Scaling the Community: We're Gonna Need a Bigger Tent | Kent Barton - Ethereum Denver

soci layers stop valuing decentralization we wouldn't really have uh the same sort of property as we do now this is the importance of it all so I'm going to start by getting into some of the boots on the ground aspects of community building uh from what I've seen uh during my time in the space and then we'll get into ways to leverage current scaling Technologies to uh scale the community while we maintaining that cypherpunk ethos so uh I was happy to see that mid journey is not so politically correct that it when I type in uh the Twitter bird exploding it wouldn't say something like well birds are nice and you shouldn't explode them it did give me an exploding bird um but the idea is meat space matters um unfortunately right now our space is very crypto Centric or Twitter Centric a lot of the discourse happens there this incentivizes very loudly shared opinions uh overly simplified emotional stuff you have shelling points of conversation around a few influencers and it's it's kind of a far cry how from how things used to be in the old days of ethereum we'd all kind of hang out on Reddit and have nice discussions um the antidote to some of this is certainly just hanging out in person just like we're doing here you know it's it's cool to be online everybody you know every day get on and say whatever you want but there's when when you're here when you're at an event there's a Vibe and it's great meet space matters so it would be awesome if there were more Meetup communities and more C communities on a local basis the Grassroots is so crucial uh these are a couple key things I learned and that I would recommend to anybody looking to start their own crypto Community or eth Community it's it's simple but effective consistency every month every month or two have a meet up have an event get that drum beat of things going on free pizza and beer I can't stress this enough uh people don't want to learn or meet people if they're hangry it's nice to provide some social lubrication free pizza and beer um good messaging explain what uh the the Meetup is going to be about and then afterwards follow up with some like hey these are some resources this is what we talked about the messaging is important it's good to tap into unmet demand uh when I started the ethereum Meetup in 2014 uh there was no e Community here but there was a strong Bitcoin Community kind of gave me a hunch that something would flourish here around eth uh if you'd like to start an eth meet up but there's already one generally but you still would like to lead something consider doing like a a niche Meetup maybe something around uh developers or nfts or whatever your your interest is and finally uh these are opportunities to embody and educate around the crypto values you know as newcomers come in this is an opportunity to explain hey this is why decentralization is important I was talking to some friends uh last night some dear friends I've had for a while and uh they were involved in HEX and they didn't understand that hex is the opposite of that so we need there's a lot a lot of uh there a lot of room and opportunity to educate around this uh in terms of the vibe keep ethereum plur using a rave term here peace love unity respect what I really mean by this is ethereum has done a fantastic job culturally of always uh welcoming civil discourse and just a really creating a really good vibe where people might uh have big disagreements over different issues but at the end of the day you know it's it's civil discourse wins the day it's a sense of mutual respect for the most part uh this is a very far cry from what we saw in the Bitcoin space uh on multiple occasions you know where we had the big block size debate we've had so many um instances of of uh of that not being the case and uh it's a huge detrim to any ecosystem to do that so keep ethereum plur keep it respectful um at the same time it's important to prevent a monoculture by that I mean um to the average Outsider here in Denver who doesn't know what we're doing they see a bunch of people running running around in like rainbow shirts and unicorn onesies and stuff and this is kind of our culture and that's cool it's kind of an extension of our own brand at eth Denver and it's crypto uh but it would be a shame if that's all there there was it's important um especially as a credibly neutral social layer and network that all people are welcome and there should be little sub niches like I would love to see like goth stuff going around and like this crazy stuff cyber Punk let's let's embrace it all um the and this goes beyond Aesthetics because if we have a monoculture then you have a situation where the community starts to enforce values on others this can lead to gatekeeping it can lead to sort of um litmus tests we've seen plenty of that at Bitcoin and we do not want to go down that route fortunately ethereum's technology and properties give us the ability to avoid a monoculture open source and sens sship resistance is a powerful combination to avoid that um farcaster is a perfect example so foraster an open source Pro protocol that's sufficiently decentralized on which you can build different clients so uh warp cast is the biggest one right now let's say warp cast decided to enforce its own values and start censoring censoring certain things maybe just around the next you know ethereum hard fork or whatever it was people using that would get frustrated but the beauty of foraster somebody could simply go to a different client that that wasn't censoring those opinions