EthCC 2: Eseoghene Mentie

hey everybody my name is si and I'm the head of QA for you pour it and I'm going to be talking about what we can learn from Asia and digitalized civilizations and I'm going to be citing examples from ancient communities and kingdoms in Africa and the reason why I'm using Africa the specimens because I'm African and I live in the continent and I grew up on the continent so what have we learned so far so far I've been trying to educate a lot on the continent and this is where this came from and I tried to look for different ways to be able to explain what the blockchain is what consensus is in terms that people can understand and things that people relate to and that's where all this came from next slide and the first thing I realized was there actually relationships between proof of work and the way things are done in ancient Africa communities an example would be weather is like a tournament or prize that is needed that you need to get for instance maybe you want to get married to the daughter of a chief or the daughter of a king or the daughter of a wealthy man now what normally happens is you have suitors and then those suitors will be given a series of tests and whoever wins those tests basically gets the prize and which is the daughter of the Chiefs hand in marriage which is kind of exactly like proof of work because there is a puzzle to solve it could be mathematical it could be a strand test it could be a wisdom test but at the end of the day you do get a reward at the end of the then another day nights or as well is there's a relationship between Oracle's that are being used in software and even ethereum today and the traditional Oracle's that we have in Africa and they're different kinds of Oracle's there's the Oracle way for different kind of things now there's an orca whether you divine you talk to a divinity a spiritual whatever to make decisions about whether you need to go to war whether they should put crown the new king choose a new elder and then there are also Oracle's that come into play in different aspects of life land disputes getting married and this is something that even still happens in Africa today in most African communities when a man goes to a woman's house and goes to talk to her father and says oh I want to marry your daughter we take it very seriously like they go to that person that man's village the woman's family goes to that woman man's village and goes to find out about the man like do a background check now when he goes to a man's village it's not just going to go and just ask any random person he sees on the road there is always the very oldest or the most elderly person in that village remember this village doesn't have technology they don't have centralized data they don't have anything stole anywhere now there's this all this person to this village and has proved themselves time and time again to be reputable and trustworthy and that's a person that tells them that all this person is from a good family this person is from a great family all this person's from a really bad family the family is a family of thieves the family they don't treat people right and all those kind of things another way another way Oracle's are used in African traditions are where you have land disputes and I will use the traditions of the evil people in Nigeria what normally happens is there is a set of elders in every every evil community called the Iman or and the in Manute go basically r3p you go to when you have land is peace or disputes generally and they can trace ancestry now remember they do not have central data they do not have something between now somewhere but information has been passed across in a decentralized way over the years and this group of people always are always the people that have this information they can trace ancestry and if they can trace the ancestry and say yes those passes ancestors are the true owners of this land there is no dispute and if you do dispute it or you decide to go against it there are consequences there are consequences in the community you could be shunned there are classes of different types of people and community you may not be able to patek of their mid-teens or their traditions or their ceremonies if you do go against those so there are consequences and that's how Oracle's work in African traditions so what more can we learn like this are just examples there are way more examples but this is some of the things that we've learned so far and I know that it also exists in other ancient civilizations apart from the African ones but I can only use Africa because that is the one I'm most familiar with yeah so reputation mechanisms I'm definitely gonna talk about this because I work on yooper which is an identity project now in Africa or in Nigeria per se I'm gonna use input community again they have traditions of I'm not evil by the way but I have friends that are evil and they have traditions that basically mean that when a man does business he has to come back to his village and take a young person to lend that same business so it's like passing on the torch and then making sure people are know like making sure that you eradicate poverty in your village so when you're successful you have to make sure the people are successful and evil people are also very known in Nigeria for trade and business now when that man goes and he lands that trade he's basically building up his reputation in the business world in the ebo community and remember this is not written down anywhere but because the community already knows that he is gone and he's gone with this person and then there are communities or groups of people that are part of the same business type it would be electronics it could be food it could be clothes but they have that those circles and the information is informal he's basically building a reputation and a circle of trust because all those people now know him and their reputation now goes through word-of-mouth in Africa we have the same that you might not have wealth or I would say most African countries the ones I've been to you may not have wealth you may not have education you may not have a lot of things but your name is the most important thing your good name and that comes from the people that know you your family history what you've done and all that and the same thing applies with this person because now he's built a circle and that's become a reputation mechanism for him without having to have a place where everything is stored now to even now take that further imagine if we could implement that in the blockchain or in theorem and then we use our Oracle's to basically get data about people remember I said like there's a circle of people that are part of that community that basically know about the reputations of the people in that community and this person can verify that what is other person is saying is true and vice versa and they can also refutes truths that somebody else is saying is true now imagine if we have an Oracle and the Oracle was for that data to always get the most recent information about that person and then you get a state channel from where the Oracle is reading from or state channels always created and then the Oracle reads from the station and puts in an Oracle and then you read from the Oracle and put it on the blockchain and you can basically create a reputation score some things that you are doing are looking at like a because of all those kind of ideas is looking at a kind of graphical way to look at your identity and be able to be without your reputation because your identity makes up so much more than your name your email address and the transactions that you do on the blockchain there is so much more about you that makes up your identity and then Pele spoke today earlier and he was talking about an EIP that he's working on that should also cover this now there's another thing that I was thinking about as I was doing all this research and I was thinking about a new consensus system now there are different types of things that evolve different types of consensus systems in communities in Nigeria especially in communities where there are natural resources now imagine if there was like for like where I'm from is good community now when there is a Abbasi or money that's given to the community and the ruler of the clan needs to disperse there are delegates that represent every age group every type of person like your age group your whether you're a