my token
What it is
My personal token represents the value I will create over the course of my life.
Its value is grounded in my profits when I sell equity in companies, personal tokens, and similar instruments. Holding shares in my token is a proportional claim to these gains. This is strictly an economic claim; it doesn't come with ownership / control / influence over me in any way.
I'm creating my token so that I can incentivize people to help me create value at the level of life – beyond any single idea, and across everything I may ever do.
Representation
At its core, my token is an agreement, and the information and functionality required to honor that agreement.
My personal token – its state, mechanics, and the agreement – exists onchain. Every action is visible to everyone.
And since my token is an agreement at its core, if you lose your onchain wallet or something else happens, we can reconcile the onchain state with the truth.
Mechanics
My "village" is a curated set of people (including me) who can trade shares of my token freely amongst themselves. Each villager has a cap – the max percentage of shares they can hold. I have full control over liquidity. I may pause trading at times, but since I view trading as valuable feedback from reality, I intend to enable it as much as possible.
Key mechanics (defined as onchain functions):
- Floor – the amount excluded from the scope of my token. I'm planning to set this to $10M, in a way that accounts for inflation. If you don't think I can create a lot more than $10M of value over my life, participating doesn't make sense.
- Buybacks – I can buy back shares from shareholders at any time, but the minimum buyback price is determined by an onchain function, not by me in the moment.
- Royalties – I get a small royalty in shares on the profit a shareholder makes when they sell. This enables me to dilute myself more.
- Voting – shareholders vote on whether capital gains are distributed to shareholders or reinvested back into me to fuel more growth. Votes are weighted by shares held. I don't vote. Like companies, shareholders will mostly profit through secondary sales, not distributions.
Any changes to my personal token (mechanics, the agreement, etc.) require every shareholder to approve. This is because any change is a change to what they agreed to when they came onboard.
One of the reasons buybacks exist is for alignment. As the token evolves through amendments, we need the ability to buy back shares from those who don't agree with a change. Buybacks also exist for the evolution of the village, which I'll discuss next.
Village
"It takes a village to raise a child person".
My village helps me realize my potential.
Since shares in my token are grounded in the value I will create over the course of my life, everyone in the village is strongly incentivized to help me maximize the long-term value I will create. Our incentives are aligned.
Help can come in various ways. Some villagers may actively help me execute by implementing some functionality. Others may chime in with valuable feedback. Some may show up once a year to offer sage advice. And a few may never say anything at all, but their mere presence in the village signals their belief in this experiment, which helps me by unlocking doors.
When I was initially designing the personal token, I didn't feel that great about letting people trade shares of my token. I felt it would distract me from getting actual work done. But my view has flipped 180 degrees. I now feel that trading shares of my token is one of the most valuable ways for villagers to help me succeed, because it helps ground me in reality.
How many shares a villager buys or sells, and at which price, signals feedback on my judgement with a degree of granularity that I simply don't have access to today. Today, a friend can tell me that they don't think an idea will work out, but it's difficult to both express and interpret the degree to which they feel that way. Sure, they could use more words. "By a lot". "May work for some time, but...". But how they trade shares in my token gives me more precise information about degree.
The village expands my surface area of feedback from reality. The more skilled villagers are, and the more they sell, the more likely it is that I've made a mistake. This is invaluable. We live in a world that encourages lying to each other for the sake of feelings, leading us down wrong paths. Thankfully, villagers have a lot to gain by being honest and right.
I believe in the saying "you are the people you surround yourself with". The quality of the village will be the most important factor for my success (or lack of). To me, a high quality villager is one who is aligned with reality, honest, and has the courage to express their opinion — socially and through trading my shares.
The village must evolve over time. Like with startups, those who are valuable in one phase of the journey, may not be later on (and vice versa). I expect the help of villagers to discover, invite, and convince the right people to join the village. Similarly, I expect the help of villagers to decide which villagers we must part ways with by buying back their shares. Stagnation is death. Addition without removal eventually becomes cancerous.
The village will help me be fair. Unfair functions, or unfair decisions, make participating in my token unappealing. Future collaborators won't want to join and existing ones will check out. A destructive cycle. People must see that there is an opportunity to create great wealth through me, and that they will get what they deserve for the impact they create. This is why I can't imagine buying back shares from a villager at a loss to them (whis also means that growth is critical for successful evolution of the village).
Anyone can be a villager! In the early days, I think villagers will mostly be those interested in technology and startups because who else would want to participate in a weird experiment like this. But over time, I expect to see people from all crafts and walks of life join the village. I would want to incentivize a personal trainer or chef or coach with shares in my token because their work can strongly impact the value I create. Similarly, if I'm launching a company for, say, college students, I would want to give some of them shares in my token, to expose them to the upside of the company through me, to incentivize them to give me great feedback.
There are a lot of possibilities. Let's explore them together.
Trust
As part of the agreement, I'm obligated to make sure that any of my holdings that fall into the scope of this instrument are reflected in my personal token. I plan to invest through my personal token. But, from a villager's perspective, it's easy for me to spin up a secret wallet to invest with. There's a lot of work required to make this obligation verifiable onchain. Which is why until you can verify my holdings directly onchain, I plan to share my yearly tax returns with villagers. And I'm open to any ideas that reduce or remove the need to trust my word. I'm hoping my village can help me figure this out.
I can't imagine intentionally jeopardizing this journey. That being said, I'm painfully aware of my own stupidity. This is why I need a high quality village that can help me make decisions about my personal token. This whole journey is a collaboration.
The personal token comes with the ability to dissolve it. I included this in the general spec because I think people, generally, would be afraid to use an instrument that forces a lifelong commitment. But I don't intend to dissolve my token before I die. And I intend to have a smart contract that executes at my death to liquidate holdings and distribute gains pro rata to shareholders.
Trust goes both ways. I need villagers to act on their own, not on behalf of others. To me, sharing the value I create over my life is a very personal, special thing. I must have control over who I share my upside with.
And lastly, if I ever commit fraud, it's your responsibility to sue the fuck out of me. All the fraud that web3 has seen has made this project much, much harder to launch. It sucks. Don't let me get away with anything that would harm others adopting personal tokens. We all win when personal tokens become a legitimate instrument that is well understood by our legal systems, and I intend to spend a lot of time making this happen.
Next steps
- Build the right initial village.
- Implement my token's mechanics onchain to enable trading within my village. Launch trading with the seed round (priced).
- Help others launch their tokens.
And we go from there...
FAQ
Do I need to know "crypto" to participate?
Not at all. In fact, I barely knew anything about this technology before I started working on this project. I'd love to help you understand how it works and get you set up. Also, I'm working on a really simple interface for all the mechanics of my token that (hopefully) makes the technology disappear into the background. You just need to learn a few basics.