# Financial Nihilism vs FOSS Culture: The Battle for Ethereum’s Soul | Devcon SEA

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-09
- Duration: 26:15
- Topics: Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-Q_bsYpVfhHs
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_bsYpVfhHs

## Description

In recent years, the Ethereum ecosystem has witnessed a stark dichotomy: the rise of financial nihilism through memecoins and rampant speculation on one side, and the foundational principles of the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) community, emphasising public goods, interdependence, and intrinsic rewards, on the other. 

This talk will delve into the experiences of interacting with FOSS developers, shedding light on their views and concerns regarding Ethereum’s current trajectory.

Speaker(s): Eleftherios Diakomichalis
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Cypherpunk & Privacy
Keywords: Values, FOSS, Decentralization, culture

Follow us: https://twitter.com/efdevcon, https://twitter.com/ethereum, https://warpcast.com/devcon
Learn more about devcon: https://www.devcon.org/
Learn more about ethereum: https://ethereum.org/ 

Visit the https://archive.devcon.org/ to gain access to the entire library of Devcon talks with the ease of filtering, playlists, personalized suggestions, decentralized access on Swarm, IPFS and more.

Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. 
Devcon SEA was held in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov 12 - Nov 15, 2024.
Devcon is organized and presented by the Ethereum Foundation. To find out more, please visit https://ethereum.foundation/

