Hi, welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the
Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the
blockchain revolution. I'm Sebastian crucio.
And I'm here with my co-host for the get horns.
Today. We're talking with Kevin iwaki.
He's the founder and get of get coin, and he's now a member of
the get coined. Ow.
Before we talk to Kevin about get coin.
I'd like to tell you about our sponsors this week because the
safe is a smart wallet. That enables you to control
digital assets. With much more granular,
permissions involving multiple private Keys.
A subsidy, which can is required for executing transactions.
These keys can be stored in different partner wallets or
software. Well, as or even shared across
multiple people notice, the save security and personalization
makes it the most trusted web three Asset Management solution
for individuals, teams and Dow. Who already use it to store over
100 billion and usd's worth of assets today.
So check out the latest IOS app, which has just been released
where you can send receive funds execute transactions and receive
push notifications on all on your mobile device.
Visit notice this Dash safe to IO to learn more.
And to get started, setting up your own safe.
We're also brought to you by tally which is a new web, three
wallet and defy wall. That is a public good.
So think of it like a community-owned.
Own version of Madam asked, it has all the features of many
masks, but the difference is that tally is 100% over open
source under the GPL, three license, and it's 100% user own
with all. The prophets flowing to the
community. Not a corporation.
The launch of Talley 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 we should be in your ideal wallet?
Noise. You currently about your wallet
that you're using. Well, try tally and join the
community on Discord. Their Community calls to feature
a new partner each week and have about 500 unique joining, you
get all the info you need at tally dot.
Cash. Kevin.
Thanks so much for joining us. Once again today.
It's we're just checking earlier, and it's been since
like, we lost have joined in 2018.
It was like right after get coin, grants launched.
So yeah. Thanks for coming back on.
Yeah, it's great to be here. It's been a been a couple years,
which is, as we all know, a lifetime and in the crypto
space, but yeah, giggling grunts 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.
I mean, get coin has just grown so much since the last three
years and it's become such a like, a pillar in the theorem
Community. Tell us a bit about, you know,
your personal Journey since we last spoke and sort of, you
know, try to summarize, you know, the last three years of
your life and, you know, sort of the trajectory of get coin.
Totally. Yeah.
Yeah, we've been really lucky turns out.
There's a lot of people out there who want to get coins.
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 this is not a business model for it because the code is
available for free. In fact, I think the number was
five hundred four hundred 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, 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 Coast 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 is have
deepened. So, yeah, it's just kind of been
really staying anchored to that mission of building, and funding
open source, software, and 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 super proud of the Impact
that we've had so far, but you know 50 million dollars is
great. But like I said, four hundred
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.
Quit, can you maybe give us a little bit deeper?
Look into the step. So, basically, how many
different projects have received funding through they currently
do to. They usually come back every
every round or they one-offs. And I mean, so how many people
in total have benefited, how many have have given to get
coin? And yeah, sure.
Well, yeah, I direct the audience to get coin dot Coast
loss results, which is our open stats page.
We like to be as transparent as possible with the stats.
And the total is 65,000. Funders 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 account, says
they've stood Anonymous identities and their 1.7
million. Complete transactions, over the
course of the last several years.
So, um, you know, I'm most proud of projects like you NE Swap and
you're in Aunt using get coined during the last bear Market when
funding had really dried up get coin, grants had become a place
where people could get get funding during the bear market.
And I'm really proud to have us supporting public goods like,
while it connects and Prismatic labs and Nimbus, the eith
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 all in total, there's about 1,000 get coins.
Grants that return every round and 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 get coin, because
there's such a density of funding on get 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 get coin, grants
your, it's a crowdfunding platform where the median
transaction is one dollar. And so it's a great way for for
you know, for project raises from 3000 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 you
wanna swap now has a grants project.
So it's a great way for newer projects to get momentum in the
space by doing crowdfunding on. Get congrats.
What's the measure of success here?
Like you were talking earlier about the size of like, the open
source market? At least value that it creates.
Like, how are you tracking? The success of get coin in the
sort of broader 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. 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 Booter.
And in one of his reviews of get 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. 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
either by quitting their corporate jobs and working on
web 3 or coming straight out of school.
If you're a student and working straight away on web 3, and it's
a little bit hard to track that. Is we don't know exactly what
people's employment are. We don't have a good data source
for that, but anecdotally, walking around it ECC.
And he's Denver. I get approached by dozens of
people who tell me o, get coin, open decks door for me or why
door for me. And it always feels great to
have those moments where you've, infected the trajectory of
someone's career. And that's, that's the metric
that that I optimize for. So let's talk about quadratic
quadratic funding. So where did the idea come from?
And how does it work? Yes, o quadratic funding is
basically an idea from Glen while who's the author of
radical markets and the talaq butyrin who people may know is
the founder of the etherium and Zoe hit Sig.
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, It. So if the three of us all
running a grant on get coin and my grant got $100 from one,
contributor, and y'alls. Grant got $100 from 100.
Contributors. Then, your Grant would get,
like, 97% of the matching funds because it R optimizing for the
preferences of the poor, and the many instead of the rich in 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 rich few.
And so that's why it 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 find
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
dollars. So the match multiples, get
quite insane. Once the matching pools, get
big. And the Project's get a high
number of contributors and that's what gets people over the
free rider problem of contributing on get coin grants.
So I'm 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 contribute based off the number of contributors
instead of the amount funded and that creates more democracy
pushes power to the edges in ecosystem, fun.
Ending. So get coin.
