EthCC 2: William Mougayar

all right so welcome back and thanks for inviting me here it's a pleasure to be back at another aetherium event some of you may know me because of my very long history with a theorem project dating from day one when vitalik hadn't even finished the paper and what i'm going to talk about today is the challenges the way I see them having been involved in the project for a long time I could probably qualify as an if a theorem historian I know an official one I wanted to talk to you about the challenges that I see right now in terms of the community that aetherium is enjoying today so I am quite involved in a number of things some of you may know me as the author of the the business blockchain a book that came out about two and a half years ago it was the first book talking about the business aspects of the blockchain I was trying to explain it to a non-technical audience that's kind of what I do I also invest in a number of companies many of them if nerium friendly like crypto keys and open Bazaar who will be adding earth to their currency in their peer-to-peer marketplace and I also run the token summit in New York so let's get going the three topics that I'm going to talk about primarily are going to center around community governance and marketing so they are interrelated because we are about the etherium community and governance is a is totally intricate to that and then if you don't market this if you don't communicate what you are doing and then the efficiency is lost and that's a very important aspect I've given different versions of this talk before and typically when I get invited to add corn and other aetherium community events I have a question that I start with and the question is I ask the audience what do you think is the most important feature about etherium and and it's a bit of a tricky question because the most important feature about aetherium is not a feature the most important feature about etherium is you you being the community the community you you are the most important thing about aetherium in terms ecosystem in theorems community is really something that is very unique that nobody else can come close to as you know now the landscape is a bit more crowded every once in a while we hear of a new blockchain coming on the scene or one that has been in development for a number of years and they always try to attack in theorem and say well we have to do this better than a theorem or we're faster or we you can do smart contracts much more easily and so on so they always try to attack a theorem on the features on some feature one or the other but they cannot attack etherium on the strength of the community having said that of course the etherium community is a very important feature and I kind of have jokingly call it it's made up of the three DS and the doers the drummers and the dreamers and one of each one of them and the interesting thing like right now the community behind the theorem has grown so much such that it has become a bit of a challenge now to continue being efficient with this community and at the end of the day it is a living a living system a living system that's how I define a theorem if you think about it as a community and the living system the definition is that a organization that that grows within its own environment by self-organizing according to opportunities and and there's nothing else that describes a theorem better than that so what I thought I was doing the first part of my presentation is let's go and look at the different characteristics of successful online communities that are forming as open-source projects and I'm going to show you a list of 20 characteristics they are from this guy how many of you know of Peter Hitchens and social architecture so that's good I have a few hands here he has been involved in open-source projects and peer-to-peer systems the student systems was him and a lot of our messaging specifically for almost three decades and he wrote this great books called social architecture that I recommend to anybody involved in an open-source project of the scope of etherium and he came up with 20 characteristics of successful online communities and the way to use this is to either if you already have a community you can assess yourself against them or if you about to start in your community you can just go down the list and be attentive to each one of them so this is the list and I thought what we could do as a as a fun exercise and we'll do it together is let's go through each one of them one by one and try to self self rate ourselves self rate until llaman each one of them so the first one obviously that's maybe an easy one so my rating system is ABC okay so a means everything's great B means to be improved and C means it to be improved by quite a bit so it's kind of something that's a bit more critical then and then it'd be so strong mission that's an easy one it's kind of having a really stated reason for the group's existence and otherwise we wouldn't be here look at how many people are in this room and every time there is a and C C's and that somewhere whether it's in Denver or Waterloo and Singapore thousands of people show up so that is a big strength and they all have a very strong sense of community so what would you give this one hey that's an easy one alright second one free entry it means how easy it is to join the group to participate I mean nobody forced you to join right you all joined on your own so that's also an easy one should we give it an A all right hey let's keep going transparency how openly and publicly decisions are made and this is a quote from the book groups that work in secret do not achieve wisdom obviously it's the reason of the crowd of I mean again that's another reason that of aetherium being very decentralized transparency is very important and there I give it a name - again I'm being direct here I'm being open I think the community itself is very transparent all the projects are very transparent but I've heard the foundation itself could be more transparent so that's why it's an a - because there is a bit of improvement that could be made in in that specific Department for free contributors how far