Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Ameen Soleimani: Moloch DAO – A Simple Yet Unforgiving DAO to Fund Ethereum Development

Episode Date: July 24, 2019

We’re joined by Ameen Soleimani, Co-founder and CEO of SpankChan. From his humble beginnings at ConsenSys, he went on to create SpankChain in 2017 at the height of the ICO boom. The project aims to create a better and safer environment for sex workers by removing the intermediaries who take significant commissions on their revenues. SpankChain’s initial product, an adult cam platform, allows users to pay performers in crypto with a native asset over sophisticated payment channels. More recently, Ameen headed a project called Moloch DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization with the goal to fund Ethereum 2.0 development. Moloch has but few simple functions: making proposals, voting on proposals, and exiting. This simple design, heavily inspired on “The DAO” of 2016 has attracted funding from Vitalik Buterin, Joe Lubin and other prominent community members. Topics covered in this episode: Ameen’s background as an early ConsenSys employee working on payment channels Why Ameen decided to found SpankChain and how the project has evolved since its inception What is Moloch DAO and why he decided to launch it The mechanism behind Moloch and how it compares to other DAOs How one becomes a member of Moloch and participates in governance The simplicity of Moloch DAO and its essential functions How Moloch DAO scales and its intended lack of a smart contract upgrade mechanism The attention and funding the project has already received Proposals already made on Moloch, including YangDAO, and their utility to the ecosystem Ameen’s views on the broader Ethereum space, his outlook on Eth 2.0 and the future of the project Episode links: Moloch DAO Moloch Ventures · GitHub Moloch DAO white paper Moloch Summoning Guide The State of Ethereum 2.0 report A Study of Libp2p and ETH2 A Call for a Temporary Moratorium on The DAO YangDAO Ameen Soleimani on Twitter Moloch DAO on Twitter SpankChain DappCon – 20% off with the code “EpicenterDappcon2019” Epicenter Meetup at Berlin Blockchain Week – Thu 22 Aug 2019 Berlin Blockchain Week 2019 Sponsors: Azure: Deploy enterprise-ready consortium blockchain networks that scale in just a few clicks - http://aka.ms/epicenter Trail of Bits: Trust the team at the forefront of blockchain security research - https://trailofbits.com This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/297

This is Epicenter, Episode 297 with guest, Amin Soleimani. This episode of Epicenter is brought to you by Microsoft Azure. Do you have an idea for a blockchain app but are worried about the time and cost it will take to develop? The new Azure Blockchain DevKit is a free download that brings together the tools you need to get your first app running in less than 30 minutes. Learn more at aka.m.m. slash Epicenter. And by Trail of Bits. Don't leave your project's security audit to just any firm.

Trust a team with decades of experience at the forefront of blockchain security research. Go to trail of bits.com to learn more. Hi, welcome to Epicenter. My name is Sebastian Quiju. And I am Frederica Ernst. Today we're speaking with Amin Soleimani. Amin is quite well known in the Ethereum community. He was an early employee at consensus and then went on to found Spank Chain, which

is an adult entertainment industry blockchain platform. And more recently, he was the summoner, not to say founder, but the summoner of the Molok Dow, which is a Tao that is aimed at funding the development of Ethereum and specifically Ethereum 2.0. So yeah, Molok has a really interesting way that it, well, first of all, like, summits itself, but also it has a really interesting mechanism for signaling one's intention to fund a proposal or not, and it's heavily influenced on the design of the original Tao, the Dow of 2016. And it's attracted some of the most prolific thinkers of the Ethereum ecosystems who have since become members of the Moloch DAO with the intention of furthering the course of Ethereum 2.0.

So we're excited to hear what Amin has to say about this. Yeah, and furthering the cause of Ethereum 2.0 is something I think that we should all be thinking about and trying to further. So before we go to our interview with Amin, I want to mention again that we will be participating in DAPCon. So DAPCon is on the week of August. 21st till 23rd. And so we'll be participating, Federica, Sunny, and myself, and we'll be doing a live podcast. there and you can get tickets at dotcon.io and we have a 20% discount code and that discount code is epicenter at dappcon 2019. It will be in the show notes. And as we usually do when we travel to

events, we will be doing a drinks meetup on the 22nd. The venue has yet to be announced, but you can sign up on the event bread page and the venue will be announced shortly and it'll probably be close to the venue of DAPCon. So you can go to epicenter. Dot rocks slash Berlin meetup to sign up. And as soon as we have the venue and time and everything, we'll put it up there and we'll let you know. So yeah, come have a drink with us right before the party that night.

Yeah. And it's definitely worth going. So DEPCon is part of the Berlin Blockchain Week. So there's tons of other events also taking place such as Eve Berlin, DaoFest, the Web 3 Summit, the Matter Cartel conference. So there's lots of things going on, and I can't even begin to mention all the meetups. It's a massive week. I think it's like the most dense blockchain week I've ever seen, or at least in Berlin.

Yeah, so basically I think it's not as dense as New York Blockchain Week, but there is a lot of events. So you won't go without an event. And it is, if you want to check out the schedule, it's at blockchainweek. Berlin. Right. I'm really looking forward to it and hope to see many of you guys there and hopefully grab a drink with you.

So with that, here's our interview with Amin Soleimani. Hi, so we're here with Amin Soleimani. He is the CEO of Spank Chain and also the summoner of the Molok Tao. So today we're going to be speaking primarily about the Molok Tao, but also the project that he's built with Span Chain briefly and also his time of consensus. Hi, Amin. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me.

So yeah, let's talk about your background. How did you get involved in blockchain space and get to where you are today? Yeah, so the story starts as many Bitcoin and blockchain story starts with ordering mushrooms on the Silk Road in college on doing them. They were excellent and very mind-opening. After that, I built a Bitcoin arbitrage bot right after I graduated. That was the first thing I did when I learned how to code. I was making money between two exchanges, made a little bit of money there, and then lost everything in Mount Cox. Made way more money off of the price run up than I was making with the arbitrage, but ultimately got coxed.

So I took a hiatus from crypto for about two years until I discovered Ethereum. and when I discovered Ethereum, I joined Consensus, and that's sort of where this story begins. What did you do at Consensus? Yeah, so at Consensus, I was their state channels expert. I was the only one there who was really talking about it or thinking about it at the time. And I did some research there. I also worked on the energy project, which was a sort of predecessor to Grid Plus. It was a partnership with RWE.

We were trying to build a new energy market infrastructure. It also helped launch ad chain, which was the first TCR token curated registry, which is basically, I think DeCriP Media would put it, a listical with equity is the most distinct description I've seen. So you joined content as pretty early on. How many a person were you at Consensus? Do you know? Yeah, so I joined in the summer of 2016, so I was about 100. Okay, and you also left a while ago?