## Transcript

[Music] [Music] my name is alos and today the title of my talk is financial nihilism versus Force culture the battle for ethereum soul I know it sounds weird right uh so uh a bit of background on me I previously found it at the radical project which is a censorship resistant and privacy preserving net work for code collaboration you can think of it as a decentralized alternative to GitHub it's a one of its kind uh what radical tries to do is basically ensure Open Access open as in open source everywhere while at the same time actually uh trying to protect the privacy of of the different contributors radical is live uh as of last month we had our 1.0 moment it's usable it's not vaporware please go use it uh and let us know what you think uh but um over the last two years I was also I have been also contributing to a project that is called drips which is um a decentralized toolkit for funding public goods that is focusing on uh dependency trees and drips takes takes a very opinionated take on how to fund public goods the way the system works is that um a funder organization in this this is a real case with enss selects a number of uh projects that they consider critical uh this could be part of their developer grants uh this could be part of their retr pgf program we have multiple different use cases uh but what they do is effectively they come together they decide on which projects are important they set weights for each projects as you can see behind me and then after that they decide to allocate some capital and that Capital can go as a oneof payment or it can take place uh using U by the second payments so that's the first part uh but where get where trips gets more interesting is that as we onboard these different open source projects within the system what we do is we um ask them to specify on chain their maintainers uh and additionally we ask them to specify on chain their dependencies um and through that process effectively we building a a tree uh where Capital flows through um and the problem that we're trying to solve is I think like best illustrated by this graphic I'm sure that many of you have seen this but the main idea behind this problem is that we have critical infrastructure out there um on the internet um and many times you have a random person somewhere you know somewhere in the world like like tirelessly you know trying to keep that that package you know well maintained and clearly that's unsustainable and we think that we have to do better um the North Star we have with drips um is this idea of what we call continuous dependency funding what's fascinating one of the many fascinating things about ethereum is that you can have this um programmable protocols that generate Revenue um the model that we want to prove to the world is that you can have those Dows and protocols that do generate Revenue but actually you can now have completely new value flows for developers imagine every time a dollar is traded in Unis swap you know every piece of dependency that actually powers that that project uh to be able to receive maybe 0.001 right we think that these are the things that actually are really possible um with with crypto and you know we try to make that happen uh but today I'm not going to talk to you um about drips and mechan design all of those things instead I want to talk to you about some of the things we hear as we onboard different open source projects to etherum and over the last year we have onboarded more than 200 uh open source projects to ethereum and and some of those projects the majority actually are non crypto um they don't work in our industry and many times they also you know don't understand our industry uh some examples that you can see behind me uh this year we managed to bring the RAS programming language on chain uh through a project that they have that's called G2 RS uh we also manag to bring on chain uh a really popular um uh frontend framework that is called zelte uh and then many many many more uh projects and as we on board them we actually get to talk to them um and when we talk to them this is where interesting things happen uh because our worldview uh living and breathing within ethereum and crypto networks many times is completely different to what they perceive so today I want to share some of those um some of those learnings with you uh and specifically I want to focus on a few criticism that we keep hearing over and over again and I want to cut straight to the core Point um which is by far the most important thing and the you know most depressing thing I have to say that we keep hearing from non crypto developers is this that basically hey ethereum is interesting but you know like it feels like a casino to us and and it's so disappointing um especially for people that like you know we we work in the space we see the upside and the potential of that space that this is still you know the dominant P perception that that that that people have about our space and it's not just you know and it's not just non crypto folks like recently many well-known crypto thinkers like poia a person that like his his writings have actually been educating us over the years he basically he wrote the exact same thing he's like you know what  that I'm done with this this space is just a casino it gets worse every year right so so there's something problematic here and um I wanted to share some thoughts with regards to how I'm looking into this and how I'm trying to explain this and in order to do this I had to start on this on this concept of financial nihilism this is not a well defined concept uh but the way I understand it Financial nihilism is characterized by a loss of faith in established systems and a search for alternative Pathways to security and fulfillment right sounds familiar to a lot of crypto people because I think that many of us actually Shar the exact same skepticism towards systems right uh in addition what's going on with people that have this view of the world is that they have this very shortterm mindset uh and where that's come where that's coming from uh is from the fact that they think that there's no solid foundation to trust long term if there's nothing you know meaningful in the long term of course you know I'm just going to be flipping coins like you know day by day and moving from the one project to the another nothing matters right so in Finance this frequently manifest on hyper speculation um selfishness at the core and then fundamentally like nothing to believe in as you can see this is not um just specific to our industry uh but it has found a great home in our industry uh what's interesting is that the same you know like like loss of trust Faith skepticism towards traditional uh systems we share that I identify with that statement but I feel that like what a lot of of the builders within the ethereum space try to do is they try to build an alternative rather than actually say you know Screw everything you know everything sucks everything is a pony you know nothing is worth doing anything right but while I feel that you know within the ethereum developer Community we do a lot of that uh I think that has still failed to translate outside of the crypto community so outside of the crypto Community um we struggle to show many use cases over time uh that go Beyond speculation right the dominant view here is that okay you have the speculative stuff and then you have some other things that come and go you know and like I feel that we really have failed to to to to show um in in an engaging and retaining way um this this this promise of the space and in addition you know we have other sit here which is like you know D is now trendy here right like is this great no it's not I think it's actually quite problematic and it's quite problematic to a lot of you know young developers that actually don't have all the the historical background but these are you know all of those things create this imbalance in perception and culture and I really think that this is actually is is hurting our space and the interesting thing is that every cycle it gets worse right like you know 2017 we had icos probably better than 2021 we had you know many sketchy nft projects projects and this cycle uh apparently it's all about mcoins and I'll