people are paid to contribute these are the three contributors or are they paid contributors and I'm sure some of you are paid some of you are not are just doing this because you love it because you want to do it because you believe in the mission and so what you think there what do we wait a theorem on that hey it's not too bad it's not there's a mix the point here is it's good to have a mix of people that are paid because that's their job that are just doing it because they are driven by the mission obviously I mean some of this could be debatable but I give it my best shot for remix ability how the contributions can remix into each other's works I mean that's there is on that of open source so again that's an easy one there's a lot maybe maybe too much remix ability okay let's keep going now this is an interesting one when I say in the context of the book and and how Peter describes this particular characteristic he's not talking about technical protocols he's talking about the way that people know about how to interact with each other so what would you think about that I would give it a pee here we had a discussion earlier in the week in one of the rings one of the magician's rings about the fact that there is no code of conduct for example if there was a code of contact for a dev but when the incident of on Twitter happened two weeks ago with after him with the community did not respond fast enough to to mitigate this because there was no specific code of conduct so I think there's some improvement here in terms of clarifying the specific working protocols between between people and groups federal authority now we're getting into some of them that I'm gonna be a bit more critical about so here it's about how the rules are enforced and and having some sense of authority because without authority the rules have no strengths what's the point of having rules if you continuously break them or if nobody what's the point of having a red light if you don't stop so what would you give this this particular characteristic scoring ABC I gave it a C so I think I think there isn't enough strong decision-making that can cut through ambiguous decisions there is almost never a perfect decision in anything and it's always better to even have some kind of decision even if it's not the best one to start with then not to have any decision and to continue to delay into analysis and let's wait and let's wait because we don't have a perfect solution that's kind of the engineering mindset so I think we can do better there non tribalism this is kind of sometimes it happens so there I think I gave it a B because if that happens it's been criticized that tribalism exists and maybe a small degree I don't think it's a big one but it's always good to be aware of it self-organization how far I mean this is a great one look at the magician's rings and the cat herders and all of these initiatives nobody is asking for permission I think this is one where a theorem excels in self-organizing in having groups finding there is a void in a particular area and then they go and form a group I formed a group on Monday about a marketing communication specifically because I felt there was a void in being more precise and more forthcoming and more regular in communicating what the theorem is doing to a non-technical audience so nobody stopped me they we had 20 people up there and then we're going to do some work in that regard tolerance how the group embraces conflicts and I like this quote there are no dangerous opinions only dangerous responses so think about sometimes if you're in a reddit discussion or Twitter and and just be mindful about how you respond to people so what do we give to that one see see I may be critic for that but be you think it's been it deserves a B okay I'll change it um that's yeah I mean I mean it's not perfect but I maybe wanted to make the point because it is not good because sometimes not wanting to resolve the conflict results in a prolongation of the decision-making and and look at how many IPS there are so many of them some of overlapping and it delays things and then when people don't agree on things they could save go let's go back analyze it further so it goes we cannot get into analysis paralysis so for that reason I think I gave it a see measurable success how are the group rewards and measures progress and and make makes it also visible I give it a suppose I mean nobody gets rewarded I mean why would like this is a big event yeah we have hackathons we give awards to the hacker on winners that's good why isn't there some kind of award system maybe more visible for for us here for those projects let's not be afraid to calling the winners in some respect all those that are making real progress high scoring high degree this is kind of related to high scoring had the group rewards its participants that's why I gave it a P decentralization how widely the group is spread out I mean yeah of course this is an a although although yeah I was gonna give it a plus plus plus but I showed it to somebody said no remove one because there is a better weakness here we do well on this naturalization but we don't do well on localization after decentralization because you have to be local as well I mean we are in Fred we are in certain parts of the world in Canada very strong in the US and and Germany but there are some parts of the world where we could be stronger maybe China and other Asian and some parts of Asia Eastern free workspaces how easy it is to create new projects again very easy it's just create a project and nobody's gonna stop you it's it's not an issue right now smooth learning how easy it is to get started and keep learning I give it a name - some people might think it's a B I think we could do better there is a new website that I talked about and I was meeting with her earlier today it seems that they are going to make lots of improvements there it'll be a jumping point into many other educational resources and right now they're a bit scattered so it's not that it's not they're not there you just have to find them and that's a challenge of decentralization for any any any type of decentralized project there's no central index for