EthCC 2: Lane Rettig

testing testing okay is that loud enough yes excellent all right is it make sure you don't miss Hudson's talk about the cat herders today right 115 all right I'm going to kick off good morning everybody Bonjour thanks for being here for the first talk I know many of you are probably as jet-lagged and sleepy as I am right now so maybe we should all get up in badger dancing or something no joking cool so I'm Lane I am a core developer on the EOS m team but I'm not here to talk about you awesome or about code really I'm here to talk about kind of the social side of etherium so a couple of things just kicking off the first is that I want to confess that I feel like completely unqualified to be up here talking about this stuff okay I'm not a social scientist I don't have a degree in sociology or philosophy or history or any of these topics I'm just a hacker who believes that what we're building has a potential to have a huge impact on the world and so what that means to me is I'm gonna make mistakes okay I'm gonna leave things out I'm gonna get things wrong and so when that happens please be nice feel free to point them out I'll try to save a few minutes for Q&A at the end there's also a forum which I'll point out where we can continue this conversation and again you know I'm just one person talking about this stuff because I care a lot about it but this is very much a community effort it should be right we I'll share this etherion Oregon a moment so please join that conversation like I said point out things that I've missed help us improve this message the second thing is to kind of manage expectations a little bit I know that talk topic the title here may be a little confusing this is not about social impact okay I'm not here to give you a feel-good talk to talk about banking the unbanked or unbanked or whatever version of that you prefer to talk about saving refugees this is like a super big picture long-term talk about massive mega political trends in the world so instead of being like a feel-good talk this is actually kind of the opposite right it's kind of a talk laying out how much work we have cut out for us so let's go ahead and dive in this isn't aetherium conference so you're gonna hear me talk about aetherium a lot right use that word a lot in the next 30 minutes but I want to be very clear this is not specifically about etherium this is bigger than etherium and so feel free to mentally replace the word etherium with your favorite generic word whether that's web 3 or crypto or blockchain or whatever or even another project I don't care as long as it's decentralized right I think the the topics that I'm going to talk about require a platform like aetherium that has sovereign grade censorship resistance so let's start from the beginning right we have this amazing aetherium community that has grown and exploded over the past year I'm really I feel quite privileged and quite lucky to have been a part of this community for about 18 months now we're all members of this community in one fashion or another as Hudson can attest we have completely failed to define the community right so we kind of try to be as broad and inclusive as we can be so we're all part of this community but you know some interesting things have happened so over the past few months I've attended a bunch of events that I thought are quite interesting right so this is an image from the web 3 summit that was hosted in Berlin in the autumn this is a gentleman named Harry Halpin delivering a talk on lessons that the web 3 ecosystem can learn from the web to ecosystem things like avoiding capture by by big companies this is also from the web 3 summit this is what's called a node they actually had a very large space reserved at the web 3 summit for kind of self organized groups to develop their own agendas and deliver their own content so this was the central node organized by the givethe team props to give it if anyone giveth his in the room and so they talked about all things decentralized I believe this particular talk here is about decentralized governance this is truly a conference within a conference that was really exciting check out the web 3 summit I know it's happening again this year this is the legendary and étude hope from the status team speaking at an event that was the etherium philosophers salon right so this was held at the status hackathon in Prague just before DEFCON last year and but things that the people in this room we're sharing I found it quite powerful right again it's not about technology these are people talking about their hopes their dreams their fears kind of our purpose right why are we all here what are we building who are we building it for this is a status Town Hall which was also held at the status hackathon and this is a room full of people team members community members again not talking about technology specifically brought together by aetherium but so this particular talk is exiled surfer here on the floor talking about vulnerability and and how that factors into his work into the community and the values this is a breakout session at Def Con last year in Prague on diversity and inclusion really awesome session to be a part of we talked about how to recruit you know more diverse backgrounds people from more diverse backgrounds more diverse opinions into our space to build products for people who are very different than we are so the point I'm kind of trying to make with all of these images and these kind of little stories is that while aetherium is what brought us together we are we've grown right and so as a community our community stands for a lot more than just