ETHDenver 2021 Opening Ceremonies: Joseph Lubin

so we're gonna transition into our last speaker um everybody should know um our friend joe lubin he's the co-founder of ethereum and uh wearing his buffa corn t-shirt i can see so um we are you gotta get the you gotta get the new spork marmot one presenting yeah nobody sent me that well yeah i sent you a free coupon and and then you're you just gotta go send it to yourself so we'll get it to you but in any case at least i'm wearing team colors yeah you got it man you're good a four-time alumni of youth denver if i'm not mistaken yep he's actually one of the genesis uh sponsors we're very grateful to joe and all of his tireless globetrotting that he does on behalf of the community but also in addition just his blind support frankly for an idea that was east denver back in the the fall of 2017 and you know here we are so joe um you got the mic take it away my man uh thanks john um thanks to you and and the team uh on uh uh producing a perennially epic event uh for our ecosystem and uh and decentralizing it uh which is uh a remarkable feat legacy economies are all about matter growing it moving it searching for special types of it transforming it and turning it into useful forms energy power and force such an economy moves at the speed of well matter and is friction filled plotting and subject to calcification most aspects of this kind of economy are heavy the scarcity of physical resources combined with the difficulty to cost effectively allocate them just in time and just where needed has driven the ethos of economies and social systems for millennia scarcity is the foundation of the prevailing global mindset which i would argue is fear we have a fear-based economy fear of not having what we need fear of not getting what others tell us we want it is difficult to be creative generous and flowing if you feel that you must constantly vigilantly protect yourself those you care about and the finite resources that you have organized and require for near middle and long-term survival when individuals and organizations have to constantly protect themselves from appropriation legal or not of their resources and hard-earned intrinsic value like identity and reputation prudent people become inclined to climb up tight act defensively following cautious strategies these are simply survival techniques in a context of fear and scarcity in a zero-sum game one party's gain equals another's loss so the net benefit is zero in a positive sum game all parties can benefit the ever-evolving system of the world has led to greater and greater expressions of civilization capabilities and general standard of living and health as a species we've erected systems and embraced collaboration over millennia enabling civilization to grow much more than grow to much more than the sum of its parts achieving positive sum as opposed to zero-sum results yet the fact that on a day-to-day basis we still operate squarely in the old paradigm that of scarcity and fear that we've inhabited since our days in caves and jungles means that despite the economic and social evolution we are still nearly all playing a zero-sum game on local scales in time and space in our zero-sum day-to-day mindset those who recognize our trigger points can leverage and have in pervasive and systematized ways the fear and perception of scarcity in the general population to create wealth for themselves and consolidate power this always involves coordination and collaboration creating positive sum pockets against a zero-sum backdrop but often this positive sum is distributed among a narrow set of the stakeholders government structures and joint stock corporations facilitate this consolidation of wealth and power the coordination of power usually comes under the guise of serving the general population the advertising industry social media and government have built systems that exploit scarcity fear and other triggers to manipulate the population for commercial and political gain monarchy's nation states and multinational corporations coordinate with their military-industrial complexes to organize cle kleptocracies some egregious and some more subtle framed of course as in the service of the people just don't ask why the king is divine or identify the kleptocracies or question the ever-expanding industrialization of the military or reject the prevailing programming of the education industrial complex at its most pernicious zero-sum mindset leads to control over education information and bodies and it is supported by the prevailing social and economic doctrine and it has recently been exacerbated by events globally in 2021 the zero-sum economic mindset is ever-present with the global economy and financial systems on the precipice of a cascading collapse triggered by covid but due to excessive debt throughout the system regional resource scarcity in food water energy freedom and problematic demographic shifts in many countries resulting in aging and shrinking of the working population the emergence of an alternative organizing principle one that is positive some would be welcome fortunately a powerful shift is in progress we are approaching a time where we as a society are becoming efficient and productive enough largely due to automation to handle our survival requirements relatively inexpensively and effortlessly compared to the cost of previous generations adequate food water shelter clothing and other physical necessities are getting much cheaper to produce and acquire robotics automation and