Kevin Owocki: Gitcoin – Building and Funding the Open Web #430

Transcript

hi welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution i'm sebastian cuccio and i'm here with my co-host federica ernst today we're talking with kevin owaki he's the founder and of git coin and he's now a member of the git coin dao before we talk to kevin about get coin i'd like to tell you about our sponsors this week gnosis safe is a smart wallet that enables you to control digital assets with much more granular permissions involving multiple private keys a subset of which can is required for executing transactions these keys can be stored in different hardware wallets or software wallets or even shared across multiple people gnosis safe security and personalization makes it the most trusted web 3 asset management solution

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profits flowing to the community not a corporation the launch of tally is coming in the new year actually it's already out now but the team have just released an early version to the community which is the tally community edition before the dow launches what features do you think should be in your ideal wallet what annoys you currently about your wallet that you're using well try tally and join the community on discord their community calls feature a new partner each week and have about 500 uniques joining you can get all the info you need at tally.cash kevin thanks so much for joining us uh once again today it's we're just checking earlier and it's been since like we last had john in 2018 it was like right after bitcoin grants launched

um so yeah thanks for coming back on yeah it's great to be here it's been a been a couple years uh which is as we all know a lifetime in in the crypto space but yeah gekko and grants is now our flagship product so a lot has changed since i was last on the show thanks for having me back yeah it's a pleasure um and i mean bitcoin has just grown so much since you know in the last three years and it's become such uh like a pillar uh in the ethereum community tell us a bit about you know your your personal journey uh since uh we last spoke and sort of you know trying to summarize you know the last three years um of your life and you know sort of the trajectory of get coin totally

yeah um yeah we've been really lucky turns out there's a lot of people out there who want to get coins uh and there's a lot of software developers who wanted to enter the space and that's kind of our niche is connecting the software developers to the funding that can fund their work in open source and i'm super proud that our mission has always been to grow and sustain open source software open source provides so much value for the world and there's just not a business model for it because the code is available for free in fact i think the number was 500 400 billion dollars per year in economic value according to a study in 2014 and since there's no business model developers are just working nights and weekends for free on open source software and that's always been our mission is to correct that asymmetry

between value created and value captured last time i was on the show which was i think 2018 uh we were primarily focused on doing bounties which is basically if you do x you will get y coins on get coin and we've since expanded into get coin grants which is basically i'm already doing x and i would like to raise money for that work in open source software and if you go to get coin dot co slash results you can see that we've done 51 million dollars worth of funding for open source software with an accelerating trajectory as the market has turned around and i think as our network effects has have deepened so yeah it's just kind of been really staying anchored to that mission of building and funding open source

software in digital public goods and just being kind of really really trying to innovate on how we reach that mission has been the trajectory for the last three years and so uh super proud of the impact that we've had so far but you know 50 million dollars is is great but like i said 400 billion dollars per year in economic value is created by open source software so we're just scratching the surface of what we could do if our mission was successful in helping open source software developers get coins cool can you maybe give us a little bit deeper look into the stats so basically how many different projects have received funding and do they currently uh do they usually come back every every round or um

are they one-offs and i mean so how many people in total have benefited how many have have given to bitcoin and uh yeah sure well uh yeah i'd direct the audience to getcoin.comresults which is our open stats page if we like to be as transparent as possible with the stats uh and the total is 65 000 funders uh have given to an audience of 20 280 000 earners and you know maybe there's a little bit of people who are creating alt accounts as they have pseudo anonymous identities in their uh 1.7 million complete transactions over the course of the last several years so um you know i'm most proud of projects like uniswap and urine

finance using bitcoin during the last bear market uh when funding had really dried up bitcoin grants had become a a place where people could get get funding during the bear market and i'm really proud to have us supporting public goods like wallet connect and prismatic labs and nimbus the eth clients that are out there are have a special place in my heart as a software developer who wants to see the people who are working on the foundations of our network getting paid so uh all in total there's about a thousand git coin grants that return every round and uh take most of the funding every bitcoin grants around and there's kind of like a bell curve down to up and coming projects and newer projects in the space that can get

discovered on git coin because there's such a density of funding on git coin it's actually become sort of an interesting place where new projects can come and market themselves to the community and make a name for themselves because with bitcoin grants you're it's a crowdfunding platform where the median transaction is one dollar and so it's a great way for for you know if a project raises from 3 000 of their friends for them to say hey put look at all these people who are our peers in the community that really care about our project and then that can be a springboard for larger grants from say the ethereum foundation or i know that uniswap now has a grants project so it's a great way for newer projects to

get momentum in the space by doing crowdfunding on git coin grants what's the measure of success here like you know you were talking earlier about the size of like the open source uh market the value that it creates like how are you tracking the success of bitcoin in the sort of broader uh open source funding paradigm yeah well the easiest number to track is just the amount of money that we've moved to software developers but the number that's nearest and dearest to my heart is the number of people who can quit their jobs and just work on open source software um if you've worked at jpmorgan chase and now you're going to work on open source then that's the future that we want to create people who can pay their mortgage and pay their

bills by working on public goods and open source software and vitalik buterin in one of his reviews of git coin talked about this idea of a quadratic freelancer someone who is making enough money from bitcoin grants or other public goods funding mechanisms that can now quit their job and work for the open internet and it's just subsidized by quadratic matching uh we haven't talked about quadratic funding but that's basically the mechanism that underpins get coin grants and so the number the number that's nearest and dearest to my heart is the number of people who have found new opportunities that we've opened doors for uh either by quitting their corporate jobs and working on web3 or coming straight out of school if you're a student and working straight away on web three and it's a little bit hard to track that because we don't know exactly

what people's employment are we don't have a good data source for that but uh anecdotally walking around at each cc in east denver i get approached by dozens of people who tell me oh get coin opened xdoor for me or why door for me and it always feels great to have those moments where you've affected the trajectory of someone's career and that's that's the metric that that i optimize for so let's talk about quadratic funding so where did the idea come from and how does it work yeah so quadratic funding is basically uh an idea from glenn weil who's the author of radical markets and vitalik buterin who people may know as the founder of ethereum and zoe hitsig and so basically the idea is that it's

basically in you run a matching campaign where you match contributions to a crowdfunding campaign and instead of doing one-to-one matching what you do is you match by the number of contributors to each grant more so than the amount funded by each grant so if the three of us all were running a grant on git coin and uh my grant got a hundred dollars from one contributor and y'all's grant got a hundred dollars from 100 contributors then your grant would get like 97 of the matching funds because it we're optimizing for the preferences of the poor and the many instead of the rich and the few so it's the the mathematically optimal way to fund public goods in a democratic

democratic community because we're optimizing for the preferences of the many instead of the the rich few and so that's why uh get coin grants when you give only a dollar the match multiple can be really significant it gets people over the free rider problem of why would i fund this public good that i'm already getting for free well the reason why you would bother to take out your wallet and give a dollar is that for the projects that have the broadest base of support the highest number of contributors a one dollar contribution can be matched with 200 300 500 so the match multiples get quite insane once the matching pools get big and the projects get a high number of contributors and that's what gets people over the freerider problem of contributing on get coin grants so um