say this up front this isn't the talk where it says mecoin mcoins bad don't touch them absolutely not uh but out of curiosity like how many of you are holding a Bitcoin can you raise your hands okay how many of you have traded a mcoin at some point in your life okay almost half of the room and how many of you have profited from a mcoin even just slightly bit same okay very interesting I think this this demonstrates the point uh mcoins do not per se mean Financial nihilism and I I want to clearly demonstrate that point but because I think it's subtle um the good case of mem coins of course is that you know it's about a good laugh right like it's about having fun it's about getting creative with visuals uh it's it's a  you to the status quo many times or as we saw with the recent elections it's it's a commentary on the state of things and many times these things actually come even above profit there's there's some noise yes do you want to uh should I replace this one okay sounds good sorry for that uh that will eliminate the that will eliminate the noise we have so yeah so back back to mcoins H so mcoins the the good case right so so the good case is is is a lot more things rather than just profit many times it creates this sense of belonging and Collective identity connect ing people across different backgrounds and and geographies right and sometimes you even might make some money as as like you know clearly this like quick Guerilla survey that we just did here demonstrates uh but but unfortunately I think that you know the use cases we've seen are still very few where that is what's happening um on the other side the Bad Case MIM coins usually translate into hyper gambling right and um many times you know they try to present these projects as fair game games in comparison to you know every other Pony in crypto right uh but many times these games are actually rigged at their core and they masquerading as Fair um and you know we can even go further right like you know I'm wondering many times is this what community can be uh but I don't want to make a moral judgment on that one but you know fundamentally many of these cases leave you with like more loneliness more selfishness and and and more trouble and you know if you think about where we are like uh you probably have seen this uh you know right now there's like a dominant investment thesis even about the mcoin super cycle right and uh this is this is uh from a a a talk from a investor and Trader called Murad mahmudov and he's making all sorts of really interesting points if you haven't seen that it's on YouTube I highly recommend actually watching that talk because he really touches on a lot of interesting points I don't endorse or believe many of the things that he says but I think it's a very interesting analysis of what's going on in that space and why that uh mcoin super cycle might be happening and um he sharing all sorts of interesting um reasons for that he has a set of reasons that he calls the internal to the crypto industry like for instance you know every VC coin is launching in basilon valuations so of course you know mem coins appear to be a lot more fair right and things like that uh but additionally he has a lot of external lesion which I I find very interesting and some of the things that he says is that you know you have accelerated prices of everyday Goods right you have the fear of ai ai is here to take your jobs go gamble you know uh you have like you know wealth and income in inequality um and many more things which all fundamentally lead down to this idea of like you know crisis of meaning and the thing that I start to think especially as it appears that we're entering another bull cycle is that if more is right and we are indeed entering in a mcoin super cycle I don't think that again we're ready for this we're just going to have another another um cycle like you know 2021 where we're going to suffer again to Showcase what what what what crypto could be Beyond just the speculative use case uh this is this is a belief uh from uh some of my friends at ferse that actually I think went went quite viral a few weeks ago we can remain Cypher Banks longer that they can remain Deion I start to challenge that I'm actually you know losing hope uh on on on this specific thing in fact what I see is that even in our own circles I feel that you know the markets are absorbing us faster than we can provide an alternative um and I want to stay positive so yeah um I've seen seen a lot of friends you know that went uh from you know interesting thinkers promising actually into like PVP sealers and yeah YOLO right um yeah something is problematic here and we even keep telling ourselves even more funny stories about that stuff it's great we stress testing this infrastructure right like this infrastructure is so tested now because of all of those mem coins we've seen and good examples will come and you know many times I feel like the people that dropping the the the good examples will come keep pointing at vitalic basically redistributing many of the mem coins that people send to him right uh but you know that's not scalable that's not sustainable uh and of course you know it's a wider phenomenon not specific to our industry so let's keep closing our eyes um so all of that makes me think that actually there are um conflicting cultures in crypto I think we are at this point in time um and there are many reasons for that but I think it's important that we get to recognize that and we as developers actually start to get a lot more strategic with regards to the type of messaging uh that we want to communicate I think what's going on is actually described really nicely by vitalic this is one of his uh older posts I think earlier earlier this year or later in 2023 where what he tries to do is that he tries to outline the different actors within the crypto ecosystem and their motivations and you see clearly here that you have uh the builders right then you have the token holders and the defi users this at the moment is heavily skewed towards you know the DJ Vibes uh that you know the after number go up U many times at the extend at the expense of a lot of other things and then the interesting thing from that is that you have he has this this bottom this box here the pragmatic users and I feel that this is almost the core of it um what has happened is that we have priced out all of those pragmatic users right most of them for a long time they couldn't use ethereum AET so ethereum AET was not for them so what happened is that you left with the builders and then you you you left with the de and I think you know somewhere there there's also a bit of a class so there's a lot more that you know on the criticisms uh I'm not going to go through all of them uh this is another common one scammers Paradise I'm a developer and still you know worried to actually interact with many of those DBS uh there's a lot more to that there's like ethereum as masc creating as decentralization I don't believe believe that but I think some of the trade-offs we made collectively in the past with regards to bringing this infrastructure to the world are now kind of biting us um um plus many other things that actually are happening on on the Dow space but I want to leave at least a few minutes and you know give you some positive stuff right so what can we do about it uh this isn't you know a talk that tries to depress you um so as I said before I think this whole idea about financial nihilism goes down to a crisis of meaning so I think fundamentally what we have to do is we have to actually give people Something to Believe In and not just give them show them the thing it's not about talk anymore right like we've been building for a while so we need to show them actually uh what What's possible and I think you know the the the the the the the foundation for that actually lies within Cypher Punk and and and force culture right again cyer punks actually believed in something they believed in in in individual freedom and they believed in empowering individuals in an increasingly authoritarian world right it wasn't about nothing and it wasn't about hypers speculation in fact most of them were actually highly skeptical about that right um and I think I think vitalic does