How Crypto Protocols impact our Psychology

Transcript

foreign I'm David uh and I always kind of think it's funny when people show up to my talks because usually you have already heard me for like a thousand hours before so I'm honored that you all are here to listen to me once again um for those that don't know I have a I think kind of an interesting starting point in into crypto I majored in Psychology which I mean there's many different ways to enter the crypto world there's like 10 000 ways into the rabbit hole but I think psychology is like an underappreciated one also with Biology as well but that's actually a subject for a different day

um ethereum means a lot to me uh I was personally in kind of a dark place when I found ethereum and I used ethereum as a thing to start to distract myself and then I realized that there's actually a ton of meaning and responsibility in what we're doing here when we build these crypto systems and I think people that discover crypto it resonates with them at a very deep level probably before they can really articulate why and this is my attempt at doing that and I think anyone who comes into crypto understands that crypto is something very deep it goes down to the basement it goes to to the bare metal of what we're doing in crypto and I call I I will classify crypto as something

that's trying to build a social structure and so a social structure is just a foundation for society to organize around how did we go from tribes of monkeys to an entirely interdependent network of humans that are cooperating across far distances all across the world how did we do that and the answer is with social structures and our social structures are is it it's a technology format it's a form factor for Technologies and social structures go back to like maybe the earliest strongest social structures are religions if you are a Christian and then you walk 10 000 miles and then you meet another Christian you can just know that by the cross around their neck that

they understand the same story that you do you can trust them because they tell a similar story that you believe in and we have different religions that have done social that have provided social structures for us to actually scale our cooperation that's like a very early one then we you know progress forward in time we get a little bit more scientific we get a little bit more concrete we go from the abstract and the interpretable to something that we try and make very very objective and very very concrete and then we discover that oh these social structures scale a little bit further they're a little bit more dependable they're a little bit more objective and I think crypto is on this same uh on the same plane crypto isn't the next evolution of objective scalable

social structures but also social structures can go wrong here's here's some of our newest social structures right these web 2 apps uh they allow us to talk and communicate to people across far distances in ways that you know create culture and create individual expression and allow us to come to consensus on like what we believe the memes that we think are funny the movies that we think are cool things that we value in culture foreign here is what I think is the next evolution of social structures so first we have you know the very very abstract the very very interpretable and then a little bit less interpretable

things that were you know we're trying to codify laws here uh and then we go into codifying cryptography I think this is actually all the same technology progressing forward into future um and all of my talks start here if you've been following Bank list and following some of the work like this is like the thing I've been focused on since like getting into crypto this is like why why I'm here and I think why everyone is here but in their own specific way shape and flavor uh like going back to like first we were monkeys and now we are playing on ethereum there's a through line there that I think we should all understand but also I want to emphasize the danger of social structures social structures have brought us to where we are today we have buildings and air conditioning and

plumbing yet also we have the largest capacity for Destruction that we've ever had before uh little did we know like nuclear proliferation like this is where we're at where there are ten thousand nuclear weapons pointed right here right now that there's a button away from that and that's true for most places that people live that's scary and that is a byproduct of I don't know why I'm pointing it that way uh this social structure so like you know this has done pretty good work but also we have these negative consequences of social structures that oops maybe we don't maybe they're less ideal right turns out after we adopt Facebook uh too far turns out after we adopt Facebook

Facebook starts causing civil wars in countries and so like you know for the most part these things are good but there's huge weaknesses that each system brings to the table that we have to account for and so as we build ethereum as we build these new social structures it becomes really important that we understand what leaks and what is bad and but I want to talk about in this particular this is again nation state the the leakage the the negative consequences of the nation-state social structure we have we have the military-industrial complex but I want to talk about like how all of us when we live on top of these social structures how does it change us because it is up to oh it's ultimately going to become up to us how these systems are expressed uh

I think we all know from 2020 2022 and just the onslaught of scammers that that year brought us uh that you know it's way well we have these amazing foundations it's the people that live on top of them that come to Define them uh and so I want to talk about responsibility because I think this goes down to the very root of what we're doing here there's a couple definitions I want to pull out responsibility the state or fact of having a duty to deal with something or having control over someone or the state or fact of being accountable or to blame for something and the opportunity to or ability to act independently and make decisions without authorization to make decisions without authorization sounds a lot like

permissionlessness for example and what I think crypto is really doing and specifically public private key cryptography is imbuing you the individual with responsibility and that is not something that we have had before now Banks you'd give the money to the banks because they're like I don't want to take care of it like take care of it for me and the bank's like sure control your fee which is great it's good service uh it's gonna start somewhere and same thing with like representative democracy like we needed to cut Corners around direct representation by having this like representative democracy where you vote for someone who votes for someone who votes for someone you're kind of like giving away your responsibility ability still it's a system that we had that you know is

better than just being monkeys so these are all just developing in a direction I think cryptography and private public private keys are the next step for that and they're giving us all the responsibility that we need in our lives to have control and have power but of course with great power comes great responsibility uh who knows what this book is raise your hand so the through line for this book the uh Victor Frankel survived the Holocaust and uh he was he ended up being I don't know if he was a psychologist before but he was definitely a psychologist afterwards or a psychotherapist his his conclusion as to like how did some people make it through the Holocaust and

