Public Goods Are Good – Kevin Owocki

good morning see the faithful at 9:00 a.m. I'm gonna try something this morning and I want to ask that you guys do it with me bomber moments all right check-in who's awake good morning everyone hello my name is Kevin Waki i am a co-founder of get coin and I'm obsessed with developers because we help them get coins in exchange for software development tasks I'm a cool organizer of the boulder blockchain with Michael Greene who I'm gonna embarrass the crap out of right now like a wave to the people yes and I wouldn't be here without the guiding hand of Joe Lubin and consensus which has funded get coins since 2017 so Joe if you're listening thanks for thanks for funding it coin today during my talk I will be I will be giving away the keyboard that I use to build the MVP of get coin this is this is it so you guys showed up at 9 a.m. and you're all in the running yeah baby yeah yeah if we run out of keyboards yeah there's a there's a quote from obi-wan Kenobi that I put up here that I just think is cool this is the weapon of a Jedi Knight not as clumsy or random as a blaster an elegant weapon for a more civilized age just like a pocket protector thank you all right so um I twisted this out maybe two weeks ago there's this seminal work in early open-source software called the cathedral and the bazaar and show of hands has anyone read the cathedral in the bazaar cool about the same results is my Twitter poll maybe a third a third of us and I was really surprised by those results because I think that there's just this rich history of open-source software and how we broke away from the old ways that software was built in order to create open-source and communicate asynchronously with thousands of developers across the world and it really triggers me that people don't haven't read these seminal pieces of history with computers ethics and society so next time you get outraged by something with a with crypto tribalism on Twitter I'd encourage you to be as triggered as I am when people don't know their history of open-source and why it matters and so this talk is actually gonna be about the cathedral and the bazaar and how I think it could maybe be upgraded updated in the web 3 era so basically the cathedral is a model of software development where you've got a team of intimate wizards that are building painstakingly a arena with a stage and crafting every single nook and cranny among a high trust team that's the cathedral model of software development you've seen it in large organizations you've seen it with canoe Richard Stallman's a benefactor of the cathedral type of model but there was a new model that came around in the 1990s called the bazaar and the bazaar is kind of like the hustle and bustle if you've ever been to a street fair of the aggregation of all of the different people that are organically working on whatever they're working on it's it's conflicting agendas and it's in its different egos butting heads with each other and so Linus basically built an open-source version of UNIX and and called it Linux and has anyone ever used Linux I'm just doing a pulse check on the audience at this point it's not am I so everyone's pulsar everyone's live great so so basically Linux is is one of the most used operating systems in the world the arguably Linus's contribution to open source software was more the development model of Linux where he delegated everything to the point of promiscuity released early and often and treated his developers as his users as Co developers of the product so a radically different way of building software that's more open and transparent and more resembles of bazaar as opposed to a Cathedral so I want to go through there's like 15 principles of the cathedral in bazaar for best practice history building self for ever until you about seven of them and the first one is that every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch to tell you about where the ambition to build a great open source repository comes from and it's one that resonates with me because as a developer I want to work for the open Internet that's why I built get coin that's the itch I'm scratching the second principle is to release early release often and listen to your customers so I was born in the 80s when the my first software that I installed on my PC was on a cd-rom or on a floppy drive and so you know we we sort of take for granted that you release early and often in the internet age when it's easy to meet and to reach your users but it wasn't always so there used to be six-month development cycles on major software projects and that was that was the norm so Linux really was foundational here and changing the way we do software the third the third one is to plan to throw one version away because you will any anyhow so basically the way I interpret this is to build something that doesn't actually make it into production but I learned something when when I'm building when I'm building that feature given a large enough beta tester and co-developer base almost every problem will be characterized quickly in the fixed obvious so this is kind of the you guys have may have heard that if if if a software is distributed wide enough then all bugs are shallow so given enough eyes all bugs are shallow and I think that it's really neat having worked on get coin where we've had hundreds I think it's somewhere in the mid hundreds worth of software developers that have co-created get coin with us if you have the right attitude interesting problems will find you this is my like most Colorado ISM of a cathedral in bizarre principle Hill Colorado praise be Colorado if you treat your beta testers as your most valuable resource they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource so still fulfilling prophecy about what you expect out of your users and your standards for them becoming a co-developer of your products not just a user of your product the most striking and innovated innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong so if you're thinking about a flat network model you're more free to iterate towards different vantage points of the problem as opposed to you know your manager someone