huh ~ Introduction Segment Removed ~ foreign [Laughter] so today I am going to be talking about rabbits no rabbits are outside of D5 but I'm going to be talking about other things that are outside of D5 and rabbits um so the vision for ethereum and for I think a lot of the crypto space even Beyond ethereum has always been going Beyond Finance right it's always been about taking these ideas of decentralization and Trust minimization experimenting with building and implementing using many different kinds of mechanisms to areas that go far beyond just a finance right so this was a post that I wrote even back in 2013 this was uh this part of this three-part series and Bitcoin magazines or the Bitcoin magazine article on a decentralized autonomous corporations and the one example there for a decentralized autonomous Corporation this was back before they were called organizations that would actually be useful was this thing that I called identity Corp and it turns out that what this thing is trying to do is basically exactly the same thing as proof of community and it like Works in actually not that difference away from proof of humanity I mean so this was ideas that I've had in 2013 other people have also had been having similar ideas for a long a long period of time so doing like interesting things like this that go beyond just um you know giving people tokens and letting people earn yield on their tokens and tokenizing the yield and entering yield on the on the yield tokens this is a like going Beyond stat has always been like part of the vision and I think for a lot of people even the most interesting part of the vision of general purpose blockchains but today you know we mostly just have Finance right like there's a lot of excitement around defy and there was you know the summer of D5 and uniswap has been very successful yay and compound and synthetics and Ave and the various projects that will get super upset at me for not mentioning them um have all been very successful um see I mentioned you with a universal qualifier you can't complain um so there's definitely this perception that Financial applications uh dominate the ethereum space right um so to clarify right like this is not bad right and you know DFI people are great I mean a D5 dad is great too um but um the chip but this isn't all that um ethereum was trying to do and uh the question is well you know why is uh is finance so dominant and to me like there have always been two primary reasons one of the reasons is that Finance is just the area where centralized technology sucks the most right like I can send you a centralized email and you will get it within one second and like sure maybe various intelligence agencies I'll read it but like at least you could read it and at least you can read it one second from now International Bank wires do not work that way right and you know they're still a notorious way annoying and inefficient and there is a lot of these extra frictions that still persist in the financial system and so the decentralized space just is a bigger Delta from centralized Finance than it was than it is from um centralized other things but at the same time centralized other things do also have problems and I think as we've been seeing centralized other things grow more and more we start to realize more and more what those problems are um and also I think there's the second reason which is that so far transaction fees have been high right like when it costs uh 5.22 cents to do anything the dhns can pay for it the Apes can pay for it the orangutans can pay for it um but you know ens names well okay I mean domain names cost eight dollars so maybe you can pay for it but if we start talking about like decentralized social media things where every tweet becomes an nft then like that can't work when you have 5.22 transaction fees um so the good news is that that problem is a problem which is now being solved right we have the Roll-Ups um you know yay optimism um see we got five of them right um and I'm sure once again and all the others that I have not mentioned um but so scaling is being fixed right and also shorting to kind of increase the scalability of that even further um so the basically now actually is a good time to start thinking about well you know can we go beyond finance and start actually building um all of these Apple all of these other things that we wanted to build um the currents focus on finance is interesting because it it does I think end up kind of a confusing people to some extent um this was a an interesting article that I saw this was a a post I think it was something like remaking positive some worlds and it was a a reply to some of the writings by myself and by some other people um talking about public goods funding and one of the uh an interesting sentences in this that I mentioned is um the at the end of the first paragraph I'm saying uh colloquially these Market Primitives are sometimes described as public infrastructure but if blockchains serve a public today it is primarily one of decentralized Finance fundamentally these token holders share only one object object of concern price now that said that's really confused me right because to me like the purpose of these projects is not price the purpose of these projects is utility price is nice but price should only ever come as a consequence of utility um but at the same time you know in the Topsy crazy doggy world of today you know price does end up dominating in people's minds and this is and so you do get these kinds of kind of Impressions that are misconceptions and like severe misconceptions from the point of view of my ideal world but they are again still like reasonable I guess inferences to make if you just look at you know what people are doing today right like so the challenge is well you know I think these kinds of problems are going to just become less uh it will become more obvious how they're not problems