a really good job of outlining values that we need to start again you know go back to those roots and think about open and Global participation what is it that we have to say about that right sens resistance or datability credible credible neutrality and and and a lot more um and most importantly I think we need to stop this  like I think like we're educating people that dig and equal Cypher Punk but has nothing to do with each other like and I think it's important that you know we call it out what it is I'm not calling for any censorship absolutely no ethereum should remain neutral infrastructure but I think we should also you know start telling the story that that you know we we believe in so I wanted to close with a few more ideas that actually we hear from Builders uh some of the positive stuff some of the positive narratives one of the most surprising things to me is that how powerful this idea Still Remains eight years later like we talked to builders and they were like oh ethereum the world computer that was exciting but it didn't happen somehow right and I feel that we actually quite close um you know uh this is from Gavin Wood's presentation back in the day uh about that but back back then you know we described ethereum as the stack of different Technologies and we actually quite close to having many solutions there we can think of ethereum as a stack we just need to tell that story um same story um ethereum as an alternative to Big Tech that excites developers I can tell you that people are super excited about that but again we failing on them every solution we're building is kind of hated on AWS and you know Google cloud and call it right uh but I think luckily some people start to organize and I heard that yesterday I wasn't here but there was a massive ethereum Cypher Bank Gathering and now they're producing this great ethereum Cypher Bank starter kit which actually starts to look like a stack starts to look like you know a bunch of readings uh it's a it's a great starting point and shout out to the web through privacy uh crew that uh is pushing all of that I think it's more needy now than ever um and then finally privacy um we like globally um yeah we are in in Peculiar we entering peculiar times privacy is more important now than ever um so yeah I think we should have something to say about that right uh so yeah so finally some more ideas uh smaller uh but developer events should focus on our Northstar I think Devcon this year they're doing a great job on that so shout out to the organizers I really feel that we're making progress on that I really think that developer event should be more about so now less tell and I know that I'm giving you a tell today but uh hey uh uh additionally I think that we should have a lot more dog fooding there's a lot of technology that we're building but we actually as the ethereum community we're not supporting that we're going for the convenient solution you know maybe we should take these things a little bit more seriously and then finally we should we should set a higher technical standard with regards to our values and principles um and we should do all of those things while keeping ethereum the tech stack as neutral infrastructure uh that's all I had um thank you so much thank you very much it was yeah super nice to hear uh your view of both cultures and also kind of interesting to see how many sort of meme coin dents are amongst us are you one yeah yeah me too I'm sorry I apologize I was feeling really bad I didn't put my hand up but um yeah I mean yeah we make the excuses anyway um we go to the questions um so there's just one so far I also have many but if you want to add more we have four minutes so now is your chance um I think you touched on this a little bit in the talk but um one of the questions was is it ethical to build apps that harness Deen greed to fund public goods does the end justify the means yeah I mean it's a great question I'm not uh I think making moral judgments is is is a tricky thing um so I think it's a it's a question that the person that wrote it needs to answer it for themselves and then act accordingly uh I believe in the values of ethereum and that's why in my presentation actually I continue to say that you know neutral infrastructure is the foundation for all of those things but I think additionally now we need to act and and we need to be a lot more tactical with regards to um our Communications so yeah not I don't have an answer for you I think this is a personal answer that you based on your morals you need to answer I think you made a comment during the talk actually that I sort of latched on to that I liked and this was um about vitalic uh donating meme coins or whatever and you said it's not scalable I think that can also apply here it's like okay fine you can build apps that you can Degen on to fund public goods but like probably only you are going to do that or like you and the few friends around you like so it's probably not so scalable and then you know by doing that you sort of encourage this uh yeah no totally I think beyond what you say and I agree with what you say uh the other interesting thing that's happening is that it feels like the DJ crowd is already looking elsewhere right they're are competing blockchains and you know they now many of them start to look elsewhere the reason for that is that what ethereum provides is quite different right if you're all after like speed and you know SQL database and something that is hand wavy decentralized well you know maybe this is not the place and I think for many of the you know mcoin Deen the the nists not all of them again as I communicate in my presentation yeah that might be a better place good okay um so maybe like we have another two minutes left one of my kind of things is like there is a bit of a push in this Cipher Punk community and like the fast mindset and like even within the Privacy Technologies you start to see um some projects or companies being a little bit criticized for not being like fully open source or having some licensing or whatever do you see this as like yeah basically like why do you see the community sort of like becoming so strong now like is it yeah was there a particular event or yeah do you have anything to say about this like the good Tech that you want to see but maybe isn't fully fast as well two questions yeah yeah the the first part of your question I think I think what happening is that you have this increased monopolization of the internet right you have the cloud work and many of the the conversations the open source Community the last few years had with regards to licenses is this open source is this somehow open source and all of that they are a product of that thing right basically what you have now you have these aggressive players that actually go and deploy a service of your open source thing and then the open source developers are left in a really weird position where they thought that they can make the sustainable but now actually they clearly can't because they competing against some of the most um well financed uh companies on the planet so I I think that the answer to this is again new business models new value flows for um open source software and some of those Technologies and it continues to be one of the things that excites me the most about the space right is this whole public goods funding space um I think we made some progress I think you know there's a lot more to be done there there but I think fundamental is about that it's about actually providing an alternative to those developers versus actually having to make those many times questionable decisions with regards to licensing and and yeah make those funny moves basically well I think we're right on time but I think this is a nice point to end it on and like I think if anybody can actually you know make the progress in the right direction it's exactly The Cypher fun Community who does have a bit of a I don't know like nicer not nicer way of thinking being I'm showing my preferences now but like you know honest ways of thinking maybe rational ways of thinking so um it feels like a much more Progressive way of thinking to me so it feels like this is where progress can be made so anyway hopefully we thank the speaker again and