Decentralisation Theatre - Migle Rakitaite

Transcript

[music] >> To be or not to be. That is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the minds to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take the arms against the sea of troubles and by opposing end them.

To die to sleep no more. Hi everyone. I'm Migle. And I spent all my childhood in theater on stage. If I can get Oh. This is me and I Oh. Let's see if we can go back.

This is also a very good metaphor for our industry that I will explain in a second as well. But this is me in a national drama theater and I spent over a decade on a stage acting. I saw and worked in every single department that you can think of. So that included the props and years of research to find specific ingredients to make the props the departments of the cinematography, the departments for the lights, the makeup, the lighting. This is me in the play of honor of Hans Christian Andersen and The Ugly Duckling. I was around 7 years old when I was acting in there.

But spending over a decade in theater taught me how much of collaboration it truly takes to bring something on stage that will evoke emotion. That perhaps that emotion will change someone's life. And I do wholeheartedly believe that most of us here, especially at the conference like ETH Prague, and not being somewhere in Miami, unnecessary shade. We are here for the ideological reasons.

And I do have been hearing decentralization theater being coined in a very negative way. So, I do feel why I wanted to start with a Hamlet is because blockchain sometimes can be like a Hamlet. We're seeing all of the crazy stuff going on. We're aware of it. Hamlet was going psychotic, but he was so in touch with his emotions, he was aware of it. And he even started writing a play about it. And I feel like that play is our crypto Twitter, where we constantly write what's going on.

See, through my career of stepping from the stage into blockchain industry, I did a lot of different things. I won many different hackathons with without writing a single code. Um I went into venture capital to find the nerdiest nerds that cannot communicate their ideas and to make sure that they get the funding. I went into the Cypher punks and privacy industry wholeheartedly. I worked for profit, for nonprofit, and I have seen many moons and ups and downs and the changes.

So, when I got into the industry, I did not think that I wanted to be here because of the fast cash making money. That did not motivate me. See, I wholeheartedly believed in a Marshall McLuhan and the message is the medium. And let me tell you a little story of how I got to know blockchain industry because it's relevant to my theme. My best friend is a Bitcoin dinosaur. The one that does not think that any other blockchains exist. And since around 2013 and 12, he's been trying to explain to me what is Bitcoin, aka what is blockchain.

And I spent hours having conversations with him. And he tried explaining it on a technical lens, he tried explaining it a non-technical way, and we never landed on my understanding. See, I was working in a theater and productions, I was running a creative agency. This was a hobby. I was interested into technology, but it didn't really click until one day we were traveling together in Iceland. We were on a road trip and he goes, "Oh my god, Migle, I have to tell you about CryptoKitties."

And, you know, I'm visual, I like creativity, so of course CryptoKitties will make sense. So, then he proceeds to give me like a 10-minute monologue about CryptoKitties and this game and what's going on and how it's attached to the smart contracts. And all of a sudden, I have this crazy epiphany that blockchain is just a computer and you can build so many different apps on it and it has the ideological part underneath. So, it took him years and years to try and explain to me this.

And then I had realized that it took me one specific example to be able to dissect it and fully understand it in 10 minutes by giving a visual example. See, and this is when I understood that in order for this ideology of the Cypherpunks, because at this point I knew a lot about Cypherpunks from him. I understood for this ideology to truly be adapted, we're going to need the people in the middle. We're going to need people with the social skills, communication skills, creativity skills, the legal knowledge, and then we're going to need people with the technical skills. Because if it took him almost 3-4 years

to explain to me what blockchain was, something was truly broken. And this is when I had a light bulb on my head and I was like, "I think I like this challenge, translating deep complexities into humanly understandable language." So, this is my story and how I ended up in in getting deeper into the crypto. So, this is when I was like, "Okay, let me get behind not only Bitcoin, but let me do my independent research." And this is when I stumbled upon Ethereum white paper, which was way too complicated for me. Yet again, it made me think about the same problem that we had. But then as the years went by, the Devcon 1 and Devcon 2, the Ethereum Foundation

emerged, and a bit more humanly understandable explanation started to come out. And one of the first things was the idea of the ecosystem and the computer, the internet computer. So, then I learned about Swarm, that it is decentralized storage. There's no clouds and everything is stored on what. Okay, that makes sense. So, the Ethereum is the contracts. It's making the decisions. And then the The the original idea was that it will be the decentralized messaging. So, this started to make sense in my head.

And even back in the day when Jeffrey, one of the co-founders of Ethereum, at uh I believe Devcon 1, was presenting the founder of Swarm, the decentralized storage, he said in his talk, "Swarm is not getting enough publicity, so I hope you welcome them today on the stage." And ironically, many years later, we're still a little bit there, where we're not aware of the things around us, and we keep on building in a lucrative way.

