DAPPCON 2018: Meditations on Governance and Culture - Evan Van Ness (ConsenSys)

Transcript

okay so my talk is titled a meditation on governance and culture I'm Evan van Ness of a newsletter called weekend aetherium if you aren't subscribed you can do that now there's my shilling so this is a meditation so if you if you will a few good humor may I close your eyes I really never close my eyes when people speakers ask me to close my eyes but I don't know you you can if you want I would appreciate it so imagine you are an American colonialist in 1776 deciding whether to revolt or

not whether to sign the Declaration of Independence so you are a a white male which in the black chain space of course probabilistically is relatively possible you are an aristocrat you live a comfortable life you're well-off you're respected in your community you have wild ideas of self sovereignty for your day which is you believe they are intrinsic and the life liberty life liberty and pursuit of happiness comes from God as the Declaration of Independence says actually it was originally pursuit of property and then

they changed it to pursuit of happiness because they considered property to be a subset of of happiness but there's a point of the fact that I'm doing American history I'm trying to make a larger point the US you know basically the colony started for reasons of a lot of them move for for freedom for tax reasons there were tax breaks given to move there so you are there you have a relatively low effective tax rate two to ten percent depending on your colony and so like before you open your eyes if

you have your eyes closed which most of you don't because we're blockchain people we don't do anything like people ask us would you risk your life against like the greatest fighting force of all time the the Redcoats the British governments knowing that you are likely to be hanged possibly your family you'll lose your wealth your family will lose their wealth and you if like in a couple generations five six eight whatever we are generations the effective tax rate would be 33% like I'm not actually making any sort of anti tax whatever you can open your eyes if you haven't closed point here aside to say that long-term

governance is hard and whatever you want is not necessarily what will happen in the future so like maybe you would actually sign that document maybe you would sign the Declaration of Independence and revolt a great personal risk I mean America is doing okay but like my larger point here is that like governance and culture matter and like in the long run what you want is probably not what will actually happen but by the way so the colonists in the colonies that was two to ten percent in

Britain at the time they were more like 15 to 20 percent so they were already paying like way less taxes than they would if they had been in Britain I'm kind of random random point so it's like some parallels to our space I'm obviously you've probably picked up since I said it's all sovereignty which is you know there were aristocrats I'm not calling us aristocrats by any means but we are like privileged enough to you know either live in a a well-off nation or be able to travel to to Germany and to know about bleeding edge tech they had wild ideas of self Authority

and like you know that that sounds like us and if they RAM in decentralization you know the u.s. started for tax reasons and freedom of religion I think that's like you know relatively fair to say about a lot of the early blockchain people as well like it's sort of a libertarian and I mean it's not always political but like non mainstream idealists people that are you know have ideas outside of the mainstream so you know the early American governance after they won the revolution from from England they were very distrustful of centralization they had a bunch of the

colonies became States and they were very very loosely Confederated under the Articles of Confederation George Washington was I mean this is like somewhat of a semantic argument but he was not really the first president there were people that held the title the President of the United States Congress assembled I think it exactly was and they were like eight people that held that title like before before George Washington George Washington was the first president once they ratified the Constitution which while they were believers endemic and democracy they had you know they wanted people to be able to vote they were very skeptical of

direct democracy as well and they built a lot of checks into that system and when they ultimately did decide that they wanted some centralized government they I mean they wanted to keep it very very small and only limited to certain things so they wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to check centralized power I'll come back to that a little bit more later and by the way don't like get too hung up on the American thing people like to like nitpick history which like you can always make arguments about I'm just trying to draw a broad strokes for our space

in our space you know on chain voting is basically the equivalent of direct democracy and it's I think a lot of people are pretty skeptical about on chain voting these days first of all the like plutocracy like a lot of tokens and individual projects are not very distributed to start with so we can't really be sure of like is it a particularly decentralized vote the incentives are often not there to vote and you can you know try to build those in or whatever but it's you know it's also hard

like for instance live pier has an interesting thing where you you bond your tokens to transcoders but and you know and and I'm not gonna get too deep into their their structure but it it is having recently done it it was hard to actually decide between transcoders who I was going to delegate to and it took some some work right which I'm still not even sure that I was completely technically qualified for because DevOps is hard another problem is that the result is known on chain right so until

we get better privacy basically everyone will know who you vote what you voted for and obviously that has problems because of you know there's vitalik right opposed years ago about I forget what you've got I think epsilon attacks so it makes it easy to bribe to do bribes because if you know what votes are then you can promise in a in a contract people that vote for this will get this and then Phil Diane had an article which I'm probably might be butchering but about trusted execution environments and in the future even making some of the

privacy features irrelevant because you can incentivize people to run software in trusted environments and then it would be trustless for bribes of course you would still have to sort of like trust that software and have these trusted enclaves but the future of on chain voting I mean is is I don't think it's dead but I think it's complicated at the very least so shift gears a little bit to talk about DAP governance I mean right now we are basically at this like the point of DAP governance is to get your thing live so it's not