once we have a crypto space where there actually is more utility and more projects and ecosystems that are ecosystems that are building all sorts of various different kinds of utility um but we have to actually get there so ethereum being defined by Defy is better than ethereum being defined by you nothing but it's time to go further but where do we go so I think the goals that we're looking at right is so there's a lot of things that people wants to do but it's also important to kind of think through you know what are some of the things that are both valuable potentially and that might be interesting to focus on in the very near term um and I think the two goals that we have to meet like one is alignment with values so it must be something that people in the community at least enough people in the community to build a thing can actually get behind doing and alignment with needs it needs to be something that is useful for people to do um so what do we have so here's what we have already right we have nfts so this year has been like a year of nfts it's you know there's been a lot of these nfts there's been all sorts of celebrities um launching nfts or at least talking about nfts um there's like what you've I mean I'm sure there's a long list I mean I don't know I was going to say Kim Kardashian but she just but she was pumping ethereum Max at Miami so I think we should just cancel her um foreign on board with canceling Kim Kardashian for the ethereum max sting okay um perfect um cancel Floyd Floyd Mayweather too he also wore the ethereum max shirt Okay so but still you know nfts are interesting they're this interesting cultural phenomenon and they really have attracted a different kind of people to the ethereum space that are interested more in the art side than in the finance side right um yes I talk a lot about ens and I think ens is actually a pretty amazing application and it's an amazing application for some fascinating reasons right like it's it is an identifier that you can have that that you control it's an identifier that is like yours and it isn't controlled by you know the like Twitter or Google or Facebook and it's an identifier that can work across different applications like if I'm or you know you can use that to send me if um then you can use that to talk to me on status well you can use that to interact with me in other applications right so we have these kind of identifiers that are useful across many applications and they do not have a yes A Central controller and their identifiers that people actually wants to use right like an email is also a multi-platform identifier but nobody is like enthusiastic about using um you know vitalik gmail.com as their name like Yay Gmail Pride that does not exist for some reason but the reason why you can say what we have already is just nfts the nfts are so amazing is because technically ens names are nfts um but hopefully we'll have more more interesting types of nfts in the future as well so what else can we have right so here's one interesting category that I personally care about um building out the ethereum social media ecosystem so why social media right like why is social media like such an interesting thing to focus on look first of all I'm not the only one saying this right like right preceding me there was uh you know those lovely uh clear Rose presentation and talking about like using the decentralized chord to do moderation um there was like study was um I think announced that he was interested in like building some kind of ethereum based Twitter so other people are also thinking this right but you know like why like what's interesting about crypto social media um so first of all there's a widespread belief that existing social media platforms suck and that we need better ones and this is true for different reasons um so one is uh centralized and arbitrary censorship and manipulation I don't have to explain that one hopefully low quality of discourse also don't have to explain that one and of course like the concept of Engagement and the kinds of Engagement that are favored are very misaligned with quality um so I need better social media too right so this is a a use case that I can perceive as being important very personally right so here's me sending one of my tweets recently where I attempt to explain vertical trees that I'm just linking to my blog post talking about vertical trees and the replies herb dollar T cyber when the bridge between Doja at HTE when anyone know mini Shiva token this is 100 morning oh sorry morning okay um is that like does that mean it did ozone enter your head yeah did I translate correctly no I actuated sorry Michaels I'm not um capitalized pancakes are always the best for breakfast um okay no real like so another example of this right so a retroactive public goods funding um is an ethrock poll something in Turkish unfortunately my yet turkey I I know basically zero Turkish um at all um oh when will we see one eat equals 10K um by the end of 2021 who here thinks that we'll see what if this 10K by the end of 2021. well so plot twist this guy this um this guy is from Taiwan and Taiwan dollars are 30 times cheaper than US dollars so you guys all just said that Heath will be down to 300 US Dollars by the end of 2021. no no I I just made that up um another example why sharding is great demystifying the technical properties if I request ethereum um picture of some guy is that like Neo or Morpheus or like the the sub Jumanji guy I I forget that's great but what is optimism coming sort out your coin mate Harmony is over one check it out okay guys Harmony dollar one remember this is a very a very important coin someone tweeted about it in response to me you guys have to check it out so basically like even I personally would really love to see a social media platform that just allows higher quality engagement period um so you know if someone could solve that then you know that would