it for for four things you have to kind of crawl and and find them regular structure how predictable it is to see the structure of who does what and knowing exactly having some predictability behind that that's not so perfect I think I think we can improve there does anybody know how many people work for the foundation for example we don't know what are the teams and so on that could be a little bit more openly available positivity I think it's great I mean the group is very positive in spite of the challenges and at some of the downturns I give it an A there why not because this is a strength of if you're my thing and I like these three quotes I know sometimes you know like trolls but trolls keep us honest sometimes they they they give you a chance to prove your value I mean I I'm not support of excessively engaging with trolls because that's what they want they want to be fed but I give them a chance sometimes and if they keep trolling then I ignore them or I just try to kill them what I block them copycats are good imitation is the best flattery right and and competitors keep you on your toes they built they helped you build more resistance nothing wrong with that especially if you're the leader sense of humor ah how many of you were at DEFCON four in Prague you saw the music and the dancing how many were at eighth corn in Toronto do you remember how did it start with a dance what did the chicken dance or something like that they were they were like metallic and others were dancing on stage and I think we had a good sense of humor right hey minimalism how much excess work the group does be I think it varies it depends too much minimalism is maybe not good because it leads to anarchy let's keep going st. funding how the group survives economically so it depends again I don't want to focus too much on the foundation but I would give the be the foundation is a source of some funding but there are other sources of funding I think it hasn't been a bad bad environment for funding although lately has been more difficult because of the the price of tokens obviously so that's in a nutshell if you want to rate ourselves against the characteristics of online communities according to Peter Hitchens and and if you look about the whole total it's not too bad I mean on the sea only for and in the B is five obviously I'd love to see in theory of improve and it's not just about the foundation don't put everything on the foundation its us it's it's the community it's the group's it's all of us have a role in in making this better into the future all right let's talk about governance now second topic of my of my talk here I've been researching a lot the topic of governance but I look at it from a business perspective when you hear Vlad and others talk about governance their positioning is more coming from the technology from implementation consensus why is networked peer-to-peer and all of that it's great and we need that but I think there are several dimensions to governance I gave a talk about governance in Hong Kong a month ago where there's a lot more going on into what I talked about but I'm just gonna extract a couple of slides but the key point here is that governance is multi-dimensional and we tend to we tend to think perhaps more in terms of the philosophical dimension which is kind of what we are here otherwise we wouldn't be kind of interested in decentralized governance there's a technical aspect of course economic now we're trying to talk about that a bit more is programmable PW it has economic implications so so what happens but then the fourth dimension that is sometimes neglected is the business dimension because it's about making decisions again there's no perfect decisions you have to make a decision at some point in time and explain the pros and cons or whatever that decision is so you can move forward so the business kind of had sometimes is that hat that cuts through the the got the noise and and and and sometimes you need that to try to find the balance between the best decision in terms of governance and and and then it's it's really different when you want depending what you who you are if you're a blockchain if you're a peer-to-peer network if you are a DAP if you are a just a straight protocol if you are just after social political change like some of the democracy related projects depending on where you come from you will have different priorities and interests in terms of how you look at governance and how you solve governance in a decentralized manner so you have to keep that in mind and and my point here is is to use governance as a tool use it as a tool not not as a weapon and not as a crutch a weapon would be like what kind of fork so that's it I don't agree about a fork that's a weapon and a crutch you just delay decisions you use it as an excuse to do not do something and while oil governance should be a tool that enables it empowers everybody some issues very quickly about governance it's not just about voting we tend to focus a lot about voting and there are lots of experiments quadratic voting and carbon voting and so on decision making by consensus is not always ideal if you look at how companies are run imagine if CEOs would just and managers would just decide everything by consensus then you always go at the lowest common denominator and you reach mediocrity very easily very quickly so I think we should not take consensus to the nth degree by also assuming that all decisions have to be arrived at by consensus consensus is great for technical protocols and we are still learning as to how to adjust our decision-making from a business perspective and that's important as well communities alone should not govern on their own meaning so it's they're part of the governance and there's been a lot that's been written about that but I like that point very much and let's be aware of not prematurely decentralizing governance because we're still babies we're still learning about it and that's the point when I come back to at the end of my talk code is not governance yet laws have to catch up to it transparency and openness is good in self governance but let's be careful as well one size does not fit all as I was