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· 12 min read
Felixander

“Juicebox in the words of” is a series that highlights JB community members in interview form. Learn about members’ roles at JB and what makes them tick.

Zeugh is a contributor to the JB space as a community manager and a straight up OG. He has all the trappings of a proverbial hype-man, and a knack for bringing a party and good vibes wherever he goes. He’s upbeat with an excellent sense of humor, and his sarcasm game is through the roof. He works tirelessly to help bring the JB community together, and to bring those JB vibes to every corner of the globe. Read on to learn a bit more about this sarcastic human teddy bear.

How'd you get started with JB, and how has it changed since you've been here?

I started at JB around Aug/June 2021. DAOs amazed me and i had my eyes on crypto for a while… but when I found out DAOs existed I was very excited to work with them. I joined a discord server and got involved with Tiles DAO, and eventually just explored more. I wasn’t in JB way at the beginning, but I did join in the first week after release. When the question came up that a community manager was needed, I put my name out there. I had never been a comm manager per se, but had been doing comm management for other products I was helping release and so I figured I’d take it on, got voted in, and hit the ground running. I started

So you’re an OG.

I joined in week 1 of JB, back at FC1. Although regarding crypto as a whole, I’m pretty much a newbie. JB was the first project I really got involved in and put my hands on.

Wow, that’s nuts— you’ve seen the evolution of JB from start to right now. Would you say it’s unrecognizable?

From the beginning? I wouldn’t say unrecognizable because I think some of the core values of transparency, building out in the open, and great vibes have been around since day one. The core values have not changed, and that’s beautiful.

I think of it like a sapling and tree, just as they are different, they are also the same.

How would you describe your role at JB?

A confusing one, firstly, but also a very interesting one. Rarely are two days the same. There is a lot of time spent online in chats and severs, whether the Chinese chats to try to understand community issues, or in other servers to learn new tools they’re using, practices they have, and how they engage/reward/manage a sustainable growth.

Lately we’ve pushed hard on trying to automate governance with guys like filipv, Phytann, jigglyjamz, lazervike and others, and Canu has been heavily involved in this as well.

What has it been like working with the Chinese community, and their role at JB?

It’s one of the better things that happened to JB ever, but at the same time definitely one of the biggest challenges. Bringing our Chinese members together in a governance process where we all get the power to decide what we do is a complex thing, but it’s exactly what makes us so critical and diverse in what we build. We have to do good stuff– not sensibly good to my taste or American or European tastes, or to Chinese tastes, but it has to be good stuff across the board. That’s very challenging to pull off, but at the same time we’re all a part of the community.

When the community first came, I remember I would jump in there with google translate to try to make sense of the chats going on in discord. Man, it was so suddenly so many new members, and we had to try to reach out and make those connections. It was an exiting and also exhausting time, especially since google translate can only do so much. I do have to say one of the members who has been a killer and God in moderating the Chinese community, getting them informed and engaged, is twodam. That guy is a beast and I appreciate him so much.

The idea of you sitting in Discord with google translate and trying to understand Chinese is absolutely hilarious to me.

Let me tell you— now we have the translate bot. It automatically translates. But that day when we got that huge influx of members, it was 3am and my phone starting beeping, beeping, beeping, and I was like ok, silent mode, I’m not working tonight, this is my one night off.

But it didn’t stop! So I got back to my comp and there were more than 1k new members, all of them Mandarin speakers, and all were over every channel– and up to that day we didn’t have a single Mandarin channel, so I spent the whole night with google translate writing FAQs, basic guides on how to solve the most common questions, translated hundreds of Q’s and ranked them with what were the most relevant answers, and I think it was nicholas and someone else who was in the twitter spaces that joined and were able to pitch in and help. Shout out to those guys and everyone who helped early on with that, it was such a huge task and everyone stepped up. Eventually we even found some university students from the US that we knew who were Chinese and we asked them to translate asap, and that helped a lot too. Now we have really amazing translator teams, the of course the amazing twodam who kills it every day, and so we’ve found a good stride.

Twodam is amazing, I can’t say enough good things. He ended up in this position of managing the greatest share of governance (by population) and is doing it incredibly well. I’m about convinced that twdam is a team– not a guy, a whole team– because the guy does contracts, community, translates, I mean he’s absolutely incredible.

Where are all the assholes at JB?

That’s a very good question, actually. The main thing on that that fascinates me is that I’ve spent countless hours crunching analytics data on our conversations, running our bots, and so far I haven’t found them either. Idk why, but they are just not around I guess. The funny thing is we’re in the crypto space— people being obnoxious is like breakfast, but somehow at JB we don’t attract these kinds of people.

What’s something somebody would be surprised to learn about you?

I was a comp sci undergrad for 3 years, that’s when I first heard about crypto, and even so it took me 5 years to ever engage in my first transaction (which was in bitcoin!) to actually get into crypto because I was completely against burning the amazon. I was a very critical person of crypto for a good while. I was misinformed.

I get addicted to hobbies; 2 years ago I was living in a small house in the middle of the woods. I spent about one year living there, talking to my cats or the monkeys who would come to try to steal my food. I was developing digital products and tending to the gardens since I love gardening. I loved the nature, the no-plastic environment, just me and plants, no eating meat. That passed now, I’m back to the animal eating part of life and living around big buildings and concrete and using plastic bags, but that was definitely a life-changing part of my last few years.

So what changed? The amazon can just burn to the ground?

I stopped listening to the news and started reading some articles.  After you read the numbers/data you understand that that’s not what’s happening. I was living in the middle of nature trying to find out how possible it was for someone living in society to have the smallest impact in nature– that was the goal of going there– to see how simple/non-violent towards nature I could live without leaving behind civilization and a modern world. I started reading everything I could in every area, so I learned a huge amount and cleared up a lot of misconceptions.

Fascinating. Who’s your fav contributor, and why is it Zom_Bae?

Haha. I think this gets me into a tight spot here. Although Zom_Bae is terrific, I don’t think I can give her the prize without sharing it with filipv and twodam. I will not even include jango in this one just because that is obvious.

