Blockchain Ethics: Ethereum, Web3, and Decentralized Morality with Reuben Youngblom

okay not quite uh all right hi everybody all right thanks for that uh thanks for that intro as it was kind of said I am a a researcher and a lecturer at Stanford University um I also lead the decentralized systems work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology uh digital currency initiative oh okay so um my research mostly focuses around privacy uh specifically in in the legal context at Stanford so I care about things like what happened with tornado cash and how we can maybe prevent that from happening again at MIT I do a little bit more technical research so if you are interested at all in Bitcoin development or in the environmental impacts of cryptocurrency or Mev please come talk to me we're always looking for collaborators so today I am here to talk about blockchain ethics and how we can actually bring ethics more classical philosophical ethics into a decentralized world in which the uh those those uh paradigms don't necessarily fit cleanly um so I don't have a timer here is that a problem I can keep Time by myself if I have to no timer but I'm just gonna I'll just kind of plow ahead okay so my goals here are one to motivate blockchain ethics this is a pretty nascent field um it still has a lot of thinking that needs to be done uh I would like to poke a little bit in terms of actually developing it and making it useful for uh this space and eventually clear a path forward so that other people can pick up the the mantle here and kind of run with it and do their own developments on what an ethical framework could look like in a web 3 world all right so my introduction to blockchain ethics was a couple years ago from a colleague of mine Reese Lindbergh and he uh he deserves all the credit for most of the thought that is happening right now in blockchain ethics one thing that he said that I found particularly impactful um was he said kind of offhandedly if blockchain will be even 10 as impactful as the internet now is the time and this was in you know 2018 2019. now is the time to start making sure that we are developing it responsibly by the time it actually hits this 10 threshold or potentially even higher it's probably too late and one of my big worries is that I think we've actually hit that threshold maybe a long time ago uh so the time to start thinking about responsible Innovation and ethics in this in this world was probably a couple years ago uh so I I'm taking kind of a better late than never approach here all right so the motivations here are to ensure responsible development of the blockchain space and you might be asking what does that look like well one thing that we want to do is allow blockchain to thrive I think everybody here is kind of in agreement with that we want to as much as possible reduce negative externalities as we'll see in the next couple slides I don't think it's possible to actually eliminate them and there's something to be said about about accepting some negative externalities if we can get some benefit from there and the last thing that I hope we do is we allow blockchain to fail when necessary blockchain is a really cool tool um but we don't necessarily do a good job sometimes of differentiating when it's useful and when it's causing more harm okay so those are kind of the goals of of this talk in the future another motivation here is that we just this is an empty space right now we have we have bioethics we have ai ethics we have legal ethics there are a lot of subfields of Ethics because overarching ethical principles don't always map cleanly uh onto a space like this so we we probably need blockchain ethics this is something we need to start thinking about um and we need to develop it in a way that actually works for this community okay and a lot of this all falls out of the idea that blockchains cryptocurrencies these all raise novel ethical issues that we just don't find historically um and so in the same way that the law is really struggling to catch up right we have Securities laws that were written in the 30s and now we're trying to just kind of grossly push them onto icos and things like that it doesn't work well same thing happens with ethics we're trying to take ethics that have been around for 4 000 years and put them on top of a new kind of decentralized world and it's it's falling short okay so blockchain ethics is actually I think of of critical importance but it might be worth asking why do ethics matter at all why should anybody care about ethics in this world um so the the easy answer is that it makes us better people it changes the world and it changes how we interact with it but if you need something more concrete I actually find ethics really interesting uh because they provide an intuitive foundation for this idea that some differences are just unresolvable and that that's completely valid okay so there's a very classic uh problem in ethics called the trolley problem maybe people have heard of it um a very naive version says you're standing next to some train tracks and there's a train you know barreling down the tracks that you're near and there's a group of five people standing down the tracks maybe they're not paying attention and if you do nothing this train will hit these people and they will all die and that is obviously a very bad thing um if anybody thinks that's a good thing I would love to come talk to you we can fight about this maybe a little bit um but in this scenario you're also standing next to a switch and you can take this affirmative action and you can flip the switch and you can shut the train off onto another track where there's only one person so there are really two two schools of thought here different people approach this problem in different ways some people say of course you flip the switch right you were saving five lives the cost of that is one life simple math would tell you that this is actually a really really good thing and uh and there's no question that this switch needs to be flipped there's another school of thought that says you know by actually performing that action you're involving yourself in this decision and you're doing a bad thing I understand that you're saving five people but you're you're performing an affirmative action that kills somebody and maybe that in and of itself is enough to say that's the wrong action and we haven't figured out as the in the field of philosophy how to get down past those two those are very foundational and it's not often in the world where such uh such foundational considerations arrive at different outcomes and so just kind of realizing that and injecting that line of thinking