Okay, so we're gonna have relative anarchy with seating wherever you guys want to go
I'm Peter van Valkenburg. You said anarchy. No, actually, that's great. We can do that if you want
Or now I might be bad for the live stream. I'm now the dictator
That's what happens with anarchy right emergence of a dictator strong man, so I'm Peter van Valkenburg
I'm a board member of the Z cash foundation and I also have a related job at coin center a nonprofit focused on government
interaction and education with respect to these technologies I'm gonna be kind of
Gently moderating this conversation because we have awesome panelists
Who have a lot of expertise and thoughts about governance with respect to mostly specific projects that they've worked on but also generally
And I think we'll have differing viewpoints and I'm excited by that
I have this slide up to start because I was wandering around Montreal
Yesterday and I came across these two rather strange statutes in the Place d'Armes
These are the the gentleman is supposed to be an English gentleman holding a
Pug and the woman is a French
gentlewoman holding a poodle and
The Englishman is supposed to be looking down his nose at the Cathedral
of Notre Dame de Montreal thinking that as an institution the Catholic Church is just not good for the Quebecois or for
Montreal and the woman is supposed to be looking down her nose at the
The bank there's a there's an old bank on the same
Place they're thinking that this this capitalist institution this English institution is not good for Montreal
as a whole but their dogs are looking at each other doesn't look like it in this picture because they smell each other and
They're excited and they're happy to make friends. So I think this is a really interesting
Installation about governance actually that's only a few
You know a short walk away and I hope today that our panelists will be more like the dogs and smell each other and be happy
to meet and play
rather than the sort of
Priggish
Commedia del arte snobs
With that to sort of allow us to get started organically
I wanted to allow you to introduce yourselves for many
It will seem like a stupid exercise because these are all very well-known people in our communities, but I want you to introduce yourselves
Say which projects or projects you've been primarily associated with and then if you have an official title with respect to those
Projects give that title and if you don't that's fine
Maybe explain what what other titles you've had and then say whether that title as a formality has it all
Reasonably represented what you see as your role within the governance of your particular project
Does that make sense?
If the title has represented the role been a faithful
Representation of your what you see is your role in the governance of the project? Okay, we'll go down this one. Yes
I'm Zuko and I'm the CEO of the Zcash company and that's a title which
Totally maps to the effective governance of the Zcash company because I can fire people since I have that title. Yep
And I'm called the founder of the Zcash
Zcash coin or whatever in like newspapers, and I don't think that title really maps very much
I guess it maps to some kind of like I don't know I can get on stage using that title, but I can't necessarily
Get people to run my software using that title. I don't think cool
and then there's a bunch of other things that I've had time like
It was a contributor to Tahoe AFS
Which is an open source project for a long time and I was up the public sort of recruiter and ringleader for that
Yep, but I don't think I had an official title. I think we'll stick to just the cryptocurrency projects
Oh, we're gonna talk about like we want the whole resume. Yeah advisor to a couple of other cryptocurrencies. You want to hear about that?
No
We'll just move along
Sorry, so my name is Jill. I am a freelancer. I've worked with several different projects in the space
including
Tezos 0x and Zcash
I think that that very generic title freelancer very accurately encapsulates my role and what I do and what
Little impact I might have on on the governance of these projects
I'm lucky and that I get to be a free agent. I am NOT
I'm not really a political figure. I'm like I'm saying maybe the rest of the people on this panel
I'm Vitalik
Founder and sometimes a chief scientist of the aetherium project. Well chief scientist of the aetherium foundation founder of the project
I mean founder of the project is probably very accurate because I did kind of write the white paper
And I wrote and I wrote like half of the original Python implementation
the
Chief scientist title like
Okay, like I do I do something that some people call science like detractors call me a chief
Well, no, they use the word dictator
Yeah
Otherwise, I don't really like I don't really think titles really map that well to what people in the aetherium community do in general
like I'm not even sure if Vlad has a title and like he goes around just like blabbing about
Governance and Casper and like CBC and frequentism and whatever all the time. So I don't know like the
I feel like titles don't really yeah
Look, the problem is the titles are kind of like boxes and they can and you know, like they simplify their lossy compression algorithms
they constrain and in
These kind of newfangled cryptocurrency communities where we're sort of
inventing approaches and norms on the go like it's
Our roles in practice are just defined every month by our actions more than everything else
At the very least when when people do use the term dictator, I feel like it's almost always with benevolent
So that's that's pretty good emerging even benevolent dictator is like used critically sometimes
My name is Jameson
My name is Jameson. My day job for the past several years is really doing infrastructure engineering on top of these protocols
Now with regard to my title, the only title that I have really within bitcoin was bestowed to me by Zuko
And if I recall correctly, it was a bitcoin philosopher Lawrence
That's awesome
But other than that, no, I'm just a guy on twitter who's trying to figure out what the heck is going on
Like many in bitcoin
Does bitcoin have a sergeant at arms?