great technology although the technology of course is what we talk about the most we're most comfortable talking about so I gave a talk at Def Con introducing my version of what it means to be an etherion this is a word that you know you've seen used on and off for years in different contexts so just kind of trying to define what this is right and I realized as I was preparing and giving this talk last year that you know identity as complex multi-layered identify as a software developer identify as a blockchain core developer identify as American and in New Yorker etc but actually one of the strongest components of my identity is this etherion identity so we kicked off a dialogue in October about what that means to everybody right is is a theory in a social movement is it a political movement are we philosophers are we just a support group for people who you know share some of the same fears and hopes and issues it's sort of all of these things and none of these things at the same time so yeah as I said you know I ask you all to kind of pause and reflect a little bit like does this identity mean anything to you and if it does like what does it mean so so one definition of etherion is simply an explicit recognition of the fact that our movement is about a lot more than technology as I said we launched this etherion org website and forum at Def Con as well so if you haven't had a chance to check that out yet please do plug in etherion org into your web browser it's at the moment it's just a discourse forum but we hope to grow it into a lot more right so one thing I intend to do is to start publishing some articles here to add some sort of a content management platform to it again this is completely community driven everyone is free to join this community contribute to it help us figure out what to do with this domain and with this website and with this community there's been some really engaging conversations here we've talked about topics like what is a nation-state which I'll talk about more today what is an etherion is that the right name for the movement and another one of my favorites here is a web three Bill of Rights very exciting topic I was not around then but I've been told that this forum resembles kind of what bitcoin or Bitcoin talk looked like six seven years ago kind of very early on some kind of very idealistic big-picture thinking in conversations there was an etherion meet up at each Denver which I missed unfortunately but we're also doing a theory and meet up here tomorrow night I'll share more information on that in a moment if you're interested in joining another way of looking at it is the following so governing blockchains is a really hard problem right as many of you know there's a lot of very smart people who have very strong opinions about this do we want on chain or off chain government do we want immutability do we want more flexibility I'm not gonna talk about any of those things today I'm turning it around right and the question that I'm asking and the topic that I'm addressing is what can we use web 3 and blockchain censorship resistant decentralized platforms to govern right what role do they have to play in helping us envision and build a better future this is sort of another version of what aetherium means to me so we have these things called institutions right and institutions can be things that are relatively concrete like banks like a physical bank that you walk into and transact with it can be something a bit more abstract like a legal system a court system it can be something as large as a nation-state it can also be something extremely abstract like the institution of marriage right and the way I like to think about institutions is that they're like the furniture in the room ok so imagine that you walk into a room like this or a hotel room or something and things are kind of configured in a certain way right there's sort of a table and chairs over here there's a desk over here there's a lamp over here and you didn't put them there right and we kind of move around in this space right and our movements are somewhat prescribed by the type of furniture the type of institutions that are around us but it's very rare that we stop and ask these hard questions right like why are they configured the way they are why is this table over here why does it look like this why is it this shape or this color who put it there and is this the best possible table okay so the way I one lens that I use when I look at the world I find very useful is this lens of institution right which which is a big power full lens which helps us understand for example why some countries some cultures some societies have done better than others why some are wealthier than others my favorite example of an institution is the nation-state okay it's sort of the biggest most obvious example and we have all grown up in a world where when you look at this world map it looks complete right there's these neat shapes and colors and everything is filled in there's not really any blank space aside from Antarctica there's there's big bold lines drawn around these nation-states and and it's sort of possible you sort of feel like the system is perfect and completely right and so as I was saying about the furniture before you actually stop to think like is this the ideal is this the best possible system why are things this way so actually nation-states are it's a pretty young system you know throughout all of human history we've had lots of other configurations right we had you know immediately before nation-states we had kingdoms we had empires we had you know much more complex configurations of principalities