Decentralizing Gitcoin Grants

Transcript

hi everyone my name is kevin iwaki and i am the founder of bitcoin and today i'm going to be talking about our efforts to decentralize bitcoin from a company into a dao so uh i have three main points that i want to get through in this quick 10 minute presentation what is bitcoin why are we decentralizing and how are we doing it so um get coins mission is to build and fund digital public goods we want to empower communities of builders to connect and work together create the future of the open web so basically we want to be the place where builders and funders come together to build and fund the open web we do that by creating an experience where builders can come to bitcoin to earn learn connect with each other and get their work funded and we do that

through a series of products uh the first is hackathons basically you show up and we give you a series of tasks to work on for sponsors in the ecosystem and you get coins when you work on them uh we have git coin grants which is the largest crowdfunding platform in the ethereum community and you can get coins using that for the work that you're already doing in web3 and then we have bitcoin kernel which is a peer-to-peer lifelong learning network kind of like a university in web 3. take 200 of the top builders in the space and help them earn learning connect in web 3.

so um all together these products have helped 33 000 funders reach an audience of 20 000 earners with 700 complete transactions and almost 30 million dollars worth of coins have been get on bitcoin so that's what getcoin is why are we going to decentralize well uh companies are domiciled in a jurisdiction it's costly dispute and transact with them and um we are interested in making bitcoin bitcoin grants subject to a dow which is domiciled on the internet uh which makes it easier to dispute or transact on the network there's no intermediaries and there's governance by and of the community that it serves um

by decentralizing bitcoin uh from a web 2 stack where there's a thin protocol layer and a fat application layer to a web 3 stack where there is a fat protocol layer and one or many applications being created permissionlessly on top of that we think that we can enable more innovation in the bitcoin ecosystem and we think that we can make bitcoin more fragile or sorry anti-fragile so basically as a system is subject to stressors its strength depends on whether or not it is designed as a fragile system a resilient system in an anti-fragile system and i think that companies are fragile when subject to stress and a dow is more anti-fragile or resilient

when subject to stressors and what that's one of the reasons that we're interested in decentralizing bitcoin so um wanted to get through those first two points really quick because the subject of this talk is how we're going to decentralize bitcoin and that's what i'm gonna be spending the remainder of my looks like seven minutes left talking about so what are we decentralizing when we talk about taking a company and making it into a dao um well in the case of bitcoin we'll be decentralizing the governance and then the computation the development and the economics of the network are all things that we're looking at decentralizing subject to uh a regulatory compliant way of doing that

so uh the first thing that we've done with git coin is uh with with git coin grants and with bitcoin hackathons there is some governance surface area especially with how much money that we move and what we've done is we've uh distributed a token called gtc which you can see in the middle right here and basically distribute it to everyone who transacted on the network subject to a formula that we decided on may 25th 2021 and basically when they got their tokens they were able to say hey i want to govern the network myself or i want to choose someone that i trust to to govern the network and so this pie chart right here is ethereum community members that get coin community members

have decided that they want to delegate their governance rights to um consent of the governed is the only legitimate basis for uh government and that's why we want to be governed by our community and we just know that most community members won't follow on governance and won't vote so we let them elect a representative that they trust their values and have them vote for them in matters such as uh which which accounts on get coin grants are valid uh contributions that can derive money from the matching pool uh if there's ever a dispute on the platform or a question about governance trent austin linda left terrace these are the people that the bitcoin community has decided to delegate their

governance to um the initial governance was set on may 25th when we did our airdrop and now we're starting to look at over time how does the governance change as people see how the stewards perform and so what we're doing is we're putting together these steward report cards which are basically a bunch of data about how what a steward has worked on every quarter so basically for linda for austin for left terrace basically keeping the community informed about what they're working on on a quarterly cadence is going to allow people to update their votes if they don't like what the person that their their token governance rights are delegated to is is doing and so having that consent of the

governed maintained by having an active shuffling of the cards depending on who's doing a good job over time i think is an important part of that um when it comes to decentralizing the development or computations or the economics of the network um we're starting to build this thing called work streams so basically at the center of bitcoin dow in in gtc we're starting to see these work streams of people who have a common mission cropping up outside of the dow um the first and foremost one is anti-fraud so basically how do we make sure that bounties on the platform are legitimate that people who are deriving money from the matching pool are doing so in a

legitimate way that's what the anti-fraud work stream is working on decentralized bitcoin work stream is actually working on taking bitcoin grants and building a totally decentralized version of it so basically the development and the computation of getpoint grants will live on ipfs and will live outside of the company of bitcoin in the future and the decentralized bitcoin workstream is the one that's working on that um moonshot collective is the r d and rapid prototyping work stream of the git coin dial myself and austin griffith are working on the moonshot collective and we're starting to just launch experiments that are allowing us to rapidly prototype building new coordination tools for dials in the space using the moonshot collective and

then the third the fourth and final work stream that i wanted to show off here is the public goods funding workstream which is basically about managing money in the bitcoin treasury which has several million dollars worth of heath and other tokens in it and basically like how do we make sure that there's plenty of money available to build in funds the open web is the charter of the public goods funding workstream so we're already starting to see the the dow has only been live for two or three months but we're already starting to see progress out come out of these work streams we are decentralizing bitcoin grants and grants around 11 which is gonna start in a month or two or sorry uh in a couple weeks is going to be the first one where we're actually

going to have a decentralized version of bitcoin grants which is going to be distributing the funds so super excited to start prototyping that um there's a ton of experiments coming out of the moonshot collective i only have said that it's slightly i don't even have time to go into each of them but basically we're prototyping new coordination tools which we're using to do coordination within the bitcoin dial moonshot collective work stream then we're going to cross proliferate these tools to the rest of the work streams and then maybe to other dials i don't know we'll see but it's all coordination and we're building coordination tools in order to um coordinate better in the ecosystem um the public goods funding work stream is working on keeping the ecosystem

informed about the good work that bitcoin is doing with a weekly newsletter and we're also talking to other uh dows about what would it look like if we integrated deeply with you whether that means governance right swaps or talent swaps or just working together to make the ecosystem better the public goods funding work stream is is working on that so um that's a very brief overview of how we're thinking about decentralizing the governance the computation the development i should say development right here and the economics of the git coin dow and so i'm very happy to say that we are off on our way in terms of decentralizing bitcoin and there will be bumps along the way um people may think

that building a dow is just this sort of easy thing where you take a company and on an even spectrum move it into a dao but it when you're actually building a dial there's a ton of setbacks but there's also moments of exuberance and living in the future and building what's missing and so um i think that bitcoin's mission and building a web 3 native place where public goods can be supported and that open source software can be built is a really high cause for me and so getting through these challenges is something that we're all gonna do together and it's because bitcoin's mission is worth it and we wanna support builders in the 21st century with ethereum-based technology so uh if we're successful then we will

build for the public good and i'm just so happy to be working on this this day over day the mission is just is just so incredible and the community is so incredible and we're going to get through these challenges together so thank you so much to the edcon team for having me here to talk to the community about how we're decentralizing git coin i hope to see you all in person at edcon when the pandemic is over one of my favorite experiences was in 2018 going to edcon in toronto and meeting all of you for the first time back then and i hope that in 2022 i get to see everyone in person so thanks again thanks so much and i'll see you on the ethernets