We will be touching a lot of relevant topics of the cryptocurrency and economic business world, as well as the natural world, and you will find that a lot of these principles apply to almost everything. We will focus on demystifying these hype words or buzzwords that some people like to use.
You probably have that one friend, or you are following someone on Twitter, and they hit you with a words that they know are a little bit confusing if you are not following the cryptocurrency space long enough. These are the questions like: What do you think about practical byzantine fault tolerance, and you are just sitting there like… ok bro, I get that you are very smart, but slow down.
My goal for you is that you can after reading this section hit them back with your own little zinger and see if they actually know what they are talking about.
Bear on mind that this will be just small fundamental touch because these are massive topics. We will be exploring blockchain principles:
Game Theory
Consensus Mechanisms
Consistency
Permanence
Truth and Responsibility
Decentralization
Scalability
Security
User Friendliness
Game Theory
Game theory, as it relates to economics and business, is the study of mathematical models of negotiation, conflict, and cooperation between individuals, governments, organizations, etc. Generally what they seek to understand is why a person makes a particular set of decisions, and how these decisions impact other individuals.
You’ll probably notice that game theory are applied to things that have nothing to do with games. So completely non-game related subjects or topics, that have this aspect of game theory involved in them, are generally known as gamification.
You’ve probably heard of gamification, and if you haven’t heard of the terminology gamification, but you’re generally involved in social media and have a digital footprint, then there’s a very very high likelihood that you are directly impacted by gamification.
We’re gonna touch on that in so that you understand how. And even, it’ll even help you identify actually when you are being manipulated in certain ways, which is kind of fascinating.
Even though the word “game” is generally meant to be described as something fun, there’s also another entry to the word game as well, like being a procedure or strategy for gaining an end. This is what we mean here.
So if you think of it this way, you have organization A that wants you to do activity B, and in order to get you to do activity B, they’re going to offer you reward C. And this is really how they manipulate you in this sense.
The overreaching goal of gamification is to engage the participant with an activity that will influence their behavior. And they generally know the demographic that they’re reaching.
So a company will understand, they’ll do research for example, and they’ll know that they are going to be targeting people between the ages of 18 and 25, female. And we know that they have in this area of the world, self-esteem problems.
So they will put an ad that goes something like, “are you tired of being overweight? Click here.” It could be just as dumb as that. Or, they will put: “Oh my gosh look how much weight she lost, this is incredible!!” And they’ll try and create a viral video for that, for example.
In marketing, gamification initiative generally is something that addresses the cognitive, emotional, and social aspects of an individual… by including a system of rules for the participants to activate, either experimentation or discovery.
They usually award points or badges for levels or participation. They can also have leaderboards. So you know, the leaderboards that encourage competition, and they generally offer prizes to participants so they win something of value.
There’s really quite a plethora of things they can create to engage the user touching on the thing that they know the user wants. And generally this aspect of game theory in marketing can be quite manipulative, and it can be quite insidious.
We will be going to discuss about how these things work, and how it impacts us on a very real way, and how we can also create systems, in a loving way, that do capitalize on game theory in a positive and transparent manner, without having that dirty edge to it.
I hate when I see abuse of weaknesses on lowest level of human existence, things that goes something like, “Are you tired of being alone? Click here to find love.” And after few times you get hit with that ad, you go like: “You know what, I am tired of being alone, I need to click this to find out how to finally find my soulmate!” That’s what we should be trying to avoid.
I said that game theory is not necessarily about games, but what is a better way to experience that than a game? I strongly encourage you to try this simple browser game, which lets you experience game theory in the first hand. Play few round of “THE EVOLUTION OF TRUST” https://ncase.me/trust/
Consensus Mechanisms
This is one that I enjoy because a lot of companies use this hype word to create this perceived drive of value, based on usually the coat tails of Bitcoin’s Wireframe. What I mean by that is Bitcoin created proof of work, and proof is directly pointing to the truth and responsibility principle which we’re revisit later. Work is the mechanism.
You have, for example proof of work, you have proof of stake, you have proof of burn, proof of whatever. I’ve read hundred and hundreds of White Papers that have created their variation of “proof of.” Some of them are fascinating, and those are the ones that generally rise to the top, while the other ones usually you can tell that this is usually just a cash grab.
