Our Collective Psychosis around Public Goods

Transcript

wow thank you guys for coming so early in the morning after that rave last night the rave you guys are uh you guys are heroes seriously so i've been working in the dao space for since there were daos and the my entire crypto career really the last seven years that i've been working in this space i've had one major goal and that goal is to change the way that we coordinate as a society around public goods oh i need a clicker and there's actually been a lot of blockers you know and you could think of

the regular blockers the like ux and crypto and getting people understand how crypto how economics works in general but honestly that's not the biggest blocker the biggest blocker is that people do not appreciate the value the work that it takes to create public goods for society it's a huge challenge and there's a there's a general psychosis around the value of public goods and that's what i'm going to talk about today so let's start with what is a public good so of course there are the in in classical economics there are four types of public of goods of economic goods uh there's private goods

which are excludable and rivalrous like your cell phone or this clicker you know i i can put in my pocket and it's excludable uh if i'm using the clicker it's not very easy for you to use the clicker so it's rivalrous right uh but if it's a movie theater movie theaters are non-rival risk movie theater is an example of a club good something that we can both enjoy together without impeding each other's enjoyment of it but it is excludable you have to buy a ticket to go to the movies these types of goods work so well with our free market economy it's incredible what we have done for excludable goods as a society but non-excludable goods which in general i

just call public goods because common pool resources is a lot to say and public goods has a good meme in the ethereum space so common pool resources are non-excludable and rival risks and they do not work well in the free market this is an example of that would be a highway without tolls a highway with tolls is actually a club good because anyone who pays the toll then can enjoy the resource but a highway without tolls is a common pool resource it's non-excludable as in uh you know anyone can go drive on the road but it's rivalrous traffic sucks when there's a lot of people using it like that's the worst right oh traffic it's

like the plague of society and then public goods public goods is the gold standard for economic goods this is what we want this is what we need to create for ourselves we need to create a society with an abundance of public goods where anything where we have such abundance that anyone can use it and it doesn't impede everybody else's enjoyment of it the best example of that is clean air if i'm breathing it you're enjoying you can breathe it too and we don't like stop each other from it but what's really cool is that economic goods can do yoga they can move around you don't have to just be stuck in one spot so the free market works great like you

can for like education you can go if you're rich you can go get a private tutor for your kid you know you can send your kids to private school and this is where the free market economy you get really good education here but if you are trying to provide a public good for society you know you want to make it non-excludable so a poorly funded public school would be a common pool resource because it might be overcrowded the students don't get enough attention you add one more student and that hurts everybody else but a well-funded public school can just hire more teachers the more people that come in and so it becomes a public good and as you can see by this example unfortunately the number one provider of

public goods is the government the government's government's main value to society what they do for us why we why we get stuck with these organizations all the time is because they provide public goods they have a monopoly over certain resources like land you know like if you want to buy a house you have to play by their rules and they'll say hey pay taxes to us give us a reason to justify our economy so we can just print money and i swear you know the government's they'll just print money and then provide public goods for us which is great right sometimes most of the time there's a problem with governments they don't have the best incentive alignment right like if a bureaucrat makes a good decision he gets a salary

if a bureaucrat makes a bad decision he collects his salary okay so there's no reason there's no incentive for them to make good decisions well what other incentives can they get okay well the other big problem with governments is that it's top down we always have public goods being funded by a bunch of people in some room that decide oh yeah we should send a million dollars there a billion dollars there and the people on the ground they get to like have a voice every four years or something it's not necessarily the best way to fund public goods in my opinion i like the grassroots approach people on the ground that know what we need know what public goods need

are most important deciding how they get funded and the grassroots approach that we have is non-profits this is a picture uh it's an illustration it's not a real picture uh it's a it's a it's kind of metaphorical of a non-profit boardroom and in every non-profit boardroom there's an elephant in the room as you can see here and the elephant is something that they don't talk about but they all know in the back of their mind this is a requirement it's just never spoken and i'll talk about that in a second but first i want to ever for everyone to understand that non-profits create value and it's really hard to see sometimes because they're not rewarded

