EthCC 2: Hudson Jameson

hi everyone my name is Hudson Jameson and I actually got this first slide wrong I'm supposed to be talking about the 15 steps to creating a great Tron app by our Lord and Savior Justin's son so sorry about that it's been a mistake it's not gonna be about governance in the year 2019 for those of you who don't know me I used to work for a bank and did cryptocurrency stuff at the bank and then I worked for the etherium Foundation I have three cats because I don't want children and I have a wife because I'm a very needy person and I love her so when we talk about governance usually people bring up blad Zamfir because he talks about it a lot and he does a really good job talking about it a lot so I like to use his definition first before I go with my boring definition so his is like four lines and mine's about four words his is that it's a process by which we attempt to establish the legitimacy of decisions decision-making processes and the related governance norms and expectations direct quote from Twitter he's also going to be speaking today at 1:10 I believe about governance so definitely go check that out it's a two-hour talk so that's a marathon of a talk but so good luck so my definition which is a little bit simpler is that it's who makes the decisions and how do they make them so here is kind of the early history of aetherium in a nutshell just to kind of bring you back and provide some context into where we've come from and 2014 we had you know just the etherium foundation it had all of the co-founders and all the first developers all in the same you know building in Switzerland and then moving on to Berlin and they were the only ones doing the code they were the only ones building the protocol they were the only ones doing any of that stuff so decisions were really easy because you know Gavin could go to the next room to vitalik and say hey are we doing this or Christian could go over and be like you how should we do this type of protocol featured so it was really easy then 2015 to 2016 they start outside entity started to form such as parity and consensus with some of the co-founders Leedy leaving and starting their own organizations Enterprise aetherium started to kind of become you know into the discussion in 2016 and 2017 2018 I cos are off the chain academic and institutional and enterprise investors and interest or kind of all over the place too so it's it was a really wild time back then some of you who were in here who are like running operations at the time can attest to how crazy the network was at the time and how it we thought it would almost kill us but we made it and we're being used less than ever so this is my favorite slide not because it has a Doge on it but because all of the lines look like like little stepping stools or like a stair staircase or something and that lines up really nice but I'm not gonna read through all these but here all the current major players in my opinion in the ecosystem that contribute to some governance decisions or to decision-making processes in general pretty much everybody on this list is is represented at NCC is something that I'd like to point out I think that's really cool that when you go to any aetherium conference you can pretty much guarantee that every single one of these organizations will have someone there that can represent them in some capacity and I think that's really neat that we're still small enough that we can have everybody even physically in the same room at least once every month or two or three we need to add the etherium cat herders but then it might not be a staircase anymore ok well I'll try to add that later so we have a few formal or mostly formal governance structures one of them is called the theory of improvement proposals or AIPS those are basically like the I guess IETF RFC is where we kind of try to formalize stuff within the protocol stuff within the community ecosystem standards the most prolific CIA is ERC 20 which was the token contract standard and what we do is every time we have a hard four core we need to do a like major protocol upgrades we define them as a IPs we go through different security auditing processes tests test creation processes and then put them into the protocols so in my opinion that's one of our to quote formal ways that we kind of have code governance on aetherium the other one is the series of core developer and other related calls that we have that are very sometimes very large and person calls as I say in person I guess virtually in person but it doesn't it feels all the same now so basically virtual calls that feel like you're in person with the people talking and every other Friday we have the core developer calls those are two hour or an hour and a half to two hours and they represent most of the people who are building on the like low-level protocol level aetherium protocol so there are pretty much every client except for a mantis right now is represented on there there's about 11 clients something like that it's an it's an awesome amount it's a lot of diversity there and as well as people from major infrastructure teams other stakeholders other experts cryptography and otherwise and it's a call where we kind of hash out what the next upgrade for aetherium is going to be and then any problems or emergencies that we have to deal with we can discuss and create retrospectives for on the on the fly there's other calls so we have the all core devs call the earth implementers 2.0 call the ewaz immunity call and the plasma implementers call there's now also a few other calls I know that there's cat herders calls now what am I missing there's there's another call I'm blanking on it but yeah suffice to say there's a lot if want to go on YouTube and look up how people make decisions within these various technical subgroups of the etherium ecosystem so here the problems the meetings are like the e IPS and the court have meetings are pretty much the only formal ways that things get decided to a way that people can say that's a decision that was made by a theory MTM and and they're made for network upgrades primarily they're not made for things like ERC standards that would be like infrastructure and token standards and things like that the core devs don't want to make political or economic decisions such as issuance reductions and if we're gonna implement prog pal on most technical discussions there's only how many core devs do we think there are I was cut trying to estimate it at various points and I'd say there's maybe a hundred to two hundred across the ecosystem that are like actively building low-level aetherium stuff which isn't a lot for how big our ecosystem is now and so a lot of them don't have the time because they're working on their own code bases to go in and make decisions and like read up on e IPS and get