Does Zcash?
We have a grand vizier, right?
No, we don't
Anyway, so for the remainder of the conversation
I definitely want you guys to feel free to interrupt each other, ask questions from each other if something somebody is saying
I've got stuff to push the conversation in certain directions
But I really want to just provoke a conversation that's fluid here
Because I think that's the best way to uncover what is an incredibly broad and maybe meaningless topic called blockchain governance
I like that Nick said that this is this term has come to mean nothing
This was Nick's definition that it gave earlier today just to set some basis
I think it's a good one. I also like Vlad's definition
Did this, when Nick brought this up earlier, did this strike you as strange or apropos or anything?
So when I talk about governance I sometimes talk about two kind of theories of governance
Where one, and I know this is a view that not a kind of framing that not everyone agrees with
Basically one view of governance is the decision function theory of governance
That basically says that there is some process and there is something that gets capital D decided
And there's some process that comes to arriving at that decision
And you can describe governance algorithms as basically being a function of the inputs of all the different participants
Where the output is like basically what are the soft forks or hard forks or whatever protocol changes that happen
And I've always found, the other view that I've talked about is the coordination view of governance
That basically says even abstract away from the idea that there is a single thing
Because at the bottom level all there is is people and the nodes that they run
And ultimately any person has the right to run pretty much whatever node they want
But because we're all playing this game and in this game there's a lot of equilibria that benefit from coordination
So for example for any set of arbitrary protocol changes A or A or B
A might be better than B or B might be better than A
But a lot of the time people are better off if either everyone goes for A or everyone goes for B
And so individuals benefit from making the same move as everyone else
And in these kind of coordination games you basically get these equilibria where
Like if there is some arbitrary set of kind of norms expectations
Which could be precise, could be imprecise for how people arrive at whether they go to A or B
Then it makes sense for any one person to follow them because everyone else is following them
They want to do the same thing as everyone else
And so you have this kind of pressure to conform that makes norms sticky
And the subject of blockchain governance basically is what all of these kind of what I call coordination flags actually end up being
And the difference between that and the decision function view is that basically
A decision function carries the connotation of it's better if it's as close as possible to actually being a function
And actually being a process that has to have some outcome
Whereas here well sometimes people like it's okay if it's subjective and often it's good if it's subjective
And there are plenty of cases where the community splitting in half actually is the optimal outcome and that's fine
Yeah the second sounds kind of evolutionary
The first sounds much more top down or scientific
The first is like I think what people are used to more when thinking about corporate governance or national governance
Because it's like a corporation or government really is more like one thing where there has to be a decision
Yeah and I feel like this is something that a lot of people who are outside of our communities don't understand
That second aspect the evolutionary aspect
It sounds like hurting
It sounds like strange group dynamics that are chaotic
And it may not lead to global optimums
In evolution you lead to local optimums where everyone like ran up this hill of evolutionary success
But maybe it wasn't the absolute or the best or if they could just de-evolve and then re-evolve into something else would be better
Which is kind of interesting
And yet with so many projects maybe across all of them a few of them find a global optimum is one way that I think about this
Yeah I'm not really a fan of the term governance simply because it can be confusing
It's very broad and can be subjective
At least for like public permissionless protocols
I like to use the terms of signaling or even divining what the consensus is
Because what is consensus is this ethereal thing that is out there
And we're trying to keep the collective together as much as possible because we're building networks and there's value around that
But at the end of the day unlike most traditional forms of governance there is no way for you to force everyone to stay together
Or force everyone to go down a specific path
Yeah some of the things you've said Jameson almost seem transcendental or mystical to me and I actually love them for that
