Open cryptoeconomic systems — it’s all about the community
In opensource in general, and cryptoeconomic systems in particular, the success of one system is strongly dependent on the community as much as it is about the technology or even more.
I received sponsorship from the DFF (Thank you 🙏) to attend EDCON 2018 in Toronto, the community’s importance became even clearer than it was before. In a way Toronto is the birth place of Ethereum, it’s where Vitalik grew up for the most part. By now there are multiple highly influential Ethereum projects in the city’s ecosystem: BlockGeeks (founded by serial entrepreneur papa Dmitry Buterin), Aragon’s offices, PoA is opening their main office there, cryptochicks (founded by Natalia Ameline), the influential crypto investor William Mougayar is living there. In many ways Toronto is an Ethereum city!
There are many lessons I’ve learnt from this visit. Started by joining the meetup about the philosophy of decentralized governance. Leading figures in the space came from all over the world: DAOStack founder Matan Field, Aragon team, Parity Tech, Nick Johnson, Hudson Jameson, the GivETH team and numerous others whom I could list. The strange thing about the topic at discussion is that there’s not quite a consensus to what is governance as a concept in the decentralized realm. Matan from DAOStack was suggesting the most important thing to do in this space currently is to formulate the models for decentralize teams, processes or projects and run experiments to improve with a quantitative approach. Other proposals came with totally different approach saying one thing that the Ethereum community could learn heaps from the bitcoin community is to create meaningful visualization tools and dashboards that track useful metrics around processes that happen on the network, to do that in a sustainable cryptoeconomic fashion, we’d need to allocate development efforts, product and project managers to work on such tools. It’s not trivial as without an incentive model it could be a thankless task.
This discussion shows how there are many facets to decentralized governance and it would likely be a combo of building digital products that bring insight into processes as well as working to formalizing behavioral models and quantify associated data so we can build robust systems in an iterative approach.
EDCON begins!
With hundreds of people flocking Ryerson Business School, coming from all corners of the world we were a very diverse mix of people: hardcore millennial cypherpunks, truly passionate developers who are freefalling down rabbit hole 🐇 and into the decentralized future, aliens like Vitalik and the foundation ppl, (de)centralization maximalists as Joe Lubin and the ConsenSys ecosystem gang, Silicon Valley type entrepreneurs who still try to fit the formula of the adds business model on everything, teams who raised sizable funds in 2017 ICO frenzy and are now working on cool projects (shout-out to Andy and the Status team), total n00bs that are thrilled by the price performance of a recently acquired ERC20 token (or as a guy I met pronounced “Erk-two-zero” 😝), questionable characters (nocoiners) from the banking sector, regulators and amazing Chinese opensource communities like the B2 crew who are coming from the Smartpool and ETHfans.
The point to notice is that it was a very inclusive blend and the organizing team from LinkTime delivered a kickass experience. When Pandia asked where should the next event be hosted at of course I went to advocate for EDCON 2019 Sydney, but, although Pandia wanted that too, it turns out the European and American community thinks it’s too far (WTH? more on that topic later ;)
The event started in a really awesome way. After a brief intro, there was a surprise, some core Ethereum community members danced for few min shaking Japanese badger moves, mushroom and snake bridge. While dancing isn’t the strongest trait our beloved nerds demonstrated (no offense ;) myself and many other people in the audience joined and it was a super refreshing way to start a conference ;)
That moment it hit me, Ethereum is a religion! The following sessions were fascinating, every speaker brought a wealth of knowledge, insights and learning.