opinions and all other this other kind of stuff so apathy and lack of participation is a problem and that's not the problem that like I want them to solve I want more participation so that the load can be taken off of these core devs who have to do everything there's also a few goods signaling systems or other methods to gauge community consensus on contentious issues so you've probably heard about signaling systems like what we'll talk about them in a little bit but they're very contentious because it's like when you have this community that's decentralized you have this community that has many different people across the world in different time zones different languages all speaking up about stuff how do you determine what the community really wants who makes that decision and how do we actually gauge that decision so the etherium cat herders are a group of people who are trying to fill the gap in this I guess project management community management and community expectation gathering side of things within aetherium and the cat herders have gone ahead and tried to gauge community cinnamon on prog pal so I go back and forth on like how effective signaling systems are in aetherium at all in general a lot of them aren't that effective but my belief still which I'm kind of on the fence about after talking to some people here is that the more signaling systems we have the better so if you have like hundreds of signaling systems that we can all aggregated telogen tlie they can't all be gamed as easily or at the same time in a way that we can actually parse through them and figure out decisions so right now the few signaling systems that we have that are on a technical level that I can talk about are our unofficial Twitter poll with a thousand five hundred people so obviously most of the community they're a carbon vote which is a coin vote which means you're voting and your vote counts per the percentage of coins that you hold we also have a minor vote which whenever a minor mines a block they have this extra data field which you can just put whatever words you want in there and they would voice their support for prog pow and it's basically 99.99% yes which is to be expected almost from GPU miners who don't want a six on the network for the prog Pat change what other signals can we come up with I'm not really sure yet there's definitely just finding trusted people in the community to say what are people talking about what's going on at the meetups what's going on on reddit stuff like that but even that's not perfect so there's there's I'm not gonna have a lot of good answers today but just to say it's something that a lot of people are thinking about and as Rick said in the previous talk you know governance and voting and things like that have been talked about for hundreds of years so as a community we obviously have to reinvent the wheel because we do that a lot with our technology and with our governance so I've kind of come to the conclusion that at the current time for major decisions in aetherium we're more or less Canarsie which is government or control of society or industry by an elite group of technical experts so whenever we have a hard fork it goes through the core devs we try to take community feedback but at the end of the day major decisions that go into the court go through the code go through the core devs and I don't really like that I think that puts a lot of pressure on them I think that puts a lot of pressure on the ecosystem to rely on people who are only human to make really really tough decisions and get stressed out about it what if they make the wrong decision what about accountability there's a lot of what-ifs and so I don't like that we're in this state and I don't know how we can move away from it quite yet just because we're still at this growing weird like growing stage in our life with a theory Ahmet we still need this room for flexibility to prevent really massive mistakes from being created created before f 2.0 I'm very against on shame governance sorry polka dot sorry whoever else but I don't think that that works very well so I don't have a great answer as far as voting or those kind of things go or signaling systems in general except to say the more signaling systems the better right now and I think that this is working I'm not saying it's not working I'm just saying it's not ideal so are we centralized no we're too disorganized to be centralized yeah that's all I can say about that so what can we do we can try as hard as we can as early as we can to get good governance structures in place I have a belief that figureheads like metallic deuteron and zuko Wilcox are good early on for projects but that over time their influence and their power needs to be diminished which I believe is happening in both cases metallics been involved less and less in direct decision-making when it comes to a lot of the stuff the core developers are deciding he's mostly working on his research and zuko is working as the CEO of Z of the electric wine company now renamed and is handing over the reins of a lot of the technical decisions over time to the trusted members of the Z cash community so I think that that's working out well for us too and then this third one's hard because the ietf is so boring like it's just so boring guys it's like if you read the documents and stuff like it's it's really good stuff but um like you almost have to just find someone who's been in the field for a while to really tell you about the ins and outs of it and they have really good governance structures in place I believe to like make decisions and coordinate the internet and things like that but we really need to look after them and other similar things that are good for decision making in the ecosystem all right thank you so much I'm gonna take some questions if we have time what's my time like no time or three minutes Oh perfect anyone have questions I think we have mics around oh we do great raise your hand and we'll bring a mic to you it doesn't have to be about governance now that I see no one has governance questions it could be about anything you want oh that guy yeah I was wondering if you could talk maybe a little bit about your opinion song we think of like a traitor like to Reddit so up and what do you think their role should be in governance if anything also Inc had a second question about leadership so I know like the taluk is like you know like taking less leadership but do you think like you just end up with a void there because one thing I've noticed like looking at reddit as like you're starting to see some people kind of becoming leaders so for example like you know DC investor sure you've interacted with them and like JT nickels who's like a moderate a moderator as a while it seems like they're like just like taking over a bit thank you so much [Applause]