Where do you belong in Web3? with Joshua Tan

All right. So, I'll be talking about where do you belong in web 3 uh or the political, economic and governance attitudes of folks in web 3. Uh this is joint work with Lucio Corpus uh Seth Frey UC Davis and Medgov and myself Medv and University of Oxford. All right. So, what's the basic point of this talk?

It's really just saying that web 3 is actually incredibly ideologically diverse. uh that it's not just, you know, libertarians and deans and, you know, people out to make as much money as possible, though I'm sure there's many of those people downstairs and perhaps here as well. We all like money. Uh but it's actually really really like different folks from different walks of life with different kind of interests coming here and experiencing this ecosystem and building a set of technologies. Uh and what we did is we put some numbers on that diversity with a bunch of fun memes.

So I'll go into that later. So today's talk I'll go quickly through like the quiz the instrument we use to collect a bunch of data to put numbers on the diversity. I'll go over the factions like sort of like this is the broad sort of landscape of different clusters of types of people you might encounter in web 3. I'll break that down into a political dimension economic dimension and a kind of governance dimension. I'll briefly round out the talk with a little bit on future work.

So a little bit background on the quiz. Uh so it was created at MC Con 2021 which is also in Denver actually and launched in Lisbon in 2021. We collected a data set of uh 3,700 responses. The quiz itself is inspired by and partly based on Pew's political typology quiz. If you're familiar, Pew is a kind of like um American think tank that runs a lot of uh surveys uh about politics and economics in the states.

Uh and the basic idea is you take this quiz. It's relatively short. You get assigned at the end based on your questions uh a faction or class. If you ever take those Harry Potter quizzes, exactly the same kind of idea. Uh you can see there uh from Bruce uh the at the end of he took this quiz and he got a this little symbol representing this is the kind of the faction he got as well as a description of what exactly that meant.

And this was uh this original research was incentivized through NFTTS on polygon and you can see that collection on openc right now. So oh also this is a example of italic shilling for us. Uh he was uh flagged as a gavinist. I'll tell you a little bit about the history. Uh it's kind of like a fun part of uh crypto.

But uh Gavinist uh is a form of is a kind of class of let's say governance factions named after Gavin Wood who's one of Vitalik's original collaborators on Ethereum. And uh he's like ah I don't feel like a Gavinist. But at least according to the quiz that's exactly what Vitalik is. Anyways, all right a little bit about the factions. Uh so I'm not going to go super deep into this but I'll just say it kind of represents three different dimensions of crypto.

So we have all the way on the left of course top left crypto leftists uh which obviously rough and represent the sort of left side of the political dimension going to dowist which are more communitarian neutrals crypto libertarians as per my personal favorite. You can see the little Shrek there. I feel like Shrek is like probably the best meme representation of a libertarian I can think of. Uh and then crypto ancaps which stands for crypto and narcic capitalists quite a number of them you might be surprised uh floating around us. Uh on the economic angle there are people there are earners so people who are really here to just you know who have a job and get paid by a company often crypto and sometimes just in traditional you know USD or some other form of fiat.

There are crypto punks represented by the Yangat uh who are just here for like you know the vibes to chill to get the free food to go to the parties and the raves. Uh also a substantial portion of the community. NPCs are people who just like haven't really gotten into it yet. Maybe you are NPCs still but you know you can you can eventually get to a faction build some experience. uh they are techreneurs and that represents actually a huge fraction of the people downstairs because a lot of people in this space are building companies or building technologies one or the other that are often like interconnected uh which represents a large part of this ecosystem and of course our favorite uh class the dgens you know it's what makes this ecosystem what it is uh on the governance side this goes into a little bit of history uh so a fun history lesson uh I'll take questions at the end um on On the bottom left is Nick Zabo, computer scientist.

Uh, very likely the original Satoshi. Uh, there's Angela Walsh, who's a law professor who articulated some of the first positions around, hey, you know, this whole crypto, Bitcoin, Ethereum thing, maybe like the government should be at least somewhat involved. Uh, there's Lad Zamanir who is also on the founding team Ethereum who articulated this idea that actually, you know, people are pretty important in governance. you know, if we're going to like run blockchains and crypto, like like people need to make decisions and like you can't just have the code run itself. And uh on the bottom right, we have Gavin Wood, who also one of the Ethereum co-founders uh now runs Polka Dot/Parody or until recently, he stepped back recently.

