DappCon 2019 – Tales of Governance: DAOs, Swarms and Anarchic Systems (#308)

8 Oct 2019 · 45:28

Recorded at DappCon 2019 in Berlin, this Epicenter panel moderated by Sunny Aggarwal brings together Ameen Soleimani of MolochDAO, Stephanie Hurder of Prysm Group, Jorge Izquierdo of Aragon One, and Sebastian Gajek to debate blockchain governance. They compare hard and soft governance, discuss which mechanisms fit which kinds of systems, how to formalize governance and represent stakeholders fairly, and why building exit mechanisms into DAOs matters.

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[Music] hi welcome to epicenter my name is the best equity oh we're still recording new interviews this week I'm happy to report that we have at least a month's worth of energies in the pipe which doesn't happen often and we're still recording more in the weeks to come so today we're releasing Sony's tales of governance panel which was recorded at Def Con in Berlin last month the panel was with Jorge Scioto Sebastien kayak I mean soleimani and Stephanie herder

and the conversation revolves around things like the types of governance that we should apply to different systems and applications the different approaches to formalizing governance on chain and on second layer solutions and so on I know this is a topic that sunny is really passionate about and spent a lot of time researching and thinking about and so I really hope you'll enjoy this conversation I certainly did as I'm recording this Brian and I just finished our interview with our guest for next week's episode which is yoni ASEA the CEO and founder of eToro I'm really looking forward to putting this one out it was a fascinating conversation and I

can't wait to get everyone's feedback on this interview also as I'm recording this Def Con is in full swing signing for the a car over there in Japan probably having a great time and they're both speaking on day 4 so check the schedule if you'd like to sit in on their talks and yeah definitely reach out as well and you should go and say hi to them and also it looks like my travel plans are changing I had anticipated not moving much until the end of the year but I've decided to go to San Francisco for SF blockchain week and SF blockchain week epicenter which is the conference that bears the same name as this podcast but it's organized by different people that's on October 31st and November 1st I am going to be emceeing at least one

of the days and also moderating the wallet panel and sunny is also moderating our panel I believe the schedule has yet to be finalized but you can go to SF blockchain week I owe four tickets they're still available and you know what if I'm gonna go from Paris to San Francisco you better believe that we're gonna do a meet-up so go-to epicenter rocks / SF to register neither two dates or the venue or anywhere near being finalized but if you go to epicenter rocks / SF and register there when we have the dates and the venue we'll send you an email to let you know and finally as I mentioned

last week we are still recruiting a community manager so go to crypto jobs list com to apply you'll see the listing there on the home page and once again I want to thank my friend Rahman the one-man team behind crypto jobs list for featuring our listing so with that here's Sony's tales of governance panel thank guys all for coming yeah and let's get this panel going alright for lunch topic of today's panel is governance which yeah we just heard talk about and to get started let's just some you know maybe go ahead and introduce ourselves let's talk about let's go down the line maybe introduce yourself why you're interested in governance and your most favorite

governance story like it could be it could be in block trains or it doesn't have to be in block chains mine for example is the 2015 New Zealand flag referendum I'm a flag geek and they went through this whole process of trying to fix the New Zealand flag and they ended up exactly where they started and it made me very sad as a flag ban so you guys go ahead hi I'm mean Soleimani cos bang Shane seminary Moscow favorite governance story I'll just pick theorem 1 it was the combination of Aragon grant proposals 41 and 42 right where there was simultaneously two

votes being held to decide one whether or not to - it's a restrict aragon from participating in building on polkadot and the other two by dots and it would have been really funny if they both passed but ultimately the the by dot failed and and the restriction to build on polka dot failed and so they are now building on polka dot but not buying dots hi guys I'm Sebastian I'm founder of did crafts where we used our approaches for software engineering yeah I would call it also in a very interesting dow or something related to that and as the European I think all European have a bit suffered from the

brexit and the brexit has and that point very interesting because it shows that democracy or democratic voting which is like you know the core of any Dow can work but sometimes is also vulnerable to attacks and this is a very very important lesson for us who built douse but we really have to be very cautious about the protocols we implement such wet douse really work in a very decentralized and democratic way I am I'm her him from from Aragon and actually I mean to took my example of a fan governance governance thing it was

