Thread by @owocki

1/ I gave a presentation today at ETHWaterloo entitled “11 milestones on the path to a financial system by & for the people”

This thread is a couple dozen pages of eye candy! 🍬 Click the thread to view more!

2/ Like many of you, I came to the p2p finance space with a dissatisfaction with the existing financial system.

I don’t like
- how it’s been captured by the 1%
- it pollutes our water & air
- how anti-competitive it is…

3/ This presentation is not a critique of capitalism; its a critique of the system that the boomers built after WW2 we we have since inherited!

Markets work very well in many situations.. This is a bold hallucinatory re-imaging of what human coordination could look like!

4/ What does a completely p2p financial system even look like?

I’m reminded of the story of ‘Platos Cave’ - in which a prisoner who is freed from a cave & comes to understand that the shadows on the cave wall are not reality at all, ...

5/ for he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the manufactured reality that is the shadows seen by the prisoners.

The inmates of this place do not even desire to leave their prison, for they know no better life.

6/ This story reminds me of the existing financial system. Which we’ve all grown up with & never really questioned because of it’s omnipresence.

Luckily, we now have a framework to experiment w new financial systems!

...

7/ @ali01 : A crypto network is more like a city than it is like a firm, or an individual. Like a city, a crypto network is a community of loosely affiliated ppl who agree about: the location of their work and residence (city); the protocol that they use and run (crypto network)

@ali01 8/ some aspirations we COULD play w now that we’ve got a framework put together:
- everyone owns a piece of everything
-UBI
- respect for individual soveirgntiy
- opt-in social safety net/public good funding
- minimization of rent seeking intermediaries
-less harm externalization

@ali01 9/ As we begin to experiment with these new ideas, I think we’ll find we may have different values.

On one end, there is the libertarian ideal. In this world
- Collectivism is evil
- theres a focus on physical & economic soveirgnty
- government is minimal

@ali01 10/ On the other end there is this ideal of the ‘gaia hypothesis’ - the vision of which is that the earth is one world organism, were all connected, and we need to coordinate to design for

- Global Ecological Diversity
- Local Social Harmony
- Individual Spiritual Abundance

@ali01 11/ A financial system that promotes
- Global Ecological Diversity
- Local Social Harmony
- Individual Spiritual Abundance

!!!!!

Not an oxymoron! You've just been living in Plato's cave all ur life ;)

@ali01 12/ If we want to design this system, how do we do it?

Imagine ur designing an economic system for the world. U want to create a system where as the “agent”s climb their local maximas (optimizing for “number go up” in their bank accounts), theyre providing value 4 the world!

@ali01 13/ I’ve recently read @SamHarris’ book entitled “The Moral Landscape”. In which there is a global moral landscape; wherein agents *climb* the moral landscape by minimizing suffering..

I think this is a pretty cool idea.

@ali01 @SamHarris 14/ What if we could deisgn a world where as agents climb the economic landscape, they are also climbing the “moral landscape”?

Unfortunately.. the existing financial system often externalizes harm as agents climb their economic local maximas.

@ali01 @SamHarris 15/ Why is it that teachers and firefighters make so little, while Wall St bankers make so much?

Why is it that we can advance economically while polluting the environment?

@ali01 @SamHarris 16/ Wouldn’t it objectively be better if we could climb the moral landscape as we climb the economic landscape?

@ali01 @SamHarris 17/ I think that @ethereumJoseph ’s vision of a “a world where everyone owns a piece of everything” is a pretty compelling one..

A world where we’re all investors/community members in the systems we participate in & therefore have a financial/moral stake in everything they do!

@ali01 @SamHarris @ethereumJoseph 18/ Lets dive into the nature of these coordination failures; If u havent read “meditations on moloch” - slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/med… u should! it is a thoughtful analysis of the animalistic forces that inhabit civilization.

In this story, Moloch is the god of coordination failure.

@ali01 @SamHarris @ethereumJoseph 19/ There are other Gods in this story too. Gnon is the god of nature

“Gnon” is short for “Nature And Nature’s God”. Gnon is a God that forces you to spend resources to placate him - Tributes to Gnon include food + shelter, clothing to warm yourself.