But anyways, uh Gavin kind of represents this idea that, you know, onchain governance is the most important thing. just like whoever has the tokens, those are the people who get the votes and that we should just run this and not try to like sort of do any kind of like multistakeholder like asking like who cares about what those kinds of things less on the human side, more on the tech side. Uh so once again I'll just dig into the politics dimension here. Uh so this is a uh graph of the distribution uh computed on a finer politics score. There are like several questions I'll go into those later of uh who is of like basically the distribution of you know how extreme either left or right people are.

So you can see uh most people fall along if I can do this. Yeah. Okay. Most people fall into this like crypto libertarian camp like the medium crypto person is somewhat on the right actually. Uh but a substantial proportion are like quite leftists or communitarian let's say and then there's a decent portion of like true anarco capitalists who are just like you know screw the government let's just uh run the tech uh build our own network state.

So this is like pretty good sort of summary if you want to take one sort of like you know learning from this uh from this talk of this is what the this is the distribution of ideology at least political ideology in this space and as you can see it's like it's you know it's like pretty bell curvy right uh so some of the questions that came up so like we asked things like which statement comes closest to your views oh by the way uh if you pay attention until the end of the talk you get a reward as and I give you the link to the active quiz and you can actually take it and see what you come out as. So, uh, which statement comes closest to your views? Uh, so we asked like, uh, whether crypto teams make too much profit, uh, which tends to align with more right leaning sentiment, uh, or sorry, uh, left leaning sentiment in this case and crypto teams make a fair and reasonable amount of profit. And you can see it's pretty balanced here. But the point is this is like coming ex this is exactly the question that shows up in the pew political typology quiz for how we evaluate left and right in a kind of normal um sort of political circumstance.

Uh here we're asking questions about you know is the economic system in crypto fair uh or does it fair unfairly favor powerful interests? People seem to generally think okay it's actually kind of fair. I don't know you know from where you guys are sitting whether that feels true or not. Take the quiz let us know. Uh and also we ask questions around you know based on hard work you know can you actually like get something out of it and you can see most people around like 60% are pretty optimistic that participating in crypto in web 3 if you just work hard and apply yourself you can you know get a return on it essentially.

Uh but of course clearly not everybody and I should also say uh I don't uh make I'm not trying to sort of say which one is right but there are definitely I would say reasons that many people do think the bottom is well so I don't want to throw paint this is like everything's great you know that's not the picture I want to paint here uh and lastly of course we asked a traditional question in all these surveys is just how know do consu liberal or leftwing neither or conservative or rightwing. This is actually quite surprising and you might like you know based on the distribution I showed you before of like oh people like most people are going to be like libertarianish and on the right and then like actually almost like very very few people in crypto affiliate with like saying like I am conservative. Uh this probably has a few reasons behind it. For example um you know a lot of crypto is relatively global uh and like conservative liberal mean different things in different countries and different regions. Uh I would also say like libertarians may not directly sort of like reference themselves and think of themselves as conservative and of course like libertarianism does show up quite a lot in this ecosystem.

Uh so something like you know like I would say like 40% like a definitely significant plurality uh understand themselves or qualify themselves as some form of libertarian or affiliation. Uh but it is very interesting and one of the things we're going to be doing in a follow-up is kind of digging into this question of just how like what does conservative mean in these cases like what kind of how does my crypto political leanings my political leanings in this context map on to our traditional understandings of politics that's quite important because more and more people are adopting uh some form of web3 technology somehow entering into into this space and ecosystem. All right, going to economics. So, we ask questions like in this case like which statement comes closest to your views. Is crypto mainly a political philosophy or a lifestyle or mainly an economic technology?

Honestly, like for me like coming into this as a technologist, it was like this is incredible to me that like 45% of people really thought of crypto as a political philosophy or lifestyle. This was not about like the the tech. uh it was not about you know like oh the money or the bitcoin or the currency. It was really about like the the values and the philosophy and the politics that rep that this space represented uh or maybe the promise of that kind of politics, right? Uh that was really really surprising to me and I think speaks powerfully to like different elements of this ecosystem that you might not see in the booths out there or actually you probably will see in some of the booths out there.