super super interesting to see how out of the blue there was a kind of this battle filling our governor's proposals and when tea deadline for for proposals for the previous hardcore Network boat was they were like these two proposals and then devotin process that was kind of decided at the at the very end it was really interesting to watch and we didn't expect that it would happen so soon like set to propose house with that much attention it was very fun to see hello everybody Stephanie hurt her founding economist with prism group those of you who remember five minutes ago I was up here so there are lots of cool examples I also really like the

brexit one especially the the leave bus that was just driving around you know issue propaganda about what would happen if if leave was voted for which turned out to be a big lie another example I really like is in the last Men's World Cup Japan advanced out of the group round for the first time ever because of the I think it was the seventh tiebreaker which was the number of yellow cards this was the first time this tiebreaker had ever been used and the really thing I really like about this example is its kind of an arbitrary decision-making rule and if it had been introduced during the tournament no one ever would have used it but because it was aligned on and agreed upon in advance even no matter how silly it was it worked right

and the World Cup didn't explode so design your governance in advance well my name is Sonny Agarwal I work on mostly on cosmos but a bunch of other things anyway I didn't give enough background on the New Zealand flag thing everyone hates the current New Zealand flag but and they had like five competitors and there was like a ranked choice voting in a round one and then one of them won and then that that one was put up against the current flag in a round two but enough people who were upset that there's dink win in round one voted against it in round two and so we ended up back where we started so that's the context of why I hate that flag referendum going on so it seems that we you know we've been having a lot of

discussion about governance throughout the space and you know I was at the governance games event I was hosted by Sir knowledge yesterday and I feel one of the topics that was very prominent was this idea of Unchained versus off chain governance I'd like to rephrase that a little bit two more rules based versus discretion based governance or hard governance for a soft governance er I don't know what do you guys think is the best way to maybe what's the best terminology that we should be using and how do you compare these and when do you think we should use each no I I think team there's something that we've been seeing

we didn't run in our own governance process is how important the of chain or like the process that doesn't involve just voting just like all the discussions that happen happen before how important that is and I think of the on chain part just as the mechanical process by which like people are just like casting their boat and like giving their inputs to the to the Machine and then the Machine just say aggregates everyone's everyone's voice but I I think more more the the other process that comes before to even go into boat is it's way more important but yeah I think on chain of chinese' it's a good terminology people use on chain governance to describe the governance of a protocol itself and if

that protocol has treasury management than where the funds should be spent if you know protocol has upgrades like something like Tasos how the upgrade should go but that isn't the entire category of on chain governance even though it's most commonly used to describe that thing right like Moloch Dow has on chain governance because the votes actually determine how the Treasury is spent but it does not have any influence over the protocol decisions right and I think that in that sense on chain governance has like a bad rap because most of us in the etherium community at least want our protocol decision-making to be separate from you know something else we don't have a

treasurer either so that there's really just no on chain governance for anything related to the protocol but then for off chain something like Eragon they have their Treasury in a multi sig and then they have voting that happens from the token holders and so they still have control it's it's their discretion whether or not they follow the votes of the token holders and I think that's a much safer way to start out because if you don't do that then you're in your token holders do something unexpected or somebody who might not be incentive aligned with you buys up a lot of your tokens to get your protocol to do what they want instead of what you want then your whole protocol is now at risk Stephanie you were smiling they're dope

with that no I think that's a I mean that's a double-edged sword right allowing discretion and whether decisions are implemented can be good or bad depending on on what you're looking at I think you know as I mentioned that they the end of my talk I agree with view that on chain of verses off chain is not really the key question it's you know you need all these different parts of governance to work you need information you need another example I really liked was the submitting suggestions for proposals you were talking about that's another piece that sometimes if proposals can only be you know fully coded sometimes you don't get that kind of information so it's far more important to have all those different pieces than to you know worry about on chain versus option so I think Amon made a very very good point so the

question is what kind of say decisions shall I shall be democratically decided some are very crucial for example if you really want to implement a stable product that's why I think asking the community for some kind of recommendations or right way but still say the team should decide whether this is a really you know important feature or not versus there are things situation for example when it really comes to funds a project here I believe that it should be on Shane simply because it's really the community but in general you know what contribute with the donations to the project and you know they're like

