From P2P to P4P

Transcript

Perfect. Uh all right, everybody. It's a it's it's always a pleasure to hmm to introduce this this beautiful uh fruiting body. >> [laughter] >> So, yeah. I mean, I know you have like I think he he pulled me down the rabbit hole, the proper rabbit hole in what three of like regeneration, talking on me, talking engineering, all sorts of like, you know, thinking about the commons in terms of systems design. I'm very grateful for that, brother. Like um yeah. And it's very exciting to see like uh how this is pushing forward the whole movement. Like I just was delightful just to read about like what you're about to present. So, I had a lot of expectations. But okay, they're good.

>> Anyway, I'll I'll get you just just go for it, brother. Thank you. >> Stand. Testing. Okay. Uh yeah, so my name is Jeff Emmett. Um I've worked with a number of organizations, but I don't like to lead with credentials because I think the value of what someone brings is what they bring and not the credentials that they bring with them. I don't know. There's all this you know, weird qualification stuff we have to do in the real world with your resume or your job titles or Anyway, I I think we just really need to get a lot more silly and or or seriously unserious. We were talking the other day about being more organized, but you know, I think mushrooms hold so many interesting

patterns for us, and they are one of the most successful evolutionary patterns in nature, and they're they're all about silliness. But, I mean, this is kind of a tangent from a lot of my work lately with Michel Bauwens in the Peer to Peer Foundation. We've been doing a lot of work over the past couple of years. I mean, we connected in my work over the common stack years ago, which was aiming to make DAO tools more human, aligning them with Elinor Ostrom's principles to bring them from these sort of cold financial mechanisms into warm human community-centric coordination tools. I would say we've been through kind of several iterations of that in at least in my experience in the Web3 space. And I think bringing all

of this back to the commons is really where it lands in a home that it can actually help change the world in the right direction, rather than just, you know, making capitalism faster, or, you know, everything else that is going on in in that space. So, talking with Michel the past year, he's really been going on about the cosmo-local principle. What is global is light and shared, what is local is heavy and and and local. So, the Peer to Peer Foundation has been aggregating information about the commons, commons-based movements, commons-based technologies into the Peer to Peer Wiki for many, many years.

And I think we're actually at the cusp of a new era of peer to peer, and that's moving it into peer for peer. So, how do we apply these new technologies of the commons to that cosmo-local production? And if we can summarize, peer to peer might be considered protocols of communication. We have end-to-end encryption, we have peer to peer messaging, that sort of stuff. Um but Peer 4 Peer can take it beyond just communication and bring these into protocols of coordination. How do we actually use chat apps or messaging apps or calendar apps or document apps in a peer-to-peer end-to-end encrypted fashion to do things to coordinate for our communities, where we can now build

these tools better than the corporate billionaires, and we can build them for us without all those capture vectors, and then we can share them among hubs and communities of people who can not just test, harden, and use, but also grow and share their own tools. So, we create this network of self-infrastructuring. Um so, peer-to-peer, you know, was became decades ago. I don't know, Michelle, if you can put a a date on, you know, the peer-to-peer foundation or or even the concept of peer-to-peer. I know it's been around for a long time. Uh 2005. Perfect. So, we've been 21 years.

>> [snorts] >> Um and peer-to-peer built uh a ton of things, you know, it proved that, you know, people will build enormous value without a boss or without profit, you know, Wikipedia, Linux, OpenStreetMap are some of the most of the internet runs on open source, uh and most of this is peer-to-peer. Um Michelle has talked a bit about Natar Natar Natarchical capitalism, capital that no longer owns the means of production, only the protocol on which that participation happens. Um so, this was part of the the peer-to-peer movement identifying these challenges in society, and I think Peer 4 Peer is now saying, "Let's take these tools and put the rubber to the road and test where they work and where they don't, and

build this contextual awareness of how we can continue moving forward, testing, iterating, and building these tools." Um so, if peer-to-peer carries the message, then Peer 4 Peer carries the record. So, it's not just um Thomas and I are sending messages back and forth, but we are collaborating on protocols that we're building. He's building something that has licensing, signatures, etc. I'm now using that. All of that can propagate along with the technology itself. So, we now have a record of who created what, when, where it's used, and then this can flow through all of the combinations of these tools. So, we now not just have we don't just have

