EthCC 2: Scott Moore

that's 28. yeah i think we're okay there we go cool close okay cool and good to go all right um yeah i guess i'll get started um thanks for coming my name is scott moore i work for a project called gitcoin and in short we help sustain open source software through a variety of products one of them is bounties which lets you take any uh github issue and bounty in any erc 20 token the other is grants which is a major part of sustaining open source maintenance through recurring funding for maintainers so what is open source exactly um in short there's sort of three things like the release of the software the source code needs to actually be like open and in public it needs to be royalty free and there can't be any modifications to the software that are in contravention of the original license so for example gpl is one where you're not supposed to use the license the software for any commercial purpose and open source software is pretty popular today about 96 of applications uh use open source software and about 57 code on average is from open source so it's a pretty big part of our ecosystem it's also worth a lot of money so it's worth about 387 billion dollars and it's a surprise then that most maintainers aren't really you know that active in fact there aren't very many maintainers at all so in total these are three figures of the average number of maintainers within most open source software projects you'll notice the average there is one to two so like if there's so much money to be made in open source software it's kind of surprising that there aren't more maintainers doing this work and one of the reasons for this it turns out is that no one's actually giving them money so none of this money from open source software is actually going to the maintainers and so none of them are actually finding time or energy to put towards it on a full-time basis very few of them are i should say and so you'll notice most of them are non-funded 62 of respondents to this poll by then essentially mentioned that they're not getting any funding others are being funded by their employers to do this part-time and then there's a long sort of tale of other smaller funding options that are just not seeing really a lot of usage today and so the dilemma for this is especially prominent now because there's not a lot of money and also there's a lot more work so you'll notice that on the left here this is showing the number of dependencies per packages per package in green which is rising exponentially and the number of packages per dependency um in uh in blue and there's a lot of um you know work that goes into maintaining these dependencies and ensuring that everything is correct within your code base and you know despite this massive growth and the amount of work that it's taking to maintain an open source repo no one's really getting paid for it and so this is happening at the same time that like the number of users for open source software is growing exponentially so you know these aren't apples to apples but like in 1998 netscape had 180 000 users and in 2018 last year there were 11 million users for lowdash for popular npm package and so like that's a like massive improvement or increase in like the number of users but none of that really goes to the maintainers and so it's no wonder then that like a lot of maintainers burn out um this is uh jack he was a maintainer of semantic ui it's an interface it was a project very similar to react or to vue it was a front-end sort of interface way to build front ends and it was effectively shut down after about three years of work because jack didn't have any time to really spend on it similarly there was um the case of openssl which i think is probably more prominent um back in 2014 there was a bug called heartbleed how many people are familiar with heartbleed yeah so part bleed was effectively um a massive bug caused billions of dollars of damage and the reason it happened was because there were one or two maintainers that effectively were getting paid nothing to work on this critical piece of software they just cared passionately about um you know full-time uh they had full-time jobs they couldn't actually spend like all their time on this um and so they tried their best to catch all the bugs but they just couldn't within the time frame that was available to them and so you know the the quote here at the bottom it might be a bit hard to see on this slide it's like the mystery isn't that a few overworked volunteers missed this bug in the first place the mystery is that it hasn't happened more often one more example uh more recent um how many of you are familiar with um event stream the recent issues there um in short event stream was a npm package that was managed by um one sort of key maintainer who has done a lot of work in a few communities including uh secure scuttlebutt which is quite close to the ethereum community there's a lot of overlap between some of the projects there and you know this was a really salient point to me because you know he mentions here like one time i was working as a dishwasher in a restaurant i made the mistake of being too competent got really promoted to cook it was only like a 50 cents an hour pay rise but massively more responsibility didn't really feel worth it and so writing a popular module he says is like this times a million and the pay rise is zero and that's sort of what it feels like to be a maintainer in open source software today so how do we actually solve this problem in short we're sort of seeing two major trends or three major trends in sort of this magic internet money world that like at least provide some way to like try and rectify this the first is that with programmable money we can actually program our values into money if we value open source we can actually try to support open source there's an alignment of incentives within the ethereum community as well around how we actually think about open source software and so because of that a lot more projects in this space relative to the average in general in like most tech are willing to support open source and again you know it's easy to transfer value globally within this sort of ecosystem and so we've been able to bootstrap a network of coders who are willing to work on these kinds of open source problems very quickly globally in a way that wasn't really feasible beforehand and