and duchies and all these kind of like you know random political configurations the nation-state system was born around four hundred years ago here in Europe this is an image from the treaties of Westphalia which was a series of peace treaties that were intended to end some religious wars that had dragged on for decades in Western Europe and this was the very first time in history that people got together and articulated for the first time what is this idea of a sovereign nation-state right because up to that point that concept never existed so again just making the point right this is actually a relatively young technology and all technologies arise in a particular place in a particular time as a result of a particular set of circumstances and eventually fade away and become obsolete and become replaced by something else so this is what Germany looked like at that time okay this goes back to what I said right this I find this map fascinating I could stare at this for hours as a geography nerd it's it's hundred of little you know counties and principalities and duchies and all these other words I've never even heard of before so of course when I say Germany like that's a modern idea Germany is a nation-state today but like it wasn't until pretty recently and it's a bit of an extreme example right you can see there are there's a kingdom of France and the kingdom of Poland and others around it and so this is Germany today right so again we're back to these kind of you know bold lines and clean colors and again the kind of map looks complete and looks perfect but if we zoom in we see things like this and if we have any Belgian or Dutch people in the room but this is a portion of the border between the Netherlands and Belgium an area called bar'el her talk I'm sure I'm not pronouncing that correctly and actually like that kind of looks like that to me right so the point I'm making is these clean abstractions like the nation-state when you really zoom in you see stuff like this and this is just one random example there are examples of this all over the world okay and to me this is where again like this abstraction this clean abstraction of a nation-state like really starts to break down this particular example these countries are both in the EU and so they actually like this is not as interesting as an example like this okay so this is Afghanistan Pakistan again we've grown up in a world where these are countries right they have flags they have prime ministers and presidents they they have national anthems right they check all the boxes except you know when you kind of zoom out you realize it's reality is much more complex and messy than that right so each of these colored blobs represents an ethno-linguistic group a group of sort of cohesive group of people who share a common identity right and right through the middle we have this thing called the Durand Line this big black line does anyone know who Durand was so Durand was a British diplomat okay a westerner who in 1893 was commissioned by the British government by the King to draw this line and divide this up into countries and trust me when he did this it was not to like satisfy the locals okay this was clearly executing like British political aims in the region at that point in time and again there are examples of this all over the world right and so the point I'm making by showing a map like this I think again we can learn a lot from maps right is that for millions of people probably for tens or hundreds of millions of people populations around the world this system has never worked for them okay they've never been enfranchised by this concept of a nation-state so I just want to drive the point home that it's not a perfect and it's not a complete system it never has been for many people and and to think naively that this system that we have now is sort of the perfect or the best system the ideal system I think is very naive so the nation-state is struggling in some ways I would go so far as to say that I think the nation-state system is beginning to fall apart it's beginning to die and there are many many many concrete examples that we could go into we don't have time to drill down into them today but we can look at you know the unrest that's happening right here in Paris this is a great place to be having this conversation we can look at populism and what's happening in places like the Philippines Brazil the United States I think Breck's it's another great example of this that may sound like a bold statement right to say nation-states are dying or on their way out at a time when they're stronger than they've ever been before right we were moving into this bipolar world with the United States and China of course Europe is significant as well but you know if you don't believe me if you're skeptical about this topic there's a book called sovereign individual which I highly recommend you read it sort of makes this case more strongly than I could and in a nutshell what it boils down to is that these large nation-states arose again because of a particular configuration of what are called macro political trends at a particular point in time in human history and in particular it's the returns to scale to large scale and to large use of violence right that caused nation-states to grow and become so strong it made a lot of sense for a few hundred years for countries to get very very big and have large populations so that they could field very large armies to dominate and gather more resources for themselves but that trend has begun to reverse in a big way and that's because of things like micro computing it's because of things like encryption