be amazing uh so why social media right so cryptotech is uh I think actually well suited to solve a lot of these problems so credible neutrality in what is one of the things that I think a lot of people want out of social media and blockchains are good at building a credibly neutral mechanisms censorship resistance blockchains are censorship resistance the concept of shared open state that you can have platforms where content is either Unchained or if it can't be Unchained for scaling reasons it it can be a kind of floating or floating around peer-to-peer networks some things like whisper or waku um and then you have this oh this public open State and then you have these kind of different views going into that state um so you can have architectures that are less monolithic you can have more separation between different layers and like there's an opportunity to build more and interesting things if you do it that way um built-in economic layer so crypto has a built-in economic layer you know you have coins and you can make your own coins and here to do a mechanism design right so it's like there's a natural fit um examples of like crypto social media that are not ethereum and that are not ghost towns exist um I don't approve I don't fully approve of like the economics of everything on here but you know like these things are not ghost towns right like bitcloud not a ghost town like steam high voice if you go on them like you know they're not ghost towns uh so there's like there is evidence at least in my view of this existing demand for some kind of a decentralized social media thing so directions to explore um decentralized content and separating out the contents from different views that can be views on the same content that filter it um prediction market like mechanisms um so the stuff that queeros talked about is like to some extent of alien in that direction but there can be lots of different spins on it right I think the core principle of like introducing prediction market like things is to encourage posts that look good one year from now and not just today um who here has um who remem made a coronavirus take one year ago that they're not proud of today who here has seen someone else making a coronavirus take one year ago they're not proud of today okay there we go see so like uh you know other we know what the problem is the problem like the problem is other people but uh like the the con the concept of uh lasting qual you know encouraging things that actually have long-term value and that aren't just like let's like spin it out so it goes viral and we get some engagement and it turns out it's like it's actually total junk like trying to move beyond that well maybe there are mechanisms that can do that um civil resistance um so you know if we don't want a system dominated by spam then you want simple resistance you want to make it difficult to create an unlimited number of accounts an interesting direction is community focused so forums that are less about trying to create Like This Global water cooler where that tries to like pretends that everyone is two meters away from each other um but more like things that may that allow people to more easily form communities and even kind of enforce rules and enforce limits within their communities even just forums where you can only speak if you prove that you're part of some Dow or you prove that you're part of some community that you have you know could be some number of coins it could be a pope you know it could be a could be some other kind of membership token um like these are like crypto is an ecosystem and we have a very easy ability to do these kinds of things plug-in so this is um another thing that I personally have cared a lot about recently so this is the idea that like you should be able to use your ethereum wallet to sign into things right like we have signed in with Google we have sign in with Twitter why not sign in with ethereum there are projects that are actually starting to do this and there's even like recently we have been trying to promote an effort to standardize this and make it and make it easier to do um and the reason why I think this is valuable once again a few reasons right so first of all today is centralized login providers like are in my opinion worst of Both Worlds in terms of centralization and decentralization so you have a centralized Corp that owns your identity they can see everything you have no privacy you have the risk of arbitrary de-platforming but at the same time like why do you need centralization well if you screw up then maybe the big centralized Daddy can help you well it turns out that like from my first hand and second-hand experience actually talking to Big centralized daddies the big centralized daddies are often too lazy to actually help you right like if you lose your accounts in a lot of these services like often it's extremely hard to actually get it back so um ethereum accounts that are social recovery wallets potentially can out-compete the centralized providers and the decentralized providers on both fronts right so you have both better self-sovereignty and better recovery um the concept of self-custody public key authentication and self-custody public key encryption it's been a dream since the 1990s right like we always wanted you know everyone could have their own pgp key and we can encrypt things to each other but this has been very hard to actually get adopted in practice right so we even needed ethereum to get cryptographic keys into enough people's hands um allow with with blockchains uh specifically we can get uh you can switch your keys you can repoints an ens name you can do social recovery you can do smart contract wallets you can do multi-six and of course you know we have this standard for a wallet that by which anyone can have their key and that you can actually plug it and use the wallet right like if lots of people have metamask lots of