Yes, I left in the summer of 2017. And after that, you started Spankchain, which is an adult entertainment Ethereum business. Tell us about that. Well, I was sitting around at Consensus, and a lot of people were proposing very, you know, ambitious and forward-thinking use cases that I thought would never work. And so I thought, well, where is this stuff going to happen first? Who actually cares about decentralization, about sovereignty, about money? And I thought, well, the adult industry, not only do they tend to be on the cutting edge

of innovation, but in this specific case for this specific technology where you can have access to money that can't be frozen and they are the ones who are sort of ostracized by the existing banking systems. They are the most motivated to switch to a new financial system. And so that's what motivated us to start swing chain. And so we did an ICO. We raised about $6.5 million in November of 2017, put together a team of engineers and designers. We shipped the first payment channel system on Ethereum to Mainnet in April of 2018. We have iterated on it since then with Connects. Built the spank card, which I think now is going to be a metaphor for channels as a sort of like fast, instant payment system that will be used again and again

in the ecosystem. And then launched a bunch of other things. And now we've also just launched a Spank Pay, which is our B2B payment processor. It's sort of like a bit pay clone, but for the adult industry. So yesterday I'm on the phone with Nadi America CEO trying to pitch him on it. So these days I do a lot of sales and stuff like that. So essentially you came at the adult industry from the technological side. So there's this idea that all technologies first start and blossom in the technology. in the other industry, like, you know, DVDs and the internet and, like, VR and this sort of thing.

I believe, like, I've seen you speak about this. Like, your ambition also is to create a space where people in the adult industry could have more sovereignty, like, not only with their funds, but also with, like, you know, removing middlemen. And I think you also had aspirations to stop or at least reduce sex trafficking. Can you tell us about how you see that playing out now that spank chain is, I believe, like about a year old or something like that? Yeah. I think we've had a healthy narrowing of focus as we've grown as a company where, you know, the timing of when we raised our money lent itself to wanting to explore a lot of things in parallel. But as we've gone as a company, we've tried to focus on just like a couple more business use cases in order to drive our initial growth. But I think that we will get to the other types of more ambitious use cases over time.

So, for example, reducing middlemen, like the payment processors in the adult industry charge about 10%. on transactions. Normally, that's around 3%. So just being able to offer a payment processor that recharge 0.5%, like that saves 10% on every transaction for businesses in the space, and there's no chargebacks, which are rampant in the adult industry. And so for them, like, they actually need this new payment system and to accept crypto. And then further, a lot of the payout options. So like Forrestbank.

for our live camsite, we've been doing crypto payouts since day one. But a lot of these sites have issues with their, you know, bankers to be able to pay out their performers. And so the bank will get shut down that they use or they'll get, have their accounts closed. And that just, you know, interrupts the payment schedule for any of the models that they're getting paid, which is pretty important for them because, you know, Sometimes they're even living like paycheck to paycheck, right? And that can be really disruptive. And so we're also talking to other sites, platforms to help manage them pay out their models to through crypto if they would like.

As for the sex trafficking stuff, I think that's mostly going to be like if there's a solution to that type of problem, it'll be in like decentralized reputation systems. I'm thinking carefully about how to roll those out because they also happen to be like if they are effective against sex traffickers, they would also be effective against law enforcement for the same reasons because they both try to abduct you while you're doing your job. So you mentioned the cam site. I believe that's like your primary product at least for the moment. I mean, in doing research for this episode, I like went on the site and had a look at it. It's very nicely designed everything and like it looks really cool. But there seems to be like very little activity there.

At most, I think I saw like two performers at a time. It's mostly, it seems mostly empty. You know, how do you see that product? Do you think it's successful or do you think, you know, there are other things that are other forces at play here that are preventing growth? Yeah. So I don't consider it successful today with only a few performers. performers were not really helping that many people. But the growth trajectory sort of mapped very closely onto the crypto prices,

where because for the last year up until really last week, we were offering only crypto payments as an option. We were excluding the other 99% of people or more who don't have crypto. And so it also made it so that any sort of marketing we did was less worth it to do than if we could convert the other 99% of people. So we have been holding back on marketing. But as of last week, we've both started to accept Fiat payments through one of these high-risk adult payment processors that charges us 10%, as well as opening the platform up to international models. and so I think we are going to see a lot more growth in the next couple months.

And we're also starting to pay for marketing directly. How is this model now better in than other adult entertainment sites, seeing that you also have to have that 10% cut? Yeah, there's a couple things that we can still do to be more competitive. I think at the beginning I was a little bit naive, and I was like, okay, we have crypto payments. This is going to be a silver bullet, and it'll solve all our problems. And, you know, user adoption is right around the corner for crypto.

Like these, you know, these things ended up taking longer than we would have expected. And so as far as the advantages, there's a couple things. So one is, like I said, we have crypto payouts, so you can always get your money when you want it. You're not on its two-week schedule for the money that you're getting. And so that's actually new for basically all models, and they value that a lot. At the same time, we also have ways that we're exploring of subsidizing our users. And so with our Spank token. And so we're looking at ways of distributing it for, like,

you know, through like stream mining. So if you're a performer and you are, you know, you make up 25% of the tips for a given hour, we want to give you a 25% chance at winning some, like, for example, a thousand bonus bank. And you can do this and spread the spank token itself more broadly because it is a utility token, because it's not a security, one of the competitive edges is that you get a lot more incentive alignment. And I think that it's really powerful

when you have a platform where the creators on that platform have a stake in the success of the platform. And I think that'll be pretty competitive too. But ultimately, it'll compete on merit, right? We will have to do many of the things that other campsites do in terms of setting up affiliate programs.

And we try to avoid doing that, but I think that if you're trying to enter a new business where you know less than the other people, it would be wise to at least start out by doing what most of them do. This episode of Epicenter is brought to by Microsoft and the Azure Blockchain Workbench. Getting your blockchain from the whiteboard to production can be a big undertaking. And something as simple as connecting your blockchain to IoT devices or existing ERP systems is a project in itself. Well, the folks at Microsoft had you covered.

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in less than 30 minutes, visit AKA.ms. And be sure to follow them on Twitter at MSFT blockchain. We'd like to thank Microsoft and Ads. for their supportive epicenter. A couple of months ago, you started the Moloch DAO, which I am sure takes up a lot of your time. So how does the spank chain community feel about this? Mollock doesn't actually take up that much of my time. People ask me that because they're like, with Fetalek and Joanne, like, how are you going to juggle this?

