Today's Web3 is Full of Trash

Transcript

thank you hi guys thanks for coming i understand that there's quite a few people queuing for vitalik already downstairs so appreciate you joining uh today we're gonna have a little bit of fun i'm gonna be a little bit curmudgeonly to start so apologies but just a quick show of hands who in the room has joined like the web 3 blockchain space in the last year awesome welcome who's joined in the last maybe two years awesome 2017ish and before 2017 nice work guys well that's a fun little bit of representation um one of the things that we're here to talk to about today is the divide that

we're starting to see between some of the older people and some of the newer people and as the space grows what we can do to make sure that people are coming together so a quick intro i helped host something called east denver where in our fifth year we've been happening since 2018. we've uh tried not to take ourselves too seriously as you can see we we play around there's usually like 2 500 of us that kind of bang around this like dodgy old building in denver we have a big focus on the building itself we play with buffalo corns it's just been kind of a family vibe for a really long time this year things got a little bit different um but you know for the most part we we try to keep it light you know

like web 3 doesn't have to be so serious all the time case in point uh i know most of the people that are kind enough to wear this outfit around the the venue and i couldn't figure out why this one was so skinny and i found out later it was uh it was our leader uh so again 2022 was a little bit of a change of pace we went from 2500 people to an estimated 12 000 that came to denver for it it grew really rapidly and that obviously it changed the vibe quite a bit unfortunately we had a lot of people who were really focused on nfts and shilling those alone and not really buying into the ethos of web3 and unfortunately we had a lot of people

around town reporting that the behavior was really bad people were ripping signs off walls in the hotel where we hosted they were walking out on their tabs at restaurants they were yelling at the staff my poor friends at the registration desk got asked so many times trying to get extra deals people are asking do you know who i am you can google me and things you know relating to the fact that like sweet dude you have an ape in your wallet that doesn't make you a rock star and it doesn't mean that you can treat everybody poorly so it was just really hard on us trying to say like you know here's the ethos of our event and please join it it was just we grew too rapidly for us to be able to do a good job of culturing people so what that means is that for a lot of the

people who have been in the space for a while we're getting kind of tired it's a little fatiguing to have people kind of start to leverage the work that you've been doing for years and trying really you know hard to help people and free people with these tools come in and say buy my moon baby you know and and create a new nft platform and here's the ways that i'm trying to extract so through all of the ups and downs we've been working here for a long time we've had winters we've had summers we've had trials and failures and successes to have this kind of thing happen you know it's it's just really disappointing this is a picture of the bodega that we host in east denver everything's free the tickets are free the food is free we

have food trucks out front for the the meals and this is a bodega that keeps the hackers fed because we're open 24 hours a day we provide monster energy drinks and snacks so that they can just hack all the way through the biddle-a-thon and this year we had people throwing food on the floor we had people grabbing armfuls of it and scooping it into their bags so that they could take it home for themselves and basically every time the staff would ask them to be kind this would happen again so this is kind of emblematic of how we're feeling right now that we're starting to just see people take advantage of the space rather than add to it i was moderating a panel last year with a friend vinnie gupta who's a pretty smart fella and he offered this

interesting analogy when talking about the growth in web 3. he said in the 1970s the british punk rock scene was pretty clear on their ethos they were really aligned about the fact that they were they were counter culture they were largely anti-establishment they really wanted to make a point which is why they had crazy hair and why they dressed in funny ways so that they could say you know pay attention to us because we're unhappy with the way that things are going and the community cohered fairly well around that as that started to grow as it started to spread you know it moved over to the u.s it started to get a little bit diluted and a little bit more diluted and that message started to change after a while

and where we ended up was something totally different so we started with the sex pistols in the 70s and we ended up with blink 182 now that same movement hit the mainstream punk rock kind of made it but you could argue that a lot of the people that started that movement wouldn't recognize it in the form that it made it in you know that it had altered so many ways that this wasn't what we were expecting anymore so a lot of those people feel like even though we made it in some ways we failed and then this is just my happiness that the third top mark was that it's crappy punk rock that made my heart happy uh so you know as we get back to you know some of the core tenets of why

decentralization matters you know it's it's kind of depressing to think about if this punk rock movement could be where we are and if that analogy is accurate and we're going to hit the mainstream in a way that we don't recognize it anymore and the people that have been here from the you know early days talking about freeing people from inflation you know the talk that just happened in this room right before was about you know like 90 inflation in argentina over the last 10 years this is what this was about and you know would we see maybe the you know the creator of bitcoin actually one like would could he have foreseen nft shilling coming i do think it's a man but i also really believe that the satoshi's female

movement is that ethos is something that we have to keep alive here that you know the the movement about peer-to-peer technology being community up rather than top down is something that hooked me really early like this is something that we're doing for us by us to support each other and that needs to stay you know a tenant that we move forward with and that we can culture as we go so for click um you know for the people that are coming in who are interested in nfts awesome we're happy to have everybody everyone here is welcome and it's our job as a community to make sure that that decentralist ethos continues and we move away from this kind of behavior that's all about

