The Commons Stack - Griff Green

all right at the moment you've been waiting for i know that you've all been waiting to see griff come on to the stage today he's a long time east denver presenter he's been with us many years in a row he's a community favorite kind of an all-star mr griff green welcome back we're so happy to have you hey hey shannon good to see you it's been a while oh i know that's actually been a year since we saw each other last year at east denver in real life where are you in the world i'm in beautiful ecuador actually i have this uh i'm i feel like i'm staying in a little princess castle i have this beautiful view it's really nice it's snowing here in denver so get some sunshine for those of us who are coming to you from the winter parts of the world but yeah yeah right you don't feel bad uh we're excited to have you presenting today you're going to talk to us about the common stack yeah yeah my goal is to talk about ending the psychosis uh that we have around public goods and uh shall i just get started let's do it take it away okay cool uh yeah so as shannon said that my name is griff green and i uh i started a non-profit many years ago called uh giveth and have been living in the blockchain nonprofit space for a while uh i've had i've learned lots of things and uh the biggest thing that i think that we often forget is that we are we are broken when it comes to public goods before i talk about our collective psychosis i just want to talk about a little bit about nonprofits and the idea of a not for-profit organization anytime anytime the non-profit organization is like meeting together trying to create a strategy meeting there's an elephant in the room there's something that they refuse to bring up even though it's in the back of all of their minds but before i talk about that elephant in the room i want to just like open our minds about nonprofits nonprofits create value uh this is if there's one thing i want people to understand after this talk nonprofits are creating value uh whether it's a social impact nonprofit that's you know taking care of refugees or uh feeding the feeding the hungry sheltering the homeless uh taking care of orphans you know any of these social welfare programs are creating value for society as a whole and the environmental nonprofits you know how much value does clean air have clean water maintaining biodiversity these things are obviously critical for our success on this little spaceship we call planet earth we we cannot survive without stewarding uh stewarding this planet so these non-profits are clearly creating value and you know some there are a couple non-profit organizations like sectors that you wouldn't think about but like cultural heritage and making space for arts in museums understanding where we've been will help us get to where we want to be right and and protecting our cultural heritage is important is it's so important uh these non-profits are also creating value and then obvious it's so obvious when you look at the open source space especially in this community how much value is being generated by the non-profit sector and i mean just look at the the penguin box over here these are all just different uh varieties of linux an open source operating system and wikipedia mozilla vlc android you know that these are huge like impactful organizations that live in the open source system and honestly they're not rewarded for the value that they're creating and this is because in our we our culture is dominated by this monopolistic economy there's there's kind of the economy that we live in and the economy is incredible at providing excludable goods if you want a cell phone you can go buy it you want to fly to ecuador and hang out with me over here come on down there's you can buy an airplane you can buy a you can buy a ticket it's not that expensive it's incredible that the the the what the free market has done for excludable goods but public goods are non-excludable and this is the big challenge non-excludable goods in general are considered a market failure and often when you want to provide a non-excludable resource the best solution is to exclude people uh so if you're uh we're in denver we're hanging and there's a lot of national parks national parks the forest this is in general it's supposed to be a non-excludable resource but to create funding streams they exclude people they say listen you want to drive your car here you got to pay 15 for a park pass this helps us fund operations it's not a bad thing there's no wrong way to fund public goods but it is a challenge it is a problem with the way we structure society if it's also obvious in the open source space if you want to uh create a business model around open source the most popular one is a freemium model you know give 98 of the people a decent service but then do some coding cl in a closed source way and sell that sell that to pay for the rest of what you want to do which is actually providing free and like art providing your art to people who want to build want to be a part of it this is a sacrifice and and the sacrifice is the elephant in the room every non-profit organization every public goods organization every organization who's trying to create a non-excludable resource that benefits society relies on sacrifice this is not good or bad it is just reality in the system we have today uh there's uh if you donate to a non-profit obviously that's a sacrifice the money game if if the economy was a game money would be points and everyone's going for a high score how often do you play games where you give points away on purpose to support other other games that's that's kind of crazy your sac donors are sacrificing in the economic game and that sacrifice actually taints the money right