Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Kevin Owocki: Gitcoin – Building and Funding the Open Web

Episode Date: February 9, 2022

Gitcoin is a platform which funds software developers for work in open source ecosystems. Open source creates value without capturing it: Gitcoin creates funding mechanism to correct the asymmetry between value created and value captured. So far they have raised $51million, which were then distributed to public goods projects.We were joined, for the second time, by Gitcoin's founder Kevin Owocki. Hear as we chat about quadratic and public good funding, the Internet of Jobs, and Kevin's book, Greenpilled - Regenerative CryptoEcononmics, which is out soon!Topics covered in this episode:An update on what's happened since Kevin was last on the showHigh level funding stats and measuring the success of GitcoinQuadratic funding - why and how?Public good fundingImpact DAOs and Regenerative CryptoEconomicsGitcoin's transformation to a DAOThe Internet of Jobs (IoJ) - advantages and disadvantagesGreenpilled - Kevin's bookEpisode links:Episode 257 - Gitcoin – Aligning Incentives in Open-Source DevelopmentGitcoin resultsGreenpilled - Regenerative CryptoEconomics - book coming soonTake the Green PillGitcoin on TwitterKevin on TwitterSponsors:Gnosis Safe: Gnosis Safe is a smart wallet for securely managing digital assets and allows you to define customized access permissions. - https://epicenter.rocks/gnosissafeTally: Tally is a new wallet for Web3 and DeFi that sees the wallet as a public good. Think of it like a community-owned alternative to MetaMask. - https://epicenter.rocks/tallycashThis episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/430

Hi, welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Sebastian Kuchio, and I'm here with my co-host, Featherika Ernst. Today, we're talking with Kevin Awaki. He's the founder of Gitcoin, and he's now a member of the Gitcoin Dow. Before we talk to Kevin about Gitcoin, I'd like to tell you about our sponsors this week. Gnosis safe is a smart wallet that enables you to control digital assets with much more granular permissions involving multiple private keys, a subset of which is required for executing transactions. These keys can be stored in different hardware wallets or software wallets or even shared across multiple people. Gnosis safe security and personalization makes it the most trusted Web3 asset management solution for individuals, teams and Dow, who already use it to store over $100 billion in U.S. USD's worth of assets today. So check out the latest iOS app, which has just been released, where you can send and receive funds, execute transactions, and receive push notifications

on all on your mobile device. Visit Gnosis dashsafe.io to learn more and to get started setting up your own safe. We're also brought to you by Talley, which is a new Web3 wallet and defy wallet that is a public good. So think of it like a community-owned version of Metamask. It has all the features of MetaMask, but the difference is that Talley is 100% open source under the GPL3 license, and it's 100% user-owned with all the profits flowing to the community, not a corporation. The launch of Talley is coming in the new year. Actually, it's already out now, but the team have just released an early version to the community, which is the Talley Community Edition before the Dow launches.

What features do you think should be in your ideal wallet? what annoys you currently about your wallet that you're using? Well, try Talley and join the community on Discord. Their community calls feature a new partner each week and have about 500 Uniques joining. You can get all the info you need at tally.cash. Kevin, thanks so much for joining us once again today. We're just checking earlier and it's been since like we last had you on in 2018. It was like right after get coin grants launched.

So yeah, thanks for coming back on. Yeah, it's great to be here. It's been a, been a couple years, which is, as we all know, a lifetime in the crypto space. But, yeah, Gekcoin grants is now our flagship product. So a lot of it has changed since I was last on the show. Thanks for having me back. Yeah, it's a pleasure. And I mean, Gitcoin has just grown so much since, you know, in the last three years. And it's become such like a pillar in the Ethereum community. Tell us a bit about, you know, your personal journey since we last spoke. and sort of, you know, trying to summarize, you know, the last three years of your life and, you know, sort of the trajectory of Gitcoin. Totally. Yeah, we've been really lucky. Turns out there's a lot of people out there who want to get coins. And there's a lot of software developers who wanted to enter the space. And that's kind of our niche is connecting the software developers to the funding that can fund their work in open source. And I'm super proud that our mission has always been to grow and sustain open source software. Open source provides so much value for the world. And there's just not a business model for it because the code is available for free. In fact, I think the number was $400, $400 billion, per year in economic value, according to a study in 2014.

And since there's no business model, developers are just working nights and weekends for free on open source software. And that's always been our mission is to correct that asymmetry between value created and value captured. Last time I was on the show, which was, I think, 2018, we were primarily focused on doing bounties, which is basically, if you do X, you will get Y coins on Gitcoin. And we've since expanded into Gitcoin grants, which is basically I am already doing X and I would like to raise money.

for that work in open source software. And if you go to getcoin.co slash results, you can see that we've done $51 million worth of funding for open source software with an accelerating trajectory as the market has turned around. And I think as our network effects have deepened. So, yeah, it's just kind of been really staying anchored to that mission of building and funding open source software and digital public goods. And just being kind of really, really trying to.

to innovate on how we reach that mission has been the trajectory for the last three years. And so super proud of the impact that we've had so far. But, you know, $50 million is great. But like I said, $400 billion per year in economic value is created by open source software. So we're just scratching the surface of what we could do if our mission was successful in helping open source software developers get coins. Cool. Can you maybe give us a little bit deeper look into the stats? So basically how many different projects have received funding? Do they usually come back every round or are they one-offs?

And I mean, so how many people in total have benefited? How many have given to Gitcoin? And yeah. Sure. Well, yeah, direct the audience to getcoin.com. Soreslust, which is our open stats page. We like to be as transparent as possible with the stats. And the total is 65,000 funders have given to an audience of 280,000 earners.

And maybe there's a little bit of people who are creating alt accounts as they have pseudonymous identities in there. 1.7 million complete transactions over the course of the last several years. So, you know, I'm most proud of projects like Uniswap and URN Finance using Bitcoin during the last bear market. when funding had really dried up, Gipcoin grants had become a place where people could get funding during the bear market. And I'm really proud to have us supporting public goods like Wallet Connect in Prismatic Labs,

in Nimbus, the ETH clients that are out there have a special place in my heart as a software developer who wants to see the people who are working on the foundations of our network getting paid. So all in total, there's about a thousand Gipcoin grants that return every round. and take most of the funding every Gitcoin grants round. And there's kind of like a bell curve down to up and coming projects

and newer projects in the space that can get discovered on Gitcoin. Because there's such a density of funding on Gitcoin, it's actually become sort of an interesting place where new projects can come and market themselves to the community and make a name for themselves. Because with Gitcoin grants, it's a crowdfunding platform where the median transaction is $1. And so it's a great way for, you know, if a project raises from 3,000 of their friends,

for them to say, hey, look at all these people who are our peers in the community that really care about our project. And then that can be a springboard for larger grants from, say, the Ethereum Foundation or I know that Uniswap now has a grants project. So it's a great way for newer projects to get momentum in the space by doing crowdfunding on get coin grants. What's the measure of success here? You were talking earlier about the size of the open source market, the value that it creates.

How are you tracking the success of Gitcoin in the broader open source funding paradigm? Yeah. Well, the easiest number to track is just the amount of money that we've moved to software developers. But the number that's nearest and dearest to my heart is the number of people who can quit their jobs and just work on open source software. If you've worked at JPMorgan Chase and now you're going to work on open source, then that's the future that we want to create. People who can pay their mortgage and pay their bills by working on public goods and open source software. And Vidalek Bouter in one of his reviews of Gekcoin talked about this idea of a quadratic freelancer, someone who is making enough money from Gitcoin grants or other public goods funding mechanisms that can now quit their job and work for the open Internet.