Without getting into specifics of particular talks. I’d say that one key takeaway from the conference is that the field of cryptoeconomics is one of the most powerful social and economical paradigm shifts of our era. Cryptoeconomics as a field was brought to the public less than a decade ago with the bitcoin Blockchain (I know some stubborn readers may have other references hashcash and other concepts). Cryptoeconomics is a combination of cryptography, open source, distribute systems, finance and economics, psychology, game theory and mechanism design. Now taking into account that this field is in its infancy, we need to be very humble and sometime reserve judgement toward many experiments that are currently running in this field (let a thousand flowers blossom). Here we are after centuries society runs rather similar centralized economic models that amount to ever increasing disparity and rather stale dynamic of wealth. One thing I’ve noticed since I’ve started my own freefalling down the crypto rabbit hole is that people often become rather religious about their opinions such as “bitcoin is the only Blockchain”, “Ethereum is the one chain to rule them all!”, “EOS/Tron will take over the world “, “Ripple” (how did that one fly so far is still a mystery), “Bitcoin Cash/Gold/Diamond is the real bitcoin “ (while clearly if anything is the real bitcoin its DogeCoin — much real very bitcoin wow).
I found the most productive approach is to be open, hear and learn from various projects as we’re all in early stage of this new cryptoeconomics experiments. For example, If it wasn’t for the fact that the bitcoin community is religious about keeping the protocol rather rigid, by now they could have forked it completely to add smart contract functionality and then there weren’t room for creative Turing complete world computer as Ethereum project or others are building. In addition, the whole ethos behind decentralization is that there won’t be one flavor, one service or network we’d all be forced to use, people should have the freedom to choose what is their Blockchain fetish, be it NEO, Nebulas, Ethereum, Cardano, ETH-Classic or even non Blockchain decentralized tech like Urbit.org.
What’s so good about Ethereum?
The strongest selling point the Ethereum community has is the network effect, nurturing thriving global ecosystem of independent developers, projects, enthusiasts etc. this is one of the most important things in an open source project that can be forked at any given moment as Kyle Samani mentions in his post.
UX Unconference
(Kudos Derek and thundertoken team for putting it together)
The following day after EDCON was over, a group of 20–30 globally leading figures in the space gathered to discuss UX in the context of the decentralized world. The topics that were discussed ranged from attempts to design identity systems, wallets, key management, developers environment, friendlier security, education content and communication tools. It was a great opportunity to meet in person and discuss with people who work on really interesting projects like like Cipherbrowser (eaten by Toshi team at Coinbase), MetaMask (Dan is the sweetest person ever), uPort, Alex Van De Sande, Beltran and the Ethereum Foundation design team (thanks for the rainbows and unicorns, makes life more jolly for sure).
Conclusion
There are two takeaways I got.
1. There’s a lot of work to do on the education front and advocate for open and inclusive attitude which will benefit the ecosystem as a whole and would surely result in a positive impact on humanity.
2. Building an ecosystem is as challenging of a task as building technology. It’s an art form, the ingredients are all around us and just like software, the riddle is in how make an efficient construct that will serve for the purpose and in the social context for the betterment of all ecosystem participants involved.
My personal commitment is to push Sydney and APAC in general as far as possible into the equitable and inclusive direction using Blockchain tech.
I’m active in several community initiatives primarily in Australia with the bitfwd community (bitfwd.com) which I’ve co-founded 3 years ago and since then grew to form massive global reach with various opensource educational activities and partnerships.
A member of the Decentralized Future Fund (dffdao.org) who started just recently as an experiment and already delivered immense value to the local Australian ecosystem by supporting individuals accelerating learning and pursuit into the decentralized realm.
The BokkyPooBah community which is arguably the deepest and most successful example of an inclusive immersive technical sessions and developer workshops community.
Things that I’m doing to push for the the decentralized future are both on the community front and the tech front.
With Tenzorum Project we’re currently putting together a new breed of cryptoeconomic system, designing key management protocol that will significantly lower the barrier of entry for mass adoption of Blockchain technologies (check out more on Tenzorum.org)
With bitfwd we’re collaborating with various communities around the world to run the Blockathon Global Tour (first stop May 25–27 2018 in Beijing PRC 💖🇨🇳) and following several locations.
If you’re interested to collaborate please reach out on social media in the following links:
Twitter:
LinkedIn (Daniel Bar 丹尼尔）
✌️🌸💖⛓⏩🌀🚀🤑
