Some founders of decentralized fields asked me this question many times: what is the 2-developer paradigm?
Will try my best to elaborate this term in short. Since this term comes to my mind when I reflected on the rights and wrongs of some layer1 investments and ecosystem building process. The key reason to use this term is to tell the difference between the 2B business model and 2D model.
We could separate this term in 5 layers very simply:
1. Architect layer, 2B means a centralized system or distributed system, like AWS and google cloud, the typical ones. 2D means more like a decentralized system. The key difference is 2B has an assumption that every node of the system is supposed to be good, or no matter good or bad. However, the 2D’s assumption is that the nodes can be bad, no matter for the single one or a group of the nodes, which means that the 2D system needs to consider these bad nodes at the first moment you design the system.
2. Protocol layer, 2B usually means it’s a private product and which follows the IT standards or methodology to build that, for example, Facebook Ads system follows the methodology of “Move fast & Break things”. Actually, 2D is more like a public protocol, which means it follows the methodology of decentralization which was proposed by Nikamoto Satoshi, trust-minimization should be the key of this methodology, or at least the pursuit or goal of the base layer protocols. Open source at the first moment sometimes is more legitimate. Simply speaking, 2D protocols need legitimacy of codes, no matter as a process or a result.
3. Economic layer, 2B is a business model and 2D is an economic model. Lots of ppl confuse these two basic terms a lot. The assumption of the 2B model is USD is solid and in the long run will continue to be solid. Then, you build a traditional company to hire some people to develop a service product, leverage the media to market your product and then a large-scale sales team will sell the product directly or through channels. The company issued stocks to secure the value and followed the rules of traditional security law and economy rules. 2B is about efficiency demand. Easily to get in this way, 2D obviously is not a business model, but an economic model, which means it has no limitation of the traditional USD system and no need to strictly follow economy rules. The protocol itself will have the economic model in itself and will secure the value of the ecosystem built by token or other decentralized tech. The 2D model is not about efficiency, at least not as a number 1 goal. It’s about the corporations or the orders of incentive mechanisms, or it can be called the harmony of incentive. Also, the 2B model separates the company and clients as a more closed system. But the 2D model is a more open economic system, which means all the parts involved in the production process are contributors and community members. No matter if you organize them in a DAO way or other way, they are at the same sides from day 1. They work together to build and scale the economy together in a well organized way. So, the 2D model plus the traditional revolution of efficiency will be super powerful in the long run, which can be the new “economic energy” in the near future.
4. Governance or culture layer, 2B is to customers and 2D is to community. In the traditional world, 2B companies need the company culture to consolidate their values from inside to outside. However 2D is more like a party, which means legitimacy is the key and community first could be a powerful value. Or if one organization wanna build up the consensus in a deeper and wilder way, The bonding of 2D is stronger than 2B as we observed. And also, open and listen to the community is already a must. The word” we” should be used at the first beginning when we build our community. The process of involving our community is not like propaganda to sell our ideas, but like a group movement of open talks to encourage more intelligence of all the community. The 2D model requires a more sophisticated design of the governance process which can be a disaster if some developers ignore some common ground of the crypto community.
5. Concept or logic layer, 2B is more like a duality model and 2D is more like a non-duality model. Nichmato Satoshi is a very good example to explain the difference, he combines the concept of “me and us” together in a very decent way, while 2B is the extension of “me”. He not only built a system to ensure your own money, but also contributed himself to a public creation for us, in a way that is not a private way. Also, from rationalism to pragmatism，underlying the 2D paradigm there is a very interesting fact that decentralized tech encourages more scientists and philosophers to come out of their labs and run social experiments directly in a logical way, with a lower social cost compared with the historical counterparts. Serendipity, this is one of the nature of this concept in the logic layer. Also, intersubjectivity could also be thought of in this concept. Let’s talk about these concepts later. In short, the 2D model provides us a more organic way to build a decentralized protocol and economy, not only a company, following the trust-minimization laws by coding, it could be more sustainable, autonomous and scalable, with a more open and united culture.