Web3: An Evolutionary Perspective with Kevin Owocki

I learned that vamping is when you need to just kill time on stage and you bring an incredible energy to the space and to the stage Griff so uh snap to a Griff um the title of my talk today is how crypto can regenerate the world I am Kevin owaki uh formerly of git coin I don't know if you've heard but I've disaffiliated from Bitcoin and now I'm building a regen Venture studio called super modular that builds regenerative de-op sometimes on top of get coins uh new Grant stack in aloe protocol and uh sometimes on top of hyperserts and other Primitives in the space so um how many people in the audience have heard of get coin grants all right you on your phone over there have you heard of Bitcoin grants all right just trolling the people who aren't paying attention um hey have you heard of Bitcoin grants before yes all right a little crowd engagement got that out of the way so I wrote this post um a little while ago on the get going gov for um called a vision for a pluralistic civilizational scale infrastructure for funding public goods um and it was like 10 pages long and I've been told that uh people haven't read it so we're putting it into video form and putting lots of uh shiny objects on the on the screen so that people will actually pay attention to it so pluralism civilization civilizational scale infrastructure for coordinating and funding public goods so how do we scale what we're doing to the world so we're going to start off by talking about uh the Target and then uh we're going to talk about coordination at scale and then doing it right and that will be pretty much the talk so how crypto can regenerate the world please do not put on a panel entitled how crypto is regenerating the world it makes me cringe so much to hear that people think that is happening now Ponzi schemes pump and dump centralized exchanges rugging you thanks John yeah this [ __ ] Sam bankman freed um it's not regenerating the world yet this is a road map to get to that world so my big question is how do we rotate Capital attention resources from the degenerative projects to the regenerative projects the most important resources in the space how do we get them to go from working on pump and dumps in bigger casinos to things that are actually exporting good for the world and helping everyday citizens earn pay their mortgage by working on public goods that's how we solve the incentive alignment problem Uh Kevin what's a regenerative project I'm so glad you asked degenerative projects go down over time in resource capacity regenerative projects number go up over time and there's also an element of what happens when these projects hit fragility if you are over leveraged in the decentralized casino then you are too fragile how do we build an anti-fragile public goods funding infrastructure that becomes stronger over time when it hits a shock event so regen number goes up D gen number goes down over the long term okay and I think it's important to say that I'm not just talking about money here I'm talking about spiritual Capital intellectual Capital cultural capital material Capital uh those are the types of resources that we want to see regenerating over time and if you project where we are now at East Denver into the future that's what the x-axis is right here if our projected path is a degenerative pump and dump uh Ponzi scheme economy the Gary against their needs to over regulate then why don't we pull the future into a plausible or possible future even if it's a it's Preposterous let's put resources towards pulling us towards a more regenerative economy by the way if Gary Gensler is listening out here a regenerative crypto economic economy is one that self-regulates from the smart contracts it's anti-fragile and Resource number go up over time I think that if we can self-regulate then that that that's one way of saying it but if we can have crypto regenerating the world if it's a positive sum game then there's no need to have Regulators um on top of us so yeah thank you yeah yeah if you know Gary tell him tell him that we're regenerating stuff with crypto how do we solve coordination failures our nation's State infrastructure Industrial Age infrastructure solving national public goods how do we solve Global coordination failures things like climate change biodiversity collapse AI alignment the surveillance Tech economy um open source funding I think of beings as um I've been working with this philosopher and thinker named Daniel schmachtenberger who calls these things The Meta crisis the sum of all the coordination failures um is is the meta crisis so if you look at this graph of if the x-axis is how coordinated are we and the y-axis is how much control do we need to give governments um the first attractor of human behavior is coordination failure we are uncoordinated and so we have things like AI alignment issues and climate change and biodiversity collapse and so the natural response to that is let's regulate it let's bring it under the the realm of the state and let's regulate it and that's how you get the second attractor of human behavior which is dystopias once you give someone the ability to regulate over top of you then how do you know that they're not going to just steal your land plunder your resources things like that so our Target is to build a third attractor where we are both coordinated but we don't need to give a bunch of governance control to people who could abuse it I think that that's what crypto can do for the world and that is why I think web3 is well positioned to regenerate the world all right so how do we do it we're well positioned to do it a little building block for this talk I've been starting