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uh thank you so much for that introduction and it's really exciting to be here uh with you together live in person uh this is the third event in the funding the commons um series and the first two were virtual so it's
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really great to see the community come together uh in person uh i'm getting a little bit of feedback which makes it hard to talk so thank you that's not still there
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uh great so what i'm here to talk about is priorities for public goods builders in 2022. uh this is going to be a really critical year uh for public goods uh generation um and here at year i'm using
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you know starting from now through the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023. uh so what i'm going to go through is a case for why this year really matters and why this decade really matters in
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the century i'll then talk about crypto econ for solving planetary problems then i'll go into how funding the commons got started and what our impact so far has been
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i'll talk about some goals for the next year and then i'm going to talk about a few different kinds of mechanisms and experiments that people may want to try i'll try to conclude with some advice and thoughts for
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public goods builders out there that are trying to experiment with a lot of the tooling and hopefully this can be useful in generating a whole wave of wave of new things and new ideas and new new solutions
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so as i mentioned sorry the feedback is really like very distracting is there any way that we can decrease it i think a little bit lower uh test excellent thank you so much i really appreciate it
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um so as i was mentioning there's an extremely critical century um we are writing on um several centuries of extreme improvement uh in terms of all our global
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development across any single against most measures for human well-being um that we know to track um we're just getting this broad-based improvement uh worldwide of course there's all kinds of things that that um
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it's all kinds of problems exist in the world and there's all kinds of regressions along the way um and there's many things that are getting worse um but for most um for most indicators of human well-being uh the world is in a
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great trajectory and the last few centuries have been um a great direction uh however we're now confronted with a series of x-risks um or how uh david one of the
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researchers in the um in our team likes to put public bads in extreme public baths that we have to have to really avoid and these especially the ones that are human caused um
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present extreme challenges for us to get through and we we sort of control the speed at which we'll uh hit these uh but especially things like nuclear war and engineered pandemics and on ai
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uh those kinds of risks are um we're speeding well into those risks so it's extremely critical that we coordinate our species to to solve these on top of that there's this large-scale
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um phase transition that that we're going through as we invented computing and as that computing has evolved and developed over over the decades we've gotten to a point where we're starting to uh blend and merge with our
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with our computing systems in the next few decades uh when we look ahead uh to the next 80 years for the rest of the century um we're going to see the introduction of things like large-scale robotics robotic swarms augmented reality systems virtual
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reality systems brain computer interfaces that will break through the barrier between uh these screens and the internet and then and our brains and then we'll make ai systems that will be
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progressively and successfully more and more intelligent to the point where we're very likely to discover agi in this century many people are now estimating that this might actually
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happen in the next decade or two which is extremely alarming in terms of the degree of of a problem to solve here now to make matters a little bit more trickier the large-scale microsystems that we've
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been building and which have been responsible for our um the broad improvement and broad well-being for the last few centuries uh are starting to um strain are starting to get captured um
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and they're kind of inadequate for solving these kinds of challenges they're designed to go slowly they're designed to solve problems of a different era and they can't quite cope with problems of this magnitude of the
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magnet that we're encountering and the speed that we're encountering in the map so we need a new set of solutions we need new structures and we need new coordination mechanisms that can enable
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us to solve these extreme challenges and we need those coordination systems to scale to organize us at that scale at that macro worldwide scale now it's extremely difficult to build systems of
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that magnitude and of that quality and hope they go uh well the you know large last macro systems that we built took many iterations there were all kinds of mistakes made and they've progressively
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evolved into a much better structure um so it's a very difficult challenge to come up with something that can improve those systems and um and handle the the breadth of challenges that these systems handle really well
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and on top of that then help us solve these uh next generation problems uh however the way to get there is by applying our best perspectives and theories and testing them in the wild at
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various different scales learning from those developments and get to a progressively larger and larger problem-solving scales to the point where we can then coordinate millions of people billions of people against these
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problems so i think the the uh the promise of the entire um blockchain world is that there that it's enabling us to have a programmable interface to build
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these kinds of coordination tools starting with very small things that let us experiment and then from then from there scaling them to larger and larger sizes and along the way tests that they're working well tests that they're really solving problems tests that they're