>> [snorts] >> All of this will make much more sense in a second, as well. So, we already have decentralized solutions back in the day. So then why did this happen? Why in 2025, the infamous 20th of October, took place, and we had a Trojan horse of the Web 3 and decentralization. So, in my opinion, this is what happened. The database, the compute, the DNS, and then with October 20th, and all of a sudden, half of the blockchain goes down.

Could we have prevented it? Perhaps. Then why haven't we? If years prior, I already read about decentralized storage, and I already read that the solutions are circulating, so why didn't we get to that stage? Of course, many memes as the crypto Twitter, and the death of the Hamlet was coming out, and the craziness was overwhelming the industry, and that's when most of the people also started to reuse the term decentralization theater.

So, you can read that people were ridiculing our own industry, the ones that are part of it, and truly making it fun of where have we landed at this point. See, that hurt me personally. And I took that personally, because all of a sudden we were talking about theater in a very negative and lucrative way. Theater has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that blockchain went down. It absolutely had everything to do with our humanly decisions, and not the future that we envision of programmable knowledge and programmable decision-making.

Theater is one of the most profound engines for human collaboration, resilience, and truth-telling ever invented. And if I didn't tell that it is theater, this word could have been changed with blockchain. Right? So, today I want to go through three acts of a long theater show to explain why I think theater is a fantastic analogy to understand how can we adopt a true decentralization from the top to the bottom.

So, let's start with building with hardness. If you could scroll down a little bit, a bit more. So, Josh Stark was one of the Ethereum Foundation researchers, and I really like the analogy that he presented at one of the events that the traditional systems were built by atoms, so hard physical objects like gold, and then we had banks and institutions. And that's where things got a little bit messy, because we trusted in people to be honest and make the decisions without the issues and the problems.

Obviously, that's when we started to have corruption and interruptions from the people and making individualistic, egocentric uh decisions. So, then we decided to have a programmable rules, right? This is where the human cannot make an error. The human interacts, creates the rules, but at the end of the day they cannot interrupt. So, it becomes this infrastructure, it becomes really hard. And Josh called it the hardness infrastructure. It is solid, it is titanium. Because all of a sudden it becomes hard to change, hard to censor, hard to selectively apply, and hard to override without

broad consensus. So, then okay, why October 20th happened? See, in my opinion, we have been building this type of theater. That our foundation is made out of a cardboard box, and we're trying to build a really fancy, beautiful theater performance with all of these beautiful performance, but the bottom at the end of the day is still cardboard box. See, I see that the unstoppable logic served through stoppable infrastructure does not work.

So, if we want the decentralized foundation at the very bottom, we really need to think about all of the different points. How to do that? I will try to give my suggestion at the very end of my talk. So, if we pretend that we want this theater instead of this, and it's beautiful, but we're talking about DeFi and very important infrastructure, so we don't want a cardboard box theater. If we want this theater, we need to make sure that we're going from the bottom up. So, how AWS half of the blockchain might have been avoided perhaps if we used decentralized solutions from the top to the bottom.

Act two, the cast. The distributing power to the weird. See, the original ideology behind blockchain and the community that we have, it was filled with the outcasts, radicals, weirdos, people that thought outside of the box, wanted to dress and look differently. Does that sound like someone familiar? Like these guys maybe that also had very radical ideologies and ideas of how they wanted to be expressed for themselves.

They wanted to re-write the foundational rules of digital society. So, they saw into the future and they were the outcasts in the basement where at the very beginning not that many people cared about them until it got interrupted to institutions. See, the theater has exactly same communities where the outcasts, the weirdos, the ones that want to express in the most whimsical way, want to come together and perform and express and most of the time it's also political philosophical radical expression reasons. So, both of those groups of people, the actors and the cypherpunks,

they have the same premise of why they're doing what they're doing because of ideology and political reasons. Estonian director, theater director, Adolf Hitler, he speaks about that theater and expression through theater can create democracy. Because when we wait for one power source to make decisions for us, it will never represent all of the society members. And this is how traditional theater can work in certain ways as well. If I come as a spectator, I sit down, I do absolutely nothing, and I expect someone to make the right decisions for my life,

I might never reach the point and the society and my surroundings to be the way that I want to be. So, Epner philosophized that with interactive theater, you're forced to go through all of your senses. And that includes the smell and the eyesight and even the taste. When people stake you from the audience, bring you onto the stage, and make you to participate. I know that some of you are more shy than others, and that is okay. That's when we go back to the little circles that some of you are more technical and some of you are more social, but we all need to find the ways to collaborate with each other.

