Charly Cares unburdens busy families by providing a platform through which you can quickly and easily book a reliable, fixed and flexible babysitter

Charly Cares

This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 DEED license. Authors: (1) Carlos Efrain Quintero-Narvaez, School of Science and Engineering Tecnologico de Monterrey; (2) Raul Monroy-Borja, School of Science and Engineering Tecnologico de Monterrey. TABLE OF LINKS Abstract and Introduction Background Design Discussion Conclusions and References II. BACKGROUND A. Blockchain and Smart Contracts Blockchain technologies are being increasingly adopted in different domains for their features regarding transparency and decentralization. Bitcoin [8] was the first proposed protocol based on this architecture, combining in its functioning techniques such as Proof-of-Work (PoW) [3], SHA-256 hashing, Merkle Trees, and the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA). It is specially powerful because of its decentralized nature, provided through the Proof-of-Work validation done with each block of transactions added to a public registry known as the Blockchain. In the following years, variations on the protocol proposed by Bitcoin appeared, collectively known as cryptocurrencies, each having their own blockchain where the transactions are registered. Ethereum [4], Monero [12], Polkadot [13], Polygon [6], NEAR, Solana [14] and Avalanche [11] are some examples of these derivate protocols. Of the protocols we just mentioned, Ethereum is a critical one to talk about as it was the first to work with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) [4] architecture, an essential feature on which many other blockchains are built upon. The EVM allows protocols to execute code in a decentralized manner and register all of its execution steps on the blockchain, making the results of that code transparent and unbiased. This code is then deployed to an address stored in the blockchain and referred to as a Smart Contract, i.e. a contract that enforces itself automatically. A simple example of a task that can be performed using a Smart Contract is that of currency exchange. Usually, when two entities, Alice and Bob, each holding a different digital currency, want to exchange one for the other at a certain rate, a level of trust is needed. Indeed, either Alice has to transfer its currency to Bob first or vice versa, making the first entity that transfers vulnerable to the other not fulfilling their part of the deal. One way to balance this trust is by introducing a third-party entity, Charly, to which both parties transfer their funds so that Charly is tasked with ensuring that the deal is fulfilled. However, this only changes the protocol so that now both Alice and Bob have to trust Charly to act correctly. Here is where Smart Contracts come in, instead of having the parties transfer to a third one, transfer to a Smart Contract entity that automatically verifies that the deal is fulfilled without Alice and Bob having to trust in it, as it is executed on a decentralized network. This is illustrated in Figure 1. These trustless features of Smart Contracts then lead the way to a variety of applications to be built. Decentralized Finance (DeFi) [1], Automated Market Makers [2], and decentralized social media [10], are among the many uses of Smart Contracts that have developed in recent years. Once again, the decentralized and trustless nature in the execution of the code for each of these applications is what allows them to provide an enhanced trustless performance in comparison to their traditional counterparts. As we have said before, the essential base on which the Smart Contract infrastructure is built is the Blockchain. Let us note some of the implications of one particular attribute of the Blockchain, its functioning as a public registry. Every time a new block of valid transactions appears, it needs to be “mined”, i.e. finding a valid “nonce” value that when added at the end of the transaction block makes its SHA256 hash have certain characteristics. These characteristics are often that the hash has a number of zeros at the beginning, a number determined by the “difficulty” imposed by the network. This mining process is non-trivial by design, so that “work” needs to be performed before adding any transaction to the public ledger, hence the Proof-of-Work name. Notice that in order for the network to reach consensus that the work has been performed and the transactions validated accordingly, it is necessary for everyone to have complete access to each new transaction block. This makes any transfer of funds in the Blockchain public, including its receivers and senders. For this reason, it would be convenient to have a method through which the network could validate transactions without receiving compromising knowledge about its users, this is where Zero-Knowledge Proofs come in to play. B. Zero-Knowledge Proofs In the context of Blockchain transactions, one problem that arises is that, due to the public consensus nature of the protocol, all transactions are public. It is straightforward to check the movements of an entities funds by just checking the Blockchain registry. Although this can be partially avoided due to the easiness with which one can create new addresses (if an entity’s address is disclosed, it can just send its funds to a new one), it is still possible to just trace back the origins of any funds. A possible solution to this could work if there was a way for the network to verify the validity of transactions without them knowing the sender or the receiver, i.e. if there was a way to prove that a transaction is valid without disclosing any additional knowledge. Indeed, Zero-Knowledge Proofs are capable of doing this, as we will explaint next. A Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) is a method through which one entity can prove a statement to another one without disclosing more information than the fact that particular statement is true. For example, given a fixed function f : X −→ Y and a fixed value y ∈ Y . If we wanted to prove to a third party that we know a value x ∈ X such that f(x) = y, a trivial solution would be to just disclose the value of x we know. However, that shares more information than the fact that the statement is true. A ZKP would entail generating a proof generator function P and a proof verifier V . Such that we can generate a witness w = P(x) that does not disclose the value x, and that another entity can then evaluate with the verifier function V (w) and obtain a true or false value that determines whether the witness was created from a valid solution or not. This way, we can prove to another entity that we know a value of x such that f(x) = y, while disclosing zero knowledge about which specific value of x we know. For a more intuitive example, consider a hashing function hash : I −→ H from an input space I to a hash space H, this function could be SHA-256, SHA-1, etc. Also, consider two entities, Alice A and Bob B. Imagine that Alice guards an entrance to a treasure cave, to which one can only enter by having a password ρ that is verified using its hash, i.e. Alice has the hash of the password h = hash(ρ). However, Alice herself does not have the password and cannot enter the cave. Now consider that Bob does have the password ρ and wants to enter the cave, but he does not want to disclose the password to Alice as to not have to share it with her. For most use cases, this can be achieved by having Bob compute the hash of ρ, and show it to Alice, having her verify that it is the same as h, the one she has. However, say that h is not disclosed to Alice through a private channel but through some public method as to ensure that she verifies passwords correctly and does not commit any dishonesty. This renders just showing the hash value h of the password not a valid method for verification. Usually, the only method left would be for Bob to disclose ρ to Alice and have her compute its hash, but there is another way to do this, which involves Zero-Knowledge Proofs. Groth16[5] is a Zero-Knowledge Proof system designed to generate a proof-verifier pairing schema for satisfiability of any arithmetic circuit. What is important about the arithmetic circuit satisfiability problem is the fact that it is NP-Complete and thus allows for a wide arrange of statements to be translated into that form, including those which are often of interest in the context of ZKPs. Note that, arithmetic circuits are comprised of gates that compute arithmetic operations (addition and multiplication) on a field F, with wires connecting the gates to represent results from one going to another. Thus, recall the SAT problem, which is NP-Complete and formulated as “given a statement with boolean variables, is it possible to find an assignment for them such that the statement is true?”. Similarly, the arithmetic circuit satisfiability problem is NPComplete too and formulated as “given a statement with variables with values from a field F, is it possible to find an assignment for them such that the statement is true?”. This makes Groth16 an ideal system for working when generating ZKPs, being used for ZK languages like Circom 2 [7]. Coming back to our conundrum with Alice and Bob in the treasure cave. As it happens, hashing functions such as SHA256 can be expressed in terms of arithmetic circuit satisfiability and can thus have a corresponding Zero-Knowledge Proof generated. Therefore, in the situation we had, it is enough for Alice to have a SHA-256 ZK proof verifier V and for Bob to use the prover function P to generate a witness w = P(ρ). Bob then shares w with Alice, so she evaluates it with the verifier V (w) and determines that the witness is valid. Thus, Alice can be sure that Bob does have the password without receiving any information about what is its exact value. Finally, it is straightforward to see how this can be applied to Blockchain transaction verification. Suppose that we have a transaction t represented in some space T, along with a validation function v that tells whether t is valid with the current state of the Blockchain, having 0 or 1 as output. Then for the transaction to be added by a miner into the registry, it would suffice to send a proof that v(t) = 1. Then, we could translate the computation of v into the Groth16 schema by using a compiler such as Circom 2.This would then allow us to generate a proof-verifier pair P and V . And finally, as was done with the Alice and Bob case, the sender would just generate a witness of the transaction w = P(t) and send it to the miners which would verify it by evaluating V (w). This schema is used by cryptocurrencies such as Monero and Zcash. Now, see that in the context that concerns this paper, a ZKP could be generated for the validity of the evaluation of a questionnaire according to some set of constraints. This would allow the user or any third party to get a convincing proof of the evaluation having been performed fairly, without revealing any information about the answers that give certain results. This paper is under CC 1.0 license. available on arxiv

