🎤 Reflections on the State of Public Goods Funding

[Applause] [Music] yeah awesome um thanks kartik um and and yeah i'm really excited to have uh both kevin and juan here for for this quick chat um on i mean coordination on probably the book uh the greek book and then of course just public goods in general which is sort of one of these like um infrastructure things that was happening in the space around uh coordination and and funding in the space as well so um awesome uh it looks like we've got kevin too so thank you for doing this um yeah maybe it makes sense to start with uh a lot of the topics that you cover one are are in uh the book that kevin wrote um maybe i'll just you know to have kevin kind of kick off and do a quick little intro as well like kevin what what what are sort of the what's the story that kind of led you to to writing the greenfield book and um and sort of just how long have you been thinking about this what are your maybe kind of intro thoughts about this space but but just in general like um what led you to uh to come up with this yeah totally uh first off thanks for hosting this uh really big fans of eath global and of protocol labs and filecoin over at getcoin um basically the genesis story of bitcoin is that i've been a software engineer all of my career all 15 years of my career and i've always built stuff on top of open source software and um open source software creates 400 billion dollars per year in economic value and uh the people that are building it don't have a business model because the source code is available for free and so every time i wanted to build a new startup and i've built a dozen side projects or startups over my career i would always get an open source database server open source web server open source operating system uh python django is it something i built a lot in so i've derived a lot of value from open source and i just found it really sad that open source because it's a public good which means that it's non-excludable non-rival risks it doesn't have a business model um which because it's non-excludable which basically means that i can't stop uh kartik from downloading uh ubuntu and it's non-rivalrous which basically means that kartik downloading ubuntu doesn't stop me or juan or jacob from from downloading it there's no way to monetize it and so basically the idea with blockchain is that we've got a trillion dollars of market cap that's floating around the open source financial system what if we could use some of that money to support open source because it's an open source financial system the money that used to go to it on wall street in the old financial system could now go to open source that was like the genesis of get coin and our mission has always been to build and fund digital public goods starting with open source software we've created 65 million dollars worth of open source funding uh using uh quadratic funding and bitcoin grants um and i'm just like so thankful to vitalik and glenn for inventing quadratic funding and giving us like a game theoretically optimal way of funding public goods like they're the big brains i'm just the guy who's like taking in putting like a neon brand on it and marketing it to people um and so so uh as we went down this path of funding open source in the ethereum ecosystem i started to discover other great projects that were also working on different types of public goods and so you know some examples would be optimism and retroactive public goods giveth and clr fund are doing some great stuff dev protocol file coin uh in protocol labs has been a big sponsor and so what we realized is that oh wait quadratic funding and what we're doing at bitcoin is only one way that we could move the needle on public goods what if we could create an educational and social shelling point for public goods funding and regenerative crypto which just basically means like any crypto that has an impact on the world and like you know the um so the idea behind the green pill book was basically like oh quadratic funding is great but but let's actually be pluralistic there's probably a dozen or hundreds of mechanisms that can fund public goods let's be inclusive of those mechanisms and let's create a category of regenerative crypto and um and embrace all of the other projects that are doing it and like you know i i think that one of the great things about this is like the the benefits of pluralism is that you get a uh other people who are trying things with other funding sources and mechanics that are complementary to quadratic funding and so it's it's the diverse fauna of funding mechanisms in the space that we really want to grow and and we've been supporting uh that with a ecosystem series called shelling point that uh is is the shelling point for these conversations and have kind of just stumbled upon juan and and funding the commons who are also doing similar things and then the green pill book is just kind of like an easy way of teaching these concepts to people and so so yeah that's that's like the four-minute version of of how we got from a to b and um and and i'm just really like uh humbled that juan you've been embraced the green pill meme in the book and have been teaching some of the concepts uh the one last thing i'll say is that these are not my ideas similar to how we took quadratic funding which is glen and vitalik's idea and we just like put a vaporwave neon brand on it and market it the green pill book ideas are the work of hundreds or thousands of really great game designers and game theoryists and economists i can economic man i can't speak today uh economists and i'm just like taking it and patching packaging it up and like the the book is a mile wide and an inch deep because i want to give people the rabbit holes to go down so um embracing pluralism is is basically the tldr awesome um well thanks for for walking through that uh i mean obviously it's been quite a journey with bitcoin um you know seeing it since the beginning as well and obviously we're big fans of keep going at each global as well um and yeah i love this kind of tourism that you you brought up um it seems like in general like this whole um space is so positive some for like the entire