investors they should also have a right to decide what happens to their investment so I mean I guess what I'm trying to ask here is so oftentimes is this question about like what is the best governance thing and I just don't think that's a valid question like different things need different types of governance the title of this panel I I put it as dau swarms and anarchic systems and I think these are like you know systems that are in decreasing order of formalization of their governance processes and so I mean for example you know Maulik Dow has pretty strict formal rules of how you interact with it and what the rules for how it changes and proposals are done and whatnot and you should obviously you

know you created that so you believe in that but at the same time you for aetherium you believe in the more anti archaic governance of aetherium and so what is it about aetherium governance as a chain that you believe in antarctic systems but in this maliki idea you believe more formal I systems yes so the reason that you know building on aetherium is because it is really hard to shut down an application that you deploy to aetherium you would need you know 51% of the miners to censor you for a really long time and if it was for example like a coin vote on a Hooda sensor or somehow Forks the protocol in order to set somebody's balance to zero then it would

be a lot easier to do stuff like that and that would give me less confidence to build on aetherium and I think that that would give less confidence of basically everybody to build on it but when it comes to just you know Malik Dow is not about protocol updates it's just about how do we spend money on Grants and in that case your voting is like proportional to how much money you have and you can leave whenever you want and that's just like a better system for people who want to put money towards this thing because it's safe so I'm a favor a bit but again from case to case might be different but in general I'm a favor and giving a bit more structure because the real power of the Dow is that you really have some experts so

some community people that care what you do right very passionate about that asking them what is good or bad for a project for good decision is for any pass a project which really wants you know to grow actually a key feedback but in order to leverage this a community power of is community knowledge you really have to help them you know you cannot ask them for a say very universal question but you really have to guide them you really have to precise you know what kind of answer you'd like to have from that just in order to make sure that say the majority of was community voters really do understand what kind of

information you need from that yeah so there's a good analogy maybe to sake classical say project development for example if you design and develop a feature you know once the feature is done the first thing you should do is you know you asking some kind of early adopters do you like it or not and this information is really like gold because without that feedback rats you might develop feature by feature by feature end up in a product that really no one wants and that's why communities key and helping the community and our guide the community to give you some kind of feedback which is relevant for the progress of your project it's also important you know in my view a lot of the early projects that

didn't really have formal governance have just gotten incredibly lucky and they answer a combination of charismatic leadership and people in the being in the right place at the right time they've avoided you know completely exploding but I think in the future most projects will need I mean the degree to which you're gonna have you know different kinds of specified governance you have one process or a thousand I think is gonna vary but I think you know most projects will end up having some kind of foundational governance which Elise allows you to update the governance itself right so there Volvo ver time so you'd be more in favor of going forward new projects or new chains even using more formalized processes more in the realm of like tezo style governance with formalized processes I

think so one of the analogies they like to use is the representative versus the vigilante which is that you know in a crisis situation you know when there's a vacuum and there's not a specified person who's going to take control your system is vulnerable right you can just have you know random charismatic leaders show up and take over so you know at least specifying what's gonna happen in a crisis situation and who has power then is very useful one way I like to think about it is that we have like layers and you have a bunch of formal layers and almost always inevitably at some point you have an informal layer and I think when we're talking about whether the change should have formalized governance or not we're basically asking about where to put that

break point where on aetherium for example the break point is you know the the chain is antarctic and this stuff on top is formalized while in tezo's the chain is formalized but then the process the meta chain which is the ability to fork Tasos and we see that happening today where there are there is a project that's in the process of forking casos and so then we we just basically we still have all these things end up becoming anarchic system but we just moved it one layer down is it possible to build an anarchic system on top of a formalized system yeah I think that by definition is quite hard I think it's way easier to build a formalized system on top of an anarchic system but yeah I

think that in the in the case of Chang governance in the case of ethereum it's it's very interesting that there are decisions that are being made with the VIPs are very very different from like repricing some up coats due to clearly technical reasons to like making economic decisions that are very very important and for for those I I believe it would be interesting to get eath holders in both windows because it's like making economic decisions 32 stakeholders that that should definitely decide and not a people that are just right in writing the code for that what are some of the cons of anarchic systems when it comes to protocol governance so