Zero-Knowledge Proofs: Questionnaire Result Verification in Smart Contracts

This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 DEED license. Authors: (1) Carlos Efrain Quintero-Narvaez, School of Science and Engineering Tecnologico de Monterrey; (2) Raul Monroy-Borja, School of Science and Engineering Tecnologico de Monterrey. TABLE OF LINKS Abstract and Introduction Background Design Discussion Conclusions and References Abstract We present an implementation of a Web3 platform that leverages the Groth16 Zero-Knowledge Proof schema to verify the validity of questionnaire results within Smart Contracts. Our approach ensures that the answer key of the questionnaire remains undisclosed throughout the verification process, while ensuring that the evaluation is done fairly. To accomplish this, users respond to a series of questions, and their answers are encoded and securely transmitted to a hidden backend. The backend then performs an evaluation of the user’s answers, generating the overall result of the questionnaire. Additionally, it generates a Zero-Knowledge Proof, attesting that the answers were appropriately evaluated against a valid set of constraints. Next, the user submits their result along with the proof to a Smart Contract, which verifies their validity and issues a non-fungible token (NFT) as an attestation of the user’s test result. In this research, we implemented the Zero-Knowledge functionality using Circom 2 and deployed the Smart Contract using Solidity, thereby showcasing a practical and secure solution for questionnaire validity verification in the context of Smart Contracts. —zero-knowledge, proof, web3, circom, questionnaire, solidity, smart contract, blockchain Index Terms I. INTRODUCTION Blockchain technologies and Smart Contracts have gained significant traction recently, offering transparent and decentralized solutions to problems in different domains. Doing trustless verification and attestation of facts while preserving privacy is one of these domains. In particular, verification of questionnaire evaluation results presents a unique challenge, as this calls for preserving confidentiality of privileged information such as the answers to the questionnaire. This paper introduces an implementation of a Web3 platform that leverages Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) and Smart Contracts to address this challenge. By employing the Groth16 Zero-Knowledge Proof schema, we establish a robust framework that enables users to receive proofs of the validity of their test results without revealing the underlying evaluation methods or answers. Furthermore, users can then produce attestations of their results in the form of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) generated by a Smart Contract that verifies the ZKP we just mentioned. This way, we obtain an end-to-end questionnaire answering, validating and attesting protocol. The significance of this research lies in enhancing trust and reliability in the evaluation of questionnaire-based assessments. By leveraging ZKPs in this way, test appliers can securely show that their evaluations are fair without compromising the integrity of the test. In turn, users can obtain reliable evidence of their performance in these assessments and share it with third parties without worrying about suspicions of forgery or other dishonest practices. We provide a comprehensive overview of our implementation, including the design and architecture of the Smart Contracts using Solidity and the implementation details using Circom 2 for the ZKP functionality. Additionally, we present the evaluation results, discussing the system’s performance, security, and privacy aspects. By introducing this innovative approach to questionnaire validity verification in smart-contracts, we aim to open avenues for integrity-preserving attestation mechanisms in a range of applications. The subsequent sections delve into the background, methods, results, and discussion, highlighting the significance and potential implications of our research, as well as future directions for improvement. II. BACKGROUND A. Blockchain and Smart Contracts Blockchain technologies are being increasingly adopted in different domains for their features regarding transparency and decentralization. Bitcoin [8] was the first proposed protocol based on this architecture, combining in its functioning techniques such as Proof-of-Work (PoW) [3], SHA-256 hashing, Merkle Trees, and the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA). It is specially powerful because of its decentralized nature, provided through the Proof-of-Work validation done with each block of transactions added to a public registry known as the Blockchain. In the following years, variations on the protocol proposed by Bitcoin appeared, collectively known as cryptocurrencies, each having their own blockchain where the transactions are registered. Ethereum [4], Monero [12], Polkadot [13], Polygon [6], NEAR, Solana [14] and Avalanche [11] are some examples of these derivate protocols. Of the protocols we just mentioned, Ethereum is a critical one to talk about as it was the first to work with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) [4] architecture, an essential feature on which many other blockchains are built upon. The EVM allows protocols to execute code in a decentralized manner and register all of its execution steps on the blockchain, making the results of that code transparent and unbiased. This code is then deployed to an address stored in the blockchain and referred to as a Smart Contract, i.e. a contract that enforces itself automatically. A simple example of a task that can be performed using a Smart Contract is that of currency exchange. Usually, when two entities, Alice and Bob, each holding a different digital currency, want to exchange one for the other at a certain rate, a level of trust is needed. Indeed, either Alice has to transfer its currency to Bob first or vice versa, making the first entity that transfers vulnerable to the other not fulfilling their part of the deal. One way to balance this trust is by introducing a third-party entity, Charly, to which both parties transfer their funds so that Charly is tasked with ensuring that the deal is fulfilled. However, this only changes the protocol so that now both Alice and Bob have to trust Charly to act correctly. Here is where Smart Contracts come in, instead of having the parties transfer to a third one, transfer to a Smart Contract entity that automatically verifies that the deal is fulfilled without Alice and Bob having to trust in it, as it is executed on a decentralized network. This is illustrated in Figure 1. These trustless features of Smart Contracts then lead the way to a variety of applications to be built. Decentralized Finance (DeFi) [1], Automated Market Makers [2], and decentralized social media [10], are among the many uses of Smart Contracts that have developed in recent years. Once again, the decentralized and trustless nature in the execution of the code for each of these applications is what allows them to provide an enhanced trustless performance in comparison to their traditional counterparts. As we have said before, the essential base on which the Smart Contract infrastructure is built is the Blockchain. Let us note some of the implications of one particular attribute of the Blockchain, its functioning as a public registry. Every time a new block of valid transactions appears, it needs to be “mined”, i.e. finding a valid “nonce” value that when added at the end of the transaction block makes its SHA256 hash have certain characteristics. These characteristics are often that the hash has a number of zeros at the beginning, a number determined by the “difficulty” imposed by the network. This mining process is non-trivial by design, so that “work” needs to be performed before adding any transaction to the public ledger, hence the Proof-of-Work name. Notice that in order for the network to reach consensus that the work has been performed and the transactions validated accordingly, it is necessary for everyone to have complete access to each new transaction block. This makes any transfer of funds in the Blockchain public, including its receivers and senders. For this reason, it would be convenient to have a method through which the network could validate transactions without receiving compromising knowledge about its users, this is where Zero-Knowledge Proofs come in to play. B. Zero-Knowledge Proofs In the context of Blockchain transactions, one problem that arises is that, due to the public consensus nature of the protocol, all transactions are public. It