History never repeats itself but it always rhymes with Marta Geater-Piekarska

So I wanted to talk to you about uh the the mistakes that we are making uh at in decentralization and generally in building Dows. I've been building Dows for quite a while. Uh I've been with consensus for quite a while and I feel like we are not doing a great job at uh learning from our past. So let's start with maybe who am I other than a random woman standing on the stage. Um my name is Marta.

I work at consensus as head of dow strategy and web3 engagement. I also sometimes row and used to do horse riding. Um I'm always told that you have to give like fun facts about yourself. Um so there you go my fun facts. So why should you care?

Uh I guess the most important thing for me is that the whole blockchain revolution and introduction of decentralization and Dows uh has brought us a real promise of doing things better and different and making sure that we really change the way that governments are are governed, the way that companies are governed. We were really hopeful a few years ago when we started this that we are democratizing this whole space, right? We heard about DeFi democratizing finance. We heard about um um Dows democratizing access to investments and governance and all those things, but it feels like we haven't quite managed to do it right. So Dows are created for a few things.

First, Dows are great for governance. Of course, uh can be used to make decisions about the direction of decentralized project or a community. Uh members can make vote uh make and vote on proposals and outcomes based on how many votes each proposal gets. They are really good for funds management. So even if you don't really want to govern something, just the fact that you can gather a group of people to decide where the funds are going is quite important.

They're also a great way of community building. What a better way to get together with your internet friends uh than to create a DA and have a mission have something that you want to really do. And then for decision making and resource allocation, resource allocation meaning also human resources. We forget that Dows are as much about the funocation as they are about dividing work and doing work together. But unfortunately there are quite a few mistakes that uh we are making.

First, I think that we kind of we started off as this group of random humans, right, thousands of years ago, uh, running around in fields and everybody was there for their own. You had to chase your animal, you had to kill it, you had to eat it, you had, we didn't even eat plants as far as we know. And then we kind of moved to thinking hey actually it is much easier if we form a group and we live together and we do things together and someone will go be responsible for hunting and someone will be responsible for gathering and it'll be great but then is it just me or is there like a feedback? Yeah. Sorry.

Closer. Okay. Can you turn it down though? Thank you. Okay.

That's better. Uh yeah. So we kind of figured out, okay, we are a group of people. We live here together, but actually, you know what, like Jake is really good at figuring out where the animals are. So let's make Jake the head of our gather hunting community and whatever.

Joseph is really great at um planting um planting crop, so let's make him responsible for the crops. And so we naturally were driven to some kind of a hierarchy and organization because it was just much more efficient. Now you know many years passed right and now uh we went from uh being random groups of people in cages to then forming um companies and those companies being there to make it more efficient to produce things right. It's it's not it's not really a thing where like we made it against our our better hope or we didn't make or organize ourselves into governments into companies because we wanted to harm ourselves. No, we did it because we wanted to be more efficient.

And then uh the cipher punk movement came and they were like, you know, got let's scratch everything. Let's destroy everything that we know about organization, about collaboration and let's make it from start completely random running around group of people that is gathered together by a passion or created together through a passion for a project. Now on one hand I understand why because governments don't work and corporates don't work. On the other hand, I think that this this is the first mistake thinking that we should be forgetting about everything that we learned from our dare I say ancestors uh and re reform everything rather than doing an evolution and improving the stat status quo and learning from the things that also work really well today because it's there are good reasons why uh why we are all here there are good reasons why we had to pass cross the border even if I'm not a huge fan of borders, but it it makes it much better. The second big thing that we don't do so well in Dows and that we is a common mistake is just ignoring the overhead.

And I'm sure you all know here, you've participated in more Dows than I that actually organization and co coordination of humans is really difficult. And now if we have completely independent humans that have all the same thoughts the same or this they all have the same right and the same power um and they all want to discuss well that unfortunately leads to a lot of complications and uh I'm sure you've heard about the bike shed uh dilemma uh it's a game theory concept which talks about the fact that if you have a community and there are two decisions to be One of them is about starting a nuclear reactor or creating a nuclear reactor and the other one is about what color to paint the shed in. Um it turns out that people will be very quick to make the decision about the reactor because it's very complicated and there are other people that know better. So they will refer to experts and say okay yeah you know what you're doing so I'll vote as you do. Now everybody has an opinion about what color the bike shed should be and there will be long discussions about it and that's exactly what we are seeing in Dows today where important decisions pass within seconds because nobody really has the ability to make those decisions or make informed decisions and we are really over complicating this um the the whole governance space by making people make a lot or asking people to make a lot of decisions a lot of the time and these decisions are quite hard.