basically don't get scared off by the math if you go to if you read the paper there's a bunch of greek symbols and in math and everything like that but basically it's just a matching campaign where we match the number of contrib based off the number of contributors instead of the amount funded and uh that creates more democracy pushes power to the edges in ecosystem funding so uh bitcoin grants is primarily doing quadratic funding on a main ethereum matching pool right now uh the last matching pool in grants round 12 in december 2021 was a million dollars but now we've started to add these little adjacent pools for uniswap and for polygon and other ecosystems that also are trying to

build their own ecosystems public goods and quadratic funding is just kind of the formula that gets people to actually get off the couch in a metaphorical way and contribute to the grants on git coin um and i just want to really quickly say i know that uh aaron mcmillan was on your podcast recently and he's running clr fund which is another really promising quadratic funding project out there and uh i'm a friend of rns and and i think that uh there's multiple implementations of qf get coin just happens to be the biggest in the earliest so um how do you become civil resistant i mean what what stops people from making multiple accounts and uh contributing a dollar each from 20 accounts yeah that's a really great question and

that's kind of like the achilles heel of quadratic funding is uh this thing called civil resistance which basically is sock puppet resistance uh in that example i gave earlier which was uh i have a grant where i've raised a hundred dollars from one contributor and you two have raised a hundred dollars from 100 contributors and you get way more of the matching pool what's to stop me as a person who wants to get more of the matching pull from just making up 100 identities and then distributing the funding through that and that's called the civil resistance problem and it's actually one of the hardest unsolved problems in the space right now imagine an ecosystem in which we can move from these one token one vote systems which vitalik has called plutocratic to one human one vote that's digital democracy if we can move to more one human one

vote type systems and so it's an unsolved problem our approach at gitcoin is to only deploy as much capital as we can be sure that we can keep the fraud tax low the fraud tax being defined as the amount of money that gets misallocated due to civil resistance so there's an impedance matching between the amount of capital that is being deployed and the cost of forgery of all of the accounts on git coin and our approach is to aggregate civil resistance indicators from proof of humanity from bright id from idena from a bunch of different projects that are doing really amazing work and creating these web of trusts in order to create civil resistance and we aggregate all of those signals and we are pr assign a personhood score to each person on the

get coin network and basically uh the the idea there is that the personhood score is just the cost of forgery of each identity so if i integrate my my get coin account with twitter maybe that provides 50 cents worth of cost of forgery because twitter accounts are easy to forge but proof of humanity i'm making up these numbers but basically like proof of humanity creates 200 worth of civil resistance right so you can give 200 worth of the matching pool to someone who's contributed based off of uh a proof of humanity linked identity anyway so it's this whole rabbit hole of of how you solve civil resistance and we're just standing on the shoulders of giants by integrating with other civil resistance mechanisms in the space and uh it's an unsolved problem i would not represent that we

have solved it but bitcoin grants is actually one of the largest data sets in finding and sniffing out civil rings and uh channeling that information back to proof of humanity and bright id is uh what git coin dow and the fraud defense work stream has been working on over the last several rounds so uh it is an unsolved problem and i would not represent that we have totally solved it but we are trying to be responsible in uh allocating the capital such that the fraud tax is low and uh the big end game here is that bitcoin grants on its face if you look at it looks like a crowdfunding experiment in funding public goods but if you look at it if you turn it on its side it's actually a giant red team blue team exercise in sniffing out civil attacks and finding new ways of proofing these civil

resistance ecosystems and the end result hopefully the positive externality of all of this is that we can create civil resistance signals for the rest of the ecosystem and move the rest of the ecosystem from one token one vote to one human won't vote is hope the hopeful eventual outcome of all of this so uh tldr we haven't solved it but we're trying to take it seriously and i'm very excited about a world that is more civil resistant so in a way um bitcoin kind of distributes uh money to different projects um by this mechanism but where does the money come from in the first place sure yeah we distribute money uh all right my

my my marketing lead has been coaching me is like say that people are getting coins on git coin so that's like the inverse of distributing money on on git coin um the uh yeah so people are getting coins from this matching fund that uh that basically has been set up at first by the ethereum foundation and what the ethereum foundation wanted when they started engaging with git coin grants was well a vitalik wanted to something that prototyped in the real world this paper of quadratic funding that he wrote with glenn just like does it even fly like does this thing even take off or does it just explode on the launch pad luckily the answer is that it does fly and the um basically what the ethereum foundation wanted was a more organic decentralized way of allocating

funding in their community so the ef grants team is is really amazing and they do such great work in supporting the major players of the ecosystem but if you're a more up-and-coming person who is not well connected in the space quadratic funding is a better way to get on the radar uh because we can do thousands of grants on git coin via the matching pool whereas a centralized grants team can only process on the order of tens of applications per month so it augments traditional grant funding mechanisms for the ef and that's that's why through rounds one through six we run these rounds every quarter rounds one through six bitcoin grants was funded by the ethereum foundation and then a really interesting thing happened in the summer of 2020 d5 summer uh andre from yearn finance which i don't know if

you all remember d5 summer but andre was like the ultimate chad during d5 summer because he had just launched urine and fair launched it and gave it all away and um he announced that he was giving 150k to the get coin grants matching pool and funding git coin grants round seven and i think over the next 24 hours i raised maybe like 1.5 million dollars just on twitter dms because everyone wanted to do what andre was doing it was defy summer and he was the ultimate alpha nerd um and so we had this like impedance or this like this phase change where we went from being funded by the ethereum foundation to being funded by the d5 projects that were taking off in the ethereum space and now have these large treasuries and some of them are even alumni of bitcoin

grants like urine finance raised money in the bear market through bitcoin grants so we see this like people graduating into becoming alumni of bitcoin and then paying it forward to the back of the space back to the space and like you know arguably they're doing it for karma but also maybe they get some sort of brand equity out of hey we're funding public goods in the ethereum space come work at urine or uniswap or uh chainlink has been an amazing funder for us badger finance has done some really great stuff for us and so we we call this the funders league it's a group of projects that is now funding the ethereum ecosystem that our alumni of get coin grants and um and and so uh that that's rounds so we've done 12 rounds of bitcoin grants

one through six with the ethereum foundation seven through ten were the d5 uh projects and then uh round 11 nfts were taking off and so me and my buddy austin griffith launched this uh pfp project called moonshotbots which are like these little pixelated robots that uh we put them on a bonding curve and we just sent 100 of the money to public goods we raised three billion dollars for the the magic pool which is just like i just can't believe how successful that campaign was uh funding public goods with nfts and the crazy thing is that the moonshot bots have been live on the getcoin site on the avatar builder for like two years and no one cared until they were nfts so uh there's some like there's like you know like like

clickbait articles where they're like do x with one weird trick it was like fun public goods with one weird trick and nfts were a new way of funding public goods um so um so that's another way that we've been funding the matching pool and then uh we just announced this thing called get coin aqueducts which is basically like you know in ancient rome aqueducts were a way of of carrying liquidity from one location to another um a git coin aqueduct is just a way of carrying liquidity from your protocol or ecosystem into the get coin grants matching pool and typically the way that is set up is that we will run uh quadratic funding rounds for your ecosystem if you set up an aqueduct to the matching pool for get coin so a typical split is like 60 40. 60 of those