is straightforward to check the movements of an entities funds by just checking the Blockchain registry. Although this can be partially avoided due to the easiness with which one can create new addresses (if an entity’s address is disclosed, it can just send its funds to a new one), it is still possible to just trace back the origins of any funds. A possible solution to this could work if there was a way for the network to verify the validity of transactions without them knowing the sender or the receiver, i.e. if there was a way to prove that a transaction is valid without disclosing any additional knowledge. Indeed, Zero-Knowledge Proofs are capable of doing this, as we will explaint next. A Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) is a method through which one entity can prove a statement to another one without disclosing more information than the fact that particular statement is true. For example, given a fixed function f : X −→ Y and a fixed value y ∈ Y . If we wanted to prove to a third party that we know a value x ∈ X such that f(x) = y, a trivial solution would be to just disclose the value of x we know. However, that shares more information than the fact that the statement is true. A ZKP would entail generating a proof generator function P and a proof verifier V . Such that we can generate a witness w = P(x) that does not disclose the value x, and that another entity can then evaluate with the verifier function V (w) and obtain a true or false value that determines whether the witness was created from a valid solution or not. This way, we can prove to another entity that we know a value of x such that f(x) = y, while disclosing zero knowledge about which specific value of x we know. For a more intuitive example, consider a hashing function hash : I −→ H from an input space I to a hash space H, this function could be SHA-256, SHA-1, etc. Also, consider two entities, Alice A and Bob B. Imagine that Alice guards an entrance to a treasure cave, to which one can only enter by having a password ρ that is verified using its hash, i.e. Alice has the hash of the password h = hash(ρ). However, Alice herself does not have the password and cannot enter the cave. Now consider that Bob does have the password ρ and wants to enter the cave, but he does not want to disclose the password to Alice as to not have to share it with her. For most use cases, this can be achieved by having Bob compute the hash of ρ, and show it to Alice, having her verify that it is the same as h, the one she has. However, say that h is not disclosed to Alice through a private channel but through some public method as to ensure that she verifies passwords correctly and does not commit any dishonesty. This renders just showing the hash value h of the password not a valid method for verification. Usually, the only method left would be for Bob to disclose ρ to Alice and have her compute its hash, but there is another way to do this, which involves Zero-Knowledge Proofs. Groth16[5] is a Zero-Knowledge Proof system designed to generate a proof-verifier pairing schema for satisfiability of any arithmetic circuit. What is important about the arithmetic circuit satisfiability problem is the fact that it is NP-Complete and thus allows for a wide arrange of statements to be translated into that form, including those which are often of interest in the context of ZKPs. Note that, arithmetic circuits are comprised of gates that compute arithmetic operations (addition and multiplication) on a field F, with wires connecting the gates to represent results from one going to another. Thus, recall the SAT problem, which is NP-Complete and formulated as “given a statement with boolean variables, is it possible to find an assignment for them such that the statement is true?”. Similarly, the arithmetic circuit satisfiability problem is NPComplete too and formulated as “given a statement with variables with values from a field F, is it possible to find an assignment for them such that the statement is true?”. This makes Groth16 an ideal system for working when generating ZKPs, being used for ZK languages like Circom 2 [7]. Coming back to our conundrum with Alice and Bob in the treasure cave. As it happens, hashing functions such as SHA256 can be expressed in terms of arithmetic circuit satisfiability and can thus have a corresponding Zero-Knowledge Proof generated. Therefore, in the situation we had, it is enough for Alice to have a SHA-256 ZK proof verifier V and for Bob to use the prover function P to generate a witness w = P(ρ). Bob then shares w with Alice, so she evaluates it with the verifier V (w) and determines that the witness is valid. Thus, Alice can be sure that Bob does have the password without receiving any information about what is its exact value. Finally, it is straightforward to see how this can be applied to Blockchain transaction verification. Suppose that we have a transaction t represented in some space T, along with a validation function v that tells whether t is valid with the current state of the Blockchain, having 0 or 1 as output. Then for the transaction to be added by a miner into the registry, it would suffice to send a proof that v(t) = 1. Then, we could translate the computation of v into the Groth16 schema by using a compiler such as Circom 2.This would then allow us to generate a proof-verifier pair P and V . And finally, as was done with the Alice and Bob case, the sender would just generate a witness of the transaction w = P(t) and send it to the miners which would verify it by evaluating V (w). This schema is used by cryptocurrencies such as Monero and Zcash. Now, see that in the context that concerns this paper, a ZKP could be generated for the validity of the evaluation of a questionnaire according to some set of constraints. This would allow the user or any third party to get a convincing proof of the evaluation having been performed fairly, without revealing any information about the answers that give certain results. III. DESIGN Our implementation makes heavy usage of Circom 2 and its features for generating Solidity code for ZK proof verifiers. This code is then integrated into an ERC-721 Smart Contract that allows the user to mint an NFT when a result of the questionnaire with the corresponding proof is provided. A basic implementation was made for a new Web3 platform called P3rsonalities, intended to have a personality test with results validated with a ZK proof and attested through a generated ERC-721 NFT. The deployed contract code with the Circom 2 generated Solidity verifier can be found at the P3rsonalities GitHub Repository. We designed the Circom 2 code in such a way that it receives a two bit masks and one integer as inputs, one bit mask representing the user’s answers for each question, the other representing the answer key, and the integer representing the result of the test, having a total of 10 questions. The questions are divided into two groups so that each one represents an attribute of the final result, i.e. the final result will be a two bits integer, each bit representing an attribute. After compiling, Circom 2 generates two files we use, one WebAssembly script for the generation of the ZK witness and another Solidity script for verification of said witness on a Smart Contract executed on an EVM Blockchain. It is important to note that the generated Solidity code makes heavy use of the assembly functionalities available on the EVM, as to ensure that gas costs for executing the verification are as low as possible. The witness generator along with the questionnaire evaluator are deployed to a centralized server, in this case an AWS Lambda function, for easy deployment and access from a REST API endpoint. The user then makes a request to this API, sending its answers to the questionnaire. The API then executes the witness generator code and returns the result of the test together with the ZK witness. The user then makes a call, with the generated witness as an input, to the deployed ERC-721 Smart Contract for minting the NFT, attesting the result returned by the API. This Smart Contract is modified so that the Solidity verifier script generated by Circom 2 is used as a required check before minting the NFT to the user’s address. At the end of the procedure, the user obtains a Soulbound NFT (an NFT that cannot be transferred) representing the result of their answers to the questionnaire. As this NFT can only be generated when the user possesses a valid witness for that result, it holds a special value as evidence for anyone interested in verifying the results of such a test. This paper is under CC 1.0 license. available on arxiv

