How To Write a Whitepaper — The Decentralised Way

The unveiling of the Free TON whitepaper first draft is the result of a seemingly insurmountable challenge. The community-driven platform, which has been quietly growing and improving upon the open-source code developed by the Telegram team, launched its blockchain in May 2020.

Only now, 15 months later, their Whitepaper is being published.

Why is this? In order to understand, we first need to look at what exactly a whitepaper is, and is not, supposed to be.

Whitepaper or Fortune Cookie

As anyone who has listened to the Nevermind the Shitcoins podcast will tell you, I like games. In particular, I'm a huge fan of the old radio-style comedy quiz shows. A few weeks back, on an episode of the TFIFT Podcast (a Free TON specific show I also take part in), we were discussing whitepapers, and proudly I devised a game I called, 'Whitepaper or Fortune Cookie.'

The idea of the game, if you can't already guess, was simple. I had a handful of quotes (with a couple of missing words), and others on the show just had to work out where the quote came from.

It was surprisingly difficult! Which brings me to my first real point here; a whitepaper should not be a vague marketing pitch. It should not be over-imbued with saccharine sweet optimism or larger than life promises. Whitepapers are technical documents, designed to detail the what, how, and why the project exists.

Bitcoin: Eliminating Trust

Bitcoin brought about the invention of trustless peer-to-peer financial transactions. The ability to send and receive payments to and from anyone, anywhere, without a third party or middleman.

If you're reading this article, I don't think I need to explain why this is important on a practical, pragmatic and philosophical level.

The whitepaper itself wastes no words. Nine pages of diagrams and description, and the model of Bitcoin, its reason for being and methods for functioning were explained. Quite how it's taken over a decade for the majority of the world to catch on to the simple, robust genius of its design is still a mystery to me.

Turing-Complete Programming

Ethereum brought about the invention of Turing complete programming for trustless peer-to-peer transactions. In layman's terms; else/if statements.

I.e. If Alice receives token B, she will release and send token A to Bob. Else (if she does not receive token B) she keeps token A.

This simple application of conditional statements has led to a plethora of financial innovations and wizardry which makes the Ethereum ecosystem what it is today.

Much like Satoshi, Vitalik was seen as a visionary with the release of the ETH whitepaper, although brevity was not quite so important. Nonetheless, it is clear and concise in its explanation of what ETH is, how it works, and why it works.

How to Decentralize Opportunity (through Anarchy)

"It is impossible to have a radical philosophy  without at first sounding like a lunatic or a moron" — Michael Malice: The Anarchist Handbook

If Bitcoin solves trustless peer-to-peer payments, and Ethereum solves decentralized investment options, Free TON solves the issues with decentralizing everything else. It takes the concept of the Ethereum virtual machine and expands it above and beyond the scope of pure finance.

Several titles for the technology are used in the Free TON whitepaper, but the one which stands out for me is as a trustless worldwide Operating System (OS). In non-technical terms, it is open-source, decentralised software capable of functioning and scaling to perform any task a centralized system would be capable of.

"The immutable ledger is quite a small part of TON. Of course it is an immutable ledger and a chain of blocks — that is how the data is written and transmitted from one network processor to another — yet there are at least two aspects which make TON uniquely more so a computing engine than a simple ledger.

Almost everything in TON is smart contracts. Every account in TON must be associated with a smart contract code (or initialized) in order for a user to be able to perform any operation with it. Smart contracts are TON Assembly programs executed in the TON Virtual machine much like any assembly code is executed by hardware or by a virtual processor in a regular computer."

The Free TON Whitepaper (draft)

While the enhanced performance capabilities of TON compared to other similar platforms are important, without an appropriate system of governance and, most importantly, token distribution, this could all be lost to the white noise of blockchain innovations. Being 'in it for the tech' is more than a bear market meme, but a revolution requires more than just the right tools. It needs the right people.

From the staggering 48 pages of the Free TON whitepaper, roughly half are dedicated to outlining the governance and economic modelling and philosophy of the project. For those interested in this, you can of course read the paper, or you can read some of my previous musings on a system we call 'Meritocracy'.

Without overdoing the details here though, the reason this is key to the heart of the project and whitepaper is that it defines the purpose for the project's being. Free TON is created not as a financial instrument (although it performs these tasks without problem also), but as a tool of opportunity which allows users to enter a trustless, censorship-resistant, interconnected world. Be this in the arena of games, distribution of information or content, or even reinventing the internet as we know it, there is no barrier to entrepreneurial entry. Economic incentives distributed on the basis of merit, rather than traditional ICO models which reward the largest investors, allow equal opportunities to all comers with the skills and desire to succeed.

A world without censorship or barriers to inclusion, are you mad!?

Me, for sure, a little. Those around me in the Free TON ecosystem, those building and working toward a less dystopian version of society, I don't believe them to be.

So take that for what you will.

So what about the Whitepapers?

Okay, apologies, maybe the title here was a touch clickbait. This article is mostly about the release of the Free TON whitepaper, but, I will address the question in the title.

In order to write a whitepaper -- in a truly decentralized fashion -- requires having a project of value to write about, a committed and talented community to decide upon the direction and values of the project, and the patience and flexibility to allow the whitepaper to write itself*.

* It didn't technically 'write itself'. The giga-genius responsible for penning the whitepaper, Mitja Goroshevsky, deserves a huge plaudit of recognition for his work. However, he would be the first to say he was merely acting as a conduit for the will of the people.