QJ Wang - Info Defence with ECF Pensieve: Decentralised Knowledge Base and Social Consensus

actually very much thank you Dr. Jack Jakob because uh with your introduction it saves me a lot of time on the explanation of info defense right like the the reason why this is extremely relevant in a world where any anybody heard of Vitalics uh pushing for DAC decentralized um defensive democratic acceleration of technology show of hand from the audience right this is not necessarily a very popular concept here I guess I hope I can give it a little bit more introduction and um so this topic might be a little bit uh for um veteran users of decentralized technologies in in the space. Bear with me if you are uh a little bit lost but I think at the end of the day this solution offers much more value to emerging communities and projects that are seeking legitimacy and endorsement. So the story might be a little bit longer and I hope uh it at least is entertaining. Um pansy this is what we want to discuss and um but let's go deep a little bit go a little bit deeper into the definition of info defense.

Um apart from what um the media is driven the media are driven by incentive maximization as we already know I think we also need to consider and I think it's not a overestimation that 50% of the content may already be generated by AI. Back in the days when I was in advertisement we know there's a cliche we know that um when you spend on marketing 50% at least is wasted. We just don't know where it is wasted. But with the AI it is so costefficient. You generate content not only because the content is generated without much um uh human hard labor in it but also the analysis of whether or not you reach your audience whether they are really converted to purchase your um your goods or consume your content will be so analyzed and then immediately put into optimization of the language model.

You will have much more efficient expense and thus improved content that is even more generated to target your emotional uh surge or giving rise to the sponsors that um require certain help and even more so today info defense is needed. Uh I hope we are still in on time not for the presentation but for technology to be there for um saving us from this situation that we did not work hard enough to prevent ourselves from. So info defense is about protecting societies and organization and individuals against the threats related to manipulation theft and disruption of information. What are these threats? There's disinformation, wrong idea, social media manipulations with bots with AIS and everything cycles, synthetic media and deep fakes and cyber attacks, um infrastructure sabotage, intelligence gathering, insider threats, data uh breach and leak, all those things that um most public folks are with are in unequipped to defend themselves against and with data themsel elves you have most of the time broken links you cannot really find where is the evidence there's no data ownership to users and we were talking about digital sovereignty you don't even have you are so right over your own data we don't talk about data ownership even in today's decentralization technology we don't have the tax stack that really ensures users owning their own data look at the decentralized social media we're using it's still far from you being able to take your data unplugged and then plug into another applications you want.

And of course the communities are working towards that uh direction but we are still quite far from it so far. And there is obviously information disparity um and um most important of all which is what our organization is dealing with which is a scarcity of legitimacy technology. What does it mean? It means whenever you want to gain support, there are very few ways for you to prove you are legitimate yourself unless you disclose much more privacy. And even at that, it doesn't mean that communities recognize until certain institutions or signals actually are sent your way.

And this isn't I think is an obvious answer to why web three communities do not care about privacy. Why? Because if I am wearing a mask now, it does not work as well as if I am exposed um with my face. Because trust is hard because we need to exchange vulnerability. We need to we need you to recognize that I am the person saying these things for you to potentially be able to hold me accountable in the future if I had lied.

And this is how society works. So even in the web3 communities privacy is not something that is new to ourselves. It is something that we know we have to sacrifice in order to get things done. And this is exactly because there is a scarcity in legitimacy technology which is a social technology itself. So as always we put our fingers at uh what is the problem.

It is not a um surprisingly shocking thing that I'm going to blame centralization. Um if you are in this audience you know that this community is about decentralization. So you have um the current flaws in the primitives of information and data handling in control over data completely centralized then following with it communication decision- making and obvious problem of single points of failure when data are leaked. Ledger at one uh point in the history was hacked and then all the addresses and the emails of people who actually purchased the Ledger at one point were completely leaked. And these are people who are pioneers in the industry that have their privacy and security um exposed uh to people who the data were sold to, right?