man or a woman what are your trade or a fisherman or a hunter or you own a store whether you're wealthy what and also represents children and now this delegates go and then and then they they make a decision that okay this is the reward who needs this reward the most who needs the most part of the money and once that's done there is a real great percentage that is now given to each delegate that now breaks down that amount into a percentage that is also given down taken down to each person that is in each group age group and what this helps with is it reduces it eliminates arguments strife it incentivizes people to keep using that kind of system to make decisions and it also keeps the peace and I think that we could also use that in the box chain in ethereum is specifically like it could be an improvement on proof of stake to the case that you could actually intensifies every single person that the transaction at the end of the day someone gets a little bit and that basically keeps the network alive next slide please so what's next people could basically use all this information I've shared you work on a IPs I'm also trying to work on one as well pehle is working on a IP 1812 he just started it like when you and Miami right that's what yeah so he's working on something that's going to mirror something like this and he needs people that have expertise in Oracle state channels and all that so I would want to see more things would improve the bass because I believe if we improve the basics of what everything else wrong for me to be better needs to work for everybody so does anybody have any questions well I have two questions one of them is that these systems are ancient in the sense that they've been around for a long time but they're still around what they're ancient and okay yes some of them do most of them still exist but they exist in the smaller communities they don't exist like maybe at state level government level and all those kind of things because and it's understandable why they don't exist because those were like kind of borrowed ways of governance for African communities because they never existed as countries and States they existed as communities and tribes so they kind of exist like under the radar exactly and that's why sometimes in Africa where you hear people say it's not working or we brought the system your company tries brings something from every the US or Europe or an application and he doesn't work and the reason why it doesn't work is because it doesn't really follow what the local traditions it's embedded in the average African so it's it's not working to what we what we see an example is a chorus how doesn't white doesn't work as well in Africa like other places in the world is because maquette day is actually a tradition in African culture the art of going to that market the art of seeing that in the act of torchi needy acts of absent having a relationship with the person that you're buying something from the haggling is all part of the process and if you don't introduce that into your Commerce in Africa for instance it's not going to work thank you and my other question is that it would be interesting to hear about the failure modes of some of these mechanisms so I'm sure that some of these reputation systems they can be gamed like people like conman can come around and fake each other's replicate you know it's a little bit hard to fake because even though I get validation from an Oracle like a really old person but can they be corrupted for example can you pay yeah they can however there is still there are still other Oracle's that same community not just out that's the most trusted however is the most trusted is corrupted you still have elders in different communities and when I'm in the community there was a community and then there are compounds families have compounds so if the story doesn't corrupt is not the same from if you go to every compound and if you don't trust what this oracle has told you and then you go to every because it's a community people know a lot about people in those communities and them different compounds and if you really want you do verification it's really easy you go to each compound and then you ask questions you don't even need to ask like deep questions but you can ask questions to verify and that's how you verify so even if one person is corrupted you can make sure that you're getting the truth by asking other people everybody in the whole community can be corrupted so basically you claim that these things practically never fail well they really feel they really feel and they really feel yeah okay my question is propagates back to this one so if I get it correctly you say that the system is safe because introducing a new Oracle is is basically free you can just stand up and then select a new Oracle if one is corrupted no you can the Oracles exist in the sense they are not setting them up they exist in the sense that they are already there are three types there's the oldest person there's the elders in the village like group of elders and I don't know about in Africa we are elders or people that really lie they rarely lie because they're old people and we have an African adage that what an older person can see standing right close to it if you climb on a tree you can never see it so like we believe that they tell the truth however there's a third one which I said you can talk to people in different compounds that's from different families in that community to do us form of extrovert vacation to be sure that the data you are getting is not corrupted okay thanks that's why I said it really feels yes if I want to learn more about all this because you know that was like 20 minute presentation if I want to dig deeper into this where where should I look you have to go three good yeah you have to go to Africa that's the only way I'm African I had to dig I had to dig yeah write a book exactly look it's gonna take a while that's still so much okay everybody say do it any more questions thank you for the talk I thought it was really interesting and always thing referencing history missus realized some of these ideas aren't so new I've been reading a lot about in the Caribbean one of my friends used to participate in sousou's which I heard come from West Africa and they exist in other cultures and people in the US collet of rotating credit and savings account where people put in money in a pot one person takes it and it's a way for poorer communities to have some sort of way of lending without relying on a bank have you noticed any people trying to take some new ideas such as maker Dow and decentralized finance with existing things like sousou's in West Africa that have been working on the basis of personal trust for a long time not really but there are there there are systems already exist in like there are applications already exist that you wouldn't we in Kenya in its normal it's um it's not just in West Africa it's something that exists on the continent it's something we've done for years without a system so it's something that exists even without the without were three its exist on web tree right now like they're even in Nigeria there are applications for Isuzu like most of them are either done by and then there are some in F in East Africa and South African most of them are done by mobile operators like a Mobile Money kind of thing see this Chema peso right yeah there's some what's the one in South Africa again yeah yes stock box yeah yeah so there even though they're moving them forward maybe I can access other African to talk more about it because I don't really know much about that but in Nigeria it's just starting up like in Nigeria that just it's just starting up understanding the capabilities in the West we can bring yeah so but I've never I'm not seeing people from outside the continent trying to bring those things in yet maybe because they don't understand that the use case is already there so I just wanted to share this I know this proverb already exists in a lot of cultures but it's something that I growing up as a child my father used to remind me that the only way you can understand what you can do is to actually learn and try to understand what the people that came before you did and then your mind will be blown on what you can do because they did that without having the things that you have now they thought about those things without having the things that you have now yeah so that's it thanks guys [Applause]