And I'm like, so, and rolling this back just a second, right? Mollock took a bunch of time when I was launching it. Mollock took time when we were writing the code and testing it and deploying it and really organizing the first cohort of co-founders to each. There's 22 people. We each put in 100 ether. And the people came from all avenues of the Ethereum community. It came from Maker, Nosis, consensus. Some are devs.

Some are investors. Some are evangelists. you know, Kinex team is in, James Young, Cassandra, he used to run the ECF, helped me start it. There's a bunch of us that really wanted to see this through and, you know, shepherding that along in the very beginning, explaining like how it worked and getting the first couple of proposals out. That took a bit of time. But then, now that Joe and Vitalik and Consensus in the F also joined for a thousand ether, it takes a lot less time. because the pitch is a lot more straightforward. It's, hey, look, these guys are in.

This is clearly a cool thing. You should also join. Where it would have taken more of my time had they not joined to be able to accomplish the same types of things. I can leverage their money essentially to do it. So I think that Mollock is actually helpful for Spank Chain because it shows the, you know, not only the, that we can ship something that, you know, can really coordinate a lot of financial value, but also that we are part of this community

that is, I don't want to say Ethereum leadership, but, you know, some of the most respected people in the Ethereum community are the ones who are in it. that has earned us some recognition from people in the adult industry who are now more willing to work with us because they recognize our status in that community. That's super interesting that it works that way around as well. So maybe let's back up here a second. So what is the Moloch Dow and what made you and your co-founders actually launch it? Yeah, so the Mollock Dow is a grants-making organization. It is aimed at trying to solve at least some of the tragedy of the commons around funding public goods in Ethereum.

So it is a smart contract. It is a way for people to deposit their ether, and then they get votes proportional to how much ether they brought in. You have to get voted in by the existing members, but once you're in, you can then also vote on other proposals, which can be either other new members or grants. And if at any point you don't like how the grant funding is going or who is being admitted, how the votes are going, you can take whatever ether you have left in the Guildbank and rage quit, which means you just exit with your proportional share of all your remaining money.

So there's a couple of grant programs actually around, and they were around at the time that the Moloch dao was launched. so things like the Ethereum Community Fund or the Ethereum Foundation grant program. How do you see those and why did you still see the need for the Moloch DAO? So Mollock is faster. The voting period is seven days.

So if you submit a proposal, you'll get your response within seven days. That might not be enough time for everybody to do a great amount of due diligence, but it does put this sort of baseline, floor on, you know, the responsiveness of that grant-making organization, which I think is really powerful because especially for sort of unexpected needs or, you know, the grants that might have otherwise taken a long time to do through either consensus or the EF, it can be

really helpful, right? Ultimately, you know, we have the sort of Ethereum meta-organization, right and like there's a feedback loop and the feedback loop is how fast can we identify a need find the person to do it and secure funding for them to do it and we from talking to Ethereum 2.0 people for you know about a test runner that would run amongst all of the different clients and give them a way to standardize their tests so that they can make sure that they're all synchronized properly and we you know I tweeted about it we we found the guy, and then we submitted the proposal in three days. And so we had our answer in 10 days. And I think that was like the fastest feedback cycle I'd ever seen for a grant's

organization my entire life. So that was pretty cool. The EF obviously has about 100 times more money, so we're not really competing with them in any sort of sense. I'm not trying to compete with them in any sense. Half of Molex money is their money anyway. Not half. It's a thousand of the ether is their money. But I think it's also helpful to have alternatives and especially helpful to have cross-organizational alternatives where the people who actually make up the decision making for Mollock, Mollock represents a new way of bringing their knowledge together, right? So there's some people at consensus or just some individuals within the community who are in Mollock, but aren't in the EF that might have something to contribute to that process.

And within Mollock, they can all do this together. Interesting. Did this project come out of sort of maybe a frustration that you saw and things not moving along as fast as you would have liked? Could you talk maybe about the motivation behind this? I believe there was a report that was written by yourself and another organization where you guys pointed out some of those issues? I have gotten a grant from the EF before,

and it was an arduous process. So anything that allows that process to move faster is great in my eyes. I care a lot about Ethereum working, and Ethereum working depends on our speed of execution. And so being able to accelerate generally how fast we can execute on projects is a benefit for everybody in the ecosystem.

So one of the sort of easiest things for Ethereum community members to rally around is ETH2.0, and that was the original sort of mandate for Mollock was to try to accelerate ETH2.0. And so we started doing that by putting out reports, adding specs. And so the first report that we put out was called the state of ETH2.0. And we just, you know, I realized one day that I didn't know really what was going on at all. If somebody had asked me, how is E2.0? What are they doing? My answer would have been, I don't know. I think they're still working on it. Right. And this is like before any spec freezes, before any of that. So we, I organized interviews with all of the E2.0 client team leads as well as Danny Ryan, the lead researcher from the foundation. and we chatted for about an hour

and we had a bunch of questions and we asked them where they're at, who's on their team, stuff like that. And we compiled it all into a report and tried to identify, you know, what are the most important challenges that this effort is going to be facing in the upcoming months and years?

And we published that. It was primarily authored by Matt Slipper, who is the CTO of Kiochan. They've done great work in the space. But Menomask, Uniswap, also Spank card on the payment channels for Spank Chain. And so they, you know, have been helping part-time since that report. Also in helping with sort of on a, we put them on like retainer if a Dow can have somebody on retainer.

I don't really know. But we keep paying them every month. And so they have, Matt has been spending some of his time helping the ETHU effort. He wrote the first draft of the networking spec. which move things forward, but then he realized that LibP2P was a sort of critical dependency that hadn't really been thought through all the way. And so we actually yesterday just published a report about LibP2P, how the client teams are using it, how they're able to interact with the LibP2B team in order to get the changes that they need

included because it's sort of become this bottleneck for the networking layer. And we're trying to move past that. How exactly does a doubt put someone on retainer? That's a great question. I don't know. We just have an implicit agreement where I keep submitting proposals every month and people keep voting yes and so they keep getting paid and, you know, the world moves on. All right. We'll come back to the governance and sort of E2.0 and the state of Ethereum. We're generally a little bit later on the episode.

But first, I'd like to spend some time on Molok. Can you explain how it works at a basic level? Mollock has two contracts. There's a sort of governance contract and then there's a guild bank. And so when I want to join, I have to get an existing member who has shares. If you have at least one share, you're a member. I have to get that member to submit a proposal. And so when you submit a proposal, there's a couple of things.

fields that are important. One is the amount of tribute that I'm willing to offer in Ether, and the other is the number of shares that I'm requesting. And the number of shares that I'm requesting will, if the proposal passes, be newly minted. And so the only difference between a grant proposal and a membership proposal in Mollock is you set the tribute to zero if it's a grant. If I'm working for the Dow, then I am not putting up money. But if I'm joining as a member and then I'm coming in with capital, then I offer tribute and I put up money. And so when in the grants case, if after a seven-day voting period where there is no quorum, the people just vote, it could pass with one vote, has in the past, actually. So after the seven-day voting period, there's a seven-day grace period where anybody who doesn't like how a vote went can leave by calling the rage quit function.