I can’t choose man, I have the blessing of a very amazing team to work with. If I had to pick, I would share my favorite contributor in four people– Filip, Jango, Twodam, and Zom_Bae. If I had to pick one, I’d go with Zom_Bae. She’s amazing. And the red rocket banny pfp! Zom_Bae does wonders in lots of micro areas around JB community - I would not trust anyone more than her nowadays to be the one who receives and onboards both partners and community members, contributor-wannabes, and everyone in between who needs guidance to navigate our complex environment.

jango has always been a steward for good culture, has always been bringing some perspectives of open criticism/honest debate since the beginning.

Filip is a monster– a complete gigabrain going from governance to some automation here and there and finding good minds to help every single area he touches– there’s not an issue I don’t se him going around. Twodam I’ve talked about more than anyone in this inteveriew– it’s well deserved. Bridging two different communities while also building data queries to better observe community trends, and making it look effortless, it’s just amazing…

But then there’s Mieos and Sage with WAGMI studios and all the vibes– Sage is definitely underrated! A huge shout-out to her and the vibes that we get from Banny and that we get from all the juicy fruits that she brings to life with her art. Banny’s something else.

Nicholas, filipv, unicorn and 0xSTVG are fucking rocking it, doing amazing at governance issues, really taking the helm on things.

And how about that awesome guy who writes the Banny histories, huh?

But he’s just in the house, I mean he’s around here and there... I’ll mention him maybe in the next one. Haha.

Okay, no hard feelings. Besides feeding wild monkeys do you have any other interesting hobbies?

I roller blade; I’m not especially good in most tricks, but I can do some tricks, some downhill stuff, but by no means an expert in any of those.

This is starting to go like a job interview, so I’m just gonna go in hard. What’s your greatest weakness?

My total lack of concentration. I am the apex of ADHD in a human being. That’s why I tend to work in the night because everyone else is sleeping and that’s less things to get distracted with. I’m kind of a workaholic; I engage a good part of my hobbies like they’re work. I played (semi-professionaly) League of Legends for a while. Very low-tier stuff though.

I love gardening. I used to have an ant farm; I would catch ant queens in mating season and I started my own ant farm. I raised some ants.

My hobby is changing hobbies– I have 3-month sprints where I have hyper-focus in something, study a lot and research a lot, get super nerdy, and then I move on to the next thing. I’ve been through organic chemistry– making my own hygiene products. Star wars– reading all I could in the expanded universe. Wicca magic. Cocktails. Making events (very close to community management)! And more to come = )

That’s awesome. What’s the favorite thing you’re looking forward to?

I’ll have to split the answer in two. The first - watching how crypto changes the world. I’m gonna play a part and I want to play the best part I can. I used to say in my twitter, “I am here to make sure the next big social network is not owned by a corporation, but is co-owned”. I want to see the power of open data, public ledgers, collective ownership over the digital assets that currently rule over people’s days most of the time, and so much more. I want to watch as that unfolds and try to play a part, and I think it will happen in a massive way.

As for myself, I’m really really keen to creating those bridges between people building stuff and people that need stuff built. I’ll be going nomad for a while and traveling to try to find a way to get a local communities to organize and find solutions through the tech they’re creating. Local communities are powerful and we’re finally at a point where digital communities are also hitting that kind of strength. If we can merge local and digital communities we can really change things. When the people making products, the politicians making promises, etc., are also the people who are living in a community, they can’t just say they’ll do things and not do them. Suddenly there is accountability, and things get better. I want to build a solar-punk future. It sounds crazy, but I used to say, “I’m not crazy, I’m just hopeful.”

· 5 min read
Felixander

As many of you may have noticed, the question of compensation has come up recently in the discord (linked here). It was an exceptionally valuable discussion that really highlighted how tricky the question concerning compensation is, both at JB specifically and in the web3 DAO space as a whole.

Central to this question and perhaps a source of equivocation is this: what precisely is Juicebox?

People looking at Juicebox like a startup, assuming it will exist like startups in the web2 world, may be quick to advocate for low salaries. After all, you don’t want high salaries if you are looking to pump up value in a company that you want to sell. This is the case with classic startups that are seeded with VC and created with the intent of profit as their final goal.

But you can also look at Juicebox like a grass-roots company– still profit driven, but not looking to sell. This would be in-line with your classic examples of companies that went big– think Bill Gates dropping out of college to create Microsoft, or Mark Zuckerberg doing the same with Facebook. In these cases, the goal was not to pump value and then sell; rather, the goal was to build first, and only after that to reap the rewards down the line. When Mark Zuckerberg made facebook, Myspace was the biggest name in town. In a few short years, it became an afterthought, and Mark Zuckerberg became the reptilian overlord we know him as today. He was in it for the long-haul, and it paid off for him.

And finally, you can look at Juicebox as a community. In this schema, it’s a collection of people all pulling in the same direction. The people who see Juicebox this way are quick to tell you that profit doesn’t really enter their minds too much, nor does a potential long-term promise of riches and private yachts. Rather, these people just like the people, the vibe, and the sense of being a part of something greater than themselves.

All this a long-winded way to point out that, if we ask the three people above about compensation, we’re likely to get three very different answers. Furthermore, we’re even more likely to equivocate the word at hand.

For instance: at Juicebox, are we compensating for services rendered, or are we acknowledging people’s efforts through compensation? Are we disbursing funds based on how profit-driven companies pay their employees, or are we giving pieces of the pie, ie JBX, to stake future promise and voice into our contributors? And in either case, how are we valuing contributors based on their roles differently?

And then there is a question of effort spent working– that is, is it even fair to tie compensation to how hard one works. Take for instance classic capitalist models. You may know someone who works hard and makes 50k per year. You may know someone who works hard and makes 200k a year. You may wonder if one person is truly working “harder” than the other. Maybe so, maybe not. But then take Elon Musk, who is worth 300 billion dollars, give or take. Is it fair to say that, in comparison to our 200k-per-year example, Elon is working 1.5 million times harder? Or compared to our 50K example, that he’s working six million times harder? We see from this reductio ad absurdem that equating value with how hard one works tends toward fallacy.

