Ethereum as a Public Good 👤 Impact of Ethereum Summit - Scott Moore

foreign [Applause] [Music] and without further Ado I think we'll just jump right into it and welcome Scott more onto the on the stage um Scott for free to unmute and share your video um and yeah really excited to hear a little bit more about how ethereum has been kind of building itself into a public good um and uh yeah just all the kind of crazy solar Punk crypto um outcomes of that so Scott when you're ready feel free to uh share your video and I'll get the screenshot out of here there you are hey Scott how's it going hey going well um can you see the screen here does this look okay yeah everything's great and I love the awesome so I'll get out of the way and uh I'm excited for your chat thanks yeah um we appreciate you having me on um I I actually have given like a kind of similar version of this talk and I kind of yielded into this uh a little bit but I think the real kind of interesting thing that occurred to me to like kind of talk about in the last few months was you know we we do have this whole conversation going on about like solar Punk and other x-punks and I think there's something interesting to be said just about kind of abstracting away from that and just talking about ethereum itself as a public good and so what I wanted to do with this talk is give a bit of context on like what is this sort of like uh like Plato's Cave that we're in around like these different narratives around you know solar Punk and so forth how do we you know kind of go beyond that towards the core mission that ethereum is driving and then how do we talk about in particular the ways that ethereum is kind of allowing us to reimagine what we mean by public goods uh in the context of the web 3 also just generally you know in the context of Open Source software um and so to start maybe the easiest thing to do is just to talk about like what are these different kind of narratives that we we've been seeing the space over the last probably six to 12 months and I think a lot of this stands actually from cyberpunk Roots like back from sort of the Neuromancer era in like the 1980s even like a little bit before that which was largely the starting point for cypherpunk which kind of advocates for strong cryptography very like intense privacy preserving Technologies uh John Perry Barlow is probably like one of the most famous members of this movement and really with the cyberpunk manifesto sort of like gave a probably the most compelling and most detailed case for this movement But ultimately what we've sort of landed on is an evolution of that which tries to take sort of the individualist notion of cyberpunk and frame it in more of a collect a collaborative way so the goal of the sort of solar Punk ethos which started back in sort of 2008 was originally really well how do we build environmentalism into our sort of like notion of like uh you know Tech is a Force for good and how do we find more ways to build a sort of open feature where technology facilitates better Global sort of coordination and in web 3 that just seemed to make a lot of sense this is a philosophy where you know everything we're doing is kind of revolving around coordination it's all coordination in some sense and you know creating sustainable convivial kind of like Pro social connection is something especially in the Dow space more recently in the last six months that's become very popular to sort of not just talk about but actually I think take action on so even Beyond Bitcoin which is mostly where I spend my time I've co-founded that back in 2017. um there's lots of projects in the data space that are really focused on trying to have more intentional conversations about you know the values that we're creating in web 3 in ethereum particular and how we're basically trying to create this connection between people and their environments whether those for sort of digital spaces where sometimes there's a lot of noise and we want to kind of bridge sense of peace or actually just the physical environment we're in and how we make sure the technology is uh you know facilitating uh that connection and obviously most recently the merge has been a really big part of that uh conversation so I think those are like kind of two not opposing forces but like juxtaposed like ideas of what the space is trying to achieve and I think there's people on kind of both sides of those and that's what's led to sort of the emergence of lunar prank as a critique of principally the openness of solar pump you know kind of like optimism of solar Punk uh you know and and it's sort of like failure to really imagine a future in which privacy is front and center especially in the face of like a lot of real risks if you know there is too much openness and transparency which principally is the risk to a lot of more marginalized populations folks that you know we are trying to make a positive impact for and so really you know it kind of emphasizes privacy and Collective action and um you know still giving people individual agency rather than kind of like you know making everyone part of this aggregore that uh you know subsumes everything uh before it and so it kind of advocates for a more realist approach to the sort of like political landscape which really is like you know goes back to full circle the sort of cyberpunk movement John Perry Barris ideas and I think we've kind of gotten to this point where the reason I kind of started with the idea that you know these are really interesting ideas but like maybe not the most useful framing since I think what we've sort of realized is that we're all kind of to some degree although this term is a bit controversial in other circles like techno Optimist I think everyone here believes the technology can have a fundamentally positive impact on the way that we work together in the long run and I think