Yes, that is a technical term. And then they withdraw with their remaining ether are not on the hook for the grant. But if at the end of the grace period, you know, the grant requested 10 shares, there are 100 shares total in the Dow. then those 10 shares will be newly minted. And so whoever was the recipient of that grant will now have 10 over 110 shares. And this presents a way for grants to sort of automatically be proportionally paid by diluting all of the existing members. It's a sort of very simplified accounting system. And that kind of is what you would expect, right?

We say, we're putting our money in this together. you get both proportional to the money, and we all spend our money equally based on how much we've put in for every time we want to make a grant. Okay. So let me just maybe rephrase this. There are two types of proposals that you can make to the organization. One is I have capital and I want to contribute capital in this grant pool. And so therefore, I make a proposal to become a member of Moloch. and I believe there's sort of a referral system where you have to be referred by someone already within the Dow. Essentially an anti-spam mechanism because we don't want anybody to just be able to submit proposals.

So you have to have an existing member, submit a proposal for you to join. Okay. So to become a member, I have to propose to the other shareholders that I want to become a member. So that's sort of a governance proposal that gets voted on. and I can do that by submitting a proposal with the amount of capital that I'm willing to allocate. Or I can make a proposal to receive grant funding. So let's say have a great idea and I want to build something like for Ethereum 2.0.

For instance, well, I'll make a proposal. Write it, I presume, post it on APFS and say, hey, like who's willing to fund this? And well, those who are funded or those who vote yes. and if you don't want to fund it, you can rage quit within the grace period and just receive your shares back. Correct. Yeah, Mollock is all about collective sacrifice, right? It's named after the Kanaanite god of child sacrifice. If you want to join Mollock, you have to be willing to bleed with us.

You can bleed with us by giving us your money or you can do some work. That's how it works. Let's talk about security. You know, DAPs are pretty unique because unlike other types of stuff, software, they can hold astronomical amounts of value. That's why getting systems audited, creating robust security processes, and fostering a culture of security in your organization is so important. And to do this, you should only trust experts with real security expertise. There are a lot of security firms in the blockchain space, but few have the experience and track

record of Trail of Bits. And they've been in business since 2012, long before things like the Dow Hack were even imaginable. Trail of Bits works with your team to audit every aspect of your And smart contract code is just the beginning. They'll help you implement best practices around things like DevOps, key storage, and user-facing applications. And once your software's been rigorously tested and reviewed by Trail of Bits, they'll provide the tools you need to make sure that your code remains safe over every new commit. They can even put a software security expert at your team's disposal who'll give you advice

and answer your questions when you need them. It's like having your own security engineer on staff, but don't take my word for it. Go to their publications repo on GitHub to read their paper. presentations and security reviews. It's no wonder teams like parody, status, Newseifer, and organizations like Facebook and DARPA trust Trail ofBits for their security audits. To learn more, go to trailfbits.com, and if you decide to reach out, make sure you let them know you heard about them on Epicenter.

We'd like to thank TrilofBits for their support. How much of Molok is influenced by other Dow's, like, for example, the Dow or DX Dow or even, you know, I would say like Cosmos is, some like sort of a Dow since it has governance as well. How much how much of the work is influenced by previous projects? Yeah, it is heavily influenced by the Dow. The Dow kept me up at night because well the Dow for me was my first week at consensus. So it's really fun watching everyone sort of initially not know what was going on and then lose their shit and there's like a whole bunch of uncertainty. Are we going to soft fork? Oh wait, no, that's a terrible idea. We could get

spammed. Are we going to hard fork? Okay, we're going to hard fork. Okay. What does this mean? Is it immutable? Who knows? Is this an existential crisis? Right? 10% of all the ETH was at stake there. So I didn't really want that to happen. And so I spent a lot of time trying to make sure that that wouldn't happen for Mollock. The simplicity of the design is heavily informed by the Dow. So Mollock is only 400 lines of code. It doesn't do. anything except for what we've talked about. It just allows you to pool money, vote, and leave. That's it. And it was designed to allow you to leave. The excellent posts on called the moratorium, a call for a moratorium on the Dow by Iman Gunsair, who is a noted professor

at Cornell, along, I think with Vlad and Dino. So they wrote this post actually before the Dow hack just about all the game theoretical problems with the Dow. And so even if it hadn't gotten hacked, it would have been broken in all sorts of ways. One of the attack vectors was called the stalking attack. So if you wanted to leave the Tao, you actually had to create a child Dow. The problem was anyone else in the Tao could join your child Dow. And so if you wanted to try and leave that child Dow, you'd have to make another child Dow and they could follow you forever. And that's exactly would happen post-hack when people tried to leave. So there were essentially two recommendations that they made at the bottom of that post.

And the first one was instant withdrawals. And the second one was post-vote grace periods. And I just took that as sort of my design outline. And then that's how we got to mullock. The combination of the two is very powerful. If you have instant withdrawals without the post-vote grace period, you can leave, but you can only ever leave before you know how a vote is going to go. But if you make it so that there's a grace period between when the vote on a proposal is final and when the execution of that vote, essentially the printing of the shares and the diluting of all members, then you give all the members who don't like how that vote went a chance to leave before it is executed. And we had to add, like, you know, a small amount of nuance around that because, you know,

just trying to get this sort of rage quit functionality in came with its own little edge cases. So one of those edge cases was, well, what if I vote yes on something and then I leave? And then everybody else is now on the hook for paying for that thing that I wanted, right? And so we actually, the only circumstance where you cannot leave is if you have voted yes, on something that has yet to be processed. It is either in the voting or grace period. So you have to be a little bit careful on not voting, you know, on something that you might want to leave after, you know, because of some other proposal. And the other thing is that the, if I vote yes on a proposal that is, for example, requesting 1% of the guild's

money, then let's say 99% of the guild's money, then let's say 99% of the, the other members leave. And let's say it's even not related to that specific proposal, but another proposal, which just happened to be before it, right? Well, now I'm on the hook for 100 times more money than I thought I would trying to be giving to this because if there's like 100 shares, it's requesting one new share, 99% of the other people leave. I'm the only share now. I'm about to dilute myself 50% because I'm going to create one share from one share. and I'm going to pay for a lot more money than I thought I was going to. It's unbounded risk, right?

