It's all Coordination

Transcript

hey everyone my name is kevin owaki i am the quadratic spokesmen at gitcoin and uh today we're going to talk about coordination and why we could use ethereum to build better coordination in the world and then austin griffith the top griffith in ethereum is going to come up on stage with me and we're going to talk about what we're doing to do that and i want to tee off my talk with a little bit of an experiment in coordination and i just want you guys to follow my lead please [Applause] developers developers developers [Applause] thank you that's this is my steve balmer moment

at ecc right here i had the sweaty pits last night at rave but not not today um we uh um we basically just experimented in a protocol for human coordination anytime you've seen someone at a talk and you've raised your hand or if you have uh given someone a handshake or if you have just clapped with me then you have participated in a protocol for human coordination we talk a lot about protocols in the blockchain space as being a smart contract-based protocol for human coordination but there are a ton of non-verbal verbal ways that we coordinate

and i am obsessed with coordination these days in ethereum because it's all coordination and it always has been we as humans compete for resources but we also coordinate to survive we're interdependent beings that are using families companies dowse and markets to survive with each other and austin and i are thinking a lot about how we accelerate coordination in the ethereum ecosystem in open source and in humanity at large but there are constraints with human coordination there's this thing called the dunbar's number which is the number of people that you can form stable social relationships with it goes up to five

for close friends 15 for super family 150 for a tribe and beyond that it becomes really hard to scale coordination because you can't form stable social relationships so if you think about the amount of discord that can be introduced into a family there's less people that have to have relationships with then when you have a larger group of people you can have things that go wrong and it becomes hard to coordinate trust breaks down we defect instead of coordinate in the giant prisoner's dilemma and so it's one of these it's it's this coordination failure that i've really been thinking a lot about over the last year if you think about a group of rational

human actors why would we choose to not have open source software funded this is a coordination failure that we all rely on open source software and that it's not well funded it's an irrational coordination failure why is it that we have nuclear weapons threatening to blow up the entire planet when no individual citizen would actually choose to have that outcome but we're living in a dictatorless dystopia in which for the lack of a coordination mechanism to solve these problems they endure so you can almost think of coordination failures as being like an all-powerful demon lord the meme that's been spread in the ethereum community is this demon lord moloch that is causing us to behave in all these irrational ways

and have all of these sort of coordination failures when it would be better if we all coordinated to solve these existential problems it is all coordination and it always has been if you think about what the internet did to humanity we now have communication with people across the world and but we don't have trust with each other we've evolved for millions of years the where in our brains allows us to coordinate in dunbar's number and build stable social relationships in a geographic basis and now we can communicate with people across the world no [ __ ] [ __ ] that social media is toxic right now we're communicating with people across the world with different priors different cultural backgrounds and we've never learned to trust people across the world

because of the million years of evolution that we have so offline it's just your geographic friends i got my high school friends i got my college friends i got my parents back in landenburg pennsylvania but online i've got my reddit friends i've got my ethereum friends i've got my designer friends i've got my friends that i larp with which is all of you we're all larping and we are now learning to scale trust across the internet we have a mesh network of trust that indexes on what we're interested in positive or negative and instead of just geographic based we're building a mesh network of coordinate coordination and that's going to allow us to scale beyond coordinating a geographic basis and one of the things that's really most exciting to me

is that steve job talks about how technology is a bicycle for the mind well what's the bicycle for the mine that's going to allow us to scale dunbar's number from 150 people up to 1500 people you know about seven degrees of kevin bacon what if we could all coordinate with uh 1500 people instead of 150 people how much more uh just and and in good could human society be if we could all coordinate and have stable social relationships with more people it is all coordination and it always has been it always has has been one of the things that's most interesting to me about coordination is learning about multi-polar traps basically prisoner's dilemma in which two people have to decide whether or not

they want to coordinate there's a famous game theoretic example of a coordination failure called a prisoner's dilemma in which uh two people are arrested for committing a crime and the police separate them from each other and try to get them to rat on each other so if person a betrays person b then they'll get less time in jail if person b betrays person a then they'll get less time in jail unless they both rat on each other and they both get more time in in jail but if they all stay silent from each other or stay silent and don't rat on each other then they're going to not spend much time in jail anyway because the police don't have as much evidence for them but for lack of a better coordination mechanism most people in this scenario according to the game theoretic primitive

