Retroactive Public Goods Funding with Vitalik Buterin and Karl Floersch | ETHOnline 2021

[Music] [Applause] [Music] all right so we are ready to kick off our keynote fireside chat and i'm super excited to welcome carl from optimism and metallic veteran to talk about retroactive public kids funding so call and we talk we'll be talking about what this is why this is important and everything about this with each other so i'll kick this off by saying carl maybe you can start us off by giving an overview on what this is and uh we'll take it i will i'll let you to take it from here so welcome sure thank you can y'all see me or maybe i'm crazy anyway so here we are we are talking about um retroactive public goods funding so public goods funding is a big topic in the ethereum community because a lot of ethereum software a lot of ethereum development a lot of theorem progress and culture it is the creation of public goods all of it is shared openly freely on the internet um and we got uh i i've got i okay so i confess i wrote down a bunch of questions for vitalik i'm gonna be able to i'm gonna talk uh and answer a bunch of things myself as well of course um but i just you know gotta hear gotta hear what vitalik has to say but anyway just for before we even get going though um a little background on me um uh i was doing you know ethereum stuff for a while i worked at the ethereum foundation and then uh now i'm working at optimism pbc trying to scale ethereum with optimistic ethereum optimistic roll-up all those good things so anyway that's me and uh i guess we we we probably know who vitalik is so i'll even ask the first i'll even ask the first question v what is a public good um so a public good um is uh something that benefits a large and unselective group of people so it's a a thing or a project or something that someone that someone can do or create that has a benefit where that benefit gets us spread out across a very wide group of people where there is no way to decide like who's part of that group and who is not right so um like for example um something like scientific research it's a public good um because like once someone comes up like comes up with some results out of their research like that that gets published and that's out there and like everyone benefits from it right like there isn't some way to make that to make it only accessible to some people and not other people whereas on the other hand like with say the the the iced coffee that you're drinking for example right that is um actually a private good um created by starbucks because even though there's a benefit that's a diffuse across a large group of people um starbucks has the ability to decide on a very fine grain basis you know you're one of the iced coffee recipients but you over there who did not pay for it is not right yeah but so with private goods even private goods produce on a large scale you can do that whereas with uh with public goods you can't and the reason why public goods are such a important and challenging category is because unlike with private goods where you can like the starbucks can earn the the resources that that they need to generate their iced coffee because like they can just sell the kind of tickets to become part of the iced coffee i'm having club well with a public good like you you do not control whether or not any particular person is like part of the group of people who gets the benefit so like you don't have that as your business model right and like coming up with ways for people to uh for people who create public goods to actually get any of the value that they capture is that's a very hard problem wow beautiful so one one you know question there is like okay you know starbucks obviously has a business model um but i'm kind of curious are public goods incentive compatible you know like for instance you know does the invisible hand work for public goods too i think um incentive compatibility is not something that like an object has in the abstract you always have to look at the object in the context of a mechanism so like for example if we did not have uh private property rights uh and anyone could just uh you know quickly run up and kind of knock down your door go up to um run up to your desk grab your iced coffee and run away with it then um iced coffee no longer be a private good it would be a well i guess um common good is probably more accurate than public because the iced coffee would still be rivalrous but um like but basically like the the only reason why i like ice coffee gets to be a private good is the fact that like we have property rights and you know we have this whole kind of economic and legal system that's uh basically designed around uh kind of putting them in that bucket so that uh you know lovely chaps like starbucks can't have a business model um so like the the question basically as um you know what kind of uh the institution kind of using that term extremely broadly um do we need to build in order to make more of our public arts incentive compatible wow cool well i'm we're going to get into that soon but uh what what uh what would like the world look like if we didn't have public goods you know chances are you'd probably be dead of some stupid disease by now it's a because of uh yeah i guess um the scientific progress because that's yeah exactly wow okay well real real quick i mean what what what are the like how has ethereum uh funded public goods so far like where where how did we how did we get as far as we've gone um so most funding of public goods within the ethiopian ecosystem and also within lots of ecosystems um just happens because there is some single um centralized body whose goals are uh who which has enough funding to just like personally fund a whole bunch of public goods and whose goals are aligned enough with some particular ecosystem or community or things succeeding that it's actually in their interest to do all of that funding um so in the ethereum case it's uh the ethereum foundation um together with a bunch of other entities right like for example you know there's consensus there is uh uh increasingly the unit swapped out um maker dow has uh funded some good things uh and then moloch dale has uh funded some good things um though like even there right we've already started talking about dows and so we've already started kind of talking about things that are not quite centralized um but like the the kind of the the traditional model right is that you do basic yeah basically have a small group of people that like basically just makes all of the decisions and you hope