Regen Economies: The Cryptoanarchist's Dream

Transcript

right i'm not sure if everybody here knows yet that um the one of the biggest newspapers in spain alpines have called us techno hippies [Applause] for to keep track no hippies i believe so generally the article is not super positive but i'm a journalist myself so from my own experience i will tell you that we are a bunch of bitter hacks and the guy probably whoever wrote it just came here and was jealous we're having too much fun well on that note i think we should start speaking about overflowing governments so perhaps i'll introduce

grief green to the stage and he'll tell us about region economies thank you thank you so much and if if we could just also give a huge round of applause to manu and jaeger michaela anya who threw this event incredible i mean i'm standing on grass this is epic this is epic and i'm i'm going to give an epic talk i hope it's about regen economies a crypto anarchist dream so let's unpack this first regen economies region economies are collectively designed constantly evolving purpose-driven coordination networks the coolest thing about region economies and this dream is that it's already a reality we already have a

bunch of regen economies bitcoin was the first regen economy many years ago providing value to society without taxes or donation doing it better than governments and non-profits can do this is what regen economies have the promise and this is why they're the crypto anarchist dream i'm going to do a little case study that that kind of hits home here uh we are sitting or standing in beautiful barcelona in catalunya catalunya is currently and has been for a while part of spain but it doesn't really want to be in 2017 october 1st 2017 i was my good friend jordy bellina outside a polling station trying to protect a vote for

independence here in catalonia it was a beautiful thing i've never it really touched me made me who i am today i've never seen such a strong political movement a peaceful revolution happening and despite spanish censorship despite they they actually coordinated with all the internet service providers to censor the sen the website they were used to track who had voted who hadn't voted whether or not they were eligible to vote which is needed for a good vote right and catalunya wanted to keep it above board they wanted to make sure everyone could vote and that this vote would be recognized by international authorities and so they had lots of people standing by and making sure that

it could happen despite spanish censorship it happened okay despite spanish censorship despite their all their efforts they were able to get that website up and one of the reasons the giveth house is here in barcelona and i'm committed to see this beautiful space high is is because of this backdrop of incredibly decent like decentralized focused techno techno revolutionaries here in catalonia they solve this problem not by talking to isps or doing political things through technology they have the largest mesh net in the world here in catalina gleefy.net and because of this decentralized technology

people were able to vote people were climbing on top of polling stations public schools and connecting the gleefy.net which whose meshnet actually reaches to france and circumvented spanish censorship to allow people to vote but unfortunately spain doesn't just go away peacefully uh this this is uh pretty violent and actually i'm sorry for laughing it's not a joking matter this is a really horrible thing that happened that day and this is why we were at the polling stations because um people at these stations were violently be beaten just to protect their vote they were standing here like human shields for the ballots so that they could actually have

a say in their governance it's gross but the grossest thing honestly is that we're still in spain how can we be in spain when people trying to vote are treated like this it doesn't make any sense right we tried and i've been part of political movements before that also failed because of government intervention and it needs to stop and but in this case study right um let's keep moving get out of that there were pros for independence there's clear reasons why catalonia would want independence control over

taxes too much taxes goes to madrid obvious economic freedom just having control of their own economy do they does catalonia want to be part of the euro probably but they don't have a say right they could offer tax benefits to organizations that want to be based in barcelona the branding of catalonia is beautiful the barsa the football club is incredible all this all the flags around um probably most importantly though is cultural preservation uh only 50 years ago it was illegal to speak catalan here the spanish government made forbid speaking another language they they were trying to destroy the culture of catalonia which is beautiful right well they like a poop a lot which is kind of

funny but like other than that it's it's a beautiful culture um and and of course most people want local government this is just obvious you have more control when it's localized uh but the cons were too much right fighting for independence um really doesn't make sense and i feel like this is talking with a lot of people these are the various reasons why the the movement hasn't really succeeded number one spain just has a lot of power within the european union and could block a lot of benefits that catalina receives banks and many other important organizations might leave because of their alliance with spain and spain is the largest trading partner of catalina just economically there's