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actually yielding better better ways of coordinating so i'm very hopeful that we will um solve a lot of these challenges and i think one of the the um yeah i often get asked what has what has changed my perspective about uh
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kryptonite 3 and so on in the time that i've been in the community and it's that um i very much undervalued and underestimated the potential impact and the potential utility of these systems
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um once you get once you sort of like step back and and see them for what they really are um you realize that they're extremely powerful tools that can help us solve these kinds of kinds of problems uh so
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let's let's dive into into why that is uh ellen in terms of like um why this decade and this year uh really matter is that um if a lot of these challenges are gonna be um sort of figured out or or um
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things are gonna be set in motion in the next uh decade or two then this decade really managed to get to work through a lot of those experiments get to really high quality solutions um and then from there scaling them um and in terms of this year uh in
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the next um the blockchain world and the blockchain systems are now at the scale of you know somewhere between about a trillion dollars in value to three trillion depending on like which month you look at it um now that's a big enough scale to try
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very serious experiments but not such a big scale um that is sort of like a catastrophic system to to uh test and vary with um so that's about the right size scale to experiment with and if we can get some really good
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principles into these systems now while they're still young and they're so very hopeful and very positive some oriented then they'll carry those principles and those ideas through to much larger scales
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kind of what i mean by that is that when you think about putting in place things like allocating whole sections of a protocol supply towards funding public goods that kind of policy is very
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positive some oriented very long-termist and is likely to go through now while the community is very um is still very kind of true to its roots and true to its values and way less likely to work in the future once everything gets much more competitive much more zero-sum
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oriented and so on so i think now is the right time to put in place these kinds of structures so that when these systems scale by an order of magnitude towards magnitude and so on um they can carry lots of those values with them think
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about the early value systems of the internet and how those inspired the web versus the web 2.0 world um that became much more extractive and captured uh great so i'm gonna um accelerate
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through these uh things now uh at the end of the day what crypto econ is about is crypto economics the study of block of cryptographic economic structures um is
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a combination of a set of fields that give us a bunch of tools to analyze these mechanisms that we can deploy at runtime into the worldwide computing infrastructure and then influence
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groups and large scale organizations at the end of the day i like calling this software eating mechanism design because it's about the software computing infrastructure that we've built out for the last few decades and using that entire continuous
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integration and continuous deployment structure with constant improvement and broad deployment into the world and then deploying incentive structures that can organize groups of people whole
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large scale entities and so on through these systems uh just to give you a feel for how powerful these systems are just think of the bitcoin energy consumption and realize that that
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just drops out of two components in bitcoin one is the block reward impact evaluator and two the price of bitcoin so those two things yield this tremendous energy
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consum consuming system this was kind of an accident this was a an accident of nobody quite intended this this device to um consume this this amount of energy and waste this amount of energy uh but
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this gives you a sense of the power of these these uh systems first off we should fix this and you know get out get to uh better systems that that actually uh make this this um energy use uh useful
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uh but this i use as an example to give you a sense of like the level of power that comes from these incentive structures and their operation at scale in falcon we're very familiar with these kinds of structures we use the same component and we've gotten a feel for how powerful
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this stuff is um in just a couple of years we ended up organizing the build out of a massive hardware infrastructure for providing storage to the world um with again just using one
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core incentive structure a block reward uh so all of this makes me really really hopeful um that we'll be able to build um these kinds of incentive structures that can scale to solve extremely large planetary scale
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problems um by designing incentive structures and structures warping the incentive fields and getting us to little by little problem by problem scale by scale um solve challenges
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and so i think i greatly encourage you if you aren't already in this uh world to try it out to try creating some smart contracts and deploying them um to try uh working with other projects and so on
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to get a feel for how powerful these these systems are um i i'm very hopeful that things like this will have a huge impact on planetary scale problems like uh climate change um i've become very hopeful that
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these systems will let us coordinate massive action again millions of people billions of people whole industries by letting us have the full power of law and economics and so on in a fully
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programmable environment i'm also very hopeful that we can get to accelerate science and technology development by using these kinds of structures to create instruments to incentivize areas of the innovation chasm that are
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underserved areas where it's extremely difficult to get funding for certain projects or where it's extremely difficult to get long-term rewards or long-term success many of you have probably heard me talk