that that small group of people is confident what yeah what's what's wrong with these approaches like what could be better i think the problem with the small group of people is that any small group of people is going to be missing important things and and we even i think saw some examples of this back when the bitcoin grants were starting up for the first time right bitcoin grant started supporting things like various ethereum cultural projects um it started supporting uh just various resources online providing information about ethereum and started supporting podcasts right it just started supporting this big like ecosystem of things that the ethereum foundation did not even like really deeply look into or consider something that's kind of that it should be supporting also the other thing is um that if you do have a centralized body um that's uh choosing all of the public goods and especially once you start talking about public goods that have to do with things like culture and intellectual output and media then that puts a huge amount of power in the hands of that one very small group group of people right and it would be nice to be able to distribute that uh power more widely nice nice okay the moment is finally here so what is retroactive public goods funding now we know what public good spending is okay so retroactive public goods funding is this idea that instead of having your public goods funding mechanism um you know dow what whatever it is um funds public goods ahead of time so where the dow would say hey you know this project looks good and it looks promising so i'm going to throw a hundred thousand dollars at it and you know hope it's gonna do you do something good um instead uh you funds uh public goods after those public goods have already been shown to have an impact right so like right now you know we already know that like bankless um has uh for example provided a lot of value to the ethereum ecosystem and it's been great and so a retroactive dow might just say hey you know i'm gonna retroactively like plunk a quarter million dollars over into uh to the bankless peeps um or speaking of plunk um you might want to give a quarter million dollars to zero dollars photography thieves um so the the core reasoning behind this is um that like basically the there there's this large category of goods that i or public goods that i call um entrepreneurial public goods like these so you know like you've probably heard the yes the the slogan that like if uh you know like like the way to be a successful um entrepreneur is not to build a faster horse right like me like the most successful a lot of the most most successful and important private goods um in our society are things that were not even recognized as being important at the beginning until everyone was already using them and realized they kind of after the fact how and how important they are um so with public goods um it's very similar right and so if you just like make a democratic decision of uh you know hey guys we're gonna vote on like you know what things will fund in the future then you're gonna get some very conformist and middle of the road opinions and you're not you're going to get a lot of projects that kind of you know roughly line up with people's existing you know social desirability biases but you're not going to get like you know your radical you know cool experiments that are like a bit out there and eighty percent of them uh or or even ninety percent turn out to be a complete failures and everyone's like well duh that's like if we'd failure but then the other ten percent um you know end up really succeeding in making enough of an impact to really make the entire thing worth it um so retroactive public arts funding um the decentralized kind of voting based like thing makes the decisions about what to find after the fact after the project has already shown value based on the value that it has shown um and if you want like you want to convert that into proactive uh funding then that's something that can be done outside the mechanism right so like for example uh someone could even just invest into a team that's producing a public good and the retroactive public goods finding gadget could just decide that you know the person who made that investment actually yeah like was a contributor to the public good and they should get a really a really big reward as well cool and you're kind of alluding to it but you've talked about this concept of like quote project tokens what is what is that right okay so project tokens are this idea um that some like team that's working on a public good and this uh eventually potentially getting retroactive public arts funding could create a token and they could issue that token based on like who they think contributed to the public good right so they could pre-mine a large share of the token and distribute it out to different team members they could put a large share of the token on uniso up and then when people buy it on uniswap um and well when they do that then like they get and end up collecting ether whatever the asset is that the token is priced against and then they can actually sell that ether then they have or just use that ether they have something with which to pay like short serve expenses for people who are not willing to accept payments and project tokens themselves um so the and then the the the purpose of these project tokens is that later on after the fact when there's the project turns out to have actually provided value the retroactive public goods funding oracle can just decide i think this project has been useful therefore i'm going to just buy up these projects tokens um and when it buys up the project tokens that rewards um everyone who holds um any quantity of these uh project tokens nice nice um so also what like at what scale do you see retroactive public goods funding kind of eventually you know getting to is this something like i mean ethereum how you know what kind of scale do you see ethereum getting to and then like how how big could this retroactive public goods funding mechanism go i think um the answer is like basically the same as it is with getcoin which is the only limit is our ability to um actually come up with the cash to pay for these uh public arts funding pools um and like with uh git coin i think the next big leap of growth the the way that we get from uh 50 000 to 50 million is going to come from us moving beyond relying on individuals to donate these uh funds um and instead move toward like mechanisms or projects and directly donating these funds right um so