Lately, I have been reading, and reading, and reading, trying my best to keep up with the swiftly moving landscape of POLYCUB, and how that works, and what the benefits are.

Ultimately, the amount of effort I put into any given project I get involved is largely contingent on my being able to readily understand how it works and what the purpose of the project is. If that somehow becomes lost in a glitzy presentation, I tend to get stuck. That probably holds true for a lot of people.

Keeping it Simple

The simple question: ”Yes, this looks brilliant and shiny, but what’s the POINT of it, and why should I CARE?”

There has to be something substantive, there!

"Oh, don't be so uptight, Curator Cat!"

Naturally, you're entitled to your opinion, but by sticking to my approach I have been able to navigate this "New Frontier" we call the Cryptosphere without getting trapped by vaporware and rugpulls.

Regardless, it may be easy to lose sight of purpose and functionality if you happen to be ”inside” a project (or even an entire niche industry) and working with it all the time. But they are also immensely important questions to be able to answer clearly, because doing so offers the ”bridge” that will make something interesting to people outside that core 0.1% of avid supporters.

I suppose I am sort of ”on the EDGE of the inside,” as a definite supporter of the projects being developed by Khal and the LeoFinance team. These are exciting times, around here!

But I still want to understand what we’re doing here, both for my own benefit, as well as to the purpose of being able to meaningfully answer ”a random friend’s” question of ”So what exactly is this thing you’re part of?”

You tend to lose people if you can’t summarize something in a ”60-second elevator speech.” You also tend to lose people if all you can offer is a bunch of "niche technical-speak" nobody really understands, in the "real world."

Yes, I just said that.

Anyway, I’ve been noticing some of the questions that have come up (about POLYCUB) — some of which are the same ones I was pondering — and I had to pause and take a step back, even while continuing to read and learn.

I remind myself that when I first came across the idea of cryptocurrency — in the form of Bitcoin — it seemed like complete gobbledygook to me. Even with a somewhat technical background and reading a fair bit, it still seemed like complete gobbledygook, and I really struggled to find an answer to the question ”Yeah, cool, but what’s the POINT if this?” People "on the inside" were too lost in the ”brilliance” of the invention to give much thought to the actual functional application in everyday life. ”Bitcoin Pizza” might have been the go to explanation, but the idea of someone investing $1,000s in technology so they could buy a $20 pizza?

And yet? Here we are…

I remind myself that when I first discovered ”Hive 1.0” it represented a whole new approach to content creation and being rewarded for online social activity. The hurdle — for me, and for untold millions of other people — was this notion of the rewards ”coming from somewhere,” because absent a company actually writing checks to content creators?

It all seemed like someone claiming to have a ”perpetual motion machine.”

And yet? Here we are…

So most recently I find myself pondering DeFi, but more specifically CUB Finance, and now this new POLYCUB project… along with the projects in the hopper for future ”CUB versions” attached to different blockchains. So far, the reading I have found most helpful has come from @shortsegments who has an ability to remove the ”insider technospeak” from the explanations and state what’s going on in plain English.

Even so, my struggle with Defi projects has consistently been the same: They all seem to have a strong "odor" of "creating more crypto so people can make more crypto by trading crypto in order to make crypto."

But maybe that's ultimately what people do with fiat money, as well. After all, who wants to actually go and dig ditches or grow potatoes in order to earn money if they can just pass it around in a circle, charge a fee for doing so, and get rich in the process?

Except... wasn't the entire point of the whole "Cryptocurrency Revolution" to get away from that sort sketchy "creating money out of thin air" practices?

Sometimes... I just remain a rather confused cat...

The Expanding Universe of CUBs

But in response to my own ”What’s the point of multiple different CUBs?” quandary, I ended up circling back to my own business: Collectibles.

Whereas I started with ”just eBay” in 1998, 24 years later my items for sale can now be found on six different collectibles marketplace websites. You might ask ”Why not just stick with ONE?”

Each marketplace — like each Defi blockchain supporting a version of CUB — is ultimately as much a marketing tool to spread the name and awareness of my core business as it is an actual profit center. Similarly (I imagine), each version of CUB ultimately supports the core project that is LeoFinance… and yes, that does sound a bit ”centralized” but I think we sometimes are a little too eager to throw out ALL aspects of centralization, rather than just the usury and exploitative ones.

So multiple CUBs appear serve the purpose of allowing people to have access to CUB Defi and LeoFinance while not having to ”travel outside” their chain of choice. Just like my having collectibles for sale in multiple venues allows my customers to not have to travel outside their venue of choice.

Of course, I could be completely wrong about that... but it sounds like a feasible explanation, to me.

Of course, there is still much to learn! So I’m just going to leave this little exploration with the note that the best thing we can do for ourselves is learn as much as possible about whatever we get involved with!

Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!

=^..^=

CuratorCat 25-MAR-2022

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta