Welcome to the Quadratic Lands - Kevin Owocki

next up we have uh a good friend of the east denver community we have kevin owaki coming to us from boulder and from the gatecoin project kevin's been a part of the ethanver community and our all of our gatherings from the beginning big big proponent of the colorado crypto scene we're so happy to have you back kevin hi shannon how's it going really well thanks i'm excited to listen to you present today you're talking about a subject that's near and dear to my heart and i am how's it going joked to have you as well so today you're going to be talking to us about uh the quadratic lands and i will let you take it away all right thanks so much shannon just sending a tweet to let everyone know that i'm going on a couple minutes early hopefully we'll get a couple more people checking us out from that so i'm gonna share my screen and we are gonna talk about the quadratic lands and uh the principle of the consent of the governed is the the updated title of my talk all right so there we go all right so this is a a topic that is near and dear to my heart and it's one of the reasons that i got into the the blockchain space is this idea that we could build more democratic systems using our digital age technologies as we transition from the industrial age in which the organizing principle for our society was um was the institution it was institutions to the information age in which the organizing principle for our society is a little bit more of the web and one of the things that i've been thinking a lot about in terms of the context of that transition is this is this principle in political philosophy of what's called the consent of the governed which basically refers to the idea that the legitimacy um and the moral right of of of a system or uh in the case of of governance uh a government's legitimacy but also in the case of a web system which increasingly dominates our lives uh the the foundational principle is that the consent by the people uh or society upon which that political power is exercised and so this theory of consent is sort of historically contrasted from the divine right of kings and um and and sort of the history of colonialism in the west and so i'm going to try to apply some of these principles to our web-based systems and and see where it goes and the starting point that i want to i want to begin with is web 2. and i think that we're all familiar with in the blockchain space this notion that in web 2 you are the product if you sign up to facebook then your attention is being sold to advertisers if you sign up to linkedin then your data and attention is being sold to recruiters and so there's this feeling in the blockchain space that we've grown past our the the scale of of these systems in in such a way that there are hundreds of millions of human beings inside of the web that are all being bought and sold and there isn't the the consent of the governed to all of these practices yes maybe in the sense that you've checked a terms of service that you didn't really read that gives people uh that gives the legal right to to do this but there isn't really an alternative to facebook where you can take your data away from facebook if you no longer if you want to withdraw their consent and use a comparable service and the same thing with tons of different web 2 apps and so as we study this idea of how web 2 apps got this way it's really a story of network effects where when a lot of these websites start out they're really trying to attract users to come to them and eventually they hit this network effect where every user that joins makes every makes the experience better for every other user who joins the platform and and then eventually over time the platform will move from attracting users to finding ways to attract to extracting users um and then on the uh on on the sort of platform relationships to its complements you know sort of you're building on top of the facebook api if you're building on top of the twitter api these platforms will move from cooperating with them in the early days when they need to broaden their reach to competing with them once they are inevitable and i think that this is sort of what undercuts the consent of the governed in web 2 applications um there's also this deeper more foundational aspect of human economic systems called the matthew effect which is basically the effective accumulated advantage for short it's sometimes called the rich get richer and the poor gets gor the poor get poorer but it doesn't just apply to money it applies to matters of fame or status or power um anything where the cumulative advantage can can compound over time and lead to capture of a system thereby reducing the consent of of the governed and so you know my basic feeling is [ __ ] the matthew effect [ __ ] the consolidation of the web we need to build something better in the blockchain space and we need to build move from systems that say they can't be can't be evil to systems that won't be evil and the big question for me is how do we blow up the matthew effect how do we blow up the network effects of these webview companies and how do we as at a time in which humanity's experience is increasingly intermediated by the online by the digital how do we blow up the matthew effect how do we how do we reverse this and so i have this sort of like visual conception of a portal to somewhere where the consent of the govern remains intact where we didn't have the matthew effect and everyday people the poor in the many could stand up to the rich and the few and i'm calling that the quadratic lands a place where there's more digital democracy in a place where the preferences of the poor and the many outweigh the rich and the few and so let's go into that portal into the quadratic lands i think a foundational building block of the quadratic lands of the consent of the governed in the web 3 era is ethereum which i i would i think that we can conceive of as a technology platform but i also started to think of it a little bit like a city in that uh it's it's more than any one firm or any any individual it's actually a community of loosely affiliated individuals who agree about their location of work and their residence in the case of a city or in the case of a protocol uh how they what what unit of account they use for their financial lives and and i think