peer-to-peer communication, but we have a full record of what was shared, what is used, and on and on down the chain. Some of you may have seen REA accounting before, resource event agent. That's kind of what this is looking at. These are two agents, A and B. The event is what happens, and then the resource may be what's shared or what's tracked. So, if we look at, you know, P4P as an extension of P2P, we are looking at, you know, extending the communication capabilities of the peer-to-peer layer, where it's not just a channel between two peers, but it's now a recorded event

with named agents. It might carry a message. I mean, a lot of us are have been talking about Reticulum and all these interesting end-to-end chat apps, but I think chat apps are still just the tip of the iceberg because it's not just sending a message back and forth, but then tracking the provenance of that message. Maybe that message is also a task or an event or you know, any other sort of metadata can now ride along with this to bring us into a much more higher-dimensional data space. And we'll talk a little bit more about that maybe at the end.

Yeah, moving changing value regimes. Moving away from commodity-based value, like how much um what are the KPIs, how many users um on on a certain technology to um what is the contributory account of the collective? If um one piece is built at the Commons Hub uh Austria and then used at the Commons Hub Brussels um or vice versa, how are these things tracked, accounted, how is the value um distributed through these networks? I think these are all open questions that are in active discussion this week and I think peer-to-peer offers the um sort of infrastructure of uh allowing those kinds of um sharing and collaborative projects to unfold.

Uh so, what does P4P stand for? I mean, at the basis, peer-to-peer was kind of a play on the, you know, power of two, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer. Um but, it could also be people for planet, uh production for place, protocols for provisioning, provenance for participation. Um a lot of opportunities, I think, to ground these technologies into um contextual practice and then see where they fail, where they work, where they, you know, might need iteration. It's not uh copy-paste, it's copy-customize-paste. We now have protocols, smart contracts, basically like programmatic legal arrangements or financial arrangements that can be copied and pasted without all of the

administrative overhead. Uh and licensing can ride along with this, too. So, I think there's all sorts of new ways that we can uh streamline our social agreements, particularly around collaborating over shared technology. So, cosmo-localism, as I mentioned before, the principle design global, manufacture local. Um we want what is light to be shared. That's like ideas, IP, uh maybe solutions for, you know, common problems. But, heavy things stay local. So, your construction, your energy production, your waste management, we don't want to be sending heavy things far, but we do want light things to be able to be used by whoever needs them.

Um so, this is what Bowens uh and Kostakis in the PDP lab have been talking about uh for several years. Uh and it's also already how, you know, so many maker spaces um you know, all of the stuff we printed here, we've pulled off of the internet or most of anyway. We have done some um custom design, but most of that is a digital commons of files that people have put up and we download them and 3D print them or download them and laser cut them, but still this is a a global commons. Um and it might not even know it is one. So, some of these layers have have no ledger. You know, it's very easy to see the local manufacturing, but it's very difficult for um the people working in the the the new sphere, let's say,

Michelle for example, he puts ideas out there. He doesn't know how many people actually take them up until an event like this happens and so many people show up and say, "Oh, Michelle put out the call." Um that's really nice to see, but there's rarely that feedback loop uh when you're writing to the internet or when you're speaking, it feels like you're speaking into the void. Um so, having that feedback loop of what is the uh link between the local and the heavy and the global and the light, uh I think it's really important. Uh as just mentioned, yeah, a design commons may be used a million times online and the designer never knows. You know, it might be used in maker spaces all over the world. It might be doing wonderful things, but there's no feedback loop to say this was important

or this brought value uh or you should do it again. So, I think there are all sorts of opportunities for linking the outputs of value back to the original creators and vice versa uh so, that we can continue moving these kinds of uh innovation forward. >> So, I won't go into detail on all of these at the moment, but I think a lot of these topics have been prevalent through the week and hopefully for the weeks to come.

Um I'm sure some of you have heard of resource event accounting. Sorry, REA accounting or value flows, which is kind of what we were just talking about where you have resources, events, agents. It kind of tracks a more holistic picture than just transaction back and forth. But, what is being transacted? What is the event over it's being transacted and who it's being transacted between? Um different technologies like content addressing as opposed to link addressing. So, most of the web works on link addressing today, which you might realize when the link breaks and you don't have that anymore. With content addressing, you address the content itself through encryption. So, the link doesn't break because the content is the

link. Um so, it's kind of an interesting new um I think a lot of these are sort of novel internet technologies that can be composed into very, very interesting systems. Um we have some holonic experts in the room, people who have been working on holonic design for several decades. Um holon A holon is just a fractal. It's like the part within the whole. Um and I think, you know, we we talk about these things almost metaphorically a lot of the time.