But what we mean here by a consensus mechanism, the more technical side of it, the mechanism side of the word, consensus mechanism, is generally a fault-tolerant mechanism that is used in computer and blockchain systems to achieve the necessary agreement on a single data value, or a single state of the network across distributed actors. It’s useful in record keeping and just a whole bunch of things.
What we mean by fault-tolerant is, even if one of the components within the system were to go right or were to fail, that would not mean that the system would derail completely. So, it has tolerance to fault within the system. That has to be a function. It doesn’t have to be, but without that, you’d have a pretty crappy system. So if one thing goes wrong within the system, the other things will still continue to act as they should.
From a less technical perspective, the word consensus means general agreement, or consent. Think of it like, imagine a group of individuals came together and have collectively agreed to a certain set of rules, and these rules are used to transfer a value, or transfer data. Now, the more robust the system, the more complicated some of these underlying rules have to be to ensure the integrity of the system is not undermined. Generally, this is the idea behind consensus and mechanism, which is really all that it is.
What we’re gonna be doing in the post is we’re gonna be analyzing all of the different consensus mechanisms of the cryptocurrency space that are worth analyzing, and we’re gonna be discussing them in-depth. And we’re gonna be also comparing them to some natural consensus mechanisms that actually exist in the world and seeing side by side what principles govern what, and what makes the system robust, and what makes the system viable, and what has longevity in a system. And how to create a hard-in system using a proper consensus mechanism, and this is probably gonna be one of the more technical things that we’ll discuss.
Consistency
As it relates to this topic, it could be defined as an unwavering or unchanging set of rules within the system which can be relied upon.
For example in say Etherium, there is a lot of rules that are consistent that people can rely on. If there wasn’t that consistency in the protocol, people wouldn’t trust the system. Things are meant to work this way, consistently. It’s not gonna work this way for me and that way for you. There’s no consistency there at all.
Let us take now for example, in Bitcoin. There is a lot of people buying into it because of limited supply. There’s a lot of perceived value there from scarcity. As we know in the markets, scarcity generally drives value in the form of fear, usually fear of missing out, or fear as it’s related to greed. And you don’t need a degree in economics to figure out you’ve got the supply going down, as the Bitcoin halving happens every four years, you’ve got demand going up because more people are attracted to this mechanism, and you know, that’s a recipe for the price going up over time, unless, of course, there’s a critical error along the way, or, something happens which really undermines the system, somehow, in which case, people move to another system.
This is why generally you’ll see, for example, the coin market cap of certain cryptocurrencies that have a very limited amount of coins, have a generally, assuming that the coin has actual utility and value, the coin itself is worth more, while coins that have, say, billions and billions and billions and billions in distribution, are generally worth a lot less. Just supply and demand, really.
Now, in Bitcoin, there are checks and balances to assure that one day we won’t have to wake up and notice that Bitcoin block reward has changed completely and it’s not every 10 minutes anymore, it’s every two minutes, and the total amount changed to 210 million, because why not? It’s not longer 21 million. Can you imagine the uproar that would happen in the community? All the companies, all the people that have invested billions of dollars and time as well, Reddit would be on fire. I’d feel sorry for the mods that day, if consistency was not a factor within the protocol.
Because how would we come to a general agreement? Nobody would trust the system, and the value would considerably dissipate. People would move over to a system that they could trust if there was no consistency there.
For more advanced users, I want to point out that randomness does not preclude consistency. What I mean by that is, just because there’s random in the protocol, for example, in this case, that does not mean that the randomness is consistently random. We can still rely on that randomness. For example, there are a few coins which have systems in place that try and circumvent large miners. And the miners are trying to centralize a part of the system, people are pretty aware of that, and they try to create these things that are ASIC-resistant, ASIC meaning Application Specific Integrated Circuit, and that’s just a fancy way of saying that it does one thing, but it does it really well. So, in this case, the one thing that it does really well is mine.
In this instance, let us say, that the algorithm has constant hard forks, and just tries to keep moving things forward in an attempt to circumvent that ASIC abuse, or 51% attack of which everyone is scared of.
