A Financial System By & For the People with Kevin Owocki

hi everyone my name is Kevin walky I am presenting today a presentation entitled 11 milestones on the path to a financial system that's by and for the people and I think that this is an experimental presentation for me I'm a software developer I spend my days building get coin at consensus and it definitely feel way more comfortable with concepts in code building great digital products that help people advance a use case and I've recently been giving a few more talks that are a little bit more philosophical in in nature because I I think it's fun when we're at these events and we're face-to-face exchanging information to try to make sense of what it is that we're building collaboratively together and and where it is that we're going I I think that building a peer-to-peer financial system is something that's a very abstract idea but it feels to me tangibly that that's where that's where people really want to go in this space and so just articulating exactly what that means I think could be a really high use of our time even if it is outside of our comfort zone and it's not as tangible as code so I'm thank you to consensus which is the primary financial backer of get coin and the reason that I'm here able to be full-time in in the etherium space today like many of you I come to the etherium space dissatisfied with the status quo of the financial system that we've inherited from the baby boomers not happy with various things about the financial system basically the concentration of wealth how hard it is to get access to financial services especially if you're in different parts of the world they don't have access that we have here in the United States lack of program ability is for me as a program or something that I think is missing in the existing financial system and and and and so I think that there's a lot of people in this space that are here because there not feeling like the innovation that we've seen in the consumer web in the last 20 years that's led to better user experiences around hailing a cab getting a job finding a girlfriend have made it into like health care in in finance and I think that it's worth recognizing that the status quo is maybe the first milestone that we're all going through together as we start to think about a peer to peer financial system that's buy-in for the people and it's with that in mind that I want to say that I think that I think that we're limited somewhat by our imagination of what the financial system could look like because we've all lived our entire lives with the financial system that was built after World War two by the baby boomers and and when I think about this there's this there's this philosophical analogy called Plato's cave where basically there's this there's this being there's this this person who's been in a cave all their life and all they've ever experienced of the real world of the Sun is shadows that are playing on the wall of the cave and in this story in this parable when they go outside and they actually see the real world they don't know what to make of it because they've spent their entire lives in this cave only looking at shadows on the wall and I think that this is a sort of for me a powerful analogy in a way of thinking about the financial system because I know I was explaining Bitcoin to my uber driver maybe like two or three weeks ago I like to get outside of the blockchain bubble every once in a while and by the end of the presentation he was like man you're off the reservation with this stuff and I think that like in a way in a way it's true if you've only been living inside the cave your entire life then going outside into the Sun is is kind of a fundamentally different thing and so I want to start a conversation articulating what life outside the cave could look like and and in what we could be building here together and I'm really excited to be here in the etherium space talking about defy and talking about dowels with everyone because it's a fertile ground for experimentation of what's actually possible and as an engineer that for me is a way of grounding these conversations in something that's tangible and recent Horowitz has this really amazing blogpost comparing a crypto network to a city so as opposed to a company which is top down and has a CEO a city is more of kind of like a loosely connected group of individuals who are connected by geography and rely on the same foundational resources and are building economies on top of that and it's a really elegant analogy I think for what's going on in the blockchain city here in in North America we have Toronto we have New York City I went to college near near Philadelphia and each of these are economic systems in in our existing world crypto networks if if you think about them in a way our economic systems are in this analogy in which there's different applications that are being built up investments jobs savings based off of these base layer protocols and so it this experimentation of of crypto networks is sort of an interesting place to start to think about what this peer-to-peer financial system can be and I'm I'm pretty excited by the trends in 2019 around dolls around defy I think that there's actual tangible things that are in lie live in production in the etherium Network being used today and and that's that's a really exciting thing to me but I will say that I really think that some people in this space have differing visions of what the ideal peer-to-peer financial system will look like and I put it along the following axes so I think that we've inherited sort of a vision of what the peer-to-peer financial system could look like from the Bitcoin community which I think inherits its vision for an ideal world from kind of like a libertarian and Rand style vision of the world in which collectivism is evil and the thing that really matters is your mind and body and the sovereignty of the choices that you're able to make as an individual sovereignty of your economic access if you want to move from place to place being able to take your wealth with you and I think that that's that's one end of the spectrum of what people are shooting for with an ideal world this space and I think that on the other end of of that spectrum and it's completely mutually exclusive with libertarianism is kind of a more Gaia hypothesis type vision of the world in which the entire world is one organism and we have global ecological diversity it's supported by the financial system it almost sounds like an oxymoron global financial system that's supportive of eka logical diversity you've got local social harmony in in your communities and you've got spiritual abundance in the individual but you could conceive of the collectivism vision as that we're all one organism flying on spaceship earth and the world will just be better if we're creating a more equitable distribution of