autonomous decentralized protocol-based systems will keep the heavier bulky and mechanical elements of the global economy operational the manufacturing the mining the agriculture the construction and even the repetitive and menial jobs that humans must handle today soon humans will be free of these kinds of of jobs across nearly all of the population to pursue higher value activities and interests people plugging into decentralized protocols will enjoy greater economic and political agency on these systems that was previously not possible the next generation economy will be lightweight in the sense that data in the form of lighter electricity is pretty much what what the highest value elements of the information infrastructure is composed of the velocity of such an economy will increase over time from speeds of matter to the speed of light at the upper bound with no cost and time consumption reconciliation with no costly and time-consuming reconciliation required between disparate databases and with money securities art identity reputation and most of our jobs and leisure pursuits migrating to natively digital forms we will squeeze out pervasive delays and frictions in the global economy compounding every moment saved in every transaction and interaction will produce exponential growth in the natively digital economy protocol-based collaboration networks will see projects defined organized funded and governed these will be the platforms on which we work and play the economy will operate at such speed that some protocol-based collaboration networks will form spontaneously defined goals fund operations and implement solutions and just as quickly many of these will dissolve back into the sea of potentiality because either the goals were accomplished or someone came along and forked the open source code or the live operating protocol or even ran a vampire attack drawing the community over to a better system forking of systems designed to serve people is good we need choice and agilely evolving systems forking should be easy i predict that in the positive sum future we will build and favor systems that make forking of code data content and anything else required as easy as clicking a button or calling the fork platform function on a smart contract investing in a world in which forking is easy will require new approaches i expect we will invest in ecosystems and enable talent to move fluidly between projects in those ecosystems without the talent having to give up economic upside the sobel project is working on that model in a world of scarcity and we are still in that world intellectual property must be protected digital scarcity can be one solution but i look forward to a world that is evolving so fast that frictions like the protection of an intellectual property for periods of time give way to the protection of rapid and incessant innovation emerging digital informational economies facilitate ease of creation duplication modification sharing and communication in a word flow ubiquitous flow wikipedia defines the flow state as the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus full involvement and enjoyment in the process of the activity the flow state can be achieved at a societal scale when the economic and social ethos shifts from self-protection and taking to selflessness and giving with a focus on the well-being of the collectives that we are associated with if it is not difficult or overly expensive we should often choose to give if it enables someone to be more effective more efficient less constrained or even just a little bit happier positive energy begets positive energy helping everyone around you to be better improves the context that you are embedded in we are moving from a near zero sum economy to one based on structures with interdependent positive feedback loops positive feedback loops of collaboration giving and sharing will build a positive sound society the glue that binds our social fabric is trust when we lived in small tribes our trust circle was small and manageable by individuals as we developed more complex societies we needed to add rules and centralized rulemakers and enforcers these systems worked reasonably well for a long time but now organizations and individuals are able to project great destructive power at a distance inexpensively and predict or shape our intentions from the tracks we leave on the internet in some ways certain web platforms may know us better than we know ourselves humanity has outgrown our trust infrastructure fortunately for all of us in our ecosystem we are developing the next trust paradigm based on decentralized protocols agreed upon algorithms to come to consensus regarding the economic and social present and past and decentralized identities and reputation systems that can serve as digital twins to actors and elements in the physical world we're building a new automated objective trust foundation for our planet that is stronger cheaper and more agile enabled by this new global trust foundation many of the projects and companies here at denver are building the next generation of global financial infrastructure that will enable the world's systems to be rebuilt on sturdier foundations in a positive some society rules are defined by collaboration networks and built into the software that runs the systems punishment for breaking society's rules will be mostly economic for example in the form of slashing of stake rather than incarceration alter altercations among nation-states or collaboration networks will be fought