Bottom Up Building: Pathways towards a Decentralized Society | Devcon Bogotá

[Music] okay so in many ways I think non-financial use cases the first non Financial use case for blockchains is actually public infrastructure so and it's it's important that we think about in this use case what neutrality means and what decentralization means so the the program has changed a little bit and we're going to talk about that uh Paula do you want to get get us started our clicker is not super working but um okay so as Pua was saying uh we're here to talk about digital infrastructure and um what does that mean not only uh in the blockchain space uh there are all kinds of digital infrastructure but of course ethereum is often envisioned as a potential uh digital public infrastructure that can be used ubiquitously around the world so the idea is to do some collective deliberation together on what does that mean and what are some of the requirements for protocols and standards that are serving this function so um the agenda for today is we're going to Kickstart this with two short talks first uh Puja is going to talk about decentralization and then Glenn is going to talk about different um approaches to neutrality and what are some of the conflicts between them and after that if the slides work we're going to use a tool called police to do a deliberation together and this tool I'll explain this to you in a moment but it's a tool that uses Advanced statistics and machine learning to gain some nuanced insights in a digital conversation and so we'll take these insights then we'll have have an inperson discussion since that's a benefit of being here at Devcon and we'll come back to polce we'll do one one more iteration reflecting some of the uh learnings and then we'll look at the results um together so in essence this is going to be um an exercise in deliberation about digital infrastructure um so hand it over to Pua to get us started okay great um I like to walk around when I talk so as I said I want to talk about first decentralization and then it's working okay great and uh and Glenn will follow up with a prompt on neutrality so um because not everybody has read uh the paper I want to kind of give first principles of how I think about decentral decentralization and really the question is how do we build bottom up decentralized networks and there are all kinds of like networks right we have energy infrastructure we have physical networks we have Internet infrastructure inter uh networks starlink we also have blockchains we have social media these are all networks and the question is oops uh how do we get bottomup coordination of individuals who are part of communities to compose into larger pluralistic networks of coordination that can solve problems at different social scales um that is how I have conceptualized the question of decentralization doing this in a decentralized way how does this work so what do we before I give like a kind of first articulation uh of the principle let's just pump our intuitions and think about what do we not mean by decentralization so you know an autocrat controlling energy infrastructure not decentralization a benevolent entrepreneur controlling internet infrastructure not great either uh you know a group of sort of uh mining pools that control a lot of mining power hash power or stake not great for decentralization and you know corporate monopolies not great for decentralization and of course there's political centralization as well and you know there's tyranny of the majority which we're all familiar with in the Civil Rights Movement there's tyranny of a political Elite and technocratic Elite and there's also tyranny of a cultural Elite that and enforce their norms and language Norms on people who don't necessarily um you know agree but I think decentralization is a much more subtle question because we also have very very uh tacit and subtle what I call accidental overcoordination because of correlated interests and we see this in particular and very cutely and Glenn was the first one who brought this to my attention in his book radical markets in traditional financial markets and so in traditional markets a lot of people you know if you're a retail investor you give your money to an asset manager like Black Rock and Fidelity and what that asset manager will do will buy Stakes across rivals in a particular industry so say Stakes across like every Airline right but in doing that they have an incentive to vote as a shareholder to pressure CEOs to take anti-competitive practices lower prices excuse me raise prices lower salaries not invest in R&D not invest in Innovation and this is like not really great for markets and if you have a bunch of groups like Fidelity Black Rock You Know State Street Vanguard all doing this um it ends up being a kind of oops uniform anti-competitive pressure on the entire market and on the entire industry um and you what you get is the appearance of competition across Rivals and appearance of competition across asset managers but really what you get is a behavior monopolist so using this to pump our intuitions uh one of the principles we articulated in the doo paper was this principle of consensus across difference and the idea of consensus across difference is that you rather get consensus between differently Affiliated people or just very different people to surface consensus and that would be a better signal of a plural shared good across broader groups than say consensus amongst a narrow group of individuals who might be sort of intentionally colluding or accidentally over coordinating in the way the the Black Rock andell example Illustrated is there any questions about this principle go ahead is consensus fascist consensus between whom people uhhuh yeah you don't have to agree but if you get agreement across the the idea is that agreement across very different people is more likely to Signal something that's good for you know broader groups than rather consensus amongst people who are very similar right which might be more sorry of think it's yeah we can do fting wild fighting so okay I will I will move on we can we can leave it can I just make one comment that I actually think you're highlighting a good thing which is that the point of pluralism is simultaneously identifying areas of cooperation across difference and identifying the areas of difference so like you can't have one without the other in in the dance of decentralization and pluralism and we're going to talk about that like we're going to highlight that in the exercise we're going to do later so I think both are like really important yeah I'll say this like a lot of a lot of discussion in um or a lot of memes in crypto are about coordination and cooperation but they don't really address the question of conflict right and so consensus across difference is a principle that highlights and surfaces like our differences right but finds those consensus amongst the most diversely Affiliated um so how did we as a first approximation Express this principle in the paper well we first introduced this primitive called soulbound tokens or non-transferable nfts to represent memberships to social groups or represent affiliations and