Grants is primarily doing quadratic funding on a main
ethereum matching pool right now the last matching pool and
grants round 12 in December 20, 21 was a million dollars, but
now we've started to add these little adjacent fools for Eunice
pop 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 grandson, get coin. And I just run a really quickly
say. I know that are in McMillan was
on your podcast recently and he's running CLR fund, which is
another really promising, quadratic funding project out
there. And I'm a friend of our ends.
And and I think that there's multiple implementations of qf,
get coin, just happens to be the biggest in the earliest.
So, how do you become super resistant?
I mean, what, what stops people from making multiple accounts
and 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, this thing called civil resistance, which
basically is sock puppet resistance in that example, I
gave earlier, which was, I have a grant where I've raised a
hundred dollars from one contributor and you to have
raised $100 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 pool 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 a more one, human one vote type systems and
so it's an unsolved problem. Our Approach at get coin is too.
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 get coin. And our approach is to aggregate
civil resistance, indicators from proof of humanity, from
Bright ID, from identi, from a bunch of different projects that
are doing really amazing work in creating these Web of trusts in
order to create civil resistance and we aggregate all of those
signals and we are price assign a personhood score to each
person on the get coin Network. And basically the idea there is
that the person had score is just the cost of forgery of each
identity. So if I integrate 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 For Humanity, Chris $200 worth of civil
resistance. Right?
So you can give $200 worth of the matching pool to someone
who's contributed based off of 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 it's an unsolved
problem. I would not represent that we
have solved it but get coin. Grants is actually one of the
largest data sets in finding and sniffing out Sybil rings and
channeling. That information back to proof
of humanity and bright ID is what Bitcoin Dow and the fraud
Defense work stream has been working on over the last several
rounds. So it is an unsolved problem and
I would not represent that we have totally solved but we were
trying to be responsible and allocating the capital such that
the fraud taxes low and the big end game here is that get
congrats on its face. If you look at it looks like a
crowd funding experiment and funding public goods, but if you
look at if you turn it on its side, it's actually a giant red
team blue team. Is in sniffing out Sybil attacks
and finding new ways of proving 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. One vote is Hook.
The hopeful eventual outcome of all of this.
So 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, get kind of
distributes money to different projects by this mechanism, but
where does the money come from in the first place?
Sure. Yeah, we distribute money aren't
my my marketing lead has been coaching these like say that
people are getting coins on get coin.
So that's like the inverse of Distributing muddy on on get
coin. The yeah, so people are getting
coins from this matching fund. That that basically has been set
up at first by the etherium foundation and what the etherium
foundation wanted when they started engaging with get coin,
grants was well, a vitalik wanted to something that.
Typed in the real world, this paper of quadratic funding that
he wrote with Glenn, just like doesn't even fly.
Like does this thing even take off her to just explode on the
launch pad? Luckily.
The answer is that it does fly. And the basically what the
etherium foundation wanted was a more organic decentralized way
of allocating funding in their community.
So the if grants team 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. Because we can do thousands of
Grants on get coin, via the matching pool.
Where as 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 1 through 6.
We run these grounds every quarter rounds 1 through 6, get
coin, grants was funded by the ethereum foundation and then a
really interesting thing happened in the summer of 2020
defies summer, Andre from urine. Finance which I don't know if
y'all remember defies summer, but Andre was like the ultimate
Chad during defy summer because he had just launched urine and
fair launched it and gave it all away.
And he announced that he was giving 150k to, the get coin,
grants matching pool and funding, get coin, grants around
7:00. And I think over the next 24
hours. I raised maybe like 1.5 million
dollars just on Twitter. DM s-- because everyone wanted
to do it. Andre was doing it was defy
summer and he was the ultimate Alpha nerd and so we had this
like it. Students are this like this
phase change where we went from being funded, by the ethereum
foundation to being funded by the defy projects that were
taking off in the etherium space and now had these large
treasuries and some of them are even alumni of get coin grants.
Like you're in finance, raised running the bear Market through
Bitcoin, grants. We see this like people
graduating into becoming alumni of git clone 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 ethereal.
Um, space come work at urine or Yuna swap or chain link has been
an amazing funder for us. Badger Finance has done some
really great stuff for us. And so we call this the funders
league, it's a group of projects that is now funding, the
ethereum ecosystem, that our alumni of get clean grants and
and and so that's rounds. So we've done 12 rounds of your
clan grants. One through six, with the
etherium foundation 7 through 10, where the defy projects and
then around Evan and FTS were taking off and so me and my
buddy, Austin Griffith launched this pfp project called moonshot
Bots, which are like these little pixelated robots that we
put them on a bonding curve and we just had a hundred percent of
the money to public goods. We raised three million dollars
for the the batching pool, which is just like I just can't
believe how successful that campaign was funding public
goods with then FTS. And the crazy thing is that the
moonshot bats have been live on the get coin side on the avatar.
Builder for like two years and no one cared until they were at
of T's. So there's something like
there's like, you know, like those clickbait articles were
there like do x with one weird trick?
It was like, fun, public goods with one, weird trick, and if T,
is, were a new way of funding public goods.
So, so that's another way that we've been funding the matching
pool, and then we just announced this thing called get coin
aquaducts, which is basically, like, you know, an ancient Rome
Aqueduct for a way of carrying liquidity from one location to
another. I get 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 a
quadratic funding rounds for your ecosystem.
If you set up an aqueduct to the matching pool forget coin.