tools like the tools that we're building as well as things like guerrilla warfare ok and so these large trends cannot be stopped they cannot be reversed so the question becomes if you buy that nation-states will not exist in their present form forever right the question becomes what replaces them ok I'm a big fan of Black Mirror I don't know if anyone else here watches it right it's sort of a slightly dystopian or maybe very dystopian view of the future and if you ask me the one version of the future is the Facebook future ok and this is where as nation-states shrink and and you know suffer and fail to collect taxes and things like that you have large private companies like Facebook that can fill in the gaps and if Mark and his shareholders have their way you know we're all gonna live in beautiful Facebook villages with houses painted blue and we're gonna you know have all of our conversations on Facebook and we're gonna vote on Facebook and that would make them very happy that's not only one possible version of the future I think if you sort of continue down the current path that we're on if you extrapolate based on current trends that's where we're most likely to end up is a is a Facebook version of the future there's a lot of sci-fi authors you know going back to books like Snow Crash that have kind of articulated some version of like the privatization of everything so the question I want to ask is if this is not the future we want first of all is this the future you want right and I'm gonna be bold and assume I know the answer for most of the people in this room if it's not the future we want how do we fight back what what do we have to our advantage that lets us build a better future and I believe the way you do that is by exploiting asymmetries okay so what tools what power do we have that the Facebook's the googles the Amazons the alibaba's of the world don't have and can't use and among them to me the most powerful one is community and ownership to me community and ownership go hand in hand let me try to explain there's a cognitive bias called the endowment effect which I'm sure many of you have heard of right and the endowment effect is very real and very powerful and it says that if you possess something something that you feel you have an ownership over you ascribe an enormous amount actually an irrational amount of value to that thing way more than you would pay for it if you were to walk into a store there's a powerful difference between Facebook and aetherium right I am NOT enfranchised by Facebook even if I buy Facebook stock even if I work for Facebook I still feel like a tiny little piece in a huge machine and that machine is not responsive it's not answer both my concerns I have no say in its governance for example right and no ownership over the content aetherium is very different right due to the nature of etherium the fact that it's this open permissionless commons any random person like me I was a complete nobody a year ago you know sitting in this audience watching these awesome talks anyone can come in and assert themselves and have a huge role to play and really feel quite a strong sense of ownership over the platform and I believe that that's something that we have that the Facebook's of the world can never have and it's even more right we also have this secret power just magic power which is the fork okay and what that means is that any subset of us in this room any group of people if we ever feel that aetherium is failing us that it's not optimal it's not serving our needs we have the power of exit we have the power of fork right we can take it and we can install better governance we can create a different version of it and that's a very very very powerful idea we don't even it's not even that we have to follow through and do that right we haven't had many Forks in aetherium but it's just the fact that that exists keeps everybody honest in facebook I can't even like change a button right I can't like change the size or shape of something I can't change the color I can't change anything I can't touch the data right aetherium is the exact opposite it's kind of this open network and I believe that that is what sets us apart as for like a specific vision and kind of like how we actually build us what it would look like there's a gentleman named Aaron Lonnie who's I think one of the most brilliant thinkers in the world today and writers as well so he's written several books this one who owns the future it's it's a relatively quick read I couldn't recommend it more highly he articulates a very clear very specific vision of what he calls a humanist information economy which is how we like reinvent the concept of a social network of a network in general and of course there is a lot of overlap with what we're doing with something like aetherium in a nutshell what he describes is that the topology of these networks of these value networks needs to change right the way that the networks look right now is that they're very hierarchical like a directed acyclic graph with a single root node at the top and that root node could be Apple in the App Store it could be Facebook it could be you know Amazon Google etc its monopolistic and and all the value created in that network flows to the top because that's the only way for value to move from one point to another point in la niñas version of the future we have much more decentralized peer-to-peer style networks where people are rewarded for creating and curating good content in the network so I think that's one very concrete vision of like what we should be working towards aetherium is sort of many things to many people right it's