with tools that influence economic well-being and mind share and will rarely involve kinetics explosives and other deadly weapons examples of a positive some collaboration networks in our ecosystem are plentiful ethereum 2 provides broad and unprecedented opportunity to build and have stake in the foundation on which the world systems will be re-architected automated market makers are liquidity providers coordinating guaranteed exchanges of tokens with fees accruing to users and governance done by users filecoin and ipfs are bringing broad granular control and configurable permanence to the read write web and we are seeing rapid evolution of broad participatory governance systems across our ecosystem each tailored to its platform there's been much talk over the years about an approaching singularity as machine intelligence and automation changes the human condition in a way that makes post-singularity humans or intelligences unrecognizable or incomprehensible to pre-singularity humans some believe that the field of artificial intelligence or a specific ai will launch into an extreme positive feedback loop and eclipse humanity or turn everything to grey goo it can be argued that there will be no inflection point no obvious moment or event that changes everything from the start of biological history intelligence has been on an exponential growth curve and anywhere you stand if you look backward in time it looks fairly flat and if you look into the future you see a powerful upturn quickly leading to a vertical wall of unfathomable complexity and possibility expect we will continuously flatten the singularity in this smoothed singularity interpretation humans and machine intelligence will likely evolve in tandem with a variety of hybrid types emerging elon musk's neural link and brian johnson's kernel will make it possible to read from and send current to individual neurons we will be able to map store and transmit neural patterns that encode perceptions experiences thoughts and ideas two people that share similar backgrounds will be able to communicate seemingly telepathically via embedded chips several people could in real time make a collective decision employing the latest on-chip proof-of-stake consensus algorithm the social shift from taking to giving as the ethos for economic and social processes may just be the inflection point if there is one that future generations and possibly ours will perceive as the singularity the act of giving elevates mood in both the giver and receiver and in collaboration networks that can have powerful economic consequences we're building the foundations that will enable humanity and all of its societies to live in the flow state to design and play only positive some games we can achieve this in interpersonal interactions and we can evolve society in this direction as well in a world of interoperating decentralized protocols society can upgrade its goals and kpis from gdp and geographical dominance to becoming an ownership and stewardship society to improving mental emotional and societal health to improving systems of governance and the supporting systems of education and discourse and to advancing civilizations off world the preceding trust paradigm that of centrally applied subjective trust lasted millennia through profound societal and technological shifts this new automated objective trust paradigm that is capturing the imagination of the world might be durable enough to undergird societies for a very long time as well so take the ethos of giving and flow that's transactions interactions solutions conducted with vastly increased trust velocity and ease and inject that into a thousand different business verticals each positively feeding back onto one another then stand back and prepare for liftoff the current generation of hackers that's you all have astounding opportunity in front of them this is the evolution we need to get humanity back on track this is the foundation we need to evolve and mature as a species with the elon musk doing otherworldly things and with jeff bezos shifting his major focus to blue origin it is up to us to contribute the positive sum software infrastructure that will constitute the next system of the world and other worlds as this is the fuel that will propel the collective networked organism called humanity beyond this pale blue dot thanks joe we really appreciate you coming you look like a pale blue dot cat hello we're just out here in the ether having an entirely too much fun with the green screen here thank you for the uh the insights joe it's always uh fun just to kind of see where your head's at and just putting everything together in terms of uh you know all the uh the impacts a little bit distracted here by this orbital john though proof of john is in the ether trust me he's there i don't know about you guys but this is all making me really uh miss you know having an in-person conference it it kind of uh it sucks the devcon's been delayed again but uh you know we're all looking forward to seeing everyone and in person when that's a thing um in the meantime you know we have this uh cool uh minecraft sports castle and other vr things poker tournaments chess tournaments uh we've got minecraft melee tonight we've got dj live streams we've got over a hundred artists contributing to our crypto voxels nft art gallery and auction so we'll see everybody around joe again thank you so much we'll see you in a virtual space i'm sure um just let me know where you're at and we'll come meet so thanks a bunch everyone