Fix the Money, Fix Our World

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to the forest stage here at eath barcelona and it is my pleasure to introduce to you right now a presentation called fix the money fix our world from juan from makerdao come on up give him a hand [Applause] hi everyone thank you for for joining it's really good being here um yeah today i want to speak about money which is a bit of a taboo sometimes when we're talking about importance but i'll i'll try to make the case of why it's actually really really important

and i'm going to start with a very very short introduction about me so currently i'm the core unit facilitator at makerdale scs which is sustainable ecosystem scaling and my job pretty much is being the link between governance which is all the community and the mkr holders that's our governance token and the sustainable ecosystem scaling team so that's uh that's what we were my job and and we're trying to do and the mission of ses is to be able to scale maker so we try to help the work the the workforce and the capital to join together how i'll join or i'll come back to that later

my journey to now is a bit probably like anyone else joining from the web 2 or web one i did a lot of consulting finally i went to start up some scale ups and and then when i discovered the web 3 world i just got hooked so let's start with a very important message we're burning our world down this is very very important everything's going really bad and we only have one planet actually we don't need to save the planet we need to save our planet and yeah the planet has been there for billions of years it will be there billions of years after we're gone so as a species we need to do something fast actually sorry i've heard that as a

species we block or we freeze whenever there's something negative or a very negative message so let's start again with a positive slide and some hopeful memes i think we can all make it so the issue is how how do we do that right um so i want to talk about two very very important tools that we have as a species one of them is the the power of narratives and the other one is is money um the first one is much more present than we actually think um narratives are everywhere that's that's what as a tribe uh made us create stories uh then that developed into religion um even capitalism or i don't know

socialism communism whatever that's also a narrative and shared beliefs then you have even football so teams i want this team to win the world cup let's go that's another example separatism uh and you can go even as to as small as a family right so your share narrative we all do and that's one of the important tools we have as human beings to to survive pretty much uh the vision of your daw that that also falls there by the way and the other thing that's quite important is money this is extremely extremely important because what it allows to do is to hyper-specialize so we have this fungible token uh which used to be i don't know

whatever gold or or whatever the coin of the king was and now it's digital money and the fungibility is very important because it can tell us where to focus our energies to actually provide value to everyone else so that's uh that's that's quite a tool and as i was saying it allows for hyper specialization so someone can become a pilot while the other one is building the aerodynamics well the third person is focusing on the chips and the microprocessors of the of the airplane right so as human beings you almost rely on the other person doing their job and you can do your own job and that's what allows us to to be this great of a of a species um so let's uh let's move on uh

and let's talk more specifics about money so which one should we accept euros dollars pounds there's a lot of currencies out there and probably the answer depends on where we're living so we take the local currency and some people will be like pay me whatever i i take every currency i don't mind but that's actually really really important and and this is why i'm not going to go very much into detail because this is a very complex topic but every single fiat unit that's out there it's based on that and this is extremely extremely important because what happens is that the debt is financing things that we might or might not agree with so

basically we are by accepting dollars by accepting euros we are accepting a debt or the the financial of a project that we might not agree with some examples uh pharma military oil the meat industry so the every government out there is subsidizing these huge industries and we personally as individuals might not agree with this but by accepting dollars accepting euros we are actually financing this huge project so that's a way of having a very very big impact um so yeah what i'm advocating for is that we should have the choice

to at least be able to say okay i want to finance these projects i do not want to finance this uh just by leaving by by taking currency by paying groceries and whatnot so yeah money that aligns to your values and again whatever they are right you can you can be like some hardcore vegan or you can be fighting for refugees whatever those projects are you should be able to allow the money to work for you so a bit of project financing and how how would these things work uh so any good company that's just for example i would have assets uh invoices future cash flows even reputation