But, I think there are very direct um correlations to how nature designs in this kind of design as well because the blueprint for every forest uh the blueprint for a forest is in every seed. And that's really interesting because you can fold up such complexity into such a tiny package. And I think we need to do the same with our data ontologies and our technologies so that they can unfold and emerge into a future that they need to without us knowing what that is going to be. All sorts of new technologies around

identity, um distributed identity, verifiable credentials, um all sorts of interesting experiments in the web 3 space uh and in the academic space and again I feel like this is sort of a hackademic confluence space where hackers, builders, but also academics uh and theorists and philosophers and artists come together and talk about these technologies. Um yeah, and lots of really interesting stuff already on the go. Murmurations has been on for several years. Um activity pub, basically how do we federate these knowledge bases and share this information?

Uh and I know there's been tons of discussion around reticulum, autonomy, logos, um ZK net, all sorts of interesting new security and privacy mechanisms to ensure that our communication stay ours because if they can shut off the taps of our communication, which they do and can, um then we can't really be free to coordinate um because as soon as it becomes a threat, they can turn off the taps. So, we need to build our own pipes.

Uh quick demo of yeah, resource event agent accounting. So, a contributory record might be an agent performs an action which is an event that affects a resource, maybe it decrements it or adds to it. Uh and that's held and cared for by the agent under the social rules of that commons, whatever it is. I think there are yeah, multiple different ways of accounting. I I we're looking at different uh fractal layers of the system from thermodynamic accounting. I think, you know, as soon as we are talking about currency issuance, we need to be aware of, you know, universal invariance. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. Nature's ecologies are not fiat. The nutrient

cycle, the water cycle, the carbon cycle, these are more like mutual credit because when you move one from here to here, it's no longer there. Whereas in a fiat economy, we have this kind of artificial inflation and it creates all these weird issues, booms and busts with like we would expect whenever we have a monoculture. This is just a financial monoculture. But I think yeah, new thermodynamic currencies that respect thermodynamic accounting will create an infrastructure layer where we don't have the same financial boom and bust issues that we do in sort of a state-based top-down dominant currency paradigm.

Also bringing in contributory accounting. So, how do we account for all of the resources, all of the peer-to-peer collaborations in between? Again, bringing in the REA accounting, all these other holonic data ontologies. I think we have all sorts of new opportunities for new ways of contributory accounting. And ultimately leading to that mutual coordination. How do we What do we create? What do we need? What's useful for us? Rather than trying to solve the problems of people on the other side of the world. There are problems much closer to home and I think the classes of those problems are often shared more than we realize.

So, once contribution is recorded, what changes? We can get recognition without wages. Contribution becomes legible without money. And that's often a lot of the times what breaks a commons apart is someone is trying very hard and not feeling that they're valued and end up leaving. Or someone comes in and free rides and then breaks down the community fabric. Yes, feedback. Again, feedback to designers. People who are working on this new spherical level often lack that feedback loop of are these technologies, are these ideas actually working in the real world? There may be multiple applications of different technologies

that are theorized about, but without the feedback to the creators, it just becomes sort of a an incomplete system. It's unable to iterate itself. Two ways this can fail and I mean lots more discussion around this to come. I'm excited to kind of open up this topic for more discussion. Um one capture of the verification layer. As soon as we're tracking metrics, those metrics can and will be gamed. This is the nature of metrics. So this needs to maintain a dynamic iterative system. So it's not just we need to do X because then people will figure out all sorts of weird ways to get X. As soon as you incentivize it and we've seen examples of this throughout history. Every

incentive creates a disincentive and we have to be very careful about the sort of economic incentives or interventions that we put into these Another risk is atomization. If everyone creates their own net, then we don't have the internet. And I think that was you know, the internet could have been a company. If Tim Berners-Lee was Elon Musk, it might have been. But instead we have this technology that is so far beyond product and so far beyond being launched by a corporation that made the whole world a different place.