Zero-Knowledge Proofs: Ensuring Privacy in Smart Contract Questionnaire Validity Verification

A DIPLOMATIC EFFORT

In the Fourth Year: Anticipations of a World Peace by H. G. Wells, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . THE FUTURE OF MONARCHY VII. — THE FUTURE OF MONARCHY From the very outset of this war it was manifest to the clear-headed observer that only the complete victory of German imperialism could save the dynastic system in Europe from the fate that it had challenged. That curious system had been the natural and unplanned development of the political complications of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Two systems of monarchies, the Bourbon system and the German, then ruled Europe between them. With the latter was associated the tradition of the European unity under the Roman empire; all the Germanic monarchs had an itch to be called Caesar. The Kaiser of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the Czar had, so to speak, the prior claim to the title. The Prussian king set up as a Caesar in 1871; Queen Victoria became the Caesar of India (Kaisir-i-Hind) under the auspices of Lord Beaconsfield, and last and least, that most detestable of all Coburgers, Ferdinand of Bulgaria, gave Kaiserism a touch of quaint absurdity by setting up as Czar of Bulgaria. The weakening of the Bourbon system by the French revolution and the Napoleonic adventure cleared the way for the complete ascendancy of the Germanic monarchies in spite of the breaking away of the United States from that system. After 1871, a constellation of quasi-divine Teutonic monarchs, of which the German Emperor, the German Queen Victoria, the German Czar, were the greatest stars, formed a caste apart, intermarried only among themselves, dominated the world and was regarded with a mystical awe by the ignorant and foolish in most European countries. The marriages, the funerals, the coronations, the obstetrics of this amazing breed of idols were matters of almost universal worship. The Czar and Queen Victoria professed also to be the heads of religion upon earth. The court-centered diplomacies of the more firmly rooted monarchies steered all the great liberating movements of the nineteenth century into monarchical channels. Italy was made a monarchy; Greece, the motherland of republics, was handed over to a needy scion of the Danish royal family; the sturdy peasants of Bulgaria suffered from a kindred imposition. Even Norway was saddled with as much of a king as it would stand, as a condition of its independence. At the dawn of the twentieth century republican freedom seemed a remote dream beyond the confines of Switzerland and France—and it had no very secure air in France. Reactionary scheming has been an intermittent fever in the French republic for six and forty years. The French foreign office is still undemocratic in tradition and temper. But for the restless disloyalty of the Hohenzollerns this German kingly caste might be dominating the world to this day. Of course the stability of this Teutonic dynastic system in Europe—which will presently seem to the student of history so curious a halting-place upon the way to human unity—rested very largely upon the maintenance of peace. It was the failure to understand this on the part of the German and Bulgarian rulers in particular that has now brought all monarchy to the question. The implicit theory that supported the intermarrying German royal families in Europe was that their inter-relationship and their aloofness from their subjects was a mitigation of national and racial animosities. In the days when Queen Victoria was the grandmother of Europe this was a plausible argument. King, Czar and Emperor, or Emperor and Emperor would meet, and it was understood that these meetings were the lubrication of European affairs. The monarchs married largely, conspicuously, and very expensively for our good. Royal funerals, marriages, christenings, coronations, and jubilees interrupted traffic and stimulated trade everywhere. They seemed to give a raison d'jtre for mankind. It is the Emperor William and the Czar Ferdinand who have betrayed not only humanity but their own strange caste by shattering all these pleasant illusions. The wisdom of Kant is justified, and we know now that kings cause wars. It needed the shock of the great war to bring home the wisdom of that old Scotchman of Kvnigsberg to the mind of the ordinary man. Moreover in support of the dynastic system was the fact that it did exist as the system in possession, and all prosperous and intelligent people are chary of disturbing existing things. Life is full of vestigial structures, and it is a long way to logical perfection. Let us keep on, they would argue, with what we have. And another idea which, rightly or wrongly, made men patient with the emperors and kings was an exaggerated idea of the insecurity of republican institutions. You can still hear very old dull men say gravely that “kings are better than pronunciamentos”; there was an article upon Greece to this effect quite recently in that uncertain paper The New Statesman. Then a kind of illustrative gesture would be made to the South American republics, although the internal disturbances of the South American republics have diminished to very small dimensions in the last three decades and although pronunciamentos rarely disturb the traffic in Switzerland, the United States, or France. But there can be no doubt that the influence of the Germanic monarchy up to the death of Queen Victoria upon British thought was in the direction of estrangement from the two great modern republics and in the direction of assistance and propitiation to Germany. We surrendered Heligoland, we made great concessions to German colonial ambitions, we allowed ourselves to be jockeyed into a phase of dangerous hostility to France. A practice of sneering at things American has died only very recently out of English journalism and literature, as any one who cares to consult the bound magazines of the ‘seventies and eighties may soon see for himself. It is well too in these days not to forget Colonel Marchand, if only to remember that such a clash must never recur. But in justice to our monarchy we must remember that after the death of Queen Victoria, the spirit, if not the forms, of British kingship was greatly modified by the exceptional character and ability of King Edward VII. He was curiously anti-German in spirit; he had essentially democratic instincts; in a few precious years he restored good will between France and Great Britain. It is no slight upon his successor to doubt whether any one could have handled the present opportunities and risks of monarchy in Great Britain as Edward could have handled them. Because no doubt if monarchy is to survive in the British Empire it must speedily undergo the profoundest modification. The old state of affairs cannot continue. The European dynastic system, based upon the intermarriage of a group of mainly German royal families, is dead to-day; it is freshly dead, but it is as dead as the rule of the Incas. It is idle to close our eyes to this fact. The revolution in Russia, the setting up of a republic in China, demonstrating the ripeness of the East for free institutions, the entry of the American republics into world politics—these things slam the door on any idea of working back to the old nineteenth-century system. People calls to people. “No peace with the Hohenzollerns” is a cry that carries with it the final repudiation of emperors and kings. The man in the street will assure you he wants no diplomatic peace. Beyond the unstable shapes of the present the political forms of the future rise now so clearly that they are the common talk of men. Kant’s lucid thought told us long ago that the peace of the world demanded a world union of republics. That is a commonplace remark now in every civilized community. The stars in their courses, the logic of circumstances, the everyday needs and everyday intelligence of men, all these things march irresistibly towards a permanent world peace based on democratic republicanism. The question of the future of monarchy is not whether it will be able to resist and overcome that trend; it has as little chance of doing that as the Lama of Thibet has of becoming Emperor of the Earth. It is whether it will resist openly, become the centre and symbol of a reactionary resistance, and have to be abolished and swept away altogether everywhere, as the Romanoffs have already been swept away in Russia, or whether it will be able in this country and that to adapt itself to the necessities of the great age that dawns upon mankind, to take a generous and helpful attitude towards its own modification, and so survive, for a time at any rate, in that larger air. It is the fashion for the apologists of monarchy in the British Empire to speak of the British system as a crowned republic. That is an attractive phrase to people of republican sentiments. It is quite conceivable that the British Empire may be able to make that phrase a reality and that the royal line may continue, a line of hereditary presidents, with some of the ancient trappings and something of the picturesque prestige that, as the oldest monarchy in Europe, it has to-day. Two kings in Europe have already gone far towards realizing this conception of a life president; both the King of Italy and the King of Norway live as simply as if they were in the White House and are far more accessible. Along that line the British monarchy must go if it is not to go altogether. Will it go along those lines? There are many reasons for hoping that it will do so. The Times has styled the crown the “golden link” of the empire. Australians and Canadians, it was argued, had little love for the motherland but the greatest devotion to the sovereign, and still truer was this of Indians, Egyptians, and the like. It might be easy to press this theory of devotion too far, but there can be little doubt that the British Crown does at present stand as a symbol of unity over diversity such as no other crown, unless it be that of Austria-Hungary, can be said to do. The British crown is not like other crowns; it may conceivably take a line of its own and emerge—possibly a little more like a hat and a little less like a crown—from trials that may destroy every other monarchial system in the world. Now many things are going on behind the scenes, many little indications peep out upon the speculative watcher and vanish again; but there is very little that is definite to go upon at the present time to determine how far the monarchy will rise to the needs of this great occasion. Certain acts and changes, the initiative to which would come most gracefully from royalty itself, could be done at this present time. They may be done quite soon. Upon the doing of them wait great masses of public opinion. The first of these things is for the British monarchy to sever itself definitely from the German dynastic system, with which it is so fatally entangled by marriage and descent, and to make its intention of becoming henceforth more and more British in blood as well as spirit, unmistakably plain. This idea has been put forth quite prominently in the Times. The king has been asked to give his countenance to the sweeping away of all those restrictions first set up by George the Third, upon the marriage of the Royal Princes with British, French and American subjects. The British Empire is very near the limit of its endurance of a kingly caste of Germans. The choice of British royalty between its peoples and its cousins cannot be indefinitely delayed. Were it made now publicly and boldly, there can be no doubt that the decision would mean a renascence of monarchy, a considerable outbreak of royalist enthusiasm in the Empire. There are times when a king or queen must need be dramatic and must a little anticipate occasions. It is not seemly to make concessions perforce; kings may not make obviously unwilling surrenders; it is the indecisive kings who lose their crowns. No doubt the Anglicization of the royal family by national marriages would gradually merge that family into the general body of the British peerage. Its consequent loss of distinction might be accompanied by an associated fading out of function, until the King became at last hardly more functional than was the late Duke of Norfolk as premier peer. Possibly that is the most desirable course from many points of view. It must be admitted that the abandonment of marriages within the royal caste and a bold attempt to introduce a strain of British blood in the royal family does not in itself fulfil all that is needed if the British king is indeed to become the crowned president of his people and the nominal and accepted leader of the movement towards republican institutions. A thing that is productive of an enormous amount of republican talk in Great Britain is the suspicion—I believe an ill-founded suspicion—that there are influences at work at court antagonistic to republican institutions in friendly states and that there is a disposition even to sacrifice the interests of the liberal allies to dynastic sympathies. These things are not to be believed, but it would be a feat of vast impressiveness if there were something like a royal and public repudiation of the weaknesses of cousinship. The behaviour of the Allies towards that great Balkan statesman Venizelos, the sacrificing of the friendly Greek republicans in favour of the manifestly treacherous King of Greece, has produced the deepest shame and disgust in many quarters that are altogether friendly, that are even warmly “loyal” to the British monarchy. And in a phase of tottering thrones it is very undesirable that the British habit of asylum should be abused. We have already in England the dethroned monarch of a friendly republic; he is no doubt duly looked after. In the future there may be a shaking of the autumnal boughs and a shower of emperors and kings. We do not want Great Britain to become a hotbed of reactionary plotting and the starting-point of restoration raids into the territories of emancipated peoples. This is particularly desirable if presently, after the Kaiser’s death—which by all the statistics of Hohenzollern mortality cannot be delayed now for many years—the present Crown Prince goes a-wandering. We do not want any German ex-monarchs; Sweden is always open to them and friendly, and to Sweden they ought to go; and particularly do British people dread an irruption of Hohenzollerns or Coburgers. Almost as undesirable would be the arrival of the Czar and Czarina. It is supremely important that no wind of suspicion should blow between us and the freedom of Russia. After the war even more than during the war will the enemy be anxious to sow discord between the great Russian-speaking and English-speaking democracies. Quite apart from the scandal of their inelegant domesticities, the establishment of the Czar and Czarina in England with frequent and easy access to our royal family may be extraordinarily unfortunate for the British monarchy. I will confess a certain sympathy for the Czar myself. He is not an evil figure, he is not a strong figure, but he has that sort of weakness, that failure in decision, which trails revolution in its wake. He has ended one dynasty already. The British royal family owes it to itself, that he bring not the infection of his misfortunes to Windsor. The security of the British monarchy lies in such a courageous severance of its destinies from the Teutonic dynastic system. Will it make that severance? There I share an almost universal ignorance. The loyalty of the British is not to what kings are too prone to call “my person,” not to a chosen and admired family, but to a renascent mankind. We have fought in this war for Belgium, for France, for general freedom, for civilization and the whole future of mankind, far more than for ourselves. We have not fought for a king. We are discovering in that spirit of human unity that lies below the idea of a League of Free Nations the real invisible king of our heart and race. But we will very gladly go on with our task under a nominal king unless he hampers us in the task that grows ever more plainly before us. ... That, I think, is a fair statement of British public opinion on this question. But every day when I am in London I walk past Buckingham Palace to lunch at my club, and I look at that not very expressive fagade and wonder—and we all wonder—what thoughts are going on behind it and what acts are being conceived there. Out of it there might yet come some gesture of acceptance magnificent enough to set beside President Wilson’s magnificent declaration of war. ... These are things in the scales of fate. I will not pretend to be able to guess even which way the scales will swing. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. H. G. Wells (1918). In The Fourth Year. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022, from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10291/10291-h/10291-h.htm This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html.