lots of issues right but more importantly probably is the violence honestly there's no way that they would go down without a fight and catalonia seems committed to a peaceful revolution which which i fully support talking with people around like hands down talking with every person from catalonia that i've ever talked to about this topic is they question whether or not it'll be worth it whether or not that a new new leadership in the same government system is really going to be that much better it's like a different flavored piece of [ __ ] it doesn't almost matter we don't need a new government

we need something better aren't really that great they're just the best thing that we have right now but what is why why do we need uh sorry uh revolutions let's stay on the revolution topic revolutions are not all they're cracked up to be i know we all want to be the web 3 che guevaras or at least like i used to want to be but really when you sit down and think about it revolutions are very destructive what we need is evolution evolution is creative we can evolve past governments right revolutions are isolated events if catalunya does have a revolution that's great for catalinia it doesn't help the rest of the world

evolution if it happens here it happens everywhere the biggest challenge though is that revolutions often fail evolution can't be stopped evolution is going to keep happening we are going to find a solution better than governments and i think it's the first step is region economies fact is governments control almost every square meter in the world and regulate almost every aspect of our lives we have governments we are addicted to governments we need governments but their control is not the problem that they're solving that's how they're

solving a problem but that's not the problem that they're solving we don't need them to control and regulate every aspect of our lives do we i don't think so we need to start from first principles why do we need governments what are governments providing that we're so addicted to public goods yeah no it's true public goods are what governments provide that better than almost any structure that we've created public goods you guys all probably know what public goods are because this conference is i think this is the theme but i'll just really quickly kind of describe what public goods are so public goods are one of the types of echo of

four types of economic goods so let's break this down on the left side we have the excludable types of public goods right and i consider the science of economics that actually really propels this forward and provides these public goods to society i call it scarcity economics i'm defining scarcity economics as the production distribution and consumption of excludable goods and services to satisfy individual wants and needs this scarcity economics is dominated by businesses they do it great they have these beautiful things called business models profit revenue cost it all goes in a spreadsheet and boom magical the invisible hand coordinates everything

we can go buy a cell phone we no one voted to have a cell phone okay we can go get a cell phone and we just have to buy it we're excluded from it it's not free you get it right you can go to a movie theater uh these these are private goods and club goods just keep pushing scarcity economics is a magical positive sum game everybody wins i i went to willy's talk today is it was really amazing talk i recommend everyone watch it if you didn't see it uh he was talking he had a slide from uh with with the guy talking about the invisible hand i think it was milton friedman and he had a pencil and he was like think about all the coordination that it took to build this pencil someone had to mine the graphite someone

had to grow the trees for the woods someone had to grow the trees to get the rubber someone had to coordinate the collection of all those resources to put it into a pencil could we control that it happened effortlessly it didn't require government control it just required a positive some game it required an economic system that works abundance economics is the other side you know economics like if you go to study economics it's really mostly about scarcity economics i would argue the science of abundance economics doesn't exist we haven't we don't have it down to a science i define abundance economics as the production distribution and consumption of abundant goods and services to

satisfy collective wants and needs this is dominated by governments fish in a bay mit license code unfortunately often to practice abundance economics our best system is actually to bring them to scarcity economics to say have the government say oh you want to fish in this bay buy a ticket you know pay get a license to fish in the bay this is not actually abundance economics they're they're trying to provide abundance to society the best that they can but they're not creating abundance they're moving it over to scarcity and controlling it by force this is not the way this is not the way abundance economics is built on sacrifice and force abundance economics requires taxpayers

to just send their money to the government usually through coercion and and them and then they just burn it they just use it right it's so different in scarcity economics this is what we need we need that kind of win-win system in the abundance economic sector and this is what regen economies can do okay so let's go back to first principles we don't need governments to control every aspect of our lives we need public goods so what does this look like i would argue that i would like to see a free market for public services provided at a high quality level right people competing to actually provide

value to society and responding to demand that's what we need currently today we have a government monopoly providing just enough to avoid revolution we want public goods to be provided from the bottom up where people that are in the know and care about it can start an organization and provide those services as the as they are needed right now we have top-down government control that has been captured by capital i mean there were to be president united states uh in last election it cost six billion dollars they spent six billion dollars to be present where did that money come from you don't think that we whether we like it or not our political systems