funds will be used to build your ecosystem and 40 will be used for the ethereum main round and um and so an aqueduct is is a way of funding bitcoin grants but also if you're a d5 project that's looking for more bottoms up organic growth then quadratic funding is like the magic way to do that so aqueducts are a way of doing it anyway tldr answer to your question at first it was the ethereum foundation then it was all the d5 projects then it was nfts now it's aqueducts we're basically trying to innovate and find new ways of funding public goods at getcoin that's the other side of the coin um and right now the matching pool has on the order of like 10 or 12 million dollars in it so even if the market turns really bearish we've got at least four or five more rounds at

three million dollars per round funded on get coin grants so we're staying ahead of the problem as as much as we can and um yeah i'd love to talk about get coin dowel a little bit later but they're actually doing most of the heavy lifting on on raising money for the matching pool now and they have governance rights over the funds so uh they're doing a really amazing job of of staying ahead of of keeping the matching pool funded that's really impressive uh yeah thanks for uh thanks for explaining like how how the quadratic uh uh funding mechanism works uh in detail um so earlier we're talking about the you know the metrics um the metrics by which you measure the success of git coin and one of the things that i think a lot about

when you're considering the success of like these new innovative use cases that crypto has enabled it's like how much of that has leaked into the non-crypto world and you we're also talking about just the the amount of value that's created in you know open source software how much how much of that are you seeing like how is is the is the quadratic funding model or the git coin model you know starting to leak into other areas of open source software that aren't you know necessarily crypto focused and is there an aspect of bitcoin's success and that has that is specific to crypto and the projects that that that is funding and the fact that there is you know sort of intrinsic economic value inside those projects in the form of tokens or whatever

i guess my question is does get coin and quadratic funding uh such as you've implemented it scale outside of crypto yeah really great question i think that the end game here is quite large if we are able to prototype new ways of funding public goods in the ethereum ecosystem then we could backport those to other other digital public goods and then we could backport those to more physical public goods and what if we've discovered more efficient more fair credibly neutral ways of allocating capital and we could transport those to the world i think the honest answer to your question sebastian is that i i we haven't proven it out um and i don't think that we really know yet but there are some early promising signs during coronavirus uh when uh

downtown i'm from colorado and downtown boulder colorado was just shuttered after the coronavirus pandemic when everything went into lockdown and we i got together with katie johnson and zach herring who are two of my compatriots from consensus my consensus days uh we've since spun out of consensus but uh kadyan and zach are our friends that i shared an office with and i was like let's do a quadratic funding matching round for downtown boulder and we did and we raised 50k for downtown boulder businesses that were affected by the pandemic now having a living down livable downtown is a public good just like open source software as a public good and i'm really proud to say that we implemented so it was called downtown stimulus and it was a quadratic funding matching campaign

that just like accepted credit cards no crypto not even in the back end no not even crypto in the back and we raised 50 50 000 for for businesses in downtown boulder and i'm really proud to say that we had hundreds of contributions from people who weren't even on email lists were were kind of like not even comfortable with with digital experiences like just this is like an e-commerce flow is is you know say in the same user experience give one dollar and get tens or hundreds of dollars in matching and so downtown stimulus was a great success and i'm really proud that we prototyped to that uh we've not done another downtown stimulus because bitcoin needed to focus on the ethereum space but i'm proud that we uh that we put that model out there

so that's experiment number one which shows i think promise that quadratic funding could go more mainstream and then experiment number two is that in may of 2021 uh git coin got together with open collective which is a prominent web 2 open source funding tool and launched fund oss.org which is a quadratic funding tool for mainstream open source software things like npm or in the python ecosystem and we were able to raise 100k for the web 2 open source ecosystem so i'm i'm really proud to say that the psychology of quadratic funding works whether you put it on crypto rails or fiat rails and i do think that we've prototyped a fundamentally new way of of

of funding public goods uh you know and to be clear it's glenn and vitalik's idea i'm just like the guy who's bringing it to one of the one of the people who's bringing it to the ethereum ecosystem and i do think that there's a lot of promise in in piloting new ways of creating regenerative finance in the web3 ecosystem and then backboarding them to the real world and i am my big hope is that bitcoin is just kind of like the tip of the sphere what we do in the ethereum ecosystem um we're actually launching this this uh grants protocol which is like an infinitely forkable version of bitcoin grants and my big dream is that people take it and they go fund uh digital journalism ecosystems or they go fund climate change or they go fund their downtowns

and i think that like copy what we're doing in the ethereum ecosystem and let's let a thousand experiments blossom in funding public goods elsewhere in the ecosystem is is kind of what i would hope that git coin's legacy is when i look back on it in 10 or 20 years and um there's early signs that it that it's gonna work really well but i don't think that we've totally proven it out and and to be clear the civil resistance problem is is real we need to solve that we need to solve the problem of how we fund these matching pools at scale um and and those are the largest unsolved problems that i've got my sights set on right now is is scaling this thing and bringing it to new verticals so uh we don't the tldr answers sebastian is that we don't know but there's promising signs

what's the biggest challenge in terms of attracting funding so like you know especially i think in the crypto space where there are like vc funds and companies and endows that have gotten um maybe in that order you know that have gotten uh quite quite wealthy from uh from crypto and you know arguably lots of the portfolio companies of vcs and like even the companies that they fund themselves that also have gotten quite wealthy are using open source technology and what's the challenge in getting more funding coming from these organizations and uh you know how do we sort of like encourage uh wealthy actors in the space to

contribute more to open source infrastructure funding it's a really great question and i think the answer is that it depends on the audience i believe that i mean bitcoin grants we're funded like four or six rounds ahead of right now and it's really been i'm so thankful that the community has rallied around our mission and rallied around our project and i'm just so heartened to see that as the community gets more rich as the ethereum ecosystem advances that they're funding uh bitcoin grants and i do think that um you know it it really you know the naive approach to the to the crypto space might be that oh it's all d gens and it's all selfishness and um and and i just don't think that that's true i i see uh us as the tip of the sphere for

regenerator of crypto economics and um the type of people that that realize that like hey what's the value of a lambo if the sky is on fire we're really all on this earth together and we're all in these ecosystems together and it's incumbent upon us to make sure that our common spaces and our communities are livable and are supporting new people coming into them and innovation and so you know the people who who really get that message i think that we've found a lot of luck in making sure that they are funding public goods but you know part part of what we're trying to do is is show people that it does work that you can have positive sum games with crypto economics even in an adversarial environment and i think showing people that it's possible is is the beginning

of educating them that uh there are mechanisms for making the world better and for making these these ecosystems better and um you know the big the big challenge is that if there's a giant hack actually i'll just the open ssl bug that happened in 2013 uh there's this bug called heart bead heart bleed which basically open ssl was dumping the openssl runs every ssl connection on on the internet the little lock in your browser that shows your website is secure as open ssl and the openssl foundation runs on less than a million dollars per year in donations and just contract work and there was a bug in openssl that dumped all of the contents of your web server to

the memory to the open internet which for those of you who aren't even security-minded like that's a bad thing you don't want your secure server dumping the contents of its memory to the open internet and it's because the openssl foundation didn't have like funding to work on this thing that was a pillar of the entire internet and so when a black swan event like that happens people understand the need to fund infrastructure and to fund our public goods and um the whole point is like getting people to a point where they'll fund public goods even without those black swan events and i think that uh it's creating that social awareness of those things is is like point number one point number two is education which like thank you for having me on the podcast so that we could talk about this thing and then three is like we want to

