Ameen Soleimani ~ Moloch Rises Moloch DAO

[Music] um so here today we're going to talk about and also do a presentation demo of a dowel named Moloch I'm not sure how many of you have heard of Moloch like how many have you here okay we have some people here uh yes so Moloch isn't a really family friendly name so the name Moloch is chalie sacre Faiz Damon and the reason we pick the name not because we really fetishized over shall sacrifice but because we're inspired by one of like my favorite personal rationalist skaldak Xander Uncas as the meditation Moloch so Moloch represents a host of problems were individual up to individual optimal optimal optimal choice doesn't lead to system of the optimal choice so for example you have conditions like reach the bottom or overfishing and all of that or coordination problems where people optimized for their self-interest which leads to actually really not the most optimal point for the overall system and that optimization problem and the coordination problem also exists in the etherium system so I think like everybody knows the transition from East 1.0 and 2.0 is the most important upgrades in the whole like if you're history but there's a bunch of like coordination problems and funding problems are slowing the process down so we make Moloch which is a Dow that is aimed to accelerate the development and transition from intern 1.0 2.0 in a volunteer basis so it's a grand making Dow and we take members and also grantees in the Dow it's actually really simple down with only about like 200 175 lines lines of code you okay okay Elmore so wait wait deploy the contract about two days ago and the first proposal for the first member are submitted so now Thank You Cassandra for those of you who don't know Cassandra she used to run the etherium Community Fund which was another attempts at trying to solve coordination problems to how the etherium ecosystem move faster but there was rife with political you know differences and and alignment you know difficulties and so we thought that a dhow would be an elegant solution to some of those problems and would be able to facilitate fundraising and resource allocation cheaper so I'm gonna do a couple things today I only have about ten more minutes I'm gonna go pretty quickly this is the transaction that created the contract as you can see we did it at 1 a.

m. here which is aligned with 12:00 a.m. Pacific so molix birthday is Valentine's Day this was an act of love this building mullick we actually started writing the contracts this year like last year here at Denver and so it's really cool to be able to see it come to fruition it's been it's been a passion project for a bunch of us James Young has helped a lot the connects team arjuna wrote the white paper and his teammates helped build the website as well websites almost done I'll show you some of it yeah so this is the actual contract address has a couple transactions sent to it I got the input parameters so this went wrong so but before I talk about like how Moloch works I'm gonna talk about what it's for first and so the thing that we want to do first with it is try to make e 2.0 happen faster this is something that everybody in the etherium community can sort of get behind as something that we need to do it's going to take a lot of effort from it from all of us and you know we want to be at the forefront of this so two weeks ago I worked with a consultancy called Keough can to publish a report about the state of eath 2.