how did others not make it through the Holocaust he had a thesis and it comes down to being responsible for something if you were an independent if you were Solo in the Holocaust you might not have made it versus somebody who had something on the outside that they were responsible for as it turns out it doesn't take that much to have something important to you that you need to live for to make it through one of the worst atrocities that Humanity has ever seen simply as things there are some stories in here that somebody had a dog that they needed to feed and it was their responsibility to feed the dog and that got them through the Holocaust trivial things like that you have a family

member that you need to take care of and all of a sudden that gives you the candle in the darkness to make it through again the worst time that humans have ever faced and so it goes down to like being responsible for something can get you through a lot and so this is a one of my favorite memes out there so it's nihilism right where like nothing in life matters oh no like it's all meaningless but if you can create your own meaning if you have the tools to be imbued with responsibility all of a sudden you're like nice I get to choose my life path but first we need to be in a context where we actually have control over things uh same meme uh let me skip forward to the one I want to go yeah so who knows what this is

I think yeah Milgram shock experiment yeah so uh sadly is a puppy uh so this is a shock box and you put the puppy on the shock side and then you turn on the shock and the puppy hops over the wall to the no shock side because it wants to escape the shock right and so it actually has agency it can do something and so if it is in pain if it's under duress the dot the dog the puppy has the ability to go do something sadly uh there was another uh control study in this experiment where both sides shocked uh and so that was bad because the dog would hop over the wall and then it would still get shocked so what did the dog do it just curled up in a ball and did nothing and just like took the shocks to the face and this is what we

called learn helplessness because the context for the dog was like I can't do anything I'm just going to sit around and do nothing and be depressed uh and so they're maybe extrapolating this into the current currency is like the nanny state where they just take care of everything for you and you don't have any responsibility over anything uh and so this is like maybe this the way that this same idea of learned helplessness from you know this this shock experiment we know from uh I can't remember the psychologist um but like this is how this scales up into large-scale systems and so why I call this bankless is if you are taking custody over your own assets you're becoming responsible for your money and money is value money is tokenized labor

into a unit and so when you go without banks and you take care of private keys under your own custodianship you become responsible for your financial assets but that's just the start right it all boils down to private keys where you finally have ownership over what we determine as value and with ethereum the idea with tokens is we can tokenize anything now first we're starting with like meme coins but then it actually spirals into hopefully something more useful and now we have this this governance token Revolution where for the first time you have Assets in your wallet that give you agency that give you power that give you control uh I think I skipped this size I want to go back um yeah so there's like this crisis of

meaning in the world where like we have suicides are at all-time highs there's a tons of thousands of reasons for why this might be true but I think one of the big ones is that we don't we have less and less agency in today's world like things are generally taking care of us and meaning in life and power and control over our own Direction gives is associated with just positive mental state your mood is better if you have control over what you can do if you are the dog that can be in pain but then you can hop over the fence to something better to a better life in the future because of actions that you are able to take all of a sudden you feel good if you have the path forward that makes you feel better you you that spirals into productivity that spirals into ownership

that spirals into responsibility and I think private keys at the bottom of all of this sorry I'm hopping around so much private Keys is at the bottom of all of this it is the Primitive that responsibility stands upon and then as on top of that we get all these governance tokens right like if you care about these protocols you have agency to dictate their future and you provably know that because it's on chain you are provably given the power and the responsibility to express your desires and change the world as you see fit and so while we all have these social structures that have improved Upon Time every single one gives its gives its participants gives the the people that

stand on this scaffolding more and more responsibility over how they dictate their lives and I don't know if maybe this is too soon but cryptography feels like a pretty damn strong logical conclusion of where this goes where we have the very very interpretable which is religion to the provably and verifiably objective which is cryptography and so I want to pose everyone the question of who are you when you have the context and the tools to be the best version of yourself because the tools that you live inside of not web 2 but web3 not web 2 is not bad but web3 is way better gives you the platform to learn how to have the most agency to self-actualize the best so you

can be become the best version of yourself and so this is just a question I think that we get to ask Humanities and when web3 does the thing that we all hope that it does and it scales out to the entirety of the internet and all of a sudden we have a self-sovereign internet who does that make you who does that make us when we have the power to do anything that we want to do because it all boils down to private keys and ownership and responsibility and so going back to the whole idea of social scaffolding and social structures the what the social structures that give people the best and and uh the strongest path forward to do what they want to do are going to be the things that are adopted right that is why that is the

long Arc of history and here we are on this Frontier of cryptography and crypto economic systems and we have the platforms to do what we want to do the best and that's why there's so many entrepreneurs in crypto probably at one part it's so young but it's so permissionless we can all get done what we want to get done and we have the tools to do that now we all just saw 2022 we as we saw what the power of permissionless Technology can do and unfortunately I don't have a solution for that but systemically we all have the ability to be responsible over our little corner of ethereum and hopefully we can all learn how to turn that into Collective action and make Society the most responsible the most bankless Society of all time thank

you [Applause] thank you thank you