. I also have tons of audio playing/recording/editing/releasing experience, and could be helpful in producing audio content like podcasts or other audio productions. I also screen print so I could make some cool t shirts or stickers or something.
If I were awarded the Eden budget, there are a few things I’d highlight as priorities.
The first of these is account creation. While the means for creating an EOS account are currently much easier than at Genesis, they still essentially assume that a user is attaining an account for investment purposes. Barely anyone I know is an investor, so you have to get them to learn what all these investment terms like Exchange and fiat mean, and that’s before you even explain blockchain and why they should buy that instead of a burrito with their small quantity of hard-earned money. People need to be able to get EOS accounts for doing things that everyone wants to do already. Voice tried it, but it’s a big company product with probably dozens of lawyers involved, and their KYC social media just wasn’t compelling enough for someone to upload a photo of their passport to join. The new direction of NFTs is more compelling, but is a little too late to ride the fad wave, in my opinion. In light of this, I think some funds could be used to support free user signups for the best non-financial EOS apps, since financial EOS apps are appealing to the investor community that presumably has just bought EOS. The apps could be voted on by this same Eden body, or by a separate body, or by all token holders.
Additionally, I think some EOS should be apportioned to a team in order to create a graphical or otherwise noob-friendly means for making Dapps. I’ve been envisioning this Dapp for years, based on an app I’ve been thinking about for probably a decade by now, and while I understand how computers work and how data flow works (check the GitHub link in my profile if you want to evaluate the accuracy of that statement), but even after spending hundreds of hours learning to code in js and C++, there’s no way I could write a functional smart contract. Not because of lack of logical knowledge, but because I don’t know all of the specific syntactical means for talking to a computer. I’m sure there are at least hundreds of people like me, who have a cool idea and know how it’ll work, but can’t talk to computers good. A graphical programming tool for EOS would be a game changer for the EOS Dapp ecosystem, and more importantly, given EOS’s affordability and capability, would be a game changer for hundreds or thousands of people who can finally run the entire business logic of their idea on a robust global automated system.
There are other priorities as well, such as Hackathons and community events, but these are the primary issues EOS issues I’ve been thinking about.
Anyway whoa sorry this looks really long on mobile
TL;DR I’m a drummer and other stuff, I like the token, we should use funds to give free user EOSaccounts to really cool Dapps, and also we should use it to help fund a GUI programming tool for EOS where you don’t need to know much code to get started.