THE FUTURE OF MONARCHY

Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens is part of HackerNoon’s Book Blog Post series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here: [LINK TO TABLE OF LINK] CHAPTER XVIII. HOW OLIVER PASSED HIS TIME IN THE IMPROVING SOCIETY OF HIS REPUTABLE FRIENDS About noon next day, when the Dodger and Master Bates had gone out to pursue their customary avocations, Mr. Fagin took the opportunity of reading Oliver a long lecture on the crying sin of ingratitude; of which he clearly demonstrated he had been guilty, to no ordinary extent, in wilfully absenting himself from the society of his anxious friends; and, still more, in endeavouring to escape from them after so much trouble and expense had been incurred in his recovery. Mr. Fagin laid great stress on the fact of his having taken Oliver in, and cherished him, when, without his timely aid, he might have perished with hunger; and he related the dismal and affecting history of a young lad whom, in his philanthropy, he had succoured under parallel circumstances, but who, proving unworthy of his confidence and evincing a desire to communicate with the police, had unfortunately come to be hanged at the Old Bailey one morning. Mr. Fagin did not seek to conceal his share in the catastrophe, but lamented with tears in his eyes that the wrong-headed and treacherous behaviour of the young person in question, had rendered it necessary that he should become the victim of certain evidence for the crown: which, if it were not precisely true, was indispensably necessary for the safety of him (Mr. Fagin) and a few select friends. Mr. Fagin concluded by drawing a rather disagreeable picture of the discomforts of hanging; and, with great friendliness and politeness of manner, expressed his anxious hopes that he might never be obliged to submit Oliver Twist to that unpleasant operation. Little Oliver’s blood ran cold, as he listened to the Jew’s words, and imperfectly comprehended the dark threats conveyed in them. That it was possible even for justice itself to confound the innocent with the guilty when they were in accidental companionship, he knew already; and that deeply-laid plans for the destruction of inconveniently knowing or over-communicative persons, had been really devised and carried out by the Jew on more occasions than one, he thought by no means unlikely, when he recollected the general nature of the altercations between that gentleman and Mr. Sikes: which seemed to bear reference to some foregone conspiracy of the kind. As he glanced timidly up, and met the Jew’s searching look, he felt that his pale face and trembling limbs were neither unnoticed nor unrelished by that wary old gentleman. The Jew, smiling hideously, patted Oliver on the head, and said, that if he kept himself quiet, and applied himself to business, he saw they would be very good friends yet. Then, taking his hat, and covering himself with an old patched great-coat, he went out, and locked the room-door behind him. And so Oliver remained all that day, and for the greater part of many subsequent days, seeing nobody, between early morning and midnight, and left during the long hours to commune with his own thoughts. Which, never failing to revert to his kind friends, and the opinion they must long ago have formed of him, were sad indeed. After the lapse of a week or so, the Jew left the room-door unlocked; and he was at liberty to wander about the house. It was a very dirty place. The rooms upstairs had great high wooden chimney-pieces and large doors, with panelled walls and cornices to the ceiling; which, although they were black with neglect and dust, were ornamented in various ways. From all of these tokens Oliver concluded that a long time ago, before the old Jew was born, it had belonged to better people, and had perhaps been quite gay and handsome: dismal and dreary as it looked now. Spiders had built their webs in the angles of the walls and ceilings; and sometimes, when Oliver walked softly into a room, the mice would scamper across the floor, and run back terrified to their holes. With these exceptions, there was neither sight nor sound of any living thing; and often, when it grew dark, and he was tired of wandering from room to room, he would crouch in the corner of the passage by the street-door, to be as near living people as he could; and would remain there, listening and counting the hours, until the Jew or the boys returned. In all the rooms, the mouldering shutters were fast closed: the bars which held them were screwed tight into the wood; the only light which was admitted, stealing its way through round holes at the top: which made the rooms more gloomy, and filled them with strange shadows. There was a back-garret window with rusty bars outside, which had no shutter; and out of this, Oliver often gazed with a melancholy face for hours together; but nothing was to be descried from it but a confused and crowded mass of housetops, blackened chimneys, and gable-ends. Sometimes, indeed, a grizzly head might be seen, peering over the parapet-wall of a distant house; but it was quickly withdrawn again; and as the window of Oliver’s observatory was nailed down, and dimmed with the rain and smoke of years, it was as much as he could do to make out the forms of the different objects beyond, without making any attempt to be seen or heard,—which he had as much chance of being, as if he had lived inside the ball of St. Paul’s Cathedral. One afternoon, the Dodger and Master Bates being engaged out that evening, the first-named young gentleman took it into his head to evince some anxiety regarding the decoration of his person (to do him justice, this was by no means an habitual weakness with him); and, with this end and aim, he condescendingly commanded Oliver to assist him in his toilet, straightway. Oliver was but too glad to make himself useful; too happy to have some faces, however bad, to look upon; too desirous to conciliate those about him when he could honestly do so; to throw any objection in the way of this proposal. So he at once expressed his readiness; and, kneeling on the floor, while the Dodger sat upon the table so that he could take his foot in his laps, he applied himself to a process which Mr. Dawkins designated as “japanning his trotter-cases.” The phrase, rendered into plain English, signifieth, cleaning his boots. Whether it was the sense of freedom and independence which a rational animal may be supposed to feel when he sits on a table in an easy attitude smoking a pipe, swinging one leg carelessly to and fro, and having his boots cleaned all the time, without even the past trouble of having taken them off, or the prospective misery of putting them on, to disturb his reflections; or whether it was the goodness of the tobacco that soothed the feelings of the Dodger, or the mildness of the beer that mollified his thoughts; he was evidently tinctured, for the nonce, with a spice of romance and enthusiasm, foreign to his general nature. He looked down on Oliver, with a thoughtful countenance, for a brief space; and then, raising his head, and heaving a gentle sign, said, half in abstraction, and half to Master Bates: “What a pity it is he isn’t a prig!” “Ah!” said Master Charles Bates; “he don’t know what’s good for him.” The Dodger sighed again, and resumed his pipe: as did Charley Bates. They both smoked, for some seconds, in silence. “I suppose you don’t even know what a prig is?” said the Dodger mournfully. “I think I know that,” replied Oliver, looking up. “It’s a the—; you’re one, are you not?” inquired Oliver, checking himself. “I am,” replied the Dodger. “I’d scorn to be anything else.” Mr. Dawkins gave his hat a ferocious cock, after delivering this sentiment, and looked at Master Bates, as if to denote that he would feel obliged by his saying anything to the contrary. “I am,” repeated the Dodger. “So’s Charley. So’s Fagin. So’s Sikes. So’s Nancy. So’s Bet. So we all are, down to the dog. And he’s the downiest one of the lot!” “And the least given to peaching,” added Charley Bates. “He wouldn’t so much as bark in a witness-box, for fear of committing himself; no, not if you tied him up in one, and left him there without wittles for a fortnight,” said the Dodger. “Not a bit of it,” observed Charley. “He’s a rum dog. Don’t he look fierce at any strange cove that laughs or sings when he’s in company!” pursued the Dodger. “Won’t he growl at all, when he hears a fiddle playing! And don’t he hate other dogs as ain’t of his breed! Oh, no!” “He’s an out-and-out Christian,” said Charley. This was merely intended as a tribute to the animal’s abilities, but it was an appropriate remark in another sense, if Master Bates had only known it; for there