Fork the Future: Why We're Building ETHBoulder as a Bottom-Up Experiment

Transcript

Opening energy: “It’s so over… we’re so back.”

All right. Well, I was think I was thinking it would be fun to uh start off today with a uh Colin response that plays with the uh cyclical nature of crypto. And it goes like this. I say it's so over and you say We're so back. >> That was so [ __ ] weak. >> We're so back. >> It's so over. >> We're so [ __ ] back. >> Amazing. Thank you. Um, welcome to Eth Boulder. This has been a labor of love for myself and other members of the Boulder community over the last couple months, but also years. Last year, we

Why ETH Boulder exists

held a Ethereum localism event here in Boulder, Colorado. the week before ETH Denver and had a really great time. And so this is sort of just an expansion of that community and I'm really excited to celebrate what makes Boulder special, what makes this moment in time for Ethereum and decentralization of the internet special. And so we're putting together an experiment that we're calling ETH Boulder that is a celebration of each other and a celebration of where we are now. And I'm really excited to be holding it at 5,000 ft elevation here in Boulder, Colorado.

Why Boulder is special in the Ethereum ecosystem

Boulder, Colorado is just such a special place to me because of the mountain energy here. We've got nature right next to downtown. Uh in between talks, you can go for a hike up at Shiitakwa or Cenus up in the mountains. There's a university, so there's a lot of sort of like engineer builder energy in Boulder, Colorado. There's a good health scene. Uh we were one of the first places in the country to legalize marijuana if you're into that. Um and uh I don't know, there's just so much special energy here in Boulder and I think that it's the perfect cradle for us to build a peer-to-peer bottoms up event that explores themes like privacy in the 21st century, themes like how does AI support

The vision: 5,000 feet → 30,000 feet

humanity in the 21st century. And so Boulder is a special place for me and I'm just really excited to share Boulder with all of you and show you why it's so special to me and to the people that I hang out with here in Boulder. And um you know I think that I really want to create a container that we're proud of over the week. But this is also an experiment so we'll see we'll see how it goes. Um so uh that's my introduction to Boulder, but don't take my word for it. capital. This is a uh a video of Vitalic 2 years ago talking about why Colorado of like >> the de facto capital of like core Ethereum developers in the US might actually be like literally like Denver.

Well, if you would coin Boulder like you know same airport. Is everyone okay with that? Yeah. Okay. Like I actually think Denver plus like plus Boulder can I'll just call it Doulder. Dolder. It's it's like a really underrated city. You know there's like a lot of really cool stuff. a lot of people with really fascinating ideas and you know unlike like Miami and Austin that kind of get hyped a lot. So yeah no it's a lot to be proud of here. So yay Colorado was pretty special. So you can meme it as Dolder if you want, but um you know I think that uh Denver is more on the map, but I think that Boulder has more core

Walking between venues & hyper-local design

protocol developers and I'm really proud of the scene that has been built out of Boulder and I'm interested to make it legible to the rest of the world. And uh I think it's just it's cool that Vitalik said that in 2022. That was not an AI clip, by the way. that was really vital. Um, who uh can't be with us this weekend, isn't traveling to the United States at at the current time, but um you know, I'm just sort of proud that it's on the map and the important people in the ecosystem know about it. So, uh the structure of my talk is going to uh I'm going to do five or 10 minutes of provocations for what I want to see from the event and then I'm going to invite up some of my co-organizers and they're going to give you some logistical details about the event. So, the

Bottoms-up vs top-down events

structure of my talk is that we're going to start at 5,000 ft, which is actually the elevation here in Boulder, Colorado, and then we're going to get really high, and then we're going to come back down to Earth and then talk about the actual event. So, um, my first provocation to you is please walk all four venues of this event. This blue circle right here is the radius through which if you wanted to go to all the ETH Boulder events, then you would be able to go to. Uh we're at Etown Town Hall which is the top rightmost blue dot here. Um there's regionhub.xyz which is a co-working space that a bunch of us work out of.

