Daily discussion thread 2025-03-06

gm,

if you're a newcomer to our Daily Discussion thread, this is a place where we discuss all Ethereum topics, news, events.

And sometimes even things that are not directly Ethereum-related :)

So... what's on your mind today?

I'm moving today!

On January 1st, 2025, me and my gf moved to a new but temporary space in the city.

It is a really beautiful 200 square meter apartment from a well-known Berghain DJ. It's beautifully furnished, there are many plants, it has big windows, it has a DJ setup with handmade loudspeakers, there is tastefully selected art hanging on the walls and overall this is one of the most beautiful spaces I have ever spent time in.

I actually got this space because I saw it listed on a local telegram channel. It was offered to me fairly cheaply. It's central, much more central than the places that my girlfriend and I live in.

There are several reasons why I got this place. I live in a poor neighborhood in Berlin, quite far from the city center. My space is dark, I can hear my neighbor trample above me, it's small, it doesn't have a lot of privacy, and I'm also not that good with furnishing it. It doesn't have plants. When I got my place, it was during COVID and I just needed to find something to stay. It was never meant to be a place of self-fulfillment.

With Kiwi News it's now two years that I've spent on building the project. And so it's been two years of trading off a good salary for investing in the application. It's also been two years of brutal quantitative assessment.

The numbers don't lie.

We haven't managed to attract more daily active users and it continues to be a grind. The app has qualitatively improved, no doubt, but there are still many construction sites.

The work on Kiwi News was initially very self-fulfilling because the path of being an entrepreneur seemed exciting. But after two years a lot of the excitement has vanished and, at times, or on some days, it is really hard to be motivated to do anything.

But the reason why I rented this apartment was because I felt like I needed to substitute the lack of fulfillment I feel when building Kiwi by improving my private life.

In December the crypto market looked pretty good so I cashed out some of my Bitcoin and Ether to budget the first third of the new year to live in a nicer space and to move in with my girlfriend.

In an ideal world I thought the crypto market would move higher by March. That said, I feel like I don't want to talk about the crypto market in this comment.

Because this flat is so beautifully designed, this really influenced my decisions on building Kiwi. Remember how I started to complain about Ethereum being ugly, needing a rebrand? And remember how I complained about the OG images being ugly? The flat influenced this.

February was my most productive month. I worked on trying to grow by speaking to advisors. I felt a need to improve my leadership skills, so I tried to learn more about marketing. I also worked on improving my productivity by using LLMs more.

I can proudly say that my Anthropic bills do prove that I'm using AI to a larger degree in my workflow now. I am really happy with our productivity throughout these last two months. I think we have given our best at trying our hand in building a social decentralized media application.

Today I will move. Tomorrow I will start to go on holiday for a few days. So this really marks the end of a period for me.

I have many thoughts, many unfinal.

The flat situation has taught me that some people have incredible amounts of money and success. It has taught me that if I want to live in such a flat, I might have to work 10-20 years more to achieve it. I've also learned that in Europe, Germany, Berlin, we don't even have that many beautiful apartments. The flat that I rented is really special. I have not seen something like it anywhere else.

I talked about privately fulfilling myself and the need of having to have more patience in building Kiwi News. Somehow it has struck me that this might be much more fundamental than I like to admit to myself. Sure, last week our numbers weren't good. This was probably because of ETH Denver. But for the entire period of living in the flat, I have given my uttermost attention and determination to the project. I've tried to work hard, smart and I've tried to grow. I have grown. The period manifested in a few wins, no doubt. But the reality is that as entrepreneurs we really think of success as this moment when it becomes common knowledge, that you're a winner.

We are aiming to be invited and celebrated on podcasts, to be written about in blog posts and news articles. Ultimately this is what we want to achieve with our creations. At the same time, along the way, we get small crumbs of this success every now and then. But it is true that the hedonistic treadmill just ends up invalidating these wins.

My organism therefore has to be physically taught that what I'm doing is okay, it's good. In fact it's exactly what I want to do, it's fantastic. Yet there doesn't seem to be an automation where it makes me feel better about myself for working hard. Yes, working hard for a day makes you feel self-fulfilled in the evening. You feel like you've achieved something. There can even be periods where you may feel self-fulfilled for working through something, for growing, for fixing shit.

Maybe it is the way we evaluate ourselves that gets in the way with how fulfilled we feel?

For the Kiwi News product, I use daily active users as the metric to understand if people like our product. But looking at this chart, it demotivates me tremendously because despite trying, I have not managed to make it go up.

Some entrepreneurs say that the reason why we hold ourselves accountable to these numbers is because they prevent us from cheating ourselves, from lying to ourselves. Yeah, the product did get better qualitiatively. I have also learned a lot. I have refined my craft. I've probably become a much better software engineer, a better leader. Yet often, on some days, I just open the daily active users chart and I feel like a failure. But also, this flat somehow makes me feel like a failure, because other people my age have somehow managed to achieve such opulence already.

Maybe there now will be comments again trying to socially correct my perception of myself. I'm obviously not constantly feeling like a failure. There are many good days and some bad days.

But I have realized that every time I feel helpless, I can't see the path to self-fulfillment. I tend to get angry when this is the case. But I've also realized that there is always a path to self-fulfillment, even in the most dire or overwhelming situations.