And it's just subsidized by quadratic matching. We haven't talked about quadratic funding, but that's basically the mechanism that underpins Gitcoin grants. And so the number that's nearest and dearest to my heart is the number of people who have found new opportunities that we've opened doors for either by quitting their corporate jobs and working on Web 3 or coming straight out of school if you're a student and working straight away on Web 3. And it's a little bit hard to track that because we don't know exactly what people's

employment are. We don't have a good data source for that. But anecdotally, walking around at ETHCC and ETH Denver, I get approached by a dozen of people who tell me, oh, get coin open to X door for me or Y door for me. And it always feels great to have those moments where you've affected the trajectory of someone's career. And that's, that's the metric that I optimize for. So let's talk about quadratic funding. So where did the idea come from and how does it work? Yeah. So quadratic funding is basically an idea from Glenn Weil, who's the author of Radical Markets and Vitalik Boudarin, who people may know as the founder of

Ethereum and Zoe Hitzig. And so basically the idea is that it's basically in you run a matching campaign where you match contributions to a crowdfunding campaign. And instead of doing one to one matching, what you do is you match by the number of contributors to each grant more so than the amount funded by each grant. So if the three of us all were running a grant on get coin and my grant got $100 from one contributor and y'all's grant. got $100 from 100 contributors, then your grant would get like 97% of the matching funds because we're optimizing for the preferences of the poor and the many instead of the rich and the few. So it's the mathematically optimal way to fund public goods in a democratic, democratic community

because we're optimizing for the preferences of the many instead of the rich few. And so that's why Kikcoin grants, when you give only a dollar, the match multiple can be really significant. It gets people over the free rider problem of why would I fund this public good that I'm already getting for free? Well, the reason why you would bother to take out your wallet and give a dollar is that for the projects that have the broadest base of support, the highest number of contributors, a $1 contribution can be matched with $200, $300, $300. So the match multiples get quite insane once the matching pools get big and the projects get a high number of contributors. And that's what gets people over the free rider problem of contributing on get coin grants.

So basically, don't get scared off by the math. If you read the paper, there's a bunch of Greek symbols and in math and everything like that. But basically, it's just a matching campaign where we match the number of contribute, based off the number of contributors instead of the amount funded. And that creates more democracy, pushes power to the edges in ecosystem funding. So, Gitcoin grants is primarily doing quadratic funding on a main Ethereum matching pool. right now, the last matching pool in grants round 12 in December 2021 was a million dollars. But now we've started to add these little adjacent pools for uniswap and for Polygon and other ecosystems that also are trying to build their own ecosystems, public goods. And quadratic funding is just

kind of the formula that gets people to actually get off the couch in a metaphorical way and contribute to the grants on get coin. And I just want to really quickly say, I know that Aaron McMillan was on your podcast recently and he's running CLR Fund, which is another really promising quadratic funding project out there. And I'm a friend of RN's and I think that there's multiple implementations of QF. Gekcoin just happens to do the biggest in the earliest. So how do you become civil resistant? I mean, what stops people from making multiple accounts and contributing a dollar each from 20 accounts? Yeah, that's a really great question. And that's kind of like the Achilles heel of quadratic funding is this thing called civil resistance, which basically

is sock puppet resistance. In that example I gave earlier, which was I have a grant where I've raised $100 from one contributor and you two have raised $100 from 100 contributors and you get way more of the matching pool. What's to stop me as a person who wants to get more of the matching pool from just making up 100 identities and then distributing the funding through that? And that's called the civil resistance problem. And it's actually one of the hardest unsolved problems in the space right now. Imagine an ecosystem in which we can move from these one token one vote systems, which Vitalik has called plutocratic, to one human one vote. That's digital democracy if we can move to more one human one vote type systems. And so it's an

unsolved problem. Our approach at Gitcoin is to only deploy as much capital as we can be sure that we can keep the fraud tax low. The fraud tax being defined as the amount of money that gets misallocated due to civil resistance. So there's an impedance matching, between the amount of capital that is being deployed and the cost of forgery of all of the accounts on Gitcoin. And our approach is to aggregate civil resistance indicators from proof of humanity, from Bright ID, from ID, from a bunch of different projects that are doing really amazing work in creating these web of trusts in order to create civil resistance. And we aggregate all of those signals and we assign a personhood score to each person on the Gitcoin network. and basically the idea there is that the personhood score is just the cost of forgery of each identity.

So if I integrate my get coin account with Twitter, maybe that provides 50 cents worth of cost of forgery because Twitter accounts are easy to forge. But proof of humanity, I'm making up these numbers, but basically like proof of humanity creates $200 worth of civil resistance, right? So you can give $200 worth of the matching pool to someone who's contributed based off of a proof of humanity linked identity. Anyway, so it's this whole rabbit hole of how you solve civil resistance. And we're just standing on the shoulders of giants by integrating with other civil resistance mechanisms in the space. And it's an unsolved problem. I would not represent that we have solved it.

But Gitcoin grants is actually one of the largest data sets in finding and sniffing out civil rings. And channeling that information back to proof of humanity and Bright ID is what Gitcoin Dow and the fraud defense workstream has been working on over the last several rounds. So it is an unsolved. problem and I would not represent that we have totally solved it, but we were trying to be responsible in allocating the capital such that the fraud tax is low. And the big end game here is that Gitcoin grants on its face, if you look at it, it looks like a crowdfunding experiment

and funding public goods. But if you look at it, if you turn it on its side, it's actually a giant red team, blue team exercise in sniffing out civil attacks and finding new ways of proofing these civil resistance ecosystems and the end result, hopefully the positive externality of all of this is that we can create civil resistance signals for the rest of the ecosystem and move the rest of the ecosystem from one token, one vote to one human one vote, is the hopeful eventual outcome of all of this. So TLDR, we haven't solved it, but we're trying to take it seriously, and I'm very excited about a world that is more civil resistant. So in a way, Gitcoin kind of distributes money to different projects by this mechanism.

But where does the money come from in the first place? Sure. Yeah, we distribute money. My marketing lead has been coaching me. Say that people are getting coins on Gitcoin. So that's like the inverse of distributing money on Gitcoin. Yeah, so people are getting coins from this matching fund that basically has been set up at first by the Ethereum Foundation. And what the Ethereum Foundation wanted when they started engaging with Gitcoin grants was,

Well, A, Vitalik wanted to something that prototyped in the real world, this paper of quadratic funding that he wrote with Glenn, just like, does it even fly? Like, does this thing even take off or does it just explode on the launch pad? Luckily, the answer is that it does fly. And basically what the Ethereum Foundation wanted was a more organic, decentralized way of allocating funding in their community. So the EF grants team is really amazing and they do such great work in supporting the major players of the ecosystem. But if you're a more up-and-coming person who is not well-connected in the space, quadratic funding is a better way to get on the radar because we can do thousands of grants on Gitcoin via the matching pool, whereas a centralized grants team can only process on the order

of tens of applications per month. So it augments traditional grant funding mechanisms for the EF, and that's why through rounds one through six, we run these rounds every quarter. rounds one through six, Gitcoin grants was funded by the Ethereum Foundation. And then a really interesting thing happened in the summer of 2020, Defy Summer, Andre from YerN Finance, which I don't know if you all remember DeFi Summer, but Andre was like the ultimate Chad during DeFi summer because he had just launched Yurn and Fair launched it and gave it all away. And he announced that he was giving 150KKKK to the Gitcoin Grants matching pool and funding

Gitcoin Grants round seven. And I think over the next 20, hours, I raised maybe like $1.5 million just on Twitter DMs because everyone wanted to do what Andre was doing. It was Defi Summer and he was the ultimate alpha nerd. And so we had this like impedance or this like this phase change where we went from being funded by the Ethereum Foundation to being funded by the defy projects that were taking off in the Ethereum space and now have these large treasuries. And some of them are even alumni of Gitcoin grants. Like you're in finance raised money in the bear market through get coin grants. So we see this like people graduating

into becoming alumni of Gitcoin and then paying it forward to the back of the space, back to the space. And like, you know, arguably they're doing it for karma, but also maybe they get some sort of brand equity out of, hey, we're funding public goods in the Ethereum space. Come work at Urn or Uniswap or Chainlink has been an amazing funder for us. Badger Finance has done some really great stuff for us. And so we call this the funders league. It's a group of projects that is now funding the Ethereum ecosystem that are alumni of Gitcoin grants. And so that's rounds. So we've done 12 rounds of get coin grants, one through six with the Ethereum Foundation,

seven through 10 were the defy projects. And then around 11, NFTs were taking off. And so me and my buddy Austin Griffith launched this PFP project called MoonshotB, which are like these little pixelated robots that we put them on a bonding curve and we just sent 100% of the money to public goods. We raised $3 billion for the batching pool. which is just like, I just can't believe how successful that campaign was funding public goods with NFTs. And the crazy thing is that the moonshot bots have been live on the Ginkcoin site on the avatar builder for like two years and no one cared until they were NFTs.