like the fact that like bitcoin controls a significant portion of the akita coin supply right like akita you know it's a dog coin like it's okay it's an institution um and that's like a thing that's uh going to fund some awesome public goods um or you know if there is an optimistic roll-up project and that optimistic roll-up project collects transaction fees then those are those transaction fees could be put into a public goods funding pod um so the question is just that like how like what kind of um like fee or what money earning capacity of institution can we convince uh to um start throwing their fees into a pot um and i think at the like right now it's fairly small but i think um over time it could potentially get quite big um and like the reason why i could potentially get quite big right is because i think a lot of these like especially very network effects uh dependent things in the crypto space they really strongly depend on legitimacy right they really strongly you just depend on this kind of social consensus that like you know we should be supporting this particular project because like this project um satisfies the community's values in a certain in some certain way or does some other thing to you know make the community feel like they should be focusing on that particular project i mean and like creating a big massive positive externality that makes the entire community really love you is like an excellent way of getting legitimacy uh so i like this is some one of those places where i think you know you have we have the opportunity to actually get a lot of leverage here right like you know basically in order to create a 100 million dollar retroactive public goods funding pod there doesn't actually need to be an individual or even a company that like experiences a hundred million dollars of suffering right like the act of contributing to the plot like and it can even like be like help kind of like cement that project's position in the uh in the community um so that so i guess those are reasons why i'm optimistic nice i'm optimistic too um you talked about this concept of legitimacy what is like what what is your theory of legitimacy because it's just one of it's one of my favorite blog posts of yours yeah so the way that i think about legitimacy is i think about it as this pattern of higher order acceptance so i accept a particular outcome and i even play my part in enacting an outcome because i expect that um everyone else is going to do the same thing because they think on average they think in the same way so like one simple example of this is how um like driving on one side of the road or even walking on one side of the road like is something that is kind of like legitimized in that way right and it can be different in different places like these are kind of self-sustaining equilibrium like they could they could go either way you know it could be on the left side it could be on the right side and in different places it is different ways um but like there is like within each particular like region there is a kind of one way to do it and like you know there's a significant coordination benefits from the fact that there is one way to do it and it's self-enforcing right like you know you don't even really need police that much because like it's never it's in everyone's interest not to crash into other people um so like the kind of left versus right side of the road example feels really trivial because well like why does it matter which side of the road you're on but like i think it's like the exact same kind of uh effect um that ends up deciding a lot of things that um actually matter matter much more right and uh even things where the choices are different enough that there's like even moral values inherent to inheritance differences and those moral values are often some of the things that we coordinate around to actually kind of like decide which option becomes legitimate um so like one example that i mentioned is nfts right like let's say you know it's the year 2035 and uh carl florsch becomes uh super famous uh and uh everybody really loves karl florsch and carl florsch decides um that you know in order to raise money for um i don't know what do you want to raise money for um permanently ending all animal suffering do you like that okay in order to raise money in order to raise money in order to raise money for permanently and ending animal suffering car flourish is going to release the car fortune ft but then also at the same time there is uh craig wright and craig wright also releases the carl flores at ft and is there you know like the the money there is there to benefit another really important cause which is cred right uh so yeah like which one of these two against legitimate right like they're both in nft they're both a jpeg they might even be both the same jpeg uh they might even be released at the same time so like why would anyone wants to buy one over the other right and the answer basically is that like first of all if you buy coral fortress cover for nft then like because there is this equilibrium where everyone recognizes that hey you know carlson ftf himself is legitimate and uh corrects nft of carl's knowledge out of it that like if you buy it you will you have a better chance of being able to resell it right that's one and then number two is that nfts are entirely built on bragging rights right like you know like he wants to actually like feel like you have this thing and you could show off this thing and like you know if you go to an ethereum party and you're like yo dog like i got satoshi's nft of credit right everyone will be like wtf mate so [Music] yeah so basically like they're these really important things right it ends up kind of like so completely hinging on um kind of social acceptance right and like these patterns of like one thing being more legitimate than others they exist everywhere right like there's uh you know even like two actively maintained um descendants of the ethereum genesis block and one has uh kind of much more legitimacy of being you know the real ethereum than the other um though of course some people in some communities disagree which is fascinating and important because it also shows how legitimacy can be kind of socially context dependent so cool so cool okay we got a good question from the audience um so do you necessarily mean public goods as in charity activities or just mean broadly as a benefit to a large group of people um so charity activity is i would define as like being creating benefits to other people for uh altruistic reasons like