So a typical split is like 60, 40 60 percent of those funds
will be used to build your ecosystem and 40% will be used
for the ethereum main round. And and so an aqueduct is is a
way of funding Bitcoin. Grants, but also, if you're a
defrag project that's looking for more Bottoms Up organic
growth than quadratic funding is like the magic way to do that.
So aquaducts our way of doing it.
Anyway, tldr answer to your question.
At first. It was the ethereum foundation,
then it was all the defy projects then it was in FTS.
Now. It's aquaducts.
We're basically trying to innovate in find new ways of
funding public goods at get coin.
That's the other side of the coin.
And right now the matching pool has on the order of like 10 or
12 million dollars in it. So even if the It 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 is as much as we can. And yeah, I'd love to talk about
get coined 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 they're doing a really
amazing job of staying ahead of keeping the matching pool
funded. That's really impressive.
Yeah, thanks for. Thanks for explaining how the
quadratic funding mechanism Works in detail.
I'm so earlier were talking about the the metrics, the
metrics by which you measure the success of get coin.
And one of the things that I think a lot about when you
considering the success of like these new Innovative use cases
that crypto has enabled. Like how much of that has leaked
into the In crypto world and you were also talking about just the
amount of value that's created in open source software.
How much how much of that are you seeing like, how is the is
the quadratic funding model or the get coin model starting to
leak into other areas of Open Source, software that aren't
necessarily crypto focused. And is there an aspect of get
coins success and that has to be specific to crypto in the
projects that the that is funding in the fact that there's
sort of intrinsic economic value inside those projects in a form
of tokens or whatever. I guess.
My question is, does get coin and quadratic funding 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 etherium ecosystem.
Then we could back Port, those two other other digital public
goods. And then we could back Port,
those two 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 your
question Sebastian is that I we haven't proven it out and I
don't think that we really know. No yet, but there are some early
promising signs during coronavirus when downtown, but
I'm from Colorado and downtown Boulder.
Colorado, was just shuttered after the coronavirus pandemic,
when everything went into lockdown and we got together
with Katie Johnson and Zach Herring who are two of my
compatriots from consensus. My consensus days.
We've since spun out of consensus, but Katie and and
zakhar 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.
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 of, no, not
even crypto in the back and we raised 50 50 thousand dollars
for for businesses in downtown Boulder, and I'm really proud to
say that we had Words of contributions from people who
weren't even on email lists. We're kind of like not even
comfortable with with digital experiences, like just this like
an e-commerce flow is is, you know, it's a 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 prototype to that.
We've not done another downtown stimulus because Bitcoin needed
to focus on the ethereum space, but I'm proud that we 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 twenty Twenty-One get coin got
together with open Collective, which is a prominent web to open
source funding tool and launched fund OSS dot-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 Hundred k for the web to open source ecosystem.
So 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 funding public goods, you know, then to be clear.
It's Glenn and metallics 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 web three ecosystem, in the dock,
porting them to the real world and I am my big hope is that get
coin is just kind of like the tip of the sphere, what we do in
the etherium ecosystem. We're actually launching this,
this grants protocol, which is like an infinitely for cable
version of get coin. Grants and my big dream is that
people take it and they go fund digital journalism ecosystems,
or they go fund, climate change, or they go fund their
downtown's. And I think that like, Oppie
what we're doing in the ethereum ecosystem and let's let a
thousand experiments Blossom and funding public goods elsewhere.
In the ecosystem is, is kind of what I would hope that get coins
Legacy is when I look back on it in 10 or 20 years, and there's
early signs that it that it's going to 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 real.
We need to solve that. We need to solve the problem of
how we fund these matching pools at scale.
And, and those are the largest unsolved problems that I've got
my sights set on. Right now is scaling this thing
and bringing it to New verticals.
So we don't the the tldr answer is 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, they're especially, I think in the
crypto space where there are like VC funds and companies and
doubts that have gotten maybe in that order.
You know, that I've gotten quite quite quite wealthy from from
crypto and you know, arguably lots of the portfolio companies
of ECS and like even the companies that they fund
themselves also have gotten quite wealthy are using open
source technology and It's a challenge in getting more
funding coming from these organizations.
And how do we sort of like? Encourage 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 giggling.
Grants were funded like for 6 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 their
project. And I'm just so heartened to see
that as the community gets more rich, as the ethereum ecosystem
advances, that their funding get coin grants and I do think that,
you know, it really that, you know, a naive approach to the
Crypto space might be that low. It's all D Jen's and it's all
selfishness. And and and I just don't think
that that's true. I see us as the tip of the
sphere for regenerative crypto economics and the type of people
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 space is, 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 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 show
people that it does work. That you can have positive some
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
there are mechanisms for making the world better and for making
these ecosystems better and You know the big the big challenge
is that if there's a giant hack actually I'll just adjust the
openssl bug that happens in 2013.
There's this bug called heartbeat heart bleed which
basically openssl was dumping the openssl runs every SSL
connection on on the internet, the little lock in your browser.
That shows you your website is secure as openssl and the
openssl foundation runs on less than a million dollars per year
in donations and just contract work.
And there was a bug and 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 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 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. I think that I'm so lucky that
vitalik Booter, and who's the alpha nerd of the etherium
ecosystem cares? So much about public goods and
that creates a social sort of consensus that funding public
goods is cool and it UPS your sort of Like social status to
fund public goods. And I think we want to create
that kind of like that social hierarchy where people were
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, you know, I
think that in the etherium ecosystem where the 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
will need a flan therapist or like the government to fund, a
quadratic funding matching pool and those types of communities.