On the other hand, you will have long discussions on forums about mundane things that don't really move the DAO forward, but it is just something that everybody wants to express their opinion. Now, the third thing is a big problem of our industry. I think that we are really having a difficult time right now seeing how not decentralized we are. And before you tell me that you know your DA has a 10,000 people on Discord that is not decentralization that first of all 10,000 is not really decentralized thinking that we have seven billion or eight billion people now in the world but also it's not 10,000. you well know that 99% of them are bots.

Uh I actually found a very interesting paper yesterday. Uh that studies the hidden problems of Dows and talks about the um does a full study on how decentralized Dows actually are. So they use two coefficients. The genie coefficient that uh is measured to uh easiest to measure the inequality and distribution of any funible good and in this case this is voting power. So genie coefficient always ranges from zero to one uh meaning zero is um perfect equality and one is highest level of inequality.

And to give you uh a reference point, most governments and most countries have the G gen GI coefficient of distribution of wealth because that's the the easiest to measure between 7 and 0.85. So that's where where we are right now. That's how distributed the voting power is, right? And that's both for holders and when we talk about delegates.

Uh the second thing is the Nakamoto coefficient which is uh it was introduced in 2017 and it is used to measure how decentralized a system is uh by counting how many parties are needed to collectively take control over the system. Uh so basically if we talk about dial governance this means that uh number we we are counting the number of addresses that are uh which together hold more than 50% of voting power and again I mean ENS is fairly good 94 but unis swap 30 right we go to to things like radical six strike one that is insane guys like we are in deep deep trouble right now because of that because every decision that governance is making and I'm sure you heard the horror stories of that is made by a handful of people that talk behind closed doors about it and actually agree on it. I mean I'm not going to name names here but uh in consensus we actually are very heavily involved in governance of some of the protocols uh to the point where we are one of the top delegates for most of major protocols and uh recently there have been some big discussions and big changes introduced to ENS and to unis swap I was called at 3:00 a.m. in the morning by another delegate being like, "No guys, you have to change your vote.

It's not according to what we want." That's that's the level of really it feels like Capitol Hill. And the fact that we are comparing Dow governance to traditional governance that we tried to destroy. Well, we are clearly failing here. So, I really really worry that um the problem is not voter apathy.

The problem is that these numbers mean that also if we look at the distribution of wallets the same people are top governors on unis swap on a on whatever other protocol hop compound wherever it is it's always the same small group of people and we see this at conferences right we come here this is a biggest industry conference and probably see some new names but most of the time like you come to those conferences to meet your friends because we are still a very very small group of people and we need to work on better adoption and greater adoption and much more diverse group of people participating in the um in the governance. Fourth is not learning from the past. Um I already mentioned a lot of it a little bit of it. Um at so ethmologically go word governance can be derived from a Greek verb verb kubernon which means to pilot or to steer. So the concept of governance was first used by plateau to design a system of rules that will make society more efficient.

And um these I'm sorry because that's probably not the greatest quality of uh of photos here. Uh but b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b basically these are two frescos that have been um painted in mid-4th century by uh Ambroio Loreni uh who who was an Italian uh artist and painted a series of of frescos. You can look them up. He depicted what a good government and bad government is and the impact on society. So if you look on at this one, it's like this is the good government.

The society is prospering. Everything's beautiful. Women are dancing here. um it's quite damaged but we can actually see bad government where people are killing each other and everybody's poor and so on and so forth. So that concept of actually government is there for for us and to help us.

Um that's that's something that we always felt and hoped for and when it comes to Dows I'm not saying that governments should replace Dows because I'm I'm very far I've my background is in security and privacy. I've been fighting governments most of my life. But on the other hand, there are things that we should be learning from how societies are organized. Um because there are good things, right? There are good things around like social care.

There are good things around just the structure. If you get robbed, you go to the police. The police should be doing something about it. If you get robbed, who do you go to? Like recently there was a book published uh by an investigative journalist that found who did the DAO hack.

She found out it names the person by name, nobody does anything. Now why? Because we are just so used to being scammed that although a lot of people lost quite a bit of money, it's water under the bridge and it's only been like six years or seven years now, right? But it is, if you think about it, in a normal day-to-day world, what happens is you get robbed, someone attacks you, you go to the police, they open a case, and there's someone that is being paid for actually chasing the the bad guys. In our situation, in our world, we don't have those structures.

We don't have structures that take care of people uh take care of people who have been robbed or attacked or anywhere else. Nobody's paid to do it. We don't have a DAO police. But maybe we should because that without that we will not get that structure and that safety on the internet or in Dows. So um what can we learn?