into your everyday life I think there's a lot to bring more compassion when people don't agree with you a lot of times it just comes back to these first principles uh that and and there's no there's no right answer and that's just you know that's something that I think computer scientists blockchain people especially lawyers we're not very comfortable with but maybe we should be all right so the inspiration for blockchain ethics um is what has kind of been happening in bioethics bioethics has developed this framework of four ethical principles and they've sort of said well you know almost every year bioethical dilemma can be resolved by looking at these principles and it should be guiding principles for how we operate as a field all right so these are respect for autonomy not maleficence beneficence and Justice don't have to go into those but what I'm going to try to do today is look at what ethical principles actually underpin blockchain because blockchain is very different all right some of the differences are it's always been very top down historically ethics have come from places like religion they've come from philosophy they've come from institutions that have power but decentralized principles especially a community like the ethereum community and especially things like web3 can change how ethics are actually developed we can actually go back and say let's let's develop a new substrate for ethics and the question here is what will that look like so to some extent this is kind of an open call to the ethereum community to take this opportunity to converge undue ethical principles and maybe change the way we think about ethics and certainly change the way that we think about blockchain all right so the sparse history of blockchain Ethics uh the the dcia had a blockchain ethics course that is freely available online I would encourage people to kind of look through that there's been some current thinking on how to approach blockchain ethics it tends to fall into two camps um some people say well it's a combination of tech and financial ethics and institutional ethics and that's that's really valid that's a really fun way to look at it you can also look at the macro meso and and uh and or sorry micro meso and macro layers of it by examining the tech stack the application layer and then the institutional and societal layer um there's a lot of other thought that has kind of gone into it some of it is good some of it is bad but by and large this is a pretty sparse space so for people who are interested in getting in sort of early in the thought process and helping shape some of these fields this field is is right for people uh that that could actually come in and contribute and have a pretty sizable impact okay so at this point as a community we I think we have a skeleton of why blockchain ethics matters but we really need to begin to develop workable ethical principles okay so that's what I hope to kind of start to do here so before we get into the principles I want to talk about my own ethical approach here it's kind of a bias check it makes make sure that when people hear the things that I say they can Factor my biases in and take it with a grain of salt so there are a lot of different ways to approach ethics and there are a lot of different ways to approach blockchain ethics one of the big questions is what is it that we're optimizing for we can optimize for the individual if we want we can say how do we build this that most empowers the individual we can optimize for a society what are we doing that that sort of most boosts society that can be the that can be the ethereum community it can be uh just Society at large it can be at the country level at the worldwide level um we can also look at how we optimize the technology or in a very kind of meta sense we can look at how we optimize for favorable outcomes I'm going to skip that one for now it raises all kinds of meta-ethical questions it's not clear what a favorable outcome is or whose perspective we should be looking at but that is a valid way to approach it so my thesis here is that we can't actually know even if it's our eventual goal how to optimize for the individual or how to optimize for society until we understand what it actually looks like to optimize for the most neutral substrate that we have which is the technology so I'm starting from a point of what ethics should be put on top of the technology so that we can eventually get to optimizing for the individual and Society okay and just as a last note this will not reflect uh how an economic system will actually work in the real world I think that's a problem with ethics in general but I think that's just what we have to work with here okay so the principles that I've set out here um it kind of follows the bioethical principles to some extent but it's trustlessness objectivity respect for autonomy and permissionlessness a lot of these come from uh kind of the Bitcoin tradition the one that I'm the most interested in in a ethereum web 3 context is objectivity um I'm gonna go through these in a little more detail now so trustlessness says no third party trust should be required to perform an operation so that can be something like viewing information it can be just in general Faithfully engaging with the system uh this is a look at how the individual engages with the world okay so this is useful for people like developers it's useful for uh people that want to go out and evangelize the blockchain space people that consider themselves or are maybe don't consider themselves but the law considers them fiduciaries and the requirement here is that trustlessness doesn't require independent verification that would be kind of a high bar but it requires the ability to independently verify so without that there's something very very important missing from what I think of as the blockchain world you need individuals to have the ability to leverage uh this trustlessness so that they can if they want to trust but verify but they don't have to right trying to kind of keep this uh keep the bar pretty reasonable the important one here is objectivity and that's really important for uh for a an ethereum in an ethereum context so generally speaking there are often objective answers to things not always um but when there are objective answers we should seek them out so this is a look at how the individual engages with the truth one of my big fears about the world and specifically about the blockchain community is that sometimes we forget to really engage with this idea of objectivity we have our own biases we have our own incentives it's really easy to do something like convince yourself that the hot Ico that you've