Or published to. And um what we have is obvious reduce the resilience as asymmetricity and surveillance and camera uh sorry privacy but but for all of these I think we are quite uh familiar already with the with the issue and the deeper flaws in the social technical system is that even with the raw data we don't necessarily have the context to understand to to to do the sense making ourselves and then we do not necessarily as I mentioned before have own these data and then can disclose them as in in a context required in a protected and ver uh a way that that only verifies the data versus handling over the data completely. And we have to assume um third party centralized uh uh institutions would do good because there's just no alternative. While data going from data to um a society or community's wisdom has to go through the process of coming from data and then condensed into information with verified um verification process. then it can be shared to the next generation to new people who come into the space and this is completely disrupted.

That's why through years of work um um and I'm very happy that last year in Naple East I was able to already uh introduce the concept of pensive with at the dawn of a publication of a white paper and this year we are bringing this white paper into a specific use case that would increase legitimacy uh discovery of projects with ECF.org work as a platform itself using the pensive frameworks. It's a little bit of a mouthful. So one is an idea like the Bitcoin white paper. The other thing is the actual currency bitcoin that is running an ecosystem and at the same time you can have all kinds of old coins based on the bitcoin idea and then having different usage themselves.

um a feature th this idea is about completely decentralizing institutional grade information systems so that a decentralized collective database is possible and the word decentralization is said so much that I have to stress here it's not only about the data being immutable and decentralized in this particular case it's about reaching consensus about what actually happened so what is knowledge knowledge is what we believe needs it is worth passing down, right? Worth sharing. And they are different community to community and people to people. But as pioneers, as generations that have the responsibility to pass down knowledge to the next generation, there should be certain consensus or ways to coordinate such consensus to consolidate knowledge from information to data and verified facts. And this is why with all the reasons of info defense and um problems of centralization we introduced this particular pensive uh um frameworks and um we were but why did we land here?

So this is a little bit of a story time. We are an organization that was founded in 2018. You might be able to recognize some familiar faces in this uh founding uh picture in Tokyo. We were the first grand program and now we are um uh incubating and then building ourselves the matter coordination level of tools. Pensive being the most fundamental one on the on the information and knowledge level and other tools that includes Zulu software that helps community to coordinate in events in other occasions and carbon.

com if anybody is familiar with um the DAO attack. This was the project that helped coordination and legitimized the the hard fork. uh it was uh nicely donated to my co-founder donated by my co-founder to ECF um for us to continue this coordination tool as a grand program. Anybody asked for grants in their life um in crypto before from the audience? None.

Anybody gave grants? Anybody run a grand program? Okay, good. Okay. So, someone um these are the challenges and given that we don't necessarily share the experiences of this, I'm not going to go very deep into it.

But as any grant program that has the resources or is looking for the resources to boost up their ecosystem, these are the issues that we face. On top is the it's the it's the obvious ones and underneath there's a lot of issues within the organization. Then the more juicy part as ECF goes because we are an organization that was co-founded by a lot of ecosystem projects as if you if you have recognized the the leaders in the space we have even more levels of complexity because it was founded by multiple ecosystems. So you have different the coordination issues and high file high-profile high demanded figures to have calls regularly but without getting anything done. Uh there's also I by the way Jared was in vacation so he wasn't in the picture but um these are the people that are still working very hard in industry but at a time put together their resources and are determined to um to accelerate uh the Ethereum adoption and technology general blockchain technology adoption at the time together.

But even with goodwill, even with real exp uh real resources spent, it was still hard because of all the reasons that I put on the slides and and some of the reasons that I will dig deeper in uh an article that we will publish next week. Um stay tuned for that. But one of the very obvious problem is that we are the centralized the gatekeeper. There is fragmented knowledge. So it was obvious after a revisit of the grants that are the grants are often were often influenced by personal networks and uh early managers and it is also very easy to see that impacts are very limited and the problem is today the the old model still stands in our industry in our community.

We still resort to institution to get funding, to get legitimacy, to get discovered. And so what we have is communities end up not really building but building for chasing legitimacy so that they can have a head start. But what if legitimacy can be grown from within so that we would not have undiscovered talent so that we the communities can discover the the talent themselves and coordinate resource and knowledge themselves. And this is the question we want to ask. The key lies in how we got success in the first place.

