DAPPCON 2019: Decentralized Foundation Launch on Mainnet - Niran Babalola (Panvala)

Transcript

good afternoon everybody I think for coming it's really nice to be gathered together with so much of the etherion community in one place in real life it feels a lot better than tweeting at each other on crypto Twitter where things can go wrong the first time that I met up with the etherium community in person was in 2015 I was at DEFCON 1 in London in London I stayed in a place called wombats hostel and I was in a room with 6 other dudes who are also part of the theorem community I was real cozy real snug but for people who've been in the

community since then it's pretty unlikely that they still have to stay in a hostel and that's really been so much of what the narrative of what this community has been about to the public when you talk to people who are just normal people when they hear about etherium when they hear about Bitcoin what they think of is people who got rich quick people who happen to hold the right token at the right time and suddenly their financial lives were changed that's what people think were all about and today I'd like to start to change that narrative I'd like it to be not a narrative about private wealth but a narrative about Commonwealth for me it's not about the kind of wealth that

you feel when you walk into the grand entryway of a millionaire's mansion for me it's about the kind of wealth that I feel when I walk through the Brandenburg Gate it's the kind of wealth that generations of Germans cooperated to build and maintain so the people that came after them could continue to enjoy it it's the kind of wealth that endures over time the kind of wealth that I'm after isn't the kind of wealth that you feel when you can afford to pay for a private performance from Beyonce or Bruno Mars there's only enough Beyonce to go around if you want to have that experience you're gonna have to outbid everybody else who wants it but what I'm after is the kind of well that I felt when I saw street performers

along the beaches of Busan not only were they incredibly talented but they had this unlimited hospitality that really made you feel at home even when you were on the other side of the plan I'm not after kind of wealth that's scarce I'm after kind of wealth that's and limitless what I'm after isn't the kind of wealth that you feel when you're high up in a high-rise and you're swimming in a pool that seems to just flow over the edge of the building and you can look down on the people below what I'm after is the kind of wealth that I feel when I swim in Barton Springs Pool back at home in Texas you don't look down on anybody then what you do is you look around at the people on the hillsides that are enjoying the same epic theme that you

want that same slice of nature that's open to everybody I believe that our public life should be full should be filled with glittering prizes for all people to enjoy and when this community got started that's really what it felt like the trajectory that we were on it felt like that because back in 2015 it wasn't about what paychecks you could get to do this kind of work there weren't that many paychecks to be had instead there was a different justification for working on infrastructure in the z-test and that justification was ether itself there were people who held ether and instead of looking for a paycheck they got to work on things that can make etherion better instead of looking for a director award they they expected an

indirect reward they expected that they could increase the utility of aetherium itself and that would increase the demand of the ether that they held so people got to work that's how this community really got started but the incentives that got us so far don't seem to be holding up now when people learn about blockchain technology they don't always join our community some of us some of them see other block chains that may have just got started and they see that maybe they can get in early on something new there's other people who take their talents and their ideas and start their own networks and they believe that they can take the

token that they create and use that to fund their work they can use that to reward themselves for the work that they're gonna do we're seeing our community start to splinter we're seeing it start to divide because then centers that got us so far aren't the right ones that are gonna take it slower gone we're seeing that same sort of decline in cooperation in so many parts of our society or seeing an economy that's beginning a stagnant we're seeing a decline and civic society and the reason that we're seeing that is not a new problem it's an old problem it's the same problem that was observed by Henry George over a century ago it's the problem that you the problem that he observed was that he saw an economy that

was increasing and wealth but at the same time he saw poverty increase as well and if you want to see a modern example of what Henry George saw you can just look to San Francisco San Francisco is one of the wealthiest cities on this planet but it has an incredible homeless Trump on this on one single blog in San Francisco you can see progress and poverty at the same time because of that problem and the COG the problem that we're seeing in our community is that we systematically reward the people who make prosperity scarce we systematically reward the people who bottle up wealth who try to exclude people and the people that try to make prosperity abundant

they have a hard time getting rewarded at all that's the problem that we need to solve to to continue to move forward together and I think we can solve that problem by changing our culture if you've been around different cryptocurrency communities you've probably noticed that each single one has a well-defined community with the well-defined culture if you look at the Bitcoin community it's a community that really got started in the aftermath of the financial crisis there were people who saw banks get bailed out they saw profits privatized and losses socialized it seemed like a corrupt system the P the people in the Bitcoin community

turned to a system that was corruptable one that wasn't that one that you couldn't influence with policies one that wrote the rules of its system encode that there would be 21 million bitcoins that they would be distributed along a curve and that no one would be able to change that over time and so many of us came up through that community and through that culture and we learned so much from what it has done in the etherium community the the culture that ether creates is a culture of buildings the whole point of aetherium is to build something on top sure there's a token that you can hold but the theme that draws people in is the idea that you can build something new that the technology provides new opportunities that weren't there before

so the people that it attracts get to work they find other people out there with interesting ideas or useful skills and they build teams that can actually accomplish those together that's really what's made this community so great to me with Pam Bala and with the Pam token that runs it I believe we can create a new kind of culture I believe that we can create a culture of generosity I believe that we can create a culture where people give so freely and so joyfully because they see the abundance that their system is producing for our community I have seen this culture of generosity play out in real life I saw