resources and that we unite around our common global challenges that we're going through and and I think that these these visions are fundamentally mutually exclusive with each other I mean you can think about it on on the axis of collectivism being good or evil libertarianism is built around the idea of sovereignty of the individual and no one can come into into my space don't tread on me and guy hypothesis is built around the collective the idea of Earth has one sort of organism and and the sharing of resources and in sovereignty around that and I think that I definitely get a little bit more of our Gaia hypothesis vibe from the etherium community from the Bitcoin community but there is that sort of inheritance of of the sovereignty of the individual that we get from the Bitcoin community and I think articulating this as an axis is is sort of gonna be important as aetherium goes a little bit more mainstream and we start to see more adoption of the of the financial system and it's with that in mind that I want to say I think it's really powerful that we're designing a whole new financial system because it means that we can design incentives in into our money and so there's anyone in the audience you guys have experience with machine learning at all or okay so like there's this concept in in machine learning in which you're training an agent and basically you want it to get to the top of a hill you want it to localize or you want to to maximize its benefits by climbing an incentive gradient so there's this idea of a heuristic that you can apply to the world and you can basically say to the agent right now you're at level zero of the heuristic and I want you to climb the local Hill and and find and find level five of that heuristic and so and so this is this is sort of how you can train an AI agent to climb a hill but it's also a natural thing for other agents in the economic world to be doing to try and climbing the hill the sort of like canonical example of climbing an economic heuristic for everyone in this room is increasing the amount of money in your bank account increasing your net worth we're all building careers we're all building families and it's a common goal - to build build up your bank account and it's with this in mind I want to introduce something that is based off of similar ideas but is a little bit more off the reservation to use the words of my of my uber driver and that's this idea that I learned from Sam Harris about just like there's an economic landscape that you as an agent can climb what if there was a moral landscape so basically a heuristic that isn't about the number of money that you have in your bank account but it's based off of how morally you and your family and their society is living around you and you know we've all learned about moral relativism if we took anthropology in college the idea from Sam Harris is that there's a moral landscape that's inherently objective and the heuristic function is how much suffering or lack of suffering is being created by your actions in your local community and so you can imagine an agent that wants to climb a moral landscape by reducing suffering increasing well-being in their local community or in the world and we're designing the incentives of the Information Age in the etherium space if you believe that then the ideal case of what we could of what we could design is designing our our ethics into our and designing a world in which you're climbing the economic hill and you're also reducing suffering you're also increasing the moral harmony the spiritual abundance of your local community the ecological diversity at the same time but one of the things that I think that we've inherited from the existing financial system is that a lot of times you'll be climbing the economic landscape but you won't be climbing the moral landscape or maybe your external izing harm and you're actually actively doing damage to the moral landscape when you're do when you're climbing your economic you're in it an agent that's climbing the economic heuristic and you know why do you think it is the teachers and firefighters make so much less than bankers or pharmaceutical companies so I guess the TLDR of this guideposts is that if we can design a world in which people are climbing the moral landscape not externalizing harm as they climb the economic landscape and I think that that's a really a really powerful idea and I'd love to expand on it with some of you after I get through my presentation like I said I'm we're backed by consensus which is a project that you know Joe Lubin is at the helm of I've listened to a lot of his talks in interviews to understand his vision one of the things that he talks about in his vision which I agree with is this idea of what if everyone owns a piece of everything would that be a better world because people will be incentivized economically to not externalize harm because they own a piece of of their local communities of the businesses in their local communities that they're that they're transacting with and that does that shift the time preference of of people's economic interactions such that they're more aligned with each other I haven't like fully baked this but I think it's an interesting idea see how are we doing on time I have 10 minutes left has anyone in the audience read meditations on mullick by any chance all right I got one person sweet it's it's a long read but it's been passed around a lot in the etherium community over the last year or so and it's obviously popularized by the the meme of moloch doll which how many people in the audience have have heard of milk cow okay so more people have heard of Moloch now than the meditations on the look so the TLDR of meditations on Moloch which is worth a read in itself is it's a narrative that is is using the Canon a god of Moloch to talk about the phenomenon of coordination failures in in our world and in this narrative universe there are several gods and you know I'm not religious I just think that this is like a very narrative what an elegant narrative way of of talking about different forces that are that are animating human nature so there's Moloch which is the god of of coordination failure there's there's a god called nan GN o n which is the god of of nature of our physical needs so we all need to have we all need to put food on the table we all need to stay healthy we all need to have food and shelter and naan is sort of the God that holds us accountable to those needs of being able to take care of our physical and and nourishment as sort of like a condition of living in this world and then there's a third god which is called eula which is the god of philosophy and love and all the soft things and as opposed to the first two gods mullick and naan which require their followers to worship them naan is the only one that has followers that like that adhere to to it but without forcing them to worship