because if you think about a non-profit with a ceo getting a fair market salary that's almost not culturally acceptable everyone who works for a non-profit and gets paid by donations is expected to sacrifice this is this is the culture that we live in today and i would argue that it is a collective psychosis we forget because the the economic system that we live in today is so dominant we forget that public goods have value and coordinating value production around public goods needs better systems and we need to get we need to break out of this collective psychosis i would argue that as a society we are exploiting the altruists and this is a bold statement and i i and but it's real it's something i've experienced it's something many people have worked for nonprofits have experienced it's altruistic burnout a lack of recognition and reward for the work that you're doing and the value you're creating by not having these by having systems that don't recognize that value we are exploiting the altruists of course i i shouldn't uh just talk about nonprofits especially since they're a minority of where public goods funding come from public goods are generally funded by governments governments also rely on sacrifice they create bureaucratic systems that force people to pay taxes every year and fight through some paperwork so that they can give some of their the money that they earn by doing work to an organization that most people would argue or are poorly run and poorly incentivized to actually provide the public good services that they exposed to create and the worst part about governments because honestly governments and non-profits are providing immense value immense value i i don't mean to talk trash about anybody or any organization that is funding public goods they are heroes the challenge that governments have is that they create a monopoly over every public goods vertical that they touch they are they control public infrastructure they control public education public health uh environmental regulations they and and really non-profits only step up when governments are failing in in venezuela clean water non-profits are very important and impactful a clean water nonprofit doesn't need to exist in the states because there's generally there is access to clean water in most places and you know this isn't this isn't anyone's fault this is not a conspiracy and and honestly there's a lot of things that got us here that makes sense right uh even though this is madness there's a method there's a there's there's problems we need to solve specifically the relation to uh the bottom line and the quality of the public goods service uh this is this is a general issue with with budgets you know if you just have a budget and you want to maximize for that budget then then you reduce the quality of the service that you provide and this is very prevalent in nonprofits where they have very limited scarce resources and they have to choose in many circumstances to provide a lower quality service to to than they would than they would prefer this is the collective psychosis that we need to overcome and and this is the collective psychosis that we need to battle against because it's not just the systems but it's also our understanding of public goods that is the real fight and with the common stack we're trying to create a third way non-profits are the main grassroots way to fund public goods today and and governments are the main top-down way to fund public goods today and the common stack hopes to create a third way that is also more like non-profits because it's a grassroots method but uh also changes the structure in the system in place that exists in nonprofits so that we can recognize the future value that the nonprofit can create we want to reward the heroes the altruists make sure they feel not only rewarded financially but also acknowledged for the work that they're doing it's not all financial but we need to create a system that will create that will provide quality public goods services and the free market actually points to this uh this what has happened with with the you know with stocks and with shares and the ability to have a publicly traded uh share of ownership of these organizations is that it's actually created a system that rewards quality service uh apple for instance is the highest publicly traded company in the world and obviously they provide nice products that's kind of their meme that they're doing same with tesla tesla has a higher market cap than all other car vehicle stocks in the united states combined this is because they provide a quality service they are fighting for customers there is competition they are not part of some monopoly system they are competing for the customer's attention and and business and so our mission the common stack mission is to develop micro economies that will incentivize and and create reward systems for the continued creation of public goods to do this we are not trying to take a top-down approach we want to be we want to empower communities we want to create documentation and tooling that will allow micro communities to design their own design and deploy their own micro economies so that we can see a viral spread and and improve these this design iteratively we are built on the shoulder of giants uh eleanor ostrom is a major influence for us uh she won a nobel prize for disproving the tragedy of the commons in the 90s and she very eloquently states there's no reason to believe that bureaucrats and politicians no matter how well-meaning are better at solving problems than the people on the spot who have the strongest incentive to get the solution right our goal with the common snack is to take the lessons that eleanor ostrom has learned through her case studies and