8. Workshop: Funding Mechanisms - Bogota 2022

so in March of this year uh common stack had a common prize and the winner would be the next Community after the token engineering Commons to implement our Commons deployment protocol so 95 unique voters from The Trusted seed participated and the winner was Grassroots economics a project we all felt yeah very honored to work with so I went to Kenya last month to understand how our design process our design pattern could work with them since everything is happening mostly in the ground in short Grassroots economics creates vouchers or currencies for local communities to become common economies the vouchers are a way for the value flow be for for the value flow to be restored where the national currency is scars so goods and services are the real values backing any economy what's missing in a lot of them is uh a means of exchange what's missing a lot of the times is just a means of exchange if we have a means of exchange that it's backed by the value existing in a community abundance can start flourishing so this picture is from a group of Elders called mongu and they have their own currency their own voucher that's called moo and they have this marketplaces that happen every Friday where people bring their goods and services to um to sell to each other using moo that is this currency that they implemented so I bought a coconut using moo and I'm clearly the most excited there because it's so good to see the grounded potential of so many of the things we've been working on happening and how people are benefiting from it so we're still understanding how our collaboration and the common stack is going to happen with Grassroots economics especially because there are technical limitations so I won't get into into much of that today but I want to share some of the reflections I had from observing these communities on the ground and also the work Grassroots economics has been doing and how they relate with the challenges we have in the in the Cyber Commons space so the first point I want to bring is demarrage Grassroots economics uses demage which is a tax on holding so for example holding 10 vouchers with a 2% decay in the end of the month would give you 9.8 vouchers and the credit that is deducted with time goes to a common pool that is governed by the community so they can decide what to do with the with the demarrage funds and based on the natural economic order that's this book it's a pretty old school book uh from the 30s that talks about how thank you that talks about how if everything decay in nature if an apple rottens why wouldn't money also rotten so hodling a tax on holding and the incentive of flow made me question The Narrative of hling we have in the space why hodling is caring when we see money as a store of value we are incentivizing power dynamics to emerge only the most privileged ones can hold the circulating Supply becomes smaller and scarcity Dynamics arise so holding makes sense in the case of an investment maybe where there's no purpose on spending but if the token had a purpose if utility was there value would simply flow so this brings to the next point that is token utility are we really working with Securities and using governance as an excuse of token utility what if the value of our token what are the values of our tokens giving access to how how to make them tangible what are the values of the ecosystems we're working with I I assume and I would love to hear more in the breakout session but I assume the most um the question I would the answer I would hear the most to that question what is the value we are creating would be public goods so the value we create is a public good therefore it shouldn't be monetized and and think like a commoner David Boer talks about how hackers in the 990s deferred from the term free software to open source because the word free would mislead to thinking that it has no cost but every has cost and if it's not externalized most of the time this cost falls on Builders and on the people who are working on it and then it becomes this um weird structures where a lot of work happening and not enough uh funding is coming into the the the value that is being created so how how can we be inventive with Commons licenses and token utility in a way that we can create um abundance economics tied to real token value and this is what I want to discuss more in the in the breakout session thank [Applause] you