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about this science and technology translation problem and the lack of incentive structures in that in that period in the castle in the middle and i think a lot of that just comes from the lack of reward structures there that make it impossible for
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groups building groups building building projects there to raise capital um because there's no good incentive for capital uh to to deploy there so uh what brought us to so knowing all
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of this knowing that this is a critical century knowing that um this critical decade and year um and knowing that crypticon is extremely powerful um why are we here why are we in funding commons so we thought about this problem last year and
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we saw that the scale of problem of um of blockchains and the kind of rapid pace of development in industry and the emergence of things like defy and dials and nfts and so on
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and especially the the broad adoption by hundreds of thousands of people or millions of people of these tools gave us a very promising um landscape to be able to solve these kinds of problems
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and so we have the potential to solve all these massive coordination problems but we're lacking good mechanisms we need way better governance structures we need way better funding mechanisms and uh and so on we need to study these things with much
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deeper theory and much deeper experimental analysis and so on um and so we and we also ourselves needed better structures better funding structures better organizational structures and so on to do our own work to develop our own teams to
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grow our own networks so based on that we decided to organize a movement to build these kinds of new models to arrive at much more sustainable public goods funding not just sustainable ideally regenerative
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systems with possible externalities they're not just sustaining themselves at some level but actually creating a lot more value around themselves and we hope to also create structures for much better value alignment within these networks
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so we decided to throw an event uh last year uh so it's less than a year ago um there's probably a number of other people that helped put this on if um uh i in my memory yesterday i remembered a set of folks who are here uh which i
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want to thank for for driving this and really creating this this event but it really takes a village to put this on especially the pl events team um uh and many others who have helped uh and since then we've now had uh three
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events two virtual one and one in person and we're scaling the community in the size of the conversations the um systems that we're reviewing the mechanisms that we're exploring the studies that we're doing and so on uh so
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in this conference we've gone from you know 11 18 talks and now 56 really encourage you to like attend all of them simultaneously of course you can do that of course you can later in time they're all recorded
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and we're also very fortunate to be working with a whole bunch of other folks in the ecosystem building out the broader public goods movement in the blockchain space great uh
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thanks to the github community and shelling point and many other manila groups that are very focused on building regenerative structures so all of this leaves me uh very hopeful um you know our impact so far has been
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to explore a set of funding mechanisms here's a few uh that i pulled from the youtube uh channel a bunch of these mechanisms are explained explaining explored and so on some of them also have kind of experimental review still early days so
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a lot of it is still kind of not very systematic not very well experimented upon and so on but i'd love to kind of crank that up and get to drastically better study to the point where we can like analyze these systems with the same
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level of rigor that we analyze things like network protocols or like hardware devices and things like that we've also [Music] sort of revived the impact certificates um
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idea and and field we've um gotten to explore a number of novel entity types i know that a few of these are actually getting booted up now which is really awesome impact for just a few months of talking about things um and we've
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created some uh we've talked about some coordination systems that could be um extremely useful i think this is a very promising area but probably under under um understudied and an area that that is
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maybe harder or seems um diffic much more difficult to get traction on so it doesn't get studied as much but i really think this last one the coordination systems how do you get large groups of people to organize much better
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that holds some of the most promise as i mentioned you can access all of these uh all we're making sure that all of this is getting recorded and built into an archive that you can go and explore they can go and send around to other people
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if you think that there's an important talk that somebody you know should watch like please please refer them to them and so on and um i want to highlight uh yes i talked a bit about the funding mechanisms on the impact certificates
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thing um it's one of these ideas that uh a number of people have been discussing for the last few years and this event really helped revive that that entire track we'll probably hear a number of talks uh during this conference about uh input
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certificates and a number of projects got catalyzed out of this so it's that's super exciting um and so this is exactly kind of the kind of thing that we want to have going not just in in this one area of impact certificates but across a whole variety
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of potential mechanisms of potential systems so you know huge props and kudos great credit to all the people doing this work um let's let's work on this in other areas as
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well uh i think there's a lot of latent potential in this coordination mechanisms layer um especially i think there's a bunch of really good ideas around um things like futarki and other struck
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i'm not necessarily sure that that particular construction will work but i think we need to a lot of experiments with those kinds of governance structures to see if there could be ways of governing systems algorithmically