that you know regardless of approach if we can build technology that you you know leads to some collective human thriving and we should try and do that and we can do that in a way that kind of I think fulfills each of these like narratives without actually creating any sense of conflict and so I think what's really important for us is to think about then you know why is ethereum part of this techno-optimist movement and how do we think about these sorts of framings as you know kind of like a relevant part of the ethereum ecosystem a relevant part of the through narrative and I think kind of the the juxtaposition right now in a lot of broader Tech is between the kind of accelerationist AI sort of like growth at all costs relatively algorithmic way of thinking about growth and about technology and about techno optimism and I think ethereum fundamentally presents a little bit more of like an agentic like agent-based form of that in which we can think more deeply about the way that you know we push back on existing social structures or political structures as the only means of coordination the way in which we kind of push back on March like companies or you know kind of large kind of capital like based actors for economic coordination and then the way that we sort of can reverse these Trends towards institutional power all these are social things they're you know based on us as agencies people not necessarily algorithmic things and I think that's like what's really kind of fascinating about ethereum and what's really interesting about this sort of particular flavor of techno optimism that we can try and Achieve regardless of the particular implementation details so I think the fundamental part of ethereum being a sort of public good comes back to this sort of technical optimism the notion that you know by building better technology together we can create this kind of future that we want to see and move Beyond this baggage of like previous institutions and I think you know there's actually some really interesting stuff that I'll talk about in a minute about like how that actually reframes some notion of public goods altogether so you know I kind of talked about this but basically we're Skilling coordination that's what we're doing we're doing that in a sort of person by person relationship based way we're trying to figure out ways to coordinate as people at scale even you know regardless of our own sort of like opinions about the world or our own belief systems or even our own uh you know kind of broader uh objectives things we're trying to achieve in the world we can kind of work together in a pluralistic way to achieve what we want to achieve and I think what's interesting about the traditional ways of looking at scaling systems is that you kind of as you build a really massive like dunbar's number kind of talks about this 150 numbers so like scale but really we're talking about systems of like tens of thousands of people probably hundreds of thousands or Millions even when you get to that scale it's very hard for people to relate to each other to feel a sense of solidarity to like build in a values aligned way but it is very possible for us to build systems to allow those relationships to grow large enough uh to grow sort of sort of like story um uh kind of like uh carefully enough that and with enough kind of background technology that we don't lose um the sort of underlying structure of the agreements that we've created together these sort of like shared agreements with each other and I think this is sort of like the fundamental conceit of like the coordination meme is that what we mean by coordination is coming to Shared agreements with each other and kind of a scaled up way and do doing that towards like effectively sometimes very different different ends But ultimately I think finding ways to basically scale coordination is a part of ethereum and kind of to me at the heart of this like um what ethereum has to offer in a techno Optimist uh like context it's you know not going and building kind of like you know uh exponentially increasing AI that kind of like subsumes similar to the sort of everywhere example like everything around it it's about building and whether that's true is a whole conversation in itself but it's about building kind of systems that allow us to work with each other um over time um I think it's very hard to over emphasize how hard a problem that is um and I I won't go into like a lot of depth here but I think this is like really the fundamental piece of what we're trying to achieve and why I think you know it's going to be so important for us to kind of like think think carefully about the narratives that we're putting forward and basically um how even across narratives we like are able to build systems that allow us to you know work together um and in that sense it's kind of like you know ethereum this is the other sort of techno Optimist angle this is our alternative to doomerism we sort of have this pervasive notion and uh a broader Society at web 3 I think to some extent maybe in the last few months as well where we think oh like you know everything's gonna fail it's like we're we're doomed to the systems that we've created for ourselves into like the problems we face as people I think that's fundamentally misguided and I think that it kind of um fails to recognize what we've already achieved with sort of ethereum as a technology in the ways that we've taken Agency energy back over a sort of existing institutions uh still other fights to come obviously with for example the Tomato cash situation that emerged and many others and that sort of vein but we can sort of also you know use these coordination tools to fight for those causes and to fight for other causes we believe in we can mentor on Cooperative currencies in order to kind of work within the constraints we have and find Capital needed