you know for whether examples from mysterium or from Bitcoin like you know I think that like some of the Segway to X stuff shows that like when you don't have more formalized systems you get in a case where you have loud voices and so how do you solve that in that most cases I don't want to say solve but definitely anarchic systems are less efficient it's in a highly contentious issue it's pure chaos and it ends up being a free-for-all where basically if it's like a you know binary split then two groups form and both try to tell everybody that they're bigger than the other group to try and accomplish the

self-fulfilling prophesy of attracting more support so that they eventually win a hard fork showdown and that means that you are trying to recruit every single person in the protocol to join your side and signal on that side and that's not an efficient process if you had a formalized system that had for example representatives you say okay well I'm just gonna point to that person somehow signal that I am supporting them and then allow that person to make a or influence the decision-making process on my behalf which saves me a lot of time as a somebody who's delegated that responsibility one thing I like to think about is sometimes maybe what you need is formalized governance over property

and assets and things that don't aren't limited property and assets are you don't need governance over so I mean I think the easiest way to explain why Moloch needs formalized governance is you have a scarce assets that you're governing what are you doing the cases where we have the option to make an asset either scarce or not and I think the best example and the problem that was relevant to blockchains is trademarks so you know we have some some trade bars in the space like Bitcoin are completely like you know just under the open anyone has the option to call their own thing Bitcoin and it really is up to the community soft consensus to decide what is true or not

while some projects like nosy cash and aetherium Allah gave it to a foundation to to say to enforce the trademark maybe there's other ways of enforcing the trademarks and so what do you guys think about one how important are trademarks and like names and how should we cover govern names I think it's the general question about the value of trademarks right I mean they have a reason why you know people apply for a for trademarks because they think that say the name or the product has certain value and they would like to protect it then there are other a lot of other applications where trade mike has no value because it's the

values maybe in the product or and the team or in the property their own and never Christian is so you know whether say a Bitcoin or Z cash you know it's a trademark and I think the team or the people behind that should decide whether you know they appreciate the value of this trademark or maybe the product you know the software stack they develop that should be part of a community decision so for aetherium what do you do you think that long term the trademark of the name aetherium should remain in the hands of the etherium foundation and if not what is a alternative for who should govern that trademark or should we just

put it out in the open like Bitcoin does I think something that would be pretty cool even though if it's like avid sci-fi is that if you have a doubt controlled by both holders that controls a legal entity that can legally hold a trademark and allow it holders to to controls is if etherium lock chain itself split now there's to which it holders that chooses that trademark etherium yeah that would be that would be interesting I mean you could also you could also have like a coin boat with the balances in the in the past to make that those sort of decisions but that would be an interesting challenge yeah so basically we'll say that like okay there'll be a trailing track of balances

let's say you know we'll decide the balance is from one year ago or what decide the trait get to vote on what the trademark is tell could be an option yeah I'll be interesting it seems reasonable I mean I don't have a better plan to keep the foundation until the foundation goes away this is why we need lawyers are any official or onstage lawyers no okay well that's problematic so do you think that in the space there's an over use of formalized systems you know one thing one question I have about the Dow which like the the original one was I I never really quite understood it I never saw the point of it why are people having to pull money for you know I I

think it could be done as a much more liveness or IC dows as safety favoring organizations while swarms are more liveness favoring organizations and you know I think the IC o---- system of 2017 proved that we didn't maybe we didn't need that collective action that the Dow was bringing and so like you know as someone who's building a project that's going out and telling people to build more like do you think we're building too many dolls or I don't I don't think we're built into too many tiles I think the ability to come together and pull money with pseudonymous people to to do some sort of things I think it can be super super powerful and something

really cool around to Taos the amount of due diligence that was being made in the proposals even if they were asking for not a lot of not a lot of funding and I think as we saw in in 2017 like there was no like no duty allegiance at the at the scale that t-tau was doing so I think that even if it's just by asking money to this particular Dao it triggers like a big community to analyze a proposal and make a decision I think that that would have been really really positive yeah I'm super excited to see more more dollars I'm also very very happy to see so many doubts because the Dow is in fact a very very powerful