people have the status well that lots of people have all these you know all the various other wallets so there we have a standard of some kind so um ethereum login you know One login for many services it's also a username one other reason why using things like a Google login and Twitter login is nice for web developers is that they provide anti-civil protection it's difficult to just create thousands of fake accounts and you know if you get banned for spam create thousands more fake accounts right because you know they do some kind of some level of you know of antisable protection and make it harder for you to create lots of accounts ethereum also does that right so in ethereum you know there is economic civil protection um there is proof of humanity there is Pope there's you know once again this entire ecosystem of tools that exist for this purpose and we can use them and also ethereum login is a natural stepping stone to an ethereum social space um once again there's an RFP with the ethereum foundation and the ens team if anyone wants to help um please check it out um building the attestation ecosystem so this is another one of these things it's not so much an application in the sense of like one app that one person builds but it's like a category of application right this is just the idea that you can have these attestations you can have people just sign a message that says I believe X about accounts Y and you can just publish that and whoever owns accounts why can actually have that at the station it doesn't always it doesn't have to be published on chain if you want to preserve privacy but they can have that information and then if they want to prove it to someone else then you know you can zero knowledge prove it and this is the sort of thing that has been a dream for a long time right but we actually have this growing ecosystem of things that are moving in the direction of being able to do that right once again there's proof of humanity there's the pope there's uh various projects doing like thank you for your participation type nfts open certs in Singapore is like actually running various ethereum Enterprise projects like a lot of projects in the ethereum Enterprise ecosystem are ultimately about making attestations about individuals making adaptations about events providing like receipts for events that happened and so we have this ecosystem of just things that are happening that are cryptographically signed that are cryptographically provable and look we can have more right and we can build more infrastructure to actually you know make all of these things be provable on chain um well voting should not be provable and chain but that's for reasons that I already talked about in other places so I won't get into that now if you want and you should be able to attest to things and use your knowledge proofs for privacy at the same time right so you can make a proof that says like prove that it that I have reputation score of at least 100 according to this metric and prove that I am a unique account but do not prove anything or do not reveal any other information right zero knowledge proofs their magic you can do this sort of thing so like this is an ecosystem that actually can be built can be built out more um git coin is kind of is interesting right in how like they are experimenting with these attestations and not giving you higher trust bonuses if you have like I guess higher levels of verification but like this can be done in a more cross-platform you know like not centralized and more privacy preserving way as well so that's one set of ideas another set of ideas that I personally am excited about is retroactive public goods funding um so I Know Carl talked about it yesterday but I like the topic so I'm going to talk about it again um so once again yay you know new forms of public goods funding um so what is retroactive public goods funding right so basically the idea here is we yes is this concept that instead of funding projects like or having some kind of centralized mechanism that funds projects based on what it thinks is going to be promising we have an ecosystem that funds projects that were already successful and then you basically create the equivalent of a prediction Market where people can fund those projects in advance based on a prediction that what some project succeeds it will get the retroactive Grant so the idea would be that we set up a dow in the the blog post from yesterday and we call it was called the results Oracle and the Dow just judges what projects were valuable according to what community schools and it judges after the facts right so you might say um you know we can judge right now that EIP 1559 is valuable or maybe we want to judge that a month from now we can judge that well your two protocols were valuable we can judge that you know unit swap was valuable and we can make these kind of retrospective judgments and then there's this concept of projects tokens where if you have a project then you can launch a projects token and you can use for this projects token to basically get either get funding for the project ahead of time or you can just allocate that project's token to people who have made contributions to that project and that encourages upfront contribution and then if that token trades on the market then like whoever actually whoever buys up that token or whoever does work to get that token will be rewarded in the future if their prediction about this project being important turns out to be correct right so this is basically like as I think like Carl Linda Jinx I am yesterday it said creating the equivalent of how the startup ecosystem Works where you have Investments backed by the possibility of an it but for public goods so the goal here is to encourage work and funding on things that I call entrepreneurial public goods right entrepreneurial public goods are public goods so projects that benefit a large and unselective