world and basically everything um that we've talked about um is sort of additive more than it's attractive in any way like you know we talked about private goods and we talked about kind of rival goods like it's not like those are gonna go away anytime soon um but really as to one's point kind of near the end of his talk like it's more about kind of building these mechanisms and actually kind of um having the mechanisms be so good um that like you kind of outweigh um all this kind of gray pill area um with all this amazing region and green pill um one of the kind of questions that got brought up as we're kind of talking about through that section was um you know just kind of inherent to all this is this concept of value and good and you know the meme the public goods are good like um but but value and good is in some cases pretty subjective um i just kind of maybe as an opening question like how do you feel about the subjectivity of like what is this value and like what is what is good like are these definable topics like what's the best uh what's your best opinion on that maybe we'll start with one uh yeah so um just the easy questions uh so this is fundamentally one of the hardest questions that humanity has been faced with um because it's so um [Music] there's so many different notions of value and many different layers of the stack in a sense and here layers of the sac include um you know humanity as different like social groups and you as an individual and civilization and the species and all living systems on earth and you know the planet and the solar system in the galaxy and like the universe and so there's there's no to the to the best of our ability um we have been searching for notions of value for millennia um and ever since we kind of um became uh aware and and and and so on and um sure many other uh animal species and so on have their their notions their intuitive notions of how of of value and and whatnot and this is one of the critical problems is like how do you orient many many groups that have many different definitions of what's valuable to them uh with high overlaps and high distinctions with um uh things that resonate and things that conflict um and how do you coordinate groups to achieve better and broader notions of value and um there's like a broader division here in in kind of schools of philosophy where um one one one track of the argument goes that you can't actually arrive at a definition of value out of observing the universe and there's a different school of thought that that says you can that you can evaluate living systems and you can evaluate communities and you can base on on on what those communities are and what those living systems are you can figure out things that are good or bad for them that you can actually define the concept of good or bad relative to that living system right and so you can think of um uh animals in the natural state or plants in their natural state and and what they sort of want to um achieve and you can think of like constraining them from that or harming their ability to achieve that as clearly bad for them and and you know this is kind of intuitive and a straightforward concept um but but that really points out that there's a connection between uh what we are fundamentally with what's good for us um and so you can come up with like some some notions of value that are that are more more uh general than others and potentially eventually arrive at something that's kind of like more universal but it's probably not something as as concrete or related to um what we as individuals tend to kind of aspire to on a day-to-day basis kind of maybe much more much more fundamental but anyway you can usually sidestep a lot of this by embracing pluralism as i can describe which is you let communities define what's good for them and what what they want to achieve and you come up with coordinating coordination systems that enable those communities to interact with each other and work on things that they agree with together and coordinate together to achieve some good outcomes and then mostly try and stay out of each other's way when they're in conflict when one group values something that the other group um uh does not value or conflicts with uh you can come up with systems that that govern their their shared space and their shared resources uh to to minimize uh conflict um and so i think at the end of the day it's like you can define value however you want as an individual or as a group or a community um and that nevertheless you should still be able to coordinate with many other groups that that define value differently um and you can find points of agreement um and even in cases where the disagreements are so wide that you you maybe don't even like um uh understand the world the same way uh and and that's okay you can still coordinate through that and you can still coordinate to arrive at things that that you both agree on i don't care if you have anything to add on uh i'm just sort of assigning value and assigning good to to these different things that are coming out of um yeah yeah so i mean uh one of the ideas that we kind of cover in the book is the idea that um there's we typically like when we think about value we'll think about financial value and um one of the things that we sort of explore in the book is this idea from gregory landua um again all of the great ideas in the book are not mine i'm just i'm just like you know the medicist behind them but basically the idea that there's eight forms of capital so basically in addition to uh financial capital there's living capital there's cultural capital experiential capital which like maybe this talk is a form of experiential capital and intellectual capital spiritual social and material capital so basically recognizing a broader diverse set of what value can be is uh i think step number one and then recognizing that each community should be free to choose what types of value they want to generate in their community you know when i hang out with my like buddhist friends they want to talk about spiritual capital whereas when i talk about web3 uh people it's more about creating arbitrages between web three and material capital which is kind