We can rely, in that system, that it is going to be randomly consistent. So, you can have planned hard forks every year. Three planned hard forks every year. And this is a way to introduce randomness as an element and retain consistency.
In everyday life, in systems that we see everywhere, we go through life with very little or no thought at all. For example, what if the trees decide tomorrow, “You know what, we’re done scrubbing the environment, carbon dioxide, pumping out oxygen, let’s say we quit!” That would be a pretty grim world, pretty quickly, right? We can rely that consistently, the trees are performing functions every minute of every day. Or what if the laws of aerodynamics decided, “You know what, let’s say we quit, we’re done, good luck!” Planes around the world, would be wheeling around tarmacs trying to take off without being able to lift into flight.
And so, whether it’s a natural system or an algorithmic based system, we should greatly consider the importance of consistency as a cornerstone of any good system.
Permanence
Permanence is similar to consistency in that it remains unchanged, but it adds one layer, and that layer is indefinitely. Or, to not get into too much of a technical discussion, let’s say, for a long long period of time or for an extended period of time.
That’s a small word, but that’s a very big meaning. This is assuming of course, outside factors, that are attempting to destroy the system, or undermine it, causing failure… that’s another topic.
What we mean here is, that the design of the core principles, should be created well enough to not need constant change. Now, I know there’s a lot of coders out there that are asking, “How can we design something that doesn’t require software patches or updates, critical security holes, et cetera? I mean, we aren’t perfect. We can’t create perfect systems.”
Even thought generally code is rushed, not by the programmer, I sympathize with them generally, but usually by investors that are trying to monetize the product, they push dates. We can agree that perfect code sounds like an oxymoron. But, we can also agree that the principles of these protocols should be strong enough to not need constant change. Because then there would be no consistency either.
For example, Bitcoin has the block reward going until the year 2140 still. Even though, Bitcoin wasn’t created in 2110, it was created just a few years ago, we can see that the creator of Bitcoin had that thought in mind, to implement permanence as an aspect of the system.
Now, we can also see that Bitcoin has had some issues over the years, and a lot of code has been changed, but not all of the principles have remained in tact, generally, as a part of the consensus. We’re experiencing for example, a lot of scaling debates happening, and it’s unfortunately fractured a lot of the community. But, there’ve also been solutions that have emerged where, I’m not saying these are the right solutions, these are just solutions that are gonna help me discuss the thought or the principle of permanence.
Like second layer solutions that can be put on top of Bitcoin’s protocol that would allow it to function with permanence. For example, payment channels across chain atomic swaps, relating network, liquid network. So, things like that, I’m not saying that any of these are the right scaling solution, these are just a thought process or a brainstorm process to help people dive deeper into the understanding of why permanence is an important thing, and to showcase that, even if there’s a critical issue, the underlying system is designed with enough forethought, and is sound enough that we could theoretically build on top of it and patch the issue, ensuring permanence while solving the problem.
We’re going to be discussing permanence in a lot of the good protocols that we see, and a lot of good natural systems that we see as well, and understanding why permanence is important in any good system, and how permanence builds on top of consistency.
Truth and Responsibility
We group truth and responsibility here together because they go hand in hand. By definition, the truth here is something which is in accordance with fact of reality. Responsibility in this context is a moral obligation to behave correctly towards, or in consideration of all potential ramifications by both you, and anyone else who uses anything you create.
Now, let’s start with the truth here. This can be quite a loaded word for many people. In reality, this is one of the most powerful principles we are going to touch on today for several reasons, but for the sake of time, we’re only going to touch on this very briefly.
Bitcoin, the grandad of all cryptocurrency, has proof of work, you remember we mentioned that earlier. The proof in proof of work being one of the principles that we alluded to, of truth. Proof of, it can prove that it does this thing, and one of the coolest features is this decentralized ledger that gives a current state of accounts dating back to the very first Bitcoin transaction.
And on the other, being a mathematically sound way to prove that you own the actual Bitcoin that you’re trying to spend. Now, the double-spend problem, without going into too much detail, if you’re trying to send value digitally, how can you prove that it wasn’t just copy-pasted? The same way you can copy-paste the text, for example.