for that value they have to sacrifice to do it and but but they do create value we all know that taking care of the less fortunate society pays off in the long run we all know that taking care of the environment will pay off in the long run society benefits from the work that environmentalists are doing society also benefits surprisingly we don't think of culture and heritage as a public good but it's so important to have history and culture and have an understanding of where we've been so we can uh you know continue to evolve and of course we all know that in this community we know very well the value of open source technology

this is a this is a public good that everyone builds on in this community and we also know that the people building these open source tools are are sacrificing they actually could be paid much better by google or amazon right to create closed source software but they spend so much time getting things right so that we can build on top of it as a society they create more value in the public good space by doing open source work than they do working for google or amazon and that's the elephant in the room that's the thing that goes unspoken in non-profits whether it's an open source project or it's a classic non-profit that's helping orphans they all rely on sacrifice they rely on donors

to give without expectations of a return they rely on volunteers to give their time and effort their blood sweat and tears with nothing given back to them just this value the things that they think they are doing in the world are making an impact and that gives them value of course but in the financial landscape we're screwing them it's horrible it doesn't make any sense this is the psychosis we as a society have created systems that do not reward the value that's being created in the public good space we know public goods have value but because of the systems that we live within in general we don't actually appreciate

the value of the work that's being done for in the public goods we know public goods have value but the work that it takes to produce the value is not appreciated and this is the collective psychosis that is stopping me from succeeding at providing these these solutions that i've been trying to work on for so long it's the constant roadblock that i have to that i keep running into and this is because i don't think we like to admit it but by having these kinds of systems that rely on sacrifice to produce public goods that the society needs society is effectively exploiting the altruists and we don't we don't want to talk about

it it's sad and it hurts but we rely on public goods when the when the governments fail to provide the public goods that we need we rely on non-profits to step up as a society and this reliance without reward is straight up exploitation and it needs to stop we need another way we need to find a better way to reward the people that are producing value so if we're going to find this way this is actually this is a quote from albert einstein it's a little out of context he was like you know soliciting for funds so that he could find a better way to deal with nuclear technology but i think it applies here too

because this you know we're talking about the destruction of the earth as well a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move towards higher levels and right now we have two ways to fund public goods governments and non-profits we need a third way and i think crypto is bringing us a third way and the common stack is dedicated to really pushing this third way and and the main focus of how to apply this is just by recognizing the future value of the work today the future value that non-profits are providing if it was recognized we'd have an

opportunity to actually reward the people who are doing good work and that's the goal we need to call these people out as heroes we need to provide them the we need to reward them with the value they deserve for the value they are creating for us and that's the mission of the common stack our mission is to enable communities to design and develop their own micro economies their own micro economies that reward the creation of public goods i really want to emphasize their own micro economies want to keep things small and agile and and competitive like a startup and it needs to be their

own we can't build a platform we at least the common stack doesn't want to build a platform for everyone to join and and use because we design it and we tell them how to do it it needs to be their own design and their own micro economy so to do this we're not creating a platform we're creating a foundation of tooling and documentation that so that the designs of the economies can improve iteratively our role as a common stack is not to design it for these communities our role is to watch how the communities play and then make better tooling and make better solutions so that more people can try out and and evolve iteratively with the communities that use our tools

the most important thing that is missed i think by most of the crypto community is that when making economies economics is a social science and the cultural side of these economies is very important to appreciate so the common stack has uh really dove into the best commons research out there the best like community research how to make uh sustainable communities uh eleanor ostrom isn't as the first female to ever win a nobel prize in economics for her work in disproving the tragedy of the commons so of course that's a great place to start uh and uh we we uh we very much in the common stack follow follow her principles that are so critical for the dow space to

really dive into and appreciate um i i'm going to read them for you i i want to say that her research was based off of commons that were lasting generations she only studied comments that lasted 100 years or more and so her words have wisdom in them for sure number there's eight principles number one commons need to have clearly defined boundaries that's easy for us we have tokens that's great and but also what is the value that's being produced that needs to be well understood rules should fit local circumstances it's not a one-size-fits-all economy we'll never get there if that if we're trying to just copy paste deploy things have to be modified to fit the