And I think we here need to think big like that as well. It's not about another product. It's not about another app. It's not about making a million dollars and then figuring out a way to give it away. Because we're just playing their field is playing their game. So, these are the risks, but I think if we do it properly, we can stay within these two uh issues and come into a What's the word I'm looking for?

polycentric mesh where you don't have canonical master-slave or server-client relationship. You have agreement and you have basically uh popularity. You know, if I'm tagging this content and you're tagging this content and you're tagging this content, it's really useful. But if nobody else is, then maybe it's smaller than other content that may be more relevant. Um so, I think there's all sorts of ways that we can start to play with new user interface and also new data types to rethink how we do even basic things like you know, web domain um name registration. Um interesting thing to think about, but like I don't

have to register my name and pay for you to all know me as Jeff. Why does Google? Why do we have to do that on the web? Um and maybe there's ways we don't have to do that anymore and just actually bring sort of our local contextual awareness into the digital realm rather than forcing um this sort of binary on everybody else. So, P4P is all about self-infrastructuring.

Uh it's about not waiting for the technologies to come along that we know we can build better than the people who are doing it anyway. Because basically their business models won't allow them to innovate outside the box. They want our attention in the apps and we want the data out of the apps. So I think the future is going to be us figuring out what are the tools that we have, how can we build them better than they already are, and then how can we join them together into systems that outcompete even the best corporate apps because their business models just prevent them from innovating in the ways that we can now.

So getting towards the end here and I'm happy to take some questions or open up a conversation. But the cosmo local principle again, what is light goes global and what is heavy stays local. So ideas, solutions, IP, this can go anywhere. And the application, the fabrication of those ideas is local and contextual and built to the that community's needs. Yeah, if P4P doesn't work out, what's coming next is peer-to-peer. So hopefully we don't have to go for that.

Some of the references to Michelle's work. Michelle's been working on this for decades in the peer-to-peer foundation. He's got a book, the peer-to-peer peer-to-peer the commons manifesto. Peer-to-peer accounting for planetary survival is a fantastic read. Of course the value flow stuff all about REA. Some links of my work at the common stack. Cat Cat is also complex adaptive dynamics computer-aided design tool. That's an open source complex system modeling tool designed by block science. One of the engineering firms I used to work for.

And this is also how we can model and simulate these systems. Run it for 10,000 years and see if you get a little Elon Musk popping up. Maybe this isn't the the equal economy that we want to be running. So, we can now test it in the lab before we're actually you know, running these things and seeing if it's going to work. Uh so, where does this go next? Tomorrow morning, I believe, we have an exciting launch of the Cosmo local initiative from Michel Bauwens and the Peer to Peer Foundation.

And uh we'd like to have you all back and celebrate with us. >> [applause] [applause] >> Any questions? >> So, um

in kind of the the table between peer to peer and peer for peer, would it be fair to say that peer to peer is basically stateless and peer for peer is stateful? Because in a way like the the the the statefulness has been captured so far by corporations. And so now, and to me this is where blockchains to me uh give us the tool that was missing so that we can recapture the state. Pun intended. As a common. >> Yes, and maybe just to distinguish state nation-state from like state machine.

Like the state of my wallet is zero. Um yeah, definitely. I think there's a provenance to the sequence of events, right? If I build this thing, you use that thing, you produce a lot of value, some of that value flows back to me. So, there's kind of a directed graph to that. So, you you Yeah. We don't need necessarily blockchains. I think you I heard you mention blockchains, but there are all sorts of other technologies like CRDTs. Someone mentioned the other day with Byzantine fault tolerance. So, you're basically talking like blockchain level guarantees with about 1% of the infrastructure cost, maybe less. You can spin up tokens

like this. You can deprecate them like this. You don't need any heavy hardware, validators, tokens, shilling, all that kind of stuff. Um so, yeah, state, but not necessarily blockchain state. Uh and it can also be local, contextual, agent-based. Um one of the things I like most about agent-based architectures is they can respect things like relativity, um which most blockchains don't. A globally ordered set of transactions is not how the universe works. Einstein proved that. Um so, if your ledger says this and my ledger says that and they disagree, we need to preserve room for that because that's the nuance of the of real universe as opposed to saying, "Nope, it is either

before or after and it has to be one." Now, we're slave to the data as opposed to the data working for us. >> Questions? >> Um I've been working with a team that's working on like protocols, especially around identity, data with Kevin Twiplet that those nerds. Um and I'm not on that level of nerd, but I'm I'm sort of asking by proxy for for them, I think. So, I'm curious if you could just number one, rattle off some of the like the top contenders that you're like most interested in, maybe if that's interesting, but more interesting maybe

is like right now there's this kind of landscape of existing protocols for a lot of the stuff that you're talking about and a lot of emergent ones, and there's I'm curious like how you see like the best rising to the surface and getting them resourced. Like is it just a kind of emergence stigmergic process or is there does there need to be more targeted like um support of the ones that are most mature or like how do how do we actually get from where we are now to actually using these things? >> Questions.