This is rooting a difficult problem to solve, in mathematics. Now let’s call this some of Bitcoin’s truth features, which are based in the language of truth, which is mathematics. By rooting Bitcoin’s core principles, in math (yay Bitcoin!), you can see easily this segues into a logical, consistent, permanent functioning system.
Regardless of anyone’s opinion or perspective, or my opinion or my perspective, or what part of the world I was born in, or what part of the world you were born in, or what language you speak, or what language I speak, we can always count on 1 +1 = 2. And that’s the power of basing your system in the immutable quality of truth, which is grounded in math.
Now in the post we’re going to be discussing the qualities of truth, which can greatly benefit systems and society in general; and how when applied, it can have a powerful knock on effect. We’re going to analyze the impact of not having truth present in a system, and the ramifications for both the users and the creators, or the system, or the business. And then apply truth to this and see what would happen, when positive change kicks in, when this very powerful principle is implemented.
Responsibility
The other half of the truth is responsibility.
This invokes a lot of rebellion in the majority of people, including me. The word responsibility, depending on how it’s used, it can be taken badly, understandably. Given that the systems that were designed by our/your caregivers and the environment generally, were probably not either consistent, or loving.
But when you have the role of designing a system, there are factors that should take some very serious consideration. For example, if my system or business has a net negative consequence on humanity, for the sole purpose of creating wealth for me, then we can see that the creation of this system is rooted in a selfish desire. Therefore, it’s ultimately not aligned with responsibility, and it will more than likely not be sustainable either. And this will bring a great deal of suffering to a lot of people that interact with the system, and the creator of the system, upon creation.
Now, a lot of businesses, systems, governments, don’t consider this core value when designing something, at all, you can see it everywhere we look. Often time, once the goal is met, the papers signed off and we go to the races, because we’re chasing the dollar… but a system which is perfect in design considers all things. Or maybe not perfect, but trying to achieve perfection, considering all things, including the knock off effects it will have on people, animals, businesses, governments and the environment.
As a nice example of this, the world has suffered quite severely due to big business having very little to no responsibility at all, in the never ending search for more profit. Now, future generations may suffer very real problems due to the poor decisions made by today’s generation or last generation of people who didn’t consider this principle in their creation.
In the post, we’re going to discuss the importance of this principle in all systems. We’re gonna analyze systems which have this quality and we’re gonna see how this is catalyst for good, and while systems which don’t have this quality end up with the severe consequences as a net negative to everything around them.
Decentralization
Decentralization by definition, is the movement of departments, or of a large organization, or functions of a protocol from one single administrative point to several locations. So rather than just have one single point of failure, you have multiple locations. You spread the risk around. It makes it a lot more difficult for this to be shut down.
We can’t knock the importance of this in a solid system. You probably hear a lot of arguments going around and in the cryptocurrency space when it comes to decentralization. It’s a very heated debate, because it’s an important topic when decentralization is applicable or logical. In all things it’s not logical, and in some it’s critical.
If you think back to Napster as an example, Napster set out to disrupt the music industry. Some of you may not be aware of what Napster was. It was basically, at its core, a file sharing platform. It did have a centralized point of authority, and ultimately the government shut it down, and the owner of Napster met some pretty severe consequences as a result.
Out of that evolved something called BitTorrent, which is decentralized. This can’t be shut down that easily due to its decentralized nature. The tracker shares the IP addresses with other BitTorrent clients in the swarm, allowing them to connect to each other. And once they’re connected, the BitTorrent clients download files in the torrent in small pieces. Downloading all the data it can get until eventually the whole file is completed. You can have say 100 people sending you parts of that file until you get the whole file.
So it’s a cool way to send data. And, again, it can’t really be shut down. If it could have been easily shut down, it definitely would have already. Now think about this when it’s applied to something that you’re trying to create, for example.
You think about decentralization, let’s imagine that you’re trying to create this loving and sound system that you want to implement to help people in a very oppressed country. Now for whatever reason, the local mafia or the local government or big business wants to keep the people where they are for X reason. It could be any reason. So they raid your operation and they shut you down in your tracks. This stops you operation dead in the water, right?