usually particularly decentralized right it's the founders who want to get it live so that you know they they get rid of the risk of the SEC coming after them and then you you sort of work on your further decentralization of your government from there and of course upgrading your features and to your road map requires centralization right I mean there's I think there's really much argument about that so some ideas about that like the solution space is large right so there are good experiments to run you know you've seen maker they're basically philosophy is to take it slow

and experiment and they've been doing this you know since the start years ago dan Finley has a proposal he calls strange loop which is essentially delegating to people that you trust and letting them vote for you essentially which i think is a really interesting proposal and maybe solve some of the capability arguments around on team building um like because if I don't feel confident that I can evaluate the choices in a vote I could delegate my vote my friend who I know does know a lot about that subject and then Aragon even

in the last couple days well they've released a survey tap but they're they're also thinking about you know having signalling votes that are that are non-binding also binding votes having veto power between token holders and founders quorums majority super majorities I think all of those make you know some of those make on chain voting a little bit more more palatable but I mean I think the core idea which is checks and balances culture matters I think it's like the only thing that

really matters and like the midterm it is it is what your culture is so I think for gaps that particularly means being clear about your values repeating them ad nauseam that's unfortunately a big part of what leadership is about cite them when making difficult decisions I mean that's really what they're there for right like if you if you have a difficult decision and you don't default to what your values are is an open source project or even as a centralized company like why you even have them right like you shouldn't have wasted all those meetings and HR or whatnot if your values don't guide your difficult

decisions in in depth I think it also means that you need to build communication tools and think carefully about how you communicate to your community and like I said I think culture is really like the thing that you know in the short term it's probably gonna be founders but in the end the midterm it's like what your your culture is so long term though is like more of a dichotomy right which is you know there's like sort of two sides to the two which is my nick szabo view which is humans are wet code and anywhere that they are involved is like a security risk right security hole and then there's like the flip side which is

software which isn't being updated which you know kind of these humans until we figure this whole a I think out softer that isn't being updated is dead so I mean I think they're they're both right so long-term attacks and I'm just gonna like talk about some of the things that have happened in America and not because I think they're good or bad just because I think they are somewhat incisive you know the states were originally supposed to be like these sovereign entities and the federal government was supposed to serve the states and that's like clearly not what actually happened right the federal government in America is way larger than the states in fact even the the original idea of the founders was basically to

have the states represent have the Senate represent the states and the house would represent people and even you know there was a constitutional amendment that changed that to give Senate elections to the voters instead of to state legislatures there's a famous quote as well from I think the Federalist Papers saying that the Supreme Court was the least dangerous branch of government but now it's like in America it's like nine elites that are all educated at Harvard or Yale Law School basically decide every contentious issue it's a I find that to be interesting and the legislative

branch was arguably supposed to be the most powerful and foremost of the founders and then they were wrong really cuz probably it's the least powerful today it it they Congress in America often passes legislation it basically just authorizes the executive branch to write all the regulations to enforce that legislation and it's so it's basically the they tell the executive branch to like they kick the can to the to make difficult decisions to unelected regulators anyway there's many more my point here is like not to get hung up on any of those I know if that's like some of this is like mildly political it's

just to say that governance is really hard so thinking about that I'm thinking about our space the the solution space to invent checks and balances is large and that's kind of the whole point of why we're here for a lot of us you know food turkey is a really cool idea um so hooray for prediction markets because it's basically you make conditional bets on future states and then you will make money or not if the conditions happen so it's a way to vote with your with your money like your put your money where your mouth is basically I think there's

some really cool things that are being done that I know gnosis is sort of planning to do that at some point in the future I think that's great I think another solution is making it easy to fork and so I call that 4d mess so some ideas for for kinas I think it means different things for different projects but and I think obviously we are still and this is nascent technology so it is this is long term but as in most things you should begin with the end in mind so I would say it's like self-determination for communities right

you want to make it so that your community can grow and you know the difference between a nation-state and an open-source project is that you can fork right like you if a part of your community wants to go off and do something else or has different values like they can do that and so I like I'd say et sig was was a good thing and you basically make it possible for people to use use your community I so I I wanted to give a couple examples of for QMS I definitely it's an idea I had a couple weeks ago I gave an early version of

this talk on July the 10th and then on July the 13th Simon who is an idea machine of course I've joked about making a section of my newsletter like Simon's ideas and the the derivatives of them that other people come up with which I is amazing I mean he's he's been so influential in our space his idea was basically that you know you would incentivize forking tokens by early adoption of forex to overcome the some issues around you know coordination issues by either having people burn so you burn to get and more like you burn

your old tokens to have that new fork token or you have a bonded curve where basically the early adopters would get more than the late adopters of of this fork I also think like fork enos for you know like auger enosis in the future could build out their token to be used as a general purpose or Oracle and more than they even have that's like a very long-term thing obviously it's an idea that came to mind so that is my talk if you have nitpicky questions on American history I was probably not the best time right

now you can badger me with those afterwards but