Impact Summit 💥 Ethereum & Coordination

[Music] the goal of this presentation is really just to take a step back um as a few people have recently in the modern sort of discourse on X and other places uh and ask why are we doing any of this in the first place why are we building Technologies why are we trying to create different forms of progress and and ultimately the the sort of framing I would like to give is why are we trying to build some kind of network Society with the internet and with all these other tools that we happen to be putting in place um and for those of you who don't know me this is a conversation I've been sort of having with the community and with um with with myself candidly for a while through the context of gitcoin uh which I co-founded in 2017 2018 with Kevin auke and others and now we're recently through Public Works which is fundamentally focused on trying to build new forms of Open Source funding for Community projects on ethereum and ultimately the question I think that we need to ask is what are we coordinating towards and why should we care and I think we should care because we've built a lot of very cool stuff as a civilization uh we have built aquaducts compasses actually wood block printing which preceded the printing press by about 700 years Telegraph Subway Lines fiber optic cables and of course the internet which I think we're all probably very perhaps too familiar with at this point in our lives but I think all of these things are just really ultimately steps on a much larger and longer Arc of history that humanity is taken in order to try to just exist in a relative ly entropic and often confusing world that we've yet to fully make sense of and I think that's just fundamentally a very cool thing uh that we've done and that we should collectively recognize that we're uh sort of taking pardon we're we're standing on the shoulders of giants in everything that we do uh all the way back you know thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years and so we've done all of this through technology but we've also done all this because we've been able to coordinate and as Society has become more complex and we've moved from things like kingdoms to things like states to tools like the internet and networks the pace at which uh Society is moving has continued to accelerate and you've seen probably at least some of you a lot of conversations about where we're accelerating to and uh you know why acceleration uh is good and why acceleration matters um but I think the fundamental question that we should ask is how does this affect and how does our interconnectedness impact the way in which we actually maintain some sensible degree of you know progress uh in terms of how we arrange not just to build Technologies based on the tooling that we have now but how we arranged to build Technologies based on what we might have in the future and and that is the fundamental disconnect in in my view in the conversation right now um and so we sort of have to ask this question we've built a lot of cool stuff we're doing a lot of really interesting things in ethereum but what did what are the problems or the existential threats that we're likely to face in the next five or 10 or 100 years that might lead us as we sort of become you know as you can see at the bottom here you know moving from one to you know 10 to a thousand nodes to to several billion nodes all connecting even sometimes on a daily basis how can we make sure that in that context we're actually solving for long-term sustainability avoiding some of the existential threats of nuclear war climate change or artificial intelligence as people are often talking about now and I think there's actually not just a philosophical question there anymore there's much more of a practical one and as we move from this sort of very theoretical idea of you know what if we had a online uh totally you know ethereal way to coordinate information to this conversation of how do we you know magically coordinate value across the world using shared computers we we should actually practically be looking at what the tooling is that we're actually using to to answer these questions and that's what I'm here to sort of try and encourage people to continue doing today so I don't think we should be pessimistic I I also don't think we should be you know fully putting our foot in the gas towards uh ultimate Doom but acceleration is our potential technology is our potential and each successive form of interconnection is also what opens up this design space for us to work together and in a network society when we have the internet when we have ethereum we need to actually use this infrastructure to survive in this complex environment and that's sort of setting the stage for what we're going to talk about today so as I mentioned many many thousands of times uh you know removed from the the practicalities as usual for me but I hope this is actually a helpful framing for those of you who are maybe not sure or maybe are still learning why it is that people care about this technology and I think again it's in context of some kind of silly sounding ideas but we have evolved from using speech to convey our ideas to the internet and now to ethereum to convey our ideas and each of these are protocols and fundamentally a protocol is just a shared idea a shared sort of set of understandings that we have with each other around how we coordinate some kind of information or value and as we build more protocols we are able to increasingly stand on the shoulders of more and more Giants and able to create more and more sort of complexity that we can actually manage because it's no longer front and center for us it's now abstracted away from us we're able to do things without even realizing we're doing them no one who's listening to this is probably paying exact attention to the packets that are going through uh to to them for this to happen but yet it it works and that is the beauty of a lot of I think what we should be striving to build is very modular very simple um and very standardized tools um but in an age of Open Source software this is very difficult for a couple of reasons and one of those reasons is there's a lot of developers doing a lot of different things um there's a lot of software companies that are doing lots of different business models and approaches to building these Technologies and there's also a lot of value that's at stake and because there's a lot of value at stake uh we tend to get really caught up in short-term Financial games this is what you see in markets all the time and uh unsurprisingly this is this is part of the reason we're in uh what I guess we'll colloquially call a bare market right now in the first place and so if we're going to think about this very very long Arc of History we need to think about how we're going to actually sustain these conversations around standards uh for a long enough period to uh for it to matter and increasingly how we're going to distribute the value from those conversations and from the tools that are created as a result of them to people in a way that leads to sustainable uh future growth and this is a challenge especially in a digital