Act three, the script, and then the infinite game. For most of history, the scripts and the traditional systems have been locked. The power to write the laws, to shape the money, and define the rules of society held by few. Until infrastructural itself became a mechanism of control. And decentralized networks let anyone help the rules, build new systems, and experiment with the change without needing a permission.

So, the script is only powerful and as powerful as the community's ability to read it, to rewrite it, and protect it from being burned. That means that it is in all of our hands in the audience to make sure that we protect it, cherish it, and don't just throw it out of the window. We come together as a community. And I wanted to bring the philosophy for the free of the theater of the oppression.

So, Augusto Boal, he was a wonderful theater director that emerged and broke through in the '70s in Brazil. And he created this tree of the theater of the oppressed because the Brazil was undergoing the military dictatorship. And he said by people getting together and establishing through this can actually have a solid change into the society. So, the very bottom of the roots are ethics. And that's where the blockchain stands. Underlying of any that we might have with each other, whether you are in RWA and stable coins, in

whatever niche you are of this world, at the end of the day, it should be all about the ethics. So, every protocol that forgets its roots eventually serves the wrong people. The direct actions is something that rehearsal becomes real and then the protocol goes live. So, it allows us to test, but take direct actions once we decide to go live with our going from testnet to livenet. You have legislative theater where people were making decisions during the theater performances of how the actor, what will be the premise and the future, whether it will

be killed off, whether they will fall in love. They threw these big performances in parks and they allowed the audience to make the decisions. So, he called it legislative theater. And what the community rehearses together becomes the rule everyone lives by. And in my opinion, that is programmable smart contract. And a performance with no stage, anyone can locate or shut down, and that is decentralized storage. So, that is the invisible theater. Something that happens in a background and you never really see it. That are the hundreds of people that go behind the stage when you see the theater actually

happening. All those cinematographers and people doing the makeup and people looking at the lights, that is all invisible theater. So, he called all of the backstage office, all of the people working in the theater in the back, the invisible theater. And I think that is the backbones of the blockchain, like decentralized storage. And then you have that anyone stops the play and rewrites the ending, and this is what DAO looks like when it works. Right? So, he called it that you become spect- actor. So, you're still performing, but now you're being the participant.

And to me, the note operator, the key holder, the person who stopped being a user and became the infrastructure. And that's what the Augusto Boal believed in the '70s. So, what can we do about it? Why do I think that October 20th could have been prevented? This is part of the pictures from Augusto interactive theater when he was getting the communities together.

See, what is missing in our community is the willingness to stop treating the person building next to you as the competition and try to treat them as a cast. I think we're several decades away from needing to start calling each other competitors. At the moment, we're all cast members that are doing the research. Some of us are focusing on the infrastructure, some of us are focusing on the other parts, but we're all cast members of the same play. We all have exactly same script and idea. So, why do we keep on pretending that we all have a new revolutionized play on a Broadway? We don't really.

So, if I can urge you to do two actions today, if you're hosting any website, maybe that's your portfolio, your CV, it's a static website, and you want to do take one action today to be a little bit more decentralized, I urge you to go to bportditswarm.org and within 5 minutes, you will be able to decentralize your front end. I don't write code. I was able to do this in 5 minutes. If you can, we're still going to be here in the booth.

Come, we will help you to decentralize your front end. That's one of the easiest things that you can do today. The next thing that I urge you to do is text your competitor. Don't wait for them to come to you. Just talk to them. We're still writing the same script. To be or not to be. The curtain is drawn. The age of centralized shadows are gone. No more illusions, no cardboard stone.

We built a resilient stage of our own. Not held in towers that the time can erase, but wow in the networks that none can erase. The script is unwritten. The future is free. Let us step on the stage and decide who to be. Thank you. >> [applause] [applause] >> We can be taking one question. Oh, we got one question maybe. Uh >> I think this was very self-explanatory, but if you have questions >> All right.

>> Um, did you look at Augusto Boal's work on um legislative theater where he interacted with law and performance and what's that's a fascinating link to the blockchain and smart contracts? >> Yes, I agree. The legislative world is another theater and I think I support a lot of the communities and we have quite a lot in Europe that are trying to get together and now there's more and more organizations that are coming together to try to explain to people the legislations that are coming in especially in European Union in a humanly understandable language.

And that to me is coming together to create this play that makes a little bit more sense. So, when it comes to legislation and blockchain, I wish we had more dedicated lawyers to try to dissect and translate those complexities into easier understandable language. And there are those communities and stuck in my head the name of the community now. Um, but it is something that I will keep on advocating for of translating the complexities into the humanly understandable language for everyone, right? And I think that's the direction that I wish on this beautiful decentralization theater to continue going.

>> Thank you very much. Thank you very much to Migle. >> [music]