are a good many ladies and gentlemen, claiming to be out-and-out Christians, between whom, and Mr. Sikes’ dog, there exist strong and singular points of resemblance. “Well, well,” said the Dodger, recurring to the point from which they had strayed: with that mindfulness of his profession which influenced all his proceedings. “This hasn’t go anything to do with young Green here.” “No more it has,” said Charley. “Why don’t you put yourself under Fagin, Oliver?” “And make your fortun’ out of hand?” added the Dodger, with a grin. “And so be able to retire on your property, and do the gen-teel: as I mean to, in the very next leap-year but four that ever comes, and the forty-second Tuesday in Trinity-week,” said Charley Bates. “I don’t like it,” rejoined Oliver, timidly; “I wish they would let me go. I—I—would rather go.” “And Fagin would rather not!” rejoined Charley. Oliver knew this too well; but thinking it might be dangerous to express his feelings more openly, he only sighed, and went on with his boot-cleaning. “Go!” exclaimed the Dodger. “Why, where’s your spirit?” Don’t you take any pride out of yourself? Would you go and be dependent on your friends?” “Oh, blow that!” said Master Bates: drawing two or three silk handkerchiefs from his pocket, and tossing them into a cupboard, “that’s too mean; that is.” “I couldn’t do it,” said the Dodger, with an air of haughty disgust. “You can leave your friends, though,” said Oliver with a half smile; “and let them be punished for what you did.” “That,” rejoined the Dodger, with a wave of his pipe, “That was all out of consideration for Fagin, ’cause the traps know that we work together, and he might have got into trouble if we hadn’t made our lucky; that was the move, wasn’t it, Charley?” Master Bates nodded assent, and would have spoken, but the recollection of Oliver’s flight came so suddenly upon him, that the smoke he was inhaling got entangled with a laugh, and went up into his head, and down into his throat: and brought on a fit of coughing and stamping, about five minutes long. “Look here!” said the Dodger, drawing forth a handful of shillings and halfpence. “Here’s a jolly life! What’s the odds where it comes from? Here, catch hold; there’s plenty more where they were took from. You won’t, won’t you? Oh, you precious flat!” “It’s naughty, ain’t it, Oliver?” inquired Charley Bates. “He’ll come to be scragged, won’t he?” “I don’t know what that means,” replied Oliver. “Something in this way, old feller,” said Charly. As he said it, Master Bates caught up an end of his neckerchief; and, holding it erect in the air, dropped his head on his shoulder, and jerked a curious sound through his teeth; thereby indicating, by a lively pantomimic representation, that scragging and hanging were one and the same thing. “That’s what it means,” said Charley. “Look how he stares, Jack! I never did see such prime company as that ’ere boy; he’ll be the death of me, I know he will.” Master Charley Bates, having laughed heartily again, resumed his pipe with tears in his eyes. “You’ve been brought up bad,” said the Dodger, surveying his boots with much satisfaction when Oliver had polished them. “Fagin will make something of you, though, or you’ll be the first he ever had that turned out unprofitable. You’d better begin at once; for you’ll come to the trade long before you think of it; and you’re only losing time, Oliver.” Master Bates backed this advice with sundry moral admonitions of his own: which, being exhausted, he and his friend Mr. Dawkins launched into a glowing description of the numerous pleasures incidental to the life they led, interspersed with a variety of hints to Oliver that the best thing he could do, would be to secure Fagin’s favour without more delay, by the means which they themselves had employed to gain it. “And always put this in your pipe, Nolly,” said the Dodger, as the Jew was heard unlocking the door above, “if you don’t take fogels and tickers—” “What’s the good of talking in that way?” interposed Master Bates; “he don’t know what you mean.” “If you don’t take pocket-handkechers and watches,” said the Dodger, reducing his conversation to the level of Oliver’s capacity, “some other cove will; so that the coves that lose ’em will be all the worse, and you’ll be all the worse, too, and nobody half a ha’p’orth the better, except the chaps wot gets them—and you’ve just as good a right to them as they have.” “To be sure, to be sure!” said the Jew, who had entered unseen by Oliver. “It all lies in a nutshell my dear; in a nutshell, take the Dodger’s word for it. Ha! ha! ha! He understands the catechism of his trade.” The old man rubbed his hands gleefully together, as he corroborated the Dodger’s reasoning in these terms; and chuckled with delight at his pupil’s proficiency. The conversation proceeded no farther at this time, for the Jew had returned home accompanied by Miss Betsy, and a gentleman whom Oliver had never seen before, but who was accosted by the Dodger as Tom Chitling; and who, having lingered on the stairs to exchange a few gallantries with the lady, now made his appearance. Mr. Chitling was older in years than the Dodger: having perhaps numbered eighteen winters; but there was a degree of deference in his deportment towards that young gentleman which seemed to indicate that he felt himself conscious of a slight inferiority in point of genius and professional aquirements. He had small twinkling eyes, and a pock-marked face; wore a fur cap, a dark corduroy jacket, greasy fustian trousers, and an apron. His wardrobe was, in truth, rather out of repair; but he excused himself to the company by stating that his “time” was only out an hour before; and that, in consequence of having worn the regimentals for six weeks past, he had not been able to bestow any attention on his private clothes. Mr. Chitling added, with strong marks of irritation, that the new way of fumigating clothes up yonder was infernal unconstitutional, for it burnt holes in them, and there was no remedy against the County. The same remark he considered to apply to the regulation mode of cutting the hair: which he held to be decidedly unlawful. Mr. Chitling wound up his observations by stating that he had not touched a drop of anything for forty-two moral long hard-working days; and that he “wished he might be busted if he warn’t as dry as a lime-basket.” “Where do you think the gentleman has come from, Oliver?” inquired the Jew, with a grin, as the other boys put a bottle of spirits on the table. “I—I—don’t know, sir,” replied Oliver. “Who’s that?” inquired Tom Chitling, casting a contemptuous look at Oliver. “A young friend of mine, my dear,” replied the Jew. “He’s in luck, then,” said the young man, with a meaning look at Fagin. “Never mind where I came from, young ’un; you’ll find your way there, soon enough, I’ll bet a crown!” At this sally, the boys laughed. After some more jokes on the same subject, they exchanged a few short whispers with Fagin; and withdrew. After some words apart between the last comer and Fagin, they drew their chairs towards the fire; and the Jew, telling Oliver to come and sit by him, led the conversation to the topics most calculated to interest his hearers. These were, the great advantages of the trade, the proficiency of the Dodger, the amiability of Charley Bates, and the liberality of the Jew himself. At length these subjects displayed signs of being thoroughly exhausted; and Mr. Chitling did the same: for the house of correction becomes fatiguing after a week or two. Miss Betsy accordingly withdrew; and left the party to their repose. From this day, Oliver was seldom left alone; but was placed in almost constant communication with the two boys, who played the old game with the Jew every day: whether for their own improvement or Oliver’s, Mr. Fagin best knew. At other times the old man would tell them stories of robberies he had committed in his younger days: mixed up with so much that was droll and curious, that Oliver could not help laughing heartily, and showing that he was amused in spite of all his better feelings. In short, the wily old Jew had the boy in his toils. Having prepared his mind, by solitude and gloom, to prefer any society to the companionship of his own sad thoughts in such a dreary place, he was now slowly instilling into his soul the poison which he hoped would blacken it, and change its hue for ever. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved April 2022 from Dickens, Charles,1996. Oliver Twist. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/730/730-h/730-h.htm#chap18 This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at , located at . www.gutenberg.org https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html