and you could mean in this case i put that because maker but you could you could mint any type of currency or you can give them a loan for example so that they can finance whatever project aligns with your value so in this example i put coffee farms micro loans sustainable farming education programs et cetera et cetera so i don't think we have a lack of of projects out there it's more finding the capital to to the right cost and we as individuals have the power to to do that so how are we planning to do it on on maker and this is very very new and not everyone in maker agrees agrees with this so maybe i should have started that

disclaimer that i do not represent maker but only my own core unit um [Music] so we are we're trying to build this metadata system in which maker becomes a bit of a of a credit facility at the at the center i'm a bit oversimplifying it but that's a bit of the of the vision and then we spin out different metadatas with different value propositions that can appeal to different people so anyone that wants to start for example may allow in latin america to help coffee farmers they could create their own methadone that would manage the risk and they would be powered by maker with their own costs their own vision and then they would like share revenues uh with makers so maker will be the engine that's powering all these

metadatas that are actually changing the world and having an impact on the world so that's a bit of the of the vision it's creating the demand and and matching with the supply so the demand is us right this every single person in this world could say i won't die instead of euros i won't die instead of dollars and then this would finance projects to create or to finance their own projects that align with our own values potentially we have several different types of dies one for each metadata so that's that's another thing that could be worked on but yeah the sky's the limit and that's that's what we're working towards so as i was saying in the beginning it's

all coordination uh any single project out there is work which is the values the the vision what you're trying to accomplish is a workforce which is us the people working for it and it's the capitals and this is very important because that's the incentives that it's going to keep the project being sustainable and actually achieving something at scale and capital doesn't need to be money it could be just the incentives of i don't know getting a free ticket to a party for example uh belonging to a society it can be anything but it's it's the coordination part and for this coordination we need the the governance part that's that's extremely important so yeah it's all governance design at

the end and and we need to design for for these things so um before leaving there are three things that i that i want to keep in mind when designing governance uh one of them is open software so this is a bit obvious maybe at least for developers open software gets more more eyeballs gets less bugs becomes more resilient the community owns it so it's much more powerful in the long run uh then the second thing which is very important is the open frameworks so instead of discussing who's taking care of what you're discussing on how to tackle things in a methodical way so we we usually say change the rules

not the rulers so it's very important setting the rules in a way that almost anyone can run it um and once you have the rules set up people can criticize the rules and the process instead of the person running it which is much less almost more trustful or trustless to say and the last one is redundancy first and this has actually two things so one of them is make your system resilient this should be obvious but uh ideally you work towards the whole system to find uh single points of failure and you try to make them redundant having failed back systems getting different groups to work on the

same things so that's very uh that's how you build a resilient system and the second one um which i think it's also important is that i think that every dao should try every person working for adults should try to make their own work redundant so maybe setting up the incentive so that anyone that actually wants to to create or to make the work redundant they can get for example some type of bonus uh that way everyone would have this vision towards automating their own work and actually making the protocol safer and more stable because at the end of the day it's software that's running on its own instead of having to trust people having trust knowledge transfer etc

so with that in mind i i wish you everyone a happy government design and if you have any questions we have eight more minutes [Applause] yes i don't know if there's a mic to hand or also we can just chill for eight minutes it's it's also cool hi thank you so much um can you elaborate on the first part of your presentation um and on the title of it because um how do you

are those parallel currencies that live alongside the national currencies like how do you can you elaborate on that a bit more like if i want to do this financing um for these projects why does it have to have its own currency basically why can't i get the dao and finance it with euros or brazilian pesos whatever right uh i'm i think i'm going to get a bit philosophical here so bear with me but what we achieved with the french revolution is separating the church from the states and i believe that at the end of the day what crypto is doing is separating the capital from the state um so they could run as part of currencies uh to answer a question in in the same way

as dollars run parallel to euros but eventually as as a species we are assigning value to either dollars or or die or uct or or ether so what what you're doing when you assign value to these things is you're choosing them as a medium of exchange um i was born in argentina so i know a thing or two about hyperinflation um but when the people stop believing in the in the currency that's that's mainly when the value of the currency goes down so potentially when you choose a currency that's only backed