make public goods cool uh i think that i'm so lucky that vitalik buterin who's the alpha nerd of the ethereum ecosystem cares so much about public goods and that creates a social sort of consensus that funding public goods is cool and it up ups your sort of like social status to fund public goods and i think we want to create that that kind of like that social hierarchy where people are giving back to the world it is is is something that's seen as as a something that's socially acceptable and even socially promotable and um you know i i think that uh in the ethereum ecosystem where money is there's everyone's like 10x richer than they were a year and a half

ago it's been much easier than it is in like communities where you're really struggling you need a philanthropist or like the government to fund a quadratic funding matching pool in those types of communities but at least in the ethereum ecosystem uh we're starting to see some really promising signs that people want to fund these these ecosystems so a lot of traction but i think it's an unsolved problem how has this worked in the oss and downtown boulder cases i mean who who um who gave money for the matching pool in downtown stimulus i went to i went to a couple wealthy venture capitalists slash funders that have either invested in get coin invested in my past projects or

just that i've known for a decade um and they were funding the matching pool uh bradfeld it has been an inspiration to me he's a prominent local venture capitalist and he funded a lot of the matching pool and then uh the get coin grants matching pool funded some of it and in the fund oss case uh pia mancini has been building web 2 open source ecosystems and has a lot of connections to tech giants that that give back on open collective and so she funded part of the matching pool and then there was also uh members of the get coin grants funders league that funded the matching pool so it's just kind of leveraging my reputation and the git coin traction in order to create a pilot and then you

know the idea is that once you have a pilot and you've proven that the model works then you can then go to local governments and people who are more risk-averse and and sell it to them so uh yeah that's how we solved it in the past but i think in the future a more systematic model is is probably needed if we're going to scale these things i want to come back to the public good funding uh aspect for a moment and sort of the parallels i see between like open source public kids and so like physical public good so like you know i think the heartbleed uh example is a great example of you know underfunded software that is really underpinning like the entire internet infrastructure and like you know if you look at say a country like

the united states where it's you know generally accepted like the infrastructure there is falling apart like you know lots of lots of investment was made in the 1950s and 60s and 70s and like not so much in the last you know four or five decades um that infrastructure is starting to fall apart uh i had this you on one of your blog posts you had this like really cool kind of illustration of like all the blocks that build up to like you know that web3 wallet that you're using or whatever and like underneath it it's all just like lib p2p and tcpip but so is there a risk that at some point like our our you know core internet infrastructure which by the way was funded like very much by by governments like you by the us government you know you know through the second half of the

20th century you know is there a risk that that infrastructure starts falling apart because of lack of funding or you know is it is it stable enough or do you know like what what's the risks here that that um come into play with regards to like this kind of fundamental core infrastructure whether it's you know uh um openssl or other other software yeah i think that that illustration that you're talking about had a bunch of like little blocks that everything relies on at the top of it is like your bags you know like all of your crypto assets that you rely on are just funded by this this these this like hodgepodge of open source projects um and it's like it's scary to have that much economic value relying on something that is is underfunded and and i think that the

answer uh to your question is that we're you know people are talking about the metaverse a lot in the in the ecosystem you know since zuck launched meta and there's a big question about well you know is is is the infrastructure of the metaverse gonna be owned free and open source and is it gonna be a public good or is it all gonna be like facebook's infrastructure and you know in in like the end game there is like are we all going to be stuck being tracked by zuck and like have ads everywhere in the metaverse versus is it going to be more of like a public good where you own your digital experience in a world increasingly intermediated by digital software who runs the code that intermediates your experience with the

world and i think that if we want to move to a more free open uh society that encourages human uh human thriving and human flourishing that we want to have a world in which the software that it intermediates our experiences in the metaverse is free and open and that you can fork it if you disagree with it and that's the vision of the metaverse that i want to see um you know and i'm not even much of a gamer i just like i just think that increasingly humanity's experiences are intermediated by software and i want that to be free in open source software so um you know that's one angle on it i think that that's one reason why it's important to fund our digital infrastructure uh i think that we're

seeing a world in which warfare is increasingly conducted online via cyber attacks and so you know there's like a national defense public good sort of reason why we would want to shore up our infrastructure and and i think that that's another argument for it and then the third argument is just like sheer scale when we when tcp ip was first designed which is a very elegant and anti-fragile protocol it really it's just grown several orders of magnitude since it was originally designed and making sure that our digital infrastructure is anti-fragile instead of fragile i think is in the public's best interest and so um you know there was a sense of civic pride in my grandparents and and great parents

generation in which they were building digital infrastructure after world war ii and i really hope to see a reprisal of that around global citizenship and um the public good for all of humanity and human thriving and you know i'm getting into like a little bit more of my like hippie dippy side right here but but i do think that there's a strong rationalist case for funding public goods and digital infrastructure but until we make it cool until we make being an internet citizen and and funding public goods cool we're never going to solve these global coordination problems like climate change and digital infrastructure and cyber attacks and all of this kind of stuff and so uh the world that i want to live in is one where we've solved those coordination failures but i i think that we have to

create a social consensus and inner subjective consensus that not only that we can do it and that we should do it and and that's that's a lot of what my work is is raising awareness of these problems even when we when we think that we should do it public goods funding is notoriously difficult because it's actually several problems rolled into one right so basically you have to decide what should be achieved how should one try to achieve it who should achieve it and so all of this kind of has to be uh kind of determined there has to be some consensus on this and then basically then you need to the funds and you need to distribute funds and so on but actually um and i mean to combat this problem i think sometime

last year um vitalik uh he published a blog post about um uh retroactive funding right so basically so that would basically um allocate funding after the end has already been achieved and what does make um make funding these in the first place a little bit of a venture game kind of kind of like to to interest like the the the the crowd that that actually has pretty good experience at funding very risky startups yes startups and other ventures yeah so what do you make of this well uh so the idea behind retroactive

public goods funding is to create an exit for teams that work on public goods so you know if you built libbed p2p and that's now underpinning the entire digital infrastructure or maybe open ssl we should stick with that example because we talked about it earlier then basically give those people an exit and give them like i don't know a 10 million or 100 million dollar outcome for building that infrastructure and then what that does is that it creates a market for venture capitalists to come in and seed fund public goods projects because they're expecting that that outcome uh they're making a rational economic game that they could create that outcome and you create the sea change where now all of this apparatus that's only focused on projects that capture value can now be all of that energy and all of that human

innovation that has been focused on capturing value in the past can just be focused on creating value without having to worry about capturing it and that's the end game of retroactive public goods funding i am very bullish on retroactive public goods funding and as i do more things with get coin i'm actually realizing that quadratic funding is just one tool in the tool belt there's plenty of other really great ways to fund the commons and to fund public goods and i envision this core primitive of an impact dow which creates positive externalities for the world and if we just stack impact out on impact dow then we're going to create more and more public goods funding and some of them will have uh their mechanism will be retroactive public goods funding on other of them it'll be quadratic funding and then there will be other mechanisms