it's a decentralized global computer it's a state machine my favorite version of aetherium if you zoom out to the very highest level of abstraction is an operating system for building better human institutions fairer more inclusive more just censorship resistant right pick your favorite adjective institutions I think that institutions are at the center of what we need to do and it's the way that we build a better world and I think that we have the tools in web 3 to do that let me give you a very concrete example I'm a big fan of maker Dow and as the placeholder team here has pointed out it's a better institution right so loans are not new for anyone who may be unfamiliar it's a maker Dow is it's a purely decentralized platform where you can lock up ether and soon other types of collateral as well and receive a loan in a token called die loans are not new right loans have existed for hundreds probably thousands of years you can go to the bank any loan originator and take out a loan but maker does it better in a few dimensions right so so there's these two things called principal-agent problems which are kind of information asymmetries one is the fact that the balance sheet of a bank is private right we can't easily audit it and see like oh how much collateral do they have on the books okay another one is incentives right so as we saw very clearly in the financial crisis the global financial crisis in 2007 2008 2008 2009 a lot of bankers who made very poor decisions who didn't govern their networks very well were able to walk away with billions of dollars in bonuses right maker fixes this to the governors of the system the holders of the governance token are directly penalized if the system is under under collateralized and there's no way to avoid that and on top of all that it's not just better it's also cheaper right it costs something like a fifth to a tenth of what it costs to take out a loan from a traditional bank okay so this is one type of institution this is sort of a financial institution but I think it's really an exemplar of what we can accomplish with platform like aetherium this was never possible before how many of you here are familiar with peril any polis or have been there before this space is in Prague I think they just opened a second one in Bratislava we visited at DEFCON last year it's awesome there's you can you can buy coffee with Bitcoin which actually is kind of a big deal there's a hackerspace co-working space there what struck me about it is actually the name okay Carol only polis means parallel society and to me this is this is my vision of what we should be building what we should be doing okay the fact that maker exists doesn't mean that we need to destroy the Federal Reserve or JP Morgan right we're building a better system and better institutions in parallel to the ones that exist today okay and if we do that if we get it right people will see it and they will join these institutions they will join these networks and if they if we don't manage to do that if people are not joining then we're not doing it right okay and I would go so far as to say that if we try instead to destroy and tear down the existing system then we're no better than the people or the institutions that we're trying to be better than that we're trying to replace and so that's why one of my favorite phrases is evolution not revolution so this ecosystem of institutions has begun to emerge in aetherium right maker is a great example we have digital self sovereign identity we have censorship resistance self sovereign money we have it's sort of legal contracts right I said identity already property registers non fungible tokens this is the very beginning okay but what we need to be doing is letting this experimentation happen right we need to be building which we are we need to continue building these new ideas these new institutions these new platforms throw them out there into the world and kind of see what works and what doesn't work and you know as I said right we we just need to build better things in parallel and trust that people will sort of see that and figure out and join us what other type of institutions can we build well so I talked about identity I talked about you know legal stuff governance things like that could we even build physical infrastructure so this is the block chains LLC project they have some absurdly large amount of land in the Nevada desert 50,000 acres or something this project was unveiled at DEFCON as well and you know I think a lot of people in this room are probably very skeptical about this project I'm certainly skeptical about it but I do think that this is the right level of ambition okay we should he we should have these big hairy ambitions to build these crazy things right so they're building things like schools and hospitals completely on the blockchain so I really think the sky's the limit I really think that there's no limit to what we can build in parallel an experimentation that we can and should be running so moving into a conclusion here we keep building and as the present system begins to collapse and fall apart when and if that happens right we will be ready right we will have money we will have identity we will have governance we will have services all these things that are online and available and hopefully usable so that when that time comes we'll be there to offer an alternative that again may sound kind of crazy kind of ambitious but I just want to explain right that there is precedent for things like this happening on at least on a smaller scale so how many of you in this room are old enough to remember this have any of you guys ever used