Magicians and Bureaucrats in the Ethereum Galaxy

Transcript

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I get ready to go all right sorry about that okay so this talk is about about magicians and bureaucrats which are two persona that I see in the community and we've heard that we've heard the term magician and I guess I'd like to think about what what we think a magician is each of us has a different concept for me a magician is somebody who creates a creative person who builds and then let's think about what a bureaucrat is and we've been convinced I think I think

bureaucrats have a bad reputation we've been convinced I think by people who want us to doubt the effectiveness of government or effectiveness of institutions we've been convinced the bureaucrats are negative but I I see a bureaucrat as somebody who supports systems like a system supporter who guides and supports things Who am I I'm James Pitts people call me Jamie out there I'm a bureaucrat I'm also a magician I'm a bit of both and I think all of us are and so you think if you think about generally the etherium ecosystem in it it's it's kind of

complicated and difficult to manage and difficult to understand and so we need we need different kinds of people to to help us understand it we have map makers we have navigators and we have historians I think those are three groups three types of people who can really help us and first I think I'm going to start with some history of the theory I'm of the etherium community and its vast and so if you think about what what what um what you see it looks so complicated like how did it get there and my position on it and I think history shows it it was a very violent and

it was a very violent beginning and with a lot of energy flying around and these these factors from the early times that are still going on now that's what that's what creates this situation that we see and we think about what are the values what are the values of the community and where it comes from we can we can generate a list and it and it's like each individual you talk to out there why are they in this why do they love the theorem why are they in the community I think there are several of these in each of us that's driving us and so you'll see people who are really into Burning Man you'll see cypherpunks

you'll talk to people who grew up in the collapsing times of the Soviet Union and these all these perspectives come together and and all of us have several of these and so you probably identify with some of them yourself and I see all of those factors leading to the original white paper which was astounding and even had funny science fiction aspects of it it was just the most amazing thing I always like looking at it and it's so raw and has so many great ideas and you can see from the values like where it comes from and it comes it comes from a

place going all the way back to the very beginning of hacker culture at MIT and then all the way up to the financial meltdown at Bitcoin culture in Occupy Wall Street you'll find a lot of people in the early aetherium times were involved at Occupy Wall Street and so in the early days everyone coalesced around the idea and of course Vitalik is an extraordinary person he he attracted a lot of people because of his benevolence and because of his brilliance but I think that it has a lot to do with the ideas and ideas are the things that have given people the ability to come

together and work on something even though they're very different on this is the original group in Miami and this is a quote from one of the founders of Occupy Wall Street or one of the leaders there the projects driven by the idea and so in the beginning there's a lot of there's there's a lot of ideas and and teams forming quickly and in the early days there's a this mad rush to find a jurisdiction where you wouldn't go to jail for creating aetherium or for funding aetherium and so that's how they ended up in zhuge switzerland

they were considering lots of different places and so this is DEFCON 0 I like to look I like to think about this DEFCON because this is the audience and the speakers of DEFCON altogether and basically they were the audience would just give a talk and then sit back down in the audience that's how big DEFCON 0 was this was in Berlin and that the permissionless aspect is starting to emerge and so in in 2014 2015 you can see like early ethos being formed and conflicts coming from that and there was and I don't want

to specified names or anything like that but in early aetherium project there was there were some exits and this was driven by a difference of values and a difference of principles and in that time the project gets funded and so that I think that's a very similar event obviously it created the financial basis for what we have it gave them independence they didn't have VCS they had a community backing them it also was potentially legally problematic so that maybe they were thankful they they all ended up in zoo to make this happen and then the teams started merging and so you see DEFCON 1 now you can see

things really starting to pick up like people really getting into it and it's permission the permission list culture is really happening teams are forming nobody is in charge but people are able to create projects and some of it has to do it there's a financial aspect some of it has to do with just culture and everyone can see that the technology is coming together and so more more things start to form you can start to clearly see the community coming together and forming structure now there's this big split another split that's important is are we going to be commercial or are we going to be an

open-source project this actually led to the consensus break off certain people left at the Aryan project and started things like consensus out of that at this time you start seeing the early governance of the protocol coming forming and for example the VIPs you have this thing called pre e IPS and it starts to becoming more formally IPs it becomes a more open process and you see maintainer x' emerging so 2016-2017 was a very tumultuous time as well you you can start to see certain splits one split is are you are you is your