use case participatory decision making is vital that's how we get to number two people need to have a have decision power in this system commons must be monitored we need to actually continually monitor the progress of these of these organizations that we're deploying and this is the next one's a tough one sanctions for abuse of the commons should be graduated when we're monitoring and we find that people are scamming the system like in angela's talk it was great she talked about how bitcoin is being abused by certain people there needs to be sanctions applied but they need to be applied gradually we need to give warnings and

and then like small slaps on the wrists and but unfortunately as much as i love the lovey-dovey like happy-go-lucky things without some kind of communication of one thing people are breaking the rules they will continue to break them so we just sanctions communicate this and then another very under appreciated and critical piece of any dow system or any decentralized system is that conflict resolution should be easily accessible conflicts are natural and can be transformative so we need to take an opportunity when there's a social conflict or any kind of conflict we need to take that as an opportunity to make everything better and uh seven is commons need the right

to or organize from society basically they need a legal structure if the government says it's illegal and shuts you down it's not going to work out right and then number eight which is also very interesting commons work best when nested within larger networks not larger organizations but networks and this is why we're not creating a platform we're allowing uh different communities to deploy their own system and keeping things small and scaling horizontally eleanor ostrom is just the wisest of the wise i love this quote from her there is no reason to believe that bureaucrats politicians nor the economic technocracy okay i added that part

uh no matter how well-meaning are better at solving problems than the people on the spot who have the strongest incentive to get the solution right i don't know why that that last line always makes me uh think real hard but um it's so critical that we give people from the bottom a voice and a way to actually say the stuff it'll never work without that keeping things small gives people that voice so i love that dave bowler's another

research that a researcher that i follow in the common space and he defines a commons as neither the resource the community that gathers around it nor the protocols for its stewardship but the dynamic interaction between all these elements when you create a dao it's not the dao is on chain and that's part of the protocol that's a major piece of the protocol but it's not everything there's also cultural rules that go on top of that and those are also often forgotten but what's really important when you're creating the dao and i think people in the crypto space recognize this for the most part is the community and the mission what are you actually doing what public good are you providing why does your dow have value if it's just a

casino on finance smart chain you know this is probably going to break down eventually but if you really appreciate the community and it's a relationship to the value that's being created and you appreciate how the protocol creates that value and appreciate how the protocol interacts with the community there's good ux in these things we have a major chance for success and david bullier absolutely agrees with eleanor ostrom that the next big thing is a lot of small things micro economies are the way to get push forward in my opinion so on the social side you know the commons research is very valuable and i i i can't recommend enough to to dive into that but on the technical side of course we we are from the blockchain tech like

well i'm not making this up you know i'm not trying to say hey i have this innovative idea let's see if it works the common stack is trying to take things that we know work and apply them to real world situations and we know that these systems continue to create public goods for society bitcoin is an open global payment system commons zcash has been funding zero knowledge research for like i don't know five years or something namecoin has provided censorship resistant dns for the entire for the entire world no one uses it but it's there and that's the most amazing thing is that these sustainable systems even if no one uses it it's there for us because

they created a system that can continue to financial reward and support the commons primecoin continues to find prime numbers every day to the delight of cryptographers around the world ethereum curecoin these are all computing power commons and it's really easy to like justify and do things without so much culture when you can very clearly measure the value that's being produced uh in a computational way with blockchain tech but the common stack this is where we really take the leap you know we're trying to bridge the in the incredible incentive alignment that blockchain tools provide with physical world applications we want to

jump into the real world and provide the same incentive alignment that we get with prime coin right but there's some real challenges here open global blockchain based economies much like bridges are public infrastructure that are hard to change we must take care and validate our designs as well as iterate upon them you don't go to home depot and start building a bridge and just hack it together that could get people hurt we need to appreciate and validate our designs beforehand but before i dive into token engineering and its value i i wanted i want to recommend a documentary to all the innovators out there

