It’s been fourteen days since Tom Gillespie accidentally staked 5000 USD worth of HEX and that has provided me with fourteen days of preliminary investigation to find out what the real story of Hexicans and The Time Value of Money should be. Notice i said “should” there.
While I am taking a different approach to this project from the last film the characters core motivations remain somewhat the same, and this film should unfold as a kind of sequel to The Fakefluencer film.
Preliminary research has shown me that whether HEX is a scam or not has been frequently debated by numerous people much more smarter than I am way back since its inception in 2019. This has helped me arrive at my personal core motivation for making this film, and what will ensure I create a film I am personally comfortable with producing.
Whether it is a scam or not is not the story.
The story (as with The Fakefluencer) at its core is about the necessity of proving decentralisation: (POD) or “Proof of Decentralisation”. Is HEX truly decentralised? If so how is the project decentralised? How is that key factor proven?
Since most crypto scams orbit around the question of who, if anyone, has ultimate power to roll back, update, change or interfere with the code, I have come to the conclusion that Tom Gillespie’s primary motivating factor for investigating HEX (and for that matter any of the numerous other crypto projects he has been asked to look at) is to discover if in fact the project is provably decentralised by a third party.
Whether or not a crypto project is a scam or not largely relies on this question being answered in a verifiable manner in accordance with other open source projects. If any questions still remain after any external audit they should be voiced and answered for.
Richard Heart has repeatedly said in his live streams “the HEX code is out there for anyone to read and verify, but not copy” Richard has also stated that there have been multiple audits of the smart contract and most if not all Hexicans are satisfied with these audits.
That begs the question why some of the smartest minds in crypto who have looked at HEX extensively have not yet become Hexicans themselves. Is something missing? Something unverifiable?
While Tom has begun his investigation in public online, and has been welcomed very warmly by the majority of Hexicans, he still has an investigation to perform. The key for me as director of this film is what is the ultimate valuable outcome that could occur from publishing this film?
This is how i arrived at thinking of this film as an extension of Toms journey into decentralisation, utilising HEX and its extremely enthusiastic community, as an interesting and entertaining medium for continuing to tell that tale.
Along with this core motivation, I also think drawing comparisons with traditional political and capitalist models, and the dreams many have of a decentralized world, is a good way to communicate the heart of the matter which hinges on the question:
Is it innovative?
After all what is the innovating factor when a crypto project that claims decentralisation is actually just a copy cat product of an already existing product thousands or millions of already happy consumers use in the regular economy? People will say efficiency! No more middle men, and then tag on the end of their claim: decentralisation!
Unfortunately the majority of crypto projects, while they may be more efficient due to smart contracts or other code executing tasks originally performed my slow and expensive humans, they are not truly decentralised to a level many would prefer.
This is the central conflict in the industry, and why I believe so many projects continue to try to destroy each other through misinformation and/or forking a project.
If I am correct with this assumption then I think the industry needs to evolve some standardisation practices. An idea i have toyed with over the last few years is viewing film as kind of Incubator, a place where ideas can be realised rather quickly and directly placed within a real world storyline, making them more accessible to more people.
In The Fakefluencer there was a few products that we prototyped in order to tell a more interesting story and while we did not go on to develop them further the audience were able to hook into the potential of the product and see and even feel what might be possible.
If we were to hypothetically to develop and produce a useful product in the Hexican documentary I’d personally like to see an industry certified mark of decentralisation developed by Tom Gillespie as a logical outcome to his investigation.
Similar to how we have certified product marks on our foods and electrical goods to help consumers know that the product they are using is certified good to go, consumers of crypto products and services should be able to easily identify if it is certified decentralised or not.
This begs the question, who or what does the certifying?
My initial thoughts although not developed to any meaningful degree, hinge on a potential concept where the “Certified Decentralised” mark is an NFT graphic(s) that has a community voting responsibility baked into it.
How or why people would engage to keep the industry honest and decentralised is already very clear amongst those that have spent any time in crypto and wish to see the major original value proposition kept in tact.
For those that wish to have “crypto” projects that focus more on efficiency and lower costs as an extension of traditional capitalist economic services are able to continue to do so, but they will not be able to continue to claim decentralisation as a value proposition to their customers.
For the crypto industry to adopt any sort of authoritative figure or mark of approval is a rather big leap and it’s why it’s so important that this authoritative figure or mark of approval is itself able to pass its own test of true decentralisation.
Think like we do?
Interested on working on this with us?
Hit me up at rich@bitjoinstudios.com
Rich Tella
bitjoinstudis.com