# The Future History of the Open Internet by Kevin Owocki (Devcon5)

- Speakers: [Kevin Owocki](https://streameth.org/speakers/kevin-owocki)
- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2020-10-09
- Duration: 20:13
- Topics: blockchain, smart contracts, distributed ledger, ethereum
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-RZ3PjPkKQko
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ3PjPkKQko

## Description

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https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/5/the-future-history-of-the-open-internet

Human communication systems have always ebbed & flowed between being open & closed.  From the founding of the Free Software Foundation in 1985, to the beginnings of the open source movement in the 1990s, to the historic battles between Linux & Microsoft, to the publication of the Bitcoin Whitepaper in 2008, to the rise of Github, Google, Facebook, and Amazon, there is a rich history of progress on open, permissionless, systems.The internet is the most powerful human communication system in history.  The internet changed the world because it allowed humans to move information across a network; and now we have the internet of money: the ability to move financial value across the internet.  What will participation in the internet of money look like?  What will the future history of our era of the internet look like?  In this talk, Gitcoin Founder Kevin Owocki will talk about the history of the open internet + project these trends forward into 2020 and beyond.

Speaker(s): Kevin Owocki
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Society and Systems
Keywords: open internet, future, general

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Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. 
Devcon 5 was held in Osaka, Japan on Oct 8 - 11, 2019.
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## Transcript