to fund those efforts and then we can design incentive mechanisms to key people working on those things long term and I think this is very much the heart of coordination all these things is what we sort of mean by coordination at scale but it's also fundamentally what makes this whole Enterprise like techno Optimist and I think it's it's sort of the sense that you know we are together in a sort of Bottoms Up Collective way not top down Collective or Bottoms Up individual way going to take back agency and sort of control over the systems that we have kind of like let run loose in the world and so okay like the whole point of this talk is is Republicans why is ethereum Republic good what do we mean when we talk about public goods what are we actually talking about so a lot of the narratives before are kind of around the idea that we have a we have sort of a um a lot of confusion about what it is that we're trying to achieve at the narrative level um we have a lot of sort of um you know progress we made in terms of like tangible ways to improve coordination techno optimism helps us kind of like promote that as like a very good thing to do in an energetic sort of like person-to-person way and in turn we actually now have these like funding mechanisms and so forth that we can use which I'll get to and leave with Bitcoin try to do this as a core part of our mission um but what are these things that we're actually funding and you know when we're funding things in ethereum and funding this coordination tool why is that a public good so traditionally the notion of public goods comes back to this sort of policy annual sin uh 1954 sort of paper around non-excludability non-rivalry things that are public goods are things that can't be excluded no one can be included from them or their non-rival risks you know one person's access to this good does not restrict another person's access and one of the interesting things about that framing is that it kind of was born out of almost a the sort of idea that these public goods of sorts were sort of um aspirational they were sort of pipe dreams and if they could be funded they could be funded in mostly a top-down Collective fashion by traditional States or state actors and I think the major kind of uh problem with that is being that like it didn't allow us to think big enough about what we actually wanted to achieve and it kind of was partly I think how we ended up with institutions that random out in ways that we didn't necessarily you know intend them to to do and so you know there's a lot of nuance to the way that we reframe public goods but I think one very simple frame is the things that we want to see in the world are things that produce positive externalities for a broader group than the initial people involved in the process of maintaining that good and the traditional example of this like an electrical Grid in like a city uh Transportation Network they have lots of really interesting kind of positive externalities that we can think about so one in the transportation case property value goes up every time a new subway station is created in say New York City there's lots of people that want to like kind of go towards that and there's now an externality for other people around that specific local area same with Electric electrical grids if you have an electrical grid you have like people that can now be part of the community part of the city and that's very good for everyone the probably less like um local example which we've started to see really emerge in uh conversation in web3 with learning communities is the notion of like a university and that's sort of where I think things like kernel or things like um emerging sort of like groups like forefronts or at like meta-label and so forth are really starting to explore some interesting territory with the work they're doing steep Club there's a lot of communities like clubs that are basically technically private like technically you can't just go and learn at the University but clear and they cost money to be part of you can't just access it with zero Capital through but like you can actually still produce massive social gains via these institutions and of course that's why you know traditional world like universities are funded by the state funded as Republican in that sense but I think what we're sort of forgetting in this in this way of thinking about um so so right now we've kind of created like you've got like you know electrical grids Transportation universities these are all things that are fundamentally like for most people's conception public goods despite this kind of dissonance around we'll wait to pay for this what are we like how are we really considering that non-excludable non-raborous and you can see how that might create issues in the definition but there's more interesting examples that I think start to create even more confusion for us uh than those and I think open source software is sort of uh like one of these where I think there's certain things like say you know the library that we all use to build web free applications something like like ethersjs and something like unit swap which we I think recoil at the idea of as a public good and and I think that's because there's this distinction between the token holder and the broader community and we sort of have this notion that there's an Indian group in an out group and if you're not in the token over the community or suddenly you know at odds with the the rest of the the community or there it out to view and I think fundamentally this is where the notion of positive externalities becomes very useful um the greater the network grows the more not only the token holders benefit but anyone who just happens to use in day-to-day interaction the protocol itself also benefits and so in this sense there's a little bit of a difference between the sort of traditional way