like proof of humanity i think is an impact out and we just stack those things on top of each other until we create this regenerative crypto economic infrastructure for the world and it's going to be emergent to your point like we need to create the magic of quadratic funding is that it doesn't matter what me kevin owaki the original founder of git coin's values are we're building a mechanism that is a channel for greater combinations of intelligence and strength to come together and is the inner subjective consensus of the ethereum community that is represented on git coin so it's not my opinion that's that's represented we're just building a more perfect channel for for valued signal value signals to be to be created and so i think it's like when you stack all of those impact dials on top of each other you get the inner

subjective consensus of humanity of which coordination problems and public goods problems need to be solved and and i think that that's the real the real end game and and as you're right you're right it's multiple problems in one it's what do people actually care about and how much do they care about it and in what directions and it's creating a way where the values of of what do we care about and what do we want to support is aggregated and and supported is the infrastructure that i think is is being built in this space and that's what makes me really bullish for regenerative cryptoeconomics let's talk about impact hours and regenerative crypto economics so you've actually said uh uh impact hours several times now kevin

so now explain it please yeah so um basically uh an impact dow is any dow that has a positive externality for humanity and i think that that can be on many vectors like bitcoin's positive impact is that it creates public goods funding uh proof of humanities positive impact is that it creates civil resistance in the ecosystem uh climadow which is a dow that's working on making sure that carbon credits are well funded its positive externality is more pressure on carbon uh more economic incentive to create carbon capture mechanisms which hopefully means more carbon capture and solves climate change so um impact ow is just the low is just a

definition of something that creates a positive externality for the world without being prescriptive about what type of positive externality and you know think of it like erc20 erc20 is this token standard that you can build a utility token on you can build a governance token you can build securities on top of erc20 um and it's just that's the lowest common denominator of how you create a token um impact l is just the lowest common denominator of any dow that creates a positive externality for the world and um the reason why it's important to define that is that if you've got a stack of impact dials of of which there are already dozens um then what you're basically over time as you start like think of

them as like money legos and if you just start to stack these dowels on top of each other what the aggregation of that is a regenerative cryptoeconomic infrastructure for humanity remember this is all being built on ethereum and adjacent web 3 protocols that are transparent immutable global and programmable substrate for human coordination and we could export so much human thriving for the world if these things hit web scale so it's about innovating new mechanisms and funding sources that create positive externalities for humanity a plurality of them not just quadratic funding and then stacking them all on top of each other and creating a regenerative crypto economic infrastructure for the world and that is my my hope that the legacy

of the uh cryptoeconomic uh movement is is that we have created a system that is more efficient way of funding public goods and creating human thriving than the old nation-state industrial infrastructure that existed before and maybe you know it's not zero sum maybe they augment each other and and work together in order to create more human thriving but i see that elegant mechanism design on top of these coordination substrates that are web 3 is there's like just a ton of like high upside for humanity if if we continue to stack impact owls on top of each other and and create that infrastructure for the world and and i'm just really bullish to see all of this starting to come together

kevin let's let's make this more concrete so basically um there's also this book that you co-authored with a couple of people the greenfield book um so basically um it talks about uh regenerative cryptoeconomics and it's actually it's a really um i don't want to say it's a read because there's a lot of pictures in it it's it's very it's very fast read i mean it's very information very idea dense but basically the recurring theme of that book is um combating coordination failures right so and um basically the uh these impact nows those are means of doing so so can we give us examples of um where in the in in the world we live in we see coordination failures and how how they

basically fail us as um humanity yeah real quick plug for the book uh i created a book uh that's really like as you said a quick read and basically aggregates much smarter people than me the vitaliks of the world the biologies of the world the glen wiles of the world takes theirs their ideas and puts them in a very comprehensible format for people who are entering the space and want to solve regenerative cryptoeconomics and i'm standing on the shoulders of giants by exporting the the ideas of michael zargham and glenn weil and all these people to the world and you know as you said these this is an aggregation of other people's ideas and i would not be there without them but um to actually answer your question uh coordination

failures are any situation in which there's a dictatorless dystopia a a system in which every single person hates the system but for lack of a better mechanism for coordination it endures so another an example of that that's more tangible than say open source is let's like an over overfishing example uh so basically like if the three of us are all sitting around a lake and we can all make a thousand dollars actually no wait this is a podcast about crypto so we can all make uh a thousand die per month by fishing out of that pond but um one of us can make a thousand and five hundred die by overfishing that pond and the result is

that the other people only make 900 die per month then basically what you get is you get a coordination failure where every individual's individual incentive is to over fish the pond and the rational economic behavior is to is to overfish the pond until the pond is completely barren and none of us can make any money out of that pond anymore so you get this like death spiral of oh we didn't coordinate to agree not to over consume this resource and therefore no none of us have access to the resource so it's a dictatorless dystopia in which each of us hates that system but for lack of a better coordination mechanism it endures that's like a game theoretic example um and so you know that's that's what i see when i look at

climate change we all have a rational economic incentive to uh fly across the world and do business and we externalize harm to the world um we all have a rational economic incentive to free ride on open source software despite the burden that places on our digital infrastructure and on open source software maintainers and for lack of a better coordination mechanism it endorse well now we've got a global transparent immutable programmable substrate for human coordination ethereum cosmos uh you know all of these different blockchains so now we've got a gl like this this amazing substrate for for coordination where we build these coordination games and solve

coordination failures by creating these coordination games and so um the end game of the book is just to tell people like teach the game theory of coordination and to tell them that better infrastructure is possible if if we just choose it and and so you know this is basically the opportunity that i see is just educating thousands and tens of thousands of of young people who who are maybe lacking hope or maybe lacking education about how we can solve these coordination failures and i and i see this like i hope that 30 years from now this is the legacy of the web 3 ecosystem is that we uh bootstrapped this decentralized finance thing but maybe that was just the bootloader for a more regenerative infrastructure for humanity long term

and you know i know you asked me for tangible examples so i'll go go back from like the beautiful language and talk about tangible examples but you know get coin is building public goods funding mechanisms for the world uh which can be used for funding downtowns that are affected by covid or funding digital infrastructure or funding journalism uh i think that bright id and and proof of humanity and all these different identity mechanisms exporting civil resistance for the world would create a lot of a lot of positive externality around identity moving us from one token one vote systems to one human one vote systems and by the way there's already people in argentina hundreds of them that just live off of proof of humanity and ubi and that creates better

circumstances for them locally uh i think climadow in the fact that they have are using cryptoeconomics to create more demand for carbon credits is an amazing example of using ethereum to solve climate change and um and you know by the way when proof of stake happens and we're all of a sudden using 99.99 less energy there's going to be a huge sea change in the perception of these systems to create positive externalities for humanity and i hope that climate change is one of the first things that builders in this space start to try to solve from there so those are some tangible examples but there's likely dozens others that that uh that we could go through if you want more tangible examples and i hope to be invited back to epicenter in four years again and we

can talk about uh hundreds of tangible examples at that point yeah that'd be great i mean um you know certainly hopefully it will help you on before that but uh so i'd like to talk about uh so earlier you mentioned that you were a member of the of the get coin dao uh you is you know expressed that you didn't want to be called the ceo of the kit going down and that's fine i think we could just call you like some some guy in the git coin down yeah citizen internet citizen right yeah what so what's the uh like you know you know it seems natural for for get going to like transform into a dow but uh tell us a bit about that process and like what is the what is the vision here for for the doubt totally um well i made a big mistake