so you know everyone needs devs everyone needs open source everyone needs things built especially more these days remote so we created a marketplace that essentially lets you do that i think most people here are probably already familiar with this marketplace so i won't like belabor this point too much but in short you know as i mentioned at the beginning we take github issues and we let you basically bounty those issues out we don't have a coin it's like in any token any currency really including eventually fiat currency we don't want this to be particular to any coin or particular to any funding mechanism you should be able to choose how you want to fund open source software and this is solving this user-to-contributor problem so there's sort of three stages here there's this growth and this is something that's been talked about by a lot of people in the open source community for a while so what you often have is um users who are you know very very active you usually have a lot of them in a lot of these open source projects you have many uh contributors but not nearly as many users as as you have users and then you have like a few maintainers like the one or two i talked about before and so what we're trying to do with this first bounties product and what we've sort of done to date is get more of these users to actually onboard to these repos and become contributors because that conversion rate currently is like extremely low so we're trying to figure out how can we get more of these people to actually engage with these projects and become long-term like sustainable contributors of these projects and so this is sort of the way that works in short you know we're getting money currently from the ef the foundation the ethereum foundation the ethereum community fund and consensus and so big thanks to all three of those organizations for supporting us in this and then we're effectively giving that money in addition to money that's being given out by other projects in the ecosystem to their own projects or to other products they want to support to these core open source infrastructure projects so like in the context of ethereum a lot of those are things like layer 2 solutions or beacon chain implementations core pieces of software even like lib p2p core pieces of software that people need to actually function in this ecosystem and one of the reasons this is possible is that as i mentioned it's really easy to transact small amounts of value so like typically it would be very hard for people to actually get you know 60 uh to like do something for 60 online and like the point of this isn't necessarily even that they're getting 60 the point of this is that it surfaced the issue to them so they can actually pay attention and like collect that 60 just as an ancillary benefit and this helps solve that problem of like maintainers or contributors not having enough time to contribute to open source software if you're getting paid for it and this is often a point you come up against if you're getting paid for it you actually just have more time to do it because you don't have to work a full-time job as much ideally not at all and so this is a first step towards that and so today we've got some pretty good stats this is like our mesh network usually it would be animated but i have this in pdf so it's not going to work here we have about 300 or so funders um 17 000 or so developers that have sort of uh tested out the site um and about 3 000 um transactions to i think that number of coders is actually quite a bit higher now but those are people that have actually like full-time completed bounties using metamask um and this was launched in november 2017 most of this growth was in the last sort of six to seven months so it's been great to see people actually actively using this in the community and so you know i talked about user to contributor but the question is and one of the problems with bounties which we talk about a lot and like which we get you know questions about a lot is like how do you actually get these people to become maintainers and like how do you make sure people aren't just doing one-off tasks and never coming back to repo and never doing anything else with this project that they care so much about and the solution to this is effectively what we're calling git coin grants and git coin grants was launched about two months ago it's effectively patreon for open source and it provides a recurring stream of revenue to open source maintainers in a way that's sort of um like patreon and it uses eip1337 to do that and yeah i mean what we've done so far is uh effectively used this paper by vitalik glenn and zoe to implement something called capital constrained liberal radicalism in short what that means is we're matching the contributions that people make to these bitcoin grants based on the square of the sum of the square roots of contributions and so all that means is like suppose you have two contributors donating four dollars each um you're taking the square root of four plus the square root of four squared 16 and if you have that same amount i think i actually have a slide for this here this is the paper by the way i'm just outlining sort of uh the rules i would recommend reading it um it's a bit more like abstract but i think it's a good grounding for this sort of subject if you're interested and so this is the slide i was talking about in short like if you have some fixed amount of funding it will actually the match will increase based on the total number of contributors and so the point of this is essentially just that you're trying to create some way for people to feel like their contributions individually matter and for those contributions to signal some additional like interest from the community in funding a particular project and so that's sort of what we've done here as a starting point with round one uh which we actually just finished a couple weeks ago so chrismatic labs was able to get about 6.5 k in matching funding moloch was able to get about 4.4 and then there's a sort of a long stream you know swap as well of other projects that have been able to effectively you know double or um you know even in some cases like quintuple their contributions um based on this matching model and so with this in mind we've decided to sort of increase this increase the stakes of this and we've essentially decided to do round two