who's far away from the problem evolving evolving what you're building and then to solve an interesting problem start by finding a problem that is interesting to you so in the Venn diagram of problems that are worth solving and problems that are interesting to you you want to find something in the middle there this works pretty well for me I can't read the cathedral and the bazaar for you but I can tell you that be pretty cool if like I feel like make it into a meme and put it on Twitter maybe but I think that everyone this is a seminal piece of of open source history and I just if you're building software for a living I'd love to have you read it and then tell me what you think about it but what I what what I really want to get to this morning is how I think web 3 extends the bazaar so basically you've got software we're building an open-source financial system and the developing model actually resembles the bazaar style development model and we're designing these communities that we can augment with incentivization mechanics and just just starting from talking you about the bazaar and extending it with incentivization mechanics I think gets us further ahead than trying to to think about the cathedrals of days past in software development organizations that we're building in the Cathedral style so designing the Bazaar is what the remainder of my talk is in addition to giving away the keyboard that I built keep going with yes just to keep you engaged there's a prize on the line open-source is our mission at git coin is to release is to grow and sustain open source software so that means releases the source code royalty-free redistribution of the program and there's a lot of syllables in those words and I was out late last night royalty free redistribution of the program and modifications retain the original software license so that's the rule set for open source software and open source software creates billions of dollars of value in the world our mission is to allow developers to capture some of that value open sources of bazaar it's a bazaar and we're trying to build incentives ation mechanics to allow people to capture that value so I'm a software engineer and me likes to think about this in terms of incentive gradients has anyone ever built like an AI bot that climbs a Hill anything like that you guys are blockchain developers Diana thank you there you go so there's this thing called heuristic maximization where you can basically define how good a given situation is for an agent and then you can program that agent climb the heuristic so that it creates better circumstances for itself in its world whatever the heuristic is and so I like to think of the bizarre is like I said it's competing agendas its competing a local Maximas that people are trying to climb in their butting heads and maybe producing great software together and so if you think about the bazaar as competing incentives you're gonna have some times where the heuristic for one agent tells them to climb a hill and then another and then another agent tells them that they should be going in a different direction but when you're thinking about programming incentives the really exciting thing is aligning these mesh networks these these these these local Maxima of incentive to create a sort of a selling point where where agents are all climbing the same Hill so I like to think that with aetherium with the technology that creates economic incentives to do whatever to post a bounty to get a return on compound that we're designing new incentives into the Bazaar which is the extension of of the bazaar I think for the web 3 era which is really exciting for me because I think that there are different sort of landscapes of heuristics that people are climbing and you know we're obviously focused on the open source landscape but a lot of people out there are stuck in closed source bless you I want to find a way to align the incentives such that people are building a little bit more out in the open and they're getting rewarded for the work that they're doing and open source software with their with their economic output so that's one way that I think about programming incentives for for the web free world and aligning incentives between between different different things that we're building another way to think about building incentives into into our software and into our Bazaar communities is thinking about who we're optimizing for so in capitalism we optimize for the heuristic of ourselves of our bank accounts and our our financial security but it but if you actually think about about that incentive system and you extend it to also include in your incentive models are you building things that are good for future you and are you building things that are good for us the whole this this talk is about public goods in a lot of way because we're building incentive systems to to to create a better whole in addition to creating better individual circumstances so you can go through a lot of different use cases things that people do in the world where they're basically trading their arbitrage in different different parts of this bento box for each other so if you're taking a drag of smoke then you're maybe getting a little bit of a bonus a little bit of high for now me but it's at the expense of health of super me should have taking a look at this last night when I was out drinking with the gecko in tune using open-source software is actually really interesting case because we are standing on the shoulders of giants we have open-source web servers we have open source database servers and every time you use it there's there's an incremental cost of production that the maintainer has to fix your bug reports or help help you help you I don't know buy food from the food truck that you can't get the open-source software to work on just a hypothetical example nici case have this really amazing talk about how to build coordination systems such that communities evolve high trust with each other so creating repeat interactions creates more trust because you know that you're gonna see someone again it's not like when you flick someone off in traffic and you're like I'll never see that [ __ ] again repeat interactions are important possible win wins so coming out in the sum being better than the whole of its part and then low miscommunication so if we're not talking past each other then we can build more trust and we can build better coordination and it's sort of these principles that we've been applying a git coin to grow open source software to create an economic graph where different people in our community are transacting with each other peer to peer so we're building a Bazaar that's augmented by incentivization mechanics at git coin this is our economic graph every node is a user on git coin and every edge is a transaction that they've done in between each other and it's a pretty proud that it's a very peer-to-peer looking it's not very top-down there's there's not a lot of centralized intermediaries we're doing 300k a month to open-source software developers to start to make an impact on our mission and starting to really think about the KPI of how many people can just work for the open Internet there's this idea of the quadratic freelancer or someone who can just work for the open Internet funded by quadratic subsidies get coin grants is one of our products that creates a it creates a lot of funding for software developers my dream is to just work for the open Internet to not have a boss and that's the itch that I'm scratching when I build you a coin and hopefully it's ember 2021 there will be dozens of quadratic freelancers in the audience all right so without belaboring the point this is my my Jedi weapon and I thought long and hard last night about who to give this to and I felt like the only fair way to give out this keyboard is by looking at the get coin leaderboard of what hackers have earned the most the most 'if on get coin so Paul I can't pronounce Paul's last name Paul if you're here then you're number one Austin Griffith is in the audience over here and he is number two I hope these numbers are right Austin and I'm not doxxing you these numbers are close let's just say and so Paul if you're here going once going twice alright the keyboard that I built get going with goes to Austin Griffith the first quadratic freelancer [Music] [Applause] [Music] rock star yeah and then and then five minutes cool and so I've gone to ergonomic and once you go ergo you never go back and so I can't use that keyboard anymore anyway it is clicky clicky we'll talk about switches later after the talk if anyone wants to and then and then further down the leaderboard is Rick Burton who gets the consolation prize of the mouse that I used to build gecko look at that unicorn horn there's so many unicorns in the audience today alright so announcement time as I do on Twitter every once in a while I like to wrap up some of our content in in a troll a troll a post and so I made an announcement that I was gonna make an announcement at ease Denver which I think like in the bull market was the douchiest thing that you could do justin son I'm talking about you and then I made an announcement that I was gonna make an announcement and then I made an announcement announcement announcement which is like I think announcement inception like you get further enough into your own delusion and you become Justin son and you'll never you'll never wake up from it did I just say that out loud so the announcement that I want to tell you guys about with my three minutes left Karthik is the launch of oh wait just kidding it's the launch of get connect that meme was so good I wish I wish that guy I'd live though I'm gonna I'm announcing the launch of kick coming satoshis visit creig right please put me out of my misery once we go cross-chain would get coyness or the quinna see alright so um the announcement is that we're doubling down on CLR so you may have heard of get coin because we're giving out 200k per quarter to quadratic freelancers to people who are participating in public goods in the etherium ecosystem and it's barely a really effective way to incentivize people doing great work together and we're doubling down on CLR by running more rounds for more money more often and the specific tangible thing that I want to tell you guys about today is that we're launching mini CLR which is basically we take a 10% fee on the gecko network for bounties and we make about a thousand bucks a month doing that well we've decided to reinvest that money in our community to incentivize helpful behavior on the get coin user base so basically with the weekly matching which happens all the time we can play with different seal our mechanics that are a little bit less high-stakes than the regular get coins CLR we can incentivize people to send point oh one east tips to each other just for helping each other out and earning tens or hundreds of dollars of matching so if you go to the git coin home page now you're gonna see this news feed that basically gives you all the activity on the gecko Network and you can see where this $400 distribution is going so you can see that basically this user Ryan storms got nine contributions worth one hundred and thirty one dollars and they're gonna earn $24 in CLR or matching through the mini CLR so um my my my sort of big hope is that we're taking what we've learned about public goods and we're building it in to get coins such that get coin is a place where you can earn money just by being helpful to others creating value and then capturing value in this this this isn't entirely unselfish of me as the btfl of get coin who's going on parental leave for the next two or three weeks I am NOT going to be here to solve all your problems so if you have a Kudo so you can't redeem if you have a tip and you can't figure out how to use it and you know if if you have a problem on get coins Network I'm not going to be here because I'm going on parental leave over the next few weeks so if you all want to help each other out on get coin and rally around each other then that would be [ __ ] great because that means I don't have to answer your support requests when you come back so public goods are good read the cathedral and the bazaar and Austin you better build something [ __ ] awesome with that keyboard thank you [Applause] [Music] you