And so we arrive back and square one. What is compensation, truly? What is fair compensation? Is comparison the thief of joy, or should we look to others to determine our own worth? Marx said: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. An honor system in other words– I am a contributor doing X in a city where I need Y to live comfortably, and I’m asking for Y. Is this the solution– a commune where wealth is shared according to what people self-report they need? It doesn’t take a much to point out the room for abuse there.

Perhaps this is the central point: complicated, worthwhile endeavors are messy. There aren’t simple answers to these questions, and there shouldn’t be. The fact that we’re doing something worthwhile is underpinned by the fact that we’re even having these conversations, and so authentically and transparently at that. Like great art, you can’t expect people to come away agreeing that this discussion means the same thing, or that it’s solved. But what can be said is that our attitude toward the discussion should reflect ourselves authentically, and should show our steadfast determination to working together, to community and to teamwork. Oscar Wilde said, “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” We should take these words to heart and resolve to never get lost in just the numbers.

· 4 min read
Felixander

“Juicebox in the words of” is a series that highlights JB community members in interview form. Learn about members’ roles at JB and what makes them tick.

DrGorilla is a contributor to the JB space on the dev side. By all accounts a deft coder, what most people will really tell you is how fucking funny he is. I stand with many when I say that I feel like he’s a comedian moonlighting as a coder. After all, comedy never pays the bills. Read on to learn a bit more about his passions, history at JB, and eclectic former jobs— one of which traces back over 500 years!

How'd you get started with JB, and how has it changed since you've been here?

It all started in November, when nicholas reached out to tell me that JB was looking for devs. I joined immediately. I had left previous projects because they were either running in circle or became cash-grabs, so I was looking for something more interesting (for a solidity dev) to do. I joined the Discord the same day nicholas reached out and wrote my first batch of unit tests the same night!

This period was in-between ConstitutionDAO and AssangeDAO, so we were in some kind of a wave of newcomers to JuiceboxDAO. Since then, Juicebox and JuiceboxDAO have been maturing a lot, in terms of governance, tech, identity (and there are so many cool things yet to come) :)

That's such an awesome origin story. One thing that has struck me is how open and inclusive people are at JB; I haven't encountered a single asshole yet. Where are they?

… Not in JuiceboxDAO. All in all, this is a great contributors team, and a super diverse community around, really a nice place!

What is something people here in JB would be surprised to learn about you? Ie interesting hobbies/life experiences etc?

Ok, tricky to not doxx myself too much… Maybe a list of professions and jobs I might—or might not :)—have done: Waiter Morgue janitor Photo-assistant MD & surgical resident Finance master & gintonic producer Art degree & real author of the Vitruvian man

lol! Omg that’s some eclectic shit! Tell me about what it was like cleaning up the morgue!

... Cold haha. But clean (not the cleanest part of my professional cleaning career, but certainly the most atypical one:) I was a teenager, so a bit afraid the first time, but humans are super resilient, I got along with it:)

How many ghosts did you bump into? Did a door ever slam shut across the hall in an otherwise empty building?

Those guys were really nice as to mark the empty/occupied "rooms" (that was a small morgue, not like the ones with shelfs as in movies, rather one small refrigerated room per body), but still, it happened to bumped into someone (who obviously didn't care being bothered anymore).

I remember one of the full-time (adult) janitor having this sentence I'll never forget: "You should rather be scared of the people alive", adding paranoia to my already existing ptsd.

lol

...

Ok, we will do a follow-up article just about this topic, but let's forge on back to nicer topics.

“DrGorilla’s Morgue Experience!” - yeah, rather morbid.

Between you and me and the internet, who is your favorite JB contributor, and why is it Zom_Bae?

Because she rocks! Nobody’s expecting a Zom_Bae, yet, she appears to solve stuff, and that’s pretty cool imo.

You know she singled you out when she was asked who her favorite contributor was.

“My favorite contributor is Felixander because he makes me look good on paper.”

Perfect, best answer so far! OK, tell me what the future of DrGorilla looks like. What are you really excited about?

Lately, I've been like deep into V2 final push, so this is my "scope" when answering that I'm really excited about starting coding treasury extensions (imagine strats à la Yearn, but as a DAO on Juicebox!) - nerdy-side aside, this is gonna rock!

Haha, that's the perfect answer for a JB contributor! Your heart is in the right place!

My heart and my keyboard : )

We will do a follow-up about your morgue days and so much more, but for now I will ask one last question: whats the silliest thing you've ever done (beside this interview)?

This is a tough one! Nothing beats this interview.

· 2 min read
Felixander

Filipv, our very own JB wunderkind and the fellow that onboarded me into such a welcoming and brilliant community, made the grave error of agreeing to record himself playing VR miniature golf with me the other day. This resulted in shenanigans, as one might expect, but it also gave us a glimpse into the recent happenings filipv has been engaged with.

Filipv: where is he now?

Filipv is still comfortably engaged with JB initiatives around governance, populating the YouTube channel, and serving as MC for town hall’s, among many other things. You can find filipv in the general chat always helping out, or across the discord helping to craft and curate threads and proposals as needed. It was his invisible hand that guided this very article into the ether that is our web3 blog.

On the heels of an engaging discussion that took place in the after-party of the last JB town hall, I also decided to ask filipv some pointed questions about his feelings on mayonnaise. His answers, as you may expect, did not disappoint.

And finally and perhaps most importantly, filipv announced that he is working on his very own NFT music project. It’s all very hush hush at the moment, but he looks forward to sharing more when the time is right.

The Horse’s Mouth

If you’d like to delve further into any of the revelations above, please find a carefully curated video of filipv being interviewed about his ambitions, his mic technique, and mayonnaise. He didn’t end up winning the golf game, but he’s clearly winning at life. And please excuse the awful audio— my mic technique is nothing to write home about. Enjoy!