Hackathon space is just a couple blocks south of that and then terrible turtle studios is just a couple blocks west. We did this on purpose. A lot of us have gone to Dev Connect and other events that distributed in the past and it's just a pain in the butt. You spend all this time getting across town. You can get from event to event in two blocks here. So you can run without run across town without a lot of without a lot of effort. So what I'm really excited about with ETH Boulder is that this is not a top down event. This is a bottoms up event which means that we have many venues and we have many tracks that are coming out of the uh space but we don't have to compromise by uh on our bridging infrastructure. We can go from place to place really very simply and I'm I'm

Sacred economy vs commodity economy

excited about that. I think it's going to make the experience way better. Um my other provocate pro provocation is to explore all 10 tracks. So we've got a DAO track where we'll be exploring decentralized accelerationism. We've got Ethereum localism, privacy, AI and society, Dowo tooling, a hackathon, uh public goods funding, creativity track, DII and onchain organizations. So I think we've got something for everyone here. And so my provocation to you would be to explore all 10 tracks. >> Question.

Practicing peer-to-peer solidarity

>> Okay. Could you not ask the question now? Could you ask afterwards? Thank you. Cool. Um, my third provocation is uh we're trying to build peer-to-peer solidarity between each other. I think there's enough top- down events of uh that are in the space already. And solidarity to me is something that we've been trying to practice in the space as we go through its es and flows. And we're trying to figure out how we support each other in the space. And so I think that we really want to try to find this a way that we could have intimate conversations with each other and we could uh support each other as much as possible. So uh this event is meant from its bones to be bottoms up, not top down. And if you could try to

practice as much solidarity with each other as possible, that's something that we're trying to create a container for this weekend. All right, now we're getting really up there. This is a graphic that I love. Uh, shout out to Open Tony for opening this up to me. But, um, I feel like there's this trade-off between the modern global economy where we commoditize uh, our interactions with each other. We tokenize everything and we sort of work in this way that uh, that sort of commoditizes each other and our interactions with each other. And I think that what we're trying to build here in Boulder is something a little bit different, something that's a little bit more of a sacred economy in which we're building allyship. We're using modern rural tools, things like AI and

What if ETH Boulder became a DAO?

privacy to support each other in a bottoms up way. And I think that there's a balance here because we have to be able to act on both levels. We have to be able to interface with the modern global economy with capitalism as it stands, but I think we can also build a more post- capitalist, more sacred economy. And I think that that's something that we've been trying to practice here in Boulder at the region hub and in the work that we do in the Boulder blockchain space. And I think that what I'm really excited about with this event is practicing those sort of sacred economics together and doing it in a way that works in a contemporary environment but uh you know is also realistic about what's possible when we're able to do that together. Cool.

“Fork the Future” explained

And then as we're sort of peaking here, as we're getting up in our elevation, uh I think that my last provocation to you all is if ETH Boulder was to become a DAO, how could we launch a DAO that recognizes that sacred economy and that peer-to-peer solidarity with each other? And what could we accomplish together if we were actually to build a bottoms up event DAO that is transparent about its finances and is delegated its governorship to its members? And so there's going to be a session on Saturday in which we talk about how we use technology to accelerate Boulder and how we're able to build this protoile together. So uh this first year we've run it uh myself and a group of organizers have uh have built this event

from the bottoms up but the goal is to do a retrospective and to launch an actual true DAO before we do it in 2027. So um you know what is possible? I think that that's really up to us and I think that other events that have launched in the space have launched in 2017 or 2020 when the Dow infrastructure wasn't as good and so what could we do in 2025 2026 and over the next cycle how could we leverage AI microtransactions uh unconference software in order to to make it all work so uh that's the I think the uh the provocation of the protodow and then the final thing uh that I want to talk out is our tagline this year, which is fork the future. Um, I think that Ethereum has uh core values

Unconference format & open participation

that we started off with in the space. Things like peer-to-peer, decentralization, privacy, actually caring about humanity's trajectory, plurality, and sovereignty. These are the ones that I think that are important to the space and I think that I feel and other people feel that we've kind of gotten away from that as we've evolved in the space and in what ways could we build forkability into this event so that you could actually have the event that matters to you as much as possible. So in a lot of ways forkability is built into the event from the top down. Uh, and we actually have an app that's going to allow people to propose their own sessions and to make the event happen in a way that is completely forkable top to bottom. So, there's unconference

The ETH Boulder app & coordination layer

sessions in which you're able to propose your own sessions. If you don't see something that you want to see in the event, then you're going to be able to propose it through the app. All right, so we're peaking now 30,000 ft. I want to take you down to 5,000 ft uh back to actually where we are now and uh talk about the ETH Boulder app, which is uh going to be the way that we logistically make this work through the weekend. And so I'm going to invite up uh Benjamin Life, who is the creator of the app, 100% grass-fed organic vibecoded app. And uh he's going to tell us about how the application is going to be used. And then we've got a couple other announcements and then we will get to Q&A.