paradigm but as with any new paradigm we first of all have to learn we have to understand what is the real power and the real value of a new paradigm and the only way we learn is just you know about doing experiments by trying out new downs seeing what works and to reef from that why it works yeah I think just building on that I mean almost any legal system or decision-making system you know gets more formal over time right you start with a basic I'm gonna use the US government gun but you start with Constitution and a basic set of rules and over time you know a legal system develops and precedent develops and you

know people don't want to rethink decisions every single time they're being made right so is this question of okay we've seen this before this is what we did before do we have a compelling reason to change what we did otherwise you know we have a defined process for for how certain decisions are going to be made so I think that formalization is good and we're gonna see more formalization either through explicit rules or just people having a shared understanding of how things are gonna work it's also possible that we might be learning the wrong lesson for I see Oh boom of 2017 if we think that the Dow wasn't needed because like Jorge was saying that the Dow helped a lot of do concentrated due diligence on all the projects that went through it so there's another reality where the doubt didn't explode magnificently and there was a

huge amount of due diligence on all the projects that tried to ico and a lot of the scams were filtered out another question with Taos is that for example Vlad will often say that one of the issues with formalized governance is that in it never believed leaves out certain groups of stakeholders and that it only represents certain factions within a community how when you're building it Dow how do you make sure you're representing all the different stakeholders in your community and not just that your token holders yeah I think that for days it's interesting to build systems that are not just like

simple majority podían of corn of certain corn holders but try to build like give identify other other stakeholders in in some way and this is the department where it gets Alan gin who gets to decide who's gonna who's gonna decide but I can totally see that we form like this bicameral systems in which like you have like the coin boater like the coin holders voting in some way and then reputations last identities as core devs system that gets gets built on the other side and here you can start having like see how they're competing competing incentives basically bounty bounty powers and I can totally see like

a governance system that gets inputs from from many different set of stakeholders but again the challenge is who gets to to pick these people in the in the first place and I think there's a lot of work to be done here and just to add to that I mean any formal governance system is going to be imperfect and is going to need to evolve over time and that's okay and so just saying well formal governance is always imperfect therefore we're not gonna have any is in my opinion not the right way to go but I also think that we still have to learn a lot and I think one of the key challenges will be to understand say what is the right voting scheme because the voting scheme is nothing else when a consensus protocol but for people not for a machines look

how many years actually community needed in order to learn and understand you know how a proper consensus protocol you know for layer one works and now we're facing exactly a similar challenge we really have to learn to research to explore how say a dull based consensus per table namely voting scheme works and once I think we solve this problem you know we will also you know have insights you know how to structure and build a dowel that is say stable enough which is not acceptable to attacks and which really delivers what we expect from modele namely save the knowledge and the powerful community just in order to

progress so when you're building an organization in the boxing space we talked a lot about the ability to exit and why that's an important but sometimes you want there to be a bit of cohesive force to the organization that even if people disagree you don't want it to just the community of fracture every time there's a small disagreement and so how do you when you're designing a doubt do you or any organization do you decide how much cohesion and how much exit force to put so for example in mullux it's very easy to exit and rage quit from the Dow while for example I'm not too familiar with Aragon but I know in DX Dow its you actually can't exit like there is no ability for you to

leave the Dow you can just stop participating altogether but you can't actually like get rid of your tokens even or shares in the Dow so how do you choose how much exit versus cohesive force to put into it yeah something that were that were working on now it's it's this concept of proposal agreement so we're calling it and data is we are trying to solve to protect from 51% attacks in the in detail in an in a way that is not as destructive or disruptive as a sexy teen even though it exiting can make sense for for some types of organizations so the way that this works is that before making a proposal see proposer basically has to stay put some collateral behind

her their proposal to guarantee that they adhere to the rules that the organization has for making proposals like they did we accept like these types of proposals they need to benefit also can holders equally or whatever did the rules are and then there can be a challenger that says okay this is this is definitely not the not bound to the rules of the of the organization and then these beauties is created and there's a dispute resolution process that that happens that eventually will sweater D proposal was valid or not according to rules of the organization so we're very excited to roll this out and have these other alternatives to try to not break the breakin organisation in case an attack is an attack is made