integrate the public goods funding that blockchain has has discovered blockchain by creating their own economy has has created systems of an opel open global payment system that everyone can use that zcash has created zero zero knowledge knowledge comments they actually pay researchers to investigate cryptography and and all it's open source it's amazing prime coin created an economy around discovering prime numbers okay if we can create an economy that rewards the public discovery of prime numbers i think we can create an economy around any public good and another thing that's really interesting lately is all of these governance tokens you know we we have this there is this constant challenge that we have that things that have qualitative value are difficult for us to appreciate the value but governance over public goods clearly has value biden and trump spent over six billion dollars to get to to fight to get a 400k salary position that's ridiculous clearly it's not about the salary right they're they're fighting over power they want power over the public goods verticals and uniswap is a provides a service yfi provides us a tornado cache these are in many ways public goods services and governance over them has value and these tokens have all proved it one the other another influence of the common stack is david boyer and he really coined the the best definition of a commons that i've heard a commons is neither the resource the community that gathers around it nor the protocols for its stewardship but the dynamic interaction between all of these elements the commons that we're building is is similar to a dow and it's not about the smart contracts and it's not about the people and it's not about the public good that the people are trying to create it's about the interactions between all of these things and making sure that they have healthy relationships and one of the things that david bowier has constantly reminded us is that the next big thing will be a lot of small things we're not trying the common stack is not trying to create the next global public goods economy we're trying to enable lots of small local communities to create their own economies their own micro economies for focused purposes we want to create what we generally call cyber physical comments where we can use the blockchain incentive mechanisms and apply them to physical world applications like roads right uh there the problem is that in the blockchain space right now we do not respect the we do not follow the same patterns that normal engineers in the default world will use computer science doesn't have is different generally than public infrastructure but blockchain-based economies like public infrastructure are difficult to change and so we need to take better steps to validate our designs as we iterate them and this is one of the things that's really slowing down the common stack honestly is that we need token engineering we need to take general engineering approaches this is the tacoma narrows bridge in washington state and when this happened they they were validating designs they had the public infrastructure takes years of design validation but they discovered that there's like a fluttering effect when the wind goes through certain structures that can create systems like this uh and now every model every bridge builder from here on out has that in their in their uh modeling software to make sure that this doesn't happen we need this for d5 we need this for blockchain we need token engineering and this is why the common stack is so excited to partner uh with our first comments which we'll be launching in the next month or two that the token engineering community is going to be the first user of the common stack product and their goal is to advance the field of token engineering to provide resources so that the d5 developers don't make the same mistakes over and over again so we have models that they can use to develop rapidly just like open zeppelin provides smart contracts for people to reuse we need design validation that a library of design validation that can be reused the biggest thing that we're uh there's so many aspects to point out the te commons is a is a beaut they have a beautiful structure uh and each it they really scaled horizontally into working groups one of my favorite working groups that i participate the most in is the tec params where we're trying to fight technocracy we're challenging the crypto technocracy we're very in a very privileged position in the token engineering community where we can actually allow the community to design their own economy but we need the tools for them to do this and crypto technocracy is a real thing i don't know of a single dow where the community actually designed picked the parameters it's always the developers who picks 32 ether as a staking i no no fault to anyone it's very difficult this is a difficult challenge to educate the community to an extent where they can design their own economy but we're creating the tools to do that and we love it this is exactly the stuff that gets us all so excited griff bottom up building everybody's included that was awesome thank you so much thank you thank you shannon we're so happy to have you where can people find you what's the best way to get in touch obviously twitter is always good um there's also if you want to learn more about the tec uh there is a talk tomorrow by olivia uh who's going to present the tec in full for 15 minutes and you can follow us on twitter at common stack or at t e c m n s t e commons that's awesome thank you so much we love having you back here for ethan for virtual 2021 thank you shannon have a good one enjoy the birds enjoy the beach while we're all freezing in berlin and denver and different places in the world