# Who Validates You: Your Choice, or Someone Else's Code? — Stepan Tkach | United Network

- Channel: [ETH Belgrade Community](https://streameth.org/eth-belgrade-community)
- Date: 2026-10-06
- Duration: 27:24
- Topics: People & Blogs
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-pxLyTVFeXyI
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxLyTVFeXyI

## Transcript

Thank you. Uh it's a great pleasure for me uh to have a talk today here and the most important thing for me is that I have an opener speech on the second stage and uh I want to say a huge shout out for uh conference organizers and especially for Peter for this opportunity. Um so um today I would love to uh talk about um distributed systems uh human psychology and um how they are in interconnected and what stays yours when everything else is going to be automated. So uh buckle up. It could be a little bit uncomfortable but basically interesting. So let me first introduce myself. So who I am and why I have a skin in the game. I am an uh before the web before I enter web three in the late of 2017. Um I used to be a professional basketball player. Um I used to play in higher league in Ukraine. Uh I spent more than 10 years of my life. it was my career and um my coach says that I had a great basketball IQ and with that I have a potentially bright future um in a basketball but um for that period of time I had a lot of injuries a lot of traumas with which I I wasn't sure that I can keep going with that but still I had a dream to play in Barcelona And uh I keep pushing myself. But then um I got some health issues with which I cannot go further. And uh it was an unexpected event for me. And after that I was in a position where I had to figure out what to do next in my life. And uh I was looking for something new. And then I wanted to feel freedom and don't have a one point of control of my decisions like my coach was. Um I wanted I wanted to uh not to be tied to one place physically and I want to do something new and interesting like a blue ocean. And then randomly I met my old friend um and he shared me that he was interested in a stocks in a stock market. And after that after 15 minutes of our discussion he um explained he explained me a difference between u proof of work, proof of stake and delegated proof of stake on a piece of paper. And since the day um since the day I've spent my time uh mostly in a web three doing different things uh with different companies um like uh community building, trading and then marketing growth and I ended up in a business development and found out myself in a business development and as you can see in my story um there was one pattern that repeated itself but with a different uh versions and in a different corners and first I made a bet on one scene staked my identity to it and then it stopped worked for me and I was in a position again that I have to reinvent myself and I suppose that um every one of you in this room was in the um I suppose that every one of you in this room or even online um has their own version of this story. And the main question for all of us, what do you do when the one thing you built everything around no longer counts? And uh in terms um and keeping that in mind and keeping that in mind I'm asking myself uh I suppose I suppose that um most of you here uh saw that um entropic research uh with a potential threat of AI capabilities in terms of jobs. And as we can see here with the blue on this diagram, this is a potential um this is a potential theory while red is current reality of usage. And the gap is still huge and the real questions are how fast it fills uh the gap and how fast we could lose our jobs. And in terms of layoffs, what numbers do we have right now on the table? So here you can see the chart from the latest research of um from Financial Times just a week ago. It was published just a week ago. And uh in the in this January we had a huge layoff at Amazon for uh 16,000 people. And then in June we had a huge layoff from Oracle around like 21,000 and in July the latest one we had AI layoff from Visa more than two and a half thousand and uh if I remember correctly several months ago there was also a layoff from Coinbase and uh several crypto from and from several crypto the exchanges due to market conditions or due to AI innovation. So if you are lucky enough not to um not to lose your job uh for the past period, I can congrat. Uh but despite that, I can guess you were pushed to uh learn and implement AI things and AI automations in your daily routine. So it means that everyone in the current world pushed to become a multi-tool and that means that once only one specialization is no longer a mode and then means that adaptability is a new hard skill. And in terms of the uh in terms and in terms of adaptability, I have a a great example from my childhood. Uh when I was visiting grocery stores with my uh parents and um I saw that the cashier counted prices of the we uh with the weird thing uh called short, but on English it's um called abbecos. And then later I figured out that this abbecus was commonly used for uh in accounting in accounting and uh in it was very popular in the 20th century in Ukraine. Then later in the eight in the end of 80s and in the 90s uh accountants have to move to upgraded sync called calculator and then after in the 2010s they were obligated to um they were obligated to upgrade their skill set and handle computers with Excel tables. So that means they were obligated to implement new skill sets into their daily routine and they were pushed to evolve and they were pushed to become more efficient. And the question was what do you do when the one thing you built everything around no longer counts? And the answers are adapt, implement, and evolve. But what if over the long run the machine outperform us on a row on a row hard skill capacity by every metric a company measures and from my perception that means then the differentiator can't be the skill itself which means we have to look somewhere else and ask a different question. If hard skills are being devalued by AI, what stays valuable in a human being? So, but before let's do some gymnastics. Uh is there any like a dev or engineer in the room? Yeah, I see. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Perfect. So me personally, I'm not a tech guy, but I can run uh I can run a node or I can deploy a smart contract into android now you know like with VIP coding is way more easier. Yeah. So uh perfect and back into my slide um blockchain as we are and VR as a blockchain. So you will understand what it means uh a little bit later but right now I ask you to remember my question. If hard skills are being developed by AI, what's this valuable in a human being? So if you know the basics and if there is some depths in a room, uh I wouldn't go deep into that but I can I I will repeat what a blockchain is made of. First of one code and smart contracts, the rules. Second one is validators, the nodes and verifiers. Third one is wallets and addresses, identity in the network and the fourth one is the network itself, communication within shared state. But the crucial thing for a blockchain uh aside of electricity of course um the consensus and that's what makes it run. And without a consensus, the chain forks endlessly. And finalization is what lets the chain move forward. Now let's imagine one thing and do some gymnastics for a mind. Let's imagine that we can keep the architecture of blockchain but replace the components. with skipping same architecture but with a different point of application. And if we say about code and smart contracts, it could be the rules we run on beliefs, habits and all default settings that were installed in early years. Second one about validators, the people and system within which we are looking for approval. Third one, wallets and addresses. Your identities, professional, personal, online, gaming, decentralizes identity, decentralized identity and the network, your relationship and communities you belong to. But if we look a little bit deeper, we can figure out then in our body there is exist already an autonomous protocol called homeostasis. We have our heart, our lungs, our nervous system running within a shared consensus within asking us what do we think about it. So it means the body reaches consensus on its own but our conscious part isn't so lucky. So if the body can hold consensus without us who decides what counts as valid in our minds and as I understood h in some point of life we have default settings where we validate ourselves against rules pre-installed within our operating system and that operating system were pre-installed by someone else. But most of us never notice that. And for example, someone judgments, someone opinions like parental, cultural, or even environmental uh with uh someone's thoughts and com comments about us could be taken as our own. But yours it might not be. And for past four years I figured out two ways out. First one is a single player the solo path where you have to reduce the noise where you have to slow down and try to build a contact with yourself. Then ask yourself an uncomfortable questions. Three simple questions, not philosophical questions, but still hard enough. What I am not, what isn't mine? And what do I definitely not want? And the second way out, it's a multiplayer party therapy. And for the past years I understood that we can clearly separate whole therapy approaches in schools into two different ways. First one is a therapy of emotional contact and second one the therapy of labels. That means where first one is about releasing suppressed emotions and building a deep connection with yourself while the second one it's about a strict and structured frameworks and deep cognitive work. But here is important very important to mention that psychotherapy isn't psychiatry and some conditions generally need a doctor and medication. But don't fall into the trap. Not every difficult state is a diagnosis and not every diagnosis starts with a pill. And if we mentioned if we mentioned already some traps, the first way has it too. You can grow your capacity and can get better at carrying the pressure and load, but the load in life doesn't get smaller and you never processed what is suppressed. The system looks healthier but you are carrying the same weight that you had. You are going further with your CPU is overheated and your RAM is overloaded. And the second trap with two modern forms of avoidance where the first is fast enjoyable consumption uh kind of like self-destruction with a short reward loops and dopamine spikes and the other is about activities that releases the pressure in your body and mind. Uh they can even be social admirable kind of like uh meditation, breast, plat plunges and even biohacking. But these tools are still real. I've tried almost all of them. I do almost all of them on a regular basis. But what I understood as well that they are not your savior because in my opinion both of them help you avoid the uncomfort uncomfortable truth and the problem starts when we use them to postpone the meeting with what is under the hood. And I have a take here that half of the modern wellness industry is built on avoidance and to not to fall into these traps. Sometimes we just have to be brave enough to meet ourselves and emotional intelligence it is what helps us accept what we meet there. So let me tell you a short personal story about emotional intelligence. Uh as I mentioned in the beginning of our of my speech uh four years ago I was about finding answers to questions who am I and what to do next. And then I saw similar repeating patterns across four main areas of life while I was in a totally new environment and my old