because some of these attacks are actually pretty cheap pretty tube to make like an ad in a doubt that is totally public and anyone can propose it's like totally free to make a credible commitment that everyone that boats yes in this proposal to steal all the money from the Chow is gonna get a share of the money like all the money that we steal and this goes like literally zero zero to make so you can put boundaries like saying okay only members can can vote you can create new proposals but this is the other approach that we're taking to try to keep the organization's cohesive so a couple pieces I think you know four platforms I think most blockchain platforms have significant network

effects so in general we don't want people you know stomping off and quitting if we don't need them to and a couple pieces that we found are particularly helpful in minimizing sort of the number of rage quits which is a super awesome term I'm gonna use it now constantly cuz it's great our thinking about you know first the proposal process you know before even the proposal process one of the reasons I love that world cup example is because you know having valid governance that people agree is legitimate no matter how weird it is is is very useful so just saying these were the rules we decided on in advance can reduce the probability you're gonna get people stomping off on you and I also think you know after that you know if you're looking at more incremental

proposals you're less likely to have a group of people ragequit I'm so thinking about the proposal process and also how information is shared can help you know keep your community together all other things constant the exit privilege is important for protecting the members right if the the pitching Moloch was way really easy because people ask how do I get out and I'm like whatever you want right and in an era gone Dow at the time you would have needed to like submitted proposals to get your money out that would have needed to have been approved by the other members and if somebody controls most of the voting power then you're sort of screwed if they don't want your to get your money out and it depends on how much the people in the

Dow trust each other it depends how susceptible it is to capture if it's an open system this is a larger concern Moloch is permission membership anyway so it's somewhat less of a concern but I wanted to just air all the way on the side of safety because we were living in the shadow of the Dow and like most people had PTSD ow and like I didn't want to be that guy you know so maybe now that we have this precedent like people will be a little bit more comfortable taking on somewhat more risk and you know what you're getting into upfront like hey okay maybe you know I can get in but like if I leave I'm leaving like 5% of my money in this thing and you know I can calculate like the chance that I think that it's gonna get hostile taken over and I'm gonna

lose that against you know how much I care about that money how do you make sure that these voting systems don't you know I think there is a value to conservatism sometimes and tradition and that sometimes over liberalism is also kind of can be dangerous and you know populism for example and like how do we make sure these dowels that are we you know essentially dows we've made it decrease the cost of voting and we've decreased the cost of executing the results of voting how do we make sure that we don't just fall into these you know bad game theory traps or populistic like situations yeah this is another another thing that we're

trying to solve with this proposal equipments in with the the organization when it created at the beginning you can set a set of rules or a manifesto for for the organization and say ok until we decide to change it and this is the way that we would go on to change it all the proposals and everything that it out does need to need to adhere to this and you can get into a situation that even if you have a supermajority or 90% of the towel that says ok we want to pass this proposal if it doesn't go according to the rules that were set at the beginning issued an incident pass even if the organization like a large amount of token holder wants to do it and then you can have like your process for changing the manifesto that can be like longer or require like almost you know

like a unanimous vote so I think that's that's a way like when people get in do you know what you're buying into and changing that subjective contract of what your organization does is like a very very hard process that there requires a lot of time so there's time for people to exceed or change course yeah I think that's a great example and I would even generalize a bit more so a challenge here is I really need to research say what voting protocols really work and I see populism you know like an attack against you know voting protocol you know for example like when you break up - you know you can break a security protocol if you have a voting

protocol you need to design it in such a way that is resistant against you know maybe populism as an attack and here I think we need to ask a research community to really you know think out of the box and maybe come up with new ideas which go far beyond you know maybe the one vote or one vote approach or one stake one vote approach maybe we really need totally new different voting protocols here kind of to zoom out a little bit so you know I think one way I think of governance is that it's coordinated

to solve game theory problems but to set up a game theory game in the first place you need to assume everyone has somewhat aligned utility or somewhat or common utility or somewhat aligned values and what do we do in situations where communities just have differing values and like an example like not even in blockchain like in the real world like you know I used to you know I used to be like Pro open borders but then it occurred to me like what if two societies have fundamentally different beliefs in property rights like you have one that believes in private property and you have another that believes in like Glen walls like radical markets stuff how can you possibly govern people who have so fundamentally different

values I was just gonna say typically they fight it out I mean there are certain situations where you don't necessarily want to have everybody in the same community right so when you are asking about status quo bias I kept thinking about another us example but in the u.s. the Senate has something called the filibuster where you need 60 votes in order to out of 100 to pass anything and this is why we don't have gun control because they have enough you can't get 60 votes to override the lack of gun control and so I think that you know there are certain circumstances where you're just gonna have communities that don't necessarily want to be together on the other hand I will have to disagree with your initial statement