it could nurture a different Community Vibe or maybe they would build one so these two properties could really be tapped into to avoid that danger of a monoculture and a litmus test uh that that is could be so poisonous to the ecosystem um at this point I'm going to get a little bit more um kind of technical we're going to go away from like boots on the ground um Grassroots to sort of like uh more use cases so let's think Beyond defi um here's my premise is we can grow a more Vibrant Community that still Embraces the cipher Punk ethos by uh kind of thinking of of different things Beyond defi by that I'm kind of referring to the current scalability landscape uh to date rollups and l2s have focused almost exclusively on dii and on replicating the functionality of popular medet ads everybody loves Unis swap everybody loves a everybody loves this crazy G dgen stuff let's do it faster with lower TX fees and 1,000 TPS that's great and it's it's cool to see that it's so cool to see the l2b chart and tvls going up awesome so that's cool but I would say what else can we do with scalability um you're just seeing dii predominate the uh the rollup ecosystem another way to put it is now that we've built cryptoeconomic Primitives and F Financial Primitives that can secure uh you know rollups and a l uh strike the right balance of uh decentral decentralization and scalability okay we have D5 but what else can we do this is where it gets really interesting so again we can uh grow the community via these new use cases in a way that also helps newcomers leverage and understand the unique properties of decentralization so we're winning on both on both efforts there so what am I referring to here um so this is an idea uh I'm deeply indebted for this portion of the talk to my friend Nathan Schneider he's a professor of media studies at Cu uh just actually I think he's on a book tour right now anyway um he was kind enough to bounce around some ideas with me around this talk and we we landed on a few uh different sort of uh thought starters and ideas and uh this is heavily informed by my discussion to him so thank you Nathan um the idea with a community rollup is rollups provide the ability AB ility to create new design spaces for communities where multiple discret projects share the same values and goals or when they just want to experiment with self- sovereignty so in you know instead of uh defi we're talking about communities on uh rollups what would be the benefits of of this approach versus maybe just living on any random rollup or living on Main net well if you had multiple um shared valued Dows or organizations on one rollup you enjoy all that wonderful interoperability and and composability that comes with living under the same consensus mechanism it's hard to underestimate that this is very important uh this would afford this would give projects the ability uh or I should say communities the ability to change the base rules how they seem fit so this is stuff that would be anathema to anything on ethereum Main net uh I'm talking about modifying credible neutrality violating immutability for example maybe a a community would want to have a mechanism for refunding users if they got hacked not going to happen on ethereum mnet but within the context of a rollup for a community absolutely doable also adding default privacy uh we've seen that you know with like Aztec and some other ones this could be extended to a uh Community rollup as well finally what I call uh functional modularity where multiple Dows or organizations under a community role up could play their own unique role in supporting a broader goal or Mission let's unpack that one a little bit uh so I like acronyms and we're in crypto so let's call Community rollups Crews what's our use use case for a crew uh decentralized Reddit would be one idea of this kind of functional modularity imagine subreddits is SE separate entities existing under the same rollup each subreddit could even have its own token or governance giving more autonomy to these communities um however this would uh give us decentralized Reddit the ability to create alternatives to the advertising model the the the Web 2.0 ad model that I think everybody is sick of and wants to move Beyond meanwhile you could have common accounts shared across each subreddit similar to how farcaster is working there's probably a lot of Des design space to build on here but this is just one idea of multiple discrete organizations and projects operating under the same consensus mechanism and rollup here's another one uh again um this actually uh comes directly from a paper uh written by uh Nathan Schneider Sarah hubard uh at all entitled uh toward Equitable ownership and governance in the public sphere um this is a a interesting one because it's not really been done now as far as I know but it's it revolves around co-ops uh traditional co-ops so the definition of these pulling directly from this paper these are organizations that are owned and governed by their users it sounds a lot like Dows doesn't it but the paper highlights some challenges uh with these Dows or with these co-ops there's a lack of organizational transparency a lack of effective governance lack of member accountability and historically this has created problems for sort of physical meat space traditional co-ops I mean I don't know about you but that sounds like a pretty pretty powerful use case for Dows having just come from shapeshift Dow I can tell you uh although Dows themselves have the challenges they're very good at encouraging governance we have effective uh transparent voting getting