· 6 min read
Felixander

“Juicebox in the words of” is a series that highlights JB community members in interview form. Learn about members’ roles at JB and what makes them tick.

tankbottoms is a new contributor to the JB space. He contributes to JB, Wagmi productions and MovementDAO, and is a passionate software developer with a unique handle to say the least. Read on to learn a bit about his thoughts on the Web 3 space, DAOs, and his passionate interest in furthering humanitarian causes through MovementDAO.

First, the name– tankbottoms– would you mind walking me through that?

I wanted to draw attention that there are other articles of clothing that may not get the attention that they deserve, such as tankbottoms, and so that’s my contribution, fashion education.

How'd you get started with JB, and what attracted you to the platform?

I’ve been around six weeks or so. I’ve been in software development for a minute, and I met some anons who wanted to do this public good DAO, which is now called MovementDAO. It’s part seeding start-ups, part non-profit, part social movements. In researching platforms to work with I found two which I liked the most, OpenLaw’s TributeDAO Framework and Juicebox.

TributeDAO we updated all the tooling and added DeFi, and at the end felt it was not as accessible as we would have liked. We also took Juicebox forked it and launched it on Polygon (where Matic is used), which was more what we were looking for. However, we are not the kind of cats to fork and do stuff, its open source and its fair game, but we contribute, add value and divide up the work, so it seemed right to contribute to helping through v2.

One place it was mentioned where we could help was figure out the BannyVerse situation. I pinged Wagmi’s Mieos and started collaborating with constructing Banny to be mintable, worked on the TokenUriResolver how the veBannys were going to be selected, and planning on the BannyVerse would unfold NFT-wise.

That’s fascinating, you seem to be well-versed on the technical side of this stuff. In your opinion, how do DAO’s protect themselves from bad actors/sabotage?

A few DAOs have added a veto contract or function in existing contracts that can veto any pending proposals. This can be provided to a law firm, also called service provider, or retained by the founders until they revoke the right on chain at a later date. In other words, it’s designed to ensure nothing crazy happens.

Interesting. It seems like that mechanism kind of runs against the philosophy of what a DAO is, doesn’t it? How do you strike a balance between control and decentralization?

That’s the dichotomy– you can make a decentralized protocol that’s idealistic, and it functions, but then there’s the reality that people are involved, and if it has ETH, there needs to be emergency protocols in place – to guard against whether someone’s gaming, a flaw in the smart contract is discovered, or some bad actors reveal themselves. This whole space is a one large expensive experiment and so you really don’t know what may happen, so its safe to be prudent.

I always think of DAO/Crypto time similar to dog-years and aging: like one month of time in a DAO has gotta be at least 6 months or a year at a regular IRL company. You and I of course both help as contributors to Wagmi productions. How would you describe your role at JB and Wagmi after this first 6 weeks or so?

I like to think if there is code which expands the reach of the Banny, I am enabling this. I wrote the Juicebox TokenURI Resolver for the veBanny and make sure the composite Banny and appropriate metadata are deployed on IPFS. Additionally and more importantly, when Juicebox token holders go to stake their Banny and enter the Bannyverse, I aim to enable the experience to mint a unique Banny with anything from Hattori Hanzo to AK-47. A banana has got to defend himself.

I always ask about where all the assholes are, it seems like so many talented people working together should bring a clash of egos. Where are the assholes?

I think it starts from the OG contributors, and fortunately the OG contributors have set a tone to be inviting and respectful as well as reward contributors. I also think people who stick around are very talented, the Notion docs do a pretty good job about making it clear that you have to contribute before seeking a one-time or reoccurring payout. All the contributors are pretty cool about their talent. And that kind of sets the atmosphere.

Between you and me and the rest of the internet, who’s your favorite contributor, and why is it Mieos?

I think WAGMI makes it clear you can add a lot of value even if it’s not code. WAGMI’s pixel ninjas, 60 Minutes style interviews, and the enabling of the BannyVerse reinforces that throughout whatever the problem, we are all here to have fun; and reminds us all to no take yourself too seriously, and that says a lot. Mieos is very humble, even though he’s been around in the space for a long time and basically the OG JB whale. He’s pretty rad.

What’s a project (within or outside of JB) that you’re really looking forward to in the future?

MovementDAO, and the future of Juicebox v2 are both things that I am working on and that I am looking forward to enabling. We are all learning every day how things work and willing to change it up, but I want to understand some fundamental parts of what makes Juicebox successful not for just raising funds but to getting people to operate treasuries transparently. We (both JB v2 and MovementDAO) want to enable this with endowments, NFT businesses, start-ups, liquidity pools into a well orchestrated decentralized protocol.

What’s something people would be surprised to learn about you?

I don’t know, hmm… I lived in a monastery!

· 4 min read
Felixander

Predictions of Past and Present

Once in a while it may be nice to let loose with a little silliness. So enjoy this short article on 18th century critical theory and the folly of technological prophesies.

Historicism, that nebulous academic term that finds itself increasingly harder to define the more you delve into it, is at play more than you may think in the ever-changing landscape of web3. A term originally coined by Friedrich Schlegel a couple centuries ago, we will define it– for the purposes of this article– simply as the idea that societies at different times in history can oftentimes lose sight of the fact that time keeps marching forward. The future, it turns out, isn’t the easiest thing to predict. And the present doesn’t offer up all the answers. As much as we may be tempted to feel like we’ve got it all figured out, history has a bad habit of revealing the folly that belies this hubris.

After all, two Romans speaking a couple thousand years ago didn’t ask each other what year it was, only for one to tell the other, “We’re in the year -22 BCE, dummy!”

All this a long-winded way to say: people tend to lose sight of the future, or, to be more precise, never truly have it. Our ability to predict is pathetically unreliable as systems grow more complex. Case in point: computing power has grown exponentially, and yet we are still terrible at predicting weather. You’d think with all our developments we’d be able to see a massive hurricane before it forms, and yet this feat is presently considered functionally impossible.

For all the naysayers out there: criticism of new ideas, technologies and ways of building isn’t too new after all. People have a hard time predicting what will work, but hindsight is 20/20. Enjoy as we pit historical figures, living and otherwise, in a match of predictions in the Premonition Rumble!

JB’s Inaugural Premonition Rumble!