I think that you know if everyone had the same preferences we don't even need governance like the reason we need collective decision-making is that people do disagree so there's sort of a spectrum where if everyone had the same preferences then we just have you make all the decisions right because you have the same preferences as everybody else whereas if we you know some of us don't believe in private property and others do then you have Glen world and another world and in the middle you sort of figure out what you're gonna do what what what do you do when for example you're just in a prisoner's dilemma of a massive scale and we just need coordination and you know for example I think climate change is an example where you know it seems like it's an everyone's incentive to try to solve it but for any single nation state it seems

in their economic incentive to just fuel development as fast as possible and so how do we if not governance but how do we encourage coordination governments are interesting because they govern down but nothing governs them right like governments exist within a state of anarchy relative to each other so you would need some other form of government or governance structure to then impose its will on each country and benefit the countries that do the climate change thing and don't attack or somewhat harm or inflict some cost on the countries that don't and so how do you get that I don't know

is it a blockchain thing maybe if it's like you know throw eggs at the Senators that haven't like voted yeah for climate change and like we make a dough for that and then get all the Senators decide that they don't want to be the only ones to not vote on climate change that would be really cool if anybody's trying to do that let me know do you have any questions from the audience would anyone like to pose any questions yes I kind of flew that especially in polkadot but maybe in other systems as well we are getting to a point where we kind of create the same structures we already know from the real world we just put tokens in there and some kind of watching infrastructure but at the at the end it is not any different so if

you have any take on that can't speak for polka-dot it seems kind of complicated hope it works it's the same here I think polkadot is like you know has its own ecosystem I'm not very familiar with all the details I'd like to take a view that like maybe that might not be a bad thing like you know I think we should maybe approach it that we should respect that the current systems in the real world have some reasons that they developed in that way and there might be ways that just like even the transparency benefits of being on a blockchain and the openness benefits are beneficial even if we have some of the similar structures that already happen

and I'm that I'm looking to this from like I've been doing a lot of research on the monetary side of like how currencies work and stuff and I think that like even if we even like something like a dollars on the blockchain seems to be beneficial on that neck so I I think it's I think it's good for experimentation at different projects are trying different types of governance I agree with that I think that there are a lot of systems that are in their place for a reason I think the more I work in blotching governments the more amazed I am that most of our national governments work the way that they do they're remarkable and you know having people use similar system with tweaks will allow us to see what works and what doesn't another thing we're actually looking into that nobody's mentioned is you know

the Internet has governance and unless you're super involved in it you don't think about it because it just works and a lot of the problems that blotching governance is having was solved by you know I can and the other governance bodies of the internet so I think that there's a lot to be learned from them too one more yeah thanks appreciate the opportunity to ask questions you guys uh so governance is really like a matter of linking the social layer of problem solving to a certain you know to a certain end with the technical side of you know game theoretically aligning all these incentives so my question is would governance be more efficient with in any dau as long as they speck the goal of

governance as clearly as possible and if they speck the goal of governance as clearly as possible they're able to sort of engineer the system to work like game theoretically as well as it can isn't finding out preference a matter of best describing the goal to any governance community yeah and I think that there's a lot that you can do in de Indias mechanism and like with with code but there's also a lot of norms and subjective stuff that you can just like write in in English or in whatever whatever language and make that the expectation of team of the system that we're gonna behave in this way and you can do your best to build code around

that so that the the process goes with that but I believe that there's there's also very important like just subjective layer of that dude don't want to try to write in solidity hey guys for coming and uh thanks very much for that panel thank you for joining us on this week's episode we released new episodes every week you can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes Spotify YouTube SoundCloud or wherever your listen to podcasts 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 TV slash subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen while you there be sure to sign up for the newsletter so you get new episodes in your inbox as they're released if you

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