my name is Kevin walky I am one of the cofounders of get coin which is made possible by consensus and a community member out of Boulder Colorado Oh she'll Colorado the talk that I pitched at Def Con is entitled the future history of the open Internet and I think I've given a lot of talks about dev relations and building open-source communities this is by and large the most abstract talk that I've ever that I've ever given and I think that for that reason it's one that's a little bit outside of my comfort zone because as a software engineer really like to focus on being pragmatic and on things that are tangible to me and at the same time I do not have a crystal ball I do not know what the future history of the open Internet is going to be but I do feel strongly as a community member as an etherion and as a father and as a member of the Colorado scene that this is the one of the most important talks that I could be giving at Def Con this year and it's because I'm increasingly worried about the direction of of the world at a time in which you could argue that our Industrial Age institutions are crumbling in terms of credibility and the world struggles with the inability to do collective sense making because of fake news and other challenges like climate change for me atheria m-- is a shelling point where I can come together with other people who have hope of building a new world and new systems that are not subject to the same sort of issues and so I think that it would be appropriate for me to talk for it to start my talk about the future history of the open Internet with talking about the present history of the open Internet and I and I think that for me you that starts in 1985 with Richard Stallman and the founding of the Free Software Foundation and say what you will about Richard Stallman's politics these days I believe that being work that the Free Software Foundation did in 1985 was really important in defining a category of software that was free as in Libre as in freedom not as in free beer and the goal of this community was to advocate for software which would give you the right to a run the software B study the software and make changes to it and C we redistribute the software with or without changes and the reason why this rule set was important to Richard Stallman was that in a world increasingly intermediated by software the decisions that we make could be influenced by software creators and so the question in my mind is always is this software doing the the right thing for me as the end user does it have my interests in mind or does it have the interests of say a for-profit corporation in by proxy maybe a government behind it in mind and so I think that Richards work in advocating that we create open-source software that we curate free software that we can inspect and look and see is this in the best interest of users and then redistribute the software that we modify which is in the best interest of users was foundational the next the next event in the history of the open Internet I think is important is Linus travels creating Linux the Linux kernel in 1991 Linux went on to compete with Microsoft for the backbone the the sort of infrastructure of the the Internet in the 90s in today is one of the most popular distributions of software in the world today and it's all available for free Linux is an important operating system because they approved that open source software a group of people who have never met each other could create a product that compete with for-profit corporations the next event that I think is important in the history of the open Internet is the founding of Bitcoin by an individual or a group of individuals known as Satoshi Nakamoto which solved the double spend problem in the Byzantine general problem and created a new open-source money that we could use to transact online this was further extended I have italic veteran in 2015 like stop my monologue in safe you guys want to take a picture of this in tag your favorite Bitcoin maximalist with it I think that I get a real kick out of that conversation Vitalik extended the Bitcoin system by creating a system that would allow for programmable smart contracts and therefore the ability for the ethereum blockchain to do more than just move money across the world so a lot of people don't know this in this space but we're actually sitting at in 2019 at the apex of a long history of people who have been advocates for end users and for peer-to-peer digital systems and I think that that's important to think about when we're wondering what is our legacy in the etherium space and in the blockchain space and what will the world look like in 2035 when I'm retired or retiring and looking back on the work that we've done so as I transition from the present history of the open Internet to the future history I want to say I want to set expectations by saying that I don't think that I could possibly cover that entire scope within this 20 minutes and even if I could this subject matter is so abstract that I don't know that we would all come away with the same conception of it there's this fable that's actually quite famous where several blindin try to conceptualize what an elephant is by feeling it by touching the elephant and they come to disagree because the person who felt the trunk said this is a tree and the person who felt the Tusk said oh this is a weapon and I think that that's a great metaphor for what is web 3 and what we're building today because I think that in some versions of this fabled some of these blind men actually come to blows because they disagree about what they're conceptualizing and I think that's a great metaphor for some of the sense making that we've been doing on crypto Twitter about what web 3 is so with that caveat aside I'd like to move on by talking about what I view as the primary story of the creation of the open Internet of the people here at Def Con which I called the hero's journey so like many of you I grew up in a small town with small-town values community family peace in Brotherhood and like many of you I went off to college to get educated I have a computer science degree but studied a few other things in school eventually launched my career by moving to a big city Philadelphia than New York City and then I got a big person job so you work your way up the corporate ladder and you're trying to please your boss so that they can please their boss but what hill are we really climbing when we're trying to support our families by working for these for-profit corporations and we're climbing the corporate ladder I found this path really distasteful and I felt like I was doing work that didn't match my values and I was working in finance I was working in a place where in order to feed my family to stay afloat in the world in order to it advanced my personal agenda I was working for some big corporate fat cat who was making more money than me and in my case specifically I felt like they were externalizing harm with the work that I was getting paid to do for them so I hated going into this office I hated everything about the meetings in the software that that I was writing and this is what I mean when I say that if theorem is a selling point for hope because my feeling is that in the etherium space we can do work that not only can advance our pocketbooks and I can support my family but I can also do work that's creating a new economy that can be better than the old economy that can do work that aligns with my values and this hero's journey isn't me it isn't just me I've talked to many of you all here at Def Con and I know that there are other people out there that feel this way the founding myth of aetherium is that we can create new transparent economic systems that can fundamentally be less corruptible than the old systems because the users can be owners of the economic systems because they're transparent and because we can program immutability into the economic system so even if the creator of the software assists becomes evil then the software system itself will still be a free piece of software it would still have the the end user interest in minds and then I think that this is even multiplied in importance because from first principles the internet of money could be huge if you think about what the Internet of information did to our society because it was the core innovation was that a group of computers could transmit information across across the internet without an intermediary everything that was based on top of information in society was fundamentally changed by the internet our media our politics the way were entertains and if you if your reason about the Internet of money in that way and you ask yourself what is built on top of money well the answer to me is job's is banking insurance investments gaming and gambling there are so many things in society that are built on top of on top of money and if we can build them based upon the