organization going to be in a jurisdiction or are are you going to be decentralized autonomous organization and take take all the risks and that's the the DAO where most of us pronounce it Dow and they call themselves V Dow which is hilarious and so then there's this other bifurcation happens that leads to the fork we all know it and but it's a philosophical it ultimately comes down to a philosophical difference code is law or are humans in charge and these these are the social forces at play and at the same time we had key attacks happen the the the dow fork was driven by an attack then also the network was

attacked and it and it shows a resilience of the network and of the team's backing network it was a very important time it showed that etherium cannot be crushed as a network and the community now right now I'd like to give a moment of appreciation for magicians this is von Neumann and that's Oppenheimer and behind them is the von the first von Neumann architecture at Princeton and this is basically the first modern computer but one thing we don't a lot of people don't know about von Neumann is he's an open-source person he took something that was basically commercial he specified it in a document he understood it from a

theoretical standpoint he specified it in a document and then he sent copies of this thing everywhere like all over the world critically he sent a copy to IBM IBM started making it and next to him is Oppenheimer one interesting thing that was calculated on the first computer here first modern finally an architecture implementation it was hydrogen bomb simulations it made the hydrogen bomb possible so you can kind of think about the pressure that magicians are under the forces at play that's the the type of character it takes to build something that is you can even consider it a weapon right like

crypto is basically a defensive weapon and in and it's a very tumultuous environment so I I think we we need to appreciate that we do appreciate core devs we do appreciate magicians but I think we need to really recognize what they're what they're facing which is an adversarial environment it's no joke it's not it is in game theory it is in crypto but it is it is direct they can feel it our community and so these are the dynamics of playing in a community the community has an anti-authoritarian culture we're all probably personally anti-authoritarian to an extent and so that might lead to a lot of contention

people are very opinionated many people are independently wealthy or just independent due due to the nature of the technology they depend on normal institutions and so you get you get the classic internet troll effect but on the other side of it you have these networks of trust forming and you see this in the core devs is a very good example they formed a network of trust even though they're from I don't want to say it's adversarial adversarial as much but there's different teams like you have the the parity tech team and then you have the the Geth team and all these different and and you have the team from consensus you have these different

people coming together they're forming trust in that and I think we all can learn from that and at these events this is where we all love to communicate with each other and get to know each other that's the trust a key part of the dynamics are the communication media that we use and as we know we're just constantly on Twitter or we're constantly endless bulletin boards another and another dynamic is overfunded versus underfunded systems there's this disparity affect certain projects are underfunded other projects have raised it in ICO and they have the equivalent of a hundred million u.s.

dollars or something like that or competitive systems have raised enormous amounts of money and this is the one central points of the talk is that there's the there's these two persona that we all have within us magicians and bureaucrats and magicians create that explosive creative growth and bureaucrats are you might call it the dark matter of the universe of gravity something that holds it holds it together and so as as you enter the 2017 era a huge amount of energy goes into this this galactic stew that we have

here this intergalactic stew and it was it was very dramatic and I cos I consider icos the first killer app of aetherium in able people to raise enormous amounts of money irresponsibly often but it was an incredible dynamic at the same time Bitcoin and other kinds of cryptocurrencies soared and so that created enormous energy pressure in the system and it attracted a huge number of people at the same time governance of the protocol became more professionalized you could see that their notes are coming together they

have these public calls this this this was critical and there's a stabilization there and I would call that a bureaucratic a bureaucratic stabilization now as you after the after the the big crash after the pop it was an interesting situation I call it the aftermath you know everybody it it took it was dramatic in retrospect but it was kind of gradually being crushed I mean we all knew was gonna crash we just didn't know how far and so just it just price of ether kept going down and down and down and projects are under more and more

pressure I see two big bifurcations coming out of this the first one I call it the libertarian socialist bifurcation and this comes from those that list of all those interesting sources of values in the community and the classic is block rewards debate in which do we do something like Zee cash does do we raise funds in the protocol to provide common goods for the community or do we just let things go as they go like leave things lass a fair type of situation and so that I there's a lot of Twitter conflict between these groups another