one of these before okay few hands good a month this is slightly before my time okay this is a modem so this is how all the computers in the world communicated and connected to the Internet all through the 1980s maybe even into the early 1990s and at the time the brightest minds in the world looked at this fledgling Internet and they said there's no way this will ever work right there's no wait like there's no way you can run something as big and ambitious as the internet over plain old television telephone service right it wasn't designed to do that it can't handle it it's too slow it's too clumsy it's not usable but those adjectives sound familiar to us I call this a failure of imagination to kind of see the future and see what's possible so you know fast forward 20 30 years right and we're now in a world where it's no longer the internet running over the phone okay we now have the phone running over the Internet okay there's a name for this phenomenon it's called inversion it's happened before and it will happen again and you know the the systems that we're building today whether it's finance whether its identity aetherium right they are circumscribed by the furniture right they're circumscribed by the existing institutions we have to obey the law you know if theory Imran's over the internet etc but if you are not able to kind of really zoom out and see a possible future where things get turned around right and where someday the internet runs on aetherium or where the institutions we've discussed to the extent that they still exist and still function are built on top of web 3 and I would say that that's a failure imagination cool so if any of this is interesting to you please check out etherion org there's a forum there where we've already got threads on a lot of these topics we'll continue that conversation I'm writing a book which I'm also sharing a lot of ideas and content and outlines and things on etherion org a book intended to talk about a lot of these themes and topics so please join that conversation as well we have a small meet up tomorrow night there's a very limited number of spots but if you're interested there's a kickback site where you can sign up so if you go to kickback dot events you'll see it also if you go to a theory on org there's a link posted there so I hope to see you guys join the conversation there and I think that's all I've got so thank you very much [Applause] we have any time left or is at it I think we have time for a couple of questions so if anyone has any questions let me know great talk is it okay closer okay great talk so one of the things that like if you read up on political theory or evolutionary theory is this whole sort of dichotomy between can can they be like this peaceful transition or do you need revolution to have change and sort of a lot of it completed you kind of need to have revolution you can really stop that and although I guess the Internet is an example is a case where it wasn't really a lot of conflict it just sort of happened do you have any thoughts on that I mean like you know the nation said hasn't really come for the blockchain community yet in any in any serious way but it feels like it is enabled to bull so what do you what do we do then so the to restate the question it was kind of there's a big topic in political theory which is like can we have big change in a peaceable way kind of without revolution or as revolution kind of inevitable is it necessary a couple of thoughts right that the first thought is we do have we have maybe two things that never existed before in human history okay to like total asymmetries the first one is all of these political polities all these states all these you know territories by definition in the past I've always had to fight over land which is a scarce it's a rival risk good okay we're in a digital world and so you can be part of multiple of these communities or territories at the same time they're not rival this okay so I think that's a great that's a big difference I think the only reason that we can build institutions in parallel without tearing down the existing ones is because we're not fighting over land okay so that's the first thought also what did I want to say yeah so you also made the point that like we haven't yet seen much conflict between like blockchains and existing institutions is that inevitable you know if you believe that this transition that humanity is going through right from the Information Age into the digital sorry from the Industrial Age into the kind of digital information right if you believe that that's as big a shift as I do right the humanities only undergone a very small number of these transitions before like moving from agriculture to industry then that does suggest that we're in for a lot of conflict right because those transitions there's massive transitions have never been peaceful in the past so I guess that's kind of two sides of the coin I don't know the answer to the question but it's a fascinating question maybe one more question any other questions in the back Vinay how are you hey is this just classical anarchism classical again I'm not a political theorist okay so I'm not gonna pretend I know exactly what anarchism is or should be or classical anarchism is I'd love to hear your thoughts on this but my short answer my gut reaction is no because we're not trying to just tear things down we're trying to kind of be constructive and build newer and better things the fact that we want institutions in the first place better ones is not energies to me all right I'm tired I'm gonna sit down thank you very much for the snare [Applause] [Music] [Applause]