And I didn't know the Bitcoin poet laureate remark of philosopher laureate might as well be poet though as well perhaps
So just real quickly this is another thing that I thought might spur some conversation or just lay some basic groundwork
I think one way to think about more nuts and bolts questions is where do we direct our efforts at improving governance of these protocols
Do we do it on the off protocol or maybe you can think of it as a layer zero level
And these are things like discussions, Bitcoin improvement proposals, pull requests and things like that
Do you try and do better governance actually in the core consensus rules in the layer one of the protocol on chain governance if you will
Or do you try to do it on like a layer two through N which would be any of the emergent structures that are built on top of Bitcoin
On top of Ethereum and these could be things like smart contracts, these could even be things like wallets
These could be all manner of other things built on top
So I just wanted to put that out there and as we go through and have our more organic conversation
If you feel like you could say something about these like where the locus makes sense that would I think be useful
So I've worked with projects that have done all three I would put Zcash in the category of off protocol
I would put Tezos in the category of layer one and I would put 0x in the category in a way of layer two
And perhaps to the chagrin of some of these projects I've worked with
I would actually make the argument that when we talk about governance there is actually no such thing as on chain governance
And perhaps this is a slightly myopic definition of what governance is but I would agree with Jameson that it's really about signaling
It's really about how we come to the conclusions that we're making how we make decisions and not about coordination mechanisms
We all want to believe that there are these elegant technical solutions to these really messy human issues like governance
And there just aren't there are really elegant technical solutions perhaps to how we can coordinate to institute these changes and these decisions that get made
But ultimately those decisions they get made in need space they get made in rooms like this
Yeah so I'm happy to go out of order in my slides but I wanted to get you on this one because this tweet that you put out not too long ago
Which was spurred by your experience I think with Tezos your quote tweeting Nathaniel Popper there
Was there anything more specific to that experience with Tezos that leads you to this sort of abandonment of on chain governance?
So again I think that Tezos and what they're building is brilliant and I think it's going to be a brilliant experiment in on chain coordination mechanisms
But there was this effort kind of by the media when you know it broke out that there was in fact some issues going on between the Tezos foundation and the founders
If you're interested in learning more I highly recommend that you read a Wired article about it that came out last week covered it brilliantly
And there's this effort though by the media to say well isn't this ironic you know look at these these founders this team this project that here is trying to solve the issue of governance
And in fact they're having governance issues
Yeah it was a little cute
I mean the layers of irony going on you know they're not lost on anyone absolutely but I think again this is where it becomes very important to be specific in what we're talking about
And what we're talking about in general when we discuss governance again it's it's a human issue it's things like how we interact with the law how we interact with each other
You know even what jurisdiction you wind up domiciling your project in or the various branches of it and then ultimately it's how the leaders of a project be they core developers be they the mining community be they the founders or visionaries or creators of them interact with their communities
It's not about you know some smart contract mechanism that exists on chain that allows stakeholders to vote the results in some plutocracy we can you know wax poetic about that all day but ultimately that's not what it's about
Thanks for good Neal Stephenson novel
Yes
So this picture I think is a good example of that off chain governance this was actually here in Montreal at the old scaling Bitcoin conference and this was the hallway meeting which was where the only progress at that conference was I think really made to the extent any progress was made
And it was kind of this almost renaissance art portrait of like philosopher kings like just chatting about stuff anyway so that that could be a positive thing to some people or could be very bad thing to some people because it's a bit of a cloistered room in a building
and who are these people why did they represent us the bad version of layer one on chain governance.