one is I called the libertarian technocratic bifurcation and it's it's the similar thing libertarians let the market decide technocratic is let's make an excellent Network let's make an excellent protocol and a prog pal debate I consider is the classic expression of that at the same time certain stabilizing stabilizers occurred the defy phenomenon isn't was an incredible force and it brought a lot of I guess you'd call it more normal industry input not to say that maker Dow or is normal industry but and that it's quite an extraordinary thing but I think the process around it if you look around

maker down all the governance and all the work they've done I see that is there's a lot of bureaucratic forces at play there and the key one is aetherium foundation expanded expands support in the community I came on and the etherion Foundation restored its grants program and that became a classic way to support the community and some people might even call it socialist but it became a major grounding and and kept us and and kept many projects running in the community things that needed to happen but it supported projects through a time in which it should have been the Great

Depression and at what it was for for many projects it was basically the Great Depression and we we had an FDR kind of situation a public works kind of program and consensus as well that did a lot of things and I think a lot of projects that did have resources or do have resources have helped us get through this time period and so think about the just kind of take it back to the bureaucratic forces at play what is constraining the energy and a lot of us point like I was mentioning earlier the etherium foundation we point to these organizations and the media I think I think the media would would

encourage this because let's say well the etherium foundation did something important today but the thing is we have to remember it's teams these teams are highly independent like you say what is the etherium foundation and there are dozens of teams into theory and foundation and some of those teams are bureaucratic in nature and they help hold it together you can't really say that there's such a thing as the etherium foundation it's really just people in these teams coordinating coordinating on things and we have to understand that teams will cluster around resources they need funding they have nerds who want to make things happen they go to the watering hole they

look around where's the resources how can I get my project going and it in an era once the I SEOs are over there's no free money out there and so yeah they have to start going to the watering holes and then that requires guidance you can't just have a phenomenon like this that come take my resources and so the guidance I call it the guidance system how who are the people who who help with this situation and and these are the bureaucrats right you have even like myself in DevOps and IT I consider that a bureaucratic process you have leadership you have administrative

assistants you have operations people this sounds like very standard stuff but these people are actually in a descent distributed organization trying to cope with this crazy situation that we're in and they have they have these challenges and for me the first the first challenges that power corrupts us it's a few put people next to resources and it's insane the amount of resources that people are next to here you know the theorem foundation has enormous cash resources enormous ether resources consensus does as well many of the ico firms that are working on projects do this is enormous pressure on people it corrupts people and so I

think people in the bureaucratic infrastructure there really have to have a lot of discipline and they do obviously we have white pret widespread mistrust of authority in the community and widespread inexperience and from that experience comes a lack of appreciation for the people who do the work day to day to keep the machine running so the developers can do what they do and developers magicians researchers and I'm about to say we because I done this professionally as a developer we just want to do stuff we just want to build we don't want rules and and traditionally we've worked at

corporations I mean corporations are probably the the the main employer of magicians out there that's what controls what magicians do in this situation here magicians have a lot more independence they want to build without interference that that is a lot of pressure and so administrators are trying to like organize organize that and guide that and that's the pressure that you see in in the in the grants programs and and then there's criticism of grants programs it's like additional pressure and then of course this is crypto this is a dramatic space this is crazy crazy and we basically have people trying to bring normalcy trying to bring

professionalism in an environment which is totally unprecedented and so a moment of appreciation for the bureaucrats they have they have traditionally have a bad reputation due to due to just what I think is is a manipulation of perception in our community there's all this distrust of authority but I think I don't think this could exist I think this would be a total disaster without bureaucrats and so now I'm going to take a really quick tour to look at the theoretical some some theoretical interesting ideas we use the word cyber

a lot but we what we need to know is that cyber the term cyber comes from cybernetics which is which goes back along with a long time but in in since World War two it really developed in this into this theoretical framework and it was very conceptual and it's how systems are organized that's cybernetics and so you'll have two different approaches you have the centralized cybernetics of corporations and in traditional institutions and I could not you know Federal Reserve those kinds of things then you have self-organized systems which is a lot closer to what what we're

doing in this world but it's not new optimally we like to think we're we're doing something new we have discovered some really interesting some really interesting tools but were people it's the same thing and so we can learn from the history of self-organized systems into theories Norbert Wiener he he endure World War two he developed anti anti-aircraft systems and the key things that he came up with was the notion of that negative feedback can keep a system and check can keep a system balanced and so he came up to