The success of Bitcoin and Ethereum was not just technological achievements. It is mostly community and coordination. It was the communities that wrote and reviewed the code, ran the nodes, evangelized the mission, defended the values, educated newcomers, coordinated during crisis and forks. And if you look at the projects these days that are really decentralized, resilient and gaining global adoption, this is the root of how the success became so globalized. So as an organization that is mission to be flexible, agile and adaptive, what we want to dig deeper into is not to repeat a direct funding mechanism because Bitcoin already did it.

What we need to do is to coordinate the communities to understand what is good, what is needed, what is ideal. And in order to coordinate that, we need to at least have verified facts that are not controlled by any particular institution. Anytime we want to check information, it is owned by someone and the data are in a server except the blockchain data that are financial transactions. So as an organization what we need to do is to help find this missing piece in the tack of social coordination and um it is also in humans deep nature to seek truth but seeking it is a complicated complex work. It requires coordination, collaboration, interpretation, and there are crosscutting concerns that can influence every level.

Uh I'm a Harry Potter fan, so I'm going to quote Dumbledore here. The truth is a beautiful and terrible thing and should therefore be treated with great caution. Now, this is why we named this mechanism pansive. Anybody knows what pansive is? It's a magical basm.

Dumbledoreo put his head inside and then you know re-examine d uh data memory. In this case we want it to be a collective pensive. Uh this is a PDF. It's supposed to be a GIF and then you know dramatic uh now we enter ECF's pensive. It's a new type of decentralized knowledge base.

Um and we think it will defend collective cognitive sovereignty. Does the community even agree on its mission? Is it just written by one or two people? Did you have to comply with it? Right.

And so if you are interested, this is the paper and um you can find it if you go to ecf.net network and all the links are there. We be we are updating the website soon. And I was just told that uh we are supposed to close it in uh soon so that we can have a little bit of a Q&A, but I want to at least give you guys the the idea of why it will help emerging communities and projects. With this passive mechanism, we could do a lot of things.

Any wiki can be decentralized. Uh I I was also told a decentral Wikip media foundation is thinking about it. I think we we have a head start and if anyone is hearing it, uh contact us. We're interested in collaborate. But any knowledge based dictionary, ontology, community mission, they can all be decentralized with uh this um reputationbased identity agnostic system that doesn't care about who you are.

And it's very easy. Go to pansy.cf.network. You could propose any project that you think is accountable and legitimate with fill in some basic information.

Anybody um but I have to say that we are in alpha. So you need an invite code. So I'll I'll let you guys scan the code to get invite code permissionlessly. You just need to introduce what you're working on. So we have a little bit of a a controlled uh alpha that does not completely crash the server at this point and then after mechanism checking we will be we will be leveraging completely decentralized the technology to have it as a mutable ledger of our collective memory.

So this is phase one uh squeeze in if you can because as we all know this but we would generously award reward our early adopters um as history also evidenced. So what you would do is you propose a project but other people can verify. The funny thing is it means that even if you are the owner or founder of a certain project, you do not necessarily have the ultimate say of what is true. And this allows community to verify, validate and give and disclose more truth about projects and surface accountable projects in aspects that um are not necessarily checked or are in databases that are in certain grant programs or VC's own emails. Um and um I'm supposed to completely cut it just a little bit of a peak of the interfaces on top of the decentralized knowledge base itself.

We as ECF are biased for certain projects but we completely open source how we evaluate uh with 200 items that are not completely launched yet because we need to consider ZK protection for certain items that regard identity um and at the same time we encourage reference to be put. So if your projects are working on online to onchain tools completely decentralized onchain tools we encourage you to come forward just like Sablier does so that when people put the reference it has a higher weight in decentralized verifiable uh verification of the claim of your information identity is not relevant. We analyze by just looking at behavior of the users. So this is an experimentation. If you're interested in getting the alpha code uh technical collaboration um research together how to evaluate and surface legitimate projects uh scan this code.

This is our discord. It's not as private and decentralized as we want but unfortunately this is where people are at the moment. uh and then follow us at ECF, Ethereum ECF and um join us to make this missing piece of the social tax stack um come out as soon as possible. Thank you guys. [Applause]