to think about these things called hold ons something that is simultaneously a whole and of itself part of a larger hole so me as a human I have one whole on in that I am a bunch of cells and organs that make up Kevin owaki and then us as a group are the whole on that is this presentation about how crypto could regenerate the world and then there's eth Denver and then there's and then there's Denver and then there's Colorado and then there's the United States and then there's the world those aren't all the whole lines but those are just a stack of where we are now okay and that's what's called a holarchy a connection between Hollands where a whole lot is both a part and a whole so basically you can do this with with like family kins all the way up to the state and then you can do this from cells and organs all the way up to the biosphere it's all Hollands everywhere around us so tldr I've been having a lot of conversations about individualism and collectivism and one of the things that I think is cool about holons and hologies is that it breaks The Duality of individual and versus collectivism because at a different level we are all a collective but also an individual so let's break that duality okay so how do we coordinate little basic coordination Preamble here prisoners dilemma game theoretical idea that uh if you have two prisoners who have been accused of a crime and they're separated from each other and given a plea bargain where if they rat on the other they get a better outcome um but if they coordinate together then they'll each get a reduced sentence and game theoretically if these people don't coordinate they're gonna um the the Nash equilibrium which is the coordination uh shelling point where people will most people go is without coordination they'll defect on each other and they'll all get a more of a sentence and if they cooperate uh sorry and but but if they do coordinate they'll they'll cooperate they could pass messages back and forth if they can coordinate then they're going to get a better uh a better outcome now this sounds like a silly example but you know when you think about things like climate change when we're all uh flying out teeth Denver and we're all expending a little bit of carbon to get here then um I'm I think it's pretty clear that we don't have the right coordination infrastructure for the world so you can take prisoners dilemma and you can attach it to a bunch of different areas of a whole lot where individuals are not coordinating even though their outcome would be better if they did I think web3 is a better coordination power tool our Legacy institutions for supporting public goods are often opaque unaccountable inefficient and centralized with high administrative overheads there are CEOs of ngos and non-profits that make 30 million dollars per year and they're just extracting from the markets that they serve what if we could build transparent uncorruptable programmable and permissionless coordination systems that are worldwide and we can solve some of these coordination mechanisms so let's get bring this and assimilate this information with the holonic architecture that I have set for this talk if you look at this whole on how does this individual interact with the whole well if they're going to fund public public goods which is a coordination failure funding public goods is a coordination uh a coordination game then I think that we can break into each hole on what are the mechanisms through which they're raising money to fund public goods and what are the distribution mechanisms where the people who are providing value are able to get rewards for doing that legitimately so the end end state of this is that if you're in this whole on then you can be fixing potholes or funding sourcing AI alignment and you can pay your mortgage and support your family instead of having to go work on private goods go work at Chase Bank in order to support your family we can stack of pluralism of coordination mechanisms inside of these whole lines and different coordination mechanisms can do different things for the whole on in the whole on the ethereum ecosystem we have multiple public goods funding um I am most closely associated with Bitcoin I don't know if you know this but I've disaffiliated from Bitcoin recently and I'm no longer leading anything there the Dow's in charge of it but there's a pluralism of coordination mechanisms in the ethereum ecosystem really excited about optimism retroactive public goods funding Dow drop retroactive Publix good Goods funding get coin and CLR fund do quadratic funding and is a grab bag of all the different mechanisms so the pluralism not only create capture resistance within the ecosystem I don't know if we can fix the problem with my mic or if I can get a different mic that'd be great I think the battery might be dying or something all right this is anti-fragility there's probably Mike second okay um wow thank you okay so when we've got multiple ways for me to speak to you that anti-fragility yeah [Applause] yeah oh man I could work my way through something like that but I can't Vamp for 20 minutes so Griff you're a an All-Star anyway uh the plurality creates capture resistance it creates anti-fragility it creates that shock resistance um I don't know how much time I have it says six minutes but I started early I'd love to go for like five more minutes over the timer if you're in the AV Booth all right coordination at scale so we've established that we are at the intersection of all these different hold ons Bitcoin dial shelling Point ethereum ecosystem you are here we're at East Denver uh in the ethereum ecosystem that's a walkie that's all of you made a whole on for each of you