Um yeah, I love what Kevin's working on with Project Weave and and all those nerds. Great great people. Um and honestly, every time I talk to someone new here, it's almost like we're all building the same thing or different parts of the same thing. And you've heard this, you know, five blind men describing an elephant and like they're feeling different parts and they think it's a different thing, but it's actually all parts of the same thing. I think we're very much in that situation. Um what I've noticed in my exploration so far is the more open and available the data is in a system, the easier it is to work with.

And I think like things like X or whatever with paid APIs and they just lock all their data in, evolutionarily they're going to die. They may be billionaires, trillionaires today, but this business model is already irrelevant. And anything with a software moat is going to die a a swift death in the next 5 years, I think. Uh it'll be like, you know, digital film compared to or digital cameras compared to physical cameras. Um because they don't, you know, if you don't like the interface of X, then you can get you know, your own interface of X tomorrow, but if you can't bring your network with you, then people are going to eventually move to things that can preserve that state of their digital history. And we won't have

this serfdom of oh here's my Musk data store and my Bezos data store and my Zuckerberg data store as my data store and they build apps that help you explore that data store or we build those apps cuz they're not going to because they want your money and your attention. They don't want you to thrive. >> Maybe just a little bit about like the practical level of like selecting or funding like the like how do we get the best projects to to be available [clears throat] to everybody to use?

>> Big challenge. Um I have been working on some ideas that again like in my own experience of working with a bunch of different groups whether they're DAOs or engineering firms as a freelancer, there's a ton of work that goes into talking about what you're going to do and then proving what you did and very little time in the middle for actually doing stuff. Um so in all of that I I we've been working on something called threshold-based flow funding um which actually I guess Kevin you may even have talked to you about. A lot of groups are interested in it and I think about it how do how would a mycelium share resources?

What if there's a pot everyone can tap into that pot and you get a certain amount of flow and if people like what you're producing with that flow they can anastomose increase your flow they join their flow to yours and increase your capacity to pull. Cuz in a mycelial network you don't have decision-making like we do in an organization. There's no head mycelial node but still everything is pushed and pulled to where it needs to be and not by some diffusion gradient. It's an intelligent choice. How do those messages get to and from where they need to go?

And I think that's what we need to to figure out. But if we had a system where you know let's say everyone had a funnel or a cup and it comes out at a certain stream. Maybe my stream is a thousand a month or three thousand a month. And then once it fills up to maybe three months or four months of that and I have comfortable runway, it starts to overflow. And all the channels are predefined. So if I have enough, I want to pay forward to Project Weave. And if Project Weave has enough, maybe they pay back to me. Who knows? Or maybe they pay on to someone else. So now there's this network of flows that go in and out and above. And if you are under-resourced, your bucket fills up faster. And if you're over-resourced, your bucket starts overflowing.

And then we can have a business model where where a a fundraising initiative where it's not just, "Hey, give the Cosmo-Local Initiative money." But the Cosmo-Local Initiative overflows into the Valley of the Commons, into Project Weave, into etc. etc. And now you're you're funding an ecosystem with uh point probes, you know, you can inject here, inject here. You see the outputs. You see the inputs. You see where the overflows are going. And maybe that'll help to visualize and uh yeah, give us more affordances in figuring out where that needs to go. But then empowering the network to figure it out.

This is like the quadratic funding angle. They don't donors don't want to have to figure out where the money goes. They want to put the money and get the impact. So how do we empower the network to figure it out? >> I have a question that I'd like to add to that. >> Wait, wait, wait. Wait, wait, wait. >> I have but this um principle of what you just described has been there in history before. Um in Homs, in Syria, in the old souk, the marketplace, usually the trades were um drawn together. So all the tailors were in one road and all the, you know, um,

tool makers and then all the jewelers and all the others and when let's say one French and maker was selling a product, he had enough business for this day, he put a stool outside of his business. So, the next one would get business too. And so, they kept like the social fabric working although everything was very close. They didn't engage in competition so much. And I found it quite like heartwarming this kind of attitude. Exactly what you described, yeah.