With evaluating ourselves by the numbers, somehow I still feel this is the most brutal, but at the same time, the best approach. Yes, somehow I could be more open minded in evaluating how Kiwi News is doing. We don't have investors, so there's not really anyone telling us to make the daily active users go up. We've also had a pretty decent income over the last year. We've chosen daily active user numbers as the proxy for success, because we feel like all other parts of the project depend on its growth. Maybe this is worth revisiting after my holiday. Maybe it is not the right way to grow our product and to achieve this fulfillment that we want as entrepreneurs.

At the end of the day, another irony is that I did live in this place for two months and that this worked, because I was invested in crypto, and because I did Kiwi and because I was using that specific TG channel at the right time.

So while, yes, I do not own this place, I was still privileged enough to spend some time in it. And this was because of who I am and how I conduct myself.

It's so tricky to be patient and to keep on telling yourself that you need more self-determination, more hard work. This is, at the end of the day, faith.

I tried to post yesterday about what we’re building at Vocdoni, but it got too late in the day.

I'm really excited to finally share something we have been building at Vocdoni. After 6 years of building a decentralized voting protocol on a custom blockchain, we’re now taking a major shift. We’re moving from a trust model based on consensus to one that relies primarily on cryptography.

So in the last weeks we have been working on DAVINCI a new voting protocol built from scratch to meet all the requirements for a universal voting system, that can fulfill both Web2 and Web3 governance needs.

DAVINCI (Decentralized Autonomous Voting Infrastructure for Non-Coercive Inclusion) is a neutral, unstoppable voting protocol designed for privacy, scalability, and security. It enables high-frequency, low-cost elections while ensuring a gasless experience, transparency, censorship resistance, anti-coercion, and integrity with the same guarantees as onchain voting.

We designed it to outperform all the existint voting systems, see a comparison here:

It's built as a Layer 2 solution on Ethereum, it keeps votes tamper-proof and trustless, eliminating central points of failure.

On top of that, DAVINCI can be adapted to any use case because it uses a system we designed to make voting flexible. It's called the Ballot Protocol and allows for various voting methods, including:

- Simple majority voting

- Ranked choice voting

- Approval voting

- Quadratic voting

- And even future voting mechanisms don't even exist yet.

We’ll officially announce DAVINCI next week, but if you want a sneak peek:

FAQs:

Preliminary whitepaper (for the techies):

Ballot Protocol:

Stay tuned! 🚀

@timdaub.eth

A lot to unpack here, but a few points resonated with me.

First of all, living in a nicer place making you more prone to notice ugliness. It got me thinking that it's - in a way - akin to using apps with great UX, which make you notice bad crypto UX. Whenever I use Revolut and have to open clanky Rainbow Android app, I'm like "wtf is that".

I think giving yourself these rewards for following the path you know is right is also a great idea. There's this meme of an entrepreneur living on the mattress in a dark dirty room, but I don't think it's that the best way to stay productive and live a good life. Whenever I went to workation in some cool houses, it was good for my work because the environment impacts me a lot.

Speaking of numbers, I think that DAUs are our lag measures and they often might be hard to move. What can be helpful is remembering about lead measures, so asking yourself if you shipped things according to the process you think is correct.

So have we spoke with users the right way, have we picked the features to ship the right way, have we shipped them the right way, and so on. And trust the process, in the spirit of "The score takes care of itself". Ofc easier said than done, I often also have doubts when I can't move the needle.

***

Sounds great @ferran.eth!

Do you plan to eventually use it for IRL elections, too? I've been hearing about using blockchain for voting for like 10 yrs and in these tumultuous time it might be the right moment to finally do it.

Thanks @macbudkowski.eth!

Answering your question: Yes! Vocdoni has already been used for official votes. Many towns and cities, including the Barcelona City Council, have implemented it.

It was also used to organize the first official and fully digital referendum under the Spanish law.

It hasn't been used for national elections yet (maybe that is what you were asking for) but there are definitely steps in the right direction!

My dream is for a country to experiment with digital voting for their overseas votes in national elections (replacing postal or in-embassy voting). This would allow to test Vocdoni’s technology on a larger scale without the high risks of doing it for an entire national election.

It’s a step-by-step process, starting with pilot projects and gradually expanding from there. Is not only about tech tho, there are a lot of legislation changes involved and the identity&auth of citizens has to be alla par and easy tyo use, ofc.

Someone wrote a book about how beauty can save the world - it seems he is onto something :))

Whenever I spend too much time in crypto spaces, I always seek out something that's beautiful to feed my soul, or whatever you want to call it to balance it out. It feels inspiring - and I think you get better at spotting it too. Hopefully eventually some of the spirit will trickle down into this industry.

Finding a beautiful apartment in Berlin that sounds like a huge accomplishment to me - all the rest aside. Good luck with the move!

Also, I completely feel you in the substituting lack of fulfilment in the professional realm with changes in the personal life. That's something I too have done and am doing - because let's be real, there's so many things we cannot influence, and so much luck involved in "making it" to the point of being recognized as a winner...

And sometimes having this side project in the private life also creates new motivation, and validation - you never know. We're all just human and even as entrepreneurs I think it's important to foster the sides of one's humanity that don't directly correlate with common measures of success :)