in the audience um and if you think about how we scale okay so now we've got the holonic scaffold to civilizational scale public goods funding and if you look at the people in the family in the community that we've got here um and and you start to think about the coordination failures that exist at all these different levels of the whole lines uh cancer and runaway growth within your body is a coordination failure at the cellular level crime is a coordination failure at the Citywide level climate change is a coordination failure at the holonic planetary level I still have six minutes on the clock would love to get five minutes more if if possible since I started five minutes early cool thank you I I hope that means yes okay a shrug all right I'll go move faster digital public goods so basically these are all the digital hold-ons that you're in the open source software uh right up there that you're with is not well funded and that's a coordination failure um the fact that the dowels that you're in can't decide their governance problems is a coordination failure one of the things I think is really cool about the ethereum ecosystem having open source forkable codes mechanisms that are funding public goods in these ecosystems is that we can cross pollination between mechanisms and money between these two different types of Hollands our digital public goods funding infrastructure is ecosystem growth tools like Bitcoin grants aloe protocol retroactive public goods funding and what if we transposed those the coin market cap of crypto is one point trillion dollars uh right now or at least it was when I wrote this talk and geographic-based public goods funding uh my friend Griff green over here has told me that there's 10 trillion dollars per year that governance governments and non-profits are giving to public goods what if we could capture some of that Capital that's being inefficiently allocated through those other Holdings oh by the way we did a quadratic funding experiment in downtown Boulder and delivered uh funds to downtown Boulder businesses that have been affected by the pandemic and um quadratic funding works in the mainstream which I think is just so cool um thank you to Brad Feld and vitalik buterin for funding uh the matching pool for this uh it was a lot of fun okay so that's coordination at scale that's how we take what we're doing right now and harmonically scale it out to all the complexity of what we're doing out there so how do we do it right how do we not f it up I'm uh really excited about this idea of plurality um I never put this much text on a slide but I'm just really excited by this this quote uh from Gene Roddenberry the creator of Star Trek Concord as much as Discord requires the presence of at least two different notes the Brotherhood of man and woman is the ideal base basis on learning to Delight on our essential differences to learning to recognize our similarities the circle and the triangle combine to produce a gemstone in the center of the Union of words that creates music and song The Union of marriage creates children I just get the little special tingle when I think about plurality which is an argument for diversity from first principles so let's build a pluralistic public goods funding infrastructure let's build for cooperation across social distance as cooperation across social distance just means that like if you and I aren't in the same tribe then we're still going to coordinate with each other you know the get coin Dao has a coordination mechanism but how is get coin dial interacting with optimism and giveth and the rest of the ethereum ecosystem let's build core coordination across social distance and avoid low cooperation across social distance tribal Echo Chambers um let's build a civilizational sale public goods infrastructure that is all about uh fully forkable and modular open source code about localism so basically the individual has to rely on the local government has to rely on the state only in the federal only when necessary this is what the Fang and the web 2 companies really [ __ ] up they're just all learning over all of us with their surveillance capitalism at every hole on level and exporting value to their shareholders by driving an attention economy that that um just extracts our attention and extracts our capital all right um let's work around the first principles game theory that we already know about donut economics um Eleanor ostrom's eight principles for managing a Commons let's build for economies of scale so basically impact owls that all benefit from each other one of the coolest things about Bitcoin grants 1.0 was that when a grant was in multiple matching pools it would get like a one dollar contribution would equal a hundred dollars from one matching pool and 500 from another matching pool coin Center was in like three different matching pools and a one dollar contribution to coin Center a few rounds ago would be equal to a thousand dollars worth of funding for crypto advocacy and so these economies of scale of those stackability of of this stuff I think is really really really really really cool and uh it was so good that like the Bitcoin Max he's accused uh Bitcoin of being a Ponzi scheme because they didn't understand how quadratic funding works and I still haven't been able to uh explain it to them but maybe when we do uh quadratic funding for Bitcoin and we export across cooperation across social distance and ability for them to fund their own ecosystem they will finally get it probably not then but when they see the matching pool they'll uh or the the the multiplier they will we'll dig at Bitcoin Maxis because I know my audience Here Eddie of Denver economies of scale so how can