>> Yeah, and I think you're gesturing to the guild structures which Michelle also writes quite a bit about because there was a lot of sort of like early um, almost like union benefits to these type because they controlled both the production and the um, the market side. If you charge too low, you're in trouble with the guild. Um, but everyone has to go through apprenticeship, learn to do it properly. So, it was again sort of sort of early um, examples of these same collaboration types. >> Um, test test okay. Um, so, I I think this is a really fascinating concept and on for my work with the what I've been calling the

space time card which is like an open source peer-to-peer timekeeping system for the moon. I'm curious about how uh, sort of like we can carry this application in a space that is like typically so, I mean like it is very inaccessible, right? Getting to the moon is extremely inaccessible. You have to you have to do this in coordination with like these major players and so, I wanted to get your your thoughts on sort of like you know, carrying one of these systems that sort of are meant to sit outside of the the industry but actually require close coordination with the industry. I wanted to get your thoughts on that.

>> I like space. >> Love space. >> I don't like rockets. I think the reason that our space programs are all based on rocketry is because of military-industrial complex. Um so, I don't Yes, we need rockets to get to space. Yes, we need stuff from space back down to Earth. But, I think in the future we can do things like flash graphene where you turn your waste into graphene and then we have abundant graphene, which is the material that we can build carbon nanotubes with and then we can build space elevators from our garbage.

Um so, this is the future of space in my mind. Um Getting into those systems, I mean I feel like there's two ways we can we can burn the candle from both ends. There are good people in bad systems that want to see change. But, there's also people innovating outside of those systems because so much of those system I just feel like they're almost immovable. Um the corruption is so inset, the billions and billions of dollars flow. They can't consider the alternatives they need because I think we we have to start small with these things to prove them and then let them grow like cells that federate into organs that federate into us. You know, we can't just go from zero to human.

We've got to go like through all of the sort of like evolutionary iterations of testing these things first. Um and I think honestly we can leapfrog a lot of the current systems rather than trying to piggyback along them. We can figure out what are the things that we're trying to do and probably do them better than oil, rockets, and dollars. >> Um yeah, I just want to make a general remark. So, uh Thanks for the presentation.

Uh so, when I think about P4P I also and maybe we'll talk about this tomorrow in our lounge, but it's you know, it's about being of service, right? It's no longer about just like engineers and software programmers how can improving those general systems, but it's actually for me it's going into production and supply chains. It's um you know, it's securing our uh watersheds, our you know, our our soils, and it's about sustaining regenerative villages and their interconnection. So, I think this is an important thing to say because

we we can't stay in this domain where we all, you know, just technical people talking to each other imagining better We really make need to make that connection to real life and producing real value for real people. Um and that's for me has been one of the real real weaknesses of web 3 is that it stays in this kind of self-referential domain. Uh and just a little anecdote this is reacting to Stefan. Um you know, in the in the Middle Ages they had this uh notion of just pricing.

Uh so, it was never like a pure market. It was a market that had a moral dimension. And uh this maybe not an example that people will like, but so if the city would buy the grain would sell it at a fixed price so that everybody had bread. And only at 5:00 p.m. would the traders be able to do the free market, right? And before 5:00 p.m. there were people from another city that nobody know with a with a hood and they had the power to execute >> the the the traders that didn't follow these rules.

Um so, that's the that's the other side of the you know, moral policing at uh of the market, but I think it's interesting that you know, you have these markets that have like an inbuilt moral uh code. And that's I think is a big issue that was kind of done away with. Um and so now we have the state that's from the outside regulating, but there's no internal regulation. Uh and that is really I think what code can do is, you know, embed these moral codes in in the transactions itself.

>> Definitely. And that that reminds me there's probably many of you, especially from the Web3 space, are probably familiar with the analogy of the um the prisoner's dilemma. So, if two um thieves get caught um and they're interrogated separately and they're basically given um a choice, either, you know, rat out your colleague and you get less time or stay silent and you know, you go to jail. And the other partner has the same risk, so now there's a payoff ratio. And basically the like default behavior is you're going to defect because in all other cases, whether they don't rat you out, you're still in

prison. If they do rat you out, you're in prison for longer. The only way you're going to get out is if you defect on your colleague. So, this kind of is used to show, oh no, there's this tragedy of the commons, this free rider potential where anyone can defect on anyone else, but as Michelle just pointed out, there are in social situations other levers of enforcement. If you, let's say, before those two thieves go out and rob the bank and get caught by the police, they have a meeting with the Godfather. And the Godfather says, "If either of you rat each other out, I'll kill you and your whole family." And then they go and rob the bank and they get caught by the police, what's their incentive now?