etherium main that and the etherium based technologies then we're gonna be able to create a economic system that is hopefully freer fairer and more open than the one that existed before and as someone who as I said before has small-town community values and I believe what we're doing in Colorado with respect to community is working it's a really great place to to live and work the neighbors are friendly we have an economic system in which we can transact in our local economy and we can take care of we can take care of each other I'm really hopeful that the etherium based internet will allow us to take what's working in our local communities and scale it past to pass what's the suggested cognitive limit in humans called Dunbar's number so Tumblr's number is a suggestive cognitive limit in which says that you can basically only have stable relationships with up to five people in York in 15 people in your super family or 150 people in your tribe and so this is a cognitive limit in humans it exists and it's it's basically something that we evolved in our hunter-gatherer days and the the sort of like composable things that are working in our local communities is that we're having repeat interactions we're having possible win wins in our interactions with people in our local communities and we're having low miscommunication ideally with people in our local communities so my hope is that with aetherium creating a new internet in which Trust is able to be managed and move around that we're going to be able to scaled on Mars map Dunbar's number so the internet was a fundamentally foundationally chain it conditionally changed the way we interact with each other because it allowed you to access someone from across the world but it didn't allow you to trust someone from across the world and it and it didn't allow you to create a meaningful relationship or a stable social relationship with people across the world and I think that if we can program our sentence sentence into our money then we can create incentives which will allow us to have more stable social relationships across the world the the final principle that I want to talk about really quick is the Matthew effect which is basically to explain sometimes as the cumulative effect of a cumulative advantage and it can be observed in many aspects of life in systems where where the rich get richer the people who have resources continue to monopolize the resources and and my hope is that because we have a new financial system that we're building in the etherium space not that everything will these these new systems that we're building in the etherium space will just magically be better but because we have the properties of transparency and immutability we can build systems that are fundamentally resistant to the accumulation the cumulative accumulation of capital over time and what's really exciting is that this year at Def Con we can all point at defy and open fie and say you can do you can do transactions on get coin in order to work for open source software you can can you can transact with stable coin you can make investments with compound and now we even have extensibility of compound that we can we can we can do transactions that benefit other people with with our die and it's it's with this in mind that I'm a little bit worried that we're just gonna see a region so the existing financial system and the incentive structures that exist in the existing financial system re-emerge but with aetherium based technology so I think the etherium community is bundled up as a set of technologies but it's also a set of values around censorship resistance around decentralization around pushing power to the edges and there's we've seen a lot of vc chains launched over the last several years last year or so that are basically taking technology that looks and sounds a lot like etherium but i don't fundamentally think it's bundled up with the same sort of values that we're seeing from the etherium space and in the founding myth of etherium so the thought that i would leave you with today is that we're designing these power structures now in 20 years you will look back at DEFCON 5 in japan and the work that we've done in the etherium space and it'll be shaped by the contours of the bull and bear market and probably by the regulatory regimes that we that we go back and forth with in our various governments it'll be shaped by the trade-off between surveillance the capitalists need to surveil your users and make money off of the data and the fundamental user right to have privacy and we're gonna decide what kind of network we're building for our networked species what kind of power structures there's going to be is it going to be a one-to-many relationship with power brokers that have monopoly of monopolies over our investment and it our employment relationships or will the power be slightly more distributed in an oligarchical type model where we all have local lords that we that we deal with in the u.s. we call our system of government a representative democracy in which we have about a hundred senators three hundred something House of Representatives that that we differ our power to and decision-making power one of the things that I've been sharing ideas with the halls of Def Con and over sake in the bars of Def Con has been what would the world look like if we were completely peer-to-peer network species if there was government in the financial system that was buy of and for the people and I think that it's really interesting to think about deconstructing jobs and deconstructing and buyer to constructing investments pushing them into a peer-to-peer network and then rebuilding a financial system on top of that the work that we're doing at git coin is designed to create peer-to-peer jobs for software developers and this is a real visualization of what our mesh network of jobs looks like you can see that there are super connectors that are brokers on the network but you can see that there's also a lot of peer-to-peer activity my vision is that we will all work for the open Internet one day and we'll be able to transact with each other support open-source software in in and support our families by doing that and one of the things that I try to remember as a design principle at git coin is that these nodes in these networks are three-dimensional humans that have families that have needs that have their own sets of values that have their own backgrounds and communication across the edges of these networks will be fundamentally hard to to facilitate value because of the communication barriers across this network and we and one of the things that we're really trying to program into our system is is empathy we're all spending face-to-face time with each other this week and we won't get to do that probably for another year or so and so when you're transacting in this peer-to-peer network building in ethical design considerations that remind you that your were transacting with an actual three-dimensional human will be important because the contours of this peer-to-peer financial system that we're building are going to be the way value flows in in this period of here this network species that we're building and we can always choose between building something that that enriches ourselves at the expense of others and building something that climbs both hills at once and we're doing this all collectively in the etherium space when we build the etherium OS which I've started to conceptualize as the operating system for a new financial system and then the DAP store that we're building on top of this new financial system which includes things like Dallas which includes things like peer-to-peer jobs which includes your investments and probably many more things by DEFCON six I get coin our mission is to grow and sustain open source software we believe that open source software creates billions of dollars of value in the world and that software developers don't get to work on and that they don't get to capture as much value as as they as they create and so we're fundamentally trying to create a better world for software engineers and trying to create a world where software developers work just for the internet I'm really lucky to be working on a use case that has highly technical people in involved in the transactions that we're creating because they'll get through the barriers of signing metamath transactions of getting gas of figuring out how to resubmit their transactions on on meta masks when the gas network is clogged but we all have a lot of work to do as a community to make sure that the most essential is a decentralized chain that's out there is the one that's the most transacted and I hope that when you're building the new financial system you'll remember the rich history that comes from the open source and free software movements because we're building the future of our networked species thank you very much [Applause] you