@ali01 @SamHarris @ethereumJoseph 20/ So be it with Gnon. Our job is to placate him insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and invasion. And that only for a short time, until we come into our full power.

@ali01 @SamHarris @ethereumJoseph 21/ Somewhere in this darkness is another god. He has also had many names - named “Elua”. He is the god of flowers and free love and all soft and fragile things. Of art and science and philosophy and love. Of niceness, community, and civilization. He is a god of humans.

@ali01 @SamHarris @ethereumJoseph 22/ The other gods sit on their dark thrones and think “Ha ha, a god who doesn’t even control any hell-monsters or command his worshippers to become killing machines. What a weakling! This is going to be so easy!”

@ali01 @SamHarris @ethereumJoseph 23/ But somehow Elua is still here. No one knows exactly how. And the gods who oppose Him tend to find Themselves meeting with a surprising number of unfortunate accidents.

There are many gods, but this one is considered the “highest”.

@ali01 @SamHarris @ethereumJoseph 24; In this narrative; humanity’s role is to placate Gnon for as long as we need to.. To commune with Eula + to defeat Moloch.

So why is it that Moloch is so hard to defeat? Why is it that one can advance their economic agenda while externalizing harm to society?

@ali01 @SamHarris @ethereumJoseph 25/ In a way this is a form of the game theoretic classic: “The Prisoners Dilemma”. - In which two agents, seperated and unable to coordinate, will statisitcally choose the most suboptimal outcomes, rather than the optimal outcome.

@ali01 @SamHarris @ethereumJoseph 26/ In this narrative.. Moloch is the reason we have overfished lakes and oceans.

So how do we defeat Moloch?

@ali01 @SamHarris @ethereumJoseph 27/ If only there was some sort of substrate where we could better coordiante human economic activity!

IF ONLY!

Ethereum at its core is about creating games with transparent rules that can't change on you. That's the founding myth of Ethereum and it's still true to me.

@ali01 @SamHarris @ethereumJoseph 28/ To me; Ethereum is a shelling Point for the Hopeful.

A community where we can collectively move on from our industrial age institutions and build new information age institutuions that are fundamentally more fair, transparent, and native to an internet native world.!

@ali01 @SamHarris @ethereumJoseph 29/ The stakes have never been higher.

We’ve inherited a lot of civlizational debt from the boomers.

We should all refuse to let our children inherit a world like this!

@ali01 @SamHarris @ethereumJoseph 30/ I think that in order to solve these problems, we need to scale our collective sense making abilities.

I’m overjoyed to say that Ethereum is starting to fulfill it’s founding promise - it’s working. 2019 was the year of the DAO + of DEFI

@ali01 @SamHarris @ethereumJoseph 31/ This space moves really fast; and its because of  all of you that we have DEFI working!

We see thousands of transactions per day in the new financial system

ht @alethio

@ali01 @SamHarris @ethereumJoseph 32/ I dream of a world in which people are transacting peer to peer so much that we can start to rebuild the stability & reliability of the old system on top of the new one.

@ali01 @SamHarris @ethereumJoseph 33/ A world where there is so much quadratic funding on Gitcoin Grants that a coder can rely on it. & we can build reliable social services / safety net on top of it..

@ali01 @SamHarris @ethereumJoseph 34/ We are building Ethereum OS- the substrate for the p2p financial system.

It's inevitable that this disrupts the status quo.

@ali01 @SamHarris @ethereumJoseph 35/ Ethereum OS is inclusive & permissionless - Anyone can create a dapp on the Ethereum dapp store!

@ali01 @SamHarris @ethereumJoseph 36/ We are all lucky and privileged to be in the Ethereum city. A city thats disrupting the status quo and I truly believe is building the substrate of finance for the information age.

To my fellow citizens: Lets be explicit about the world we are creating.

@ali01 @SamHarris @ethereumJoseph All art above was created on @gitcoin & is licensed Creative Commons. Use it to inspire someone in your local community! Start a conversation about what the p2p financial system could look like with them :)

Art: docs.google.com/document/d/1BS…
Deck: docs.google.com/presentation/d…

/fin