by projects that you support you're directly you don't even need to to donate you're directly contributing to these projects because you're lowering pretty much so so you're you're creating demand so then it's easier to to create the supply at a lower interest rate uh i don't i don't want to go too much into the details but you but by choosing dollars or euros you're saying i agree with all the spending of the european central bank or of the of the american government when you choose a currency that's backed by projects that do things that you agree with you're backing this project in a very direct way so that's that's a bit the power of money as a coordination tool i think i see a hand

throw the mic hello oh thank you for a great talk oh here oh yeah okay thank you for great talk one juan uh so my question is it's about the governance design uh i think right now maker dao is having this kind of governance crisis right between core units to make this hard decision and i think you know there's a one you know uh presentation a proposal that is you know proposed by hass which is like making this council model implemented to this you know flat structure right yeah so i'm just curious about you know what's your thoughts on this having

this creating this console model in in the maker in a governance structure yeah so i think that so decentralization i don't think it's binary i think it's more of a spectrum and you have a very centralized projects and then very decentralized projects some of them have no human intervention for better and worse so i think all almost all projects start in a very centralized way and they most of them they would say we want to become decentralized in the long term so a council might make sense for a lot of projects where yeah where fast decisions are needed or

if you're still looking for product market fit that might also be a reason uh if you have a lot of distance that might be another reason so i think that's that's the main reason why they are proposing it uh from a purist decentralization point of view that might include a lot of risks in the or a single point of failure right like if the council fails i believe that it will be extremely expensive to change it because you need to rally everyone convince them that they are not doing a good job so i think that that it might jeopardize the decentralization part of of maker but then again it that might not be a bad thing right like

you could choose this is going to be decentralized or to be centralized until we achieve this and then we're going to decentralize that single point of failure in in this or that way so that's that's also fine i think there was one more question two more questions nice hey how do you see that usage being affected by central banks digital currencies i mean compared to the easy of usage that digital currencies will have and will

bring to the masses uh what narratives should maker dao and crypto communities should bring uh into the table in order to to make competitive and i mean what usage do you see for it right so in going back to business 101 we have product and distribution channels um maybe a reason why tesla or usdc or even the the binance table uh coin is in some regions more popular than die is because they have a much larger they have much larger distribution channels the extreme of that is a government

imposing hey i'm collecting taxes in whatever the currency is so you need to acquire that that money to to to pay the taxes so they are forcing you to do that um funnily enough uh this is a bit of a sidetrack but uh that's that's the way you create a market right you pretty much have an army you give them your coins and then you request taxes from the other side so you start that's how you kick start the the economy um so how do i see it i think that uh and again this this goes back to my to my talk i think that as users we need to be more conscious about the money that we choose so more focused on the on the

product and not just take whatever the distribution channels are feeding us if anyone wants to same thing when you go to the supermarket and you choose a brand over the other so it's all con like conscious decisions that we need to have but ideally we start by having the choice i agree with you that it needs to be much much easier right like you you you kind of expect someone to know like private seat phrases and know how dabs work so there's still a very long road to to go but hopefully we'll make it there i feel i'm getting a stunt time here

hi uh thank you for the talk uh i have a small question uh honestly speaking i was a bit confused by the beginning of the talk you said that supporting dollars euros etc is supporting governments that issue them and i agree on this however uh what do you think about i don't know stable coins for example die die is tied to dollar doesn't this mean that using die i support dollar with all the consequences i have 20 seconds to answer so i'll do my best so right now that is packed to the dollar because uh

it's dollar is the most unit uh used in the world but it would take 24 hours to change that to anything like a currency of baskets gold ether we can take it to whatever we want so in a way it is supporting it but in another way it's just a number that people understand like people know everywhere uh where a big mac costs in dollars uh in the currency or baskets currency less so so but yeah i agree with you that uh there's a bit of a paradox there alright thank you arun [Applause] you