EthCC 2: Jean Millerat

blah blah blah I wish a rush may I start yes maybe the others will come back from the coffee break because there is a coffee break before there will be a coffee break after my presentation so you'll enjoy it coffee very much so I am zhang yoha and i work in a French administration French governmental organization called to consider departmental the Autzen I will talk about mechanism design and mechanism design applied to my real world the real world of the console departmental is the real world of citizens who need some help because they have disabilities because they are poor because they need social welfare social help social services so they go in waiting lines they fill forms they come to public servants and they ask from money and we in the concert departmental we collect money from the taxpayers and we give that money back to the people in need and that's a very centralized way of doing social justice and I'm interested in I mean I mean I am exploring what could it be in the blockchain world from the very far side very right side of the this slide and in order to bridge the gap between the real world the real centralized world of today and the real decentralized restless world of tomorrow I used a board game and I will I will tell you about that so the way we do social justice usually is as I said by having public servants paper forms maybe sometimes IT forms web forms and sometimes blockchain can help and last year I presented a small experiment where the constraint departmental servants would register people with disabilities on the blockchain and say the owner is the owner of this ethereum account has some severe disabilities so that donors could give money could give it directly to these people so blockchain can help central authorities by bringing some transparency and by lowering liability of for direct giving schemes the concept button motor does not receive the money but that's quite limited because that's not trust less that's not decentralized so I want you to experiment this year with what would it be like if we had a consensus-based trustless system for defining who deserves to be helped who needs social help who as social who has disabilities who is a senior citizen losing its daily autonomy and needing some money the cons of this kind of schemes is that they are not really safe privacy is an issue scalability is an issue well you are very familiar with all the of the current limits of the blockchain technology but there are some very big advantages to be obtained in the future and the near future I help first it would be simpler because there would not be no need for a governmental organization no need for an NGO to collect money and to give it back that would be direct direct giving that would be cheaper because no employee no public servant that would be more convenient maybe no waiting lines no complex paper forms and that would be hackable that would be that would allow anyone to design their own social justice scheme and to implement it that wouldn't probably not replace central such as social justice that would be a compliment that would be something that would add a layer of welfare so the idea is that you can design your own social justice and in order to design the social justice I imagined I I had to design a way of voting a way of doing what we call a shelling game protocol so that people would vote on who deserves help who does not deserve out and there are many way of many possible applications of this kind of scheme so I had to deal with a problem of mechanism design so you know that game theory is great when you've got a given set of rules a given policy and you want to define the the optimal strategy what's the the the the behavior that is optimal for the set of rules but when you've got the reverse problem to solve you have a mechanism design problem so I want some behavior from the citizens I want taxpayers to be happy to pay money or at least to accept to give money to the system and I want people to assess if other citizens are really in need of that social money or not and I want scammers to be to fail well when they try to scam the system what's the the right set of rules in order to to obtain these behaviors I had many ideas because like you probably do I read blog posts I read things about people's epsilon attacks I read things about how there are great technology to great technologies to to defend a guy against this type of attacks but in the real world how can I know that these technologies really work and that they will bring the right incentives for the people to behave like I expect them like I hope them to behave I had I had a need for testing the ideas for testing the designs that I read about that I imagined and they so I'm talking about a game board that is something that is really paper based so I've brought my equipment with me that's a piece of egg carton that I cut with the scissors I've got some beans or you can use chickpeas I've got a dice I've got paper I've got pencils and with that I could test I could experiment the the rules that I designed for the system with real people people who are not geeks and the fact that I used a game board something that is really not technology Clee complex helped me to recruit testers because when you do design the the biggest the hardest part most often is to recruit testers and to recruit testers that are not you mom not your wife not your friend but people from everyday life and who would enjoy testing and and get the right incentive to test your system and why why did they come to me for testing the system because playing a board game is something that is fun that is enjoyable and that allowed me to iterate faster after each game session I could think about the rules that I tested and without having to write any line of solid et code without having to deal with the complexities and Wikus ease of truffle or I don't know what I could change the rules and test them once again maybe in the evening with the people who would come and play with me in the evening so what I say that with a game like that you've got a cheap way and a lean way for doing a Lean Startup way of testing mechanism mechanism design things and the real value from this test come from malicious behaviour because the the main the main obstacle to overcome with your system is to have people trust it well enough so that they will donate money so that they will put money at stake or that they would give attention to resistant so that they will adopt your DAP or your your set of smart contract and they can do so if you can bring some proof and not some theoretical proof but some real-life proof that it works that scammers are defeated and that the altruistic users of your system will win at the end so the the one of the fun piece of one of the fun aspects of playing a game is that you can divide the players in two camps the altruistic camp the the attacker camp the malicious camp and you you bring the right incentives for the for the the malicious camp to to and you try to bring this the right rules so that you will defeat their attacks and in my case in order to make the game fun I set up this game in the in the universe of the French Revolution and the idea was to distinguish the real song qulet the song here at other poor people from the privileged ones though the aristocracy without knowing who really is a song ki raat who really is a privileged person and the two camps the altruistic would would be called the revolutionaries the ones who want the social justice revolution to to to win and the attackers are the the grabbers in French we call them the a kappa haaha during the French Revolution there were some people who wanted to grab everything for themselves we were they were called the grabbers and in the end what's important to me is the social impact that can be brought with such a game so before the game I would ask the players who in your real life if you had to design your own social justice system who would be your sunk unit who would you like to help so I did one game with a judge she said well I would like to help the people who are in prison and who are about to get out of prison okay so let's imagine we reduce that follow for these kind of people would it work or not and at the end of the game I would ask them now how much money would you would you like to put at stake or to donate to such a system if it were brought online with blockchain technology for instance and it helps me to recruit early adopters too so that's the idea you can play with me you can play with me near Paris you drop me an email that's my email see at a key signal or we can also play online I've got an online version you can contribute to the project you can read the rules on these websites website and you can also suggest enhancements or report books about this game that's it you've got questions can I ask a question so we have been thinking a lot with a colleague how to do to make donations peer-to-peer two people are in the streets in Paris and we found two constraints one would be how to actually get that money to the person that you are giving it and the other one would be how to use these donations to actually get a tax reduction at the same time so you can incentivize the people to use it that was the main point of my presentation last year because I had with me the parent the parents of a young lady who was severely autistic no she had Azumi and so down syndrome and her her her need was to buy toothpaste she wanted branded toothpaste and so I registered her as someone with disability and I had a donor give money give eath and then they the parents got eath and they say okay we have eath in on one hand on our mobile phone and we want to buy toothpaste how do we do that and it was really a real struggle in the end we found a way for doing that that was really complicated that was that would that was to send money to a spectral coin account then to buy Amazon French Amazon vouchers and to buy toothpaste and the fees were enormous and it was really awful so at the moment that's an open issue I don't have the solution but in this scheme here maybe the question that we would ask when we've got some some ether am address the question that I would ask to the players to the voters would be do you think that sending eath to this address will end in having that person in the street getting some help not whatever the intermediaries are so maybe the the the end user the beneficiary does not have a direct access to the blockchain maybe it goes through an intermediary maybe this is a nonprofit organization maybe this is a neighbor who who's savvy enough about blockchain but they my my game board does not solve the the last kilometer problem and that's a real issue the digital divide is real other questions thank you [Applause]