Fixing the Internet with Layer 2 Governance by Ben Jones | Devcon Bogotá

foreign [Music] I think we need to get livened up a little bit so I'm gonna have some heavy crowd engagement to start this off are you all down y'all ready yeah wow okay I always bring this to my talks I don't know how I'm gonna hold it maybe we'll do okay this is going to be the most ridiculous thing but here's what I need you guys to do just uh can you do that there we go come on you got it okay [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] there we go okay so that's how we we dust off our uh our post lunch energy there okay so thanks all for being here cool so hey everyone my name is Ben my stage name is weird eth Yankovic I discovered that I can do music if it's about crypto and it covers how bad I am at music works great um and I'm one of the co-founders of the project called optimism oh yeah thank you okay I'll take it and uh today I am going to do a talk on what we are building and why because if you thought that we were building a blockchain if you thought we were building a scalability solution you are dead wrong um and by the way this is the most ridiculous talk I have ever done like by an order of magnitude so in addition to thank you for being here thank you for coming along this ridiculous ride and uh yeah brace yourself I believe that we are here to change the future and hopefully if you're here at Devcon you feel that way too when I discovered ethereum I dropped everything I saw something something clicked we call it going down the rabbit hole but whatever the heck it is it's this kind of vibe here's one of our great ethereum shows Mr David Hoffman crypto wasn't created to make you rich it was created to set you free so we've got a lot of shills out there but the reality is that we all have to acknowledge we have a lot of haters look at some of these communities that are all dedicated to poo pooing what the heck we're doing here right so what's going on why is it so hard to convince these people and what can we do to make that happen well I think really what this comes down to is that when we talk about these systems we describe the properties of the future that we see we talk about decentralization censorship resistance digital value but what we don't talk about are the paths that we're going to take to get there and the reality is even if some of these properties of the future are inevitable the outcomes resulting from the paths we take there simply are not 30 years ago Silicon Valley had an explosion of technological utopians that knew that the internet was the next big thing the information superhighway the World Wide Web according to Popular Mechanics this was going to be the greatest social Revolution since the automobile and probably it was but nobody really saw what was coming in 1996 this guy John Perry Barlow often called the Thomas Jefferson of the wire generation wrote a very famous piece called a declaration of the independence of cyberspace let me read you something from it governments of the industrial World You Weary Giants of Flesh and steel I come from cyberspace the home of mind on behalf of the future I ask you of the past to leave us alone you are not welcome Among Us you have no sovereignty Where We Gather this is good stuff weary Giants of Flesh and see yeah I mean that deserves a plus totally it's great it's incredibly moving right weary Giants of Flesh and still what a phrase right oh my gosh and this thing went viral back in 96 within months it was on tens of thousands of websites and it had taken a subset of the community by swarm but it's hard today also not to look back on this message with 30 years of hindsight and feel that in some ways it's a little bit naive what we learned was that the roads of that information superhighway were not equally paved and the reality is that those weary Giants of Flesh and steel have been replaced today by siled Giants of concrete and silicon this is what runs our internet this is what things look like today so how are we not going to do this again with crypto what can we say about what's to come well the only thing we know for sure is that technology is keep is going to keep accelerating it is going on and on and on you can feel it in the air guys I don't know about you but I certainly feel it seems like every week something crazy is going on the AI have started to do our homework the homework of our children and better then those children are able to I think probably whereas a year ago it didn't exist half of the people at Devcon used an AI to generate the slides that they present here at Devcon here's an AI generation of depicting someone using artificial intelligence to generate their slides right it's crazy this is going on all the time and look it's all fun and games until we start impersonating world leaders [Music] this is ridiculous but this is what's happening right this is the world that we are headed into sure in that video our world leaders were getting it wrong but the reality is we are on a March towards something much different and they're not getting along folks we are maximizing our profits with no regard for the long-term consequences of what we're doing we are Sybil attacking ourselves with fake accounts and even Faker news and we are literally straying dangerously close to nuclear war call it what you want Call It The Singularity say it's something else but it's clear that we are moving through a phase shift right now into something new and whatever that is if it's not our destruction we'll change how life is expressed in the Galaxy fundamentally or at least our solar system anyway I don't know about those aliens maybe they're already there and in many ways the crypto dream is to forge a path through this uncertain future right open source software knowing what code is being run digital sovereignty going bankless living in the metaverse working for daos right these are things are the promise of crypto they're the dream what is the reality today though it's a little bit different coin voting that's what we have today folks coin voting there are exceptions but by and large this is what exists in crypto today right and this is just sad come on guys look at this guy this is a 400 year old mechanism this is the founder of the Dutch East India Trading Company who is basically the first person to make a coin voting structure right it was a um you know it was a company