So there's some like, there's like, you know, like those clickbait articles where they're like do X with one weird trick. It was like fund public goods with one weird trick. And NFTs were a new way of funding public goods. So that's another way that we've been funding the. matching pool. And then we just announced this thing called Gitcoin aqueducts, which is basically like, you know, an ancient Rome aqueducts were a way of carrying liquidity from one location to another. A Gitcoin aqueduct is just a way of carrying liquidity from your protocol or ecosystem into the Gitcoin grants matching pool. And typically the way that is set up is that we will

run quadratic funding rounds for your ecosystem if you set up an aqueduct to the matching pool for Gitcoin. So a typical split is like 60. 40, 60% of those funds will be used to build your ecosystem and 40% will be used for the Ethereum main round. And so an Aqueduct is a way of funding get coin grants. But also if you're a defy-fri-project that's looking for more bottoms up organic growth, then Quadriatic funding is like the magic way to do that. So Aqueducts are a way of doing it. Anyway, TLDR answer to your question. At first it was the Ethereum Foundation, then it was all the DeFi projects, then it was NFTs, now it's aqueducts. We're basically trying to innovate in find new ways of funding public goods

at Gitcoin. That's the other side of the coin. And right now the matching pool has on the order of like 10 or 12 million dollars in it. So even if the market turns really bearish, we've got at least four or five more rounds at $3 million per round funded on Gitcoin grants. So we're staying ahead of the problem as much as we can. And yeah, I'd love to talk about Gitcoin Dowell a little bit later, but they're actually doing most of the heavy lifting on raising money for the matching pool now. And they have governance rights over the funds. So they're doing a really amazing job of staying ahead of keeping the matching pool funded. That's really impressive. Yeah, thanks for explaining how the quadratic funding mechanism works in detail. So really we're talking about the metrics, the metrics by which

you measure the success of Gitcoin. And one of the things that I think a lot about when, you know, considering the success of, like, these new innovative use cases that crypto has enabled, it's like how much of that has leaked into the non-crypto world? And we're also talking about just the amount of value that's created in, you know, open source software. How much, how much of that are you seeing? Like, is the, is the quadratic funding model or the Gitcoin model, you know, starting to leak

into other areas of open source software that aren't necessarily crypto focused. And is there an aspect of Gitcoin success that is specific to crypto and the projects that is funding and the fact that there's sort of intrinsic economic value inside those projects in a form of tokens or whatever? I guess my question is, does Gitcoin and quadratic funding, such as you've implemented scale outside of crypto? Yeah, really great question. I think that the endgame here is quite large. If we are able to prototype new ways of funding public goods in the Ethereum ecosystem, then we could backport those

to other digital public goods, and then we could backport those to more physical public goods, and what if we've discovered more efficient, more fair, credibly neutral ways of allocating capital, and we could transport those to the world? I think the honest answer to your question, Sebastian, is that we haven't proven it out. And I don't think that we don't think that we, really know yet, but there are some early promising signs during coronavirus when downtown, I'm from Colorado, and downtown Boulder, Colorado was just shuttered after the coronavirus pandemic when everything went into lockdown. And we, I got together with Katie Johnson and Zach Herring, who were two of my compatriots from consensus, my consensus days. We've since spun out of consensus. But Katie and Zach are

friends that I shared in office with. And I was like, let's do a quadratic funding matching round for downtown Boulder. And we did, and we raised 50K for downtown Boulder businesses that were affected by the pandemic. Now, having a livable downtown is a public good, just like open source software is a public good. And I'm really proud to say that we implemented, so it was called downtown stimulus. And it was a quadratic funding matching campaign that just like accepted credit cards, no crypto, not even in the back end, no, not even crypto in the back. And we raised $50,000 for for businesses in downtown Boulder. And I'm really proud to say that we had hundreds of contributions from people who weren't even on email lists. We're kind of like not even comfortable with

digital experiences. This is like an e-commerce flow. In the same user experience, give one dollar and get tens or hundreds of dollars in matching. And so downtown stimulus was a great success. And I'm really proud that we prototype to that. We've not done another downtown stimulus because Gitcoin needed to focus on the Ethereum space, but I'm proud that we put that model out there. So that's experiment number one, which shows, I think, promised that quadratic funding could go more mainstream. And then experiment number two is that in May of 2021, Gickcoin got together with Open Collective, which is a prominent Web 2 open source funding tool and launched fundosS.org, which is a quadratic funding tool for mainstream open source software,

things like NPM or in the Python ecosystem, and we were able to raise 100K for the Web2 open source ecosystem. So I'm really proud to say that the psychology of quadratic funding works, whether you put it on crypto rails or Fiat Rails. And I do think that we've prototyped a fundamentally new way of funding public goods. And to be clear, it's Glenn and Vitalik's idea. I'm just like the guy who's bringing it to one of the people who's bringing it to the Ethereum ecosystem. And I do think that there's a lot of promise in piloting new ways of creating regenerative finance in the Web3 ecosystem and then backporting them to the real world.

And my big hope is that Bitcoin is just kind of like the tip of the sphere, what we do in the Ethereum ecosystem. We're actually launching this grants protocol, which is like an infinitely forkable. version of Gekcoin grants. And my big dream is that people take it and they go fund digital journalism ecosystems or they go fund climate change or they go fund their downtowns. And I think that like copy what we're doing in the Ethereum ecosystem and let's let a thousand experiments blossom in funding public goods elsewhere in the ecosystem is kind of what I would hope that Gekcoin's legacy is when I look back on it in 10 or 20 years. And there's early signs that it's going to work really well. But I don't think that we've totally

proven it out. And to be clear, the civil resistance problem is real. We need to solve that. We need to solve the problem of how we fund these matching pools at scale. And those are the largest unsolved problems that I've got my sites set on right now is scaling this thing and bringing it to new verticals. So the TLDR answer is, Sebastian, is that we don't know, but there's promising signs. What's the biggest challenge in terms of attracting funding? So like, you know, especially I think in the crypto space where there are like VC funds and companies and Dow's that have gotten maybe in that order, you know, that have gotten quite, quite wealthy from crypto. And, you know, arguably lots of the portfolio companies of VC's and like even the companies that they fund themselves that also have gotten quite wealthy are using open source technology. And what's the challenge in getting more funding coming from these organizations and,

how do we sort of like encourage wealthy actors in the space to contribute more to open source infrastructure funding? It's a really great question. I think the answer is that it depends on the audience. I believe that, I mean, Gitcoin grants were funded like four or six rounds ahead of right now, and it's really been, I'm so thankful that the community has rallied around our mission and rallied around our project. And I'm just so heartened to see that as the community gets more rich,

as the Ethereum ecosystem advances that they're funding Gitcoin grants. And I do think that you know, it really you know, a naive approach to the, to the crypto space

might be that, oh, it's all DGens and it's all selfishness. And I just don't think that that's true. I see us as the tip of the sphere for regenerative of crypto economics and the type of people

that realize that like, hey, what's the value of a Lambo if the sky is on fire? We're really all on this earth together. and we're all in these ecosystems together. And it's incumbent upon us to make sure that our common spaces and our communities are livable and are supporting new people coming into them in innovation. And so, you know, the people who really get that message, I think that we've found a lot of luck in making sure that they are funding public goods. But, you know, part of what we're trying to do is show people that it does work, that you can have positive some games with crypto economics, even in an adversarial environment.