On the other hand, if you can have components of your operation have that fault tolerance that we were talking about in consensus mechanisms, and have that decentralized system in a way that if something were to get shut down, other things would continue… then this would make the orders of magnitude more difficult to stop the operation. And it would also allow for some positive change to potentially occur… which people can then measure, can react to, can do overall change.
Let us take Bitcoin as an example. There are a lot of very, very, very powerful industries which this technology is looking to disrupt, right? If they could have shut it down, it would be shut down. It’s really that simple. It’s not to say that there are not attempts, there are attempts all the time. From a security standpoint, there have been attempts; from a marketing standpoint, from social media manipulation, to straight out market manipulation. There’s been a lot.
You can go through all the Bitcoin obituaries and see all the times it has “died” for example. And the smart companies are hedging their bets and they’re buying into the technology, while they basically try to develop their own respective variation of it. Everyone’s got their own coin coming out, or everyone’s got their own patent that they’re trying to get in.
Same as the Blockbusters of the future basically bury their head in the sand, until eventually Netflix will come and eat the food off their plate – as an example of two companies in the same industry that eventually, one evolved one didn’t.
Now, this technology having decentralization as an inbuilt function allowed it for to flourish irrespective of the competition’s feelings about it. And that’s one of the powers of this feature.
You can be discussing why it’s so important and also execute some analysis on different protocols in businesses which have adopted both centralized and decentralized systems, and studying why one’s more robust than the other in detail. And also, in some cases, decentralization doesn’t make sense. Sometimes it is just a hype word after all that cash grabbers use to lure you in..
Scalability
Scalability by definition is the capacity to be changed in size or scale. For the purpose of this post we’re gonna be discussing not just scaling up, but also retaining the ability to scale down. This is important and often times neglected in a creation.
Since adoption of the network is critical and people do sometimes consider this, whether it’s the network, whether it’s a protocol, whether it’s a business, or a system… if scalability is not present, if there wasn’t the responsibility beforehand to create this scalability as a potential, then eventually it’s gonna run into a bottle neck, and that’s gonna severely strangle the growth for the potential of the business or for the potential of the protocol or system. And it’s gonna lead to the detriment of the overall network, which is gonna end up in either stagnation or collapse.
This is important to also consider in a non-linear way, as we mentioned earlier – scaling down. Though the bitcoin network is an example, which I’ve been pointing to consistently, is interesting because the mining side of it has a good example that we can point to. There is something in the bitcoin mining network that’s called “difficulty.”
The difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks, or if a block is every ten minutes, it’s roughly around two weeks. So every two weeks, the bitcoin network looks at the difficulty based on the amount of computational power that is pointed at the network at that point in time, and decides: “Alright, so two weeks gone through, has the computational power gone up? If yes, then we’re gonna adjust the difficulty and scale it up. Has the computational power gone down? Yes, then we’re gonna adjust the scalability, bring it down.”
This adjusts it for the miners, so that they can either have an easier or harder time, depending. Let us say that someone decides to point a metric ton of computational power, the network, they’re not gonna be able to just bleed the entire network and take all of the block rewards.
On the other side, if that person decide, “Allright, I’m going to take all of my hashing power,” that again is not gonna leave everybody else on the network dying to try and find the block because the biggest player has left, and because of that there hasn’t been consideration to scale down.
So the network is not going to be destroyed. This is a fundamentally important part of the system, otherwise we’re would see some really interesting game theory take place, and the system would more than likely fail.
When you hear about the importance of things like scaling up, you should also consider the opposite, scaling down, to be equally as important.
Scalability is also a big part of responsibility, as we just mentioned, since all the angles are considered. We need to think about a system on a larger and a smaller scale.
We’re going to be analyzing both businesses, protocols, and systems that have accounted for scalability, and we will compare both. We’re also going to have some considerations approaching scalability and how to properly achieve this without compromising other aspects of your business, or other aspects of the protocol. We have some very further fascinating examples that are taking place all the time in the crypto currency space, since scalability is a big issue and everyone’s racing to solve it.
Security
Security in this context refers to all the measures that are taken to protect something or to ensure that only people with permission enter or interact with the system as intentioned by the creator.