But at least in the ethereum ecosystem, 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 Am I who gave money
for the matching pool? In downtown stimulus.
I went to I went to a couple, wealthy Venture capitalists /
funders that have either invested in get coin invested in
my past projects or the just that I've known for a decade and
they were funding the matching pool Brad Feld.
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 the good coin, grants matching
pool funded some of it. And in the fund.
S case po Mancini has been building web to 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 members of the get coin, grants funders
League, that funded the matching pool.
So it was just kind of leveraging, my reputation and
the get coins 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 yeah, that's how we solved it
in the past. But I think in the future more
systematic model is probably needed if we're going to scale
these things. I want to, I want to come back
to the public good funding aspect for a moment and sort of
the parallels that I see between like open source public goods
and so, like, physical public goods.
So like, you know, I think the Heartbleed example is a great
example of underfunded software that is really under painting
like the entire internet infrastructure.
And like, you know, if you look at say a country like the United
States, where it's generally, accepted that the infrastructure
there is falling apart. Like, you know, lots of A 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 that
infrastructures fall, starting to fall apart.
I had this one of your blog post.
You had this like really cool kind of illustration of like all
the blocks that build up to like, you know, that web three
wallet that you're using or whatever.
And like underneath it. It's all just like, live P2P,
and TCP IP. But so is there a risk that at
some point like are are, you know, core internet
infrastructure which by It was funded like very much, bye-bye,
governments like you but US Government through the second
half of the 20th century. Is there a risk that that
infrastructure starts falling apart because of lack of
funding? Or, you know, is it stable
enough or do you like what what's the risks here that come
into play with regards to like this kind of fundamental core
infrastructure, whether it's, you know, 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 it.
The top of it is like your bags, you know, like all of your
crypto assets that you rely on or just funded by this, this,
these, this like hodgepodge of Open Source projects 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 to your question is that we're,
you know, people are talking about the metaverse a lot.
The in the ecosystem, you know since duck launched meta and
there's a big question about will you know is is the
infrastructure of the metaverse going to be own free and open
source? And is it going to be a public
good? Or is it all going to be like
Facebook's infrastructure? And, you know, and like the
endgame there is like are we all going to be stuck being tracked
by Zuck and like have ads everywhere in the meta verse
versus is it going to be more of like a public good, where you
own your digital experience in a world increasingly?
Created 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 society, that encourages human
fruit, humid, thriving, and human flourishing that we want
to have a world in which the software that intermediates are
experiences in the metaverse is free and open and that you can
Fork it if you disagree with that.
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 Humanities
experiences are intermediated by software and I want that to be
free and open source software. So, you know, that's one angle
on it. I think that that's one reason
why it's important to fund our digital infrastructure.
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 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 design, which is a very elegant and anti
fragile protocol, it really it says 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, you know, there was a
sense of civic pride in my grandparents and and great
parents generation in which they're building digital.
Structure after WWII, and I really hope to see a reprisal of
that around global citizenship and 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, hippy dippy side right here.
But, but I do think that there's a strong rationalist case for
funding public goods, and digital infrastructure.
But I in the 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. Is like climate change and
digital infrastructure and cyber attacks and all this kind of
stuff. And so the world that I want to
live in is one where we've solved those coordination
failures, but I think that we have to create a social
consensus and internet, 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 kind of determined, there
has to be some consensus on this and then basically, then you
need to the fans and you need to distribute the funds and so on.
But actually, and I mean to combat This problem I think
sometime last year vitalik published a blog post about
retroactive funding, right? So basically so that would
basically allocate funding after the end has already been
achieved and what that's make make funding these in the first
place, a little bit of a venture game kind of It kind of like to
interest like the the the crowd that Actually has pretty good
experience at funding very risk groups.
Yes startups and other Ventures. Yeah.
So what do you make of this? Well, 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 openssl. 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 ten million dollar or a hundred
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 Expecting that that outcome, 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 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 realize in the quadratic funding is just
one tool in the tool belt. There's plenty of other really
great ways to fund the comments and to fund public goods.
And I Envision this core primitive of an impact owl,
which creates positive externalities for the world.
And if we just stack impact out on impact.
Ow, then we're going to create more and more public goods
funding and some of them will have their mechanism will be
retroactive public goods funding and other of them.
It'll be quadratic funding and then there will be other
mechanisms like proof of humanity, I think as an impact,
ow, 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 quite
the magic of quadratic funding. Is that it doesn't matter what
me, Kevin iwaki. The original founder of get
coins, 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 etherium community that is represented on get coin.
So it's not my opinion. That's that's represented.
We're just building a more perfect Channel 4.
For valued signal value signals, to be to be created.
And so I think it's like when you stack all of those impact
owls 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 the 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 supported is the infrastructure that I think
is being built in this space. And that's what makes me really
bullish for regenerative crypto economics.
Let's talk about impact dollars and regenerative crypto
economic. So you've actually said impact,
I was several times now. Kevin, so now, explain it,
please. Yeah, so, um, basically an
impact Au is any doubt that has a positive externality for
Humanity and I think that, that can be on many vectors like, get
coins positive impact, is that it creates public goods funding
proof of Humanity's positive impact is that it creates civil
resistance in the ecosystem climate, how, which is a dowel
that's working on making sure that carbon credits are
well-funded. It's positive externality is
more pressure on carbon more. Incentive to create carbon
capture mechanisms, which hopefully means more carbon
capture and solves climate change.
So, impact Au is just the load 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 your see. 20 years
E20 is this token standard that you can build a utility token
on. You can build a governance
token. You could build Securities on
top of your C, 20. And it's just that's the lowest
common denominator of how you create a token impact.