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and and with a way of aggregating a lot of our perspectives and thoughts and values um in a much more systematic way than sort of like uh very brittle representative democracy that like doesn't really scale to to
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millions of people um and i think you know in terms of a lot of the mechanisms and structures that that we want to build um there's a lot more theory that is needed there's a lot more implementations that
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are needed there's a lot more rigorous study and assessment of of performance and so on that is needed so um really encourage you to kind of pick out any of these there's lots of interesting work to uh to get done here
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uh and so yeah there's a super packed schedule lots of amazing things um definitely look look forward to it i want to frame some goals for the community um for this next year uh and i'd love to kind of see uh some impact in these things i'm gonna be working on
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a number of these things myself would love to invite you to join me and join a number of the other people doing this um and it'd be great to look back so i like commit that you know a year from now um halfway through next year i'll look back
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and kind of see how we did on some of these goals uh so uh you know to introduce these again this is a very special year in weathering crypto there's there's tens of thousands of scientists and builders worldwide there's massive scale resources in these
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networks proper well experience well-sized experiment scale is very fluid and very easy and very excited it's a community that's very excited to try new things that is
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encountering real large large-scale problems and is very interested in getting solutions to work which is very different from a lot of governments i don't know if any of you have tried to change your local government and try to pass something but it's an extremely
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grueling process compared to the idea of starting a system a community online of people that want to try those these things and try to experiment with them um and i think in this kind of like moment of downturn in in both krypto and the
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macro world it's a great moment to build a lot of these things uh and get poised for like a very strong refi summer to come out of it so in the crypto world has had many downturns have been in at least four of them um and it usually
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follows a cycle of um there's like a big hype moment and then a downturn where people start building lots of things in one of those downturns i built uh i started protocol labs and built the first version of ipfs and with a whole number of folks
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and then you know in the next um next one of those we had all of the sec new next generation blockchains the layered a lot of the layer twos um all of d5 all of nfts all of the dow tooling
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all of that came out of that one of those build build times so really hope that in this next downturn build time we can build all of these kinds of regenerative structures build out a much better
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framework for studying all these systems and get to a much better better outcome so some goals first and foremost actually there's a meta goal let's have a few meta goals let's continue to
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grow this community um explore let's explore a bunch of domain specific tracks let's dive deeper into certain kinds of mechanisms let's maybe um think of um explore having some um events that
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like pull together a set of um people focused very much in one area let's try and experiment with workshops and hackathons i think we've been thinking it aloud together for a while it's time to
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put a lot of that into practice and stimulate that by having workshops and hackathons that enable both theorists and builders uh often the same people to come together connect and make a bunch of these things and experiment with them
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um i'd love to have some network funding for ourselves to build a a network-oriented grant program to support researchers and builders in the space i'd love to kind of like target like a i think a five million dollar
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fund size is like a good place to start um of course if we can get more that'd be even better um i think we could we should grow the community um we should think of this as an expansion space for for um
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for us and bring new people uh so like let's each of you like bring three new people to the event and this might be just refer them to like a talk or something like get them interested in the in the um space and recommend three
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speakers that you think should be uh talking to us about their ideas and their thoughts um uh i now very concrete goals uh i think the impact certificates idea space is extremely interesting and extremely
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valuable um let's dive deeper into it let's deploy more systems let's deploy hyper certificates um let's figure out the nft structures for them um let's build a market let's fill ideally multiple markets in a few different
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verticals and i think it would be amazing to get to a scale of having an impact market with around 50 million dollars in value uh next year i think that would be that i think at that scale is where you can see some interesting things starting to take
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shape smaller than that it's harder to see it working higher than that is like too hard to kind of reach for in one year um i think the 50 million scale is both achievable it's very ambitious but achievable um and i think will give us
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like really good outcomes uh beyond that um i think impact evaluators are one of these tools that are extremely extremely powerful we just have don't haven't studied or experimented with them enough and so i invite everybody to dive into that um i
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might um uh lead workshops and so on on this kind of stuff and really let's study the outcomes because this is one of these areas where you want to be careful because if you if you get it right you build um you know really compelling things you get it
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wrong you get like a runaway process that is like eating up all the energy in the world so uh careful um you know it's like it's like mickey mouse with like the the uh brooms so um
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yeah and then i really think that we need much better performance evaluations of all these systems we need um good evaluations and good mechanisms and struc evaluations of mechanisms and structures we need better frameworks