group of people so you can't like pick and choose you know you get it you get it you get it you don't get it you get it you don't get it it just you know you it's either out there and it benefits everyone or it's not out there and it benefits no one but at the same time projects that are only seen as important after they are built so entrepreneurial public goods are hard because markets and governments both tends to system systemically fail at them right so markets fail at entrepreneurial public goods for the same reason markets fail at every other public good there's the Fremont rider problem and governments fail at entrepreneurial public goods because being institutions they're either to if they're centralized they're too exclusionary and if they're decentralized they're too conformist right so there isn't a really a good kind of funding channel for people people to kind of get rewarded for building things that are not recognized as important at the beginning but only become recognized as important once the whole the whole project is already done and everyone can already see the benefit so examples in ethereum EIP 1559 so EAP 1559 it's launching two weeks from now yay right now the idea for EIP 1559 was originally came about in I think it was like 2017 or 2018. right so the idea was published then what happened the community just kind of sat on it for a year a few people recognized that it's important but no one was working on it and because and no one thought that they felt empowered to work on it and no one felt that they would be rewarded for working on it and so people sat on it and then eventually a bit more research was done later then people sat on it more then eventually um you know there was some more research done and then finally the community kind of staged this mask protest where they basically just flooded one of the gay coin grounds and they just redirected like half of an entire Bitcoin matching pool over to an EIP 1559 Grant and by then you know there actually was this big Community signal that EAP 1559 is really really valuable and we need to actually do it but it took a long time right you know imagine a world where you work on EIP 1559 had actually started even if by some small team a year just somewhere in the ecosystem that really believed in it one year earlier um Layer Two scaling um so Layer Two scaling right now it's a big space but two years ago it was a small space right and you know even before that like there were teams like for example the optimism team before they were plasma group and when they were plasma group like people theoretically knew that layer 2 scaling was good but no one really felt the urgency and you know some some people did donate a couple hundred thousand dollars to them but you know we're not going now the uh OMG team uh supported them right some a couple of other people supported them but like there wasn't really that much more support right there wasn't really that much kind of incentive actually encouraging them to start thinking about and start working on those problems then now imagine if plasma group instead of being like three to five people had been able to scale up to 10 to 20 people way back in 2018. they would have figured out that plasma is a dead end a year or later they would have probably switched to optimistic Roll-Ups a year earlier and we probably would be Asia you know we would have been selling tickets for efcc on a fully functional and stable optimistic roll-up even right now easy to easy tools another good example um you know stake just infrastructure to make staking easier for users is something that we're increasingly recognizing is really important but that there wasn't really a good proactive effort for it um uniswap right launched in 2018 nobody cared about it for a long time then in 2020 um you know all the the talking heads on uh you know on Twitter that consider themselves to be very smart started talking about oh it's a summer of D5 now and oh amms are the future this story has a bit of a happy ending because uniswap managed to convince Paradigm and that they had some hope of having a business model and eventually they actually did have a business model but this is not the average story right like the there's plenty of public goods that never have a chance of actually getting a business model when they're just stuck being pure public goods um so why retro funding right basically I think the core idea here is that decentralized decision making is much better at retrospective decisions than it is at prospective decisions right like if you just take like a sort of a vote of 100 people and you ask them well what are important things that were done in the last 50 years they might give some wrong answers they might give some crazy answers but you know they could give relatively reasonable answers now if you ask a random group of 100 people what are things that will be important for the next 50 years you're probably going to get total junk right so the idea here is to basically use decentralized decision making retrospectively and allow the people to start and just individually participate in and even speculate on projects prospectively and so those two mechanisms they kind of function according to different principles right like there is both this decentralized community driven retroactive evaluation but then also a retro funding ecosystem preserves a role for leadership it preserves a role for individual Vision Vision it preserves a role for small teams that are just the that are just really sure and they have a really good idea about what is going to be important gives them space to actually build out their vision and if they're if they're lucky actually get a reward and it it creates a reward for making uh predictions about what the future will need correctly so I think the core principle here right and I think this is one of these kind of principles that I think a lot of the crypto