that you could trade the shares of it's 400 years old um his name is Johann Von Olden barnabelt crazy right the United Cynthia company do we really think that this guy the mechanism that this guy made if we take it and we make it Unstoppable by putting it on a blockchain we're suddenly going to usher in a new era of unity and freedom for the world it's just not enough what a joke it's a joke and I want to be clear we should still stand on the shoulders of giants these mechanisms are 400 years old and worked for a reason but the reality is we also have to use those mechanisms in new ways right much of the anger at the world today that we at crypto in crypto feel like we're trying to solve is the fact that we let this coin voting mechanism run unchecked and we talk about late stage capitalism and all of that and so ultimately our anger is about these systems so it's completely ridiculous to say that we're going to go and put it on a coin vote and suddenly the world is saved so we're facing an inflection point we have to ask ourselves right now do we want to live in a future where those autonomous giant where those giants are now autonomous Giants of biting bites and steel and capital or do we want to be in one where there are benevolent Giants of life and Liberty these are the questions that we must be asking ourselves right now optimism obviously okay so we're not going to do it alone but this is what I meant at this beginning when I said we're not creating a blockchain here we're doing something more optimism is a collection of optimists we are here to Align Technology with Humanity and reject those Futures in which capital alone is King because capital is already King today we don't want to just make it autonomous and unstoppable that's crazy crazy look at that Echo the technology that we're talking about today is necessary but it is not sufficient it is one half of the picture if we're going to align with ourselves and with the technology so this is something that at optimism we've been dealing with for a long time so actually we started out as a non-profit foundation called plasma group plasma was an early precursor to the Roll-Ups and scalability we see today and basically what we did was we created this non-profit we released a bunch of code and Designs out into the world and pushed forward the space of scaling but very quickly it became apparent that the incentives were broken because everyone was going and using our technology and we couldn't raise more money we couldn't hire more people it was incredibly difficult to get by at the same time cookie cutter D5 projects and scam artists were having money poured into them poured these are the early signs of the dangerous future we need to avoid so after a year we wound down the non-profit and we said you know what we've got to solve this we created the thing known now as optimism it's a public benefit Corporation and our goal was to solve the problems and make it so that we were the last ones to encounter the issues that we had faced as a non-profit after that we got to building again the technology is critical it is very very very important and we spent the last three years building some awesome awesome Tech we've gone through a lot of iterations and what is now known as the op stack which is the core code base that we have is modular it's scalable and we're confident that it will form the basis for scaling in all forms not just optimistic and not just uh roll-up for years to come so it was time to look again to the other part of the story because the technology is only half so earlier this year we launched the optimism Collective [Music] okay what is optimism Collective the collective is a band of communities companies and citizens united by a mutually beneficial pact to adhere to the Axiom that the impact to the collective by an individual should equal their profits so you can read more about that here another thing that we did was created a working Constitution so something to imbue what we're trying to get after and we have a few core principles here one of them is governance minimization if you can do something with a mechanism and without more complex complexity you should do that another one is forkability and in particular here I mean Pro forkability there's a difference between calling your code base open source and having the ability to click Fork on GitHub and actually creating systems which are easy to Fork this means we need to build tools that make it possible to Fork optimism as easily as possible this is very very important it's not just about being able to make a copy of the code it's about to being able to deploy the exact thing in a new instantiation okay so the world is going down this crazy path what is the optimism Collective really in all that context the optimism Collective is a spaceship built to care Humanity through the singularity I told you this was going to be ridiculous crazy presentation this little Opie cheeks so cute okay I think this is a Perfect Analogy but it's an interesting one you can think about the different components of the spaceship in particularly things like the engines and life support and things like that as the technological aspects the execution the settlement the consensus but there's also a key component to a spaceship which is the navigation and the AI presumably that helps you navigate this ship and that is the governance does anyone recognize this ship in the audience anyone yeah oh yeah of course this is from 2001 A Space Odyssey and of course the AI navigator on that ship the discovery xd1 or something like that was HAL 9000 the most famous AI villain probably of all time and the entire premise of that movie is basically that how goes Rogue and how becomes an autonomous AI that doesn't care about the people on board it only cares about completing its mission so how do we present becomes the question in optimism governance how do we prevent op9000 this is what we need to avoid we have three strategic pillars that we're taking here to try to prevent these outcomes number one is identity humans over Capital we need to give humans in these systems not just a voice but a fundamental ingrained notion of control it must be that the op9000 AI listens to its crew another we have is retroactivity reward after impact if we want to prevent these dangerous Futures that we might be headed towards don't put money into something which might