And so we had to introduce a little mechanism just for that so that if more than two-thirds of the people leave between when a proposal gets voted on and when it is processed at the end of the grace period, it just automatically fails. And then, you know, you could try it again if you want it. Okay, I see. So basically, say I have submitted a proposal

and it was passed for, you know, a payout for a grant for building ETH 2.0 unit, whatever. So I'm issued shares and do I then, how do I actually retrieve the money? So I effectively have to rage quit in order to actually get the ether back out, right? For the shares that I've been issued for nothing, for doing this work. Yes, that's correct. You would have to reach with the shares. So you have the option. You can either keep the voting power if you don't immediately need the money,

or if you want the money or you don't want to hold it in ether, then you have to exit. So long as you keep at least one share, right, which is we started out with just one share, one eith. So you keep at least one share, you will be allowed to stay in the Discord channel.

You'll be considered a member. You'll be allowed to submit future proposals for either other members or more grants for yourself or others. And do you have any kind of mechanism that this payout is contingent on? So basically, typically, if I apply for a grant, there's some kind of payment schedule or there's some sort of milestone that I need to reach before payout. Is this the case for the model now? No.

The idea is because the system's fast, we would just probably split it up on like a month-a-month basis and then just do separate proposals every month. you can do a sort of ad hoc, right? Like if it's a larger proposal, you want to have somebody manage it. We could find somebody who's trusted within the Dow to act as a manager, give disbursements every month.

And like if they decide, you know, that we don't want to continue this, just give the rest of the money back to the Dow. We haven't done this yet. So far, we haven't given out to, like, you know, there's only about a little over a, million dollars in the Dow right now. So I haven't given out, I think the largest one was like $20,000 for a mixer UI on top of the Argon Hopper smart contracts. And so these have all been

in the range of like one to two months, right? And I think the reputational risk for anybody involved is also quite high. If you want to go and fail the Mollock Dazz Dal, you're failing quite a lot of the most important people in the space. So do so at your own risk. Okay, I bear that in mind. Can I delegate my vote to someone else in the Tao? So you can't delegate your vote to another member in the sense that, like, I can't pool votes.

That would have been a really helpful feature from a U.S. perspective if we'd allowed that. We built a mini-permission system so that you can essentially, have two addresses. You have the address that controls your ability to leave with the money, like they can call the rage quit function, and then another address which acts as your delegate key, but two members cannot give, you know, another member, like, to act as their delegates also. You have to have separate delegate keys. And this was annoying because when, like, for example, the EF wanted to join, it would have been really easy if they could just join with a thousand ether and then say, okay, this address has 100 shares, this address is 100 shares, this

addresses 100 shares. But instead, they had to join 10 times from 10 separate accounts, which each controlled 100 shares, and then delegate those addresses to the voting, you know, the address of the member within the EF that wanted to vote. So those were 10 different proposals to have the EF join the down? Yeah. Our lack of foresight. that there caused an EF Ops guy to spend an afternoon making 31 transactions, which, you know, it's not the end of the world, but it would have been better to be able to avoid it. There's a lot of things now that are really obvious that could be improved about the Dow. And I think it's great that we've been able to identify those because we sort of

We tried to do our best, but ultimately our focus was shipping it. This was a side project of a couple of us that had other full-time jobs. Arjun wrote the white paper, me and the Connects team. We did a lot of solidity. Cassandra was helping to sign the game theory. Had we spent too much time on this and tried to figure everything out up front, it might not have shipped for another several months. Writing solidity is easy.

Shipping solidity is not easy. And so you end up designing the entire process just to optimize for how easy will this be to understand and get audited and how confident am I that, you know, the tests are thorough. And every single thing that you add on, especially if it interacts with any other thing, increases that complexity and makes it much harder to ship something. And the fact that we're having this conversation at all to me means that, you know, I've already won in terms of designing a thing that, worked well enough that it got attention and can now be iterated on. And so, you know, do you foresee then a rage quit at any point soon, like everybody rage quits and then there's like a new one that comes out and with all these added features? There's no upgrade mechanism, right? So people that kept asking me, like, how do we upgrade? I'm like, here's how we upgrade.

We all leave. And then we make another contract and I'll join that, right? And I do. I think that maybe in six months to a year, we'll do it. It's not pressing because nobody has abused the system yet. For example, it would be, you have to spend 10 ether as a deposit when you want to submit a proposal. And you get that back in two weeks period after the voting grace period are done. But if you really want it to spend the Dow, it would cost you. There can be, there's five new proposals per day. So the maximum throughput is 35 proposals per week. So you'd have to put down 10 per each. So you'd have to put down 700 ether to occupy the entire proposal throughput during the voting and grace period, 35 and 35. So 70 and then times 10 for deposits, 700 ether. And that's

not that expensive if you really think about it. And what would happen is somebody does this, some member defects. Right. And then, well, it becomes a more pressing issue. to figure out how do we design a better anti-spam mechanism and the one that came to mind that wasn't obvious at the time was well you can nonlinearly increase the cost of the proposal deposit cost just on the person who is submitting so for example if I'm the only one spamming right then my proposal deposit cost should go up with every other proposal that I've already submitted. So it starts at 10, then it goes to 11, 12, 13, 14.

Right. And then it becomes a lot more expensive for me and only me to submit proposals, but everybody else is fine. Right. And that, like these kinds of mechanisms would have been harder to explain at the beginning at the outset, right? I have to go and say, hey, well, this is what we think. And they're like, why would you do it that way, right?

And there's a whole other conversation, which makes the, getting people in the door, you know, a little less socially scalable. But, you know, if somebody spams it, then it's really easy conversation to have. which is like, hey, look, this happened. Here's how we're going to fix it. Moving on. Also, having the ability to forcibly remove members, not take their money,

but just kick them out. Would also be nice if, you know, we feel that a member is compromised and spamming all the time. And we would prefer to, instead of moving to a contract, just kick them out. Yeah, those are really great points.

Yeah, totally agree that it's preferable to ship early and often and if necessary iterate over what you're offering. Maybe let's talk a little bit of the funding and the influence of the Tao. So how many people are currently members or how many entities are members of the Tao? I'm looking at the website.

It says 65. It's a little hard to tell who's who. So 10 of those are consensus people. 10 of those are Ethereum Foundation people. About, you know, one of those is Vitalik with 1,000. ETH, one of those is Joe. The original 22 co-founders, they're largely individuals. Spank chain joined with five people, each with 100 ether as well.