Owl is just the lowest common denominator of any doubt that
creates a positive externality for the world.
And the reason why it's important to Define that is that
if you've got a stack of impact, owls of which there are already
dozens, 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 crypto.
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 create.
In a regenerative crypto economic infrastructure for the
world and that is my hope that the legacy of the crypto
economic. 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 a 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 three. Is this like it's just a ton of
like high upside for Humanity if we continue to stack impact.
On top of each other and, and create that infrastructure for
the world. And I'm just really bullish to
see all of this starting to come together.
Kevin. Let's make this more concrete.
So, basically there's also this book that you co-authored with a
couple of people, the green pill book.
So basically, it talks about regenerative crypto comics and
it's actually, it's a really, I don't want to say, it's a read
because there's a lot of pictures in it.
It's very, it's very fast reader.
I mean, it's very information, very idea dense, but basically,
see the recurring theme of that book is combating coordination
failures, right? So check and basically the these
impact douse, those are means of doing so.
So can we give us examples of where in the in the world we
live in, we see coordination failures and how they basically
fail us as Humanity. Yeah, real quick plug for the
book created a book. That's really, like, as you
said, a quick read and basically Aggregates much smarter people
than me, the metallics of the world, the biology's of the
world. The Glenn Wiles of the world
takes, there's I, their ideas and puts them in a very
comprehensible format for people who are entering the space and
want to solve regenerative crypto economics.
And I'm standing on the shoulders of giants by exporting
the the ideas of Michael's argaman, Glenn while and all
these people to the world. And, you know, as you said the
Is an aggregation of other people's ideas and I would not
be there without them. But to actually answer your
question coordination failures are any situation in which
there's a dictator list dystopia a system in which every single
person hates the system, but for lack of a better mechanism for
coordination, it indoors. So another an example of that it
that's more tangible than say, open source is let's like an
over overfishing example. Oh, so basically like if the
three of us are all sitting around a lake and we can all
make a thousand dollars actually know it this is a podcast about
crypto so we can all make a thousand die per month by
fishing out of that pond, but one of us can make a thousand
and five hundred die by overfishing.
That pond in 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 ever you individuals
individual Is to overfish the pond.
And the rational economic behavior is to is to over fish
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 all.
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 dictator list distopia
in which each of us, hates that system.
But for lack of a better coordination mechanism, it
indoors that's like a game theoretic.
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 fly across the world and do business.
And we externalize harm to the world.
We all have a rational economic incentive to free ride on open
source software, despite the burden that that places on our
digital infrastructure and on open source software maintainers
and for lack of a better coordination mechanism and
indoors. Well, now we've got a global
Transparent immutable, programmable substrate for human
coordination etherium Cosmos, you know, all of these different
blockchains. So now, we've got a guy like
this, this amazing substrate for for coordination, where we can
build these coordination games, and solve coordination failures
by creating these coordination games.
And so, the endgame 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 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 young people who are maybe lacking
hope or maybe lacking education about how we can solve these
coordination failures in it. And I see this like, I hope that
30 years from. Now, this is the legacy of the
web three ecosystem is that we bootstrapped this decentralized
Finance thing, but maybe that was just the boot loader for a
more regenerative infrastructure for Humanity.
Term. And you know, I know you asked
me for tangible example, 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, which can be used for funding downtown's, that are
affected by covid, or funding, digital infrastructure, or
funding journalism. 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.
They just live off of proof of humanity and Ubi and that
creates better circumstances for them locally.
I think climb a dowel in the fact that they have are using
crypto economics to create more demand.
For carbon credits is an amazing example of using aetherium to
solve climate change and and you know, by the way, when proof of
stake happens and we're all of a sudden using Nine, point nine,
nine percent less energy. There's gonna 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, 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 hundreds of tangible examples.
At that point. Yeah, that'd be great.
I mean certainly hopefully it will help you on before that.
But I'd like to talk about. So earlier you mentioned that
you were a member of the of the get coin.
Dow U is you know Express that you didn't want to be called the
CEO of the cake going down and that's fine.
I think we could just call you like some guy in the get going
down. Yeah.
Citizen internet citizen, right? Yeah.
What. So, what's the like, you know,
you know, it seems natural for get going to transform into a
doubt. But tell us a bit about that
process and like, what is the, what is the vision here for the
Dow? Totally.
Um, well I made a big mistake when I first started coin, which
is that we made it centralized to start and, you know, the
tools didn't really exist back then to make it into a dour make
it. Do you watch for the disgust of
the people on Twitter who were responding to the, my question
of what we should talk about? Yeah.
I mean like, hand like hand to the air, if you're watching the
video, see my hand in the air like I plead guilty.
We built it centralized like I'm guilty.
I'm I'm sorry. I wish I hadn't done that.
Also, 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 funding
infrastructure for a decentralized ecosystem or for a
decentralized world. And, you know, I think that the
ecosystem deserves credible neutrality, the deserve to know
that I'm not the ones with my hands on the lever of governance
of get coin and that the community should be in charge of
the governance of get coin. And so the launch of get coin,
Dow 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 get coin or I
like to say it stands for grow the community.
And, and basically, the idea is, we are returning an apple into
an orange right now. We are turning a centralized
company into a dow or at least returning the grants portion of
our assets into in to get coins Owl.
And the whole idea is basically that No company should own this
infrastructure is should be a credibly neutral doll.
That's governed by the community that it serves.
And that was the idea behind get coin dowel.