you're not being incentivized to do it you're just like doing it out of the kindness of your heart or just like you know you get some feeling of passion from like being able to do something meaningful in the world and and that is um like and actually that doesn't even necessarily like that doesn't only motivate uh public goods right so like for example holding the door for someone like that's a totally private good like it's a it's a service that benefits exactly one person um but at the same time look that's an act of kindness like you could even say an act of charity that people do every day um so that but at the same time there are also public goods that get produced um incidentally um so like for example you know there's like facebook they do a whole bunch of centralized stuff but sometimes they decide that like it's important enough to create tooling for centralized stuff that they create all their their own tooling and then they open source their tooling and so you know i think what react.js got created that way right so um like basically like they do create public goods as a kind of byproduct of their like generally private good oriented activity so that's something that it happens too and then another thing that happens too is people just create public goods because they're paid to do them right like like if you are like a worker um working on building a road because the government pays you to do it right like you're not necessarily being charitable you know it's a job you're being paid um you know you could be passionate about roads and and have a kind of ethic of like the public service that you're doing or you might not be in you might be just like there to get the money um but you're also creating a public good um so i guess you do need to make the distinction between like the motivate what what the motivations are of the people that are doing the thing versus kind of the privateness versus publicness of the things that is being uh created yeah and by the way one thing that vitalik talked about a little bit earlier was that we are trying to like kind of give a business model to the public good so what that is actually doing is it is reducing the amount of charity driven public goods and increasing while maybe not reducing it but at least it's increasing the amount of non-charity driven public goods and so this is like this is clearly benefiting all of us but it is uh uh uh you know it's not about charity it's really it's it's really about paying people for the value that they're creating and and creating that really virtuous cycle um i mean i think sometimes it's a mix right so like for example there's um a lot of people who are perfectly happy to take extreme pay cuts to work on things that are in the public interest but they're not quite willing to take 100 pay cuts right like they need just enough funding that they can feel like it's a comfortable job right and so like there are totally people who like you know if there is no public goods funding at all they'll just say well you know they might work out on an open source thing for a couple of months and they'll say well screw this i mean all the guys that are i'm shilling scam coins they're earning 25 million dollars of an ico so i'm going to go show a stamp coin um but if you just crank up the public goods funding a little bit then um you know you can crank it up to the level where like these kind of not infinitely altruistic but still altruistic people you like to do like like or actually end up being empowered to and actually and have the opportunity to work on the public goods there that there are that they've always been more passionate about doing um so that's something that also exists um i think you know definitely like in an ideal world like the the like in a maximally fair world um something that uh produces um you know like a thousand units of value spread across a million people um should be renumerated exactly the same as something that creates a thousand units of value concentrated in one person but like in order to create that world like we just have to have like this extremely huge level of public goods funding that would just require like you know really unprecedented human coordination um so but you know while we have more limited resources like we are kind of creating second best to some extent but like we know we're still like often you know the first dollar is the dollar that counts the most right and you know what we are like potentially doing a huge amount of uh good bye by starting by alleviating the worst parts of the problem thankfully we have a system for creating and aligning incentives anyway uh what our next our next thing so this retroactive public goods funding stuff right it still requires governance so governance is a big a big a big topic um so what would you say is like what's the high level state of the with respect to blockchain governance hmm i would say i would say the state of the art is still not very artful um so i think there's two main kinds of blockchain governance right there's um on-chain governance and off-chain governance so off-chain governance is uh what uh bitcoin and ethereum use to agree on protocol changes um basically you know you have some kind of rough consensus between core developers community stakeholders and some other groups and if there's a a disagreement that's irreconcilable then like it's not a vote what happens is the system just splits in half and there's a fork i mean everyone kind of chooses their own universe um and but then on chain governance is uh both it's used for layer ones in cases like for example tezos and eos um and some of the other chains i think polkadot as well um i i have no idea like what like dfinity or salon or cardona or any of those do for their governance right but there are these layer ones that do on chain governance where you literally have coin voting um used in or sometimes a combination of coin voting and other kinds of mechanisms like sometimes there's indirect uh representative coin voting i mean there is like some kind of committee of delegates or whatever um and they end up like basically just voting to decide on what the protocol changes are and there's protocol changes which happen often they just happen with some delay but it's automatic right um and then there are application layer projects um so things like maker dow for example that have to have on chain governance because there is just is no way to fully off chain govern um a an application lawyer thing if that application layer thing has what i call external capital right so what i