Warren Buffet versus Robert Metcalfe

"In terms of cryptocurrencies generally, I can say almost with certainty that they will come to a bad ending.” - Warren Buffet, 2019

vs

“I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.” — Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com, inventor of Ethernet, 1995

Paul Krugman versus Thomas Edison

“Twelve years on, cryptocurrencies play almost no role in normal economic activity. Almost the only time we hear about them being used as a means of payment -- as opposed to speculative trading -- is in association with illegal activity.” - Paul Krugman, Nobel prize-winning economist, 2021

vs

“Fooling around with alternating current (AC) is just a waste of time. Nobody will use it, ever.” — Thomas Edison, accomplished inventor, 1889

Warren Buffet versus David Sarnoff

"Cryptocurrencies basically have no value and they don't produce anything. They don't reproduce, they can't mail you a check, they can't do anything, and what you hope is that somebody else comes along and pays you more money for them later on, but then that person's got the problem. In terms of value: zero." — Warren Buffet, 2020

vs

“The wireless music box [ie the radio] has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to no one in particular?” — David Sarnoff, founder of RCA, 1921

Charlie Munger versus Steve Jobs

“I think I should say modestly that the whole damn development [of cryptocurrency] is disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization.” - Charlie Munger, legendary investor, 2021

vs

“The subscription model of buying music is bankrupt. I think you could make available the Second Coming in a subscription model, and it might not be successful.” — Steve Jobs, 2003

Bill Gates versus himself

“As an asset class, [crypto] is not producing anything and so you shouldn’t expect it to go up. It’s kind of a pure ‘greater fool theory’ type of investment.” - Bill Gates, crypto expert!, 2019

vs

“No one will need more than 637KB of memory for a personal computer. 640KB ought to be enough for anybody.” - Bill Gates, computer expert!, 1981

vs

“Two years from now, spam will be solved.” - Bill Gates, spam expert!, 2004

vs

“I see little commercial potential for the internet for the next 10 years.” - Bill Gates, Nostradamus Incarnate!, 1994

Main takeaways

  • All the radios in the world are kind of just window dressing, I guess
  • Wtf it’s 2022 and Spotify still doesn’t have The Second Coming!?
  • Alternating current is a flex, not the basis for the world’s electrical grid
  • I don’t even know where the fuck you’re reading this, because the internet imploded in 1996

Welp...

Our competitors fought ferociously— have you been keeping score at home?

· 5 min read
Felixander

“Juicebox in the words of” is a series that highlights JB community members in interview form. Learn about members’ roles at JB and what makes them tick.

twodam is a long-term contributor at JB that is known for an incredible work ethic, moderating the discord server, and creating data visualizations. He also serves a unique role in bridging communication between our English and Chinese speaking communities at JB. Read on to learn about his roles as a contributor and communicator for the JB community.

How did you get started with JB, and how has it changed since you’ve been here?

When researching ConstitutionDAO, I discovered the platform Juicebox, and joined Discord. During that time I read through the documentation and code base, because I saw a lot of people asking questions, so I spontaneously went to help answer them. It so happened that because of the popularity of ConstitutionDAO, many people joined Discord, and that number of people reached several thousand. Zeugh recognized and recommended me to be the Discord mod. After that I also made several data panels according to the needs, to better show the trends in different aspects of JB.

Since I’ve joined, JB started to have multi-language support, the governance process got better, the number of contributors increased to a dozen, a lot of things were moving forward, and everyone was smart about it.

That's awesome, it sounds like you're a big part of that progress. What would people be surprised to learn about you? Any interesting hobbies?

Yeah, just in time and it's great to work with everyone. I actually did contract development for a while before and was a full time programmer. I used to study projects from the whole and in detail— for example, studying a protocol from the front-end all the way to the contract implementation, from the documentation to the surrounding tools and from the community to the team atmosphere.

That's super cool. When you're not at a computer, what do you like to do to pass the time?

Read books, hang out with friends, play billiards. I also like to read science fiction and literary fiction.

That's awesome. A lot of the Web 3 space can feel like a sci fi, to be honest.

In terms of exploring a lot of new directions?

Yeah, new directions and also I think people don't really know what this new space and technology will bring. How do you think Web 3 will change the world?

It will make UGC owned by the creator, bring innovative formats to human collaboration and keep many things decentralized on chain, which brings transparency, retains history and much more...

And maybe also somehow important, there are not really regulations yet, so innovative ideas without too many limitations can thrive.

“Innovative ideas without too many limitations" really strikes me as a biggie. It seems like people are willing to go out and take risks, and make themselves vulnerable. It says a lot for an environment to bring that out of people. How would you describe your role at JB?

I work as the Discord moderator, multisig owner and specialize in Data Viz. I also do community support and alignment, and post educational materials for mainly the Chinese community. I’m also actively looking for different things that I could help; recently I’m writing a Juicebox weekly summary with 0xSTVG. Also our website and blog supporting multiple languages is something filip and zotico work on very hard, and I work on the Chinese translations of that.

That's awesome, and things like the weekly summaries are really important. I always wonder about the Chinese community and how the information travels between it and the rest of the community. You kind of bridge that gap from what I understand, is that accurate?

indeed, with the help of zhape who helped a lot in communication and vibe summaries in town-hall.

That's amazing. Is it a difficult role to have? I know sometimes there are differences of opinion between the communities. How do you manage to keep the peace?

First thing I would try is to understand different opinions, and then I would help to bridge them to discuss together. Sometimes it’s because people have misunderstandings, I will show them where to check and explain to them the reasoning behind. Sometimes it’s because the language gap, then I will help to translate and/or communicate, for example: find the real problem, let them have discussion and correct the misinterpretations if there were any.

Yeah, this role is not easy I would say, you can’t make everyone happy... have to balance between a lot of things.

It sounds tough, but it also sounds like you are taking a really level-headed and fair approach. Okay final question-- what is the favorite part of your day?

getting inspiration when solving problems and getting recognition from others.

make me feels good and powerful.