And I think showing people that it's possible is the beginning of educating them that there are mechanisms for making the world better and for making these ecosystems better. And the big challenge is that if there's a giant hack, actually, I'll just, the open SSL bug that happened in 2013, there's this bug called heartbeed, heart bleed, which basically open SSL was dumping the open SSL runs every SSL connection. on the internet, the little lock in your browser that shows you your website as secure as open SSL. And the OpenSSSL Foundation runs on less than a million dollars per year in donations and just contract work. And there was a bug in OpenSSL that dumped all of the contents of your web server to the memory to the open internet, which for those of you who aren't even security minded, like that's a bad thing. You don't want your secure server dumping the contents of its memory to the open internet. And it's because the OpenSSL Foundation didn't have like funding to

work on this thing that was a pillar of the entire internet. And so when a black swan event like that happens, people understand the need to fund infrastructure and to fund our public goods. And the whole point is like getting people to a point where they'll fund public goods even without those black swan events. And I think that it's creating that social awareness of those things is, is like point number one. Point number two is education, which like thank you for having me on the podcast so that we could talk about this thing. And then three is like, we want to make public goods cool. I think that I'm so lucky that Vitalik Boudron, who's the alpha nerd of the Ethereum ecosystem, cares so much about public goods. And that creates a social sort of consensus that funding public goods is cool.

And it ups your sort of like social status to fund public goods. And I think we want to create that kind of like that social hierarchy where people were giving back to the world. It is something that's seen as a something that's socially acceptable and even socially promotable. And, you know, I think that in the Ethereum ecosystem where money is, there's everyone's like 10x richer than they were a year and a half ago, it's been much easier than it is in like communities where you're really struggling. You need a philanthropist or like the government to fund a quadratic funding matching pool in those types of communities. But at least in the Ethereum ecosystem, we're starting to see some really promising signs that people want to fund these ecosystems. So a lot of traction, but I think it's an unsolved problem. How has this worked in the OSS and downtown Boulder cases?

I mean, who gave money for the matching pool? In downtown stimulus, I went to a couple wealthy venture capitalists slash funders that have either invested in Bitcoin, invested in my past projects or just that I've known for a decade. and they were funding the matching pool. Bradfeld has been an inspiration of me. He's a prominent local venture capitalists, and he funded a lot of the matching pool. And then the Giccoin Grants matching pool funded some of it. And in the fund OSS case, Pia Mancini has been building Web2 open source ecosystems

and has a lot of connections to tech giants that give back on Open Collective. And so she funded part of the matching pool. and then there was also members of the GICCoin Grants Funders League that funded the matching pool. So it was just kind of leveraging my reputation and the Gitcoin traction in order to create a pilot. And then the idea is that once you have a pilot and you've proven that the model works, then go to local governments and people who are more risk-averse and sell it to them. So, yeah, that's how we solved it in the past. But I think in the future, a more systematic model is probably needed if we're going to scale these.

things. I want to come back to to the public good funding aspect for a moment and sort of the parallels I see between like open source public goods and so like physical public goods. So like, you know, I think the heart bleed example is a great example of, you know, underfunded software that is really underpinning like the entire internet infrastructure. And like, you know, if you look at, say, a country like the United States where it's, you know, generally accepted, like the infrastructure there is falling apart. you know, lots of, lots of investment was made in the 1950s and 60s and 70s and like not so much

in the last, you know, four or five decades. That infrastructure is starting to fall apart. I had this, on one of your blog posts, you had this like really cool kind of illustration of like all the blocks that build up to like, you know, that Web3 wallet that you're using or whatever. And like underneath it, it's all just like live P2P and TCPIP. But so is there a risk that at some point like our, you know, core internet information? infrastructure, which by the way, was funded like very much by governments, like, but U.S. government, you know, through the second half of the 20th century, you know, is there a risk that that infrastructure starts falling apart because of lack of funding or, you know, is,

is it stable enough? Or, you know, like, what's the risks here that, that come into play with regards to, like, this kind of fundamental core infrastructure, whether it's, you know, open SSL or other, other software? Yeah, I think that, that illustration that you're talking about had a bunch of, like, little blocks that everything relies on at the top of it is like your bags. You know, like all of your crypto assets that you rely on are just funded by this, this,

these, this like hodgepodge of open source projects. And it's like, it's scary to have that much economic value relying on something that is, is underfunded. And I think that the answer to your question is that we're, you know, people are talking about the metaverse a lot in the,

in the ecosystem, you know, launched meta. And there's a big question about, well, you know, is, is the infrastructure of the metaverse going to be owned free and open source? And is it going to be a public good? Or is it all going to be like Facebook's infrastructure? And, you know, in like the end game there is like, are we all going to be stuck being tracked by Zuck and like have ads everywhere in the metaverse versus is it going to be more of like a public good where you own your digital experience? In a world increasingly intermediated by digital software, who runs the code that

intermediates your experience with the world. And I think that if we want to move to a more free, open society that encourages human, humid thriving and human flourishing, that we want to have a world in which the software that it intermediates our experiences in the metaverse is free and open and that you can fork it if you disagree with it. And that's the vision of the metaverse that I want to see. And I'm not even much of a gamer. I just like, I just, I just think that increasingly humanity's experiences are intermediated by software, and I want that to be free and open source software. So, you know, that's one angle on it. I think that that's one reason why it's important to fund our digital infrastructure. I think that we're seeing a world in which

warfare is increasingly conducted online via cyber attacks. And so, you know, there's like a national defense, public good sort of reason why we would want to shore up our infrastructure. And I think that that's another argument for it. And then the third argument, and it's just like sheer scale. When we, when TCPIP was first designed, which is a very elegant and anti-fragile protocol, it really, it's just grown several orders of magnitude since it was originally designed and making sure that our digital infrastructure is anti-fragile instead of fragile, I think, is in the public's best interest.

And so, you know, there was a sense of civic pride in my grandparents and great parents' parents' generation in which they were building digital infrastructure after World War II. And I really hope to see a reprisal of that around global citizenship and the public good for all of humanity and human thriving. And I'm getting into a little bit more of my hippie-dippy side right here. But I do think that there's a strong rationalist case for funding public goods and digital infrastructure. But until we make it cool, until we make being an internet citizen and funding public goods cool, we're never going to solve these global coordination problems like climate change and digital infrastructure. infrastructure and cyber attacks and all of this kind of stuff.

And so the world that I want to live in is the one where we've solved those coordination failures. But I think that we have to create a social consensus and intersubjective consensus that not only that we can do it and that we should do it. And that's a lot of what my work is, is raising awareness of these problems. Even when we think that we should do it, public goods funding is notoriously difficult because it's actually several problems rolled into one, right? So basically you have to decide what should be achieved, how should one try to achieve it, who should achieve it.