mean by external capital is um assets that are controlled by that application that are worth real money um yeah oh sorry assets that are owned by that application are worth real money but that are not defined by that application right so like for example if someone creates a version of auger uh the the prediction market where everything happens in august in like rap tokens right so you use rep to vote on the oracle either the prediction markets are denominated in a rap that everything is done in rep then that's something that's completely forkable because like there there really is no internal capital right like the the auger defines the meaning of rep and so when you fork auger like you also you would fork rep as well right and so that basically forking doesn't mean that you're kind of leaving any assets behind whereas if you look at something like maker dell where inside of their cdp is they have actually have like eve and like i think some amount of usdc and some other assets but those are external capital because those are assets that are not defined by the bakery down protocol and so if maker dow forks like as a result of some off-chain governance decision like that opportunity governance decision has no ability to make the if and like all the other assets contained inside of the cdp's go anywhere right um so that's why things like maker i do need on-chain governance to the extent that they need governance at all um now in terms of what the uh kind of state-of-the-art devon chain governance is well it could be it's usually coin voting sometimes it's going voting with a couple of extra steps but you know i've written a bunch of posts over the years about why it finds coin voting on unimpressive so i'm also very interested in the search for alternatives what is that what's the like uh the tldr of why coin voting is like alone unimpressive um so coin voting um relies on this um a kind of concept idea that there is or that it's trying to create this kind of alignment between power and responsibility basically because every coin is a bundle of the economic interest like the the coin itself and you know what's going to happen to that points price and your ability to use that coin in the protocol um and governance rates right so you're aligning power and responsibility because you're kind of packaging together economic interest and governing rights inside of the same coin but the problem is that the financial markets and just the complex systems in general are really good at uh kind of disentangling um things that are entangled right and there's a whole bunch of ways in which governance rights and economic interests can just become completely separated from each other uh this and this can happen because of a kind of fairly explicit driving attacks but it can also happen because of like very mundane scheming and a financial market evolution and so there's a whole bunch of ways that we should happen and once that happens then the entire link is broken right and it just becomes possible to like buy governance decisions outright and once uh that happens and then like concentrated interests just end up like totally running over um anything that's not a a concentrated interest um so it's uh like it if you kind of push the logic a couple of steps forward like it just easily falls into very not nice equilibrium nice yeah what what and and the like what is your what is the best way to like uh kind of keep the governing rights entangled or what would you do to improve that situation um i think in the long term you're going to need explicit kind of like anti-collusion technology of some kind right like so things like basia that we've been working on like basically ways to actually make it impossible for like people to credibly sell their voting rights essentially um and like this sounds difficult but with some extra assumptions it's actually cryptographically doable which is really nice um another thing that needs to be done at the same time is moving governance power into the hands of something other than coin holders um basically because like with coin holders like even if you do this uh like even if you prevent um like vote selling at the level of like selling by the current coin holder like you can still have the exact same effect using all these financial tricks where like you just separate the coin from the economic interest in the coin right and if you move governance over a way to in um so that the the resource that's like doing the governing is something non-fungible like some notion of like unique identities for example um then you end up alleviating that problem nice so uh what is we have another question from the audience what would be the best governance model futuristic favorite the ultimate what is the ultimate governance model friendly ai dictatorship um no i think um like i am ultimately i think the yeah like there is no like perfect model the answer can only come through experimentation um and experimentation is ultimately what the crypto space is all about can we learn good things from history about uh exactly like you know some government governance experiments um um so we could definitely learn from the decade of crypto history that we've had so far um so if like in one of my earlier blog posts um i had my yeah like the criticisms of eos governance right where he actually showed how like it actually did very quickly settle into this plutocratic equilibrium where he had these really large holders that were just bribing each other to make decisions that were vote uh voting for each other to be eos delegates and like if that led to this the kind of the governance collapsing pretty quickly um another example was that whole steam hive situation right where justin's son ended up like basically like talking to exchanges and using coins on it from exchanges in order to cement his control over an ecosystem um at least until that that got resolved by high forking away into being their own thing um so there's like there have definitely been historical examples of uh coin governance going wrong in various ways um even in the absence of attackers um i think uh we've seen things like you know low participation rates um generally low quality of uh in uh of decision making output in a lot of cases just uh because i'm like you know you're spreading out the decision-making power so thinly that you get a kind of tragedy of the commons and figuring out what the right decision is um so these things have all happened in like various corners of downland and it's definitely important to keep them all in mind nice um in 