that you can look at it in in that context of a city and within that city communities will organically start bottom bottling up from from a bottoms-up perspective so a place where people dissatisfied with the status quo to gather experiment in creating new economic systems i like to say ethereum is a shelling point for the hopeful we don't all exactly know what we're building in this in this space but we know that we're trying to build something that's better for the world than what exists in the status quo and so the exact tools that we're using in the ethereum space are programmable money in order to program our values into our money we've got immutability so you can build systems that live past you and we can go from won't be evil to can't be evil transparency so that you can inspect what's going on in the system um so basically what we're doing is creating transparent economic games that can't change on you and and this is why when people say that they don't believe that ethereum can make a difference so they don't and they believe that we're just creating a new oligarchy in a new place uh in order to get away from the old oligarchy i say no now we're building transparent economic games that can't change on you and that's why this is such a foundational piece of of building this portal to the quadratic lands is that is that i as a programmer could create a system that can't be evil that can't consolidate against the everyday people and i think that that's really really powerful because what i want to do in my in in my community and in my presence in the digital space is trying to build more bentoism into into the economy and so bentoism is this idea from yancey strickler from kickstarter which basically says hey how about instead of just optimizing for if you look at life as an optimization game if you look at our economy as an optimization game instead of just optimizing for instant gratification what if we were to optimize for what would be good for future me in addition to naomi what would it look like if you expanded the incentives from away from just me into now us and future us and so we have a bento box of incentives in which we're creating a regenerator regenerative force in the economy by focusing on time preferences and community preferences over individual preferences and maybe we could create a stronger economy together using programmable money and and focusing on bentoism so some of the actual tangible examples of of of creating some of these systems that i'm really excited about that i think are a part of of my quadratic lands is a liquid democracy so basically i think that there's a huge problem with low voter turnout and dows in the space right now i think two percent voter turnout is standard for a lot of dows which i just think is bs if if we're launching governance tokens hey let's actually use them for governance and so there's this idea of liquid democracy which is a form of delegative democracy whereby an electric electorate has the option of vesting voting power in delegates as well as voting themselves directly so basically you could have a system in which there's a group of senators that have the consent of the governed and they aggregate the consent of the governed and they're the ones who have the time and willpower and connections to actually be involved in the governance of the system and the consent of the govern can be revoked at any time if you don't like what your senator has voted for and that's why it's called liquid democracies because you can revoke your consent at any time you can move it over to anyone else so i would like to see more of these web 3 systems that have the consent of the governed and actually have a high engagement from the governed in the form of high voter turnout and liquid democracy is one way that we can get there um i think another great way to get to the quadratic lands is to create systems where we own what we use tokenized ownership can allow us to create web scale cooperatives that allow users to become owners aligning capital and labor and management of these systems you know assuming it's not just a protocol that's completely neutral can have aligned incentives between investors and the people that are in the the system and so um i've been on enough startups to know that sometimes when when things get rough your investors want to know where their return is going to come from and sometimes that can come from extracting from the users it can come from chipping away of the from the consent of the governed when you already have that network effect going and i don't want to build systems like that i i want to build systems that are more democratic and have the consent of the government because i think that that's how we're going to scale this space to to web scale so one of the one of the ideas that i think is is really kind of interesting when we're looking at building digital democracy is this idea of quadratic voting and basically um there's two problems with on-chain governance i think one is low voter turnout and low engagement and then the second is this thing of plutocracy which basically is the matthew effect it's compounding gains of accumulated advantage and and basically quadratic voting can counter that that because quadratic voting is a collective decision-making process where individuals allocate votes to express the degree of their preferences rather than just the direction of their preferences and basically you're voting with your identity because uh the the more that the more vote credits that you spend on any individual vote decay in the amounts of votes that you actually expend and so quadratic voting is just this this way of of prioritizing the preferences of the poor and the many over the rich and the few and also expressing expressing a degree of preference instead of just a direction and so it's i think a key to this portal to the quadratic lands that that we want to build um quadratic funding is something that getcoin grant is famous for and i don't mean to bury the lead i know that this is what people i get invited to speak about a lot of things and usually it's related to quadratic funding it's basically this way of taking quadratic voting and instead of voting with a voting credit you're voting with your actual capital and so basically it allows you to express a preference and also degree of preference in