which is sort of what i'm here to announce today so round two is funded in part by again the ethereum foundation consensus and some other sponsors in the community and it's also funded by the community itself and this is probably the most important slide and i'd like to thank eric connor from ethub for this sort of initiative so he created on his own accord this bitcoin torch initiative and we found out about it a few days afterwards and we're extremely thrilled that he was able to actually like round up some funds for this and get people engaged in this and so we've raised actually i think this number is out of date now we have about 15 000 indirect matched contributions from the community and these will be matched in that clr fashion um basically directly to the campaigns in round two and actually this qr code is active so like this is gonna be my you know please donate a dollar today moment where i ask you guys if you're interested to potentially donate to this campaign and so some of the actual projects in this round include radical exchange which is actually glenn's major initiative um their treasurer decided that this was a good good way to actually test out the campaigns that are actually like or the sort of concepts within radical markets um that they're actively trying to pursue through radical exchange um iron belly which is actually a a grin wallet um and the reason we decided to put a grin wallet on here is because actually i'm not sure if you guys are familiar with this like background but like hashmap and a lot of the grin team have not really gotten a lot of funding from the community at large and the reason for that is they didn't actually implement any um reward for themselves in their project and so they ended up sort of just being stuck not really getting a lot of funding and so we think this is a good bridge between the ethereum community and other communities by supporting grin we can support sort of like this idea that ethereum is about open source and is able to support it actually binance will be a large contributor to this particular initiative um plasma this is a particular plasma implantation by keokin um matthew slipper has done great work on this um blockchain education network which has been around since i think 2012 and is a large initiative to educate people about not just ethereum but blockchain in general um block scout an open source block explorer and your lib3 which is a very critical part story of the python ecosystem so a lot of these things and what we're trying to get across here these things aren't necessarily just ethereum projects in general we're trying to support anything that is open source and this is sort of our first step towards that outside of just ethereum one other thing so eip 789 was just introduced by kevin our founder and it's a kind of potentially controversial initiative but we think it's important to start a discussion around this idea of sustainable open source in ethereum and so what the point of this initiative is is to allow some kind of 20 fee on issuance rewards to support ecosystem stewardship and to support ecosystem development and so you know this is just one initial proposal for this the goal of this is not to say that you know we have the solution to inflation funding and in fact there are already a lot of comments on this and we have a lot of problems to sort out here but this is a good first step in thinking about what these sorts of sustainable funding mechanisms might look like and we encourage everyone to be involved in this discussion and so with that you know i'll give you the last sort of um ask for matching um the clock starts now if you guys want to basically have the square of the sum of the square roots of your contributions matched in this clr fashion please take a look here and donate today so thank you guys so much for your time and i'll take any questions that you guys have [Applause] i hope uh the the contributions in in a legal sense from from community members or from from companies are they donations yeah in this context they are donations um there is not like a um 501c3 or any equivalent it's just a sort of donation based on you're interested in it's exactly it's a donation based correct yeah there's no expectation of any kind of reward for this it's really just if you support or think an open source project is useful um give them a few die basically right this is important yeah so like you're actually signaling the interest in this project so like this will inform a huge amount of matching um love git coin love everything it does love the grant system also used it uh with streamer so it works uh from our perspective great but saying that um is there a problem here with the if you know you have the foss model free and open source the problem being free uh that essentially applications that haven't really sorted out they haven't like utilized token economics properly and that's why they're failing and have to rely on crowd contributions isn't that the essential issue here so i think that's a reasonable like in some cases um like kind of path of reasoning but there are a lot of projects that can't necessarily do that or where it doesn't make sense to do that so a good example is like like docker is like an application layer sort of like open source project and like docker was able to build an enterprise business and that's fine like docker has sustained itself very well on that on that basis um and it was able to receive venture funding on that basis but a project like openssl can't really do that very effectively and it's not clear at least on the face of it what the token economic model would be for something like openssl so to me that sort of one of the challenges is i think there's a benefit obviously to tokenization in some circumstances but i don't think we want every project out there to just generate a token for the sake of being able to sustain what they're doing i think there's a lot of cases where that's hurt the ecosystem in the past where people have just thought this is the only way to actually necessarily build wealth or or build a sustainable business and so to me that is a challenge so i would say you know tokenization is not bad i don't think we should demonize it in any way but i think there are circumstances where it works and doesn't and we need to be mindful of those other circumstances cool thanks so much you