And so all of this kind of has to be kind of determined. There has to be some consensus on this. And then basically then you need the funds and you need to distribute funds and so on. But actually, and I mean to combat this problem, I think, sometime last year, Wittelik published a blog post about retroactive funding, right? So basically, so that would basically allocate funding after the end has already been achieved and would thus make funding these in the first place a little bit of a venture game kind of like to interest like the crowd that actually has pretty good experience at funding

very risky startups. Startups and other ventures. Yeah. So what do you make of this? Well, so the idea behind retroactive public goods funding is to create an exit for teams that work on public goods. So, you know, if you built Lib to P to P and that's now underpinning the entire digital infrastructure, or maybe OpenSSSL, we should stick with that example because we talked about

it earlier, then basically give those people an exit and give them like, I don't know, a $10 million or $100 million outcome for building that infrastructure. And then what that does is that it creates a market for venture capitalists to come in and seed fund public goods projects because they're expecting that that outcome. They're making a rational economic game that they could create that outcome. And you create the sea change where now all of this apparatus that's only focused on projects that capture value can now be all of that energy and all of that human innovation that has been focused on capturing value in the past can just be focused on creating value without having to worry about capturing it. And that's the endgame of retroactive public goods funding. I am very bullish on retroactive public goods funding. And as I do more things with GICCoin,

I'm actually realizing that quadratic funding is just one tool in the tool belt. There's plenty of other really great ways to fund the commons and to fund public goods. And I envision this core primitive of an impact Dow, which creates positive externalities for the world. And if we just stack Impact Dow on Impact Dow, then we're going to create more and more public goods funding. And some of them will have their much. mechanism will be retroactive public goods funding. Other of them, it'll be quadratic funding. And then there will be other mechanisms like proof of humanity, I think, is an impact out. And we just stack those things on top of each other until we create this regenerative

of crypto economic infrastructure for the world. And it's going to be emergent. To your point, like, we need to create a... The magic of quadratic funding is that it doesn't matter what me, Kevin Oaki, the original founder of Bitcoin's values are. We're building a mechanism that is a channel for greater combinations of intelligence and strength to come together. is the intersubjective consensus of the Ethereum community that is represented on Gipcoin. So it's not my opinion that's represented. We're just building a more perfect channel for value signals to be created. And so I think it's like when you stack all of those impact dials on top of each other, you get the intersubjective consensus of humanity of which

coordination problems and public goods problems need to be solved. And I think that that's the real end game. And as you're right, you're right, it's multiple problems and one. It's what do people actually care about and how much do they care about it and in what directions. And it's creating a way where the values of what do we care about and what do we want to support is aggregated and supported is the infrastructure that I think is being built in this space. And that's what makes me really bullish for regenerative crypto economics. Let's talk about impact dows and regenerative crypto economics. So you've actually said impact dows several times now, Kevin. So now explain it, please.

Yeah. So basically an impact Dow is any Dow that has a positive externality for humanity. And I think that that can be on many vectors. Like, Gitcoins positive impact is that it creates public goods funding. Proof of humanities, positive impact is that it creates civil resistance in the ecosystem. Climidau, which is a Dow that's working on making sure that carbon credits are well funded, its positive externality is more pressure on carbon, more economic incentive to create carbon capture mechanisms, which hopefully means more carbon capture and solves climate change.

So Impact Dow is just a definition of something that creates a positive externality for the world without being prescriptive about what type of positive externality. And, you know, think of it like ERC20. ERC20 is this token standard that you can build a utility token. on, you can build a governance token, you can build securities on top of ERC20. And it's just, that's the lowest common denominator of how you create a token. ImpactDAL is just the lowest common denominator of any DAO that creates a positive externality for the world.

And the reason why it's important to define that is that if you've got a stack of Impact Dowls, of which there are already dozens, then what you're basically over time as you start, like, think of them as like money Legos. And if you just start to stack these dows on top of each other, what the aggregation of that is a regenerative crypto economic infrastructure for humanity. Remember, this is all being built on Ethereum and adjacent Web3 protocols that are transparent, immutable, global, and programmable substrate for human coordination. And we could export so much human thriving for the world if these things hit web scale. So it's about innovating new mechanisms and funding sources that create positive extra. for humanity, a plurality of them, not just quadratic funding, and then stacking them all

on top of each other and creating a regenerative cryptoeconomic infrastructure for the world. And that is my hope that the legacy of the crypto economic movement is that we have created a system that is more efficient way of funding public goods and creating human thriving than the old nation-state industrial infrastructure that existed before. And maybe, you know, it's not zero sum. Maybe they augment each other and work together in order to create more human thriving. But I see that elegant mechanism design on top of these coordination substrates that are Web3 is there's like just a ton of like high upside for humanity. If we continue to stack impact owls on top of each other and create that infrastructure for the world.

And I'm just really bullish to see all of this starting to come together. Kevin, let's make this more concrete. So basically there's also this book that you call. authored with a couple of people, the Green Pill book. So basically, it talks about regenerative crypto economics. And it's actually, it's a really, I don't want to say it's a read because there's a lot of pictures in it. It's very fast read.

I mean, it's very information, it's very idea dense. But basically, the recurring theme of that book is combating coordination failures, right? And basically these impact dows, those are means of doing so. So can you give us examples of where in the world we live in, we see coordination failures and how they basically fail us as humanity? Yeah, real quick plug for the book. Created a book that's really, as you said, a quick read and basically aggregates much smarter people than me, the Vitalics of the world, the biologies of the world, the Glenn Wiles of the world, takes their ideas and puts them in a very, comprehensible format for people who are entering the space and want to solve regenerative crypto-economics. And I am standing on the shoulders of giants by exporting the ideas of Michael

Zargum and Glenn Weil and all these people to the world. And as you said, this is an aggregation of other people's ideas and I would not be there without them. But to actually answer your question, coordination failures are any situation in which there's a dictatorless dystopia, a system in which every single person hates the system, but for lack of a better mechanism for coordination, it indoors. So an example of that that's more tangible than, say, open source is like an overfishing example. So basically, like, if the three of us are all sitting around a lake and we can all make $1,000, actually, no way, this is a podcast about crypto.

So we can all make a thousand die per month by fishing out of that pond. But one of us can make 1,500 die by overfishing that pond. And the result is that the other people only make 900 die per month. Then basically what you get is you get a coordination failure where every individual's individual incentive is to overfish the pond. And the rational economic behavior is to overfish the pond until the pond is completely barren and none of us can make any money out of that pond anymore. So you get this like death spiral of, oh, we didn't coordinate to agree not to overconsume this resource and therefore

none of us have access to the resource. So it's a dictatorless dystopia in which each of us hates that system, but for lack of a better coordination mechanism, it indoors. That's like a game theoretic example. And so, you know, that's what I see when I look at climate change. We all have a rational economic incentive to fly across the world and do business and we externalize harm to the world. We all have a rational economic incentive to free ride on open source software, despite the burden that places on our digital infrastructure and on open source software maintainers and for lack of a better coordination mechanism it indoors. Well, now we've got a global, transparent, immutable, programmable substrate for human coordination, Ethereum, Cosmos,

you know, all of these different blockchains. So now we've got a, like this, this amazing substrate for coordination, where we can build these coordination games and solve coordination failures by creating these coordination games. And so the end game of the book is just to tell people, like, teach the game theory of coordination and to tell them that better infrastructure is possible if we just choose it. And, and so, you know, this is basically the opportunity that I see is just educating thousands and tens of thousands of young people who are maybe lacking hope or maybe lacking education

about how we can solve these coordination failures. And I see this, like, I hope that 30 years from now, this is the legacy of the Web 3 ecosystem, is that we bootstrapped this decentralized finance thing, but maybe that was just the bootloader for a more regenerative infrastructure for humanity long term. And, you know, I know you asked me for tangible example. So I'll go back from like the beautiful language and talk about tangible examples. But, you know, Gipcoin is building public goods funding mechanisms for the world, which can be used for funding downtowns that are affected by COVID or funding digital infrastructure or funding journalism. I think that Bright ID and proof of humanity and all these different

identity mechanisms exporting civil resistance for the world would create a lot of, a lot of positive externality around identity moving us from one token, one vote systems to one human one-one-vote systems. And by the way, there's already people in Argentina, hundreds of them that just live off of proof of humanity and UBI. And that creates better circumstances for them locally. I think climate Dow in the fact that they have are using crypto-economics to create more demand for carbon credits is an amazing example of using Ethereum to solve climate change. And, and you know, by the way, when proof of stake happens and we're all of a sudden using 99.9% less energy, there's going to be a huge sea change in the perception of these systems to create positive externalities for humanity. And I hope that climate change is one of the first things that builders

in this space start to try to solve from there. So those are some tangible examples, but there's likely dozens others that we could go through if you want more tangible examples. And I hope to be invited back to Epicenter in four years again. And we can talk about hundreds of tangible examples at that point. Yeah, that'd be great. I mean, You know, certainly hopefully it will have you on before that. But I'd like to talk about, so earlier we mentioned that you were a member of the Gitcoin Dow. You expressed that you didn't want to be called the CEO of the Kit Coin Dow. And that's fine.