Not that there's anything wrong with bitmain I think they make great hardware but if you're going to use a proof of work consensus mechanism you're ceding a lot of power potentially to a certain number of people who are very good at making hardware, even if you think you're a sick
resistance, or are you because the rules of the software actually limit what even a powerful minor could ever accomplish or do.
It's a bit of a tangent but I'll just disagree I don't think the miners have much power.
That's provocative. Well, especially.
They do more so in transparent systems like zcash with t addresses, or Ethereum, or Bitcoin, because then they have the power to discriminate among users so they could target a specific class of users, or specific user, or whatever.
And they can't use the addresses and they can't discriminate among users, and so then they have almost no power left. Well, right. So software is my power to interrupt and disagree somewhat.
Like, the main use of power by miners that we've seen so far is basically either implementing or vetoing particular soft forks, right, like that's miners have the ability to basically collude to create de facto changes to the protocol by censoring all transactions that don't comply with a particular set of rules.
You know we don't use soft forks.
Well, you don't use soft forks but the miners might decide to.
So, I don't think that would be feasible if the users were using the addresses.
No, but like the miners could do things. So first of all, miners could ban the addresses or they could change the rules that would cause the address transactions to become more expensive. I think we should pop back out and move on but let me just say banning the addresses is not discriminating. You can ban everyone from using the addresses but you can't target.
Attempts to influence a very broad political decision, right, that was handed. The only reason they had that power is because the community said, we're going to do whatever you say about this.
Right. So it has nothing to do with miners, the community could have just as well said to like, I don't know, yeah, coin desk or reddit upvotes or something else that could have said the same thing and then everybody would be saying oh it turns out reddit upvotes have a lot of power.
That's why these communities are so fascinating is because the balance of power is going to come down to what the community decides and like I would make an argument that, like the Bitcoin cash ecosystem gives a lot more power to the miners, they have kind of seeded and deferred to miners to do more things.
So it's going to be different in every system. In that case, in the Bitcoin cash case I'd agree in large part because like I feel like miners voting on protocol changes is basically an explicit part of the social contract as stated by many of the core founders. So the details of what the kind of key founders and high priests of the ecosystem say should have the power definitely matters a lot in practice.
Vitalik, would you at least? Sure. Hi Darren. What I was going to say is we have examples where mining factions have controlled the evolution of protocol upgrades. For example, in Litecoin, basically Bitmain and Inosilicon had a large proportion of mining power and they controlled whether Segwit activated on Litecoin.
As Zuko says, Zcash does not have the same miner based signaling to activate forks as Bitcoin and Litecoin have and that's quite a deliberate design decision.
Yeah, partly because didn't want to give miners that particular power. I mean, Vitalik, would you at least agree with I think what and Zuko you can tell me if I'm rephrasing your position incorrectly, but I feel like part of your position was we already take a lot of power and discretion out of the hands of miners even in Bitcoin.
There's no way to put in a fraudulent transaction if you can't make the signature. You have to solve the proof of work. Zcash to the extent that it even further limits the discretion of the miner, assuming we move to a world where they're all shielded transactions, you don't even have the ability to censor a particular person because they all look the same.
I agree that miners power is very limited. I'm just claiming that it's non-zero. One other example is that miners still have the absolute power to basically soft fork down the Zcash block size to any value below the vertical maximum.
So I was thinking just now that this means you almost could use mining behavior as a flag or a signaling and you might confuse that with it as an execution.
There's two different things. Which reminds me, I was thinking of a different kind of layering. The bottom layer is the consent layer. I don't know if there's maps to this, but maybe it does. What I was thinking of is the bottom layer is the consent layer.
I've been using the word consent and privacy interchangeably throughout this conference, which I wanted to ask you about, but please continue. I think they're intimately related. The next layer up is coordination and signaling and flagging and stuff, or deciding, if that's the way it works.
And then the next layer up is execution. So that's where some of the smart contracts and on-chain governance and things like that. All they're saying is we're going to automate step three of implementing and enforcing once we've all agreed on step two, which is coordinating and deciding.
