The "Mother of All Demos" for Crypto?

The crypto world has been super excited by PoolTogether this week (especially the ETH-focused cryptoeconomics world). It reminds me of the excitement around FOMO3D about a year ago. It has me thinking about Doug Engelbart's "Mother of All Demos" from 1968, which showcased a variety of awesome computer features "from the future" like: windows, graphics, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, and revision control.

What does the Mother of All Demos for crypto look like? Do we even have the infrastructure for it yet? My strong instinct is yes. Remember that the audience for the Mother of All Demos was other developers/academics, not the general populace. And it was in 1968, not 1994. So, what could we demo that would get the "builders" super excited about crypto tech? I think it's important to optimize for "wow factor" here. I'd add:

On the smart contract cryptoeconomic application layer:

  • #MakerScan: My example here would be adding ETH/wiping DAI from a MakerDAO CDP with MakerScan. (That's amazing that you can add/remove from loans around the world.)
  • FOMO3D: Mostly to tell the story of incentives and how it was eventually beaten (human beating bots by beating their deterministic behavior patterns). Could go into token bonding curves if you wanted too (but seems a bit much maybe).
  • PoolTogether: A good example of the two above combined. It's a weird incentive game now combined with #DeFi primitives of the DAI stablecoin/Compound interest accounts.  
  • MolochDAO: Not sure the best thing to showcase DAOs, but my instinct is MolochDAO instead of Continuous Organizations, Aragon, DAOStack, dxDAO, or the Commons Stack. Moloch is a clear (strange) example of people coordinating for the public good.
  • Etherisc: Parametric insurance is a pretty sweet use case and seems to be the leading "social good" use case.
  • I might show an NFT, like the MtG tokenized Black Lotus, ThisArtIsAlwaysOnSale, or virtual celebrity selling a digital fashion. Though this might be less crucial.
  • I might show a prediction market, though it seems less crucial.

A note on the above: many of the DeFi things get finance-types excited, not necessarily the general population.

Bitcoin and Other

  • Bitcoin: I'd send a large ($10k+) transaction to my friend around the world.
  • Zcash: I'd show a shielded transaction
  • Dogecoin: Mainly just to discuss the idea of meme currencies.
  • Scaling and PoS: I might show some staking networks or a specific scaling solution, but...doesn't seem crucial.
  • I might show some of the enterprise stuff like the Glacier protocol.
  • I might show something like Bitconnect as something to stay away from.

...Hmmm. So that's my list. A couple cool cryptoeconomic games and some Bitcoin/Zcash payments. What would you show in your Mother of All Demos?

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