· 11 min read
Felixander

“Juicebox in the words of” is a series that highlights JB community members in interview form. Learn about members’ roles at JB and what makes them tick.

peri is one of the two OG’s of JB, having created JB along with jango and worked tirelessly to streamline it, organize contributors, and deliver excellent front-end work at a breakneck pace. Along with jango he has by far the widest perspective of the JB story. Read on to learn a bit about JB’s beginnings and evolution.

How'd you get started with JB, and how has it changed since you've been here?

I was kind of around building JB from day one; jango and I were working on it by ourselves for a pretty long time before we started getting some more regular teammates… I probably spent a good six months or so building the app and most of that time I was full-time dedicated to JB. I’d left my other day job early on.

The first iteration of the JB app was fairly limited; it definitely had some shortcomings, so we figured let’s just get this to a  good place and see if people enjoy it. After JB launched it took about a month or so before the project got much traction. After that– I think Sharkdao was the first project that gave it a lot of traction– we got some other front-end contributors to help out with the work that I was doing.

What kept you going early on, when you had to move mountains and put so much effort in. Did you and jango have a clear vision for what all that work was going to amount to?

I think jango and I each had our own unique visions for JB– they weren’t opposed in any ways, but there were definitely certain things that were driving me and important to me, and certain things important to him. Early on– really really early on– I didn’t have a complete vision for how JB would exist in the world; it was more just an interesting experiment to build a web-3 app, and I wanted to get some experience working in web-3. JB is fairly complicated, so over the months we were constantly reshaping it, so the vision was changing as well. About 2-3 months before we launched I started to think about it and realized how valuable it would be to DAOs. While we were building it, DAO’s were only just starting to become big. I felt like, somebody could use this not just as a business or to create a fundraiser, but can create a community of people, and that’s when I felt like JB really came into its own and found itself. The beauty of jb is that it’s super extensive, and can be used for all kind of things, not just DAOs.

What’s the average day for you look like now that JB has kind of found its stride and that major early work has been done?

It’s definitely changed a bit– in the early days after the launch, once JB went public, it didn’t change a lot, but we were also getting a lot of feedback from people on what was needed and how to better streamline things. Putting a lot of these complex items into a digestible way was very hard, especially when you’re so intimately familiar with these complex processes, so getting feedback from people who were seeing this for the first time was a huge help for us.

Once there were more full-time contributors coming in (who we formed peel with), it changed a lot. I can’t say enough good things about those early contributors– I feel so blessed that they came so eager and willing to put themselves into the work. From day 1 I was pushing code to fix small bugs and also thinking of these big-picture things, so I had wanted for a while a team to be able to help out with some of that workload. It was really beautiful because it was a time of wondering how to get those people in here, and I wondered: is this what a recruiting process looks like, do I need to be advertising positions, interviewing people and so on? That whole process is not something I was very excited or eager about, so I was just like, “Hopefully there will be people who find the project interesting and show up to help out”– and that ended up being exactly what happened! JohnnyD, Aeolian, Torvusbug, Ooyoo were some of the major early contributors and with them we kicked into high gear. The code base got cleaned up a lot and having that diversity of opinion and diversity of experience was just a huge asset. After a month or so of that we realized we had a real team here, and started feeling like a machine.

With growth happening so fast, is there any way to even predict what JB might look like in a couple years?

The speed of things is remarkable, and that’s an amazing attribute of web 3. JB feels like it’s going as fast as it can go, and that’s a consequence of a  number of things. A big factor is that there’s always public conversations and transparency, so there’s very little time wasted on catching people up, so everyone is getting the info more or less in real-time at the same time. Most people spending time on this aren’t clocking out at 5pm, they’re working when they want to and when they feel like it, and their passion has them executing ideas very quickly, which is wild.

Talking about 2 years from now, that feels like a lifetime; it’s hard to make any predictions, but I think the main thing we’ll see going forward that I can hardly even really predict– I don’t know what it’ll look like– but I think there’ll be a lot more decentralization of the project itself. With introduction of V2 there’s gonna be a lot of added flexibility, with more diverse use cases people can use JB for, and a lot of these use cases will probably end up being built around custom extensions of JB.

Switching gears a bit: when you meet that awkward uncle at thanksgiving we all have, and they ask you what you do, how do you explain JB and your role in it?

Haha. To be honest I don’t find myself in that situation all that often, so I don’t practice very frequently, and every time I do find myself in that situation my take on it may have changed since the last time. Oftentimes, if it’s someone who isn’t familiar with web 3, I won’t even mention JB at all because there’s so many layers of abstraction to go through. But if someone’s really curious, I generally start by comparing it kickstarter, and I don’t really think that’s the best place to start, it’s just the easiest since it’s a fairly similar type of mechanism people are already familiar with. So you can kinda start there as an organization that raises money, but obviously the big differences you have to jump to is issuance of tokens, what that means, the programmability of it all, the restriction on money withdrawal and to whom. That’s when it starts getting really tricky to explain.

I’m always surprised by the conspicuous lack of assholes at JB– where are they all hiding?

Haha. I really have never thought about that. There’s a lot of assholes in the world, and maybe there were 2-3 who have come through JB in the past, but I think of it by remembering this term jango said to me once, he used this expression– “DAO immune system”-- and it immediately clicked to me what he meant: every DAO that has a strong culture, they have an immune system, and it’s an immune system to people and decisions. And the consequence of that is if there’s ideas thrown out and talked about that aren’t fitting with the momentum of the DAO, then it tends to be squashed. But the beautiful thing about that is that the way the JB immune system seems to work is very polite and genuine.

Would you call that killing with kindness?

Yeah, I definitely see a lot of that, and it’s a beautiful thing. On the topic of the DAO immune system, when factions do emerge, the beautiful thing about it is that it still remains a very democratic process, and evaluations of decisions aren't based on what’s “right” and “wrong”, it’s rather the democratic process of voting with JBX. Also fascinating: they’ve always been fairly close votes when these issues have arisen. Ideally the way the system is set up and the governance processes we have, the DAO will ultimately decide what’s best one way or another, and that’s entirely subjective, since there’s no such thing as an objectively good or bad outcome.