We launched it on May 25th 2021, which is a day that will change
the trajectory of get coin forever.
We draw we dropped 18 GTC to 18,000 different members of the
community, and basically allowed them to delegate to different
members of the get coin Community to what we called
stewards. So basically there's a big
problem. Of 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
get coin that when they first got there, there tokens, which I
think was an Innovative way of making sure there was 100%
consent of the governed, you know, other dials have like
three to five percent voter turnout, get coins out regularly
gets 80, or 90 percent voter turnout, because we've got
these, like, delegated people, stewards that are aggregating,
the End of the governed in participating in governance
votes. And so that was like our primary
Innovation on governance for for Bitcoin.
Dow was making. It was having that delegation
layer that was 100% represented at the start in DNS.
Has since copied our dowel delegation mechanism.
I'm very proud to have pushed the space forward and very like
one small way there. But yeah, anyway, so we've
decentralized the governance of get coin Dow and the surface
area of that governance will increase as we launch a credibly
neutral protocol. For quadratic funding and move
all over 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, but yeah, so decentralized governance, then
decentralized the computation in 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, yeah, tldr can't have a centralized.
Terry 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.
Now. I'm afraid to check the Twitter
thread. I'm probably getting hated on
for being centralized know. Most of the most of the most
responses were really, really positive, and 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 there, 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 the current system of governance
that we have like 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 recently in the
recently in the cosmos Community.
Like there was this kind of uproar about like some
governance votes that you may have been influenced by like
some committee members Etc. And I think we see this thing
once On the crypto space, there are other solutions to this.
Like how do we get people more engaged?
Like I'd be like a simple thing could just be like you get a you
get a notification on your phone.
There's something that's a vote on you just like vote on it
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. 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 expand the mental computational Cycles to
understand the problem into vote, which like, you know,
you're sitting there laying like watching Netflix and you get a
notification that have to vote on something like, uh, like
another thing for my to-do list, so, I don't know, like I think
it's an unsolved problem and I'm supportive of seeing people
innovate on. A problem.
The important thing for me was that the the communities consent
of the consent of the governed from like political theory is
the only legitimate basis for for governance as opposed to
like, the divine right of kings which is what you know in like
old like old times where the legitimacy of the government
came from. And and I do think that you
know, these web three networks that like get coin is 100%
giggling. 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 quadratic
voting, which is basically more of a one human one boat 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 and
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, which is
that every time you do a contribution on get going 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 grads. It just doesn't feel like voting
every time you give a one dollar contribution in $500 more of the
matching pool goes to a project because of it like we tricked
you your governing, how the matching pool is distributed.
They're so these systems where there's robust signal already
being generated that you can take that signal and channel it
into a governance mechanism. Is hopefully an aggregation of
the preferences of the community that is being governed.
And I think that those are really elegant ways of creating
governance, experiment that like didn't exist in a ski morphic
old world type way. So I guess tldr.
I hear your criticisms, but I think that delegations better
than what we had in web to, I think quadratic Voting is a way
to improve on that, and I also think that robust signal
generation in like the get coin. Grants example is another
meaningful experiment and I hope to see a hundred experiments
Blossom, that, that improve the ability for the consent of the
governed to be expressed, in a digital way.
And that's the challenge of Our Generation.
I think is upgrading democracy to be high bandwidth for the
Next Generation. I think that that's, that's like
really one of the hugest levers that to make the Better for Gen
Z and gen Alpha. Is they inherit the world that
we can do? Thank you.
That was they were super enlightening.
I have one more question that kind of ties in with the last
couple of topics before we unfortunately have to rap and
that's the future of work. So basically, if you look at the
way that get coin grants and the good coin dowel kind of, do it
out work to different people. So how does this kind of tie in
with the notion of the internet of jobs that you have publicised
elsewhere? And how How does it
differentiate itself from from the concept of a gig economy?
I think 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 are in the listeners Minds.
So, basically, in the internet of money, we have now created
the ability for computers to send value across the computer
network, and I think that's really exciting because it
really 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 to preview of
how this is going to alert gonna 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 the
computer network, and it follows from first principles that we're
going to rewrite. Right how the banking system
works, which is defy, how art auctions work, which is n ftes.
But no one everyone sleeping on. What is the future of work with
within and and I think that we're all kind of like the
internet of jobs is basically the design space that I think
happens when 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 Achtung technology and web, three era systems
around data storage and distributed computation and
dowels and in digital reputation.
I think is an important thing here that I think digital
reputation is foundational because when I want to make,
like, you can't have like, a trust list interaction with like
an Uber driver. Like, when I want to have, when
I want to hire someone to take me somewhere, then I need an
assurance that they're not a creep and they're going to get
me there safely. And And and I think that there's
like reputation is a big part of how we do value transfer in, in
our lives in am 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
Uber example is like a very rudimentary example, but
because, because I only really care if it's like, they're gonna
get me there safely and and quickly.
But on get coin. When I hire a software engineer,
I want to know, like do Because same language is me.
Are they in the same time zone? Do they speak the same
programming? Language is, do they have like a
bunch of like communication or like emotional problems.
Are they reliable? Do they produce a good code?
Are they gonna ghost me? Like there's this many more
vectors and I think that reputation matters a lot, and
the way I see this as different than the gig economy is like,
the gig economy is what jobs look like, if you just like bolt
and internet of jobs on Fiat rails, but now that we have this
like open source. Mission list blockchain
technology to program. The way we do value transfer
with each other. There's going to be non
skeuomorphic 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 and and
in like I think a great example of that is coordinate, which is
basically a tool where everyone in a dowel 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.