There's another thing that I think is an interesting comparison. When you look at governments, how many votes do you have every year? Like two, one. Usually you have like one presidential election and one parliament election like so one vote every two years really. And those votes are really simple.

You get a card and you can either do it by post or you have to go in person. But it's really really simple method of casting your vote. And that vote is also a very simple decision, right? It's like, do I want this, this, or that? Like there are three people and there's some education.

There's time, there's ample time that people will campaign for it themselves and all that stuff. And of course, it's corrupt. It's horrible. But it still is a very simple decision that you have to make at the end of it. And maybe you'll just be like, uh, that one, uh, that's me because I live in the UK, but I'm Polish, so I don't really follow British politics.

And, um, yeah. uh but but still there is a simple decision that you can make and there there is a lot of education and there is a focus on the human aspect of it. What we do is we really focus on technology and how can we make the DAO you know do the governance better or distribute the funds or so on there isn't the human aspect and the decisions that we are making there isn't much of like taking care of uh of the well the agents that create those like humans right we all just focus on technology rather than on on ourselves and what we do and finally something that actually I I was I added this morning is the separation of money and vote. Something that's very different between governments and what we do in Dows and I would say our it is a problem of our industry is that the wealthier you are the more votes you have right the more token you hold the more token you can purchase and before you tell me that well there is delegation and you can enter this this area with no tokens um and just get delegated well we tried it at consensus uh with maker we applied to become a recognized delegate and we got the recognition. We followed the process, but on purpose, we didn't really purchase any tokens to be able to vote.

We thought, you know what? Let's see how many people just delegate votes to us. Not many. And it's a several billion dollar company with a brand that is really established in governance in general, right? So, me as an individual, like if I showed up to any of the protocols and be like, "Hey, I'm Marta.

Just delegate votes to me." like I don't know if anyone here would delegate votes to me and you already met me right so I think that this is a problem we say that we democratize Dows and we democratize the governance space but we don't we still ask people with money to put more money in and then the final final aspect of um of the problems or probably there are many more but the ones that I wanted to highlight is the tech centric um user uh experience design of Dows. Uh we have not managed to refocus our efforts on userinformed design, something that is so known in like any other tech industry, right? Userinformed design. My PhD was on the user-informed design of privacy and security tools, right?

Even security is nowadays more focused on user informed or user centric design rather than um technology centric. In Dow, we really focus on what can the technology be and we just like put in the we put in the the the effort into like establishing governor alpha and governor bravo and now it's like you know it's snapshot it's not snapshot but it's still we we haven't done any studies as far as I know in how can how can we make it easy how can we cast that vote like we cast that vote for a president or for a parliament ticking a like we need that kind of level of simplicity because otherwise we won't get adoption and I think that without adoption we will fail like we we need to have more people going back to that decentralization we don't have enough decentralization so that's it that was my I know this talk it's a long story why but this talk was supposed to be 20 minutes when I was informed that I was accepted and then on schedule somehow it ended up being 35 minutes but that's great because we have 15 minutes to talk. So, if I manage to either inspire or outrage you, um I' I'd love to take some questions. And if not, then I'll just go home. Yeah.

On the the good things from previously existing governments, you had separation of um like managing of the money and the decision-m, how would you recommend that like a a framework separate those two within a DAO? So uh in case I don't know how good the speakers are but the question was uh how would you separate the money and vote in Dows if we need to do it I think one human one vote is the right answer probably so or one wallet one vote of course this is this is some it is possible to trick that uh by having multiple wallets and increasing the power um so I think that that it's a space that needs research probably quadratic quadratic voting helps quite a bit because it reduces the massive power and I know that there are some even more complicated like double quadratic voting uh schemes um yeah so probably more research is what I would do I just can talk about what what isn't working I can't give you answers probably directly Yeah. So here you go. Yeah. Is this working?

Yeah. What would you what things would you take from current governments and imply in Dows? I think that um segregation of decision making in a way probably much more optin than uh than not but not asking every person to make or every DA participant to make every decision. So, you know, I'm I'm an expert in security, self-proclaimed expert in security or in um whatever brand. I will vote on those things, but don't ask me to make decisions on tokconomics because I have no idea what that is and I don't really have time to dive into it.

So I think that this would be one of the biggest things that I would want to take from like what we know or what we learned is just making it simpler and much more rare to vote. The too many votes are also a a big problem. I didn't include that in in that um the graphic from that paper but I'm happy to share it with you. Uh on how many votes there are there have been or or proposals that you needed to uh vote on. I mean we are with uh at we in maker we had to actually establish a separate we we have a very complicated process on how we cast votes because we are consensus so we really want to make sure that everything's like very kosher and we have a framework and we produce memos and so on and for maker we actually had to scrape scrape that process and make it way simpler because it was such an overhead for every quote to like to to do that memo.

