Ethereum Foundation Values by Aya Miyaguchi (Devcon4)

hello everyone welcome to pride and welcome to they've come for and for those of you who haven't met me my name is aya Miyagi I am executive director of the theorem foundation I have been to past that comes in Shanghai and also in Cancun last year but this one feels special as this is the first time as an organizer and I'm excited to see a lot of familiar faces and also excited to meet new people we tried our best to welcome new members of the community to discount this year and you may have attended various events throughout the year in the world and you if you have heard my talks you probably know I have spent this year sharing my thoughts on the values and philosophy of youth am and the foundation and to kick off today one of they've come for I like to share a family of deep thoughts for some background I've been in the crypto industry of Fisheries since 2013 and my original interest in boxing was its potential to empower the empower the powerless underserved and also restore the balance that society has lost and through my experience I also learned the biggest obstacle of the blockchain success is not necessarily in the implementation but overcoming the existing systems and people's mindset for so many people boxing wasn't an idea to be feared mainly because but spooly understood so I needed up spending a lot of time putting those gaps but also on education and then III was born and I felt this this evening represented hope but I liked about him originally was how it embraced the spirit of Kaizen so you you probably have heard about this word and this is often used for assembly line or supply chain but it simply the word simply means a continuous change for better improvements and I think that's exactly how a theorem was created by batalik return and also how it has evolved and you will see here about those improvements in the next batalik talk about East 2.0 but also from many speakers at this Def Con every time when I learn about new project in crypto I think about two things one is technology and the other is philosophy technology can change the world but I believe it's philosophy that moves people to try to improve and also philosophy is what guide us toward the right direction and with our philosophy the tool cannot change the world and lately I have had chances to speak with visionaries and healers of the early days of the internet and increasingly I feel that the internet was created for the freedom of people's activities voice and rights however we have also seen how the Internet has contributed toward more centralized systems in especially in the past few years this is why we need to be cautious as an industry blogging could create intentionally or unintentionally more centralized systems under the name of decentralization so as I said a team offers hope with its huge technical potential but I also believe even more so for its well-intentioned philosophies and it's people who continuously try to improve this and we are lucky to have this glowing community but we also have a new challenge to maintain our philosophies and the culture and this is exactly why I envision this DEFCON to be a strong opportunity for us to think not just about what and how we are building but about why this is an opportunity for us to remind ourselves why we are working on a theme and share our philosophies and visions with people around us and there's also a lot we can learn from the helos of the internet many of whom share our philosophy a mission and it is also very important now for us to learn from our kindred spirit outside of crypto as well for that in addition to taken research talks and discussions this year we have great risk of inspiring speakers we have Stewart brand from the long down Foundation Brewster Kahle from the Internet Archive Glanville of the book particle market Kaspar colleges from the Estonian government and also call a doctor a cipher author and activist and I also like to mention the city of Prague is perfect for this years they've come many times in history this city has lost its identity and its voice and also was controlled by central power centralized powers it was absurd for many years and the Nazis during the World War two and most importantly during the Cold War the public actually believed that this city could be the model of communism ideologies and lost its freedom again with the spirit of Kaizen I like to believe we can always learn from the history and we can do so by being in this beautiful city but also we can learn from people in the city and how they have achieved their freedom back again let me talk about the foundation for a little bit I joined the foundation early this year and it's been a thrilling experience when I joined there was natural requests and pressure to make the foundation more into corporate or a startup way and then I thought about what Ethan was all about but I also spoke with a lot of people in the community and also of course focused with Alec who was the big influence on this and then somehow it put me into this like very thin state of mind and I thought about my roots and why I decided to support its aim and then I realized these are overrated what felt most right to me was this principle of subtraction in this today's society we are program to by you addition and then the society has trained us to believe that the more is better the bigger is better but this addition has dark side more people comes at the cost of more resources more money comes at the cost of exploiting human and more power comes at the cost of human inequality when we are thoughtlessly we create embarrass in the world this is why we have to increasingly think about this philosophy of subtraction pursuing the centralization and also when we are building this ecosystem and also making decisions to build an organization and this philosophy is not really new to me in Japan we have this expression called beauty keys and no big aku which literally means beauty in subtraction and it's deeply rooted in them Buddhism it's similar to minimalism but not quite the same subtraction allows ideas taste or strength to exist in their purest form the idea is used in food martial arts design everywhere and you can also find this idea in the Western culture - and I believe this community would understand this and one of the reasons why this open-source project has attracted the many of people and one of the reasons why I wanted to support idiom so going back to how to build a foundation building it in a corporate or startup structure they don't feel right these can be quite different one is in more hierarchy structure and the other can be flat but both in to grow bigger add more at the foundation we actually aim to grow small that doesn't mean we are not hiring but hiring should be where only the foundation can do and we try to minimize power wherever we can as much as possible because what we want to glow is the entire ecosystem not just the eternal foundation so as the community grows and then there's the industry goal naturally we can be tiny part of it and we see the entire attorney work system like a constellation in this concentration there are developers researchers enterprises and then different stars create different shapes and then it's the Chiefs can be different depending on what we are improving scaling the security UX privacy or like who is affected and user the apps government enterprises or nonprofits each group and individual is connected by their work solution and impact in the foundation is the one who tries to coordinate these collaboration and collaborations and communications between those stars and power them where we can buy either directly funding them or connecting with other stars I would also like to mention there are many hidden stars you probably most of the time you hear big public names but the more I learned about this community I believe like there are many hidden stars who are critical to maintain this decentralized structure and then most of the time they don't want to be public but you know like these hidden stars are inevitable without them we can connect these dots and speaking of empowering one of our main activities is giving grants you know this year we have provided about 20 million u.s. dollar amount of grants to more than 70 individuals and organizations and we invited them to Def Con and probably you saw some of them at grantee showcase if you like like we invited them so that you can talk to them and then you can ask their experience and we would like to continue and continue doing this hopefully more more a quicker and also how we dip one is in the decentralized way this is something like people a lot not many people know we work with actually community members to identify what are the missing pieces in the development and research work and then we actually work with community members to decide on who should work on these missing pieces and also we work with community members to fund together or sometimes let them fund directory so there are many funding mechanisms it's existing in the system and we do not care where the money is from as long as we are making creating positive impact and it looks a little chaotic now but in order for us to maximize our impact this is at this at this moment this is where we are and we were trying to organize and coordinate better but that that's what we chose to do okay lastly I like to give special thank you to the city of plug other than offering this beautiful city in place the city is providing the free transportation to Epcon attendee during DEFCON time so thank you sorry anyway it's ok and also I have to mention that there are many volunteers from the city community members I I don't know if they can be here but the community members here have been really supportive in helping throughout the entire time since we decided on the city and that I like to give big thanks to those people thank you very much [Applause] Joseph Joseph is the leader of the community members and he is going to come on the stage in a minute but so to close this I like to encourage you to exploit this beautiful city apply as much as possible but also Huli extra napkin and then get to know each other and then share your values and philosophies with others and enjoy the event thank you very much [Applause] you