mentioning earlier if you're a blockchain or tap or protocol whatever where you come from we'll give you a different perspective as far as what you do with governance and this is a fact a lot of the governance tools are very technical when they when they require you to vote you have to go to your wallet you have to do jump through some hoops that if business user is not able to comprehend yet even some of the governance projects are very technical in nature they haven't reached a business user yet that's why that's one one of the reasons why you don't get a lot of quorum participation in these token based voting mechanisms and and I'm sorry to say but the tower was not a standard it was an accident so everybody wants to be like the Dow and have self governance of everything putting everything on the on the chain and that's not really what's advisable because we have a lot to learn before we can automate things are we decentralized yeah that's an important question there was a website that tried to quantify that and the website has gone down since then unfortunately because I was costing money to go and crawl the defendant and find out where we were I wish they would come back we need to better define decentralization if a theory of is the standard decentralized global blockchains maybe theorem can set the standard in in in what it means and let others measure themselves against those those standards and one another project has 21 notes and they say they are decentralized and they are fast then we know what we are comparing I put this chart two months ago and it got some pushback I'm a big fan of marketing marketing communications not in the sense of marketing in terms of advertising not in the sense of shouting from the roofs but in the sense of communicating very accurately what you are doing especially to a non-technical audience by and large a lot of the blockchain projects start to focus on the technical audience but we also have to focus on the non-technical ologist because they are also decision-makers they have budgets and they are the ones that give those matches to developers and the best kind of marketing is where you are rightly marketing what you are doing not overly and not utterly not other marketing I put it here as the in the other marketed bucket because there's potential to do a better job and I hope I will be able to contribute a little bit to it in the the ring that I proposed and in the over market it means what you're saying is it's way ahead of what you are delivering it doesn't mean you are lying it means that you just a little bit to add maybe your vision you're selling your vision but your product is way behind the vision and you're deceiving a little bit the market I got a lot of pushback from two companies on this on this chart but one of them was came back and said you're right what can we do better and that's what I like to hear people being self-conscious about their shortcomings now this is a new one that I just published an hour ago I think this will be controversial I've thought a lot about this I've talked to a lot of people I see a lot of things in my field I put my analyst hat I used to be an analyst and this is the reality right now in terms of where we are I mean aetherium is the leader when you think about this has nothing to do with the price of tokens or market caps this has to do with market presence and market evolution and capabilities and where they are obviously nothing comes close to a theorem or Bitcoin as bona fide blockchains they are there there are applications on it there are users it's it's there to stay and the next bucket to look for is the contenders so the way this is modified Gartner Magic Quadrant Gardner the famous analyst firm they have magic quadrants for like hundreds of software products that's part of the revenue model they they just do that and they publish them and they charge companies to explain them so the the next ones that I in my opinion that are kind of contenders so the contents are the closest to becoming leaders our Yost polkadot and cosmos and the challengers are doing some interesting things and they could be either moving to contenders or dropping off and there are a lot of new players in the niche niche meaning that we're not sure are they gonna evolve they may become contenders they may become challenges they may go away but at least they have something interesting that they are working on and if you notice here there is an anomaly here where there is one item here that is not really a blockchain which one is that it's the Amazon have you heard of the Amazon quantum ledger database was announced a couple of months ago it's a distributed ledger database basically it provides it it's an immutable data base with programmability and I put it there because you don't need a blockchain for everything if all you want is immutability so you should consider as well just having an immutable let your database for example so think about that I think imagine if all the database vendors because I'm right now they are they aren't really into the blockchain imagine if all the big ones like Oracle and and so and so on got into this and and started to have immutable databases cryptographically computed and and stored and and with giving some properties of what that we know that block chains have I think that would be a a game changer so that's where we are today and and the important thing to consider the application for a theorem is that we cannot rest on their laurels especially that now it's becoming challenging because we have a theorem 2.0 and we have one point x XX or XY z and it almost looks like there are two chains and some people in the market are a little bit worried so what is the transition going to be from 1 X 2 to and it looks like we restarted again a new kind of project with 2.0 a year ago more than a year ago I spoke at a Stanford I was the opening know speaker and I put that chart because that's where I thought we were at the time there was no talk of a 2.0 it was just a theory of one aetherium that was going to evolve and continue to improve itself and become more scalable they come faster POS and so on but today with since DEFCON 4 and s 2.