space is sort of behind without realizing that it's behind is the idea that like we can be pro-social without being conformist right like the usual divide is you know we talk about individualism versus collectivism and individualism gets criticized as being like less pro-social and being like a like encouraging people to be competitive against each other and fight these kind of Wars of everyone against each other collectivism gets criticized as just being this you know boring gray conformist thing that's just like stepping on your boot forever but what if you can you could be pro-social but at the same time like you don't like there are different ways to be pro-social and you can be pro-social in a way that's different from the way that everyone else is pro-social you can even be pro-social in a way that other people don't recognize is pro-social until it's actually until what you've done is actually done um so I think retroactive public goods funding is like one of those ideas that kind of exists in that top right quadrant right uh so that's I think uh one of so this is also one of the reasons why I think retroactive public goods funding is interesting um quadratic funding I think also falls in there right because with quadratic funding you can the point is to funds public goods but it still leaves open the room for different subgroups of the population to have different ideas about what is what is uh the public good um so you know the one question you might ask is well are there more interesting ideas in that top right corner so retroactive public goods funding is already happening I'm so I think two days ago this was uh quietly announced um the EIP 1559 supporter and Patron nft so uh the there's a group that made an nft and it's going to be sold and all proceeds well I mean you can read the the the screenshot yourself right yeah I I managed to actually screenshot the video at the exact time that it stopped at this phrase um yeah all proceeds go to those Comedia AP 1559 happen um so this is also an interesting experiment and like rewarding um EIP 1559 contributors retroactively um and also the experiment in retroactive public goods funding from the uh from the optimism team um so there I'm sure there are plenty of things that look I would say deserve retroactive rewards today um one other interesting example ZK snarks right that this is technology that we really depend on and there are a lot of very smart people like even the starkware team and um Ellie Benson and his team is one example there's also just plenty of academics in all sorts of places that worked very hard and in some cases even worked for decades to get all of the different pieces of technology that are needed to make ZK snarks possible happen today right and there's this like very long chain of citations right to have us to be able to use a CK snark like you know you need you might want to use polunk and Planck was built by the Aztec team and Planck is based on polynomial commitments and there's kcg commitments that were created by Kate zafarucha and Goldberg work and then those are built on elliptic curves and elliptic curves are created by these other academics from 30 years ago and then zero knowledge proofs themselves or this theory created by theoretical cryptography that slowly grew over the last 30 years and then you have the people who invented the PCP theorem back in the 1980s and 1990s right look there's all of these people doing War all of this amazing work that we now recognize is just absolutely key to making a the next step of this multi-hundred billion dollar industry possible but you know in a sane World there would be there would be a reward for putting Decades of your life into things that become that become uh you know finally valuable so a lot of promise for retroactive public goods funding as well um I think it's an idea that's interesting for the crypto space because the crypto space has a lot of public goods and because the crypto space is just cares about mechanism design experimentation so let's uh let's funds more richer let's fund more public goods and let's fund it retroactively and like Yay you know we can like create like create the public God of public goods um so key takeaways right so the ethereum ecosystem has to expand Beyond like just making tokens that help with trading other tokens right because they're like like in some ways like if you just take like just this narrow thing that is defying you just like to keep you know pushing it to infinity and you keep letting like you know the a16z and the z32w and like the AK-47 and whatever these funds are and they just like keep like you keep going forever and then like you're just gonna get like tokens that give you profit from yield farming other currencies that are Financial derivatives between other yield farming tokens and this other thing that's a prediction Market of yield farming tokens on top of stable coins and like some these things are valuable up to you know layer one and Layer Two but once he gets to layer three it's like yeah and then once he gets away you're sick so like you're actually increasing the chance the the financial instability and the risk of this whole thing is going to collapse and like potentially get a couple Regulators angry right so let's not just do D5 um and doing not just a Defy is uh yeah um yeah it's uh it's already happening right but we can do more so moving beyond DFI is not about being against E5 right so I actually think the best applications the most interesting ethereum applications are going to combine elements of finance and non-finance one simple example like ens ens it has like it has fixed fees and for fixed fees to be possible in a decentralized way you need you know either a stable coin or a price Oracle ens itself like registering domains um it requires money and that's a currency currencies are the simplest form of defy um if we want some kind of decentralized