of thinking about public goods and the way that ethereum kind of redefines those to be about these files of externalities especially in the face of existing fees possible restrictions to to use and especially in the face of like different classes of members people that are or not spoken holders people that are or are not delegates people that are or not core team members and I think this is something that is still fundamentally important for us to wrestle with and explore as we think about what we're building on ethereum and we're thinking about it Theory and making impact we need to be thinking about basically you know what is that boundary point that we think is acceptable and I guess my case here today is that we're actually a lot of these things that we are debating about sometimes you know on twitter.com or whatever it might be as being oh they're not really public they're not really you know uh they don't meet this criteria they don't meet this like strict definition I would argue that in many cases those are things that we fundamentally all benefit from in a way that approximates something that we would like to call a public good um even if it's not the traditional way that we Define it and so in that sense you know I think funding more of those things I think building more of those things I think finding ways to help people understand and educate people about more of those things is itself a public good and it is something that actually is fundamentally in line with the sort of agentic techno-optimist vision that I think we all want to start to push forward um you know as as sort of ethereums in this in this network and so fundamentally we have a few examples of this that I think we're all sort of familiar with but that I think are are worth looking at that we should be supporting in some form or another um admittedly I may be biased towards some of these I think that you know portable especially private identity like you know something like seismo which which allows for that sort of privacy I think that sort of form of identity is a really cool like an important primitive for us to be able to for example solve support systems ensure that we have some pseudonymous identities that we can all sort of interact with each other through um so that we can kind of move Beyond this amorphous sort of like dark forest and something that's a little bit more um visible while still giving people the option to keep privacy especially when they are at risk of you know serious retaliation from for example State actors I think this is where solar Punk ultimately kind of like in the extreme gets it wrong which is that like yes we want techno optimism but we need tech and optimism in a way that allows for people to consider privacy good and to consider privacy as a fundamental human right and that's like you know I think it's just a really cool application that obviously ens has done an amazing job with and many others are starting to really explore deeply and I think there's a reason it's being like a really important topic for ethereum just because we I think haven't had a sort of portable layer for our own like lives on the internet despite the fact that we use the internet probably more than probably more than once a day I think it'd be very unlikely to find a lot of people who use it exactly once or less than once a day um I think that like there's a lot of these examples and I could go through them for a long time but I also recognize that I have a limited amount of time so I'll kind of just go through these pretty quickly uh for the remainder but basically we've got the centralized storage um the D web principles are kind of like part of what uh Falcon ipfs have contributed to in terms of how are we thinking about creating systems that um really prioritize user agency into centralization and so forth in general I just think having the centralized storage kind of fits in with this need um that we're talking about to have uh fundamentally like uh distributed kind of global coordination systems and I think that like more centralized you yet the more you run this risk of basically capture the network in a way that isn't you know shared with the users shared with the broader community and I think that's one of the reasons this sort of positive externality is framing for public kids works and web3 much better than it did in previous iterations which is that like for each of is actually um but especially for like these kind of core identity storage Primitives having the infrastructure that you're building be shared even if not everyone is owning that like a portion of that infrastructure um you know equally as in a co-op for example I think it's very important uh for the long term uh sort of like sustainability of of web 3 for ethereum um and is like kind of the the core you know part of what we're building here the other two kind of components I think are a little bit higher off the stack but it's basically you know things like optimisms retroactive public goods funding quadratic funding those are ways to help us in a Grassroots way signal and basically fun things that we care about I think this is really important because traditionally again like what is the reason that this sort of like State funding as like the only mechanism for Republicans became so prominent well because it's very easy to kind of like collect and like aggregate value and then kind of put that out into the world in a sustainable way if you're a government but it's very hard to do that at a Grassroots level and especially hard to do it in a way where you feel like your voice is being heard um so having some ability for people to locally sort of signal what they care about and then to be able to aggregate those things into a kind of preference map is really important and I'll get to that a little bit more in a second and then modular governance tooling