S- like uh not defect, wasn't it? Um So, the point is if we can add an incentive and I'm not saying physical violence is a good force, but what about staking? What about staking and slashing? I'm going to put a 100 bucks on the line that I am going to follow through with my commitment and if I don't you take my $100. So, now I'm committed not by violence, but maybe a little bit of self-imposed economic violence or accountability. If I do don't do this thing that I've committed to you can now take that away.

And that's almost like insurance. So, we're self-provisioning our own insurance for our own services. I'm going to provide this service to the community. I'm putting up maybe 10K, 100K, who knows? It's a if it's a big service and if that service is not provided, that is now the bank account which um you know, claims can come out of. Um and be refilled as that trust is renewed or gone to zero and another service provider comes in. So, I think there are all sorts of ways we can create incentives to ensure coordination over defection if we do it properly.

I'm curious like how do we protect these from capture? Because you're you're talking you mentioned like the trillionaires and the billionaires and what nots and like uh they definitely, you know, we start building um the revolution is coming and what nots and like and somebody suddenly offer a big fact check, you know? That they even if if that can be or land or something, you know? And then then these diff definitely these things can be coerced and there's also like people we we we you know, in positions of powers that may be open to these things. It's like uh Elon Musk's ex was hanging out at Susan and we were like chilling there.

Uh Grimes. Well, anyway, she's she's she's a different breed. >> I thought you meant the platform. >> Yeah. Well, yeah. Oh, no, no, no, no. Maybe too. But like uh or like I don't know. Uh there's there's >> like people that have broken broken away from those, and we might have like opinions on them. Like, Jack Dorsey doing his own thing with the Bitcoiners. But, like, and yeah, and I was explicitly told not to invite like um a friend that's quite a hippie that would have loved this place, but she is the She She She is the royal like whatever of the Hackster family. But, anyway. So, you know, it's like In my mind, it's like we create alternative systems. We also have to infiltrate and recognize

that there are places of power that if we don't enter these places, like, other people will. And so, it's like how how to balance that out, how to avoid like capture as a whole. Maybe that's a lot. I think everything is gameable, and that's why these systems What we need more than the perfect system is a dynamic system that can iterate and evolve, cuz we can't even understand all the problems yet. So, I think we need to put down this idea that there is like perfect governance or perfect anything. Because it Yeah, resilience. It needs to adapt to its um Actually, a researcher at Block Science wrote a really good paper about the thin

line between Occam's razor, meaning, you know, as simple as it can get, but no simpler, and Ashby's law of requisite variety, which means an organism needs to be at least as complex as its environment, if not more so, to be able to interact and evolve with it. Between that is the fine line of where these like protocols need to be in the sort of dynamic growth. Um Can they be captured? Sure. I mean, look at all the things that capital has already destroyed. Um but I think if we have participatory contributive value flows, if a billion dollars comes into him, it's then going to flow to all of us, which would be great. Um I had another point there.

What else did you ask? You said >> I don't know, but like on that point, it's like you're talking about like mechanisms like drips or is it like a new mechanism? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, like like radical drips, similar. Um threshold-based flow funding. The only addition over radical drips, cuz drips is just like splits and streams. So, I have a cup. Who does it split to and at what rate does it stream? Um now we're um saying what is the concept of enoughness in your cup? So, you put a threshold and then over that threshold, it overflows. So, once you are sufficiently funded, and we could have several graduated layers of that, then more of your income flows out. Um so, I think yeah, we can iterate with new tools around the automated allocation of

resources um that could help to address that problem. >> There's so much to unfold there. >> This was a minor addition, but I'd also like to point out Hollands was doing something similar with flow funding and buckets um of different varieties, maybe something to check out. He's sitting next to you on the couch. >> Absolutely. Yeah, it's it's interesting how ideas seem to have us instead of us having ideas. Like these things pop up in different places at different times and then we all have conversations about them and they morph and they evolve. Uh but I think this is where like

nature is more redundant than efficient. And that's it's a bit of both, but nature has a lot of redundancy. Human systems do not. Um so, I think it's important actually that we have evolutionary variety in the development of these tools, that it's not just that system, just this system, just that system, but that there is a healthy diversity because as like virus as pathogens work, if we were to take let's say one system and everybody use that, then there's a capture vector. As soon as the the root of that evolutionary tree is captured, it spreads through the whole ecosystem. But if we have variation and variety, then we eliminate that capture vector a little bit or at

least diversify it. >> Cool. I have the mic. Uh >> Do it. >> Get up here. >> This is just a a riffing question. the P P2P foundation, I guess, has an like an institutional curator almost. It has a meme.