content moderation Dao that might need incentives and those incentives might require a token of some kind right so applications that combine elements of Finance but Finance not just as an engine itself but as a tool to make the non-finance and to make the ultimate utility happen I think applications like that are the future um so what can we do right so turning accounts and like ethereum accounts into fully fledged profiles so I mentioned the attestation ecosystem ethereum logins ethereum social at the same time also um do like actually keep working on you know social recovery wallets and multi-sig wallets and better security Technologies so that you know you're not going to lose your entire ethereum like or online identity if your house burns down in your 20 and the 24 words don't survive um talking not just about D5 but also about D gov um you know quadratic funding quadratic voting I saw the git coin Dow use quadratic voting which I think is amazing um the Retro funding you know are there going to be other ideas um I think this is one of those things that's really worth thinking about so there's a lot of things that we can do right and well let's let's start building let's like do more experiments and uh you know maybe a few years from now and we'll have a lot of just really exciting things to talk about that are providing just all kinds of like very diverse and real value to all kinds of people not just within the ethereum ecosystem but you know also going far beyond it as well thank you [Laughter] of course yeah thank you for for this great presentation uh so when you talk about the retroactive Public Funding like how do you set basically the price at the beginning do you see that more like an As an X prize equivalent or something like that how do you think about it I mean I think like extra index price is a good example but I think the important thing that this mechanism has to provide is that the prices have to be ongoing and they have to be persistent so that people can start new projects in new areas on the assumption that if they succeed then they then they will get a prize in the future right like the X prizes or and like existing prices they tends to be oriented around a very specific goal which I think is good and I think it's valuable but I also like I my what I want to see is also like the for the market or like people people's independent decision making to be not just for like what is the way to solve a specific problem but also for like what are the problems that need to be solved in the first place right so like if you come up with something that people don't even realize is valuable today and then it becomes valuable five years from now like you should be able to get a prize from that and so like I think you know the existing kind of work and thought going into prices is definitely like a good start but I want to take that further as well and then in terms of like what mechanism will decide how the prices are distributed and I think that's kind of deliberately left a little bit blank because I think doing like so if we a perfect solution to that problem would be a perfect solution to the governance problem and Community is very far from perfect solutions to the governance problem right so we do have to I think kind of be humble and realistic about it and approach that problem more experimentally and iteratively um so start with something simple see how it goes and then just keep improving it over time as we see how it actually collides with the real world hmm hi vitalik hi I was thinking maybe instead of canceling Kim Kardashian we offer her like something that maybe she could um join the community for instance she has a closet full of clothing I know there's some fashionistas in here I was hanging out with them last night um and I know vinay Gupta is working on materem maybe uh tokenizing her closet for instance and then adding value to clothing so we recognize it in terms of a theory like its value in tokens instead of um because this is very valuable to women especially where I'm from Texas it's like our clothes are very valuable so it's instead of canceling her maybe we invite her in offering her different um that would be great too um I think the one Province though is that like I really want these nft things to benefit not just the celebrities themselves but also find some way to benefit wider Society too so you know if it like no no if she makes an uh if she makes an nft and a large portion of uh let's say for example some portion of the rewards go to charity and this ends up funding some you know really awesome thing that like empowers poor people and you know in like say yeah the Selfies as you're Africa then like I think that would be amazing and I would be the first to like give some kind of official on canceling um so no no if things like that can happen then uh that would be really delightful thank you um yourself um Heights OH um um after this zika roll up we're going to to be implemented and um yeah and some others several steps will go through and this ethereum level will become the level It Is wishable by all of us I think will it not be the problem by the governance so somehow take the control over because like I've heard the today's presentation about human recognition and by just along we think and yes it is a private blockchain and plus the recognition without naming a name but if you take some other database and basically come things put things together and everything what's going to happen maybe a privacy issue and right then so I think like a couple of things there right like one I think it would be better if these things are done like on public chains instead of on private chains just so that they can be used by everyone instead of just a small group of people and then for a privacy issue like I think private Chain versus public change should not matter because a well-designed system of attestations should not be putting