I think we could just call you like some guy in the Gitcoin Dow. Yeah, citizen, internet citizen. Right, yeah. So what's the, like, you know, it seems natural for Gitcoin to like transform into a Dow. But tell us a bit about that process. and like, what is the vision here for the Dow? Totally. Well, I made a big mistake when I first started Bitcoin,

which is that we made it centralized to start. And, you know, the tools didn't really exist back then to make it into a Dow or make it decentralized. Much to the disgust of the people on Twitter who were responding to my question about what we should talk about. Yeah, I mean, like hand to the air. If you're watching the video, you see my hand in the air, like, I pledge guilty.

We built it centralized. Like, I'm guilty. I'm sorry. I wish I, I hadn't done that also. And that's a big problem. And I think coming to grips to that has been a lot of the story for me over the last two years is that you can't have a centralized funding infrastructure for a decentralized ecosystem or for a decentralized

world. And I think that the ecosystem deserves credible neutrality. They deserve to know that I'm not the ones with my hands on the lever of governance of get coin and that the community should be in charge of the governance of get coin. And so the launch of Gitcoin, was basically the imbuing of governance rights for how these quadratic funding matching pools are allocated. What are the rules of what's acceptable in them

into a governance token called GTC, which stands for GIC-coin, or I like to say it stands for Grow the Community. And basically, the idea is we are returning an apple into an orange right now. We are turning a centralized company into a Dow, or at least returning the grants portion of our assets into Gitcoin Dow. And the whole idea is basically that no company should own this infrastructure.

It should be a credibly neutral Dow that's governed by the community that it serves. And that was the idea behind Gitcoin Dow. We launched it on May 25th, 2021, which is a day that will change the trajectory of Gitcoin forever. We dropped GTC to 18,000 different members of the community and basically allowed them to delegate to different members of the Gitcoin community to what we called stewards. So basically there's a big problem with governance tokens where everyone wants to govern things in theory, but in principle no one ever votes on anything. So we made everyone delegate to people who would actually be involved and would help govern Gitcoin when they first got their tokens, which I think was an innovative way of making sure there was 100% consent of the governed.

And, you know, other DAOs have like three to five percent voter turnout. Gitcoin Dow regularly gets 80 or 90 percent voter turnout because we've got these like delegated people, stewards that are aggregating the consent of the governed and participating in governance votes. And so that was like our primary innovation on governance for GICCoyndao was making, was having that delegation layer that was 100 percent represented at the start. And ENS has since copied our Dow delegation mechanism. I'm very proud to have pushed this space forward and very, very,

like one small way there. But yeah, anyway, so we've decentralized the governance of Gikkoind Dow, and the surface area of that governance will increase as we launch a credibly neutral protocol for quadratic funding and move all of the funding mechanisms from the centralized platform over to the protocol over hopefully the next 18 months. I'm like kicking the engineers under the table to be able to tell me that it's going to be sooner than that. But yeah, so decentralize the governance, then decentralized the computation and the

economics of the network, and then I can have the feather in my cap and respond to those people on Twitter that are accusing me of being centralized, which is totally true right now. So, yeah, TLDR can't have a centralized intermediary doing public goods funding for a decentralized ecosystem, and that's why we're moving a lot of these assets into the Dow. That's super cool. No, I'm afraid to check the Twitter thread. I'm probably getting hated on for being centralized. Now, most of the responses were really, really positive and, you know, we've covered a lot of it here.

So this idea of like the, you know, the problem with governance, as you mentioned, like, I think you accurately put it that everybody wants to govern, but nobody actually ends up governing. Do you think that the solution ultimately is delegation? Because that seemed, like, to me, it's sort of, it's sort of like analogous to, you know, the current system of governance that we have, like, in. in like, you know, just our regular politics, which ends up creating all these negative externalities like career politicians and like, you know, corruption and stuff like that. And like, you know, recently in the, recently in the cosmos community, like there was this kind of uproar about like some governance votes that, you know, may have been influenced by like some community members, etc. And I think we see this thing, you know, once in a while in the crypto space.

Are there other solutions to this? Like, how do we get people more engaged? Like, I mean, like, a simple thing could just be like, you. get a notification on your phone and there's something to vote on you. You just like vote on there on the spot. Like what are other solutions to like this delegation? Right. Well, I think that's a really great question. And I think that we should not shy away from these hard problems. The problem with the notification on the phone is that, okay, well, now you're notified that you have to vote, but you have to actually expend the mental computational cycles to understand the problem and to vote, which like, you know, you're sitting there laying like watching Netflix

and you get a notification that you have to vote on something. You're like, like another thing for my to-do list. So I don't know. Like, I think it's an unsolved problem, and I'm supportive of seeing people innovate on that problem. The important thing for me was that the community's consent of, the consent of the governed from like political theory is the only legitimate basis for governance,

as opposed to like the divine right of kings, which is what, you know, in like old, like old times. where the legitimacy of the govern came from. And I do think that these Web3 networks that like Gipcoin is 100%, Gickcoin grants is for the most, we're trending towards 100% consent of the governed because it was the community that allocated their governance vote to community members. And I think that that's super important to have those initial starting conditions.

Yeah, I mean, I think that quadratic voting, which is basically more of a one human, one vote type system, which prevents capture by rich elites is another area where people are innovating in terms of governance. And I would love to see more experiments in quadratic voting dows. I think we'll see those in the next several years. And then the other thing is that, which is a totally different category of governance, is that every time you do a contribution on get coin grants during a matching pool, you're actually don't like the secret.

The secret is going to be out after this podcast comes out. But like you're actually governing where the matching pool goes every time you do a contribution on get coin grants. It just doesn't feel like voting. Every time you give a $1 contribution and $500 more of the matching pool goes to a project because of it, like, we tricked you. You're governing how the batching pool is distributed there. So these systems where there's robust signal already being generated that you can take that signal and channel it into a governance mechanism is hopefully an aggregation of the preferences of the community that is being governed. And I think that those are really elegant ways of creating governance experiment. that like didn't exist in a skemorphic old world type way.

So I guess TLDR, I hear your criticisms, but I think that delegations better than what we had in Web 2. I think quadratic voting is a way to improve on that. And I also think that robust signal generation in like the Gipcoin Grants example is another meaningful experiment. And I hope to see 100 experiments blossom that improve the ability for the consent of the governed to be expressed in a digital way.

And that's the challenge of our generation, I think is upgrading democracy to be high bandwidth for the next generation. I think that that's like really one of the hugest levers to make the world better for Gen Z and Gen Alpha as they inherit the world that we can do. Thank you. That was super enlightening. I have one more question that kind of ties in with the last couple of topics before we unfortunately have to wrap.