when i first started get coin which is that we made it centralized to start and you know the tools didn't really exist uh back then to make it into a dial or make it much of the discuss of the people on twitter who are responding to the to my question about what we should talk about yeah i mean like hand like hand to the air if you're watching the video you see my hand in the air like i pledged guilty we we built it centralized like i'm guilty i'm i'm sorry i wish i hadn't done that also um and and that's a big problem and i think coming to grips to that has been a lot of the story for me over the last two years is that you can't have a centralized uh funding infrastructure for a decentralized ecosystem or for a decentralized world

and um you know i i think that the ecosystem deserves credible neutrality they deserve to know that uh i'm not the ones with my hands on the lever of governance of bitcoin and that the community should be in charge of the governance of get coin and so the launch of git coin dao was basically the imbuing of governance rights for how these quadratic funding matching pools are allocated what are the rules of what's acceptable in them into a governance token called gtc which stands for git coin or i like to say it stands for grow the community um and and basically the idea is we are we're turning an apple into an orange right now we are turning a centralized company into a dow um or at least returning the grants portion of of our

assets into into get coindao and the whole idea is basically that uh no company should own this infrastructure it should be a credibly neutral dow that's governed by the community that it serves and that was the idea behind get coin dao we launched it on may 25th 2021 which is a day that will change the trajectory of get coin forever we draw uh we dropped 18 uh gtc to 18 000 different members of the community and um basically allowed them to delegate to different members of the get coin community uh to what we call stewards so basically there's a big problem with uh governance tokens where everyone wants to govern things in theory but in principle no one ever

votes on anything so we made everyone delegate to people who would actually be involved and would help govern bitcoin when they first got their their uh tokens which i think was an innovative way of making sure there was 100 consent of the governed uh you know other dallas have like three to five percent voter turnout get coin dow regularly gets 80 or 90 voter turnout because we've got these like delegated people stewards that are aggregating the consent of the government and participating in governance votes and so um that was like our primary innovation on governance for for get coin dao uh was making was having that delegation layer that was 100 represented at the start and ens has since copied our our dial delegation mechanism i'm very proud to have pushed the space forward and very like one

small way there um but yeah anyway so we've uh decentralized the governance of git coin dao and the surface area of that governance will increase as we launch a credibly neutral protocol for quadratic funding and move all of the funding mechanisms from the centralized platform over to the protocol over hopefully the next 18 months i'm like kicking the engineers under the table to tell be able to tell me that it's going to be sooner than that but um uh but yeah so decentralize the governance then decentralize the computation and the economics of the network and then i can have the feather in my cap and respond to those people on twitter that are accusing me of being centralized which is totally true right now so um yeah tldr can't have a centralized intermediary doing public goods funding

for a decentralized ecosystem and that's why we're moving a lot of these assets into the dow that's super cool um now i'm afraid to check the twitter thread i'm probably getting hated on for being centralized now most of the most of the most responses were uh were really really positive and um you know we've covered a lot of it here so this this idea of like the you know the problem with with governance as you mentioned like i think you accurately put it that everybody wants to govern but nobody actually ends up governing do you think that the solution ultimately is delegation because that seemed like to me it's sort of it's sort of like analogous to you know the current um system of governance that we have like in um in like you know just our

regular politics which ends up creating all these negative externalities like career politicians and like you know corruption and stuff like that and like you know recently in the recently in the cosmos community like there was this kind of uproar about like some governance votes that you know may have been influenced by like some community members et cetera and yeah i think we see this thing you know once in a while in the crypto space are there other solutions to this like how do we get people more engaged like i mean like a simple thing could just be like you get a you get a notification on your phone when there's something to vote on you just like vote on there on the spot like what are other solutions to like this delegation right well i think that's a really great question and i think that

we should not shy away from these hard problems uh the problem with the notification on the phone is that okay well now you're notified that you have to vote but you have to actually expend the mental computational cycles to understand the problem and to vote which like you know you're sitting there laying like you're watching netflix and you get a notification that you have to vote on something you're like like another thing for my to-do list um so i don't know like i think it's an unsolved problem and i'm i'm supportive of seeing people innovate on on that problem um the important thing for me was that the um the community's consent of the consent of the governed from like political theory is the only legitimate basis for for governance um as opposed to like the divine right of kings which is what you

know in like old like old times uh where where the legitimacy of the govern came from and and i do think that you know these web 3 networks that like git coin is 100 bitcoin grants is for the most we're trending towards 100 consent of the governed because it was the community that allocated their governance vote to community members and and i think that that's super important to have those initial starting conditions yeah i mean i think that um quadratic voting uh which is basically uh more of a one human one-vote type system which prevents capture by rich elites is another area where people are innovating in terms of governance and i would love to see more experiments in quadratic voting dials i

think we'll see those in the next several years and then the other thing is that which is a totally different category of governance is that every time you do a contribution on git coin grants during a matching pool you're actually don't like the secret the secret is going to be out after this podcast comes out but like you're actually governing where the matching pool goes every time you do a contribution on get coin grants it just doesn't feel like voting um every time you give a one dollar contribution and 500 more of the matching pool goes to a project because of it like we tricked you you're governing how the matching pool is distributed there so um these systems where there's robust signal already being generated that you can take that signal and channel it into a governance mechanism um is hopefully an aggregation of the preferences of the

community that is being governed and i think that those are really elegant ways of of creating governance experiment that like didn't exist in a skeuomorphic old world type way so um i guess tldr i hear your criticisms but i think that um delegation is better than what we had in web 2 i think quadratic voting is a way to improve on that and i also think that robust signal generation in like the git coin grants example is another meaningful experiment and i hope to see 100 experiments blossom that that improve the ability for the consent of the governed to be expressed in a digital way and that that's the challenge of our generation i think is uh upgrading democracy to be high bandwidth for the next generation uh i think that

that's that's like really one of the hugest levers that to make the world better for gen z and gen alpha as they inherit the world that we can do thank you that was uh they were super enlightening i have one more question that kind of ties in with the last couple of topics uh before we unfortunately have to wrap and that's the future of work so basically if you look at um the way that git coin grants and the bitcoin now kind of doles out work to different people um so how does this kind of tie in with the notion of the internet of jobs that you have publicized elsewhere and how how does it differentiate itself from from the

concept of a gig economy i i think that those answers are really unknown so far but i can provide the way that i think about them which will hopefully start to create shape for what the internet of jobs looks like in the readers or in the listeners minds so basically in the internet of money we have now created the ability for computers to send value across a computer network um and i think that's really exciting because it means that we can reinvent how value is transferred in all segments of society to not need intermediaries and like by the way if you want a preview of how this is going to look going to look in 30 years like just look at the internet of information when we took the

computers and we gave them the ability to send information across a computer network and that reinvented entertainment media politics all these things in society that rely on information were rewritten by the internet and we have like a 30-year view on what that looks like and now we have the ability to reinvent value transfer and governance and scarcity in society because computers can now send that across a computer network and it follows from first principles that we're going to rewrite how the banking system works which is defy how art auctions work which is nfts but no one everyone's sleeping on what is the future of work with with and and i think that we're we're all kind of like the the internet of jobs is basically the design space that i think it happens when um the 99 of humanity