age uh it's not one that you know is new but it is one that is more pressing in a sense because really the more abstracted things become the harder it is for us to know how to maintain most of the tooling that we're using without the help of the maintainers and the maintainers are often feeling in open source software especially uh relatively burned out this is actually something that Nadia eggwell uh covers really well in a a book I think in 2018 working in public would highly recommend that book um and the fundamental reason in part that maintainers are burning out is that they're actually not really getting paid all that much in fact of those who are paid less than 30% earn over $1,000 dollar per year so if we're going to solve this problem of coordination we need to solve um this sort of meta problem of allocation of capital and we fundamentally are doing that pretty well uh obviously we' we've managed to survive this far that's pretty great um and we're slowly getting to a point where you know the the technological pace is accelerating but if we don't really think about these kinds of uh blockers now um it only takes you know a few small mistakes to end up losing the plot and and you know for example causing things like heart bleed um which wiped out billions and billions of dollars of economic value uh from the world in 2014 uh and there's other more recent examples of this uh fundamentally because uh the open source maintainer who was working on that software uh was not paid um they had another full-time job which was actually arguably much less important uh which paid them that they were focused on and this is part of a general Trend uh in the way that value is distributed across the economy I that's why I sort of mentioned and wanted to make sure I stated before that this is not just fundamentally a issue with uh open source software but it is an issue of how we actually drive productivity in markets um and distribute that back across Industries and right now the problem is particularly Stark as you can see from this there's there's quite a gap between hourly compensation and product productivity um as of 2017 and this has only increased uh over the pandemic and so if we're going to get to this point of actually building out new kinds of systems with increasingly large numbers of people and we are going to ensure that people are still motivated to to build these tools and to um sustain and and not you know poten as Peter turchin might say uh counterrevolution uh Society then we need to solve for some of these these inequalities and issues and in turn down the stack we get all these other benefits of technology that I mentioned earlier so I actually think this is the fundamental thing that is the impact of things of tooling like ethereum because it is all about Distributing value and I know this is kind of the meme to say crypto can fix this um I think for any problem Under the Sun at this point uh someone has said crypto can fix this but I do think genuinely there is a reason that uh crypto works for these specific kinds of problems and that is because these are problems that are internet native and they're part of the networks that are really fundamentally at the base right now of our Network Society so we have an opportunity to actually think about new kinds of projects that might realign our incentives or redesign how we can collectively sustain the infrastructure that we need for the rest of you know the impact that we might want to make to move forward and there's a few ways we can think about modeling this practically one of which um of course um which I've uh misspelled uh here um in my my haste to actually edit the the title of this slide um but one of which is from vitalic in a particular post of his on the revenue evil curve and essentially the idea of the revenue Eagle curve is that what we can do traditionally to fund public goods is work with States work with large scale philanthropic institutions uh work with other kinds of um you know generally large scale actors across the world to flow value down the stack to different types of maintainers um to different types of dependencies and ultimately that leads to really quite sustainable um systems in a lot of cases that's how we have roads and bridges that's how we have electrical grids that's how we have you know even some of the media that we listen to or uh you know watch on a daily basis is through these institutions but the other piece that's missing in my opinion from this conversation and it's part of what I think is implicit and quite interesting about this Revenue evil curve piece is how these types of systems can actually be built to rely on each other uh interdependently and the fundamental idea of the revenue evil curve is that there's certain types of goods that can be monetized without causing a real loss in positive externalities that the benefit that the good creates for broader Society and you can see this with things like the bridge example here um you know if there's a small uh tool for the bridge it actually can improve the congestion uh and in turn actually can be used that that funding can be used to subsidize things like public transit which benefit Society at large um on the other hand you have things like say a patented algorithm which if monetized in that way will immediately become unusable to anyone except those who can pay pay a huge amount of money uh to make it uh work for them and this is a problem obviously from the perspective of net societal benefit and and in turn a problem for the broader question of you know how do we make sure that technology is being sustained uh and that we are coordinating around the progress of it in a way that doesn't lead to societal collapse and solves again some of the existing inequalities and I think that the really interesting part of ethereum in particular is that we actually have the ability to create solidarity economies between projects each of whom have their own Revenue Evo curves and each of whom exist in a network with a fundamental base currency entirely online and that is something that fundamentally did not exist uh before ethereum and I think that there is something to be said for the point in time which ethereum emerged that make me really genuinely believe that it will be hard to reach the same level of network effects after it and so I think we have a really interesting opportunity in this community to try to build interdependent Mutual Network subsidies between different types of projects uh like for example um you know the kinds of uh internet native decentralized exchanges that we might have like say Unis swap which has recently implemented its own fees um and you know for example uh large scale uh libraries that we're all relying on such as say uh ether's JS and that's a very Micro Niche example but if you have a whole series of applications across different uh types of um verticals across different types of design spaces with different monetization models what's really interesting is just the possibilities for that interdependence to emerge and the way in which that can help solve these sustainability problems in a kind of secret Third Way that doesn't really makes sense