It’s interesting connecting DAO’s to democracy– in democracy, we have structures to influence voting, like campaigning, super PACS, etc. Arguably the world of DAOs is too young for this– but do you see this is an eventuality of communities and factions within DAOs trying to gain control to guide DAO decision-making?

I think we see that already. That’s a necessary part of any voting process, a “campaign”-- it doesn’t necessarily need to look like what we think of campaigns in ordinary politics (posters, pamphlets, etc) but it already does happen, for instance when somebody creates a proposal, there’s an implicit requisite for them to defend that proposal and explain why. The temperature check is designed for discourse, and those types of conversations are themselves a form of campaigning. It’s the responsibility of people much more involved in JB who have a more nuanced understanding of the mechanisms to distill their opinions on responsible voting, or to fairly summarize the pros and cons of the proposal because less-active JB members aren’t as familiar with the proposal.

Excellent point. Switching gears: who is your favorite JB contributor, and why is it filipv?

Haha. Filip’s great, I have a lot of love for filip. When I think of filip, the things that come to mind are that he’s just an excellent talker, and being a good talker is not something that feels like a resume item, but it really is, it’s a really truly valuable skill that’s underrated. Having somebody like filip facilitate conversations like he does is super valuable. Not only is he so good at explaining things, he’s also very open-minded, knowledgeable of what he knows and quick not to pretend he’s knowledgeable about what he doesn’t know. He’s very active, and good about proposing things we may not be thinking about. The dude just seems very level-headed; I love talking to him.

If I had to pick a favorite that wasn’t filipv– I mean you can’t pick just one obviously– but the other person I really respect is aeolian, who has come in and really taken over a lot from me to be the lead front-end person on peel. And I just have so much mad respect for aeolian– not only is he a great developer, but he knows his stuff and is great at writing good code, and he’s great at having conversations about these things and being open to learn, open minded, open to teach. All the times I spent working with him– I really credit a lot of the joy I get contributing to peel, to him and the rest of the peel team, because he’s made work so enjoyable.

That’s awesome. Okay, final question: do you have any huge project in the future you’re particularly excited about?

That’s hard to say. At the moment, as of about a week ago, I’m spending much less time at JB. I’ve contributed to JB for so long, and having a solid group of contributors like the peel team to help take on my workload has eased me up to pursue new projects. I’ve wanted to do some different type of work that is’t necessarily front-end code, like some solidity work, and art-projects, and so on. So I do have a lot more time to spend on other projects now, and there’s another project that I’m working on now– that hasn’t really been announced yet– but I’m looking forward to announcing it soon.

(Note: this interview was transcribed from a discord call.)

· 9 min read
Felixander

“Juicebox in the words of” is a series that highlights JB community members in interview form. Learn about members’ roles at JB and what makes them tick.

jango is one of the two OG’s of JB, having created JB along with peri and worked tirelessly to streamline it, organize contributors, and deliver excellent work at a breakneck pace. Along with peri he has by far the widest perspective of the JB story and the vision that created it. Read on to learn a bit about JB’s beginnings and the vision that spawned it.

How'd you get started with JB, and how has it changed since you've been here?

It started as a seed of thought. Around 2014/2015ish, I was building this app in iOS dev world. That was back in my younger days when I loved building shit, working with friends, piecing together who’s good at what, etc. We didn’t have a tonne of users on the app, but we had an open slack server where several users would come hang out with the builders

We didn’t want to think about price, business models, advertising etc. We just wanted to build, and we didn’t like thinking of this structure with users on one side to pay fees, and builders on the other to create and get paid, since we felt like the folks using the app were a part of the building process as well.

One day I was sitting with my notebook, trying to figure out how this whole thing was going to play out, and I captured an idea floating by. If we figured out exactly how much it would cost to run this thing, including server hosting, salaries, and so on, we could come up with one number we needed to get to by the end of the month. When we realized we could enumerate exactly what those expenses were to the users, fully transparently, and tell them listen, this is what we need to get to each month for the service to run, and if we exceed this number, we’re going to use that overflow to push down the price of the product– once we realized that, we just ran with the idea and that became the product. It seems like a win-win– the team gets paid, the users get a service, and if it becomes more successful, the service becomes more and more affordable, or even free.

That sounds like a light-bulb moment. How did it translate into your project at that time?

So I stopped the project to focus full time on the building out this new concept, but tried to do it all in the Web 2 world, and it was really really hard– trying to forge relationships with banking systems about a system where there’s fees, maybe fee refunds if we have overflow, etc., and someone would have coordinate all these fees, refunds, and so on, it just wasn’t possible to manage all that with Web 2 structures. Around that same time I was delving into crypto, learning about the blockchain, smart contracts, and then in hit me: this idea was executable, but we were totally swimming against the current trying to do it in the Web 2 space. So I hunkered down and jumped into learning everything I could about smart contracts, did some prototypes, and by that time a lot of the team was like man, I can’t get dragged on another project, so I decided to kind of jump in head-first and take the lead on seeing how this would play out. I figured the moment we had something tangible, all these brilliant people who I’d met and who I had the luxury to spend time with would just hop on and help give it life.

At this point I was working hard along with peri to get this concept built out, and we actually went a few different iterations of the name. There was “the sustainers market”, back in the Web 2 world, and then eventually we called it “fountain”, because of how overflow from payments kind of would trickle down, and then at a certain point, I think it was peri who said, let’s just call it “milk”, and we got real funky with it and said fine, and so it was “milk” for about five minutes, and then we decided on “juice,” and that actually stuck for a while. It wasn’t until like a week before launch that we felt like man, something’s missing, and then somehow we came up with “Juicebox,” and we all felt immediately like yes, that’s the one, and so we launched with that.

In terms of where JB is today: everyday it changes a little bit, and early on we had no idea how it would be used. I had a decent understanding of how I may use it, but seeing how it’s been used has been really awesome. But who the hell knows where it’s going. We learned so much along the way, and a lot of incredible badass motherfuckers started to come through and add on to it, and it’s only gotten better and better because of that.

peri told me about the “DAO immune system” - a term you coined - can you explain it in a bit more detail?