cause that future instead reward once we know that that thing had the outcome that we were looking for don't let things backfire and the third I already talked about is forkability but I just want to stretch it again the optimism code base we'll talk about in a minute the op stack should be a one click a bit should have a one-click ability to deploy everything about the optimism system in an entirely new instantiation and I'm not just talking about a chain I'm not just talking about a sequencer I'm talking about the governance the voting the off chain tools which we use things like forums to actually come to consensus on things everything should be able to be forked we need Escape hatches if one optimism may not the one we currently know goes down we should be able to very easily fix that problem and create a new one and get over to it okay so how are we doing this in practice the op stack is the code base it is the blueprints of the spaceship optimism that we are building and like I said that includes not just parts of the chain which my uh my incredible teammates Calvin and Carl gave some great talks on and I could do a whole another hour talking about how incredible splitting up consensus and execution and settlement and all these things are and how this is going to summon an incredible crazy scalable blockchain future but they've already talked about that so I'm going to talk about the governance go watch their stuff and be a mace so the first thing we're doing with our governance is it is by camera I love saying that word it sounds very fancy but really it's for something quite simple it just means that optimism has two co-equal houses in its governance this is an example of us borrowing and standing on the shoulders of giants uh it's very simple but it's very clear and it's been very effective something like 40 of the world's governments today are not run by a single entity there are two entities that are co-equal these two houses that need to come together to make decisions keep each other in check so what are the two houses for optimism house number one is the token house like I said before token voting is a very powerful mechanism it has a great track record of extracting profit but left unchecked that's where we've seen the issues so the token house is the product profit-seeking House of the optimism Collective what does that mean well it means that it sets the parameters and sets the chain up for Success keep the chain healthy the other house is the citizens house the token house is one coin one vote the citizens house is one person one vote and its goal is to distribute the profits that are acquired by the token house how does it do that something called retroactive publicist funding there's our retroactivity again who in the crowd is familiar with this let me say raise of hands for rpgf oh yes the meme is spreading I love it okay I love it oh I will say it's important to think about when you're thinking from a mechanism perspective about the retroactive funding as what we're doing here right you can use retroactive funding for other things in public goods it's just that public goods are the most important so in a nutshell what is retro pgf it basically says two things one it is easier to agree on what was good than what will be good this is this retroactivity we talked about earlier and two it doesn't mean that a Dev working on optimism should wait for their code to be merged and like it to be good to be able to pay their paycheck it just means that it's not the collector's responsibility it's the responsibility of the market so the other piece of this is to basically take VCS and free them oh yes so a key piece of this puzzle is that Venture capitalists are very good at predicting what things will succeed and they're very good at what they do the problem is that they are constrained because they need an exit and if you need an exit then you can only invest in things which are going to extract value to provide that exit so rep the point of retroactive funding is to give the VCS an alternative way out and mean that they can invest in things that are just pieces of code that don't take a fee that don't do anything because they will be rewarded in the future so we're going to change the game for those those sneaky VCS okay so that's what we're doing I'll talk a little bit about what is next for optimism and how are we going about implementing these designs I'm talking about here there's a whole lot more I could say about the modular retro pgf and some really cool things we're doing now that is very connected to how we're building the tech on the blockchain side but I think the most important thing to say is that when you're building Rockets you should expect some failures look at that these videos are amazing if you guys haven't watched some of them just truly truly awe-inspiring the reality is to get the spaceship optimism into orbit we're gonna have some crashes and we have built that ethos into the core of what we're doing iterate iterate iterate the governance will self-destruct that forkability that I talked about is built in and expected as we get this thing into orbit the governance will self-destruct we even put that in our constitution the Constitution can be modified for the first four years until we reach a final one and another much more practical thing that we do is we run optimism in seasons so we've had two seasons of governance so far we're going to enter the third very shortly and in each one we take a step back we have something called the reflection period and we look at what's been going well and what's not we fix the things that are not going well we emphasize the things that are going well we run in seasons I'm very excited for season three it's gonna be so good the last thing that I want to just say here as I close up is that this is not a purely charitable endeavor while we now can see in the distance the end game for blockchain scalability it is going to take a very very long time and a very large number of people to bring us to the technological future we're talking about here there is countless Innovations countless pieces of code countless improvements that we're going to need to make so it's not just that we want to fund public goods because we're nice it's because we need to create a global Collective of people that are contributing towards this technology no team alone is going to do it no team alone is