I made a comment on a recent post by @surpassinggoogle about the TearDrops SMT (you can read more about the actual post below):
https://steemit.com/smt/@surpassinggoogle/teardrops-token-will-be-among-the-coming-generation-of-smart-media-tokens-and-it-will-reward-proof-of-tears
And as usual I found myself misquoting someone unintentionally, so I had to go to the trouble of finding the actual author for the quote that I borrowed from. It turns out that this quote:
The cure for anything is salt water — sweat, tears, or the sea.
Was by Karen Blixen, who is a prolific Danish writer and you can find out more about her if you are interested:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Karen_Blixen
But getting back to the quote itself and why it was so meaningful to me requires some creative interpretation of what it means, I found that the concept of the TearDrops SMT and the future of a decentralized society requires solving some interesting challenges. And in a strange but profound way, the solution itself can be found in the quote.
How do we create a community that rewards people who provide genuine value and contribution to its members? The blockchain technology merely facilitates the process but cannot solve the actual problem. I think it comes down to a couple of very important things mentioned in the quote:
- Sweat, or how we measure effort and the significance of the contribution to the community
- Tears, or how we measure the impact and empathy of the contributor to the community
- Sea, or how we ensure that the consequences of our actions are shared as a community, so that the efforts and impact is reflected faithfully as benefits or detriments to the grow and well-being of the community.
Sweat, tears and the sea all contain salt, and it is this intrinsic connection that makes our effort and impact matter to the tides and currents of the sea.