what I call self-regulation methods stopped working for me and I was needed to new answers for the old questions. And almost four years ago in August 2022, I was brave enough to lay down my shields, shields of ego. And then I decided to start therapy for the first time. And then I finded out something that I never ever can imagine and something with no end to it. Self-discovery is a neverending process of better understanding of ourselves through the journey of your life. So what helps us understand ourselves better? Again, emotional intelligence. It will help us stay human in the age of AI. And if you can ask what is emotional intelligence there is a lot of informations here for sure but basically it has five core components with uh first one self-awareness it's about understanding yourself second one is uh self-regulation it's about managing yourself third one is a motivation that things that keep you driving further And empathy is about understanding what others feel and why their is important and matters to them. And the social skills for sure is like managing relationships effectively. So all five of these runs on the same um same resource and that resource is finite because again human mind has a mental capacity and this is a hard biological limit that we cannot show that we cannot change. And the same as a blockchain has a hard block size enforced by design. And again we can see a similarity between two of them. But for finalizing block in a blockchain we again need consensus and then cons and that consensus in a proof of stake with a Byzantine fault tolerance can be achieved with a two sorts of validators agree on one truth. So even even if one third going to be a bad actors we still can find the truth. So a few years ago uh I built my uh startup recall Korea which I took to MVP but never launched and it was built same on the same idea with 33 to 66 67 67 [laughter] uh ratio idea uh about reaching your long-term goals, finding your own equilibrium and balance and most importantly not burning and out because I understood as an ex-p profofessional basketball player demanding 100% from yourself under constant load is how you overload your system because 67% still finalizes the block and uh to figure out what actually needs validating and what doesn't I keep back myself to this serenity prayer. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Serenity, courage, and wisdom. None of that is a hard skill. And that thing brings me back to the question I asked you to remember. If hard skills are being devalued by AI, what's left what what's left that's actually ours? And I have a good news. AI aren't coming for us. AI AI and artificial intelligence are coming for our skills. But also, I have a bad news. Robots are coming for us. So what AI doesn't take um from ourselves the contact with yourself knowing what you actually feel and understanding why you feel it empathy same but with others sincere interest in something or in someone fourth one is unstoppable energy within yourself call it enthusiasm and fifth one is um rare and core and the greatest skill from our childhood is creation and creativity and uh emotional intelligence is going to be [sighs] become is going to become the new hard skill of the next decade of AI era. And as Gary V as Gary Vaynerchuk said, A+ human beings with B minus skills always beat A+ talent with C minus personality. But and of course I'm sure that all of you here are A+ human beings. But if you could ask me how can I get one more plus I can answer you have to start with a clarity of mind. And as a quick example Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson doesn't start um therapy with his clients until the basics of his clients aren't in order. So that means that in most cases if you can get control over foundational pillars of your life of your existence you might not be needed therapy sessions. And here we can see the foundation pillars. It's not a new biotechnological ideas. It's not a futuristic biohacking. It's a proven overthe- time protocols and methods that are really works for us. And the main thing here is uh you have to restore your sleep schedule is a fundamental need for our body. Second one, please don't consume as much as possible processed food. Third one, it's establishing your physical routines both like aerobic and anobic uh anorobic activities. That means you have to do cardio and lift weights. Fourth one, it's about stabilizing stabilizing your mental health. You have to take care of yourself. And fifth one, it's about evaluating your progress and of course tracking it with the variables because variables really could help us to understand ourselves better. So that means that systematic conscious effort towards foundational pillars. This is our basic layer and empathy, creativity and enthusiasm. It's the next layer on top of it that runs on top of this foundation. And ambitious goals and your own meaning are the next layer that opens up after foundations is strong enough for the long run. So maybe you might not be disciplined enough but at least you have to be committed and today we have covered a lot. We discussed about multi-tooling, adaptation, blockchain, what is consensus, who is protocol within our operating system, what is emotional intelligence and what is uh our operating foundational pillars. Then we kind of understood what to do with everything and we have answered on all of that. But what's the reason for it? that want the reason for my speech. That's you. Because you are the only system where it all comes together. And I would love to finish my speech with uh my favorite metaphor for life. Life is a raging ocean and you are a small sailboat in it. You don't get to choose the vine wind. You adjust the sail, raise it, drop it, turn it. The wind decides the speed. You decide the trajectory. The choice is yours. Thank you. [applause]