the global the global uh design pools and platforms support the local scale and vice versa collective intelligence a lot of you may not know this about Bitcoin grants but it's not just a uh a fundraising mechanism it's actually a signal aggregation mechanism for the ethereum community to see what is the next important thing for the ethereum community this is a graph of Bitcoin grants around 11 where each node in the network is a contributor and each Edge is a contribution we're building a mesh network of signal aggregation to figure out which public goods we actually care about and by the way we're doing it way faster cheaper and better than a government ever could do uh get coin grants is uh signal aggregation for the mechanism and I think that you know when BCS look for deal flow and the ethereum foundation looks for which grants they're going to fund they can use git coin as a signal aggregation mechanism they can also use the other mechanisms for doing it okay this one's heady but stay with me because it's really dense once you get over the or fun when you get over the learning curve what if we build an evolutionary tree of the web3 ecosystem if you've ever seen a evolutionary tree in nature where single cell organisms become multicellular cellular organisms become uh become mammals but I think that the crypto ecosystem has started with the Byzantine generals problem being solved and then from 2008 to present we have a cycle of Bull and Bear cycle of bear markets in which we have the Bitcoin ecosystem and by the way have like Mount gox which is an Extinction event in that ecosystem and then we have BTC forks and eth and we have uh early dowels and icos and there's like another Extinction event because anyone in the audience still use dentacoin not a single hand is using denta coin [ __ ] all right while it's uh D5 alt layer ones Bridges eth layer twos nfts there's an evolutionary approach to this space where we're using Market selection instead of natural selection to select what the capital intention and talent resources is going to as David in the audience hello as David Hoffman in the audience would say third microphone anti-fragility plurality Etc David David Hoffman would say uh what's the next meta and at one point I'm gonna I'm gonna convince you that regen is the next meta at some point as we rotate Capital attention and talent into the next Market cycle each bull market is a Cambrian explosion of talent of new projects in each bear Market is an Extinction event but the projects that make it through each cycle are the keystone species the species that all the other things rely on for support and so how do we build keystone species that are regenerative and rotate capital and talent uh into web three all right growth into web scale so we're going to build this holonic infrastructure for funding and coordinating public goods right now there's just a little regen dot in the middle of the ecosystem but as people figure out that coordination is the new meta David Hoffman uh we are going to reach an end state in which we are coordinating around our holonic public goods because in the early stage The Meta for these ethereum Dow ecosystems is coordinating their own attention and capital we bootstrap the mechanisms we build the muscle and then we bring it to web scale for the entire civilization to fund their public goods we siphon off money from governments that are doing it uh administrative with high administrative overhead and we bring all this to web scale and by the way Gary Gensler keeps his hands off of it because it's regenerative the whole way up and down okay there we go I'm also inspired uh I know Simona pop is here but biomimicry is one of her memes and like what's the uh like the idea that like as a forest grows then the root system gets more and more complex as we uh interoperate with each other the people who are building the mycelial networks of these things are the ones who are building the networks that I just think are really cool they're gonna be the one that's how nature coordinates with my serial networks The Roots underground that channel resources to each other we're building the infrastructure for the mycl network of web3 right here oh my gosh we're already at the end and I'm only a couple minutes over all right so um if you haven't read this post uh hopefully the you know like now people understand my vision at least for pluralistic civilizational skill for funding public goods how crypto can regenerate the world how do we rotate Capital attention and resources to regenerative projects how do we make regeneration the new meta is the open question that I will leave you to you leave to you how do we move from a projected future that is degenerative into a plausible or possible adjacent future in which uh crypto is regenerating the world and Finn that's it together um so sajal is uh I hope I'm saying your name correctly is uh we're localizing so green pill the podcast that I run on the bank list network uh we're localizing that into a bunch of meetups in a decentralized movement for a headless brand uh that reject like if you want to get involved in regen stuff and you want to help out stajal is over there can you raise your hand and has pamphlets about how to get involved um thank you for coming to my talk and I love you all I hope we do something good with this opportunity uh David has a are you are you just clapping okay all right wow wow okay we we did it all right um I am going to go hang out at the super modular Booth which is right there super modular is a regen web3 Venture Studio come please take swag please ask questions about how we can do this and uh I'll see you I'll see you over there peace and love goodbye