Um so too many votes is another I think we we need to reduce that. Uh uh hi uh I'm I'm the founder of CD and we have gone through one year evolution evolution. So I totally agree with you uh what you're talking about in the evolution with uh revolution. So I've got two questions for you. One is about hierarchy because as you involved and your DS get larger and larger maybe you will like uh some se separation about mounting governance and if you need rare votes sometimes we were involve like like seven layers uh it means have some hierarchies uh so how do you think about hierarchies and the doubts uh for uh flat organization that's the first question and second wise how do you think about n yeah um so I I think the on the first question I think that subdows and and having some kind of working groups and task forces and all of that is very important and that goes back over also to the overhead that like the more overhead there is a lot of overhead in the discussions.

So limiting the uh the size of the discussion to people that actually should be participating is quite quite a good way to do it. And I think that there are some interesting models of like even with delegation for instance I was talking this morning to someone and we were saying maybe we should have a system where delegates uh get uh need to be reelected. So like the same way as governments we have to reelect our government with delegates once a year you lose all of your delegation rights and everything and then you have to vote vouch for yourself again to become a delegate. So I think that kind of models uh are really required as your dows uh scale. I'm very happy to uh hear your speech.

Uh we have run a DAO in Chinese community for half and one year and now we see DA as an infinite game and uh focus on coordinatorship. Uh yesterday I have uh I have been to DA Denver. Uh I'm very happy that uh DAO co-contributors are talking about how to develop leadership in DA. Um but I have a question um because we uh if you really run a DA you will know uh you need to get things done and you need to coordinate. Um I think the good uh governance is about uh is a combination of uh top down and the bottom up.

And I want to know how do you think we can coordinate the uh we can balance the button up and the uh the top down and the button up. Yeah, that's a very interesting question. How do you how how do you balance that out? I think that's um that's an because Dows are such a kind of endeavor and human coordination and community and all of that. I would say that it's interesting to see an initial structure that is like created by the common common the founder founder DAO team whatever you want to call them founding community uh ideally uh but then uh having it flexible so that as the DAO grows uh there are proposals and that process of making changes to the way that the DAO is coordinated is um is very simple and open.

I think that's that's a good way of like providing an initial structure but then being very open and agile to how to how how to change it or how to make it better for the participants. I guess the the challenge that we observe with Dows right now is that unfortunately they are not very agile like making a decision and in a DAO and like making a change to the structure is very complicated. So simplifying that process would be would be the next thing. Any other questions? Yeah.

Hi, thank you for sharing. You just mentioned that you prefer one person one world mechanism but my concern is that that kind of mechanism will lead to populism which will make D ineffective. So uh would you like to elaborate more on that? Yeah, thank you. I didn't hear your concern.

Sorry. Uh can you repeat? Yeah. Just I just just concerned that one person one world will lead to will lead to popular then. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. That's that's true. That is also an a a a challenge I think. Uh and yeah, as I as I mentioned before, I think that we just need to dive deeper into different ver versions of how to do it.

Maybe some balancing act or maybe you know because we have like ideally D should be a meritocracy, right? So those who do and those who know most have the greatest power of voice. So I think that maybe what we should be doing is we should be really just um giving voting power based on how much you know on that topic and how much the community understands that you're an expert in that topic. Okay. I Okay, there's one more.

Oh, sorry. Is this one working? Yeah. Okay. Thanks for sharing.

You mentioned a bit about policing and a option for there to be like a police dow as such. So, I'm wondering if you have any more thoughts on that to share what that would look like and how you imagine that. Yeah. So, uh I don't think I'm really thinking of a police d as such. I think that there should be more of a general structure or a committee like I I in general think that we should work together much more than we are like establishing good patterns for how to do governance and making it so that's I I guess I forgot to say that one of the things that uh is easy is that even like I moved countries several times the voting process for almost every country is the same.

I know how to make that tick, right? I I I need to educate myself about whom I'm electing, but I do need to learn more about the process. On the other hand, like tax laws are completely different in every country. So, you have to really educate yourself, and that's where people really fail and go to jail for tax evasion. Um, and I think that we should be establishing more of like very common practices on how to do governance and rules around the governance to make it much more easy to participate as you're changing Dows.

So going back to question about policing, I think that we need to form a committee like as a whole web 3 industry, we should have like a improve improvement committee and part of the improvement committee would be like one one working group I as I imagine it would be talking about standards around governance and another one would be talking about the security and would serve as that kind of you know chasing the bad guys body. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for all the questions. I'm I'm really enjoy talking to you and um see you around.

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