2015 i kind of i made this decision that i wanted to basically spend the rest of my life working for daos and i think i've mostly succeeded in this depending on your interpretations um but i'm just kind of curious like what do you expect uh the role of dao's to play in our everyday lives you know maybe not everyone's everyday life but like you know it seems more and more people are being directly impacted by doubts so anyone who has ever used that dye has used a stable coin that's managed by a doubt um i mean anyone who's ever used rye like you you could probably call the governance gadget for that uh or is the oracle gadget for that of dao as well um there's uh definitely an increasing number of people working for dows directly or indirectly so bitcoin is slowly gallifying for example and so but everyone who works for a uh or it gets paid out of quadratic funding pools um a lot of them are going to end up like ultimately being being paid by dallas of some kind um once you start like you're thinking of protocols as being doused then um you know lots of people are going to end up being just paid by things that are by revenue that ultimately comes from application fees of some kind um dallas are going to provide an increasing number of services um so um cleros you could call that a dao and clairos as kind of the ultimate dispute resolution mechanism for proof of humanity but so anyone who's uh going to be getting a crypto ubi in the future is going to have uh multiple dows or like you know an entire supply chain of these dallas talking to each other and like serving as the economic backup for each other to to thank for their um ability to get that ubi um so there is yeah i think like most things in the the cryptoverse are going to like have uh you know some some portion of uh their stuff uh made in dallas oh man it's gonna be exciting but what what uh like what would be what are the big what is the big failure mode or are there any things that you're afraid of with uh like this increasing dowification of everything um i'm definitely afraid of bad governance mechanisms becoming entrenched um so coin voting is a big example right of a a mechanism that i think right now has more legitimacy than it deserves to um i think because coin voting just is more correct like it is credibly neutral right um so there's like there's that and like there hasn't really been any effort to try to come up with any legitimate alternative um and one of the other problems with point voting also is that like i think the main reason why a lot of the existing coin voting based projects have not been attacked or broken yet is because their coin holdings are actually pretty centralized right and one of the ironies of bad governance mechanisms is that bad governance mechanisms tend to get more secure the more centralized they are uh because like if you go down to having a very small number of participants then like you know the facts that the participants all know each other and they're all bodybuddy with each other and you know they're not really gonna do look one of them is really not gonna do anything that'll compromise their ability to like have their beer or their iced coffee or whatever with the other participants um so like the more you get into kind of like very tiny um you know super wealthy old voice quake world the more like the the more resistant it is to attacks for that reason but that's not a healthy equilibrium right because like we're just going right back to a small quake and often you get a clique that's uh like less competence than the creek that you would get if you just explicitly installed the technocracy right because like these are like like these people are not a technocracy they're a moneyocracy and they're like they've been selected into their position by their um ability to get money um so that's uh like there are definitely are failure modes that arise from that sort of thing um so how to avoid both of those well i mean that's part of like what this whole conversation is trying to be about indeed well uh extending even past this conversation so uh you know i i at optimism we're trying to figure out we're doing this right track to public goods funding stuff we are you know taking our sequence of profits to to pay for retroactive public goods and we're going to be doing some governance experiments um to figure out who we are actually paying um in the very near term so uh what what kinds of things would you like to see tested or if you know kind of what kinds of uh information would you like to learn about ways that we can kind of determine this retroactive public goods funding in these various governance experiments that we that we're uh going to run mm-hmm um i mean testing like governance mechanisms that are not coin voting is definitely something that's really important um otherwise i guess uh just like letting the governance run and seeing what decisions it makes right like one of their other nice things about retroactive funding is that they can just start making decisions immediately because like you don't have to apply for retroactive public good spending well you can make a system where you have an application form but then you know people can just apply other people into the mechanism and like i think that's something that should happen um so like they can basically just like start going around and saying like hey here's a listed address or something that's provided um some value to the community let's just like go and give them a nice surprise um so that's one of the things i'm excited about and you should be able to actually get some feedback fairly quickly so exciting all right well um should okay real q one question should douse phoned public goods yes okay great um okay so now for some miscellaneous questions these should hopefully be fun um first uh what is the importance of quote fun in mechanism design you've said this to me a couple times um that it's you know it's actually an underrated part of mechanism design fun yeah and i think you know people are more likely to enthusiastically participate in these in these mechanisms and like keep coming back to participate if the mechanisms are fun to participate in right like if the mechanisms um you know there's there's fun and the participation there's fun and just like seeing what the results of everyone's participation put together um certain ads turned out to be uh in kind of watching the discussion that comes to the results that are being made like the more that these things can be made into something that people actually want to follow and engage