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better benchmarks to hit i'd love to get to a governance a set of governance benchmarks where you could kind of like come up with a with a benchmark test suite to analyze whether a particular governance structure is doing well or
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poorly for a community so think of like having a set of features that you would want your governance systems to do well at and then we can turn that into you know a set of observations that you could apply on top of any governance structure um and then it'd be great to
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have that as a test suite for people to to develop against in the computer science world this has been incredibly instrumental in getting us to build the modern computing infrastructure um almost every field that you can look at
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in computer science um tends to have these intense battery of tests that we kept getting developed and refined and improved over time but then every successive system has to beat and so you get this amazing evolutionary structure
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where whenever you're proposing some new new system you can always run it against this ever-growing intense battery of tests and see whether it's actually better and that yields an extremely good um evolutionary environment we need
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something like that for governance structures we just don't have that we have no way of properly evaluating whether one particular governance structure is actually going to be better than another one in a systematic repeatable way where like um we can all
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clearly see with hard data that it actually works better than another and i think it is very very achievable so i'm going to um actually i'm gonna given the timing and that i wanted to get us on track i'm gonna
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skip the mechanisms and experiments to try uh because you'll hear a ton of them um throughout the week maybe i'll give you just one which is this is this idea of an impact evaluator um i'll maybe describe it in in high level
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now and happy to talk discuss it more in detail with with folks it's a very simple system which just says that you're going to have a periodic evaluation of some um value across a community so this
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could be a risk contributed this could be a um rated performance against some goal uh and in that in each time step uh your the impact evaluator is going to release a reward proportional to the value
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contributed it's very simple it's just provides a long-running repeatable auction that consumes a set of indicators from an environment so it measures the environment and it rates
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all participants and their contribution in that time step and then it rewards proportionally uh all participants with a fraction of the pot uh together now that sounds kind of serious so you
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can make it positive some uh thanks to evan for this idea uh or and some other folks i think um by um uh by just scaling the reward gets put out by the increase in the in the
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thing you're trying to measure in the indicator and so this kind of structure can be applied to all kinds of measuring um all kinds of properties that you might want to measure and it's extremely extremely useful because it gives you this repeatable um thing that you can
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just keep um scaling the level of impact and sharing in that pot of rewards and if you um associate the work being done with the value of the reward itself then you get this amazingly positive feedback loop
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that then scales really fast uh that's the map that's the magic behind uh bitcoin and filecoin and a lot of these um structures uh so some in the last 50 seconds some some thoughts and advice for for
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everybody um connect with other folks i think um this is one of those times in in um the development of a field where uh everything is moving very quickly
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and new ideas will diffuse um uh fast there will be a lot of independent um discovery or independent discovery the same thing um and there will be a lot of people very interested in building things so this is
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not a time to hold back your ideas and develop them very deeply and then publish something like you know kind of like drop information theory in the world or calculus or something like that and you know spend five years thinking about it um
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that is going to be way too slow and all i almost guarantee you that most if not all of your ideas will probably get independently discovered and so you'll do much better by working with a lot more people a lot faster
00:28:03
develop everything much more quickly get it deployed out there get it tested get it um scaled um and the sooner we do this the better because all of that value flow will compound so you know if you have a great
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improvement and you deploy it now and we get to have more uh more months and years to compound it even if it's like 20 as good as you could have done it in a year or two years that compounding rate and that utility of like scaling it sooner will
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be much more valuable to everybody um so really strongly encourage you to like collaborate work with other folks uh get things tested and really kind of experiment and try things out like um just try something um see if it works uh
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evaluate and measure it and so on and whatnot and reach out for help so if you are running into some problem if you have some ideas and so on and you feel stuck reach out to the community ask for help uh this is a super positive sum
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oriented uh community and group uh everyone helps each other so yeah just reach out with with uh your thoughts ideas and and and people will be glad to help all right um oh yeah uh ship quickly so yeah i guess that kind of made that
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point make it make it again um and then composability so really focus on composability of these structures if you build a thing um try to make it as simple as possible and try to make it very composable with
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other tools and other systems that is part of what made d5 scale that is part of what made nfts work really well on scale that's part of what um and i think that's one of the things that's holding back dials i think dials are not nearly as composable as they need to be
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they're kind of composable but they could be much more composable um so yeah this is uh uh let's uh go forth and prosper thank you
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