And that's the future of work. So basically, if you look at the way that Gitcoin grants and the Gitcoin Dow kind of doles out work to different people. So how does this kind of tie in with the notion of the Internet of Jobs that you have publicized elsewhere? And how does it differentiate itself from the concept of a gig economy? I think that those answers are really unknown so far. but I can provide the way that I think about them, which will hopefully start to create shape for what the Internet of Jobs looks like in the readers or in the listeners' minds. So basically, in the Internet of Money, we have now created the ability for computers to send value across

a computer network. And I think that's really exciting because it means that we can reinvent how value is transferred in all segments of society to not need intermediaries. And by the way, if you want a preview of how this is going to look in 30 years, just look at the internet of information. When we took the computers and we gave them the ability to send information across a computer network, and that reinvented entertainment, media, politics, all these things in society that rely on information were rewritten by the internet. And we have like a 30-year view on what that looks like. And now we have the ability to reinvent value transfer and governance and scarcity in society because computers can now send that across a computer network. And it follows

from first principles that we're going to rewrite how the banking system works, which is defy, how art auctions work, which is NFTs, but no one, everyone's sleeping on what is the future of work with, and, and I think that we're all kind of like, the internet of jobs is basically the design space that I think it happens when the 99% of humanity that their financial lives is not their bank accounts and their investments, but it's how they earn a living. And what happens when that collides with blockchain technology and web, three-era systems around data storage and distributed computation and DALs and in digital reputation, I think is an important thing here. I think digital reputation is foundational because when I want to make, like, you can't have like a trustless interaction with like an Uber driver. Like when I want to have, when I want to hire someone to take me somewhere, then I need an assurance that they're not a creep and they're going to get me there safely. and I think that there's like reputation is a big part of how we do value transfer in our lives and in so many different places.

And so I'm curious to see what markets for doing knowledge work together look like. Because the Uber example is like a very rudimentary example, but because I only really care if it's like they're going to get me there safely and quickly. but on Gitcoin when I hire a software engineer, I want to know, like, do they speak the same language as me? Are they in the same time zone? Do they speak the same programming languages? Do they have like a bunch of like communication or like emotional problems? Are they reliable? Do they produce a good code? Are they going to ghost me? Like there's just many more vectors and I think that reputation matters a lot. And the way I see this as different than the gig economy is like the gig economy is what jobs look like if you just like bolt and internet of jobs. on Fiat Rails, but now that we have this open source, permissionless, blockchain technology to program the way we do value transfer with each other, there's going to be non-schumorphic ways of doing value transfer with each other that couldn't have existed in the old world. Skemorphism just means like basically it's like native to the new environment as opposed to the new world. And I think a great example of that is coordinate, which is basically a tool where

everyone in a Dow votes on whether or not everyone else is doing a good job, and then you drop tokens on the entire set of workers in a Dow. That's an example of a non-sumorphic use case for the Internet of Jobs is like creating an intersubjective consensus of people who are working together of what they think of each other and then allocating tokens based off of that. I think paying people in governance rights is another really great example of a non-skeumorphic internet of jobs thing that didn't exist in the gig economy. If I pay you in Docton, then like see you, you might go away after that. But if I pay you in governance rights for a project that I'm involved in,

then you have aligned incentives with me in many, many different forms. And so the design space of the Internet of Jobs is just basically what happens when money, the Internet of Money, collides with a society that it earns their living as opposed to makes it from investments, makes it off of labor instead of capital. And I think that the huge upside for the blockchain space, by the way, is that 95% of humanity, 99% of humanity, their financial lives is their jobs, not their investments. So you want blockchains to go mainstream,

then you need to invest in Dow's and the Internet of Jobs because that's like people don't, people are going to work on the financial, are going to use D apps that have the financial use cases that they care about, that they solve for their job to be done. And so I think that's what the Internet of Jobs is. And I predict that an upcoming cycle will be around Dow's

and Internet of Jobs and future of work. And I think it's only a matter of time. You can make the argument from first principles. The Internet of value is reinventing everything in society that has to do with value transfer and jobs has to do with value transfer. So it just follows from First Principles to me that we'll see a cycle that is all about

the Internet of Jobs in the next several years. I really get the difference, I think, between the gig economy and the Internet of Jobs and the differences that you have aligned incentives. I think that's one of the main differences in that. And the reputational. aspect, I think, plays a huge role too.

Reputation is something that's been notoriously hard to figure out in the digital world, especially, I think, in the crypto world. And I think that a lot of people are looking at reputation, at least from my vantage point, as is like an objective measure of like some data points that you can get from, like, I don't know, Git commits or like, you know, how long you've staked in something or like these sort of very objective measures. But reputation is about so much more than that. It's about like there's all the subjective.

aspect as well. You're talking about talking the same language. Well, you know, that's relative to you, but it might not be relative to like, you know, someone living in France, for instance, or in Germany. How do we, how do we come to terms with those sort of like, you know, of course, you need to have the, the objective things that we can, you know, objectively look at and measure. You can say, hey, like this person has like, you know, so many commits or whatever. And then the more subjective aspects, is that something that can be solved in the crypto space? Or is it like a coordination problem that goes beyond the scope of decentralized reputation. Oh, man.

You know, I'm going to tell you that all coordination problems are solvable. That's like, you know, that's my whole stick is that we can solve these with coordination. No, so I mean, I'll take your questions in reverse order. So I think we should move from trying to find the completely rationally objective measure of like reputation, which like appeals to me, by the way, because I'm a software engineer and I love things that are like zeros or ones and they're tangible. and like I know what I'm dealing with. Objectivity is a false idol though.

We want to create an intersubjective consensus of what multiple people think from multiple vantage points. And that is, I think, like once we widen the aperture of design to intersubjective consensus to just like totally, from totally objective, then I think that that is really what the Holy Grail is. It's like your reputation is the sum of what people think of you around you. That's intersubjective consensus.

And by the way, the intersubjective consensus I'm trying to create is that coordination failures are solvable. I want to move people from like, oh, we just have to live with this like decaying infrastructure to like, no, we can solve it. Like that's the intersubjective consensus I'm trying to create. And then the last point I want to make before I kick it back to you is like, who owns the infrastructure is a really big problem here. In gig economy, Upwork and LinkedIn own all of our reputation data and and everything. And who owns the infrastructure and Web3 is super important. I want to be able to take my identity from site to site and I also don't want

Upwork taking 10% of my of my fucking paycheck every month. Like, fuck that. And the fact that LinkedIn, their whole business model is taking your reputation data and selling it to recruiters. Reed Hoffman makes $30 billion per year off of your fucking data. It's bullshit. And that's one of the big differences between the internet of jobs and in the gig economy is that we're going to all own our reputation data and take it from from place to place to place. But anyway, yeah, to actually answer the question you asked me, intersubjective consensus over objective measures, I think is where we're going. And one thing that also came to mind here in researching this and sort of like

reading your writings on the Internet of Jobs aspect is, you know, what may be some of the negative aspects of moving in this direction as opposed to the sort of traditional employment model that affords people's stability, sort of long-term benefits as well, such as retirement or life insurance, and, you know, sort of immediate things like healthcare. Is this something that can be adapted to the Internet of Jobs model? Are we going to start seeing Dow's offering like retirement savings plans and health care, like health care packages for its members? Yeah, that's an extremely important question.

And I think that it's one of the things that really keeps me up at night is how much of our legacy, like the industrial age infrastructure, how much social safety net stuff is globed on to jobs because there's not another better coordination mechanism for it. I have a family and I'm interested in end of life planning and making sure that my kids have a good education. planning for retirement and creating life insurance and health insurance and all those things. And those things are all just globed onto jobs in the old world. I'm really excited by what Opolis is doing in basically creating a bridge between the internet of jobs and these social safety things where basically what they do is they create a corporation that you work for that you get your retirement and your life insurance and all that kind of stuff. And they just take a percentage of the earnings that you get from the Dow and pay for those

things that way. So that's like a skeuomorphic way of adapting those things. to the real world. And so I think that the Internet of Jobs absolutely is going to need to have core primitives for how insurance is done, how you plan for retirement, how you save for education, and hopefully reinventing education, by the way, so that it's not just like, you know, $45,000 per year to get an education at a college. I think that, you know, there's a ton of debt that's gloved onto the old system. And I think that unwinding that for the next generation is really important. In the U.S. I mean, many parts of the world.

to actually have this. So basically, I mean, this is a very U.S.-centric point of view, right? So basically, I'm German. I went to, I went to, I got a perfectly good education here. I went to university and I did not pay anything. Actually, basically, if you go to university and your parents don't have enough money to fund your living costs, you just get a loan from the government. You have to pay back half at zero interest.

and it's capped at I think 16,000 euros. So one six. So basically, I mean, I mean, this is, it's, it's, in parts of the world, this exists, right? So basically it shows that, that it's, it's not a utopian vision. I mean, it can be done. And in many parts of the world it is. Totally. Yeah.

