I drove 4 hours to visit Zorp HQ in Tyler, Texas on Tuesday.
I wanted to see the new office and learn about developments in the run up to Dumbnet.
Talking with Logan and Edward in person, I realized something...
I've been writing about the Nockchain philosophy for many months, but there was one thing I still didn't really understand: Who exactly are the first customers going to be? I presumed they had some kind of "business development" strategy to court and convince a target market to use Nockchain.
What I finally realized is that Nockchain really is an art project. I've heard Logan say this many times, but I assumed it was marketing: A concept, a talking point, a branding element. They brought me on to help with the "marketing," so I figured he was just suggesting brand concepts.
It was only on Tuesday in this tiny office in Tyler, Texas that another realization clicked at the same time: There is no marketing, either. Art doesn't do marketing, art is self-marketing. If a work of art needed marketing, wouldn't that just prove it's a failed work of art?
The Zorp guys think they've discovered a system that——if it only existed——would slightly tilt the entire world toward truthfulness. If they are correct that such a system can be built, then it is destined to win, if only someone builds it.
Their main business/market wager is that the Proof-of-Work hardware moat will be enough to make Nockchain the global standard for ZKPs. Beyond that, they really have zero concern for marketing or business development——to a degree even I found shocking, after working with them for several months. If they can make this machine run, it will be attractive to miners, and if there are miners, then the machine will grow itself. That's all there is to it.
The closest comparison is Bitcoin——which was also a pure research project, an art project essentially, to see if the concept of digital money could be cracked. Because it successfully instantiated digital money, and because digital money is objectively desirable, the built-in block rewards were sufficient to grow a new monetary standard now worth a trillion dollars. Early Bitcoin developers were not concerned with who their first customers would be, and they had no plan for convincing anyone to use the product.
It's striking how few blockchain companies have grasped the "marketing" logic of the one most successful blockchain. Nearly every blockchain company runs old marketing and business-development playbooks, probably just to look and sound "serious" and respectable. Zorp seems to be one of the only blockchain companies post-Bitcoin that understands the cybernetic and teleological nature of protocol value accretion with candor and conviction.
To the degree we do “marketing” for Nockchain, it's just Proof-of-Work——costly effort to prove our fitness, broadcasting at great length why exactly we don't do marketing.
And now I also understand why they asked me to help run their marketing.
It's because I have no idea how to do that.