mathematics and all these ideas about how systems can run and a key is posit you think about positive feedback like if I used this microphone in a certain way you would hear that crazy feedback sound negative feedback is a way to correct for that and that's how I see bureaucracy I see bureaucracy is sort of like a negative feedback effect one interesting insight he had was that you can decrease entropy through information I used to think about information before I understood this and I used to think how can the how can how can entropy it was a conflict for me the notion of of entropy and then seeing how things become organized that that just seemed

contradictory things should collapse because of entropy but he's basically saying you can local in a localized since you can decrease entropy if you use information right Hayek is very often cited in libertarian circles it's very interesting insights about self-organizing systems this is something that might not be understood people usually talk about them from an economic standpoint and it is an economic concept but his notion is that the price mechanism is is the point of coordination enabling a decentralized economy and I think this is a very powerful concept it can be miss apply

or can be over applied in the sense that you would that that you would apply it to too many things or you see you see that you could use it where maybe it's not applicable but I think it's a very interesting notion it's a very powerful notion and he he came up with the concept of Cadillac see I hope I'm pronouncing that right it was kind of interesting ideas and it that's what led me to the idea of that this is a galaxy Heather Marsh who worked on WikiLeaks in Occupy Wall Street she looked at a natural something from biological scientists called stick magic stick merging processes and she talked about

stigma a society that you could have these emergent coalescing along an idea you can have these emergent organizations and teams that don't need to ask permission from anybody that don't need Authority and and that really fits in even though she's obviously not libertarian because she's fighting Wall Street at least I don't believe she is this concept is really similar to Hayek's notion that you're you're aligning on prices that that she's saying you're aligning on ideas to move a project forward Falk Binga I think I'm pronouncing his last name properly he's he's from the pirate party he's more of

an organizational person and he's applying some of these notions to how to build a political movement and the key thing for him is to overcome Dunbar's number which is we cannot organization can't scale because it's very hard for us individually to manage relationships too many relationships you can only meaningfully manage a certain number of relationships as an individual and so that becomes a limit for the scalability of organizations so organizations have evolved traditionally using hierarchies and command and control he came up with the notion of cells and he basically said don't ask permission start

start a cell start a political organization and just go with ideas stick with the basic principles of us but you can organize and the pirate party succeeded beyond like definitely beyond expectation off of this one and the interesting thing he had was there is kind of a hierarchy is that each cell needs to have somebody who come together in a different cell at least one person so that there's his overlap so it's a bit of a Venn diagram but he basically created a socially scalable organization which I see the things like the etherium foundation is a very similar notion Joe Freeman feminist she had she had a just

this incredible essay that Casey that trio told me about and it's called the tyranny of structure lessness and I would really recommend reading this and I would recommend reading any of these any of these things but tyranny of structure lessness is a classic basically it it describes how in the feminist movement there was a an impulse to to get rid of hierarchy and to have everyone being equal and she was basically saying you can't you can't get rid of leadership you can't get rid of structure people just create a secret structure and she's really interested in the notion of opacity and open that that

you can be able to inspect and see what's going on and have things clearly stated and did that and this is a problem in the community is that we don't always know how to get started and the structures are mysterious to us and that that there's a tyranny there right and so that's that's why having an open process is so important having certain things stated certain things formalized certain things in a bureaucracy these these these types of actions help address the tyranny of structuralist us and so really rapidly to finish it up I'll go

over some ideas about decentralized planning and decentralize planning is a thing it's not widely apply but I actually think that we're learning how to do it in in this community and you know the idea is to to facilitate what magicians want to do and to facilitate what bureaucrats need to do I think something that's really important is any organization any institution any team any unit needs to declare the principles which are basically how you do things I think it's really easy not to do that

and it doesn't mean you need to declare principles for the entire aetherium community or anything like that but just declare principles in your local sense and these are example principles and these are from Joe Freeman about democratic organizations this principle if an organization adopts it it it's it's basically visibility as to who has what authority that's not always clear there's people who we see around the community we don't know what their authority is we just know they're powerful that's tyranny of structure lessness