I think that does map, actually. Am I able to edit this on a flag? No, not going to even try it. That's way too ambitious. But when you say consent, are you talking about opting into using the protocol in general? Is that?
Sure. If you're thinking of these as foundational layers, if a certain portion of the community wants to rip out a lower layer, then they can basically undo anything that's going on at the layer above.
Or they can fork off and do something different. And so that consent layer is that off protocol decisions of the parties, both what software to run and whether to change the software. The coordination layer is that layer one that we have here, where you have mechanisms like SHA-256 or whatever the consensus
is to get them all on the same page once they've decided to be together and consented, and then you have stuff running on top of it. On this slide, the off protocol discussions and pull requests and all that, it makes it sound more like the metallic contrasted, the decision where it's the question of what is going to be the outcome of the group versus the atomic individual decision.
Which leads me to something else I wanted to say. There's a big scalar slider. Jameson said something like need for people, there's a strong value of network effects, so people want to stay in the same, to follow the signals and make the same decision.
And Vitalik said everyone wants to do A or B. But not everyone goes all the way that direction, right? Sometimes people prefer to fork, like they mentioned. And the question of how much forking or how easy of a forking is itself one of these coordination questions.
I'm in favor of forking as governance. And there's weird implications there, like if you fork and your coin gets listed on an exchange, you had a much more successful governance movement.
There's also the issue that there's a huge barrier to entry for anyone trying to make a fork of a coin with a protocol as complicated as Zcash. There are not very many people who would be able to pull it off technically.
And then the network effects of getting people to come with you. We should almost not consider that as though it's a practical option in any protocol design decision.
So in some sense, we can't argue that we have consent for a protocol change because people could do something different if in practice they couldn't do something different, if it would be too hard.
So this is like users are trapped, users are locked in, they really don't have a market choice. One way of putting it is Albert Hirschman's idea of exit versus voice as ways to address failing institutions. You can leave or you can try and change it. Maybe exit isn't an effective mode of governance or something that we can actually tout because it won't actually be good for the users because they won't actually do it.
Well that's part of really I think one of the big experiment that's going on with all of this is that we have lowered the barrier to exit so greatly that a lot of people have been experimenting with it and time will tell how well that works as an option.
Yeah, so Jameson, this is, I think, one of those more mystical quotes of yours that I love and your focus here is on voluntary raising. It's on this idea that, I think Darya, I agree we can't rely on exit, but this idea that we can form these organic communities that self-assemble and disassemble if they need to is definitely a market feature of this technology as compared to any other governance system that's been widely employed.
Because moving around in meat space is hard and moving around in crypto space is hard but maybe not nearly as hard.
And we're putting the, somebody's pointing at something.
Sure.
I actually wanted to go touch on the issue of like miner power again. And my question is like, don't miners have the ability to manufacture consent and or consensus in an open system such as bitcoins.
So, kind of what I'm thinking here is like, if there is a bit that miners are collectively signaling, then the apathetic users might read that as a signal of what the community supports.
And by supporting it, because this is a coordination game, the more, shall we say, ideological community members who do actually, you know, take an informed stance would nevertheless be induced to follow the apathetic stakeholders who are being guided by the miners.
Because of, because of like an inertia?
Yeah, basically. So like, you know, anyone wants to comment?
Segwit 2X I think is a great example. I think it had like 80% of miners that were signaling for it and you saw how well that worked out.
I mean, I'm sure there were some people, I heard plenty of people saying, hey, look at the charts, the miners want this and the enterprises want this and and it actually ended up going a very different way where we had a, you know, the Bitcoin Cash Fork happen and the Segwit 2X Fork kind of fell apart.
So, you know, the the power balances in these systems are also very hard to figure out because we've talked about a number of like potential miner attacks, but for almost all of these there are counter attacks, and you can go back and forth and back and forth all day long.
And it's very difficult to predict where it will end up.