them without without forcing sacrifice but naan is also sort of like the third the third the third God in the order of operations of what all the followers in this world pay down so it's sort of like an elegant narrative of thinking of the idea of coordination failure and the incentive stacks that the animates human society and I think that we the more tangible example of this is is in your economic in your economic life what is the incentive to advance your own gain in a exchange for reducing the the well-being of the whole that's the definition of a coordination failure so if you're if you're a power plant in a big city then you basically have an incentive to dump your trash in the river if you can get away with it if you can externalize that harm and and that saves you some costs in your operations of the power plant but it produces the the well-being of the whole the more like game theoretically pure example of Moloch's influence is just the prisoner's dilemma in which you have two agents that are captured by law enforcement and they're given a dilemma in which they can when they're put in separate rooms either rat on each other or they can remain silent and game theoretically the best outcome that they can do is to both remain silent and each get less of a sentence because the police have no less evidence on them but in practice more and more people will statistically defect and rat on each other because they're not able to coordinate when they're in the separate rooms that they're put in by the by the police officers so I think that when I think about designing economic games if you can reduce the amount of coordination failures against economics in this economic agents in the system then you can create a more globally optimized optimized optimized world optimized well-being and what's really exciting about being in the etherium space is that the founding myth in my mind of theorem is creating transparent economic games that can't be changed we've got this concept of immutability so you're now playing an economic game that allows you to solve some of the coordination transparency information asymmetry problems that that allow Molech and his malign influence to to influence human nature and and for me this is the founding myth of aetherium and it's something that's that's still true today I think and it animates a lot of the ideals in the etherium community and the technology itself is a really amazing thing but I'm I'm excited by the social that I'm I'm seeing develop in this space for me aetherium is a selling point for the hopeful that we can transcend our industrial age institutions and all of the problems and baggage that we've inherited from the baby boomers and we can build a new information age infrastructure of peer to peer financial relationships and we can and we can build a fundamentally more just more economically immoral aligned world then then didn't exist before and that is my articulation of where I'd like to see the space go the reason I'm giving this presentation is I want to hear from all of you where you would like to go and I think that the stakes have never been higher I I have a kid and I've got another kid on the way right now and I don't want to pass along to them the same sort of civilizational debt that we've inherited from the baby boomers and the ones that matter to me are climate change the whole of the idea of a hold a world that's you're turning up the heat you're turning up the heat it's like a game of musical chairs well their music just keeps getting faster that's [ __ ] scary as [ __ ] the idea that we can't make sense of anything in our world and now there's all this disinformation is a really scary thing to think about not only for my lifetime but for my children's lifetime and and I think that these are problems that we're gonna have to solve but it gives me a lot of hope to see like I said for me aetherium as I hope as a shelling point for the hopeful and it gives me a lot of hope to see the momentum that we're seeing in this space to see defy growing bigger and better our period of pure financial system by and for the people growing bigger every every day I'm trying to do my part with get coin this is our our mesh network of jobs what I like to call it every node and the network is someone that's participating in every edges in economic transaction that that they've participated in and you know I don't take the the mission of building up the economic infrastructure for jobs lightly I think that there's a lot of things that are really good about the old world the social safety nets of being able to retire being able to have savings and not live from to gig being able to have insurance and it's sort of my vision that once we have enough activity going through this peer-to-peer mesh network of jobs that we're gonna be able to reconstruct what's working in the old world in the new world let's see I'm gonna speed through the rest of this because I think that we're almost out of time but I sort of have started to conceptualize the global financial operating system that we're building aetherium OS as sort of a permissionless dap store that anyone can contribute value to that anyone can can add to and I think that that's in a lot of ways what we're doing here at eath Waterloo our mission at git coin is to grow and sustain open source to provide financial opportunities to coders and I think that a world in which open source software contributing to the Commons and actually getting paid being able to to pay your mortgage is while you're doing it while you're providing that value to the world is a fundamentally more just more economically a fair world to software developers and it's a great pleasure to be in the etherium city and to be building this together with with all of you I will very quickly end by saying that all of the art in this presentation has been created on git coin and I'm licensing it Creative Commons so if you follow me on Twitter my last name's a walkie that's my Twitter handle I will be tweeting out a link to the Creative Commons artwork that's in this presentation and please use it please take it back to your local communities and explain some of these concepts to the people in your network because I want to create conversation about where we're headed with this global peer-to-peer financial system that that we're building and I think that I'm at least a very visual person if you can be more visceral and how you explain things then you know picture is worth a thousand words and I want to enable you to start having these conversations with people that you care about I'm exactly out of time right now thank you very much for coming to my presentation please nerd out with me in the hallways and if you see me at eath Waterloo I would talk about this stuff all day every day and my wife won't let me talk about it at home so I'll talk about it with you thank you everyone [Applause]