EthCC 2: Philippe Honigman

hi everyone it works want to yeah so my name is uh phil philipponingman i'm an entrepreneur and uh i'm going to talk today about ownership and ownership in the air the daos um so i'm especially interested about ownership because of you know as an entrepreneur you care about the power that you have on the ventures that you start and also you care about the value that is going to be created out of those ventures and i'm also a commoner meaning that i care about how the value that we can create through the companies that we start are actually contributing to the wellness and the wealth of the society at large and i found out after a few years that decentralization was a good way to go from close companies to open ecosystem and to the commons so that's why i also qualify myself as a decentralization hacker so we're going to talk today about different dimension of ownership and the first one which comes to mind obviously is the ownership that we can exit through or on a company which has two different dimensions one is the dimension of power and the other one is the dimension of extraction of value and both are materialized through something that we call shares right as a shareholder owner you have actually part of some power of the power to direct uh the the strategy of a company and that's called voting rights and you have also part of the value that is going to be produced by the company and that's called dividend here they are but then when we uh talk about uh decentralized network dollars and decentralization at large we have a different view where we care about the way power is concentrated and actually decentralization or decentralized is kind of a negative definition right it says that essentially power is not centralized it doesn't say how it is not centralized so it's very open and there can be many definitions or many approach to define how something is decentralized the starting point is that there is no central point of control so again a negative definition but what does it mean for dao so it can mean that the ownership is um the the dao is owned by many right meaning that there is some sort of even distribution of power of ownership across a large number of people of parties so you can think of course of a blockchain for instance blockchains are often are often compared to dows where the level of decentralization of your blockchain and the level of resilience of the blockchain is going to depend on the number of nodes uh the number of miners and maybe the distribution of the tokens themselves but another way to look at dao's is actually to think about some entities that are owned by no one's not by many not by many parties but actually no one and this is more like the a of daos right the autonomous part uh those two definitions are actually quite uh compatible this is two ways to look at the same reality in order to have a clearer view of what this mean i invite you to think about the doubts that you have in mind and see how they can be either seen as owned by many or seen by owned by themselves so i'm going to go through a few examples examples for instance the aragon network i'm sorry for the this is an old macbook so the definition is awful but the idea is that the argon network in itself can be seen as a dow right and there are many players many parties uh the aragon phonations and the jurors and the taos themselves and the the end holders or the token holders so those parties balance themselves right the decentralization is obtained because there are different roles different parties and within each class of members there are different level of decentralization for instance jurors could be seen as some sort of decentralized group that might not be the case of the aragon foundation itself another example is the plantoid for those who know this is a live form an art artificial life form and it is self-owned in a way in the sense that the plantaride owns assets in order to sustain its own life and reproduce itself but in order to reproduce itself it depends on other parties which are artists that going to create other generation or the public the patterns that are going to fund the creation of a new generation of platforms so it's autonomous in a way it's owned its own own life but it depends on other parties another example is the dao the famously dao the famous dao which was designed as a decentralized investment vehicle for the ethereum community so it was decentralized but actually it was not that decentralized in a way uh and what is more interesting is that at some point this so-called unstoppable application so there is again the autonomous id here was in a way deactivated by the underlying infrastructure ethereum through uh some action conducted by the ethereum community itself so the ethereum community has never been seen as a part of the dao the the part the members of the taos were either the contractors or the investors but it was a party that was external but powerful enough to affect the course of action in the case of a crisis of the dao so this is super important because it means that actually the program uh rules that govern the functioning the way that the dao works can actually be suspended when there is a state of emergency instead of exception that requires to do so another similar view can be applied to bitcoin itself bitcoin has often been compared to to a dowel or to a protodow there are indeed a number of parties in bitcoin that coordinate through code only right the miners and the create bitcoins and the validate transaction thanks to code only but at the same time there is a number of action that needs to be taken in order to evolve bitcoin as a network and that is done using interactions with other parties such as developers for instance and sometimes there's no agreement between the different parties and there is no code to actually resolve those tensions or those conflicts so on by many or on by known we think and i think that it's a bit of both and it should be seen as complementary layers so the first one here is owned by many aspects this is a network of multiple stakeholders some are represented