Gardens: fulfilling the promise of effective on-chain governance

Transcript

you can start hello can you hear me okay great my name is sasha i'm here on behalf of onehive and i'm here to talk about gardens which is what i would say fulfilling the promise of effective unchained governance the chinese have a proverb that goes when the might when the wise man points

at the moon the fool looks at the finger and i think this is a proverb that applies particularly well to dao's it's easy to get excited about all the possibilities um that taos can enable so you know investing with friends creating your own sovereign digital nation um finding ways to raise funding that doesn't depend on vcs there are many other things to get excited about however i think that in getting so excited about all these use cases we run the risk of missing the bigger picture

the bigger picture is that we finally have the technical technological foundation to keep power from centralizing and in doing so um have really bottomed up organization that is able to make better decisions and share value more fairly to elaborate a little here there's well perhaps my favorite complexity scientist a man called your nearby yam he in 2002 wrote a paper called complexity rising in which he looks at the collective complexity of civilization

from the hunter cavalry period until now and extending forward actually one of the things that he um brings attention to is that as early as 2002 the complexity of uh civilization sort of has exceeded the demands or the ability of any one individual to to comprehend it how that affects human organization is particularly interesting and it's what i want to touch on here so if you go back to early civilizations and you go back for example to the romans um you know i guess we're in paris so i'll

make an asterix and an obelix comparison right if if obelix were to hit a roman soldier on the head which he does quite often what usually happens is the messenger goes and runs to caesar and say you know hey the the obelix the goldwaters are messing around with our roman soldiers we need backups we need reinforcements caesar would normally freak out a little bit and command summoner general who would then assemble his platoon and and go and march on gold the point here is that when the behavior of individual individual humans is simple enough

you can have these hierarchical systems that channel complexity through one individual who can then control or order many individuals as civilization gets more complex this becomes harder to do so if we fast forward to the industrial revolution already we have the a large increase in the complexity of civilization and this comes from machines the fact that we are humans using machines and the fact that we're not only limited the complexity that can be produced by human labor also there's this added complexity that is introduced by turning energy into into things so if you look at take for example a cotton factory

um you had you know there were two very different sub factories within that one which produced the thread itself the yarn and another which would take that yarn and turn it into cloths cloth sorry and these two separate stages use very different machinery required very different specialization and you needed a manager or a a control someone in control a separate individual for both um cases the complexity was too high for just to report to one individual on both these um on both these things so

already you have this element that human tasks are becoming more specialized more complex and then the ability of one human to control many humans is diminished so you have what you would call a larger branching ratio sorry smaller branching ratio moving forward to today um he would say we are now what's called the hybrid society where we have you know if you go into an organization today it's very um rare that you won't find uh a ceo uh maybe in crypto that that's where we have the exceptions but in a typical organization it's very rare that you you don't find a ceo and you don't have some form of hierarchy but it's equally rare

that you don't have communication lateral communications between teams because this is sort of you know evolutionarily what has allowed organizations to survive is you know you can't re-route everything through a top manager you need to be more agile you need to have a way of dealing with the complexity that is stronger than any one individual this is um i'll quickly go through this one this is essentially an extension of the of the slide before so it actually is is the second half of that diagram um and it just shows the topological structure of of what i'm talking about maybe one thing to point out is

the hierarchy levels going down as the lateral connections go up and there's a sense in which uh you know where that bottom arrow is pointing is where we are now um and that's sort of how the future is going to look like um so there's a sense in which we're going back in time from a hierarchy perspective one of the interesting predictions from his paper in 2002 was among the possible future organizational structures are fully networked systems where hierarchical structures are unimportant and i would argue that bitcoin is you know six years later is that prediction coming

to to life um so i would say bitcoin is the first fully network system and in that sense i would also that's that's what i think of a dao as well so i would make that link um intuitively we might not think about it as a dao but it is a community coming together over a shared vision a set of values um creating a token and that token being distributed to reward people who are furthering that mission the simplicity here is that that issuance policy is already set cannot be changed and it only goes to one group of individuals right it only goes to the

miners um so you don't need a formal governance structure when you have such a simple issuance policy so to come full circle to the beginning here i think the real hope is that a fully networked civilization prevents power from being abused and um bitcoin is the first example of that but it's certainly not the last but to read out a quotation from one of my favorite films this film is ilgato pardo the leopard which is set in to visconti movie set in late 19th century sicily

during the unification of italy and from the perspective of a aristocratic family called the salinas who are worried that they are going to be made irrelevant because [Music] because the middle classes are trying to overthrow them but i'll read out the quotation do you know what is happening in our country nothing simply an imperceptible replacement of one class for another the middle class doesn't want to destroy us it simply wants to take our place and very gently when he realizes this he this is don fabricio he he sort of calms down and realizes that he knows how to play the you know the political wave that's

coming and he knows that actually um he will be okay if he plays his cards right the point is i think that the point i'm trying to make here is that if you look at any revolution that has happened within our history civilization's history after enough time we usually end up replacing or re-implementing a lot of the structures that we were so allergic to at the beginning the structures that caused this revolution to happen and this happens because we have systems that allow power to concentrate and over time those systems are attractive to people who want to exploit that power and over generations they end up

being exploited so where are we now in the dow world um essentially most dows follow a sort of plutocracy you know one token one vote system with multi-sigs at the center um this in my opinion is uh is causing us to reimplement the existing system or rather not deviate that far from it in some senses it's better in some senses it's worse but it's true that what we are doing is creating very fragile dowels um that allow power to concentrate so plutocracy is self-explanatory power