to do in the context of a lot of uh traditional non- networked uh public goods context so for example it's very hard to get roads and bridges in the city to go and decide to subsidize the creation of a better local electrical grid without a lot of government overhead and a lot of other stakeholders involved in that process but in this context a lot of those kinds of parts of this cycle of creation production exchange consumption and then Surplus allocation can actually happen between essentially in part autonomous agents uh on on chain and this is part of what I think is fast fascinating about the design space here from an impact perspective because this is agnostic of the kind of impact you want to create it only cares about the ability for you to think about the interdependent ecosystem that you're part of and importantly to think about that selfishly in the context of the fact that you're all relying on the same shared currency so this to me is fundamentally a very practical design space for anyone to think about who cares about the idea of improving the sustainability of the technology that we're we're using in building um but fundamentally also in my opinion for anyone who cares more generally about solving any of those other problems that I mentioned before whether those are you know climate change or artificial intelligence or any other Global coordination problem because fundamentally those are going to be based off of this kind of infrastructure and so if if we can construct some kind of what I would call in an Ostrom sense um elanar Ostrom being in my opinion one of the best thinkers uh of the last 50 years uh who wrote governing the commons uh and and won the Nobel Prize for her work in 2009 um if if we can sort of build a Commons in in this sort of sense of solidarity sustainability and self-management uh in an entirely internet native way then we get this kind of what I'm showing on the right here uh as as sort of like you know three diagrams uh this kind of polycentric um interconnectedness between groups that previously may have just been sort of adjacent to each other and what you can see at the top there a kind of Hub and spoke model and that is more resilient that is more sustainable and it's also although it's a little bit of a buzz word now a little bit more decentralized and this is a kind of mutalist not feudalist principle that I think we should aspire to and that we're able to really drive forward in the context of a lot of the um the work that we're doing online in a way that would be harder to drive forward again in sort of quote unquote real life so these are three principles that I'd like people to think about as they're building in the context of you know anything that um they're doing on ethereum but also uh frankly anything that they're doing with digital Technologies or digital infrastructure because often uh this is not yet at least in my view part of the the real conversation that is is being had um when it comes to how to think about designing these these systems um so I I guess like fundamentally to to go back to why is ethereum particularly well suited to this um and why should we uh care about the sort of opportunity we have here in the first place you know why hasn't this happened before I think there's fundamentally three things that a theorum has that make it particularly interesting and unique the first is that it has credible commitments so we have the ability to now create shared state with things like Gasper that I mentioned before to transfer value without intermediaries and then go on to create whatever kind of positive exter aties we might want to create we have a lot of value Exchange in this ecosystem there's a lot of markets there's a lot of new kinds of uh markets that actually emerge sometimes on extremely uh ridiculous things but those markets can still facilitate the self-interested open source provisioning of these kinds of common goods and finally what you've often seen happening especially in the last Market were the creation of these decentralized organizations which were able to in turn sort of send value down the stock but also create agreements between each other and what's fundamentally really interesting about all these three things is that they're themselves happening on an economic engine which is you know driven by validators across 86 plus countries who are you know earning almost you know over two billion dollars globally and this is kind of on its own fascinating but what I think is particularly worth highlighting in this context is it's really the kind of conways law of the system that's interesting here you're getting people to build interdependent networks and interdependent Commons in the context of having already um you know decided to participate in a network that is itself interdependent and generating value around the world and so I think all of this is just to say we should really be looking at each project in this ecosystem as part of one a long Arc of history and part of a long AR of History which is towards some form of technological progress and towards technological progress in the context of um a sustainable long-term economic system that allows for people to really feel cared for feel uh like they're able to maintain a lifestyle that matters to them and maintain values that matter to them and also that we're able to continue essentially building with each other versus just you know ending up in perhaps a dystopian uh AI Overlord feature State and what's great about ethereum is that all those things are embedded into the technology itself and into the community itself so that's a little bit about where I'm coming from and why I care about this SE system um and why I still care about it even in the context of a you know a bare Market where I think a lot of people have decided to focus elsewhere or you know decided to worry about other problems and I think there's sort of three major Paradigm shifts that allow us to really actually engage with these other conversations in a productive way at a time where the ecosystem is going through its own hardships which are again let's think about the connections to other people and the agency we have to create those connections with other people let's not think of ourselves atomically as just individuals working on our own projects let's think of ourselves as an ecosystem uh surprisingly not not always something that happens um let's think about the entanglements that we're actually creating and measure the value we're creating for each other and trying to increase that value together versus just maximizing individual profit um like you know sometimes we talk about with certain staking pools um and let's talk about creating these new kinds of Commons as an alternative to the or or rather augmentation of the existing relatively you know Common top down models we have for provisioning of goods that we all sort of need and care about and if we do that we can hopefully make it to the next Thousand Years so thank you very much uh I hope that isn't too high level for people to uh end the day with but maybe it gives you something to think about uh over the rest of the evening and thank you very much for having me