Oliver Twist: Chapter XVIII

Oliver Twist: Chapter XII

The American Dream 'Exists,' But What is the Reality?

El sueño americano 'existe', pero ¿cuál es la realidad?

Le rêve américain « existe », mais quelle est la réalité ?

अमेरिकी सपना 'मौजूद है,' लेकिन वास्तविकता क्या है?

アメリカンドリームは「実在する」が、その現実とは?

O sonho americano 'existe', mas qual é a realidade?

Giấc mơ Mỹ 'Tồn tại,' Nhưng Thực tế là gì?

美国梦“存在”，但现实是什么？

Woow! It's 2020 and this story got too old to still be relevant. Regardless, I think we should keep it published. We're now working on CreatorKit, a new video marketing tool to help creators grow online. It has tools to make it super easy to with engaging motion graphics. add text to video =================== A little over a year ago, we with the goal of creating engaging mobile apps, tailored to young millennials and gen Z. Fortunately to this day, have downloaded the apps we built in 2016. founded Beta Labs more than four million users Top Nine, Game Switch and Animately on the Charts So what was the key to our success? A simple three step process. [TL;DR] There are many ways to succeed on the App Store. Ours was the combination of influencer marketing and building an app that exploited some kind of trend. We’ve partnered with hundreds of influencers and owners of social media accounts with a large audience, mostly on a per-impressions or per-posts scheme. Influencer marketing has always been at the core of our strategy. Influencers enabled us to advertise and promote our apps successfully, but with more than 500,000 active developers and 2,200,000 apps on the App Store, . In our case, another key factor was that we would always exploit some kind of trend or opportunity gap. I’ll cover only our experience with Game Switch, Animately, and Top Nine on this article. you need to do more than just apply great marketing skills to differentiate from the crowd The process is pretty simple: Our three step process As you can imagine, execution is not that simple and straight forward. However, it worked for us pretty well most of the times. 1- Detecting trends and opportunities [TL;DR] Exploit seasonal trends. Pay attention to newcomers on the Top Charts. Uncover the trending searches on the search tab. Check out OS release notes regularly. Use mobile data intelligence platforms. There can be hundreds of different ways to succeed on this crucial step. We used many as well. , based on the trend that every December, Instagram users look for an app that generates a collage with their best 9 photos of the year. . Take a look at the trends last year: Top 9 was Andy’s idea The takeaway is that Google Trends may be a great tool to validate seasonal trends With Game Switch, we just looked at the Top charts. “ ” appeared on the 150th position of the App Store. We saw that playing games from the iOS notification center was an interesting paradigm, so we jumped right in. Then it reached the top charts, and the . Steve — The Jumping dinosaur buzz around it started Another in the App Store. This was the case for Animately. We saw the keyword “Wallpapers,” and after looking at the “Live photos” section of the we saw the opportunity to create Live Photo Wallpapers. key method to understand trends is looking at the search tab release notes for iOS 9.1.0 A simple OS update may give way for the creation of an entirely new app space. To give you an example, if you open the App Store search tab almost EST, you’ll see Truth or Dare is a trending search. That’s because there have been more than 7 million users searching for the keywords “Truth or Dare” almost every weekend for the past 5 months now. Cool opportunity right? Yeah, it an amazing opportunity. Now it’s saturated and it’s only cool for those who are among the first results, which happen to be the first ones to have created a decent and engaging app. As with any other search algorithm, it will favor the older over the newer ones. every Saturday 8 PM was If you want to create a profitable business out of building apps, is critical to understand that My grandma and my 7-year-old cousin have app ideas. It’s more about You’ll find tons of interesting posts about how to find profitable opportunities, this step is very different than having an “app idea.” understanding potential, competition, trends, and the opportunity out of developing something relatively simple with the right marketing strategy. including ones calling out the less morally-equipped ones, for exploiting the system in order to scam the more vulnerable users. 2- Build the app before the trend is over [TL;DR] You’ve detected a trend or opportunity; that means dozens of others probably did as well. Be fast and build with an MVP mindset. A lot of developers will copy innovator’s app in no time. In technology, there’s always a tradeoff between the time it takes to develop something and the quality of the end product. Charly is a detail-obsessed, design-centered software engineer. You get the picture, right? As the leader of our engineering team, he wants to make sure our infrastructure will be able to handle thousands of users at any given moment, providing the best possible UX. Most of the apps we’ve made went viral, staying at the top charts for a couple of days. Being on the Top 10 of the US App Store spells at least 100,000 downloads a day. If you are building apps based on trends, be advised that hundreds of similar apps will pop up. is perfectly mirrored on the App Store: First are the . Then there’s the . Then there’s the . Idiots saturate the business. Warrent Buffet’s idea of the “Three I’s” Innovators Imitators Idiots There are many developers who will create incremental innovations to an existing app. But This means roughly the same icon, same UX, and even almost the same UI. As an innovator, you invest time understanding and A/B testing the high converting UX for in-app purchases or better engagement (= more ads). As an imitator, they just need to copy it! The way the App Store handles copycats is very frustrating. To be honest, there’s still a lot of room for improvement. there are many, many others who will create an exact copy of your app. MVP mindset You want the design to be amazing and to launch with 100% of the features, but it’s better to be one of the innovators. If you’re not fast enough, you may be already among the imitators. Getting the time/quality tradeoff right can separate your app from failure to success. We learnt this the hard way. Remember the Pokemon Go Chat apps? Have you heard of the GoAtlas app? Of course you haven’t, because it was too late by the time we were going to launch it, so we didn’t. We were confident it was going to handle 300K active users a day, not like the #1 app . Developing an architecture that complex for real time messaging at scale took us more than what the market could wait. that crashed for not being able 3- Marketing strategy based on Influencers and viral loops [TL;DR] Read if you want to understand how viral loops work for apps. Influencers are an amazing way to execute “the big push.” You’ll also find many marketing secrets as well. If you want to create viral apps, the most important insight to take into account is that Ideally, the app needs to be designed for growth, integrating the marketing strategy with the product. Otherwise, you need to have a good picture of how the ad creative is going to be like. If it’s a game, That’s how made it to the top initially. Another example of an amazing marketing strategy around a simple app is the current hit: “The floor is lava”. Look at the creative from the geniuses behind it: the marketing strategy needs to be created before anyone writes a single line of code. consider using videos of influencers or random people playing it. Color Switch BuildBox Clear brand + engaging video playing floor is lava at WallmartInfluencer marketing , as companies are “required to ensure that its influencers clearly disclose when they have been compensated in exchange for their endorsements.” And believe me, . Influencers on Instagram began using the #Ad to comply, and that’s why Instagram . Influencer marketing has become somewhat of a buzz word lately, but it’s a very effective way to entice someone’s followers. After all, they’re following the account because its influence makes them tick. Influencer marketing is the grey territory between an ad showcasing a testimonial and a subtle product mention that almost blend in. That’s also exactly what the FTC doesn’t like this is enforced is launching a “paid partnership” now like parody accounts or ones that simply post engaging content. We’ve never worked with celebs, partly because we didn’t have the budget for it, but mainly because these influencers don’t drive instant conversions. Instead, they help you develop the brand image. We normally combined the other two. We would use niche influencers to generate social proof, together with large accounts to help us amplify it. The social network of choice will depend on the audience you are targeting. We used Twitter and Instagram mostly, but you’ll