that their financial lives is not their bank accounts and their investments but it's how they earn a living and what happens when that collides with blockchain technology and web 3 era systems around data storage and distributed computation and dowels and in digital reputation i think is an important thing here um that i think digital reputation is foundational because when i want to make like you can't have like a trustless interaction with like an uber driver like when i when i want to have when i want to hire someone to take me somewhere then i need um an assurance that they're not a creep and they're going to get me there safely and um and and i think that there's like reputation is a big part of how we do value transfer in in our lives in in so

many different places and so i'm curious to see what markets for doing knowledge work together look like because the the uber the uber example is like a very rudimentary example but uh because because i only really care if it's like they're going to get me there safely and and quickly but on gitcoin when i hire a software engineer i want to know like do they speak the same language as me are they in the same time zone do they speak the same programming languages do they have like a bunch of like uh communication or like emotional problems are they reliable do they produce a good code are they gonna ghost me like there's just many more vectors and i think that reputation matters a lot and um the way i see this as different than the

gig economy it's like the gig economy is what jobs look like if you just like bolt an internet of jobs on fiat rails but now that we have this like open source permissionless blockchain technology to program the way we do value transfer with each other there's going to be non-skew morphic ways of doing value transfer with each other that like couldn't have existed in the old world skeuomorphism just means like basically it's like native to the new environment as opposed to the new world um and and um and like i think a great example of that is coordinate uh which is basically a tool where everyone in a dow votes on whether or not everyone else is doing a good job and then you drop tokens on the entire set of workers in a dow that's an example of a

non-skeuomorphic use case for the internet of jobs is is like creating an intersubjective consensus of people who are working together of what they think of each other and then allocating tokens based off of that um i think paying people in governance rights is another really great example of a non-skeomorphic internet of jobs thing that didn't exist in the gig economy if i pay you in dollars then like see ya you might go away after that but if i pay you in governance rights for a project that i'm involved in then you have aligned incentives uh with me in in many many different forms and so uh the design space of internet of jobs is just basically what happens when money uh the internet of money collides with a society uh that it earns their living as

opposed to makes it from investments makes it off of labor instead of capital and i think that the huge upside for the blockchain space by the way is that 95 of humanity 99 of humanity their financial lives is their jobs not their investments so you want blockchains to go mainstream then you need to invest in dowels and the internet of jobs because that's like people don't people are going to work on the financial are going to use d apps that have uh the financial use cases that they care about that they solve for their job to be done and um and so i think that's what the internet of jobs is and i predict that an upcoming cycle will be around dowse and internet of jobs and future of work and i think it's only a matter of time you

can make the argument from first principles uh the internet of value is reinventing everything in society that has to do with value transfer and jobs has to do with value transfer so it just follows from first principles to me that we'll see a cycle that is all about the internet of jobs in the next several years i really get the difference i think between like the gig economy and the internet of jobs and like the the differences that you have in line incentives i think that's one of the main differences in that and the reputational aspect i think plays a huge role too um you know reputation is something that's been notoriously hard to figure out on you know in digi in the digital world especially i think in the crypto world and i think that a lot of people are looking at reputation at least from my

vantage point as like an objective measure of like some data points that you can get from like i don't know git commits or like you know how long you've staked in something or like these sort of very objective measures but reputation is about so much more than that it's about like this there's all the subjective aspect as well like you're talking about talking the same language well you know that that's relative to you but it might not be relative to like you know someone living in france for instance or in germany um how do we how do we how do we come to terms with those sort of like you know of course you need to have the rep the the the objective things that we can you know objectively look at and measure you could say hey like this person has like you know so many commits or whatever and

then the the more subjective aspects is that something that can be solved uh in the crypto space or is it like a coordination problem that's goes beyond uh the scope of decentralized reputation oh man you know i'm going to tell you that all coordination problems are solvable that's like you know that's my whole stick is that we can solve these with coordination um uh no so i mean i'll take your questions in reverse order like so i think we should move from trying to find the completely rationally objective measure of like reputation which like appeals to me by the way because i'm a software engineer and i love things that are like zeros or ones and they're tangible and like i know what i'm dealing with um objectivity is a false idle though we want to create an inter-subjective

consensus of what multiple people think from multiple vantage points and that is i think like once we widen the aperture of design to inter-subjective consensus to just like totally from totally objective then i think that that is really what the holy grail is like the your reputation is the sum of what people think of you around you that's inner subjective consensus and by the way the intersubjective consensus i'm trying to create is that coordination failures are solvable i want to move people from like oh we just have to live with this like decaying infrastructure too like no we could solve it like that's the intersubjective consensus i'm trying to create um and then the last point i want to make before i kick it back to you is like who owns the infrastructure is a

really big problem here in gig economy upwork and linkedin own all of our reputation data and and everything and who owns the infrastructure in web 3 is super important i want to be able to take my identity from site to site to site and i also don't want upwork taking 10 of my of my paycheck every month like that and and the fact that linkedin their whole business model is taking your reputation data and selling it to recruiters reid hoffman makes 30 billion dollars per year off of your data it's and but that's the one of the big differences between the internet of jobs and in the gay economy is that we're gonna all own our reputation data and take it from um from

place to place to place um but anyway yeah to actually answer the question you asked me inter-subjective consensus over objective measures i think is is where we're going and and one thing that also came to mind here when researching this and so like reading your your writings on the internet and jobs aspect is you know what what may be some of the negative aspects of moving uh in this direction as opposed to the sort of traditional uh employment model that affords people stability uh sort of long-term uh benefits as well such as retirement or life insurance and you know sort of immediate things like like healthcare

is this something that can be adapted to the internet of jobs model are we to start seeing dows offering like retirement savings plans and and health care uh like health care packages for for its members yeah um that's an extremely important question and i think that it's one of the things that really keeps me up at night is um how much of our legacy like the industrial age infrastructure how much social safety net stuff is globed on to jobs because there's not another better coordination mechanism for it um i i have a family and i want to i'm i'm you know interested in end-of-life planning and making sure that my kids

have a good education and planning for retirement and creating life insurance and health insurance and all those things and those things are all just globbed onto jobs in the old world um i'm really excited by what opolis is doing in basically creating a bridge between the internet of jobs and these social safety things where basically um what they do is they create a corporation that you work for that you get uh your retirement your life insurance and all that kind of stuff and they just take a percentage of the earnings that you get from the dow and pay for those things that way so that's like a skeuomorphic way of adapting those things to the real world and so i i think that the internet of jobs absolutely is going to need to have core primitives for how insurance is done how you plan for retirement how you save for

education and hopefully reinventing education by the way so that it's not just like you know 45 000 per year to get an education out of college i think that you know the there's a ton of debt that's globbed onto the old system and i think that unwinding that for the next generation is is really important um like the more macro many parts of the world do actually have this so basically i i i mean this is this is a very u.s centric point of view right so basically i'm german i went to i went to i got a perfectly good education here i went to university and i i did not pay anything actually basically if if you go to university and your parents don't have enough money to uh to to fund your uh to fund your living costs you you just

get a loan from the government you have to pay back half at zero interest and it's capped at i think 16 000 euros um so one six so basically i mean i mean this is this is it's it it's in parts of the world this exists right so basically it shows that that um it's it's not a utopian vision it can be done and in many parts of the world it is totally yeah and i'll just note that um i am an imperfect vessel for a lot of these uh conversations but what we did do is we just created an intersubjective consensus like you from europe would be from america about what this could look like and and i think that that's completely valid there's also probably you know the infrastructure i can't