of what climate dal is doing by putting carbon credits on the blockchain um bitcoin is is creating uh when we run the shelling point events and when juan and protocol labs run the funding the commons events we're creating an arbitrage between financial capital and uh intellectual capital and so um you know i just think that like recognizing a broad set of values and giving communities the locality and the sovereignty to define which type of values they want to pursue is kind of what this movement is all about and then on top of that embracing a pluralism of communities being able to pursue their own their own sets of values i think is just a really beautiful uh world if we can build it bottoms up awesome one of the things that i feel like has been like particularly powerful um at least for me personally over the last couple years have been like just being able to like put names to these things i think one you kind of mentioned it with like you know actually calling all these kind of the bad stuff in the world that's smallic um you know and actually being able to personify it and be able to build these tools and actually like name all these things you know regen isn't another one of these things green pills like uh like all these kind of solar pump type concepts like being able to name these things seems like a very powerful concept to me and i think it's made a lot of this like more clear whereas like you know i mean you may have kind of taken a lot of ideas and a lot of inspiration from a lot of different places kevin but to be able to like succinctly put it down in a single place and name these things and be able to like uh order the this is you know super critical i think and being able to like actually come up with the solution for these for these problems um maybe maybe to motivate that like we have seen a lot of things like climate dial like you know the move towards like more um green block chains all these different like kind of more kind of regen any type things happening like um how do you two feel about where we are right now like are we on a good path i know we have these like really big problems that are on the horizon uh looming climate change all the things we've talked about one asteroids like are we on the right path do we need to do more um like how are we trending in your opinion uh we we are doing pretty well and we need to scale it up so i think today we're doing dramatically better than we were doing a year ago two years ago three years ago like our community just just thinking about the crypto community um it is now fine to talk about how proof of work is creating this horrible waste uh and that there are better alternatives and not only that proof of stake systems like proof of sake work but you should actively replace your proof of work structures with proof of stake work structure or systems of work that produce some useful thing and not just kind of waste the waste the energy um and not only that but like now we have many of these groups like many of these i was experimenting with uh structures and systems to to scale better we have examples of the first uh blockchains that are uh getting to carbon neutral like the the falcon did this with with our own estimate of all the energy use of the source providers it's only a fraction of the that's like the largest fraction of the energy use that anybody has um has done involved with with with falcoin uh there's some amount of calculating all of the other activity and and then the production of the the software itself like think about all of the activity that all participants in creating the software uh have made or the hardware the hardware usually tends to be one of the big carbon generation um problems um and and but we can estimate all of those things and we can we can offset all of them and so we can get to ideally like you know the we're sort of like on a race there's a number of different blockchain systems that are right now in the race to become not just fully carbon neutral but like the greenest systems the most regenerative systems around and this is totally transformative relative to where we were two or three years ago and so it's massive progress and super exciting however it's still like very small compared to the broader world right so we're in a in a serious um uh crisis of action globally uh and so it's this super hopeful like think of it right now we have a sapling or like like like a seedling of like what it could turn into this amazing tree long term and so we have to get like keep working on this keep these systems coming come up with more ideas scale the ideas that are working and then uh just kind of uh use it to with the other industries in the world um in a super positive oriented way like we should be doing it in a in a way that is incentive aligned and that is that is um uh collaborative and causes the rest of the world to to orient the same way and get to a better better spot i i mean and the and it's not just script i mean like the broader world has been tackling this problem not well enough i think and not not as quickly as we should have um but i think we're in the i think we're still kind of in time to to scale some like really fast solutions that can not only avert the the worst of disasters uh but we could potentially like curb um a lot of the the even the other problems that we that we see kind of appearing in three four decades um if we act if we scale the stuff well right so one of the amazing things about crypto is that it scales really quickly like you can go from something a mechanism working for a few people or you know in in a small scale like coordinating tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in value relative value um to handling millions to billions and trillions in in a matter of months to years um with sort of minimal changes to to the structure so that scalability is super super powerful if we can it really is kind of a tremendously long lever to try and solve the problem yeah no that totally makes sense i mean you see that even with like you know the quadratic funding that bitcoin's doing like i mean i remember that started with you know very humble beginnings right it was it was a concept and now like it's