0 it seems that the x lines are shifting so you have to be careful about delivering on time and what happens if two point O is delayed or doesn't come in in two three years are we going to maintain market share and leadership and and that's really an important question to keep in mind in closing I just wanted to close with some positive advice I think if I just picked three of them I think they are probably some of the more important ones in my opinion let's not try to eat our dog food too early I mean as a observer as somebody on the on the ground talking to a lot of people and interfacing with projects on a daily basis especially around the etherium ecosystem specifically we tend to be wanting to implement decentralization too quickly and then we have to just maybe slow it down a bit if it doesn't make sense in some cases it means introducing a little bit more sense of urgency czar all related and some authority in decision-making to break the deadlock of decisions so that some of the projects can accelerate their delivery and that would be my my advice if we wanted to go forward and and maintain the leadership that we want to have thank you very much oh because the the end of the day we're all it the same we have the same goal and we all want the blockchain to lead us through a new world that is better than the one we have today that is the big question thank you very much I think we have five minutes or less for any questions one or two whatever yes do they need the microphone to do and thank you by the way that was pretty interesting especially from like a sociological point of view almost I just noticed at the end when you spoke about trying to find Authority especially you in this sort of like murky landscape that etherion finds itself I believe anyway to what extent do you find it almost like paradoxical when leaders sort of step down in anticipation of launching a decentralized smart contract platform and then when you're facing such change that if they're going through right now you then need leadership it's almost like this cycle but how do you get out of that make sure I understand the question is how do you break the cycle of when smart toy you said you said smart contracts right I didn't catch what I was sneezing I didn't catch part but then I'd almost argue that you do need to get a show for certain efficiencies yes right now I'll be blunt it's just a bit of a mess yes so how do you what's the answer to it but my point there is about people leadership in terms of project management and project is able to be more than one or a multitude of people oh it's multitude but it's it's really implementing a little bit more traditional management into this big open source project that is called ëthe Europe one of the pushback I keep hearing is that while we're not a start-up and you say well the open source projects are not like startups yeah I think you're not like Sarah but you have a lot of sort of characteristics and you have a lot of organizational characteristics you don't want to reinvent everything people are people they have to be managed and not everybody can self manage themselves not everybody is self-motivated not everybody is going to excel at everything they do not everybody knows everything so you have to manage people to get results and and that's really what the focus of my point was was about the management aspect and there has been an important initiative that Lane is leading the cat herders to really professionalize project management a bit more into the groups that are leading those different groups so so that that's kind of where it's gonna go hi I'm so you gave funding sources for the work in our community B and to me it seems more like a D like the proliferation of different competitors who are launching their own token to build their own blockchain seems like it's only happening because people can't fund their ideas to scale blockchain networks and you stay with the theorem community to get that work done so do you think that there's work we could do to improve funding sources that would reduce the splintering that happens in our community so I'm not sure if I understood it properly you think people are moving because a funding was big or because they are not finding the features that they want is that what you're saying I think there's a lot of teams that would be happy to build features on etherium if they could make as much money as they intend to make from selling a brand-new token I think the funding is not I mean if you're all only depending on aetherium funding from the foundation you shouldn't be I think a lot of venture capitalists are out there with with funds and would be happy to to fund startups and ideas and projects that are doing some great things so I I don't think there's a lack of funding there are lots of new funds and and not so new funds maybe a year or two old that have lots a lot of money left in their funds and they want to invest and they want to deploy them so I will encourage projects to reach out to the community of venture capitalists I mean I have an angel investor I'm not institutionally a VC we're not bad people I mean there's been some some bad rap in some places about staying away from VCS but if you get the right you see on your side right investor right group it's not such a bad thing because they can give you lots of mentorship and they've been seeing a lot of these companies like yours and they can help you to grow on the other aspect yet some projects have been leaving aetherium because there is no fit so be it but at the same time there are new ones that are coming to it and there are ones that have been working on projects for the last two years that are going to go live and that will bring a lot of transactions into it so I'm not too worried one when I hear that some projects are leaving for one or two other reasons yes Hey so a question I have is why does the community exist like what is the shared incentive here and is it just the value is it that is it this like collective delusion around the eath token and if so you know how does the growth of the community impact the eath token and what happens as individual like ERC 20s on aetherium like for example BnB token now is slowly like raised rising and value significantly and what happens when the value of individual ERC's begin to like you know approach the value of eath itself I mean that's a loaded question I think it's about the collective work I mean yes why does a community exist it's about the collective work and the output that they are delivering and and and that's still way ahead I think if I talk about a theorem specifically a theorem is way I had from the other block chains and projects and I think the price of the token will take care of itself it's it's it's a common saying here in the stock stock market when a company is not doing well or the stock is depressed but the CEO knows that they are doing the job the company knows they are doing the job and the mantra is there is keep doing what you're doing but the stock price will take care of itself and it does in more cases than none so I think the the prices right now have no there's no logic there's no logic there's no correlation there's a lot of dumb money in the system but it's up to us to show some metrics and show some real measurable progress so that the investors can try to correlate these metrics to some variation that they they can have in their heads hi William Judy mom from Dada dot NYC and it seems to me that some of the bees in this exercise have to do with failure of communication in a way I think that it's a huge challenge for such a decentralized organization to have efficient communication and I wanted to hear what you think about this yeah the question is about this there is a challenge in efficient way you're right I mean that's why my topic was the challenges of decentralized communities and we are at that stage right now it's it's a good problem to have it's a big it's a big group so I think my initiative is gonna hopefully help in a little bit but I think the foundation is aware of that too and we have to all have that as a as a responsibility is to communicate more with each other and with the market more precisely more aggressively and more regularly but it has to be done it has been a shortcoming but first the first step towards change is awareness and and now I think there's a bit more awareness that there is a shortcoming so I would wait a few months and hopefully see the progress thank you I think I have to cut it short - we can stay on time thanks again I'm gonna stay here for a little bit longer bye-bye [Applause]