Um this is a kind of like a this question kind of goes into well how are people actually engaging crypto? Uh so you know when they participate in web 3 are they here to earn a living and build a career? I'd say around like as you can see around 25% say yes. Uh around 40% sort of say they're actually here to like create some sort of social change. They're trying to sort of like pursue an a social or political agenda.

uh around uh once again coming back to our lovely deans uh around 30% are here just to make as much money as possible whether through investing, building tech, launching a company uh or just you know clicking some buttons and trying to get those rewards. Uh and around like 10% or actually maybe like more like 5% 7% they're just here to have fun, chill, feel the vibes. uh and into governance and regulation. Uh so uh you might have a little bit harder time so I'll try to go into this a little bit deeper but uh we ask questions like you know uh I would say around 50% of people believe all crypto governance should be onchain most or all crypto governance. So this is like you know like onchain voting uh doing sort of like having like minor validation in POS those kinds of questions.

a significantly smaller but still substantial percentage uh go all the way uh right and sort of say you know just don't let the humans be involved. The only thing like and this is like very closely associated to kind of like a Bitcoin maxi or what we call it Zabian like sort of like original Satoshi vision that just just this is an algorithm there's one application just let it run don't try to govern it don't let the humans get involved uh and then a the smallest portion sort of uh articulate that most and all crypto governance should be offchain so this is like uh I want to point out this is actually like how for example like Ethereum is actually run most governance of Ethereum in terms of making decisions about like sort of like the protocols and decisions around like that is like that doesn't happen on onchain it happens offchain and this is true of actually a lot of like sort of like L1's even L2s um the ones that are not like formalized as Dows um and uh and actually really surprising percent 18% says you know like really should be regulated by the government u in some sense this to me like given like where we are now like this see this feels low. I feel like more and more people have like gone on board with the fact that we're going to get regulated no matter what. Uh and we should just accept that and like figure out how to engage with it. uh and um hopefully I don't know how much time I have left but I might just skip this part but this is basically just saying like the key takeaway from this question is uh most people actually even though like people think that governance should be onchain they feel that you should try to engage a really as much as wide a variety of decision makers as you can including token holders who are you know and often these voting schemes are the ones with power but also node operators app like devs foundations and users.

So even though they want things to be onchain, they want that onchain kind of like system to be representative uh or at least take into account a wide variety of stakeholders. So it's just something to keep in mind. Oh, and I'll just say like uh once again pointing out like only like maybe like five to six% of people think core devs and technical staff of a blockchain should have the decision-making power. But in practice like this is exactly how Bitcoin and Ethereum are run. The vast majority of ability like power to make decisions and make changes to protocol lies in a really small group of technical staff and core devs.

Just something to keep in mind. Okay, it doesn't work. Ah, what happened? Okay. Uh, this slide goes into like okay what's um basically government regulation.

So government regulation of crypto this is this is like you know what the community thinks about regulation. So government regulation crypto can do some good. Most people believes that. Um but uh a substantial portion think uh you know just a little bit less think any kind of government intervention is going to do more harm than good. So you know obviously people are quite actually polarized on this question.

Uh though a significant fraction once again just says like you know we really the government really needs to be involved in these in the in these technologies. I'm going to skip this just in the interest of time. Uh we did have a question that sort of asked people like um you know which ecosystem they affiliated with. Uh in this case because we you know tended to like interact a lot with the builder communities. Uh we did end up getting mostly Ethereum kind of like you know adoption but we got quite substantial Bitcoin, Salana, Polka Dot and Cardano as well as well as like a pretty wide variety of other kind of affiliations.

Uh but what this allows us to do is compare things like you know like what does the community of Bitcoin people uh how does that compare with the people who care about Ethereum uh and some major differences that you kind of things you would expect is like crypto does not need human governance you know well yeah if you're adopting Bitcoin you're going to think substantially more uh or substantially more people in Bitcoin agree with this statement than people in Ethereum uh who should have this decision making power over blockchain. uh substantially more people in Bitcoin think that the token holders uh as determined by the protocol versus in Ethereum maybe they're thinking like oh actually we need once again this wide variety of wide uh wide ranging representation right it's kind of interesting one thing that we is not depicted here but is actually surprising or maybe not surprising depending on how cynical you are is that um uh the question that most distinguishes the most sort Like if you're going to ask a question, a single question to a Bitcoin person to a person in order to figure out whether they belong, they sort of participate in Bitcoin or whether they participate in Ethereum. Uh the actual question you should ask is do you think there's a gender problem in crypto? The thing that they most disagree about is do you think that there is a gender problem in crypto? I kind of let you guess that who's answering uh what to that.