So probably, yeah, around 60 members total. So Vittalik, the Ethereum Foundation, Consensus and Joe can vote for 1,000 shares. each, right? So they put in the thousand ethers. Consensus and the EF votes are split between 10 people. So there's 10 people who each have 100 shares. That is like two-thirds of the total pool, right? Yeah. Do you think there's a problem with this voting power distribution? So the great thing about how this works is that if it was ever perceived as a problem,

everyone else could leave. So even if they're sitting there, you know, the way the game theory of the Dow works out is you don't want to vote in ways that incentivize other people to quit. Because then you're just back to funding things by yourself, right? So, you know,

Joe and Vitalik to date have not voted at all. Some people within consensus in the EF have voted. So let's say I felt like being exploiting the votes that Spank Chain has, right? We have, I have personally 100 votes and then I have, Spank Chain has 500 votes. So I see this Ethereum 2.0 Lodestar proposal here has 500 yes votes right now, right? So I could go and swing that whole thing inside that, you know what, this E2.0 team does not deserve a grant for Mollock. Now, do I want to do that? Right? And so if I did that I might, you know, piss off those 510 shareholders worth of capital and maybe they no

longer are interested in participating. And that would be sort of self-destructive, right? So maybe I don't want to do that at all. On the other hand, there is another series of votes for another doubt. Also, they will also lose their funds if you were to vote no on this, right? Well, they wouldn't lose any funds. It's just that the team that was trying to get the grant wouldn't get the grant. Right. Okay. There's no penalty for proposals that don't get passed.

No, no, no. Okay. There's no penalty. You get the deposit back at the end of the two weeks. You get the 10 ether back. So that's why, you know, the cost of spamming the thing is 700 that you lock up for two weeks, essentially. And so there's another series of votes on Yangdow, right, which is a much small. It's 10 times less money than what the Lodestar II team is asking for.

It's 3,500 instead of like 30,000. And it's something that I think is really important, but so far many people have voted against, and it's kind of contentious. So like the votes are split here. There's four different proposals, so we did it in four parts. And so one is like, it's funny because some of them are passing. One is like 625 to 600, another one's 425 to 600, another one's 525 to 500. But I could also make all of these pass. And so maybe what I'll do is I'll make all those pass, and then I just won't interrupt

the other vote. And that's a sort of compromise, right? It's not even a compromise I had to talk to anybody about. It's a sort of compromise based on like the implicit game theory of the situation, which is that the other members don't want me to leave. So they might not vote If we all have our own little pet project that we want to get funded

through this, it could happen through a series of compromises. Now, I think that Yang Dao is critically important and having a grant from Mollock would signal boost and add some legitimacy to the project. I think it's an entire category of new use case where we are collectively funding marketing operations for a U.S. presidential candidate.

I think that could attract a lot of attention. I think it could inspire other clones for other U.S. presidential candidates. And I think like that's the kind of level that we as a community want to be operating, right? It's sort of not enough to always be looking inside and trying to think about, you know, research and tools and scalability. if nobody is using it. And so I think the point is to bring Ethereum to these other communities. And if we're failing to do that,

then we're definitely not getting anywhere. Let's talk about the Yang Tao in a second because this is actually truly fascinating. But is it fair to summarize your entire stance as saying the Moloch Tao works because we have an off-chain reputation system within the Ethereum community and people know who I am

and I know who the other people are I know that our interests in getting Ethereum 2.0 off the ground are lined. Yeah, that's like pretty accurate. You know, it is a permission system after all, right? You have to know who the other people are in order to get in. There have been some people who have, I have actually proposed that they join, and there's a couple of people who I don't even know who they are, and I propose them anyway.

And the reason is they were able to prove to me that they have a Genesis wallet. And I was like, you know what, fine. That's good enough. So basically the system in and of itself is not something that's game theoretically locked in. So basically you actually have to rely on outside things. So for instance, I mean what some other Dow projects have tried to do is to build this fail-safe system. So for instance, what can in principle happen with the Moloch Dau is you can actually turn a vote at the very last block, right? So basically you could actually submit your 600 votes at the very last block of the Vodestar voting period, and you could still turn it.

And then no one else would actually have the chance to actually turn it back because no one would have known that. So basically, I mean, some projects actually have actually have, for instance, as quiet. period where if the vote flips, then the voting period gets extended by a certain amount of hours or days. And in itself, it's not a system that works in a vacuum. Yeah. I think that the vote flipping the quiet period or whatever that is a good feature. I would have preferred it to be in this as well. I think that, so I talked to Martin Koppelman about Dostak a couple times, how they have designed it.

And we basically came to the conclusion that they kind of wish they had a grace period, and I kind of wish I had the vote flipping thing. Because right now, people are incentivized in Mollock to vote at the very end, right? There's like a day left on these proposals. Maybe, you know, I'm just going to wait until the last, like, couple hours, and then I'll start voting because then that gives less of a time for everybody else to organize around it. Like if I flip the vote and then it would keep going for a little bit longer and give other people a heads up. At the same time, the fact that there's this grace period means that I can't

bully anybody in the staying and paying for anything that they don't want, which is also really helpful, even if the vote flips. Because if you didn't have that grace period, you would have to decide whether or not to leave based on, you know, like you could leave because you think a vote as going to pass and then it could get flipped, right, on the last block. And so that's also kind of annoying, right? Now, what the point is, is like, I'm not going to be like as game theoretically exploitative as I can be because that would, you know, potentially backfire in incentivizing the other members to quit. Right? And like, if I do that, then I'm back to funding everything just from

Spank Chain itself, which is where I started. So I don't want to do that. That makes sense. And I think it's a great approach in that it actually did. I mean, I think this can't be stressed enough. This is actually a project that did get traction and that attracted a lot of important community members to contribute their own money. and with a common goal of furthering the course of Ethereum 2.0. So looking at the proposals, so there's 85 proposals in total and about 65 members, I think. So I guess a lot of those proposals are proposals to add new members. And then of the rest, quite a few of the ones that are pending at the moment or in the voting period are for this Yangdow.

We'll talk about the Yangdau in a second, but can you talk about sort of aside from the Yangdow proposals, which, how many of the proposals are actually about advancing ETH 2.0? And I guess my question is, like, has anything come out of this that's actually usable and that is being used towards building ETH2.0? Yeah. So there's the first one was the state of ETH2.O report. Then we were funding Matt Slipper just part-time contributing. He did the first draft the networking spec. We brought Anton Toomey, so now the CTO of Wipe. block on to build an E2.0 test runner that many of the clients were using and can integrate into their workflows. We were actually, yeah, and so then we just published the GDP report, and now we're sort of in the RFP process for doing a validator client that can plug into any underlying node and have a GUI that shows, you know, performance, earnings, and, you know, and stuff like that for a ETH2 validator client that is trying to calculate their earnings as they go.