it at the consensus retreat in February of last year consensus the company that I work for held her a treat and Portugal and at that retreat we played a game that works a lot like $10 bills we didn't have a token that runs on the blockchain instead we used poker chips and we didn't have smart contracts to enforce the rules instead we had a game master but the dynamics of that game were the same as the dynamics of $10 what we did is we issued tokens to reward people at that retreat though our making our lives better and to support those people we bought tokens from them when we donated it back to the system to complete the cycle that would make the system work and the culture of

generosity that really emerged around that game was a sight to behold it was something new it was something that was no yeah unfamiliar at the same time for me the thing the closest comparison is to the feeling you get when it's your first day as a first-year student on a college campus there's so many new strangers that you're gonna meet and the only reason for them to cooperate with you is this idea that they're part of the same thing they're in the same school of you so that's the reason that we're gonna move forward together they're gonna study with you they're gonna pursue friendships with you they're even gonna root for the same football team it's that kind of school spirit that reminds

me of the Penn Valley spirit that we felt as we played that game this idea that we had a new reason to cooperate that we could move forward together in new ways where opportunity was endless but I believe that the cultures that form around these different tokens are really tied to the communities beliefs about property when it comes to Bitcoin and when it comes to ether the belief about property is really similar to the beliefs of Murray Rothbard and what he believed is that when it comes to property it's really just the business of the owner of that property and his heirs the more labor that she put into it the more value that you're gonna get

out of it but the rest of society you have no obligation to them your property is your business but that's not the only view of property that felt that here in Germany they believe something different if you look at the basic law of Germany Germany's Constitution I have something to say about property and what it says is that property entails obligation it's useless also served the public good when you hold a Bitcoin there's no obligation you can buy some bitcoins you can forget about it for four or five years you can come back find yourself wealthier than you were before you didn't have to do anything to earn it when you hold pan when you hold pen vollis tokens that

property entails obligations your obligation is to serve the public good your obligation is to govern our system of grants and issue grants that continue to produce above and if you do it well that's what creates the reason to hold pan in the first place the reason to hold it is a because donors will buy that toki from the grantees they'll donate it back to the system and they'll complete the cycle that can continue to produce abundance for our community pan holders have this obligation to systematically reward the people who produce abundance now when I described with system to people so a lot of times it sounds like a perpetual motion this idea that you

could issue grants in your own currency that you can take them in in your own pen see what's actually making that cycle continue to really understand how it works you can take a look we can take a lesson from the river stream the spray flows right outside this building exploded before Berlin was here it's it'll keep flowing long after we're done what makes it flow isn't a perpetual motion what makes it flow is nature's cycle the water starts near the Czech border and the Highlands and it flows downhill when it gets to Berlin and murders in with another river and heads out to the North Sea and when that water sits in the North Sea some might

hits it starts to evaporate it forms clouds and those clouds take that water back where it started in the highlands that cycle is not a perpetual motion machine sunlight makes it go some way isn't what makes pan Bala system go front the Sun cannot make donations to the pan Bala I wish it could my life would be a lot easier but since the Sun can do it you have to be the light you have to be the light that collects the pan that flows to our to our grant recipients you have to be the light that takes the pan back to its source you have to be the light that completes the cycle that produces abundance for our community now to some

people that might sound like an obligation but when you start to do it I don't think it'll feel that way I don't think you'll feel that way because when you contribute to the system it's going to produce more value than you're putting in it's gonna produce more value than you're putting in because that value isn't private wealth that value is Commonwealth when you don't have to reward each person individually when you can reward them together you can produce so much more that makes participating worthwhile I'm not excited about an Bala because of some Toki or some smart contracts that we move the reason that I'm excited about Penn Galah it's because I've seen the light you shine in this community every single day that

have been a craving and the idea that we can start to harness that light and put it to work to produce the themes that we all depend on that's what gets me excited as I speak my teammate Isaac is sending the final transactions to initialise pandava on the etherion nook for me today is a particularly good day to start something new it was on this day 38 years ago that my parents and my two older brothers arrived in America they left everything they knew in Nigeria and started a new life in Texas that choice that they made that leap of faith that they took has produced so

much value for me so much value for my family and I think what lies ahead of us for pantalla is that same kind of opportunity it's a leap of faith that you can take it but not with your feet you don't have to move to be a part of pinball pinball what matters is where you plant in your heart and where you plant your mind and what I'm asking you to do today is to plant them firmly with pandava plant them firmly with this community what I'm asking you to what I'm asking you to do today it's to be the light that completes the cycle that produces abundance for our community and Bala is now life and I'm so excited to see what we do it okay in that happy

respect I would just take a moment to turn over the pulpit for our next speaker there's there's lots of details about the how the system works I can I can explain it really briefly but the basics of it are that we issue grants to teams in our community that are doing work we issue those grants in our own token and when you decide to

become a donor to pan vallah the way that you do it is you take your ether and you exchange it with the team that earned grants they now have ether to fund their work and you have a pan ball a token you take that pan Bala token and you donate it back to the smart contracts that store the token supply up and voila that's what keeps the tokens that we are issuing sustainable over time we don't run out because you complete the cycle that keeps it going