have been captured by capital and that's and we need better ideally public goods creation would be regenerative people get paid to provide value to society and it that would give access to innovation innovators that are like yeah public roads are great how about this zip lines let's do it let's maybe people like zip lines better build towers travel that way right there's other innovative solutions uh but it's but right now are just printing and burning money and doing it with drudgery it's like oh yeah i go to the government job push the papers it's not there's no innovation and we need fast pa feedback cycles we need we

need demand to be responded to and when it's responded to positively scale right right now we have vote every four years like there's no feedback cycle but most of all we just need an underlying system that creates abundance that creates value for everyone in a positive some way right now public goods creation is used to control us it's held over our heads to maintain control of society that's not what we need what if instead of having monolithic governments that coercively collect taxes to maintain a top-down monopoly on every public goods vertical that they want to control because they're the only

good source of funding for public goods what if we had organizations competing to provide the public services that were most in demand where labor expertise and capital contributions were actually rewarded and people that care have a voice in executing how these these services the craziest thing is not only would it be incredibly beneficial to society it would actually be probably the largest sector of our economies 25 i'm estimating about 25 trillion dollars a year is spent by governments 10 over 40 about 40 percent of that just by the us

this is spent 25 trillion that's 25 million million dollars it's an obscene number and this is spent this was spent in 2021 estimated 25 times the total market cap of crypto not invested spent burned but that's not where we start we don't start by trying to compete with the government they have great systems when governments fail to provide public goods that are in demand people start nonprofits this is where we start we don't need to like start competing with governments that's a losing battle and we don't need them busting in here with their clubs we just need to do better than

nonprofits and this is a low bar this is an incredibly low bar everyone is burning their money right it's like the best case scenario they could get up to a 50 like tax rebate on their donations we don't even have to make money we just have to lose less and we're better than non-profits now i think we can make money providing value for society though and if we do if we can disrupt nonprofits this itself is a huge sector right half a billion dollars in just the u.s was donated in 2021.

sorry half a trillion 500 billion dollars a year going forward will be donated just by the us so this is the road map this is this is how we can evolve past governments first we disrupt the nonprofit space we can do that it's a low bar i promise next we provide government services that people actually want and this may sound like a stretch but honestly local governments would be so happy to not have to build the roads wouldn't they be excited if you could say hey how about instead of just

burning that money you invest in this regen economy and we're going to coordinate better you know we'll fix the potholes faster we'll build better infrastructure it'll work they would be stoked they could use more money to be doing the dumb stuff that they actually want to do right but as more government services start being replaced by region economies competing region economies governments would eventually just lose legitimacy they'd stop doing the things that are in demand and they'd only be left doing the things we don't want them to do just like cell phones versus corded phones no one we didn't have a violent revolution to tear out the cords of of like you know corded phones everywhere

all that infrastructure is it's still just sitting there you know it's just kind of faded has less use cases you know maybe we would need governments for some things for a while but eventually i think that they would just fade away peacefully and we wouldn't need to go through all this hubble and this is the this is what giveth and common stack are focused on we're going to disrupt the nonprofit space step one we giveth has built the best donation platform in the world we're meeting non-profits where they are creating win-win situations for them to interact with their donors common stack is going straight at the heart of the problem it's kind of the applied research arm of giveth right common stack is going to the web 3 nerds

that are trying to make the world a better place and giving them regen economies first with the token engineering commons now we're working with grassroots economics the goal here is to build mission to build regen economies regional economies that can are like startup micro economies that can that are effectively mission driven economic games and games is the key word here it needs to be fun right it needs to be something people want to do mission-driven economic games that reward the production and distribution satisfy collective wants and needs that's the goal and we're doing it uh we don't need another revolution

we need evolution we need to do better than governments if we do 10x better than governments they'll just fade away and so i want to invite everyone to come visit our booth uh we have an awesome booth with some swag you can learn how to donate we got stickers over here if you want some stickers they'll probably be passed around uh definitely join us in building the future of giving if you are inspired by this talk please follow us on twitter at giveth.off and follow me at the grifft and you'll learn more you can reach out to us on twitter tag us on twitter and uh join this join this movement because it's going to be not only is it going to change the world

it's actually going to be creating the biggest industry we've ever seen so [Music] you