As an example here, we can look at Bitcoin (surprise!). The reason I picked Bitcoin is because it’s the most well known, and honestly it’s really what brought us to this point today. There’s a lot of experimentation that’s happened, and a lot of really cool use cases that have come out of this one open first creation. So referring back to it, for the not just for the sake of consistency, but because, well it deserves it.
There are billions of dollars worth of value in the Bitcoin network, right? Billions and billions. As well as other networks as well. Now if security was not considered, in these systems, we’ll just use Bitcoin for this example. They would’ve failed a very long time ago, right? It’s constantly being attacked in a variety of ways. Like hackers know that there’s billions of dollars worth of value here. If I could find a way to get into these wallets, I could take all this money.
You’re probably reading about all these different attacks and things that have happened, and that’s not the Bitcoin network that was hacked. A lot of times these journalists, or even publications, don’t get that right.
It’s the ecosystem around bitcoin, some third party provider that was hacked. Let us say the exchange that was hacked, or the wallet that was hacked. Or just the dude’s PC was hacked because he just clicked on that Rihanna link that had some software exploit. So it is not the actual bitcoin network itself that was compromised. That would be terrible, as a differentiator, to a third-party being hacked.
And, not only has it been constantly attacked, but it’s remained live the entire time. The integrity of the network has never been compromised. And it has remained in a live state. You never see a message saying, “Bitcoin network is being updated, come back in a week.” It composes zero down time. And that’s no small feat, that’s a good testament to the fact that it has a robust consideration for security. It was grounded on a lot of logical premises.
When you’re looking at part of what secures a network, you can consider the amount of computational power that is securing the network. This is approximately 100 million terahashes, at the moment, give or take, it can fluctuate.
Some of you are probably like, “What’s an terahash?!” One kilahash is roughly around 1,000 hashes. A megahash is around a million. And a gigahash is around a billion hashes. Now, we’re not gonna get into what this is in this post, but for the sake of conversation, it goes up giga, tera, peta, exa… This is really just a measurement of computational power for the sake of this discussion.
Needless to say, if we were ever to enter the age of quantum, like really, I mean we’re in the age of it, but if we were ever to really have quantum computation be realized, and it threaten the network, even then, with that possibility, there are measures that can be taken so the network still functions well. So that is a consideration that has already been put in place. Which is, more than I can say for a lot of systems that protect a lot of valuable things.
Now, there are a lot of factors to consider when you’re dealing with security and digital money in the same line, right? We’re going to explore the principle first and expand on that, in the desire we want to consider all vectors of attack. There are a lot of things that need consideration when you’re dealing with digital money in a digital space.
And we want to have sufficient responsibility in the design that even when a buyer comes with the worst of intentions, he can’t undermine the system. Or the people that are interacting with that system. Now, this isn’t to say that you have a perfect system, but the person, individually, has poor security is exposed to say, theft, and that occurs outside of the system, that’s another topic. We’re talking about the system itself being present and not hindering user experience, while seeking the optimal security.
This segways nicely into a user-friendly system, which we’re going to discuss a little bit later. If you think about Bright wallet as an example, which allows the user to have a seamless experience, while not using a Bitcoin address more than once. Now it’s been determined, for example, that the key values in an address can reuse over time, but one hacker, one ethical hacker, went in and took all of the BlockChain wallets. “BlockChain,” in this case being the company, not the blockchain. All BlockChain wallets that had key values exposed and he just swept all the wallets and took all the money out of it, and then he gave it back to the company to say, “Dudes, what’s going on here?” And then the company eventually, I guess, tried to settle with who they could settle with and do things as fast as they could.
But, this is an example of a company that did not consider security and left it completely exposed. Now on the other hand, Bright Wallet decided “Okay, you know what, this is a dangerous thing to do – to reuse a wallet. For varying reasons. What we’re gonna do, is we’re gonna change the address every time, and the user doesn’t really have to know what’s going on in the background. They don’t have to understand where the seed is, they don’t have to understand anything deterministic, nothing. They just have to know that this is changing if they pay attention.”
This is a good example of, someone having a software and utilizing a best practice to execute responsibility in a consistent manner, while utilizing good security measures, and having a user-friendly experience. This is why this product is successful, right? People know the product, they know that it works, and it also takes care of their interest.