which I think is just very important for any of these structures these staffs these tools that like basically are allowing for kind of the creation of public is on ethereum um this modular tooling is important for that to uh to take shape so basically the thing that I'm focused on uh what day-to-day is thing like this idea of collective sort of intelligence collective decision making via things like quadratic funding what quadratic funding basically means I think everyone kind of knows at this point is just that you're trying to essentially fund um a large group of projects in a given area based on local individual preferences um and then basically philanthropic funds are matched according to that preference map and the reason this is important is again in the state case you don't really have the ability to um really have a lot of say there's not really actually despite kind of a lot of academic conversations on us a lot of prior to story budgeting that happens in practice but this is kind of a web free forum of that participatory budgeting where we can actually take the action that we want to see uh in the world and know that it will be listened to by a broader group of philanthropists or for folks that are helping to fund the system at large and I think this is a really important kind of like example of what will be a much broader design space around the coordination of funding in in the future and I think that like again there's this really interesting conversation about like to what degree do we kind of rely on like collective intelligence to what degree do we rely on Experts to what degree do we rely on like AI is the ultimate expert it's like this like kind of meta expert and I think there's a real conversation to be had about like how uh you know much should be uh let go of our own sort of like capacity for uh decision making and there's the trade-offs there of course like certainly experts are better for some decisions than others but I think it's really that's like a fundamental question that we're gonna have to Grapple with and I think ethereum is like a really great kind of selling point for having conversations around those tools uh in context so in the end I hope that by creating all these kinds of doubts by creating all these uh sort of like different uh ecosystems that are you know creating their own local impact creating positive externalities in the process we're able to basically create a kind of impact Network and David ehrlichmann has talked a lot about this he wrote a book on it and uh called impact networks I believe and it's very um it's a very interesting idea in the sense that I think there wasn't really you know the cypherpunks have this notion of we're all going to independently build our own tooling work independently and solve for you know we're going to fight the state through our own like kind of a heroic action I think the Solar Products have the notion that we can do this like collectively and work with the state and be kind of like you know a happy family I think the lunar punks are kind of like trying to uh trying to be more realistic about those things but I think regardless of those different narratives the idea that we can actually form impact networks locally together uh with some kind of broader um you know uh and coordination that's achieved again like as a result I think that's that's ultimately where a lot of this um is going where that the benefit of ethereum the impact of ethereum comes in so uh hopefully that kind of got most of the points across here um I think I'm out of time so um all I'll say is ethereum I think is a public good I think the notion of public goods needs to evolve from where it is today um and I think that if we find ways to evolve that definition uh we can coordinate towards a more techno-optimist future so thank you very much thank you Scott that's awesome um maybe a quick question um just just before you go like if anybody wants to start like actively participating in you know being a part of this kind of public goods movement using ethereum like where's a good place for them to start doing that right now I'm definitely biased towards you know get going as a place to do it um I think you know going to to get coin Discord and just getting involved um optimism as well is just starting up and they have lots of initial grants I think honestly there's at this point there's no real shortage of places to make an impact I think it's a question just what kind of impact do you want to make find the thing this is like the really everyone gives us this advice but like find the thing that you're passionate about right and leverage that passion and find ways to you know basically work with a group that needs that skill set and kind of you know a lot of the original challenges of this with Daz was you kind of tried to do that and I think there wasn't really a good process for onboarding and getting people involved but I think that as people have started to realize hey you need structured leadership endows I think that started to change and so I think that people going to the house now certainly relative to like a year ago we'll have like a better experience kind of like finding the path end finding the way to get involved and I would say like you know any of those organizations I mentioned are really good starting points DNS as well filecoin protocol Labs as well it's doing really good work in this area [Music] um feel free to reach out um if you have questions about Orcs through to get involved in and I'm sure I can find one amazing yeah thank you so much uh really great having you here Scott and uh I mean congratulations also on you know you're chatting about coordination and how hard that is uh all those 40 000 people donating in the last Bitcoin round that just closed yesterday that's like a crazy amount of people so congrats on the success on get coin round 15.