allocating you know tens of millions of dollars right so you know the scalability there is like pretty pretty impressive to see and how quickly that even happened it's a it's insane um how about you kevin is is them all explained you just get to hang out in your hangout in your hammock uh in an undisclosed location for the rest of time or um how do you think we're trending and maybe to add to that like um this is a hackathon people are going to be building over the next couple weeks like what are some of the experiments you'd love to see yeah in this space and where should people keep put their effort do you think yeah great question here in meat space i'm hanging out in my hammock in sunny colorado but in the metaverse we'll we'll fight molok uh or build build uh protocols that can fight moloch since since i think we need to coordinate in order to do it um i i would i would agree with juan that we're we're doing good and the community has formed but there's there's still uh some ways to go yeah i think if if you make it like if you think about it as crawl walk run we're kind of like we've established that we can crawl uh and now we're trying to walk and it would be great if we're eventually running and i think that's you know some of the milestones that you can look at from a macro perspective is that the web3 regen community public goods community however you want to splice it knows about each other like just that niche being established i think is crawling and i i what i would like to see in the future is more capital and talent flowing into regen web 3 than d-gen web 3. so what would it take to engineer capital rotation away from the projects that just have the best ponzinomics uh or best marketing and into the projects that have the most real world impact is like the horizon of where i think the space could be going and there's a lot of infrastructure and coordination that it's going to take in order to get there and um you know i think that i'll just say that you know thank you for your kind words about the the green pill book and git coin um uh one of the things that i think that we really strive to do is be a channel for greater combinations of strength and intelligence to come together so you know when you ask me kevin what should i work on in order to make this vision a reality the answer is i don't really know um but we have this quadratic funding mechanism that creates a signal map of what uh the community actually wants to see built and so i think like having that credibly neutral channel of what does the community want to build is is kind of like what i would point you to and so like just to illustrate this point um i'll just share my my screen and just show you the economic graph from bitcoin grants around 14 in june 2022 where five million dollars were raised for uh for public goods this is a graph of uh all of the contributions in bitcoin grants round uh 14 which was just a month ago 700 000 transactions each edge in this network is a transaction and each node is a user or a grant in the network so we're building a mesh network uh that not only sends funds peers to pure peer-to-peer but creates a signal of what the community actually cares about um oh and by the way 700 000 transactions in the round but uh it was crashing my browser to visualize all of them so this is one one thousandth of the economic graph but it should be like a proportional amount of the economic craft so the answer is um unfortunately jacob i don't know what people should be building but uh i think that you know if if you look at that data set then maybe you'll get an idea of what the up and coming projects in the ecosystem are and can get some inspiration from that but you know one of the things that i i see as someone who's like analyzing the data and again i'm perceiving the community's preferences not injecting my own preferences into this is that we need to engineer more capital into regen web 3 projects um if we can create an ecosystem in which we reward projects that can create value instead of just the ones that capture value that systemically changes the incentives for founders and capital allocators in the space to regenerate the world and create impact so i'm really bullish on impact certificates right now so like what would what would be true if like every time you took 10 carbon credit carbon tons of carbon out of the atmosphere you minted an nft for it um or you took 10 people out of poverty you minted an nft for it um you invented quadratic funding you should get an impact nft or like a certificate for that and then what we can do is we can build a market where there's demand for these impact nfts and if we add a sufficient scale what we've done is we've systematically changed the incentives of the entire ecosystem to creation of value if you're an impact dow that's removing carbon from the atmosphere you now have a business model because you can just sell those impact nfts so systemically changing the incentives i think is like the north star that that i'm really aligned on and impact certificates are one way to do that retroactive public goods funding which vitalik and carl have been a big sponsor of are um are like the other the the other thing and and then like we have to build the thousands of dowels that actually create impact from there and one of the things that i kind of like like to think about um and i'll just end here because i think it's a fun beam is like we're all familiar with minor extractable value in this space which is basically i'm front running the transactions in the mempool in order to extract value for myself so juan submits a transaction that's about to redeem uh 10 eth out of some smart contract and if i'm in the mempool i can front run that and like replace his address out with mine if if if that transaction isn't isn't uh isn't uh minor retractable value prevented and so minor extractable values this idea that you can front run the projects that are creating value by being in the memphis what would it what would have to be true to create vibes extractable value where you're just showing up to these impact dials thinking oh there's good vibes here they're creating impact and i trust that eventually like bitcoin