find influencers on all networks. Pinterest influencers are a gold mine for targeting women in their 30s for example. Snapchat and Youtube are well known ways to approach Gen Z, but you’ll be surprised by performance. There are different types of influencers: celebrities, niche influencers, or publishers with a large following Musical.ly’s You’ll need to negotiate with each of them, and they won’t be cheap. We stay profitable by knowing we will get organic downloads after hitting the top charts and trending searches. If the viral loops structure breaks somewhere, we may even lose money. is an influencer marketing agency that will be able to help you with all this effort. However, working with influencers is not simple. Coast9.com Viral loops This is how viral loops works for the App Store, and the process for any of our marketing campaigns: Viral loops for Apps Every marketer will tell you, the only way to understand what the best creative is, is to test with several ones until you see better results. Once you get some results, increase the budget on the better ones. We invest a lot of effort on creatives, trying to . For instance, this was one of the creatives we used to promote the Animately app: As with any marketing channel, the advertising creative plays a key role. make them as relatable as possible for the social media influencer’s following . If you check the account, you wouldn’t have been able to stand following us, as we would have spammed you during 10 days. That stage represents “the big push” on the viral loops model. We used a wallpaper that the audience could easily relate to @animateiy (UPDATE: This account is not active anymore) Ad Spent through time (not exact values) Analyzing the strategy for Animately, you can also see a few phases: First, what I call . During this time we optimized both the creative and the app (wording, captions, etc.), until we found the best performer. This stage involves scheduling a synchronized campaign with all the influencers simultaneously, so the effect is amplified. The key lies in investing most of the budget in only 2 days, preferably Saturday and Sunday if you rely on influencers. “the three T phase” Test, Tweak, Test Then, “The big push.” Engagement and conversion rates during weekends are much higher. The big push combined with an engaging creative seeds the next loop, where users share, comment, and like the creative, generating buzz. The bigger risk here is not being able to get to the next loop. However, we don’t want to spend more budget than what’s needed for it. When doing viral loops for apps, This will bring hundreds of thousands of “organic” views that we’ll try to convert into downloads with an amazing App Store listing. the next loop is triggered when reaching the trending searches and top charts. Two weeks ago, . It doesn’t matter if the revenue made with the app during the first stage doesn’t cover the cost of “the big push.” Believe me, it will work out after reaching the top charts, just make sure to reach them in the first place! Tim Cook announced that 500 million people go to the App Store every week searching for apps . At this point how good the app is doesn’t matter that much (yet,) as long as it’s aligned with an interesting trend and the marketing campaign is good enough (including the App Store listing.) Top 9 was designed for growth. To understand how we got to the next loop, you can read the marketing strategy we used for it here, and also The next loop really depends on the app If your app was designed to encourage organic growth, then reaching the next loop will probably be easy. learn how we got 300,000 users in 24 hours using Coast9. If on the other hand your app wasn’t designed for growth, As you can see on the chart, you’ll need to save an ad budget for the final stage. This stage consists of making efforts to “hang on” to the charts. Even for a while after the trend is starting to drop, there will be new App Store visitors who will see your app and download it. After 2 or 3 days however, this will not be enough to hang on the charts. , perhaps not as big or aggressive as the last one, but just enough to offset the decreasing amount of organic downloads you were having before. That’s why you should progressively increase it until it’s no longer a good tradeoff. the bad news is that viral things don’t last too long. You’ll need another push You could try using native Twitter and Instagram ads, posts of a certain influencer. Make sure to also target friends/followers of that audience. Again, social proof is key. targeting people who have engaged with all the past tweets and Instagram . The opportunity lies in the fact that there aren’t many advertisers on the platform yet, so your bid can be relatively low. With the right targeting/set up, Another secret of the App Store is Search Ads you can get installs for as low as $0.10 (yes, 10 cents.) Does this mean I can easily build “the million dollar app”? [TL;DR] The only way to crush it on the App Store is by building something really amazing. That takes a lot of work, and it’s a very different business model than the one we had with Beta Labs. Read on to discover ASO tricks. Haha. For a second I pictured myself like that when we first reached the top charts. Great feeling. So no, the answer is no. Hell no. This post is meant to be helpful for anyone on that path. Of course there are many highly profitable growth hacks, but none will last too long. The only way to succeed is working really hard every single day of the year, no gimmicks. (though reaching them will certainly enable you to get short term profit out of it.) and wrote the bible for this, . Huge thanks to for it and for all the support so far :) Achieving high retention and organic growth is what will differentiate a HUGE success from just one more app that made it to the top charts and dropped Nir Eyal Ryan Hoover use it Tory Make them search First of all, understand that influencers need content to keep their followers engaged, so if you’ve got something that’s aligned with their content, they’ll be happy for not harming their audience, even more if you . An example of this is our creative with Game Switch. We have an amazing relationship with the owner of the “Dory” account on Twitter, so we were able to get a post for free. Of course we bought the owner a huge gift afterwards, as the account has 1.7M followers, and conversion was amazing. don’t show any link. That’s where the trick lies for ASO and trending search You’ll be able to tell this just by doing a quick search on Instagram. Although don’t look for “Link in bio”. Another way to do it, is by linking directly to the in-app search. Be careful about this, as the algorithm can penalize you. If you’re reading this on an iPhone, check out how it works . Otherwise it will break. We did well with this for Want, although it wasn’t crowded. If you analyze the trending searches on the search tab right now, you’ll notice that there will be at least one app that made it there through Instagram influencers. following this link Want is #1 for the Key Word The reason we made apps a profitable business was mainly because we were able to leverage our influencer network. However, As you can imagine, there many ins and outs about this topic. I recommend you paying for Keyword analysis data on . iOS 11 just rebuilt the App Store app. There are also . Personally, I think the fact that videos will play automatically is key, so if you’re publishing an app, make sure you have a captivating one. ASO is a huge source of acquisition as well. Mobile Action plenty of opportunities for newcomers here Why did we write this? We’re recruiting. The main reason we began writing this post was to be helpful to as many app makers as possible, but we are also looking to work with people who would like to contribute to this huge project. What kinds of profiles? All kind. From all ages and willing to work in San Francisco, Uruguay or remotely. If you feel this post was helpful to you and know someone who may be a good fit, encouraging them to is how you can give back. Developers, marketers, content creators, influencers, advisors or really anyone who’s invested 20 minutes of their life into reading this. contact us Enjoyed this post? Share it! We've come to know a few things about viral loops when working with a younger audience, but this is our first time creating something for people in tech. We believe this content is valuable to your network, and if so please It would mean a lot to us. help us reach the next loop by clicking any of the share buttons. is a new company established in the U.S., so thanks to Stripe for creating , and for all the support from the team on that process. . Subscribe to the or follow on Twitter! Beta Labs Atlas We will share insights on many topics we weren’t able to cover here, like monetization secrets for marketers, tips for developers about our technology stack, and interesting stories in our journey Beta Labs blog here Beta Labs

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