Uh and once again, yeah. So, uh, Bitcoiners are a little bit more conservative. Uh, Ethereum is a little bit like actually dis neither leftwing or right-wing. So, this is actually kind of a little bit interesting, right? That people who participate in Ethereum are actually like trying to like disassociate more so than people who own Bitcoin uh, from either a left or a right kind of wing kind of self-descriptor.

All right. Uh, fun part. If you actually want to take this quiz, get a little assignment, post on Twitter. You can use this link or just go to metaggov.org/cryptoolitics.

Uh the quiz uh really only takes like five minutes. Just click through it and you can uh it'll take you through a set of links and you'll be able to see like what all these types mean. It's kind of nice history of or essentially ethnography of like this is all the variety and diversity that's happening in crypto. Actually pretty interesting. Um, I had a lot of fun sort of like just doing that research, trying to understand, oh, these are the these are names that follow on to my intuitions from just meeting all the people downstairs.

And, uh, this is actually now also a, you know, much more like fully described, fully fleshed out formal archive paper. Um, you can read it archive. It'll be published soon in a peer-reviewed journal. uh I can't say which one that is right now because it's not officially announced but it is very proud of this paper. It's actually really good.

It's a completely new data set doesn't exist in this space uh at all yet and we're hoping to improve it uh within future iterations which I'll talk about round out. Uh so yeah so final pair is coming out soon in our journal. Uh we're currently raising from a series of L1 foundations including parody to set up a basically next year's version with a much more rigorous demographic panel. Uh that was one of the major limitations of this one. I won't go into the kind of all the wonky details.

But we really want a better demographic panel so we can make judgments about you know what are the age and ethnicities and like other kinds of things that you kind of care about when you do these large uh large surveys. Uh we really love to dive deeper into the culture and values of different sort of blockchain communities to understand not only like how they compare but also like to understand like how can we more effectively shape and you know support these communities based on like what they believe what they care about and more memes. All right I think with that say thank you and uh please feel free to reach out if you have any questions. Uh do we have some time for questions? Go ahead.

Uh the question here is what is a den? What is the definition of a deen? Uh it's kind of like a a mythic figure I suppose in this community. But generally speaking, it's uh a lovable deen is a person who's generally here to who's motivated almost solely by like short-term financial gain. like uh you participate in a protocol to maximize your return without caring or sort of like caring too much about like what is the underlying technology or you know what it's you know what's the long-term sort of like perspective of this.

It's sort of like I'm going to like figure out how to make as much money as possible. There are like a classes of dgens like we call them like bag holders. uh you can you can go into the uh go just go take the finish finish the quiz and it'll take you to like a a link where it explains all the different types. So there are subasses of DJs that we think it was like bag holders or somebody called them like the citadel. I don't know where that came from.

There's so many memes in the space. Uh but people who are more like a little bit more long-term but still more about like I'm going to pump pump this coin so I can like increase my returns, right? It's not the founders exactly, but yeah, it's it's the it's the core devs effectively. Yeah. Yeah.

So one of the things we've been talking about with the like you know the Ethereum foundation others is uh like you know it it's not I want to the fact that it's like uh relatively few people making like core technical decisions and these are fundamentally technical objects uh does not I'm not saying it's a bad thing. There's a lot of reasons like you know if you're trying to deal with like some sort of imminent attack that you need to be able to respond fast right uh also these are very very complicated technical systems and there's relatively few people that really like understand like if I make this change what are the actual implications does the increase decrease the security so all sorts of reasons why you know if governance looks like that in these chains in these like some of these L1's uh there is some work to try to make these more transparent by publishing more information uh about them having like open common periods. uh EF is talking about doing some level of dification though actually to be clear like EF is not even the thing that governs Ethereum like clearly uh sorry when I say EF I mean Ethereum foundation um they try to not interfere with the core developer process that governance process uh instead they try to like though in in practice like several like you know many core devs are employed by the Ethereum foundation so it's like kind of complicated a lot of is like much more subtle like in terms of how governance happens in these cases than you would expect. But there is there's some work to to do some decentralization there. Yes.

Um I think there's an intention to make to progressively decentralize at some point in some way, but there's no like hard commitment to do that, right? Um, I think people just want these systems to remain stable because they're like, you know, Ethereum is like the basic infrastructure for this entire like ecosystem at this point. Certainly in this, you know, obviously in at E at ETH Denver. So like making like fast change. Okay.

Yeah, we can end. I'm not sure like when this is supposed to end. Uh, I think happy to take questions right afterwards. Thank you, Joshua. Very cool.

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