I remember that! That’s a fascinating concept. People are diverse, and JB has always had an amazing team, but over the span since launch there have been some ideas that have come up and vouched for adoption or funding, or were communicated in non-productive ways, and other folks started running away from these or critiquing them heavily, the same way a body would reject a pathogen. I found that so fascinating, and wondered how that worked, since it seemed to happen all on its own.

The DAO is interesting, in that I see it more as a place where ideas exist and sometimes compete. I don’t think people are bad for DAOs, but ideas can certainly take root and harm the operation of a DAO. The interesting thing is early on in a DAO, ideas that come up for vote are not only important short-term, but also precedent-setting. This is a double-edged sword though, because while setting precedent can kind of immunize a DAO against future bad ideas, it can also lead a DAO to try to solve new problems with old methods. All of this is still in a nascent stage, and very fragile, so it’s interesting to see how it plays out, but I do think a DAO has some built-in mechanisms, certainly JB does, that kind of helps it move in positive, productive directions.

Speaking of how fragile all this is, how do you approach managing risk?

A lot of the things I learned come from taking risk, and I’m not a risk averse person. In this context specifically, maybe as a programmer of the contracts you tend to feel a bit more of that weight, and you can sense a community in anticipation, and a zealousness, and so just peeling toward balance in general I think is healthy. More generally, and this is something I constantly point out, is that we need to keep the focus– it’s tempting to go to the next thing prematurely– but we need to keep the focus and stay the course on the tasks in the here and now.

JB seems so inclusive and friendly, so I’m wondering: where are all the assholes?

I’m kind of a proponent of assholery, if it’s needed.

So wait, JB doesn’t need it now? Did it ever?

At JB, we’re doing a thing and everyone has a mode of operation– when you talk about inclusivity, it’s not saying that anything goes. After all a lot of people are taking a lot of risk here, and we can’t be inclusive of things like cutting corners or taking simple approaches that don’t match the complexity of a problem. I don’t think being an asshole is good, obviously, but sometimes you do need to focus in the conversation, and there will always be some people who don’t want to do that, but I think that’s where the limit is to the inclusivity. So I don’t think there’s assholes around, but if we needed them to keep us honest, or if a situation requires people to act that way to make real progress, then maybe we’d see more of them. Fortunately at JB we’re a good team and we communicate well, the transparency is there, but if that wasn’t the case then I don’t know that assholes would be a bad thing.

Who is your favorite JB contributor, and why is it Zeugh?

Zeugh is a complex, charming character. I’m a sucker for really complex, charming characters. I don’t care for yea-sayers or nay-sayers, and people like Zeugh are their own person. Love him for it.

Without question peri is my favorite for many reasons, Zeugh for many reasons, Mieos for many reasons. Twodam is a fucking legend, he’s subtle and sometimes goes unnoticed but holy moly, anytime I talk to anyone about some of our contributors twodam comes up and oh my goodness, what an incredible incredible person. Not a fair question.

Folks who have a strong belief or mindset or some part about them that isn’t looking to step aside (or who just want to be there by association), but rather people who want to be there because of who they are, that tends to be the ones that stick out to me. People who, given a good enough idea, argument or situation, will 100% get behind something and contribute to its success, even if they at first have a hard time with it, are the kinds of people that stick out to me. It’s not stubbornness per se; it’s productive arguments and debates and vibes and fun.

Oh man… It’s impossible to pick a favorite, but that characteristic of people is definitely important to me.

Excellent answer. Okay, final question! What’s something people would be surprised to learn about you?

I’m not a very fun or interesting person, really. Nothing to see here, move along.

· 3 min read
Felixander

“Juicebox in the words of” is a series that highlights JB community members in interview form. Learn about members’ roles at JB and what makes them tick.

Today, we’re getting the inside scoop on filipv, a JB workhorse who seems to always be ready to jump in and find a solution. From running blog posts, editing podcasts and writing and editing governance protocols, filipv does it all and then some, and keeps a great positive attitude throughout. Read below to get to know him a bit better!

How'd you get started with JB, and how has it changed since you've been here?

I got started through a tweet that I saw; I was on twitter, managing another account, and I saw a tweet from Nicholas asking for help with social media.

So I joined the discord server and it was pretty sweet… people were really nice… I said in the server that I wanted to do social media, and 9birdy9 asked me to help with governance issues, and one thing led to another and now I’m doing quite a bit of stuff.

Since I got here, back in November 2021, JB has grown a lot. That’s led to a few things– one is that the culture has evolved, it’s gotten a bit more serious and formal, but we’ve also had a really large demographic shift as the Chinese community has taken greater interest in JB. The team has grown, and I feel like we’ve moved into a higher gear work-wise, and become more efficient as a team.

How would you describe your role at JB?

If I had to put a title, I guess “operations”, or “operations generalist”. I have varying amounts of skill in a number of places, and I try my best to chip in where I can, but that also means I’m pretty diverse in what I do; I tend to be shifting more toward governance stuff/writing proposals, but generally I just look at what JB is doing, and I try to help steer the ship in a direction that is fitting.

In my experience at JB so far, everyone’s been very nice and helpful, so I’m wondering: where are all the assholes?

I would say a lot of times people become assholes in a corporate setting due to resentment that stems from a lack of honesty or allowing expression, but JB is quite good at facilitating expression. Also I think JB attracts a different type of person– there’s no job interview, manager telling you what to do, etc.-- you really have to be a self-starter, and since everything is handled by voting by your peers, there’s real incentives for you to get along; if you’re an asshole, people will vote you out.

What’s something that people would be surprised to find out about you?

Hmm. I play trumpet, and I worked as a jazz musician in New York. I’m getting to be a bit of a coffee snob as of late. Oh, and at one time I was nationally ranked in yu-gi-oh.

What’s been some of your most exciting experiences at JB so far?

All the events around AssangeDAO, despite the chaos, were really fun to be a part of. That being said, every time I do a new project I get very excited.

And finally: who’s your favorite JB community member, and why is it peri?

Gotta be the sex appeal.