I would guess around 60 or 70% of the grants actually have gone to ETH2 stuff. This is skewed slightly by a $20,000 recent grant for Block X to build a web UI for the mixer. Because there's a mobile app that had a mixer integrated, And so we were like, well, we can increase the anonymity set and bring this to more users if we build a web UI as well that interfaces with the same contracts. So the mandate is evolving, right? And we always knew it would in the sense that like we knew that you get a bunch of these people together and we're going to have ideas of other potential things that we might want to fund above and beyond just, you know, ETH 2.0. And some of those things have also not gotten funded.

You know, some of those proposals have failed. There was an ETH 2.0 Block Explorer, I think it was Block Squid, and that was rejected. And some of the membership proposals failed. I tried to reach out and personally recruit somebody from the Ethereum community I'd never met because I liked his blog post. The name was Peter Pan. And the other members felt that he shouldn't be let in. His mistake was that he didn't, he didn't.

didn't have very much money. And at the time, the members were trying to limit people who would join with less than 100 shares because they thought it would increase the coordination overhead, which seemed like a valid concern at the time. But then they rejected him. And well, that's how the meta-cartel doubt was actually born. So I called him up and I said, hey, I was with Cassandra. I was like, hey, let's make another doubt. screw it, let's do it again. And he's like two steps ahead of you. I've actually already gotten all the Metacartel people.

Like, we're all excited about building a Ux-focused Dow for building tools for the application layer. Because a meta-cartel started with meta-transactions, which is a way to use relays and forward transactions so you don't have to pay for the gas. You can even abstract the unit of account that you pay for your gas. You can pay for it with and die. and so forth, and you just sign a transaction and uses a smart contract wallet and da-da-da.

Right. That's all great. And then it's evolving into funding both other tools of that kind and to make DAP development easier and some DAPS themselves. And now the MediCartel, I think, has a couple hundred ether, maybe like between $100 and $200,000. And that's like $750 or something, yeah. They are trying to decide what their first grants should be. And so this shows a way that this can scale.

And it's using the exact same contracts. When we call it a fork of Mollock, it's really just a redeploy. And, yeah, it has a different set of members who are pooling their funds and advancing the cause that they are passionate about. And so one of the proposals for Yangdow is actually I've had Peter Panis, a surprisingly good Dow coordinator to help PM a lot of the Yangdiao stuff. And I thought that maybe Mollock could reward him for that. And so now we'd have like dows spawning other dows. So let's spend a little bit of time in this Yangdow idea. So what is the Yangdiao and

why is it becoming a proposal within Mollock? Why wouldn't they just spin it off as as their own thing? And yeah, as a fork of the Mollock? Yeah. Well, it I mean, it's also the same contracts, right? So Meta Cartel, Molluk, Yang Dao, there's even, you know, earlier stages, there's a lobby Dow now, but we'll come back to that. So it could have, you know, I could have funded out of pocket. It wouldn't have been as interesting, I think. I think it's, you know, people are watching Mollock now, right?

It has some attention. It's not quite, you know, the EF, but when Mollock gives, gives a, grant, it's, you know, access, access signal within the community. Also, I'm sort of using Mollock to just accumulate talented people that I want to work with and that I want to be able to have access to if we have stuff that needs to get done. And so the people who are, you know, proposed to be getting money for Yangdao are one of the designers who made a site, which is, you know, the art for the Yangdow.org site. So you can, if you want to, if you want to, want to join the Yang Dow, you can pre-register.

It's possible we actually have to give some background at this point. So for everyone who's not based in the U.S., so Andrew Yang is one of the Democratic presidential candidates for the next election, his main talking point is the unconditional basic income as far as I know. He's been gaining a lot of traction. And I think one more thing we should say about U.S. campaign financing is that there are very strict laws about this, right? So basically, you can only contribute a certain amount towards any given candidate.

And you also have to be a resident or a national of the U.S. I'm not quite sure. Maybe you can talk about this. I mean? If the contributions are going to the candidate. But if the contributions are going to marketing around the candidate that the candidate is not explicitly not coordinating with, which is the sort of rules that governs super PACs, then you have, I think, a little bit more leeway.

I didn't actually expect the Mollock Dow code to be used in this way. I was just talking to somebody who was close to the campaign, and they were like, yeah, we're raising money. I was like, how does that work? I was like, you know, they explain. And I was like, well, you know, we built this interesting grants system that you might be interested in to use it. And it turns out that it maps really well onto that use case,

because normally when you donate money to a politician's campaign or like a super pack, right, you just give them the money and then you hope that they do, they spend it well. In this case, you actually get the option to not only vote on it, but also leave with your money if you don't like how they're spending it. So it has some advantages in that regard. Yeah, so with the end of the other things that we're building is James Young, who is one of the, who's a BP engineering at Spang Chain for a while, moved on. He's been building the abridged wallet.

And so it's like a really nice bridge between Web 2 and Web 3, where you can sort of counterfactually instantiate. Basically, without having to send any transactions until you have money in this contract, then the contract gets deployed to kind of how the NOSA Safe works. You get this wallet, and this wallet can have any number of your keys plug into it. So it's not like an M of N multi-sig, but it's also a, you know, it's much safer if you already have one or two wallets to just plug your existing wallets into a contract and authorize them as spenders of the money or as people who can execute transactions through that. Then, you know, needing to make a new wallet and then write down a seed phrase and da-da-da. And so we're the Yangdiao when it launches in like about a week, it'll be the first app that uses that.

And so we're paying for the developers there and the designers there and for the coordinators who are sort of managing. And this is very well something that could hit the mainstream media if it becomes successful, right? So I mean, people will talk about this. So is your ambition in promoting this to a large part a PR exercise or is it's truly the idealism that fuels it? PR for idealism is never bad, right? If you have ideals and they get more attention, that's a benefit. I mean, it's because we have maybe for the first time a presidential Democratic candidate that is crypto-friendly. And so if we can help support them with our crypto, then maybe we'll change the narrative.

Trump has already started tweeting about Bitcoin. I expect crypto to be at least, if not, you know, the topic. a topic during this nomination process. And I think that being able to have our voice in this process would be really important. And if that blows up, then great. People will look at Ethereum and say, hey, this can actually be used for stuff that maybe isn't even

around finance, right? This is just purely a social coordination mechanism. And if that brings more activity onto the Ethereum network, work, then I think that's a win. I think that would be super interesting to see. And I'm personally rooting for the Yangdau. Yeah, it's a very interesting, like, design. And I think your approach to building it has been,

I see it as kind of like a lean product approach where, you know, you just build the features that you need. And then, you know, if you need to implement new features, and then everybody just exit and there's like a new Dow. And I think, like, that's a really good way to, to try to boost trap this thing. And the whole way that you boostchap it is very interesting. It's a new type of development practice.