are going to actually turn on each other and i think that this is sort of just such an example of irrational and irrational behavior that happens in groups of people because they don't have a way of coordinating with each other it is all coordination and it always has been um i believe that we can solve coordination failures with ethereum and that is the great purpose of ethereum when we hear vitalik talk about what's in ethereum past d5 i think that solving coordination failures is a better thing that we can do with this technology than just creating a decentralized casino we now have transparent immutable ledger in which the games cannot be the game cannot be changed on you that's a better foundation for markets and for society and ethereum is a

shelling point for the hopeful the kind of people who are tired of the [ __ ] with the industrial age tired of all of the cruft that we inherited from the baby boomers and want to build new institutions on top of this transparent immutable ledger we're not happy with the status quo and we want to build better coordination what if we could build a hero from all of the different projects in the d5 space all of the different money that's being created in the d5 space and we could create a superhero that could grow up and could fight molluck for us we could build a megazord that could solve humanity's biggest coordination problems by scaling up dunbar's number by solving the prisoner's dilemma because we have a substrate for coordination and hopefully making a better world

because we've recognized that it's all coordination and it always has been one of the things that i'm really excited about with ethereum is that software is using the world and open source software is eating ethereum sorry open source software is being eaten by crypto and our mission is to grow open source software and empower open source software developers to be able to quit their job at chase bank and to go work for the open internet on open source software what if we could make a shelling point for hundreds of thousands of software developers to come work on public goods to come work on coordination failures instead of just private profit there will be profit but there will also be solving of the externalization of problems that we've had before um and so what if we could create a

shelling point for the hopeful in crypto in which we solve coordination failures we economically empower open source software developers then since software is eating the world we use that to pill software developers across the world and then we create a better world a better coordination mechanism for the entire world i just happen to be the founder of the quadratic spokesmeme at git coin which has its fingers in a lot of these different pies in the ethereum ecosystem we've done 13 million dollars worth of grants in the ethereum ecosystem we do hackathons to pull developers into the ecosystem we want to pull developers into the ecosystem so they can work on public goods and my big dream with ethereum is that we create a dow of dowels where basically all of these tokenized projects rise and fall in utility

along with each other and i think it's really exciting to think about as opposed to traditional markets where the s p 500 everyone has their market share that they're trying to optimize for each with each other what if we all coordinated in uh so as an ecosystem we can rise and fall together so i think for designing the evolution of trust nikki case had a really interesting uh game that he published on the internet that basically game theoried out that in order to evolve trust with a group of humans you need to have repeat interactions with these humans so basically like if i flick you off in traffic it's probably because i think that i'm never gonna see you again if i do it at ecc i'm probably just tired because i didn't get any sleep last night possible win wins we've got a lot of these in d5 in the ethereum space

this is a pie that's growing so fast and we can all play positive some games with each other because of the possible win wins and low miscommunication this one's a hard one for me as a software engineer it's hard to be communicative with people but it's worth trying to do because it's all coordination and it always has been so um i would like to bring up my buddy top griffith and ethereum austin griffith uh and oh my gosh he's got so much charisma what do i what do i do is that coffee um so we're gonna launch a thing called moonshot collective which is basically what it sounds like we're gonna build more coordination tools faster

in ethereum and i'm just so thankful to be partnered with my chief build officer austin griffith we're gonna we're gonna blow it up so austin tell us what the moonshot collective is i think uh one key insight that i had when i first got into this space is i went too deep on my own project without getting any feedback i didn't prototype quick enough facebook spent that's so many galley ass so many so i think a key piece here is we have to learn to prototype and throw things away and try things over and over again and i think the stack even changes a little bit when you're doing that level of prototyping so yeah looking at this loop we start with a hypothesis hypothesis we hypothesize we do an experiment

then then we test our results and then usually we throw it away and we learn from it and we try again and we just have to keep that flywheel going what do we call it when a moonshot doesn't make it it's a moon shark it's a moon shark if it doesn't make it and we should celebrate our failures even uh if they don't work um the reason why austin and i are doing this together is that austin runs scaffold.eth it's basically the ruby on rails of the ethereum ecosystem and it's going to allow us to spin this flywheel faster gitcoindao has access to a ton of capital we have access to a ton of talent and we also have tools to coordinate did i mention that it's all coordination and that it always has been i did yeah thank you for someone answering that so so as we go through this like