which you can spend your capital on it and and basically the way it works is that you have a central matching pool that is allocated alongside a crowdfunding campaign and that central matching pool is allocated to different initiatives based off of the number of contributors for each initiative more than just the amount funded and what's really cool about this is that it pushes power away from the edges away from whales and power brokers and more towards democracy and i think that that's what we're trying to build in this space we're trying to empower everyday people to be a part of their economic systems um in reality quadratic funding is live on git coin grants it's no longer just a theory it has we've run eight rounds of funding worth 4.5 million dollars and i am super proud to say that we've created this this graph of preferences amongst the ethereum community around what public goods they want to see supported so this graph on this slide right here each node in the network is a user or a grant in the network and each edge is a funding transaction within that network so we can now measure not only the preferences but the degree of preferences of the ethereum community in which pieces of open source software foundational pieces of their infrastructure they want to support and so super proud that git coin is is playing a small role in funding public goods and creating more digital democracy in the ethereum space and i i hope to see other people take this concept in many different directions and we can fund more public goods in in the physical world and in the digital world using quadratic funding but i would warn you before you go forward on this on this journey young adventurer that you need digital identity to create reputation and which allows us to create trust digital identity can allow us to go from one cpu one vote or one token one vote to one human one vote and that's why i think digital identity is key to the quadratic lands if we want to create digital democracy we have to be able to weed out the bots from the actual actual people and so this is a foundational piece of our exit from the dark forest and our entrance into the citadel of of community and of richness because once you have reputation you can see who you're interacting with and you can build trust with them based off of their past behaviors and based off of their reputation that they're staking in every interaction with you reputation is a foundational part of our social lives and we can build it into the web 3 space so my call to action to you is let's take the journey to the quadratic lands let's [ __ ] destroy the matthew effect and let's restore the consent of the governed to the web with the blockchain ecosystem so thank you so much to ethereum denver for having me y'all are amazing colorado is the blockchain epicenter of the united states and um i really tried to one-up your flashy shiny neon branding with my shiny neon branding i'm not sure who came out on top but either way i am just so happy to be at east denver and hanging out this this year and uh looking forward to being in person next year at the sports castle thanks kevin we're so happy to have you back that was awesome we had some good comments in the chat if you've got a couple more minutes to hang out with us um one of the ones that really stuck out to me if i can speak in english uh joshua was talking about how we have consensus um you know that's all on chain and so what happens when gaskets are too high do we now end up with a different form of people being excluded based on priority and their own funds yeah um i believe that this is a problem i think that the ethereum main net that we see right now basically requires you to be uh a thousand there or a millionaire to do trades on uniswap and i think that the ethereum mainnet l1 is not the right solution for voting um i see aryan and aryan in the in the audience and i know that his experiment clr fund is working off of x-die which i think is a great chain for for doing things off of the main net that we have eth2 coming we have roll-ups that you can do chain uh voting if you need to and also snapshot.page is this really interesting experience in in signatures that don't actually get broadcast broadcast on chain and that's a mechanism where you can just vote freely and cheaply without paying any gas fees so i would like to see more experiments with off-chain governance that can be rolled up into on-chain decisions just migrating that gas fees and we're just early in in in that road map and i think that that's why it's a problem right now i would encourage everyone in the space who's building something to go look at layer twos go look at xdi they're a really great way to in some cases have near near mainnet security profiles at way less gas costs that's awesome do you want to just tell briefly what you did in in boulder this spring during lockdown around quadratic funding yeah for sure uh we launched a uh a a project called downtown stimulus which is basically an experiment in quadratic funding that was aimed towards main street or i guess in boulder it's pearl street but we we had a 25k pilot round of quadratic funding that was supporting five different local businesses and we ended up raising i think it was fifteen thousand dollars from the crowd and deployed about forty thousand dollars in total using quadratic funding and you know it was just an experiment and we kind of yellowed it but i i'm proud of supporting our local businesses having a livable downtown is a public good but i think that the the main achievement that we unlocked is proving that quadratic funding works just out of ethereum and in out of blockchain and the psychology actually works in in the everyday like the everyday world so uh google downtown stimulus if you want to learn more about that and maybe i'll link the wrap-up post in the comments here on airstream please do i think it's really important that we start talking about how kind of main street is actually engaging with this because right now it's so obvious that we're in an echo chamber for a lot of these things and to actually see regular people engaging with it and starting to learn about these concepts by being able to actually interact with their own communities it's really important for sure well thanks kevin that was awesome we appreciate you we're happy to have you back