It's called meme-driven development, MDD. If the meme is good enough, we'll do it. That's the point. Right. So moving now to the sort of future of the ecosystem and your views on the ecosystem. We've talked about this a little bit. But I'm curious to get your thoughts on, you know, where you see the future of Ethereum. going and if you could, you know, share your thoughts on, you know, the foundation more generally.

Yeah. I think Ethereum's going to do well. I mean, I think ETH 2.0 will ship. There's a lot of talented people working on it. It's a hard problem, but I think they've solved a lot of the research problems and moved on to engineering. I think it's going to be a heroic effort that's required because we have to like build all the tools again to adapt to this new sharded future. I think the community will get there. It's like one of those things where you're anxious about it, but at the same time, you're pretty sure it's like you're going to win. In terms of like EF, I'm really impressed.

They've stepped up a lot, increased their transparency. They ship the new website. People have opinions about it. I kind of like it, to be honest. But they have committed to spending, you know, $30 million over the next year. As an organization, they seem more willing to, you know, let go people if needed, which I think is healthy. So we had a case of that. And also they're, by participating in stuff like Mollick, they are decentralizing themselves.

Right. So they are planning to be obsolete. at some point, right? They don't want to go obsolete too soon because the ecosystem needs their support. But they also don't want to go obsolete too late where they stick around for longer than they're needed. And so they're playing a delicate balance game.

And they're also trying to support other decision makers and community members who can potentially complement them in coordinating resource. allocation, which I think is pretty cool. So one question that I often ask people who are deep in the Ethereum ecosystem and is with regards to sort of the roadmap and how long it's expected to take to deploy Ethereum 2.0. So, you know, firstly, like, how long do you think this will take? Like, when you think that Ethereum 2.0 will ship, if you have any indication there or any ideas.

and secondly, do you think that introduction of other blockchain systems that have a lot of the features that Ethereum 2.0 are, is wanting to have, like, you know, things like Cosmos and Pocodot, which is coming soon? Do you think that the fact that these chains are ready or near ready can harm you the ecosystem and take away some of the talent and mind share and just like generally like the projects that we're looking to build on blockchain systems? Yeah, I think they'll develop communities. I don't think competition is necessarily a bad thing.

I think it, you know, inspires you to push yourself to new heights. Going back to your roadmap question for a sec, though, Q1, 20 is like the planned, you know, beacon chain release date,

so phase zero of sharding, which is just the backbone. The data layer should be made available by the end of 2020. So maybe Q4 or Q1 the next year. And then I think the interoperability between shards and adding smart contracting to the shards will come something like a year after that. It could be faster depending on how well teams transition

between implementing a spec and the sort of other engineering challenges that go into building a client. Additional coordination on the engineering side, I think, would probably be welcome because most of the coordination that's going on is happening at the research level. Like, here is the spec, build the spec, did you build the spec? Yes, okay, good. What about all the rest of the work that goes into building client? That is not just this.

Well, you know, the teams are sort of on their own to manage that part. and I think that maybe there's room to do better there. Cosmos and Pocodot are, you know, they are not in and of themselves smart contract platforms, right? But I can connect them to other chains, base chains, right? And so they're actually glorified layer twos in my mind, right? Because they don't really exist without layer ones. So will they get to?

You know, probably will it, you know, people might launch experiments on them in the meantime. But ultimately, like, I have a choice when, you know, I'm building something for my users. And it's like, you know, I can plug into this one ecosystem where I have all these other developers that built out a bunch of stuff that I didn't even realize I needed yet. Or, you know, I can be a pioneer, but that's going to be like Ethereum five years ago, right? not a whole lot of the tooling is built. They haven't really figured out what it's supposed to be used for, stuff like that. So I expect maybe it'll drain some of the value from Ethereum in the short term over the next two years. While there's uncertainty around the Ethereum roadmap execution,

but I think at the end of that, right, when there's no longer uncertainty about the Ethereum roadmap execution, all of that value and more is going to come back to Ethereum, and Ethereum will continue to dominate. That's my bet. I could be wrong. There's a lot of people who have, you know, I'm sort of incentivized to play this way, but I'm also, you know,

there's a thing where, like, your holdings reflect your beliefs, and then your beliefs reflect your holding in a sort of cyclical way, right? So I'm sure that's at play here, too, and there's lots of Cosmos and Pocodot bagholders, which would tell me otherwise, and they'd say, oh, but you need governance. Like, how are you going to get anything done if you don't have a governance structure? And it's like, well, you know what? I don't actually really like that a governance structure can make protocol updates or determine, for example, in Pocodot, like, who gets

the lease of PeraChane? Because I also run a adult-oriented company. And historically, you know, adult companies have had issues with banking. with they are on the other side of consensus, if you will. Like that means that if I'm operating a parochane or on a parochain, then I always have to wonder, like, will the dot holders decide that, you know, they no longer want my community on their chain, which they could do because, you know, they're about to bring in some banking partners, are really excited about it. And then they decide, you know what, do we really need these, this, you know,

the sex worker community. And every single time that question has been asked in that way, the answer is no. So Ethereum gives me a lot of benefits because for people to remove something like Spank Chain, you'd literally have to get everybody to update their full nodes at the same time and do it via hard fork. And people, I think, really underestimate the power of that kind of decentralization. because the reason I'm building on Ethereum, not like the Twitter API,

is so that I can't get shut down, right? If you can shut me down via some kind of coin vote, like I'm not as interested in building on your chain, you know? And I think that the most value in the world is, you know, held in like central banking reserves. And so when they decide who wants to, like,

they want to build on, they will want to build on something neutral. And so I don't see, you know, platforms that have captrable governance being useful for them to build, for example, settlement layers between central banks on, which is like sort of the ultimate full, you know, case for any sort of crypto settlement layer to begin with. Perfect. Thank you. I mean, I think those were fantastic closing words. Thank you so much for being on the show. we're excited to see what the future of Moloch Dow brings. Great. Thanks for having me.

I had fun. And where can people learn more about Mollok and perhaps even, you know, how do people become a member of like someone wants to make a proposal to become a member, for example? Yeah, so to make a Mollock Dow proposal to join, you can't, right?

You have to find somebody who's in. You can DMEM-I-M-I-M-Sole on Twitter, mollickdow.com. We're about to set up a forum for Mollock Dow so that you can post a sort of like, hey, I'd like to join, here's me, post there. And then Yangdao is, I think yangdow.org. You can pre-register for the launch.

There's also Metacartel Dow. Check it out if you're into DAPS and UX. And, you know, as always there is spankchain.com and spanklive, which are, you know, adult-friendly platforms. Okay, thanks for joining us, I mean. Yep. Cheers.

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