it's called general magic uh it's about a group that actually made the smartphone in 1995. they sold 3000 copies and went out of business because society wasn't ready for the solution they were providing they knew the long-term goal they knew where the world was going but society wasn't ready for it so i don't want to fall into that trap and i really strongly recommend you guys don't fall into the trap we have to appreciate where society is we have to appreciate the collective psychosis we have to appreciate the crypto ux and we have to see where we are and choose audiences for our for our solutions that can actually succeed and that's why uh we're so the common stock is extremely delighted

to partner with the token engineering community as our first comments the token engineering commons token the token engineering community understands that in my opinion there's no better community to overcome this collective psychosis they understand that token economies have different models than what normal business models have and that value can be appreciated through like ecosystem value flows as opposed to needing a business model and this is the opportunity because public goods can't have business models to have a business model you have to exclude people you have to have a gate you have to and a gatekeeper but public goods they thrive when

there's no gatekeeper and that means there can't be a business model but you can have an economic model so with the tec we're trying something different that's never been done before we're calling it participatory economics participatory economics is about allowing the people that are participating in the economy to actually have a choice there has never been an economy that gave people a choice the federal reserve you know we have democracy in in the us or whatever but the federal reserve who elects them right who decides whether the interest rate goes up or down not us right and even in crypto like crypto is way better because you can opt

into the economy but it's still a bunch of people in back rooms that decide all of the parameters and then if we choose to accept it then we buy it or or whatever or they airdrop to us and then we sell it if we don't like it but with the tec and the common stack designs we're trying something different we're trying to make it your economy your choice from the very beginning we're allowing people to decide how the dao is structured this is like a doubt you know instead of just having a group say yeah the minimum quorum is ten percent and and uh what it takes eighty percent voters to say yes and blah blah blah we actually give people tools so they can decide it themselves

every crypto economy that's ever existed up until this point has had a technocracy and that's okay that's how it is you know it's very difficult token engineering is a very young science and and most communities aren't in a place where they can do token engineering themselves but we're very privileged to be working with the token engineering commons a bunch of token engineers can actually participate in economics and we can over we can have a crypto economy without a technocracy and crypto economies by doing this process we were very surprised at the benefits number one the biggest benefit is we had

an educated community so we already did this process we allowed uh every anyone to propose the economic system that we're going to launch that we launched and afterwards everyone felt like wow i really get it non-technical people now understand what we're doing and how it works and so we have the benefit of 60 people that voted on our economy and i think there were well over 40 submissions of economic parameters from our community that then we voted on and now everyone knows what the parameters are and if they want to change them we have this core group of wise community members from diverse backgrounds that understand

it but that's one of the benefits one of the challenges is political debates you know when you give people a choice all of a sudden politics comes into it and different people have different opinions and it's it's a it's a challenge and to have these economic debates you know can be challenging for a community this is why we spent a year doing the cultural build making sure that we have a lovey-dovey community that can have some that celebrates together that praise each other that actually appreciate each other we gave ten thousand praises as a community 10 000 messages of gratitude to each other throughout this year

and every thursday we actually have this awesome call where we just all praise each other it's a it's really fun and creates a culture of gratitude that allows us to have economic debates we celebrate birthdays we we celebrate holidays you know we we have fun together we're a community we're not we're not just like creating an economy but we are creating an economy too and it's actually live right now uh we just started the hatch we we have a goal of reaching 800 000 and we have a cap of 14 million and we are actively encouraging people to join our community

and participate in this uh the the funds the r the x die that goes into this into this will actually initialize a bonding curve and the people who participate will be able to design the bonding curve the conviction voting system that we that we that we launch so when you put funds into this you will actually become a member of the dow and have a say in our economic design but before you can actually participate it's not open for everyone we do not we we need to have a trusted seed and the trusted seed cannot be overstated it's a just like if you're a tech startup you want to find investors

that actually care about the value you intend to produce and it's the same thing here so we don't if you when people apply we don't need your like id it's not really kyc but we look you up on twitter and if it's airdrop airdrop d5 d-gen twit tweets then we don't let you in you know we reject you but if you actually care about creating value you will be able to join the hatch and i really invite you all to check it out so thank you guys one last thing we have shirts we have

shirts back there if you want one of these go grab one