and and filecoin and heath global are going to figure out how to systemically change the incentives in order to make impact owls profitable but like this is vibes extractable value i'm here early for the vibes and i trust that like the world will will reward me in the future so um i want to live in that world and uh so so i guess i'll put the question back to you jacob which uh youth global hackers have good vibes this hackathon yeah yeah i mean i guess we'll we'll have to see right i mean it's it's basically what we're building i think so uh yeah i think uh yeah it definitely i think you can also get a pretty you know i think actually the the whole vibe check thing is real you know like you can kind of sit down you can chat with somebody for like 10 15 minutes and get a sense like where their heads are and you can you know get a sense of whether or not there will be some like vibes extractable value down the line just because of that type of person and where they're thinking and where their heads at um and and yeah so no i i love that um maybe one i'll turn it over to you it's also you know i know you love hackathons as well so um i know maybe a wacky doesn't know what to build uh but maybe you do um maybe i'll put this over to you as kind of the last question is sort of you know as people set out on their journey um to to build over the next two and a half weeks um it's a long enough time for them to kind of iterate and build something cool um what do you think it's like well yeah yeah so it's good uh so let me give you uh let me share i i love this is like a panel with like show and tell this is great yeah it's good yeah um so you can hear a lot of ideas from iwaki and others in the greenfield podcast you just go through and like listen to each one of these it's also on other other resources uh shellingpoint and funding the commons both have like huge video libraries with tons of ideas and tons of suggestions so just like go to these playlists and like just grab one at random and if like you don't find an idea within like five minutes switch to another one or something like that um and uh what i would also recommend is uh check out um i think i i'm really into things that uh create like funding loops and funding structures so uh impact certificates like kevin was describing uh there's a uh implementation of that called hyper certs um then things that uh um something that also would be would be really good is um ways of so for a lot of problems usually you can come up with an incentive structure if you can get the data so so you can usually break down um a lot of these problems into hey first measure just measure what's going on in the world and get accurate readings of what of some problem and and make sure that that stuff is is is verifiable you can even start with a simple problem like because verifiable is hard so just start by measuring what it is today and feed that into a structure that you can create smart contracts around once you do that then you can experiment with a bunch of mechanisms to try and incentivize action as soon as you have some mechanism that is pumping some significant amount of value into trying to solve this problem then a bunch of people are going to show up to try game it and that's when you can like recruit the effort to try and make a verifiable thing right so it is pretty difficult to make some of this information gathering verifiable but you don't even have to do that to start with just like take some problem in the world and measure what's going on and make that measurable thing be accessible through smart contracts so like create an oracle out of that um bring it into like start you know this is where you can use um uh you know in in in in in the spirit of hack fest and so on a file system is a system of files great so like get a bunch of the data about the world turn it into files uh couple it uh with smart contracts then start trying some incentive structures until you hit something that works and then at that point you can worry about having to make it all verifiable and what not um because uh you know once you start that incentive loop and get it going um then you know you start scaling the activity and you make it good it's kind of how carbon credits started uh they first made them people weren't thinking very carefully about verifiability there were a ton of problems out of this uh but now we have much better much more verifiable carbon credits um it just kind of we solved that problem when we got there totally and i i think sound advice in general which is you know solve the smallest problem first and then continue iterating from there um you know especially for people hacking like you don't need to think about end game today you just start with an idea measure it like once said um you know do some maybe testing build something small see what happens um and then once it gets big then then you get to worry about all the other things that are that are hard but uh for now just just do something cool um awesome okay well um really thank you both for your time and it's so cool to have you both here um and and really appreciate i appreciate you one and kevin for being part of this um all these talks will be available afterwards as well so if anybody kind of tuned in halfway um feel free to uh to watch it on our youtube channel and then yeah to one's point there's an amazing repertoire that was built up over the last couple years of talks in this space finding the comments the showing point um the greenfield podcast uh among many others actually so lots of awesome cool stuff out there as additional resources to this so um thank you so much again good to see you both jacob let me just interject before i leave that uh i passed along a coupon code for the green pill book in the chat and i think that's going to go out to people who watch this panel and then uh there's 99 uses on that so it maybe will even go out to the entire event so check out the book and you can get it for free and let me know what you think uh thanks again for hosting and juan thanks for being a great co-panelist yeah thank you i really appreciate you coming coming in and talking to us all about this thanks so much thank you so much folks