in the code some might not be so and the other one is owned by non and this is the open source crypto economics protocol that is indeed on by none in the sense that it's open source but also on by none in the sense that it only its own resource so we could call them the social layer which is off-chain essentially and the protocol layer which is on chen so now if we look at them and try to compare them the strength of the social layer as i said earlier is its evolutionary capability it's the ability to actually face crisis face state of emergency and more generally create a new direction in order to govern the the evolution of the dao it has also the capability of creating legitimacy through the representation of all the members of an ecosystem and the protocol layer on the other hand is often seen as rigid we cannot change it it's precisely unstoppable like in the case of the dao and it can also be seen as technocratic in a way it's kind of paradoxical but the open source code is opaque or difficult to interpret and understand by many people that are actually engaged in a doubt because they don't have the capability and it's often a technical elite that is in charge of changing the protocol on the other hand the social layer is corruptible and is opaque the negotiations that go you know behind the scene as are by definition difficult to to understand and to to learn about on the other hand at the protocol layer the strength is probably the fact that it's immutable and transparent so on the basis of this this view of this representation of the the double dimension of the house we have a short thesis here which is number one those are for ecosystem not for firms uh we think that we can spend hundreds of thous on something like the aragon network but if there are actually firms well you can as well use firms right there's not a lot to be gained from taos that are actually not decentralized and not really autonomous neither so we think that actually the power of daos is to create a new way to coordinate in loosely coupled networks which are ecosystem uh crypto networks industries so all environment where you have a large variety of stakeholders that do not engage in close relationship with one uh and another in another the second uh point is that protocol layer and social layer are complementary they are not opposed we are opposed frequently on chain and of chain governance but we think that it's actually more like a complement uh they are complementary to each other the social layer is very good at adapting to change whereas the protocol layer is uh better at implementing in a way that is trust stressable a process for routine and daily operation and the last point is that those two layers should be as tightly integrated as we can because they can profit and benefit to each other meaning that the social layer can protect the autonomy of the protocol and the protocol layer can protect the decentralization of the social layer so as an example i will end my presentation with how we do it or how we plan to do it should i say in the context of the tribute network the first thing that we do because the tribute network that we're building is an ecosystem rather than a firm we make a strict distinction between value owners and power owners as i was saying at the beginning of this presentation if you look at the share that materialized ownership you have a an overlap between ownership of value and ownership of power you have shares and you can exert power and extract value but in an ecosystem it's very different you have different parties some will want and will need to extract value out of it and some will actually get something that is different not an economic value but a new use value so here we have the distributing value of the system we have three so first of all we have a security token called the tbx and the security token is heavily distributed to three stakeholders one they are the builders the people that create the network and that contribute work the second one is the second tier is our investors that contribute money in order to build a network and the third one are the comments who contribute well the digital comments right right so open source software open knowledge open data open protocol all the the basic bricks that we need today in order to build our digital society and we consider them as part of our ecosystem and we should give back to this tier through the tbx through our token and another the another stakeholder is the users uh that create the liquidity for the tbx token and this is my last slide this is the this time the distribution of power as opposed to the distribution of value we created uh this this structure uh um while being inspired by something called collective interest cooperative so the idea here is that we implement a decentralized power structure based on the fact that you have five type of stakeholders that hold each of one fifth of the power so there is no majority of the power in any specific type of stakeholders so those are the investors the core team of builders the contributors of uh in the builders the users or organizations that use the service and the common conceal and inside each group of stakeholders you have the ability to vote on the in the democratic way well that could be you know if you have for instance a very large amount of contributors it could be something else could be something like the holographic consensus for instance but the idea is that you have decentralized uh governance inside each group and decentralized governance at the level of the whole system there is also something that is important which is what i was saying by mentioning the dao as a condition for uh residents of the governance structure the idea here is that voicing expressing a vote or having a decision uh power having an influence as part of one of this group depend on your actual activity within the network and the trace of the activity that proved that you have one is actually the transfer of tbx the transfer of tokens so this is how the the protocol layer enables the social layer that is represented here and i'll finish here thank you okay