personally identifiable information on chain at best it should be putting hashes of pro of privately identifiable information on chain and if you wants to prove it to someone else that you have something that matches a hash with a zero knowledge proof you can but if you don't send someone that proof then look they're not going to see what the hash represents it's just a random number right so I think like it is definitely important to design these systems privately and one of the reasons why I would want the ethereum community to be kind of actively involved and do it designing these systems well is because if they're not designed well then like someone else with some with very limited technical understanding in a very narrow mind profit motive is going to design them badly and that would be a you know unfortunate now the next of course challenge is like you know if these systems have decentralized governance of some kinds then like what if that governance gets corrupted somehow that is a genuine concern and like I'm worried about this stuff even today right like I'm worried about how even a lot of these like defy governance tokens you know there's like five or ten people that can have that can control half the supply and then they can just like make a proposal and like to make force the projects to do what they want like it's uh I think hardening these systems so that they are more resistance to attack and so that like potentially even like putting a speed limit on them and like designing them in such a way that changes can only happen slowly adding more kinds of safeguards adding more diverse sets of stakeholders like these are all things that we need to also focus and think about more so science scientific research is a good use case of public good that could be funded with the Retro funding and and for example you could give value backwards to uh impact factor of Publications and other microcontributions like peer reviews data collection that usually are not valued economically but so I wanted to know your thoughts about it but also how do you think this could be integrated with the a prospective funding since the problem of science actually to have money to start with projects now I think scientific research is a great example um actually one very timely example of this is like take covid vaccines right like coveted vaccines I think have provided like literally trillions of dollars of value to humanity even right now by just allowing um but allowing us to get past the whole covert thing much more quickly and if you look at the amount of money that governments are putting into them it's like tiny right it was like a few billion here a few billion there it was like it felt as though people were just like stuck in kind of like a standard procedure followed the rules mode and they didn't realize you know the enormity of just like how big a benefit could come of this and like the needs to just actually throw out all stops and put everything into it right so this is look that would be one example where I think like the people who were responsible and just putting in that hard work to make the whole vaccine thing happen like they should be very uh well rewarded for something that like we very clearly recognize today right that um you know if that did not exist then I mean like billions of people's lives would be would be significantly worse for an entire year and I think many other kinds of science are definitely similar medical research in particular right like good medical research has the potential to improve a lot of people's lives um I mean this is also important for me personally because I'm a longevity and anti-aging person and I think like I really believe that with the Right medical research we could be seeing like people just regularly live well past the century by within 40 years and that's these are the sorts of things that could like provide a really huge amount of value but right now there really isn't anything encouraging the people doing all of the kind of hard work like five steps on Upstream of the good outcomes right so I think that's important another thing that's also I think interesting in like in academic spaces is that in academic spaces there's often this kind of web of contributions right so like I'm less familiar with biomedicine but in cryptography as I mentioned right like ZK snarks depend on the code they depend on elliptic curve pairings they depend on kcg commitments that depends on up to curve parent carings that depends on elliptic curves they depend on arithmetization it depends on the PCP theorem and there's this like big graph of important stuff that was done 20 to 30 years ago and that like figuring out how to actually kind of extract that graph like I mean there is a citation graph in Academia which is actually nice right but like trying to kind of make that model stronger and more robust and extend into other places and I think I think there's really interesting problems hmm hey vitalik hello over here yes anyway other side oh yeah just uh just to let you know because your talk had a lot of um uh points about attestations and we just launched the uh well we announced the ethereum attestation service today and it's it's a public good it's uh open protocol it's a registry for anyone who wants to make any attestations on uh on the blockchain uh the the attestations the schemas can also be uh made made there and there's a schema registry so a lot of the things that you spoke about um could potentially use it it's free it's open to use um there's no token or profit motive so take a look at it uh that's uh amazing I mean I think my my advice would be to kind of work with the community and see if like you can get you know the existing attestations like the you know the proof of humanities and the popes and like actually yeah like just get everything together into a framework yeah that would be awesome the time [Laughter] Back To Top