What do you envision sort of like realization of P4P is? Is it special club of people or projects? Is it a meme? Is it an organization? I I don't know. What do you think? >> I mean, I think in similar to P2P What I don't like is like epistemic squatting. I don't like people saying this is my idea and now you can participate in my idea. Um I think like peer-to-peer has been uh one of the most successful memes of the internet in terms of like how to build and interact with other people online without this sort of

power dynamic. Uh and I think Peer 4 Peer could be the same. Um I think the um opportunities for applying these tools are almost infinite. Um the experimentation is ongoing and we We to categorize the successes and the failures cuz this is how we learn. It's not about perfection, it's about iteration. Um so how do we take the tools that solve our problems today? How do we harden them? Make sure that they are actually doing what they need to do and how do we interlink those and as Michelle said start linking from this um global light idea space to the landed on the ground heavy place. How do we

start solving the problems of these different groups using these technologies? Um but I don't think that um should be claimable by anyone organization or anything like that. >> Oh my god, Thank you. So so amazing in the line. That's uh We have um the opportunity of creating like a common pot, right?

Of putting all the nice ingredients of the different technologies, the different protocols, and uh we need to stir the pot. So that's how we're going to come together how how the taste of each one of these ingredients actually comes together and and melt and make this soup cream. what's important is that at some point there's somebody that says this is ready. And picks up some spoons and serves it. This is a combination of technologies and protocols and and that it tastes good enough at least to be granting like a a a cup to to somebody, right?

We can stir more. We can say somebody's going to say this This, Tabasco just put this in. >> You missed Tabasco. Oh, do you know we have Tabasco? Thank you for bringing the Tabasco. Uh And they said, "Oh, that that killed it." So, yeah, so Exactly. That's the beauty of Tabasco. You just give it pass it around. Exactly. That's the customization that you are referring to. So, in this metaphor, where are we on the cooking process?

>> Do you have a spoon? >> There is no spoon. >> It's going to be hot for your hand, man. >> You had me at common pot. >> Common pots, yeah. But if everybody brings his own cup >> Let's get playing. I think that's For me, that's what the tech track is all about for these next few weeks is experimenting with all of those technologies and everything people are building or have built and see where these pieces can come together cuz we can combine things like never before.

>> Yeah. With the help of the AI and we're all here. So, we all the ingredients are here. Let's cook. >> Thank you, Jeff. Um great presentation and could just just to get a feel for how how many people just a sense to kind of visualize and get a feel for globally, we're talking a dozen projects, hundreds, thousands just to get a sense of the complexity of this and and who's who the main players in that, yeah.

>> So, I think this goes into the Cosmo-local initiative that we'll be talking more about tomorrow. but I I mean, at this point, this is the evolution of the work that the Peer-to-Peer Foundation has done and envisioning a path forward. I mean, we'll talk a bit more about it. But, I mean, it's been a few years of turbulence for the Peer-to-Peer Foundation and we are now entering an age where it's coming back under Michel Bauwens' control. There's going to be, you know, a steady direction and the Cosmo Local initiative and Peer for Peer could be one of those that starts to connect. I mean, we have nothing but contacts from Michel reaching out from all over the world of people who are applying technologies or are interested in being connected. So,

this could be an opportunity to start interconnecting, but also I think hardening and testing these things in situ. We do need to build these for vulnerable communities. We need to make sure they don't blow up in the hands of vulnerable communities. So, we shouldn't be testing things on um, you know, people in the real world who have livelihoods at stake. And I mean, I'm talking mostly about all these Web3 blow-ups. I think it's good that didn't happen in the hands of indigenous communities as opposed to, you know, rich crypto bros who bought all their NFTs and made their millions and lost it. Okay. But, we need to evolve these technologies so that the phone doesn't blow up in your

pocket while you're on a plane sort of thing. So, I think we're still early in at least on the Web3 crypto side of things, we're still in the 70s. The internet came out in the 50s, but it didn't start getting used until the 90s. There was a 40-year gap between the invention of ARPANET and the browser and email. And we're only 20 years into crypto. So, it's it's got a bit of maturing to do. But, I think this is the space where we can take those steps to the next level. >> Let's rap and rap, let's rap.

>> Hey.