in the more that they can actually not just to do public arts funding but also like even just be a community building tool cool yeah that is a definitely underrated uh underrated thing um okay so now as a kind of end user i feel like we're actually always working towards like building a better internet but i'm i just kind of i'm curious like in your mind as an end user like what is the way that our interactions with the internet will change if crypto is successful [Music] so yeah it's a good question um i feel like crypto is um the way that crypto is going to succeed if it succeeds is um it's not going to kind of warm its way into existing services so much as there will be entirely new things that get created um and those new things that get created are just going to be crypto native right so like for example you know if this metaverse thing actually comes to fruition and we see as some kind of you know decentralized world with objects that get to talk to that can talk to each other like that something like that can all kind of happen on the blockchain and uh you know your ethereum wallet may well just be the way that you end up interacting with that um if daos are going to be responsible for like giving everyone a crypto ubi then you know you're going to be using an ethereum wallet to kind of sign up and actually actually receive those tokens um and uh you know submit your profile and like you get it proof of humanity verified or whatever um if there's like a dow that's being used to create like you know um some like stable coin or some d5 or just any other financial thing then you know once again like an ethereum wallet or you know some what this will be something that uh you actually use to like interact with you and hold your coins um your identity will like instead of being you know signing on facebook and sign in with twitter it can just be like sign in with your crypto account um so like i think there will be a lot of these different kind of different little things um the differences between the crypto native things and the kind of centralized things that came before is that crypto native things will tend to emphasize interoperability much more and still like the centralized world i think really selects for building empires and the problem with building empires is that everyone wants to be the empire and so they end up really competing with each other but the crypto world i think is going like the winners will be the projects that focus on building tools like do one thing do one thing well and build something that interacts with everything else right so like the unix philosophy except the unix philosophy stretching out across an entire community and um you know controlling money and controlling pictures of monkeys and rocks um so i mean okay fine i guess like the unix shell can technically control pictures of monkeys and rocks too but you know they're not worth 3.4 million dollars um so yeah i mean you know what whatever this uh the the fun stuff is that the yeah the the brave new crypto enabled meta world uh creates the i think uh blockchains are going to be a huge part of it so fun so i had one of my new one of my favorite ideas recently has been that uh crypto is kind of creating a social network like what we're doing is you know crypto not just crypto and also retroactive public goods funding it's kind of like you know forming this this basis for social interaction so maybe one one bit of social interaction is like can crypto help like fight misinformation or like you know make sure that good you know valuable things get surfaced to to us as we scroll through twitter i mean just use restricted public goods funding for that right like you just uh you know like yeah you just like give retroactive likes to like say yeah you know tweets that actually still look good a year in the future and uh yeah hopefully the like if you kind of design social media in a way that has the incentives right then you know you should be able to hopefully um get push people so they start optimizing their behavior around that instead of optimizing around like you know immediate engagement in your ability to get like 500 outrage clicks before it turns out the thing that you retweeted is actually completely false um great retroactive public goods funding solves everything this is fresh off the press um but um okay uh do you oh yeah here's some here's some fun ones um okay so is tech is technology fundamentally empowering humans or are we like losing control hmm i definitely think that we're still far from losing control right now um i mean what's the scenario where we always control the scenario where we lose control like the most obvious one of course is the uh unfriendly ai apocalypse right where we just create an ai and uh you know we tell a security cancer but the ai realizes that the best way to cure cancer is to just turn us all into paper clips um that's the sort of uh like that's one way in which we might lose control um another way in which we might lose control is um you know if offensive technology becomes um like star it progresses much more quickly than uh defensive technology and you get these kind of one of these multiple traps where but just the number of groups that's capable of completely breaking civilization keeps on going up and up until eventually one of them does it um i think like the only fix to that sort of thing ultimately is to just like create more defensive technology right and like i i think crypto is defensive technology like crypto is a way of building infrastructure um so that you know even a high school noob can build an application that has like extremely high grade resistance against dos attacks that's just something that you fundamentally cannot do in the centralized world um so [Music] i i agree keep going i know i'm i'm not sure if i have anything more like smart to say on that particular question like right well i definitely agree i do think that crypto is you know really creating our you know humanity in some ways or captivating cultivating our humanity um okay some more questions very important will we survive the heat death of the universe uh interesting um i would say 50 yes okay great great great um are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of humanity i don't i would say optimistic um i think yay um things that we could be optimistic about and i think um there's like the kind of scientific and technology stagnation over the last couple of decades seems like it's coming to an end and we're really starting kind of the next great woosh cycle of uh you know rapid