What Is Fair Launch?
“Fair launch” is a slogan that has risen again along with the Bitcoin inscription craze, but now I find that some coins with 50% locked, 10% reserved, and the like also tout themselves as “fair launch.” This abuse of the concept dilutes its meaning. Of course, language is free; I can’t do anything about their misuse. But we should strive to build consensus and discuss the bottom line of “fair launch.”
“Fair launch” is a kind of revival (please refer to my “The Threefold Great Crypto Renaissance” https://yilinhut.net/2023/12/29/9432.html ), because Bitcoin itself was launched this way, and the early altcoins likewise all took fair launch as a consensus; initiators who engaged in even a little pre-mining were looked down upon by the community.
So we can look to the paradigm by which Nakamoto launched Bitcoin to examine the basic elements of “fair launch.”
1.No insider trading. Before issuing the coin, Nakamoto had already been hyping the project in internal mailing lists, but only in the sense of sincere academic discussion. Before Bitcoin was launched, Nakamoto had been in close communication with fellow cryptographers, announcing his ideas, getting various suggestions, and attracting attention, but early observers had no privileges beyond the advantage of being early observers.
2.Public ideas. The Bitcoin white paper was made public long before the Bitcoin network went live; Nakamoto generously disclosed his core line of thought and was not afraid of being scooped.
3.Transparent rules. What Nakamoto released was in fact an entire set of code and conventions. Anyone who followed these transparent rules could obtain the same returns as Nakamoto.
4.No privileged class. In the whole setup, there was no provision for certain players to enjoy higher privileges than others; there were no distinctions such as project team, capitalist, administrator, and so on. The only differences between players were the number of coins they held, or a distinction based on resources that are neutral in themselves, such as “hash power”; there could be no privilege based on a special identity or a special address.
5.No reliance on centralized censorship. There is no need for KYC or for some team to distribute whitelists and blacklists, and so on. “Trustless & permissionless” is a basic element of Web3.
6.Fully circulating. Every coin that is minted can be put into the market immediately; every coin is equal to every other coin, 1BTC = 1BTC. No pre-mining, no lockups, no fancy release mechanisms.
This kind of arrangement is not difficult to implement. Early altcoins were almost all like this, and more recently the Bitcoin inscriptions as well as arc and dmint on atom are mostly like this too. Historically speaking, only Ethereum, and the VB+VC era that Ethereum opened up, trampled on the consensus of fair launch in the coin world.
It’s not that if you don’t “fair launch” you can’t play. The crypto market worships freedom; running a Ponzi scheme, issuing stocks, doing MLM, and so on are all free. But there’s no need for other kinds of玩法 to piggyback on the concept of “fair launch.”
We are playing the role of that wave of forces in the middle stage of the entire crypto movement or digital revolution who set things right, refuse to be co-opted, and hold fast to the original aspiration. We believe that the ideals of the predecessors of the crypto movement have not yet faded,
that in the movements pursued by the sages and heroes of antiquity for fairness and justice, one had to be ready to sacrifice one’s life; and that our generation also has the chance to take part in such a great social movement, when the greatest price we might pay is nothing more than bankruptcy. Moreover, Bitcoin’s continuing victories have proved that a movement that insists on fairness and justice is not incompatible with getting rich. Why wouldn’t we welcome that? In our lifetimes we have taken part in such an exhilarating movement; are we really content to just send money to capitalists and be harvested by project teams? It is time to re-establish the consensus around “fair launch”!
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
Leave a Reply