I would also add to that the apathetic user will have a multitude of inputs into her his decision, and I would find it quite unlikely that mining would even be one of the strongest of those to sort of the average everyday hodler just user of cryptocurrencies.
I disagree with what Dara said earlier that users don't have options and I agree with what Jameson said is that that's what's different about cryptocurrencies from what came before is the barrier to real exit is so low.
And I wanted to add that it's getting lower all the time, such as the overwinter activation three or whatever days ago, which made it much safer and cheaper to coordinate chain forks of Zcash.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean for the first time in history no one has a monopoly on money, not the central banks, not Zuko, not Vitalik, not Satoshi.
The downside is we end up arguing a lot more. Yeah, it's nonviolent arguing. That's the fun of it. Yeah.
Although if we want to build more important systems on top of these machines that kind of dissolution into fragmentation could be hugely detrimental if you wanted to have globally recognized identification use cases on blockchain or or securities trading or things like that.
Maybe or maybe not. Maybe you just have interledger protocols or things like that deal with that. It does strike me that there are some some downsides here.
I think it comes back to, you know, the decisions that get made in in meat space where if I think about, you know, if I want to go build a securities token trading system based on Ethereum smart contracts.
Would it be a huge pain if there was an Ethereum fork that happened as I was doing that? Absolutely.
But I would also realistically need some legal frameworks around it for these things to be considered securities in order to, you know, be able to to actually push it into production in order to have users, etc.
In meat space you set up ex ante rules that say in the event of a fork. This is how we will make the decision which exactly ledger will honor and they just set that out ex ante and then as a policy, people who could be harmed by that policy at least comply or consented to it at the beginning.
The difficulty of it, of course, is thinking through all of these, you know, sort of edge cases.
Okay, I think we're agreeing too much. So I wanted to.
I have this quote from Vitalik. This is Vitalik. This was an article that you recently fairly recently published with a co author.
Wow. I'm pronouncing it right. So in this paragraph, it's might be too small. So I'll read it because the theory of another cryptocurrency is intentionally lack trusted judges and other authorities to adjudicate disputes.
They depend heavily on formal and transparent rules. The failings of standard property and voting rules quickly manifest themselves.
I take it. You mean things like, say, take proof of work and bit mains emergence as a as a major force there or any other.
When stripped of the protective coating of human driven judicial discretion, which is kind of that off chain stuff that we would usually use in squishy meat space to deal with strange issues in the record.
Blockchain based projects therefore have a strong demand for better rules that can help maintain the decentralization of economic power and for governance rules that can avoid the need for large bureaucracies these communities cannot support.
I think it's relatively uncontentious to make that second statement that we can't support large bureaucracies.
So we need governance rules. But this idea of decentralizing economic power, I think, is one that maybe certain folks would not agree with.
Well, so here's one very practical example, right? Like, look at the EOS blockchain, right? So one of the things that happened yesterday is that we basically found out that Bitfinex with their 1.8% of all EOS tokens had enough tokens to single handedly vote their own delegate into the pool of 21.
And what that lets you do is it basically means that they can capture the delegate revenue. And if you add up what the delegate revenue is divided by their 1.8%, this basically gives them a, you know, like special premium plutocrat special interest rate of 2.8% per year that common plebs don't have access to.
And what this basically means is that inside of this on chain governance mechanism created by EOS, you have this situation where basically the richer you are, the more you can kind of like basically abuse the mechanism and abuse the kind of super linear returns inherent in the mechanism in order to get these special interest rates.
And, you know, if you basically get picketties are greater than G on steroids to the point where you have five, five guys negotiating with five other guys controlling the entire system. So the reason in the top part of the quote, what I mean by that basically is that like a lot of governance mechanisms, if you treat them as kind of pure formal mathematical mechanisms are attackable in a bunch of ways, right?
If you take a voting mechanism, well, first of all, you can do things like coordinating 51% to enslave the other 49%. You can just bribe people to vote in a particular direction. You can find various ways to informally bribe people, you can make different various kinds of coalitions and real voting systems tends to have a lot of subjective institutional constraints that try to limit a lot of this behavior.