obviously concentrates if a whale can hold a lot of tokens and influence the vote and the direction of uh how that dow behaves multi-sigs you know obviously if you have a small group of people who are responsible for signing off on on those proposals and whether they are accepted or not obviously that that power can be abused it can be manipulated by a government it can be um over time you have to think about okay maybe the founders are are trustworthy but then where does that power get distributed to over time and how can what is the potential for abuse there um i'm not going to go into the details

here but i think we've all seen what happened with unisop governance recently they awarded 20 million to a vc uh well it's called defey education fund it had a lot of it wasn't a transparent process there were a lot of links between large holders and members of that entity that didn't really have wasn't really well known within the community i'm just gonna take a sip of sip of water here okay so how do we fix this

i think in in a sentence we need to move along the axis of technical decentralization um much closer to bitcoin and ethereum right we now douse to resemble um to resemble these fully network systems much more closely the problem here is that as we touched on at the beginning in bitcoin's case it's very easy to oh it's not very easy but but you don't need a formal governance structure to to have the dow work in the fully networked way because the insurance policy is so simple right we have much more complex dowse over in ethereum land and we need to

decide on how we allocate funds to specific um divisions and missions that are much more general than um you know just rewarding people for security so we need a way of of voting on things of deciding on things that's more formal that's it's more structured this is where i introduce one hive one hive is a little-known dow that i discovered this year that you could say it's sort of a spin-off of aragon a lot of the founders have ties with aragon and for me they are paving the way in terms of showing what is possible

[Music] with uh decentralized software what is possible how do we um you know how do we create these dows that are fully network systems in a sense and in particular i think that the the heart or the secret are these three pieces of decentralized software perhaps three of the most important pieces of decentralized software ever written the first is a community covenant which is essentially an aragon agreement that is used to encode values more on that later the second is celeste which is a decentralized court that is integrated with bright id it's actually a fork of aragon court

luke who who who's a one-hive founder he was instrumental in pushing aragon court forward while at tarragon and the third is conviction voting to allocate funds um conviction voting is is comes out of tremendous tremendously valuable research from both the common stack and and block science so to zoom in a bit on the community covenant this is a general this is the one hive covenant it's just a general text that explains what our standards are what sort of proposals are acceptable what our mission is what our values are what are

why we're here it also explains what sorts of verses are not acceptable so the second pillar celeste is the decentralized court and that's essentially used to uphold the values as articulated in the covenant so if a proposal is made that violates the values in the covenant which you can think of as a decentralized social contract of sorts then any community community member is able to challenge that proposal and in doing so take it to a group of decentralized jurors who are drafted to decide on whether that proposal

is in line with the values as expressed in that covenant taken together these two pieces allow us to get away from having multi-sigs at the center of a dao the third piece conviction voting is what i would call the heart of a garden this is a really interesting new voting system for many and essentially i mean you could spend the whole talk explaining the intricacies of this and i'm not going to do it but a few of the key takeaways are proposals the community doesn't essentially need doesn't need to come to consensus on

anything proposals simply need enough support to pass and the fewer funds they ask for the less support they need i think this allows for a sort of complex organism dow structure to take place one in which um one in which you know small token holders can ask for a small amount of funds to experiment with things at the edges uh and if those experiments prove fruitful to the community they don't need that much support to start experiment to start raising funds but if those experiments start proving fruitful they can come back and request more funds and and and the community will support them more fully

and and these experiments can turn into fully fledged teams uh within uh a community itself and we've seen that happen at one hive many times um another interesting element to highlight is a time element so it's although you know if you have more tokens you do have more weight there's also an element that if you stake um so what we're doing is actually staking tokens on proposals within this system and the longer you stake your your tokens on a proposal the more weight is is given to to that proposal so there's this time element that rewards persistence and consistency one one final thing worth highlighting here is that

um you can support many pr uh proposals in parallel there isn't it's not about binary decision making you can say you know you have a b c d e you uh rather than voting yes or no on all of these options you actually say uh i really like e i like d slightly less c i'll also support a a friend has said that this is useful for them i'll put a little bit there and b i don't care about and you just fix that um when you sign on and you view your your dao's interface and those uh you can think of it as like running water coming out of a tap and and jumping into these boxes into these buckets uh the longer you you keep those preferences the more

uh conviction they accrue the more weight they are given um so the ux is sort of simplified to just showing up and supporting things you care about there's no down voting um a benefit of that is that whales can't drown out the voice of the community so why we're here essentially this is all well and good if it stays within one hive but the idea is to create a fully networked civilization right one in which anyone can start a dao create a community and use this way of doing things to structure themselves so this is where guardians comes in gardens is an initiative uh by one hive

to essentially allow take this framework out of out of how one hype does you know out of the one hive system and allow anyone else to to use it in a plug-and-play way those who might be interested are traditional online communities that have yet to tokenize um or projects from an existing token that want to improve the interface between let's say their core contributors and and their community so i'd love it if um you know either you already know this is for you and you want us you haven't started a dow yet and you want to go all in with this way of doing things and that's great but also i think you know there are many dows that are um existing quite well with with a

governance framework that they like uh colony is is one that i uh deeply admire as well and perhaps with those sorts of vows one thing i'd love to see is you know take a small part of your treasury put it in such a a garden's dao and really let the community feel empowered and have a voice and see what happens so i wouldn't say it's all or nothing here who's already on board here are a few of the the groups that are already on board i agree and in closing um this is probably the hill i'm prepared to die on

um this is why i'm i'm here uh i think that taos plus better voting systems plus peacefully enforceable social contracts equals hope for a better world yeah thank you for listening thank you just

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