And I'll just note that I am an imperfect vessel for a lot of these conversations. But what we did do is we just created an intersubjective consent. like you from Europe, it'd be for America about what this could look like. And I think that that's completely valid. There's also probably, you know, the infrastructure, I can't speak to in Asia or South America, what it looks like as well. But I guess like one last thing I'll say is that, you know, like one of the things I think the big risks of this space is that if you build the optimal signal generation mechanism for what people value, what do we do if we build the perfect channel for people to express their preferences and they have shitty preferences.

Like, what if you don't want to save for education or health insurance? Like, I don't know what you do then other than, you know, invest in education and risk management and social safety nets from an infrastructure level. And then you get into complicated questions about like, should we coerce people into saving for education or retirement? And I haven't figured out the like, what do we do if, if like, you build the signal generation mechanism and people have values that are like I haven't I haven't worked out that part of the equation yet so that's those are kind of my thoughts on the subject but I think that it's an

unsolved problem yeah and there's certainly like some non-skeomorphic you know like paradigm shifts that that are meant to happen there so you know if you know there's this does funding education in 20 years from now like if you're working for a Dow like you know Does that look the same as what it looks like now? Just saving for retirement look the same. Like, you know, healthcare, where does that look like? I mean, there's also different levels here, right? I mean, basically there's things that kind of pertain to yourself and your own future.

But saving for education typically actually pertains to your kids' futures or at least, you know, the younger generation. So I feel like, I mean, if you suffer from your own bad choices, okay, that's too bad. if your kids suffer from your bad choices, I think to me that's a different story. Sure. Yeah, one of the, one of the sort of ideas that's in the book, which I originally got from Yancey Strickler, the founder of Kickstarter, is this idea of bentoism, which is how do we move from a financial system that prioritizes instant gratification to, which is now me, which is like to the group, which is now us. So how do we move from what's good for me now to what's good for me now to what's for everyone, everyone now or like my family now. And then the other vector is futures, which is basically like, how do we move from now me to future me? And then like you make, you make that into a four by four matrix and it's now me, now us, future us, and future me. And so how do we build a financial system that like passes the marshmallow test of basically, you know, how do we plan into

the future and how do we plan for the group instead of the individual? And I think that the that's just like a lens that you could look through the design of regenerative crypto economics. And by the way, like it'd be hard to do worse than the old finance, like at least in the United States, we have this quarterly earning cycle and all of these like executives are just focused on their next quarterly earning cycle. And, you know, I think it'd be hard to do worse than that in the crypto ecosystem. Hopefully we can build better primitives for coordination that can plan further out for existential risks that don't fit into the quarterly, the quarterly cycle like, say, climate change or digital. infrastructure. Yeah, I think I think somehow it's really difficult to kind of straddle the gap between

what we think is right and what is generally done and accepted and not question. So I mean, basically, I mean, Kevin, you also have kids. So basically you will also know this. They will ask you why does, why does someone sleep on the street? Why don't we give them food? Why don't we give them, why don't we give them money? So basically things that in principle seem like there are no-brainers. I mean, no one should go hungry when obviously, in principle, there's enough to eat, right? So all of these things that are no-brainers when you explain them to kids, somehow we still get used to them and we don't question them every day. So how do you think we avoid moral fatigue?

That's a really great question. I think the first thing that I'll say is that, you know, arguably we're already suffering from a certain amount of moral fatigue. So maybe I'd reframe your question into how do we pay down the moral fatigue that we've inherited. But the other thing that I'll say is that my really, my goal for for Bitcoin is to build a channel that greater combinations of intelligence and strength can come together. And this is actually a key point that. you know, it's not my values that, like, I don't want the things, the causes that I believe in to be, to be the ones that are funded. I want to build the most perfect, the best rails for expression of human values and for those combinations of strength and intelligence to come together. And so my hope is that by building this coordination infrastructure, that when you have these, these areas where there's a very, coordination failure in the case of what you asked, like we failed to give this person on a street a, like food and probably home and like the chance to contribute to society and to be a productive member of society. Like my hope is that by building the rails through which humanity can express its preferences, that we can, that we can solve some of these coordination failures. And, you know,

maybe we build this and it turns out people really do care about homelessness. They just don't have a good coordination mechanism to solve it. And that would be the bullish case for this infrastructure. And the bearish case would be, oh, we build the signal aggregation preferences and like people don't care. They just like step over the person on the side of the street. And, you know, that would make me personally sad. But, you know, at least we've got the value, the signal generation tools out there.

And then I think it becomes like an education. and in like a governance question of like, why don't we care about these things? Like what is it about our values that causes us to? Sorry, I see you want to say something. Go ahead. Yeah, but Kevin, do you think it's a signal thing? Because basically I think, I mean, if you kind of change the context, right? Say you go hiking and you see and basically you're in the middle of nowhere in the Rockies. and you come upon a person who's clearly hungry and thirsty and asks you for food.

What do you do? Of course you give them food, right? Because you're the only person there, right? Basically, but as soon as you transpose the exact same theme to downtown anywhere in the world, people react fundamentally differently because they think this is no longer their problem. They're no longer the only person who can solve it. And basically, this is a society's. problem now, right? So basically, I would kind of posit that basically there's like this

disconnect between personal morality and societal morality that kind of absolves you from the human decency to kind of act. And you step over that person. And I'm, yeah, so I'm, I'm not sure whether signaling is actually the problem. Yeah, the numbness of, of like the lack of hope, I think is a real problem. So like, first of all, I want to say, that like I'm extremely privileged to be where I am in my life and working on something that I love and to have a house and a family and all the Maslow's hierarchy things mostly taken care of. And I think that we should not take that for granted. And I really feel that like deeply when I hear your question asked. You know, when I wonder why we feel so numb in that situation.

And, you know, the question that comes to mind for me is that in a hike, like, in May, the way I would try to rationalize it, in this. may be wrong and it may be totally callous to even try to even try, but I'm going to try against my better judgment is that if I see someone lost in the woods, then my assumption is maybe, oh, they're lost, like they just got lost and it was like a mistake. Whereas I think that there's many, many deep unfurled societal problems with homelessness in cities, which have to do with probably underfunded social infrastructure. And by the way, this is worse in America than it is for you all in Europe, probably mental health, education, drug abuse. And these are systemic

problems that cannot be solved by giving someone a sandwich. Like, you know, if someone's just lost in the woods, I would presume there's less systemic issues there. And I do think that those systemic issues behind the person in the city, which, you know, may or may not be right on an individual basis are our human coordination failures. And I do think that, you know, we're kind of speculating here. But I do think that if you can solve for the education and the drug abuse and the lack of employment infrastructure and all of that kind of stuff, then maybe people will be less numb and that we can have more hope.

But maybe that's an optimistic take. And maybe it's even inappropriate for me to speculate about these things from my place of privilege. Well, I think we'll leave that note to end on it. But no, certainly this has been a really fascinating discussion that's taken us down all kinds of rabbit holes. I wasn't expecting it to get here, but yeah, this is great. So where can people find more about the book, which is called Green Pill and just get involved with what you're doing? Yeah, thanks.

So you can Google me. I'm Kevin O'Waki. I'm the only O'Waki out there that I think that you'll find if you Google that. and you can go to green pill. party if you want to download a digital version of the book. If any of your listeners are at East Denver, then I'll be giving out physical copies there as well. Really enjoyed the conversation,

and I appreciated that we didn't go, that we didn't gloss over the hard topics. Looking forward to continuing the conversation, and thanks so much for having me. And we'll have you again on, but not in four years. Thanks again, Kevin. It's been a pleasure. Sounds good.

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