going to do it so we're focused on the critical technological impact it's not a charity hopefully I convince you at the start that public goods like solving global warming Ubi deforestation is the right place to go but the op stack is the most important public good for us today so the last thing I just want to say is like okay this is a big Grand Vision what does it look like for success for us I think that if optimism can build the blueprints for the spaceship prove that these Kinks can fly and create an initial cohort of citizens that are ready for whatever comes next personally I would consider that a success and what we're trying to build at optimism so I'll leave you with that thank you very much how do you see that uh governance playing with the other uh Layer Two Community participants so I think that so the question was yeah how do we see it's playing with other layer twos what I hope is that we don't and I I've certainly I think that we can avoid having negative some games right what would be really bad would be if we saw a bunch of layer twos that we're trying to basically pay different people to move one place or another and just doing extremely negative some behavior that doesn't really do anything so I think our goal of the governance should be cooperation and I would also love to see more cooperation like I would love for other uh layer two projects to be retroactively funded by optimism for building code that we can use um so I hope that I see it going in a Cooperative Manner and that's certainly a culture that we're trying to imbibe with optimism yeah hi Ben I'm Han hi great talk great great enthusiasm and I think we're all learning a lot from your governance thinking um I think I kind of followed the slides but I really got lost on the VC one can you just elaborate on are you trying to disrupt the VC model what's the thinking there yeah so I mean in some sense again It's The End okay so I'll go back to my my retro funding slides let's see here so retroactive public goods funding is basically about the collective as prescribing a budget to some thing that it is going to fund in the future retroactively so what's an example of this an example of this is dependencies in the optimism code base right so if someone builds a tool we use that tool in the optimism code base that has a value to us it has an impact on us and it should be rewarded with profit and so the point is once we start using that and once we see that it has an impact we will take that and we will give it money what this means is that a VC can invest in the person building that tool even though that tool is not taking a fee it has no Revenue model it has nothing but the knowledge that it or the hope that it will be funded in the future will allow the VCS to invest in it so I don't know about disruption I think the point is to Leverage What VCS do really well which is predict outcomes and put Financial bets behind that what we want to do is we want to unconstrain those investments from having to go towards things that are profitable because they extract money out instead of extracting money out of some system these projects will receive money from the collective yeah hopefully that helps thank you Ben you and optimism are awesome my question is about season three how can one get involved oh get on the Forum get on the Discord start talking I mean look if you are a believer in this vision and a participant in the community you are an optimist and something the whole point of doing these seasons is that we have periods of time called reflection periods where we don't do any votes we don't distribute any Capital we just talk about what went well and what didn't and everything that's going on is out in the public so the best thing you can do is come get involved if you want to sign up to be a delegate and get some people to delegate to you and get some voting power you can even do that but I would say you don't have to do that just come watch what's going on and make suggestions on how we can improve that's how you can get involved yeah thank you um I said it was similar but uh yeah I had a question but it was similar but let me just ask again so I'm one of the projects who wants planning to launch on launching on optimism so just curious how will this model of redirect funding um might be affect the current model where typically go you apply for Grant after that there's like some potential VC fundraising so would it potentially bring more VCS early because um or like maybe you can give example a little bit would be great to understand yeah so it's really interesting there's a lot to be said about how and we were thinking very deeply about how to make retropcgf work and work well and the reality is if you want to have people make upfront Investments with an expectation of future return you need to prove a track record of claiming that you're going to give out money and giving out that money and that is not going to be a one and done thing you could take a perfectly working retro pgf mechanism and at Day Zero it might not generate any interest after a year of proving that it does Investments it might generate a lot of interest so effectively one way to interpret that question is how do we scope the kinds of impact that we're going to reward and when so at the beginning we're very focused on the core elements of the op stack which are the technological basis for what we're building and part of that is because we think it's something more manageable it's a community that we're very very well connected to it's something that we think we can take on over time we need to expand that scope of impact and I think one of the fascinating open questions right now is how impact works on the application layer because clearly if you're a project you know a uniswap V1 is a great example of this didn't take any fee was massively important created an explosion of value for ethereum that's the kind of thing that probably should be retroactively funded too so I would say that's a little bit farther off because we need to give a really good track record and we're going to start with that code but as we expand that's going to be one of the most fascinating I think components to how we build out the collective so just like this guy get on the Forum start talking about it we'll figure it out together Amazing Ben thank you so much cool thank you guys great presentation with a lot of optimism