So that includes like prohibitions on vote buying in the case of democratic elections, it includes antitrust law in the case of markets, it includes all sorts of things. And these rules are ultimately very subjective. And, like, basically, in order to have a mathematical definite, a full mathematical definition of what each of those rules really says, that definition literally would need to contain inside of itself a strong AI.
So that's, and if you try to have on chain rules on a blockchain, then you obviously can't have a strong AI inside of a blockchain. And so, like, basically the same sort of stuff that can work on at the human level because we can kind of institutionally use like courts and subjective judgment and whatever to model through in blockchains tends to kind of fall apart more quickly.
So I find, you know, whenever we start talking about voting in any sense, it becomes problematic for some of the reasons just stated, but also because I think that that tends to lead us down this path, where we think that we are doing, making changes that are best for the majority of the community,
which, of course, leads you to tyranny of the majority. And I prefer to see governance of these systems be a sort of different direction where we are trying to do the least harm to as many people as possible.
Hippocratic oath for blockchain development. I think that's right. And I think I am also very wary of the voting democracy conversation, because I think when people say, oh, we need better governments, a lot of governance, not governments, they automatically need those two.
We know everything's fine. I'm in D.C. It's all under control. It's going real well. But I think a lot of people confuse the term governance just with democracy, which is fascinating because democracy is just one form. And democracy is one of those words that maybe the shine is wearing off a little bit lately.
But generally it gets, you know, like mass approval. Like, yeah, democracy. That's that's what we want. That's great. When Apple pie when it goes with Apple pie and baseball. But I think a lot of the foundation of the economic prosperity of the U.S.
administration has nothing to do with democracy. It has to do with the more infrastructural simpler rules underneath like property and contract and tort law, which I'm sorry, I'm the lawyer. I don't have to bring this up. But but but that are just facilitators of individual decision making and very simple rules, not complex rules like we're going to have a vote and it's going to be, you know, first past the post or not this or not this.
And then the person who wins that vote or the policy that wins that vote will be implemented and that policy could be arbitrarily complex. I'd like to like to interject a shift in perspective.
I want to start with I very much like Vitalik's model to of what we're talking about when we mean governance that we're not talking about formal rules. We're talking about individual actors making voluntary decisions. But then there being a because of the architecture of what we're making the decisions about.
There's a strong incentive for many people to come to a common decision to agree with each other. And I think that that's the problem is that part of the architecture of the systems that the block chain world has been creating has created reasons why there's a payoff for many people having to arrive at a common decision.
The best way to solve large scale collective decision problems is to avoid them.
The good a good example of an architecture that avoids it is let's take the evolution of natural language or common law, as opposed to to legislatures right where we do come to coherence and agreement over time. We mean largely the same things by the same words, but we don't do it by a collective decision making procedure.
We do it by an architecture where we make lots of separate decisions where we can where the where the overall system works when we're disagreeing with each other when we're trying out many different experiments.
And it's over the process of the feedback between these experiments that there's this gradual conversion over convergence over time while simultaneously there's continual architectural diversity and experimentation coexisting with that.
But I wonder, I want to see the idea that quarter, which to me was the most mind blowing talk I've seen maybe in years is a real change in enable change in technology that enables a change of architecture.
And I want us to I want us to to to prod the the the panelists with the question, starting with quarter, can we recon coda sorry coda not quarter, not coda coda coda c o da, I am so glad you corrected me.
I want to see that starting with coda, can we reconceive of the nature in which the crypto commerce components interact, so that we get the overall emergence safety of a well governed system of block chains, but without there needing to be something like
large block chains that many people have to agree on.
That's a great question.
I don't know how to apply it to specific block chains, like the cash in between aetherium isn't obvious at all, but it reminds me of my straw man proposal for Z cash governance, which is called the friendly fork.
It's probably Nathan's idea originally like most but. So I have a proposal that we're going to pick a mutually incompatible changes that we could make to Z cash, which both sides seem totally plausible.