invested in I'm kind of picking that because I think we're out of the woods with that uh that uh that chapter for the for the most part um it's really easy to convince yourself that this new coin that you've invested in is the best thing in the world and an objective analysis might say actually maybe we don't need a coin that helps you just pay your dentist and that's kind of all it does and and maybe if the price goes up we're doing something wrong so we need to get a lot better about being objective about the information that we believe and the information that we share so the required requirements here are adversarial thinking that's something that a lot of people dislike there's a lot of defensiveness just in the world it's a very human trait um maybe I'm projecting I definitely skew a little bit defensive when people challenge me but uh without adversarial thinking the entire ecosystem is weaker adversarial thinking is a very powerful way to protect against attacks and the reason for that is that an adversarial attack on your ideas on your protocol on whatever it is it really only has two outcomes either you successfully defend against the adversarial attack and then you have have proven to yourself that you are hard enough uh to have that not be a worry you've proven that you proven is a strong word but you at least have a lot of evidence that your ideas are sound at least against that particular attack or if the adversarial attack succeeds you have learned something really really really important everybody should always be wanting adversarial attacks on their system on their protocol on their ideas and that is something that we as a community need to get a lot better about okay the second requirement is a reduction of individual desires and motivations if we want to see this technology succeed it's not always the best thing to do to optimize for the the individual right away okay so everything has negative Earth externalities if used improperly that goes for blockchain that goes for you know new coins that people want to Mint we need to be thinking very objectively about whether these things are good for the world and are the right things that we should be we should be promoting all right respect for autonomy is maybe less exciting but it's one that is maybe the closest to my heart um respect for autonomy says that all participants um including civil participants that shouldn't matter have equal autonomy so another issue that I have seen in I guess in the world but also just in the blockchain space is this idea of autonomy for me but not for the and I you know I kind of ripped that from sort of the the Free Speech cry but uh um it's a problem when people believe very strongly at least ostensibly in autonomy and are willing to give themselves autonomy but not grant that to other people it's a so I think one of the things that that we need to work on is accepting behavior that we think is wrong it's very easy to uh think that we're right about something it's very easy to say I believe that this is either the right thing or the wrong thing and when people don't do what we expect them to do it's very upsetting but the principle of autonomy would say in so much as as I have autonomy to do what it is that I find important to vote the way I want to vote to uh to push the protocols that I want to push everybody else also has that same right okay so what I would push for here is community over tribalism tribalism is something that has a a pretty real chance at tearing the blockchain community apart it's gotten you know I've been part of the blockchain world for like seven or eight years and that the uh the tribalism meter is just it's steadily growing and I it's really kind of viscerally upsetting to see okay so the last one here is permissionlessness I think uh we all kind of have a pretty intuitive idea what this is um but it says that actions undertaken by the system should not be subject to individual whims or incentives okay so open systems in general really must be free systems otherwise it's not clear what we're doing here the requirements for provisionlessness I would say are decentralization we need to get a little bit better about carefully architecting permissionless systems we've kind of gotten into a space now where we've Blended the line between permissionless blockchains and permission blockchains um and I think both have their place but they maybe are not equivalent in the way that that we're starting to move towards seeing them as and also permissionlessness requires accepting negative externalities which again is not something that we as a community are very good at um but permissionlessness says if somebody wants to put something really really awful on the blockchain no exercise their autonomy and do that maybe that's a negative externality that we should consider accepting because the benefits that we get are so much greater all right one minute all right so um I just want to touch on what was actually left out here these are things that that I considered putting in as ethical principles and they didn't quite make the cut or they got subsumed under something else we have immutability the idea of code is law optimizing for favorable outcomes and the general idea of decentralization I put that as a as kind of a subcategory but maybe that's enough of an important concept that it should be near the top and it should be its own kind of top level um top level consideration so for people who are interested in this um I'm looking to help get some people to help put together this Community Driven set of ethical principles so I have a GitHub here that uh that it's it kind of pushes to a website but I'm hoping that we can get people to help develop that um or you can talk to me about engaging with the DCI we're always looking for collaborators collaborators and uh and this is something that I am personally very passionate about all right so you can email me here um I uh I feel like people tend to put their Twitter I don't actually have a Twitter that I use very often but uh I do have a list of people that are worth following who agree with me um and then I also have a list of people who very strongly disagree with me and are maybe more anti blockchain um and these people are also really really worth following um because it'll expose you to a new a new way of thinking and you'll start to uh you'll you'll just get exposed to things that maybe are uncomfortable but uh are ultimately a lot of fun um so if you're going to follow somebody I would mostly focus on that side maybe we all kind of you know maybe we follow these people already but uh yeah give them give them a look so thank you everybody [Applause]