I think paying people in governance rights is another
really great example of a non ski morphic internet of jobs
thing that didn't exist in the gig economy.
If I pay you in dollars then like see 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 with me and in many, many different forms.
And so the design space of Internet of jobs is just
basically what happens when money, the internet of money
collides with a society that it earns their living as opposed,
to mix 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. What blockchains to go
mainstream. Then you need to invest in
dowels in the internet of jobs because that's like people
don't. People are going to work on the
financial are going to use the apps that have the financial use
cases that they care about that, they solve for their job to be
done. And and so I think that's what
the internet of jobs is. And I predict that an upcoming
cycle will be around dowels 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,
the A net of value is Reinventing everything in
society that has to do with value transfer, and jobs has to
do with value transfer. So, just follows from first
principles to me, that will 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 difference is that
you have in lined incentives. I think that's one of the main
differences in that and the reputational aspect.
I think plays a huge role to, you know, reputation is
something that's been notoriously hard to figure out
on, you know, digit in the digital world, especially I
think in the crypto world. And I think that a lot of people
looking at reputation, at least from my vantage point, as it,
like an objective measure of like some data points that you
can get from like, No, get commits, or like, you know, how
long you've staked and something or like these sort of very
objective measures but reputation is about so much more
than that. It's about.
Like there's all the subjective aspect as well.
You were 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. 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 refugee the the objective things that we can
objectively look at and measure you.
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 in the crypto space or is it like a coordination problem?
That's goes beyond the scope of decentralized reputation, 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 know.
So I mean, I'll take that your questions in reverse order.
We like so I think we should move from trying to find the
complete. Irrationally 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 objectivity is a
false idol, though. We want to create an
intersubjective consensus of what multiple people think,
from, multiple, Vantage points. And that is, I think, like, once
we write widen the aperture of design to intersubjective
consensus, to just like, totally from totally objective, then I
think that that is really Really what the Holy Grail is.
Like, the your reputation is the sum of what people think of you
around you. That's intersubjective
consensus. And by the way, the inner
subjective seek 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 to not like no,
we could solve it. Like that's the inner subjective
consensus. I'm trying to create and then
the last point I want to make before I kick it back to you as
like, who owns the infrastructure is a really big
problem here, in a gig economy up.
Work and Linkedin own all of our reputation data and and
everything. And who owns the infrastructure
and 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 up
were taking 10% of my of my fucking paycheck every month,
like fuck that. And in the fact that LinkedIn
their whole business model is taking your reputation data and
selling it to recruiters Reid Hoffman makes Thirty billion
dollars per year off of your fucking day.
Data, it's bullshit and wet. That's the one of the big
differences between the internet of jobs in the big economies
that we're going to all own our reputation data and take it from
from place to place to place. But anyway, yeah, to actually
answer the question. You asked me intersubjective
consensus over objective measures, I think is where we're
going. Hmm.
And what one thing, they also contain the mine here in
researching this and so, like, reading your writings on the
internet, a job aspect is, you know, what?
Maybe some of the negative aspects Moving in this
direction, as opposed to the sort of traditional employment
model that affords, people stability, sort of long-term
benefits as well such as Retirement or life insurance.
And, you know, it's of immediate things like like healthcare.
Is this something that can be adapted to the internet of jobs
model that are we going to start seeing Dow's offering like
retirement savings plans, and And Health Care like health care
packages for its members. Yeah, that's an extremely
important question. And I think that it's one of the
things that really keeps me up at night is how much of our
Legacy like the Industrial Age infrastructure, how much social
safety net stuff is globbed on to jobs because there's not
another better coordination mechanism for it.
I have a family and I want to 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 grabbed onto jobs in the
old world. I'm really excited by what
obelus is doing in basically creating a bridge between the
internet of jobs. And these social safety things.
We're basically, what they do is they create a corporation that
you work for that. You get 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 Real world. And so, 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 saved for education and
hopefully Reinventing education by the way, so that it's not
just like, you know, 45 thousand dollars per year to get an
education at a college. I think that, you know, the
there's a ton of debt that's Club Dogs, the old system and I
think the unwinding that for the next generation is really
important but like the more macro many parts of the world
where We have this. So basically, I mean this is
this is a very u.s. Centric point of view, right?
So basically, I'm jamming. I went to, I went to, I got a
perfectly good, egg education here.
I went to University and II did not pay anything, actually.
Basically, if you go to university and your parents
don't have enough money to, to fund your, to fund your living
costs. You just get a loan from the
government, you have to pay back half at zero interest and it's
capped at I think. Thousand Euros.
So 16 as though basically, I mean, I mean this is this is its
in parts of the word this exists, right?
So basically it shows that it's not a huge Hopi envisioned.
It can be done and in many parts of the world it is totally.
Yeah and I'll just note that I am an imperfect vessel for a lot
of these conversations. But what we did do is we just
created an intersubjective consensus like you from Europe
and B 4. America about what this could
look like. 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 what
it looks like as well. But I guess like one last thing
I'll say is that you know, like one of the things I think that
the grit, the big risks of this spaces, that if you build the
optimal sick, 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 don't know what you do then other than you know invest
in education and risk management and social safety nets from an
infrastructure level. And then you get into
complicated questions about like should be 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 values that are like I haven't, I haven't worked out
that part. Of the equation.
Yeah, so the that's because there's a kind of my thoughts on
the subject but I think that it's an unsolved problem.