advances and awesome stuff and if you just uh like think about the difference between a computer in 1950 on a computer in 2020 like that's the difference i'm expecting between um anti-aging technology in 2020 and anti-aging technology in 2090 um so that's uh and the difference i'm expecting you know between the tech technologies and a whole bunch of industries right um so you know if by the end of the of the century we're all just going to be get you know 150 year old um immortals hanging out on mars and making um backup copies of ourselves in these in the decentralized cloud and like everyone's in you know post-scarcity luxury communities some happy utopia then uh that's like yeah but you know we've done it i feel like uh i think like there's definitely headwinds right like there's uh kind of short-term headwinds just in terms of like you know world politics becoming massively less cooperative than it was 10 years ago for example but like ultimately i feel like those are things that humanity can get past um [Music] so well i'm glad you're optimistic very very glad well and we also happen to be talking to a bunch of people who are about to do some great hacks and those hacks are going to all save humanity um and so what what uh what advice do you have for for these uh these these hackers and um are there any projects that you're you know particularly interested in you know the classic questions they're a hackathon yes so one very important category for me actually is a cross-layer two bridging infrastructure um so like right now is like exactly the time when the ethereum layer two ecosystem is really kind of coming into its own and uh but moving from uh being theory to be like something that exists in practice and and in order for the layer to ecosystem to work well like it has to be able to work across the different layer tubes right like you can't go from you know being ethereum to having five different silos that don't talk to each other uh and in order to avoid that world there need to be ways to move assets between the roll-ups um so that includes uh definitely tokens like any kind of token it also includes nfts um i made a proposal for a way to move uh nfcs between roll-ups quickly and so that would be like one example of something that someone could just implement um you actually could even use that exact proposal to implement a dex for moving tokens around interestingly enough um but that's a yeah kind of a harder challenge um but just like yeah making kind of cross-roll-up bridging infrastructure that is decentralized and that does not require the user to either wait a week or touch the base chain is the the holy grail here so whatever you come up with and whatever you biddle is uh greater what what was a yes plus one by the way just i mean i'm i'm clearly a bit of a roll up stan um so uh yeah plus one please please build these uh crossbow bridges um so uh what like what advice do you have for these you know hackers building their projects fulfilling their dreams like you you clearly did a bit of a hack and your hack seems to be relatively successful so you might actually have a bit of advice for people who want to create bitcoin magazine um the bitcoin magazines of the future i think good the important thing is to just um you know not give up after a weekend to just like keep going and like you know if there's a project that you're passionate about kind of start building out your community and like actually persist and keep doing it for a year keep doing it for two years um and you know if you keep on persisting long enough then eventually like your project will kind of make it into the ethereum public consciousness and like you'll have made it um it's yeah yeah persistence is important nice nice and you seem to persist and uh be ever optimistic and full of uh full of ideas how do you do it i don't know how you do it if you're gonna answer right okay if you were gonna answer iced coffee then that's not really transferable because my tea lately has all been decaf um but yeah i know i know even without caffeine you can still be optimistic like you just uh you know look at the world and uh you know don't look at the at uh kind of interpretation of the world and just like see the all the actually existing bright stuff that's that's that's beautiful okay and i will say okay the the the way that i would that i would do the uh optimistic and persistence thing is uh visualize what the future is going to be be excited be curious and not take things too seriously because really i mean you know i mean it's it all really like matters but it also like you know it does it doesn't matter that bad that much so just don't take two things too seriously enjoy go with the flow you know listen to what other people say because you definitely don't know the right things um you know that's that's real that's really the move to be honest with you yeah just go with the flow because you don't know and that's the way to grow um and move away from poe uh yes and also have many freestyle sessions uh walking around uh uh various neighborhoods so that these are all these are all great questions okay so i have one final question it's the most important question of all that we have asked so far everyone's been wondering since we started this you know you don't have to tell me you don't have to send the question i knew you had it the price of these will be 30 000 but i'm not going to tell you what currency that's denominated but i'd say dollars no it's not what i meant to mention it'll be 30 000 but i don't know what currency that's the joke no did i screw up the joke no i screwed up the joke oh no no no i don't i don't know what the price of you will be it will be 30 000 something it could easily be venezuelan boulevard um okay okay well that was the other question you you already intuited [Music] good luck hacking uh and um shout out to eth global all my peeps at youth global um that was a lot of fun mm-hmm carl vitale that was indeed a lot of fun and uh i'm sure we'll rather talk sometime about our freestyle rap session so uh can't wait for that one um thank you so much uh glad that you were able to talk about this thing and and make this work and um yeah i mean i learned a lot of cool things and uh i'm glad that we were able to cover not only just retroactive funding but also all the other things in life that are important or maybe not important so this is great thank you thank you amazing thanks perfect all right so we are ready to move on to our next piece which is me talking about all the prizes [Music] [Applause] [Music]