0 that provides you know some direction for initial grants and so one of these we identified is like there's no real it's 2.0 lead and that there could be additional management that might be helpful at least on the engineering side of things to some of the e 2.0 developers I gave a presentation that had these slides so this was just a link to the report that we published then we all discussed it it was cool we found that you know some teams are happy with more structure and that you know there's some coordination overhead that that could be reduced just talking a little bit about what Moloch is the concept is really interesting in and of itself these are actually slides from when I was still at consensus and I was pitching a different kind of oversight committee called the resource allocation committee the rack that consensus those guys know what it's about they're all at this presentation and and you know I started talking about you know tragedy the Commons race to the bottom etc arms races and so forth and like you know talked about how the adoption of blockchain itself is Maalik because we're giving the bank's like you know guns and letting them all shoot it out and that's great for us I was initially two years ago and I was pitching this kind of thing it has since evolved I was trying to build like my own version of consensus the ethos wasn't appreciated as much at that time it's trying to make it a little more Spartan they're a little you know let's discuss everything so you know the point of moloch is like if we were just doing this in a vacuum it'd be fine we wouldn't need to speed up we could just take however long run it but the reality is that there are other teams building things that you know make a lot of sense in the space and we should pick up the pace if we want to remain competitive so we are in a molecule I kit or not and if we can beat our own community Maalik of you know coordination failure then we could potentially even get ahead of all the rest of the teams and make a theory I'm not just like you know the cool thing that happened in 2015 or 2014 but like you know something that stays around forever so yeah we are in a blockchain space race and that is why we want to do Moloch and to talk a little bit about how it works this is what the UI is supposed to look like there there are some kinks here it's great that we have an entire hackathon now to figure this out it couldn't have had better timing there's one member right now and that's me I'm the summoner so I get one vote one share and as soon as I vote other people in that have more shares than I do then I lose any advantage that I have and it's decentralized there's no sort of any specific roles or anything so you can see there's two proposals right now you can't really see anything about them because the UI isn't reading it right but I'm going to show you on my crypto so I put in the contract address and the ABI and so I check the proposal queue and I see that there is a proposal I see that you know it matches the address Andrew made so we all also made gnosis safes for Maalik so that we could integrate and then we are requesting each 100 shares so there's 1516 people who've committed to being founders and put up 100 either right now and so the the rate limiting step right now is like getting the gnosis safe multi-sig approved transaction on the contract and then once we have that then I can submit a proposal to include you and so this is the proposal for Cassandra and so it says the details and it says the token tribute that she offered so she put up 100 wreaths and then if I read proposal Q number one that would be me and so you can see in the details it says my name is I put it in when I submitted it all right cool so a little bit about how it works and then I'm going to vote us both in doing it live no-no-no I have the only vote right now so I can go to us both right I'm the summoner that's how this works centralized bootstrapping is great by the way as long as you know there's credible you know moving away from centralization so anyway how this whole thing works I should have a better diagram for this but I don't but it's pretty simple so I can just explain it you submit a proposal only members can submit proposals so because I'm the only one with a share right now and the only one who can submit proposals those proposals go to the end of the queue when it proposals at the end of the queue once it reaches the voting period there's a seven-day voting period there's five proposals a day so there's there's a clock internally which is like four point eight hours and after you know 35 of those periods about proposals no longer in the voting period and it enters into the grace period and so one of the cool things that you can do is you can ragequit like we have this guild and if you don't agree with how the proposals are being voted on you can leave and take your money at any time and that gets a lot of the game theoretic issues if you read the moratorium on the Dow by Eamon goon saira published in the you know right before the original Dow got hacked he talks about two things specifically one is post vote grace periods that give everybody the opportunity to exit and instant withdrawals that mean that you know even if you can just basically leave it whenever you want all right and so we did both of those things so then there's no quorum requirement because it's safe because you can leave so most of the time in voting systems you have a forum because the decisions are final in this case they're not you have that grace period where you can leave you can only leave though if you didn't vote yes if you voted yes then you're stuck and so this makes it so that you know if you are prepared to pay for something and and then if a bunch of other people leave let's say like half the guild stays then half the gold leaves and rage quits then like the people who are remaining or on the hook for twice as much money because the way grants are funded there's only one mechanism you request shares and you optionally offer tribute right so you can buy shares by putting up ether as tribute and requesting new shares to be minted so if there's like a hundred million dollars in the guild bank and 100 outstanding shares you want to come in you'll offer one new share and you'll get you know and you'll put up 1 million dollars and so that way the price is sort of the same right but if you want you can also offer to do some work for the guild and if you do work you can also say I promise to do this work and then I will request these shares for myself and so it's sort of one of the first systems that puts capital and labor on unequal footing and I think that's that's kind of elegant ok so moving on ready yeah to be voted in you don't actually have to do anything so now I go here and I click Submit vote and the Cassandra's index is zero and the votes can be either a 0 a 1 or a 2 a 0 is null means if you abstain so that's what it is by default 2 would be a no vote and a 1 would be a yes vote really hope I don't have these backwards because you can't throw it again so I just submitted a thing so I did that work hit write hit generate transaction I hit Send transaction now hit Send now we get the meta masked thing it's working so then I confirm then we can see this and once this confirms then I will be able to read Cassandra's proposal again and hopefully the yes votes will be one mmm let's find the proposal Q there we go so still nothing still pending I paid 20 gig away man so yeah it's a now we just wait this is the best part of watching you 2.0 couldn't happen fast enough scalability y'all I'm just gonna hit refresh while we watch this grass grow oh yeah there's a bunch of people who deserve thanks the graph is one of them because they've helped build a data caching layer for this ok a lot of people inspired this like Matt Liston has been big on trying to help get a grants Dow put together and and had a lot of conversations about this type of thing so let's try it again oh oh there's a yes vote it happened okay cool so Cassandra's been voted in to our guilt now and I'm gonna vote myself in so wait I can't that's your proposal index okay so then I do this that's just crank it and then I'll do my vote and then I'll be in oh yeah mr. mayor it was like solicit funding yes if you would like to help you know provide funding and join and help you know provide input on how we spend that funding like then you know reach out to somebody and join our guild so let's see once this is done yeah problems were student to figure out launching the contract and launching the website to step one we're student to figure out like how do we coordinate our chain like how are we going to select things to fund and how do I sell priorities so like if you want to help any of that you can join the guild by contributing work working out to be if you want as well so yep my transaction confirmed so now I check this and I check one that's mine and I'm like hey I got a yes vote so that concludes that concludes our demonstration excited to seeing where this goes I highly encourage everyone to fork it we built a sort of Minimum Viable dhow we took all the lessons of the DAO hack and we tried to make the simplest thing we possibly could we stripped everything down to about 200 lines of code and then I only added a couple more as like safety mechanisms to allow you to like abort an a proposal that you know you didn't agree to the terms of and also to like add a little bit of a permission system so that I can have like the gnosis safe as my main key and then like have another key that I use to actually do the votes and then like one can reassign the other stuff like that so yeah thanks