Yeah, and they're certainly like some non skeuomorphic, you know,
like Paradigm shifts that that are meant to happen there.
So, you know, if you know that does this does funding education
in 20 years from now, like if you're working for a doubt like,
you know, does that look the same as what it looks like?
Now just saving for retirement. Look the same like, you know,
Health Care. Whereas Like that.
I mean that's also there's also different levels here.
Right? I mean, to, basically there's
things that kind of pertain to yourself and your own future,
but saving for Education, typically actually pertains to
your kids, futures, or at least, you know, the younger
generation, so I feel like 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 one of the, the sort of ideas that's in the
book, which I originally got from UNC strickler.
The founder of Kickstarter, is this idea of Bento is?
MM, which is how do we move from a financial system that
prioritises instant gratification to, which is now
me, 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, and then the other Your 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 4 by 4 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, 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 that's just
like a lens that you could look through the design of Ridge
regenerative crypto economics. And in like, by the way, you
like it, be hard to do worse than the old, find it 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 earning cycle.
And, you know, I think it'd be hard to do worse than that in
the crypto ecosystem. Hopefully, we can build better
Primitives for coordination, that can plan.
Further out for existential risks, that don't fit into the
quarterly. The quarterly cycle likes a
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 in the accept. Accept it in not question.
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?
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 are no-brainers.
I mean, No one should go hungry, when obviously in principle,
there's enough to eat. Right?
So all of these things that that that kind of, that's there are
no brainers. When you explain them to kids,
somehow we still get used to them and we don't question them
everyday. So, how do you think we?
We avoid Mora fatigue? That's a really great question.
I think the first thing I'll say is that, you know, arguably were
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 we've inherited?
But the other thing that I'll say is that, I'm my really my
goal for forget, coin is to build a channel that greater
combinations of intelligence and strength can come together.
And this is actually a key point, that Well, you know, it's
not my values that like, I don't want the thing that causes that,
I believe in to be to be the ones that are funded.
I want to build the most perfect, the, the best rails for
expression of human values and for those combinations of
strength and intelligence to come together.
And so, my hope is that, by building this coordination
infrastructure 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, a like food and probably home in like the chance to
contribute to society and to be productive member of society.
Like my hope is that by building the rails through which Humanity
can express its preferences that we can 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 About
homelessness. They just don't have a good
coordination mechanism to solve it.
And that would be the bullish case for this.
This infrastructure and the bearish case would be 0.
We build the signaled 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 of the signal generation 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? So I see you want to say
something. Go ahead.
Yeah, but Kevin, do you think it's a signal thing because
basically I think I mean if you kind of change the context,
right? Say you go hiking 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. It.
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
is seeing a theme to downtown anywhere in the world.
People react fundamentally differently because they think
this is no longer their problem. They are no longer.
The only person who can solve it.
And basically, this is society's problem now, right?
So basically, I, I would kind of posit that basically there's
like this disconnect between personal morality and societal
morality that kind of absolves you from the human decency that
to kind of act and you step over that person.
And I'm yeah, so I'm not sure whether whether signaling is
actually the problem. You have a numbness of like the
lack of hope I think, is is a real problem.
So like, first, 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 have a house and a family and all the Those
hierarchies takes mostly taken care of.
And I think that we should not take that for granted.
And and I really feel that like deeply when I hear your question
asked, you know, when I wonder why we feel so numb in that
situation and any other, the question that comes to mind for
me. Is that in a hike?
In May it the way I would try to rationalize it and this may be
wrong, and it may be totally callous, even try to even try.
But I'm gonna 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 think that there's
many, many deep unfurled societal problems with
homelessness in cities which have to do with probably Social
City infrastructure. And by the way, this is worse in
America than it is for you all in Europe.
Probably mental health, education, drug abuse.
And these are systemic problems. That cannot be solved by giving
someone a sandwich. Like, you know, if someone's
just lost in the woods, I would presume there's less, there's
less systemic issues there and I do think that those systemic
issues behind the person in this city, which you know, may or may
not be right on an individual basis.
Our human coordination failures, and I do think that, you know,
we're kind of speculating here, but I do think that if you can
solve for the education and and the drug abuse, and the lack of
employment infrastructure and all that kind of stuff, then
there may be, 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 an appropriate for me to speculate about these
things from my my place of privilege.
Well, I think we'll leave that note to end on it.
But no, certainly this like been really fascinating discussions.
As taking us down. All kinds of rabbit holes.
It wasn't expecting it to get here.
But yeah, this is great. So where can people find out
more about the book, which is called green pill and and just
get involved with what you're doing.
Yeah. Thanks.
So you can Google me. I'm Kevin a walkie and the only
iwaki out there that I think that you'll find if you Google
that. And you can go to green pill dot
party. If you want to download a
digital version of the book, if any of your listeners are a
teeth Denver, then I will 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. 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.
Keven a pleasure, sounds good. Looking forward.
Thank you for joining us on this week's episode.
We release new episodes every week.
You can find And subscribe to the show on iTunes Spotify,
YouTube SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcast.
And if you have a Google home or Alexa device, you can tell it to
listen to the latest episode of the epicenter podcast.
Go to epicenter, .t V /, subscribe for a full list of
places where you can watch and listen, while you're there, be
sure to sign up for the newsletter.
You get new episodes in your inbox as they're released.
If you want to interact with us guests or other podcast
listeners, you can Follow us on Twitter and please leave us a
review on iTunes helps people find the show and we're always
happy to read them with. Thanks so much and we look
forward to being back next week.