extraction rather than addition that we continue to talk about why this space matters so i believe that in in the punk rock analogy we are slightly in in the ramones era of the movement like we've come over it's still pretty dingy and awesome and before we go the way of blink 182 let's kind of keep it back on track that said i'm not trying to pretend that blockchain has always been awesome and free of this stuff and that nft shilling is new because the people that have been around for a while remember things like banana coin and people trying to put wi-fi on the blockchain back in 2018 and a whole slew of plagiarized ico white papers so it's not to say that old is awesome and new is challenging it's just

to say we really do need to focus on keeping the ethos alive for everybody and as we move forward yes defy games are awesome yes talking about new ways to invest is great but we also have to keep hammering in why we're here how it's going to help bring financial inclusion how it's going to free people because frankly the echo chamber that we've been in for a while wasn't getting mainstream adoption and what's the point of building tools that are going to free everybody if no one is using them so you know let's share resources with people who are new let's have talks where everyone's included let's have more unconferency conversations thank you so that we have more ability to have the dialogue between everyone here for

the new people we are so happy to have you like the perspective that you bring is fresh the way that you think about things is really important it shows that we are getting traction and that the early people weren't totally crazy and we need all of that um i have a friend who was really early in the ethereum foundation and he told me once that there was the a proverb that they would use among their co-developers that with fresh eyes on a problem ultimately there will be no problem because we all look at a problem from different angles and we bring in different perspectives and that's how things get solved so we need fresh eyes we need more collaboration we don't need a whole bunch of curmudgeonly old folks just talking to each other but we need to make sure that we're

doing it from a community mindset you know some of what's going on in space right now i'm doxing a couple of my friends here you know there is fatigue people feel like people don't want to learn as we move forward so newbies stay curious ask for mentorship most of the people who have been around for a long time most of them are super awesome and totally happy to share and offer perspective and resources and seeing curiosity from it from new folks is really exciting personally i don't need a single new like another person asking me if i understand this thing called a smart contract you know like we get a lot of people assuming that we don't understand the technology so staying curious is important

but again more collaboration these headlines finding this took me maybe 10 minutes there's so much going on these days that is really impactful in the blockchain space there's so many ways that regenerative finance and climate change and uh you know like desai like there's problems that are going to be solved at such a rapid rate it's really exciting to see what's developing there are people in this audience who are doing amazing work around the world in developing countries and we're getting to the place where we really are bringing financial inclusion and so that's the stuff that we need to keep talking about we need to bring that onto the stages into the conversations into the unconferency rooms with us and make sure that you know this

very well worn but really important adage stays true that we are building the new systems of the future and we're going to do that by creating things that are totally different than what we've seen before and we're going to do it together so thank you that's it i would love to hear from you guys like what problems you see with the argument that i made or ways that we can create more collaboration and coherence among the newbies do we have a mic yeah any question so those of us who are older who aren't quite curbudgenly generally take a look at how we brought this upon ourselves and we really did not create

the world that we said we were going to the blockchain money is not more distributed it's more centralized a lot of people got rich really fast and there's no question about why young people who have no hope in the future particularly in the united states have been brought up this way and when they see some way that maybe one day they might be able to afford a house they've come into our industry and i would say that we really have not in any way fulfilled on our promises those headlines yeah i know they took you 10 minutes but if you look deeper into that a lot of financial inclusion ends up creating more and more inequality even among those places we've also created an industry that has

pretty much mimicked the absolute worst of wall street in terms of centralization of power in terms of speculative instruments and we only have ourselves to blame for all of us and also in terms of our industry is 99 financial capital and maybe one percent productive capital which is even better than wall street was able to reach so i think we only have ourselves to blame and we have to wake up and actually start doing good every one of us and i understand the need to give artists reasonable compensation but that's not exactly what happened all right challenge to the community who's going to count her in the back one less direction it's not really a question there's more

statement to add on to it i think this is naturally part of the industry um i remember 2016 there was barely any events three years ago fcc there was no side events i think the if you want to call it that will naturally go away i also think partly that is formal in this industry where nobody really wants to miss out on an opportunity and still nobody really says what true decentralization is so for example a dao it's not really that it's the founders it's the team it's the investors and i think if people speak about this more then we might come to

kind of an ideal solution yeah agreed and one of the arguments let's speak about it more let's find solutions i think you're right that we've always had pardon language but we've always had in space you know kevin owaki the other day was talking about impact and saying there's so much good going on he just released a book on impact dowse i think there were 140 of them that were they were featured and we have crypto zombies taking up the headlines right so it's on us to make sure that we're doing good things we have time thank you [Applause] you