Blockchain as Commons - Berkeley 2024

[Music] okay how's everybody feeling so we're going to bring some more action here um I'm super excited because this combines so many different domains and you know we try to like break the silos and all of that good stuff so I run an organization called the digital Economist we are uh fairly young but not quite a startup anymore we launched at the world economic Forum in 2020 um and our mission is to drive convergence of different Technologies towards a human centered world and I should expand that by saying life centered system so in this case you know of course other life forms as well but what are commons right uh and it's important I think to get the definitions right because Commons are not the same as public goods so there are two things that happen either you can exclude someone or not um and the other is if the consumption by one person impacts the consumption of the other person right so in other words is there a uh subtractability that happens of of the common pool resource so you can see you know you have public good which are by the way taken care by the government through public money which means taxes uh fiscal policy and that has low subtractability of use this is the kind of the term that ostram uses in a work and then you have you know the pure private Goods case where you have um the ability to exclude you know ownership private use Etc now there's Club Goods right all sorts of memberships which are private Goods but you know could be shared within a certain group uh but then you know that the use by one doesn't exclude the use by other and then you have a very special case uh which again asram along with our co-authors they clarified which is common pool resources here you know it's it's a unique animal because you cannot exclude others from accessing it if we consider blockchain as an infrastructure technology we have to ensure that we understand it and treat it as common pooled resource which is again like I said different from from public goods right um and then of course you go into uh the governance aspects of it which is how do we actually ensure the resources protected right um and I will go on to say even that the fact that a lot of the problems we see in the world are not so much because of there isn't enough resources it's because we poorly manage our resources as humans we've always been governing our resources collectively and so we have to remember that there are communities around the world that have always been managing uh our resources as Commons and we you know in many ways that the best way to do right so the wisdom of the crowds is also kind of uh the reason why here um you know we see a strong case for managing the resources the common just a few examples of course you have uh you know the Lakes your forests as as as local Commons you have Global Commons like uh the outer space the oceans um Beyond you know the 10 miles whatever we have as as uh National jurisdictions then you have digital commment as a subset and here's kind of where uh what brings us together that we don't have to reinvent the wheel the principles exist the uh the guidelines exist we have to think about how we apply these how we bring them into the current context perhaps the most beautiful and what we sort of picked as the core of this approach is to have a polycentric system uh so there's no one center right so different centers again uh have their own governance me mechanisms then it feeds into the the overall um approach and and uh you know the governance of the full common um this is important because uh a it makes governance easier than uh centralized obviously authority to govern it why blockchain governance is a key driver for long-term sustainability our premise is the following the governance of the the the resource is going to be a key driver for the value of the resource itself it's intricately tied in it's one of the core pillars right so all this work sort of comes from uh from this hypothesis and we argue that actually it's even more important in case of blockchain because first of all um given the mutable nature you know of of uh of blockchain Technology it becomes even more important that you want to get it right from the beginning because you can't go back and change it even though rules you know do evolve over time then of course it's driven by community commun uh there's consensus that you know the community has to arrive at in order to to move the protocol further so it it's very important that we look at Community not just as a as a side thing or a later thing and I don't think that's something I have to say to this this group here but a lot of the times and I've been at the space for for eight years um we we we haven't seen all of the chains uh I think uh working on the community in the best possible way that they can and then finally incentives um which again uh from an from an economist perspective we know that people respond to incentives we know that companies and organizations respond to incentive and U there's a lot of empirical work 200 years of economic literature um but again um when it comes to you know the polycentric approach to governance um the blockchain um you know can can can of course have the risk of being centralized and being overused and the tragedy of the commment occurring in in their case um if we don't get the governance right what I'm sharing with you today um has been two years in the making uh first time we're um talking about this publicly which is something called the austr project so our kind of vision it's uh it's a little complex sentence but is to is to support protect and enhance efforts to create a cohesive sustainable future and again digital actions and all the things we do somehow to aggregate come together bring it together together into a an interconnected web right of initiatives uh to contribute to our uh well-being of the planet and of course all life in it currently we are envisioning the off project to do these three things uh which is research in applications of polycentric governance governance again being the primary driver of ensuring the sustainability of of U Commons over the long term but to kind of offer this is sort of the you know equivalent of a policy um or best practices uh repository which I think will go a long way uh to help researchers engineers and really uh The Wider stakeholder community and then also um you know supporting policym which is let's let's mark certain resources to be governed as Commons uh by community and uh treat it as such and I think we've seen a lot of that play we certainly have in Washington DC where there's a lot of uh there has been and still continues to be there is some clarity now by treatment of different uh you know blockchains digital assets and sort of what that means as well here's my email ask how you can get involved and uh thank you [Applause] [Music]