Aunt Sussanne knows nothing about technology. However — and I blame my stubborn younger brother on this — she´s got a laptop as her 90th birthday present. After unpacking and clapping happy for her new toy, she took her glasses off and looked at me — there were one hundred people in that room, but she gave me a direct glance — and told me with her sweet voice “You need to teach me how to surf the internet”.
It took me two long months to teach her how to use Facebook.
I was surprised that after those though months she learned by herself how to google stuff and she started spending a lot of time making video calls in Skype with her grandnieces. By her 91st birthday, she was a total expert and her birthday present was a Chromecast — we decided not to give her a cell phone because she would have downloaded Tinder in a blink of an eye. Two days later I paid her a visit and I was shocked when I found out she was casting to her TV Downton Abbey straight from Popcorn Time. Even though I had given her access to my Netflix account, she decided that Popcorn Time was a better solution. “Why would I make you pay for this if I could have it for free?” she told me lowering her glasses to the point of her nose and giving me the same glance she gave me in her last birthday.
Aunt Sussanne knows nothing about technology. She hasn´t even heard the word “blockchain” or “peer to peer”, she is not aware which protocols are behind the apps she uses on her laptop. And she doesn´t care about it. She just uses the applications that are easy to understand and have a beautiful interface. And they have to be free. She is 91 years old, she learned that internet stuff is free and no one is going to make her mind on cashing out one cent on content.
I had dinner yesterday with her. Before the dessert, she asked me about Flixxo. She follows our twitter account and saw an article with my picture. I tried to explain “Flixxo is some kind of decentralized YouTube” She just stared at me with her glasses about to fall from her nose and told me “I don´t like YouTube. A lot of rude kids saying nonsense” I continued “In that Popcorn Time app you use, all the movies are stored in the computers of other aunt Sussannes and you are grabbing pieces of those movies from their devices. That is better than having everybody going to Netflix´s computer at the same time and trying to grab the movie from there”
The waitress brought her a huge slice of chocolate pie, it would have driven me sugar blind if I had that whole pie for myself. But it was not a challenge for aunt Sussanne. I thought the Flixxo conversation was over, but when I asked for the bill she joked “Are you going to pay with Flixx?” If I had glasses I would have lowered them to the tip of my nose. “I got that part”, she told me “I can earn Flixx and watch more videos for free if I let other people enter my computer and take a piece of the movies I´ve already watched”
Wow.
She was speaking about a token, about earning the token and using it again in the network as an inherent value, about taking the token away from the platform and using it as mean of payment in a restaurant. She was speaking about blockchain, but she was not aware of. She just got the token concept. Aunt Sussanne, who has her first computer one year ago, understood Flixxo economic model.
What made this concept accessible to her is that it was tied to something she is used to: Popcorn Time. Instead of paying a Netflix subscription, she knows she would watch the same content for “free” if she participated in the network, if she contributed. A token on top of that, a useful reward, makes a lot of sense. I share, therefore I earn, therefore I watch.
In order to make blockchain a mainstream technology, we need to stick with glue token economies to existing massive applications. Create understandable models. In order to bring the masses to blockchain, we need to remove entry friction, developing ways for final users to earn cryptocurrencies. That was the spirit in the beginning of Bitcoin: even though it was a nerdy thing, anyone was able to mine, then earn tokens. But we lost that chance a long time ago.
If we want to teach aunt Sussanne, our children, our mothers… even our friends who are not into “crypto-space” about blockchain, crypto and tokens, we need to build economies in which earning by participating has to be an option.
I left Sussanne at her home. Driving back home I decided she deserves a smartphone for her 92nd birthday.
Do as aunt Sussanne does, and follow us on twitter: twitter.com/flixxo
And join the conversation in our Telegram channel: t.me/flixxo
Learn more on the project, and contribute in the ICO: www.flixxo.com