people more engaged uh predictable compensation and patronage uh creating better organizational transparency better uh member accountability and uh facilitating uh Capital formation these are some uh Dow Dow tooling benefits uh right directly from the the paper I just cited so co-ops as Dows is a untapped use case that could grow the ethereum community and in a way that also underscores those all important Cipher Punk values because remember that's why we're here if we're not living and breathing those values then we might as well build be building a database and we've done enough of that so just to kind of continue with the the uh Community rollup theme imagine co-ops as a crew multiple organizations on the same rollup sharing security while enjoying the benefits of scalability and interoperability so uh you know imagine like a a multiple nonprofits who are kind of doing their own thing but they all share the same sort of goal let's say for example uh helping refugees and ases here in the states um maybe they would choose to uh sort of gather under the same rollup doing their own thing as maybe Dows but also enjoying that that broader security uh another benefit of this with the crew approach these organizations would be easy to Fork you can imagine if a successful Regional nonprofit uh has a proven model hey this is open source simply Fork the code and uh create a new one under the same rollup very cool uh Network States so hot right now this is like you know the big thing uh not not just with bology and what he's proposing but there's so much going on in the space of net Network States uh so you can imagine the uh the community rollup approach would be a good fit for Network States because this provides a good balance of having ultimate Economic Security and finality all that good stuff backed by ethereum midet as we've seen you know with this is proven with rollups but at the same time within the context of a community rollup a network state or group of network States could kind of write its own consensus rules write its own um specific uh you know rules of the game perhaps adding maybe a governance element to the uh to the consensus layer within the context of a rollup there's so much that could be done here if we just think beyond the limitations of defi maybe there's way to incorporate defi as well well you might be wondering okay that's cool this idea of moving beyond defi but how do we how do we secure uh a crew how do you secure a community rollup if there's not like transaction fees well for starters this is about to get way cheaper thanks to 4844 uh this this is a huge you know upgrade for the uh the rollup space in general and the affordability of it costs are coming down uh one interesting sort of approach uh we landed on discussing this Nathan and I is um Community member Subs subscriptions so this is this is powerful um a lot of organizations especially maybe like nonprofits or co-ops people believe in the ethos and values of those things so much they'd be willing to pay a subscription uh for belonging to the organization in response to that they could get uh you know maybe an nft or something uh but also their funds are contributing that that that could be used to pay for the the security of the rollup uh last I saw I think rollup as a service deployment is something like $3,500 maybe that was a month or I'm not sure but these costs are coming down rollups will no longer be the domain of just giant um giant defi players there's a KnockOn benefit here a nice benefit that this also makes communities stickier because once you kind of have skin in the game and you have a long-term subscription uh you'd be more incentivized to uh stay with the community so pretty cool uh in addition to that you could just have donations you can imagine people donating to support a rollup in situations where they really believed about uh in the the uh the community's purpose and finally there could be a situation where uh there's transaction fees that are relevant here um one example is City Dows uh ATX Dow is a uh one of the Dows doing this they engage in some nft type uh exchanges and drive fees from that so uh TXS are not completely out of the uh out of the loop here as far as what could secure rule the the sky is a limit really depending on the community so what would be the next steps um for starters don't underestimate the power of a local Grassroots Community everything you see here is a testament to that Grassroots is powerful meeting in Meet space is powerful it's a way to get across or or um kind of not have to deal with all the the the noise that comes with being online and engaging with with uh you know all these very loudly stated opinions and uh influencers and all that um and it's just fun so consider starting or joining the local eth community or whatever crypto you like uh keep it civil respectful peaceful and fun the moment we stop being respectful to one another is the moment we we turn into uh you know say other ecosystems that have had Civil Wars and it's it's ugly and then the focus isn't on decentralization uh think Beyond defi I just uh offered a few Alternatives or ways to think just beyond that this can grow the community in a way that is uh is could powerful powerfully embrace the cipher Punk values and then imagine scalable self- Sovereign Community rollups the the the design space here is very promising so that's my TED talk thank you for coming uh if we get things right I think in another 10 years we'll have an even more Vibrant Community that is still decentralized and still embracing the cipher Punk ethos thank [Applause] you