Shouldn’t We Rethink Debt? What DeFi Can Learn From Susu’s and Immigrant Lending Clubs (Devcon5)

[Applause] era for the next actions back by the way for the next five minutes I'm just you know pose a question shouldn't we be reasonable head and one of the ways you know making that and what I'm thinking about in the last couple months is this idea of sousou's coordinator and lending clubs so mr. Patel with all due respect that was amazing talk I have to say over the last year I've learned a lot about finance I have a background in history Chinese politics but it's pretty amazing what's been happening in the dfi space if you know you have a bag over your head you then you missed out on Def Con you realized so much the excitement is actually understanding what all these products your honor right have been able to show that eath is trustworthy foundation and you know code can be a self in length but this picture here is when I googled Bear Stearns on some funny clip art you know there are some I think pretentious parallels to what we actually sort of imagined as the crisis in 2007-2008 a lot of synthetic derivatives are you know over leveraged in I had me thinking a lot about that so a lot of people probably came to the theater thinking about money and if you haven't read this great book by Dick Gregory he sort of poses a question what makes the concept that so strangely powerful and goes through a history of 5,000 years of different you know societal conflicts and raising rich debt and the you know the breaking of bonds of all the debt that people owe causes war cousins you know conflict a couple other interesting things is that even the idea and built into our language so in Greek the word symbol on we became to work for money in Chinese this fool and it was literally a word to describe a debt or credit to someone else in this simple I was sort of a piece that you break and a half and represent the debt you wrote so yeah I mean that is very critical to get our idea of money in that bet if we go to pull a lot of us in this room have some sort of debt but our mortgage or soon once or something so in that I have been thinking about are there ways that people have been lending and created money systems that don't involve a debt or at least some sort of central actor providing a loan or some personal credit and it turns out there are there's a lot and I'm a white American so this is all new to me but Sousou is a circle West African word and it scribes this idea of rotating savings and credit Association turns out it's also a Tunde and Latin America and Chinese itself great and that's been around actually since this guy since the Tong dynasty which is like 600 and what it is is pretty simple it's the savings with the community each person puts a set amount into a pool and then the pool rotates and so you can set parameters whether it's you know in this example ten dollars per week everyone who received two hundred dollars at some point so Tom does in some praise they set up garlic people can choose when they want to the club cool so the other thing though is that it's simply savings and it's super savings so no one actually earns interest on money set aside so when I was researching this something I found people all throughout the United States use sousou's do people use it to pay for a car the Jews and Borough Park use it to buy real estate they it's just built into the social fabric they all share their money and essentially one person gets to draw from the pool from the cleft of wool in proving communities it's actually happens and triggers so you have a group of like seven people and one trusted collector and then eventually you know they paid out whether it's five months eight months what happened and then this Court is that a lot of people who are banks especially in the US for these informal lending thoughts so yeah in like the early 2000s banks it's very like you know thinking of Providence on this so there's actually this this project that art with the silver of GCS CA which they selected a actual individual that they call it Sousou collector and in these command markets people in burrows has solved a party using these two two schemes pooling resources to be able to buy large shipments of you know produce and what they found is that there's actually you know seventy bucks 75 million pounds being traded and collected so there's some drawbacks if there is a central collector even if it's a small group of people you trust there's a chance they go off the grid they take all the money and run the other idea is that you know the person who's lost some light goods is not receive any interest so it's a little less reliable than great money in a bank account and that's assuming you know you have enough money to create a bank account so the last thing I can erase is long doing this research there's like two projects that came up just you know sort of assessment to help fast things are moving in the defense space but pull the other I've been using that it's more they're describing themselves as in no loss lottery and it's kind of fun and they're earning interest on the side there's also Acropolis I'm not exactly sure the size of this project but in their website materials they describe it as millennium folks so it's yeah this work all to continue talking with other people if you want to discuss sousou's and think about the applications for theory with I guess trustless CC collectors thank you [Applause] you