right there and so last part of here she used the term democratic base procedures I would say consensus based procedures there's a democracy implies votes I think I think consensus is a better way to think about it another principle basically distribute the responsibility and and this is why we have almost the triggering fear of centralization in the community so spread authority around as much as possible delegate I think that that really prevents a lot

of abuse and she does too so and and another principle is Oh openness and the flexibility of reform ISM within a pragmatic to a pragmatic extent I think people like this is what her Freeman's comment about tearing your structure lessness is that they took some things too far that's why pragmatism is such an important notion is that to apply that to any principle that you have and I think I'll end it here and it's basically to say that we have this explosive situation and we have this

energy in the form of capital we have this technology with all of this incredible potential that's attractive and powerful dangerously powerful let's let's create a control system for that that is still along the lines of our values but there's still effectively a control system even if it's decentralized even if it's stick merging in nature and that is I see that is what's happening just given the history of etherium from the beginning and it's really one of the things I'm most

attracted by this society that we have here is because we are we're being experimental but we can learn from the past in order to in order to build a better control system it happens over and over again in history and I'm pretty sure if we learn if we learn from that we'll we'll be able to we'll be able to persist without completely blowing this up that's it so I'm not sure if this is actually a really difficult format to have a discussion in I was originally going to try to have a discussion with this

with this talk but actually into right here if unless unless someone really wants to have a talk I'll probably come down and talk but in this room I don't think it's too much of a I don't think the format's good for it but with that that's it thanks ed any questions okay that's it yeah all right so bring in Mike so all all

thanks a lot for the talk was very interesting talk very insightful about you guys works between bureaucrats I'll say that again I'm sorry I said thanks a lot for the talk very interesting to see are you you're walking between bureaucrats because from the outside definitely we see as a very efficient machine you always talk about reaching a consensus yes for me production is not about the consensus is not even desired it mostly incentivized okay but I don't think it's even desired how could we work without consensus does it make sense I think I think the key thinking

about that in a technical sense economic sense I think what you're saying is correct like about how black chains are based on incentives and I see that incentive design as a as a way to build a system as a way to guarantee the security or to guarantee certain properties of a system but it doesn't mean that the system is always going to function that way because it's just the messy reality of people and so I think that's a good way to design the boundaries the potential boundaries of a system but

consensus is something that it's a very human it's a very human form of coordinating and communicating and I don't think that human consensus is exactly possible using using blockchain technology or even software those those dynamics are so subtle it's really the the software designers and economics make an economic mechanism designers I think they're about forming the constraints the boundaries and when people get in there they're going to do all kinds of stuff but my point was even better than that is would it be better to have multiple time magician working

in Paulo for different things looking at different thing in parallel just like our Macy's estoppel ecosystem is rather than trying to try to map everything at the same place with the same order I agree with that yeah I think it is important that you don't have one I guess you call it the principle of one way to do it there's many ways to do it and I think that's a that's a principle from languages yeah I just want to piggyback a little bit on what you said that consensus is a very human thing it's in the human nature but but I think that as consenting as this consenting is is really human so my worried is that we

shall actually be in the silence systems that considering those two options how to agree on disagree how to create value on out of that agreement you know that's right that's right for these of knowledge model is the thing that approached this thing more it will be may be nice to offer people that ragequit into automatic create new kind of parallel organization that Forks out of that that's right yeah they're forking needs to be less less extreme even organizational working I think organizations should this is something that isn't as fully developed and we blocked shows that it's possible and in traumatic but it's amazing that it's

possible and that really gets people thinking you could fork the code base you could you actually fork the system the network which is amazing but I think yeah a lot of a lot of development needs to be done in order to do this in an organizational sense that you say we have different values how can we part and still coexist and not destroy value how to create more value because you're you're kind of you're expanding the potential expression all the different expressions of our values and so I could see why you would you would want that yeah not sure if you I'm still just starting to follow hollow chain hollow chain but yeah because that's very

interesting paradigm that is considering that from from from miscarriage yeah and you can even I even consider polka dot polka dots architecture and the the execution environment the introduction introduction of E's and in etherium to I see this as a way to facilitate different value systems still preserving the network but enabling people to say okay well we're we're gonna we're actually gonna fork and we're in a less traumatic way but it I do I do think a lot needs to be developed for this on in a technical sense but also just in a

social social dynamics sense thank you any more ok anyone all right good we're done so thanks [Applause]