prototyping this market validation there's a lot of stuff that we i mean it showed the slide shows it perfectly we have to start with market validation we have to prototype we have to grow and then eventually decentralize if it does get that uh that that stick but it takes time and you got to try things and you got to celebrate your moon charts and the moon shots the ones that make it are the ones that are going to change the world and are going to help us coordinate better and uh for us it's just building that shelling point of the hopeful and and the builders in the space that are going to come together join our monthly calls go into pitches go into team formation exercises austin and i between us have tens of thousands of software engineers that we're trying to route to the right

projects so if you're a project that's looking for software engineers we'd love to have you come uh we'd love to have you come come check out the moonshot collective so um basically i'm going to like do a couple pitches of projects that are on our backlog there's like 20 projects on our backlog and i'm inviting all of you guys today to add uh to our backlog on moonshotcollective.space one of the things that i want to see us build is basically a token and talent swap marketplace so basically like a place where we can share job descriptions partnership proposals and token swaps uh proposals with other dows and so basically the idea is that git coin can help empower this because we have an audience of 20 200 000 software developers and we can help you bootstrap

a token swap marketplace and i just imagine a world in which we've got a mesh network of projects that can actually compete uh to out coordinate each other so basically token swaps the the ultimate result is that we're all this mesh network of dowels that is rising and falling together and it's just someone creating that place for the uh those token swap proposals to live intra dao enter in between dials and um you know maybe we'll add some fun mechanics around like staking or or basically upvotes or curation using crypto economics so if you're a builder that wants to build a token swap uh marketplace with us or if you're someone who wants to do token swaps uh then i'd love to talk to you more

that's my pitch come join us at moonshot collective if you want to help build that or if you have a picture of your own austin what's your pitch well i'm hoping these pitches kind of help us get an idea of the things that we're looking for and uh i i want to like zoom in on even open source is not good enough open source even if you're open source it's still not good enough it needs to be hella forkable right like something that you build someone else needs to be able to take that and create six different other versions of it and see what else can get better product market fit so with scaffold eth we spend a lot of time creating a good template for something a good starter kit for something and then we can use that as a starting point to quickly spin up a lot of other things so

right away a good gtc starter kit for scaffolding uh my dude varaz has one put up and then from there we've got delegate communication like my delegates of my people who have delegated their gtc to me to make decisions for them i have really no great way to communicate with him and if we could set up some kind of thing where my delegates could sign my there we go we got a delegate wouldn't it be great if you could send a message up to me now and then like hey don't do that or hey let's let's lean this way right and so i feel like that's a great first step and a good little component to have to have delegate communication talking with a ton of people about dows now thinking about generic dow

components and governance components it's almost always just like a gnosis safe bootstrapped with something right so if we had a good gnosis safe multi-sig underneath and then you just have a react app that goes over the top of it you could create it like a quick little dow starter kit i always use the example of like a mood dao or something where you just throw in your signers and your signers can sign you know within the front end i think the the mood of the dow should be this and then you get your signers together and they can they can go one way or the other so it's a good way for a bigger dow to even you know create a little side module for that and that that leads to the moloch and the uh minions and stuff but uh another one is a good moloch starter kit right like

if you could quickly spin up a moloch and have that as one and then just kind of start bringing in the the minions and stuff and that's a shout out to isaac who's working on that too so an important coordination tool molecule as well that's right that's right it's all coordination it always has been yeah even like a game right so hopefully this has given you an idea that we're just looking for generic components to help uh experiment and and make coordination better fun public goods a good way to do that might be a game right if we could come up with a game that uh kind of pits people against or dowse against each other in an adversarial way that might be more like the real world but it's still a game so those are those are my pitches i think totally those are really exciting if

you're a builder who's looking to get into the space and you want to work with me and austin come look up moonshotcollective.space yeah austin's got the charisma body moves i'm just like the i'm the wave guy yeah um uh we are really so passionate about solving coordination failures about solving public goods i passed out some comic books about how ethereum can be used to solve coordination failures so pick one of those up on your way out and uh in the meantime please spread the meme it's all coordination and it always has been we'll see in the moonshot collective thank you everyone moonshotcollective.space

let's all let's all coordinate to have a q a yeah so uh i wanted to ask about uh the bitcoin uh voting process for uh for funding so currently i don't think it's uh decentralized enough okay so i wanted to to ask you have you ever considered um improving on that have you heard of maybe macy and uh what are your thoughts and opinions and problems that you stamped uh stamped on stamped upon if you even thought about the centralizing so when you say that voting and get coin is not decentralized enough you're not talking about the dow and the way that gtc is released from the treasury you're talking about

