Cults, truth, values and the bubble | Devcon SEA

[Music] well all right that's not the actual title but that is the actual title so yeah originally this presentation was intended at something more technical but now I found it actually more interesting to bring something more humanistic here to the stage and this title might sound confusing and I'll try to cover a lot of ground here and I'm very excited to do that with you together today so a bit of a prease so yeah my background here is quite diverse um so I used to be a software engineer for a while um I used to work in research and now I'm a bit more in a coordinative perspective but I'll actually get right into it to give you a bit more of that so values I'll start with talking about values of individuals in the ecosystem and how I perceive different people here and how where I allocate myself as well and then give you a bit more of a landscape of yeah different companies different parts of the ecosystem in this value um framework then I'll talk a bit about economical and political games truth Cults the bubble and I'll try to tie that all together at the end even though it might sound confusing now it will like make a lot more sense when I go into it so I like to ask myself the question a lot is why what's actually my motivation why I'm here and what is the motivation why other people are here and so to put it in a very simple framework I realized most people can be described in this kind of triangle so either people care a lot about decentralization in the space people enjoy fun in the community or people care a lot about monetary gain and often that gets a bit dis disguised or it's not very clear and so it's really nice to have very direct conversations with people about that and for me personally has been a bit like that so I started with a a lot of idealism I realized at some point there's also a lot of money to be made here which is often not directly talked about that much but in the end I stayed because of the people and a community and I'm slowly going back towards more idealism and impact but if we look at the space overall actually it makes sense to extend this framework a bit and add one more the intellectual challenge which is very interesting for a lot of us here and so if we do that and we try to map the space a bit so then we get to a landscape which looks a bit like this and for me that was pretty interesting to just allocate different parts of the ecosystem and also see like where does it fit where could I personally fit with my values and this is not the full truth but I found it really interesting to to map the landscape a bit like that and maybe that's helpful or interesting to one of you yeah continuing here towards the the games we're playing the economic games in the ecosystem so there was a really good talk recently this week by kristofh schel from flash Bots we're actually in a market structure where there's a lot of private value for example private order flow the stable equilibrium is actually a full Monopoly which is the opposite of decentralization do we want that let's look at what the market actually looks like for example here the Builder Market some of you might know it's a dooi basically at the moment but in a equilibrium actually it would be a full-on monopoly and why is that like that or for example looking at how order flow works also here it would be basically equilibrium of like 1 controlling all of order flow but actually it looks more like this like a very complex structure so that means in the background there's a lot more political games happening than we are aware of and it's very interesting to observe those once you're like a bit deeper into the space and the question is how do we not devour ourselves in this like internal political Warfare but actually focus on the issues we care about open question for now might get back to that so another angle to look at this is like what do we TR TR in in the space so here we can put it on another framework so I feel like the space emerged a lot from losing trust in government institutions then trusting more in protocol and code or do we actually just trust ourselves because often we have this overemphasis on just wanting to trust the protocol the code something predictable but maybe there's something else and so I yeah kind of ended up with this nice midwit diagram I really like those so some of us really work hard I used to really work hard and want to save the world but in the end Also let's have some fun let's not be too serious in this space but also really just enjoy ourselves once in a while and so one question that arose in my Reflections there is if you just have fun sometimes crypto feels like a big big playground of technology and do we then still actually care about issues or do we just become CH and have yeah just have fun do nothing to change the world for me actually it's more the way if we can relax a bit if we don't have to have these like political warfar for example stuff like like this then we can actually be more united and aligned in the ecosystem over all and so to continue from here what are actually if we look at ourselves really reflect deeply on emotional space our needs as humans here like what do we actually care about why are we here and what makes us happy for me actually it's really mostly about the people and to be more seen as like a whole human being to be sometimes confidently insecure and not know things that's something which really fulfills me and that's also a reason why things like this place here as a conference but for me it feels more of a than a conference with the Cozy spaces the smaller groups or popup cities have been th thriving where you actually get a feeling of community but then also there's other dangers there if you become such a closed ecosystem of like Community really close to each other but then there can also be you see myself there at subin for example it can sometimes become almost cult-like we have we're like a bubble in ourselves so what about this vibe that the whole ecosystem feels a bit like a bubble with its own language and we don't actually know how to talk anymore with the outside world is that a danger as well and so I realized in a very interesting conversation with Phil Dian that the world is actually watching us a lot more closely than we think um for example the New York fed recently published a paper in August where they were looking at tornado cach sanctions and I was astonished by the amount of detail how they actually understand the Builder landscape and the graphs I showed you before so I think it's also time to start talking to this world and not only see them as the enemy but maybe find a more collaborative approach there so to conclude based on all of this we're in a complex space here but sometimes you're a bit too too much stuck in your head because we try to build protocols which predict every single edge case but by evaluating things we can also trust more our intuition be humans be vulnerable be stupid like I often also have this impostor syndrome even though we work really close with ethereum researchers and we like very deep in the ecosystem that're like I know nothing but all of us sometimes feel like that and even though we can still create things we can dare to also be on stage RS in while like myself here and sometimes peek outside of the bubble talk to people outside of the space try to speak their language and put things in like simple words and simple Frameworks like I tried to do it here today thank you thank you hi good to have you here any questions um I do have one like what do you think is the way for us to break out of the bubble because it's the language is so different you know how do we start like understand where other people come from like start from the other person's starting point bring bring bring things in really into really simple words simple language find analogies from other people's world and to describe it from there and then bring them closer in is that how you Uno your mom yeah I'm still struggling with that but I'm making some progress slowly my dad is easier cool uh do we have any uh question from the audience any questions I guess we can have discussion prly after this cool happy to talk later thank you so much thank you [Applause]