Once we design a system from the top down, you have to consider the fundamental elements that we’ve discussed so far. And, the design naturally starts to kind of fall into place. For example, if security is based on the system of a centralized business where one person has the ultimate decision on what happens within the business, or the system, or the protocol; while employees or users are interacting with the system where they have checks and balances… we can see there are a lot of potential loopholes or potential vectors of attack that can happen, leaving the users exposed, the employees exposed, the business itself exposed. Simply because there was a single point fo failure. Checks and balances between system creators and users must be present. Systems without these design considerations can have several loopholes and vectors to attack.
There is huge importance of building the sound security into the system, and security being the freedom from threat, or harm, or danger, in this case.
User Friendliness
For the sake of this discussion, we’re gonna refer to User-Friendliness as hardware device or software interface that’s easy to use. So it is User-Friendly, as it states in the word, meaning it’s not difficult to learn or understand or interact with.
When you are designing a good system, regardless of the level of complication that’s involved on the back end of the system, the user should have a really simple and clean time using it or interacting with it.
We don’t want to ruin this experience with overly complex design or difficult commands. There should be easy to locate options and it should flow in a very intuitive manner. Logic should be present in the design, not just functionally but also aesthetically. So to be yeah, intuitive, but also aesthetically intuitive that points you in the direction of what is logical next. There should be minimal explanation required for you to function in the system and operate with it.
There should also be reliability present as a User-Friendly experience is there. But if this such as it on what we just discussed, which is the consistency principle as well. If you notice there’s a trend, which is all these principles build on top of each other. And that’s really how you end up with a strong system.
So in this case, we’re saying consistency would be nice. For example, I don’t want this to be crashing or for malfunctions to constantly happen. That’s lack of responsibility, that’s lack of security, that’s lack of consistency, and probably not going to lead to a functional product in the end.
The ultimate end goal of user friendly product, or system, or law is to make it a seamless entrance as possible.
What did I mean by law? Well, let’s touch on a very, very cool system that we interact with on a daily basis, which is the law of gravity. Now, nobody really considers this. I’m sure some obscure scientists do it and maybe other people do sometimes, but very few people discuss the intricacies of this law, right. When was the last time that you heard someone state, the two masses, which attract each other with a force equal to a constant of gravitation, multiplied by the product of the two masses, and divided by a square of the distance between them helps us stay on the planet? Doesn’t happen. No one says that.
But when you wake up in the morning, and you watch your bathroom or your kitchen, you interact with the law on a continual basis, through the operation and execution of the law. Even though it’s a measurably complex, our interaction with this law is smooth, it’s intuitive. Babies can do it, the baby see adults walking around, they’re like, “Maybe I can do this thing” and they get up and they just try this walking thing and they interact with this highly complex law.
Later, we’re going to be discussing the importance of this principle in a good system. We’re also going to be analyzing systems with and without the principal. And we’re going to be diving deeper into some of the components which allow for a really seamless user experience without compromising a solid system.
Conclusion
I hope that I helped you to develop the ability to discern things quickly for yourself. If the system is built properly or not, which is possible, very easily, if you understand the principles that govern a good system.
This will help you in a lot of aspects of life as well. Whether it’s making a decision for your job. Is this job sustainable? Is this a place where I want to work? Do they consider responsibility for their employees here? Do I feel like I’m just being abused, or are they actually valuing me as an employee?
Or, your friend told you to invest money in this cryptocurrency, and it’s sparkling, and it has 70,000 telegram users (that are bots), and because they use that “game theory” we talked about. And you’re like, “Ah, but this doesn’t look like a sound thing”. I’m not saying you can’t make money buying into a pump and dump. You can, I mean at your own risk. But, if you invest with these fundamentals in mind, odds are you’ll probably get burnt less because other savvy investors will also be looking for some of these things that we discussed.
Now, this is also going to be positive for you as the potential of you building a robust business or system, or protocol for yourself in the future. You can that way have potentially a net positive impact on the world, if that’s what you want. And knowing these principals, you can take that and arm yourself and build something with them, if that’s your desire.
By applying these described principals, in a logical way, you can see as we mentioned, that each one builds on each other in a very consistent manner, until there is developed product that is just hardened and isn’t easily broken, and has net positive impact on everyone.
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