speak to in asia or south america uh what it looks like as well um but i guess like one last thing i'll say is that um you know like one of the things i think the great the big risks of this space is that if you build the optical optimal signal generation mechanism for what people value what do we do if we build the perfect channel for people to express their preferences and they have shitty preferences like what if you don't want to save for education or health insurance like i i don't know what you do then other than you know invest in education and risk management and social safety nets um from an infrastructure level and then you get into complicated questions about like should we coerce people into into saving for education or retirement

and and i haven't figured out the like what do we do if if like you build the signal generation mechanism and people have uh values that are like i haven't i haven't worked out that part of the equation yet so the that's those are kind of my thoughts on the subject but i think that it's an unsolved problem yeah and there's certainly like some non-skeomorphic you know like uh paradigm shifts that that are meant to happen in there so you know you know that does this does funding education in 20 years from now like if you're working for a dow like you know does that look the same as what it looks like now does saving for retirement look the same like you know healthcare what does that look like so i mean there's

also there's also different uh levels here right i mean so basically there's things that kind of pertain to yourself and your own future but saving for education typically actually uh pertains to your kids futures or at least you know the younger generation so i feel like um you i mean if you suffer from your own bad choices okay that's too bad if your kids suffer from your bad choices i think to me that's a different story sure yeah one of the um one of the the sort of ideas that's in the book which i originally got from yancey strickler the founder of kickstarter is this idea of bento-ism which is how do we move from a financial system that prioritizes instant gratification to um which is now me uh which is like

to to the group which is now us so how do we move from what's good for me now to what's good for everyone everyone now or like my family now um and then the other vector is futures which is basically like how do we move from now me to future me and then like you make you make that into a four by four matrix and it's now me now us future us and future me and so how do we build a financial system that like passes the marshmallow test of of basically you know how do we plan into the future and how do we plan for the group instead of the individual and i think that the that's just like a lens that you could look through the design of regenerative cryptoeconomics uh and and like by the way like

it'd be hard to do worse than the old finance like at least in the united states we have this quarterly earnings cycle and all of these like executives are just focused on their next quarterly earnings cycle and uh you know i think it'd be hard to do worse than that in in the crypto ecosystem hopefully we can build better primitives for coordination that they can plan further out for existential risks that don't fit into the quarterly the quarterly cycle like say climate change or digital infrastructure yeah i think i think somehow it's really difficult to kind of straddle the gap between what we think is right and what is generally done and accepted and not questioned so i mean basically i mean kevin you also have kids so basically you will also know this they will ask you why does why does someone sleep on the street um why don't we give

them food why don't we give them why don't we give them money so basically things that in principle seem like they're no-brainers i mean no one should go hungry when obviously in principle there's enough to eat right um so all of these things that's that that kind of that's that are no-brainers when you explain them to kids um somehow we still get used to them and we don't question them um every day so how how do you think we we avoid um moral fatigue that's a really great question i i think the first thing that i'll say

is that you know arguably we're already suffering from a certain amount of moral fatigue so maybe i'd reframe your question into how do we pay down the the moral fatigue that that we've inherited um but but the other thing that i'll say is that um my really my goal for for git coin is to build um a channel that greater combinations of intelligence and strength can come together and this is actually a key point that you know it's it's not my values that like i i don't want the things the causes that i believe in to be uh to be the ones that are funded i want to build the most perfect the the best rails for expression of human values um and for those

combinations of strength and intelligence to come together and so my hope is that by building this coordination infrastructure um that when you have these these areas where there's a very clear coordination failure in the case of what you asked like we failed to give this person on a street uh a like food and probably home and like the chance to contribute to society and to be a productive member of society like my hope is that by building the rails through which humanity can express its preferences that we can um that that we can solve some of these coordination failures and you know maybe we build this and it turns out people really do care about homelessness they

just don't have a good coordination mechanism to solve it uh and that would be the bullish case for this this infrastructure and the bearish case would be oh we build the signal aggregation preferences and like people don't care they just like step over the person on the side of the street and you know that would make me personally sad but you know at least we've got the value like the signal generation uh uh tools out there and then i think it becomes like an education and and like a governance question of like why don't we care about about these things like what is it about our values that causes us to sorry i see you want to say something go ahead yeah but kevin do you do you think it's a signal thing because basically i think um i mean if you if you kind of

change the context right say you go hiking um and you see and and basically you're in the middle of nowhere in the rockies and you come upon a person who's clearly hungry and thirsty and asks you for food what do you do of course you give them food right because you're the only person there right basically but as soon as you actually if as soon as you transpose the exact same thing theme to um downtown anywhere in the world people react fundamentally differently because they think this is no longer their problem they're no longer the only person who can solve it and basically this is society's problem now right so basically i i i

would kind of posit that basically there's like this disconnect between um personal morality and societal morality that kind of absorbs you from the human decency that to kind of act um and you step over that person and i'm yeah so i'm i'm not sure whether where the signaling is actually the problem yeah the numbness of of like the lack of hope i think is is a real problem so like first of all i want to say that like i'm extremely privileged to be where i am in my life and working on something that i love and to have a house and a family and all the maslow's hierarchies things mostly taken care of and i think that we should not take that for granted um and and i really feel that like deeply

when i hear your question asked um you know when i i wonder why we feel so numb uh in that situation and and you know the question that comes to mind for me is that in in a hike like in may the way i would try to rationalize it and this may be wrong and it may be totally callous to even try to to even try but i'm going to try against my better judgment is that if i see someone lost in the woods then my assumption is maybe oh they're lost like they just got lost and it was like a mistake whereas i i think that there's many many deep unfurled societal problems with uh homelessness in cities which have to do with probably

uh underfunded social infrastructure and by the way this is worse in america than it is for you all in europe uh probably mental health education drug abuse and these are systemic problems that cannot be solved by giving someone uh a sandwich uh like you know if someone's just lost in the woods i i would presume there's less uh there's less systemic issues there and i do think that um those systemic issues behind the person in the city which you know may or may not be right on an individual basis are are human coordination failures um and i do think that you know we're kind of speculating here but i do think that if if you can solve for the education and and the drug abuse

and the lack of employment infrastructure and all of that kind of stuff then there maybe people will be less numb and and that we can have more hope but maybe that's an optimistic take and and and maybe it's even inappropriate for me to speculate about these things from my my place of privilege uh well um i think we'll we'll leave that note to end on it but uh no certainly it's like been a really fascinating discussion that has taken us down all kinds of rabbit holes um i wasn't expecting it to get here but uh yeah this is great um so where can people find out more about the book which is called green pill and um and just get involved uh with what you're doing yeah thanks uh so uh you can google me i'm kevin owaki i'm the only uh oaky out

there that i think that you'll find if you google that and you can go to greenpill.party if you want to download a digital version of the book if any of your listeners are at east denver then i'll be giving out physical copies there as well really enjoyed the conversation and i appreciated that we didn't go that we didn't gloss over the hard topics uh looking forward to continuing the conversation and thanks so much for having me and we'll have you again on but not in four years thanks again kevin been a pleasure sounds good looking forward