One is, you know, proof of stake and the other status quo, and then we're going to do both.
And we're all going to use both we're not going to split into two communities we're all going to use both block chains and both things the whole time. That's a fascinating before, and you could imagine more than one friendly for.
I was reminded in this of a story of hedgehogs that Michael Oakeshott brought to my attention or reading Michael Oakeshott brought to my attention. Hedgehogs huddled together for warmth, but they poke each other so they come apart, but then they get cold so they come together again and gradually they find a way to be just close enough that they're warm, but not poking each other.
Like, emerge in order I think it's a great metaphor it's one thing I think of all the time. Does anyone else have thoughts on coda. Yeah, I'll give some thoughts I think yeah they're a great team I do work with them.
I don't know about disclosure, but what I really appreciate about them is that I think you hit upon it really well actually that the underlying ethos of it is that it shouldn't be down to, you know, just a handful of core devs or just a handful of mining nodes to be able to verify that
what's going on in these systems is what we all think it is, you know, to really actually hate to use the word but democratize it in a sense.
And I, you know, for someone who often gets branded as non technical I don't read or write code, you know, that's really meaningful to me as someone who equally wants to participate in the system and be able to verify and audit that things are true when when they're presented to me as such.
And, you know, that should be able to happen on a cell phone, in addition to in a data center.
I'm just about out of time, and he's gonna yell me because I'm gonna go a little bit over. I just want to, I want to allow Vitalik and Jameson to offer some closing thoughts, because we just heard.
I will say that I think that from a higher level view, regardless of all the various experimentation and governance that that's going on. You can make an argument that we have, you know, market based governance that is happening and ultimately, if you have faith in the markets,
then I believe that they will choose, you know, which of these many experiments is considered to be the greatest utility and boon to humanity. And I mean I think that's what we're all really just trying to do is find the best way for us to move forward on projects
where we are replacing systems of authority with new types of interaction, and they may be specialized they may be generic. But from from that standpoint I do think that we all have the same goal, and you know these great experiments are going to continue.
There's too much, too much resources and people behind them that people are not going to give up. Yeah, I was hoping to debate you and Vitalik into a bit of a debate over this, this plutocracy wealth inequality aspect and whether a goal of these protocols should be to
redistribute wealth, let alone governance. So, well, yeah, I mean, I would say whenever you start saying that you're going to redistribute wealth of course that gets to be very contentious.
It gets to an ethical issue of, you know, do, do people deserve the wealth that they come into. That's kind of a question that I think is what turns into a lot of like the toxicity that you find on social media of people calling other people scammers,
in many cases, is correct but in other cases it's more like, I just don't like the way that you ended up with all of that wealth. And so I mean there's there's no right or wrong answer there but I do believe that that wealth, naturally, is going to be somewhat concentrated.
And that's for many different reasons. And I'd say, so far, I can, I have looked and searched but I have not found a way in which block chains can reliably kind of like the concentrate wealth wealth between individuals just because watching
fundamentally don't have access to any source of information about which two accounts are two different people anyway. And so, the best that we, the best that we can do and something that we should do though is when we design our protocols try hard to make sure that we don't have
opportunities for super linear resource allocation. So, opportunity is where a guy with twice as much money can get 2.1 times the return because if you have things like that then you're actively making the situation worse and you arguably are going to transition into an oligarchy over time.
So, to some extent Pareto distributions and that distribution kind of wins in the end. Right, but Pareto distributions and all of those distributions still have an exponent parameter which could be smaller or greater.
And there are definitely charts where the top hundred holders and like Bitcoin and Ethereum have 19 and 35% of all the coins and obviously you can't compare them exactly because of the differences between how many addresses people use but then on the other hand
with Tron or whatever the top hundred go up to 90. So, yes things can be either tolerable or super super bad. So, what Vitalik said was the Hippocratic approach to Jameson's concern.
Cool. All right, we're over time. Please join me in thanking our panelists.
I actually know who I'm supposed to introduce next.
Oh, it's Andrew.
Chairman, Chairman Andrew.