quadratic funding yeah yeah yeah cool also by the way like i bait and switched you guys because i was going to give a talk about quadratic funding and then i didn't so yeah thank you for coming anyway um yeah so macy is amazing i really love clr fund and what organ orion's doing austin is working on a qf mechanism for build guild i think it's really important that we uh co-evolve quadratic funding together and get coin's implementation is not perfect um we are spinning up uh d-grants which is basically an ipfs hosted version of bitcoin grants um that is more decentralized and we're looking at macy it'll probably take like quarters not months to get there

we're like retooling from like zero to one like founder yolo driven to being more systematic and um and so we're retooling and and launching d grants i guess is the answer but uh it's a fair criticism and you can check out other quadratic funding tools it takes an ecosystem to build public foot uh public goods funding together yeah thanks for the question thank you very much yeah anyone else have a question i noticed that griff green was out there so i'm only the second best griff in the space oh i think we're gonna have to have a griffoff in the hall there all right is it all coordination

everyone it always has been thank you so much oh my gosh uh what's your question in the back uh on one of your slides the there was like a path of uh market validation uh prototype that's funny yeah so you just had market validation first uh which yeah i was just curious on what you were doing on what that was for you like you know and how that happens before you prototype and grow yeah git coin is my seventh side project and if i had done market validation before i built prototypes maybe it'd only be my third side project so i've i've gotten a lot

of licks from building prototypes before market validation but in reality this stuff is all iterative and uh you know you can go to you can go to growth and realize that you don't actually have true product market fit so i wouldn't take the linearity of it too seriously good question thank you um if you're a builder learning how to validate your market is a really big time saver for you i've built a lot of stuff that no one gave a crap about so learn to validate your markets if you're a builder and that's something austin and i can help with if you join the moonshot collective hello citizen hey awesome awesome presentation um uh curious about the first uh pitch you gave for a token swap like network oh yeah is the idea there that you wanna like

scale dunbar's number by having like a network of dows that like swap tokens and it's like royal intermarriage and we're all like working together after that is that like the approach or is there another idea behind it yeah you're more concise than me that was that's good yeah um yeah inter dao uh diplomacy like um so there's an article in bank list that just went live today about the git coin and akita interdollar diplomacy and that's like an adversarial example but like i [ __ ] love common stack and meta cartel and all these other regen projects and imagine that we were all doing token swaps with each other instead of everyone having their own like uh you know like their own like token system you basically have like

everyone sort of incentivized to work in between dowels and not just within the dowels that there are and it's like the um the the brotherhood of many banners like kind of thing and i don't mean to gender it at all i just mean like i want us all working together to solve coordination problems as an ecosystem and rising and falling together so yeah that's that's the end game of it but like this is just kind of like a milwaukee like pitch like whoever like whatever builder we join like we can give some funding to and some coaching and and we can kind of discover it together i've got dao token swap proposals that have been proposed to get coindao um and i'm assuming every other dow out there probably has similar things going on so what if there was a shelling point where it was all happening out in the

open and we could kind of like copy templates and proposals from each other it it seems like it's something that could push the space forward to me but yeah come find me later and we'll we'll nerd out on it oh gosh i'm such a bad chiller um every month we're gonna have a moonshot collective uh pitch meeting and the first one is on monday after 8th cc so if you join moonshotcollective.space austin and i will invite you to the meetings it's like it's like an hour per month uh minimum to just be involved in the in the project so it's not a big commitment and you get to hang out with me and austin uh how much more time do i have one more question maybe last one yeah last one cool

anyone have a question so i want to help uh growing projects have the out of the collective how should i get involved um sorry i didn't quite hear the question you want to help you want to i would love to help growing projects out of the collective how should i get involved how can i get involved yeah so uh for one uh if you just sign up to the email list on the website that's number one um and then if you uh show up to the first meeting then just give your pitch and and like austin and i can kind of take it from there we're gonna we're gonna spend a lot of time on pitches for the first meeting and just like team formation and stuff all righty are you asking me a question are you

just returning the mic okay it's okay cool um thanks everyone for your time i will see you in the lobby i love ethereum and i love you all [Applause] goodbye you