I'm here to talk about a theory of
governance or one of the many ways to
think about aetherium governance I
suppose less philosophical it's entirely
what is happening today who are the
organizations involved what's the
history of it first a little bit about
me I have been involved in
cryptocurrency since about 2011 I worked
at a bank for a few years then aetherium
Foundation and I co-founded Oken
innovations and served as an adviser
there I have one wife Laura top-left and
three cats top right is Viviane bottom
left is fry and bottom right is Li Lu so
I'm gonna start with Vlad's definition
of governance it's the process by which
we attempt to establish the legitimacy
of decisions decision-making processes
and related governance norms and
expectations I just like that definition
a lot so I wanted to throw it into my
slides I think it makes it really I
think it really boils it down well for
what most blockchain governance
discussions kind of come down to in a
way so that's just kind of how I feel
about the definition okay so let me give
you a history of kind of what governance
or the you know powers of aetherium
what-what that was back in the day so
2014 early 2015 all clients and
development tools were developed by the
etherium foundation all the co-founders
were there all the first developers
Devcon zero had about 50 people and
that's kind of where it was all
centralized you can think of it that way
granted it was so small such a small
project you can't really blame it for
not being decentralized yet 2015 to 2016
outside entities started to form and
leave the etherium foundation we had
stuff like consensus happening parity
happened around 2016 I believe and other
stuff like that and just keeping time
and then 2016 Enterprise aetherium
discussion started on a Skype chat
between a lot of enterprises who are
starting to get interested in it and
then eventually the etherium Enterprise
Alliance formed
more infrastructure is now being
developed by third parties we have meta
masks we have in fira they probably
started a little bit before 2016 but you
should you start seeing them be a lot
more used and then 2017 Enterprise
aetherium brings traditional companies
into aetherium and that's more visible
from a government and academic interest
perspective you have ic3
from Cornell University you have
Stanford Harvard the Cambridge is
another big one
UCLA there's just a lot of different
blockchain organizations within colleges
and academic institutions now what is it
now it is vitalik holding a lambo okay
so this is my favorite slide because
it's the most aesthetically pleasing
because it looks like stair steps like
climbing down and I didn't plan for it
that way until I noticed that all of
them could do that so yeah my favorite
slide here the current major players in
the ecosystem that kind of contribute to
a lot of the decisions being made the
direction that etherium is going things
like that consensus is a big hub and
spoke model I guess a company
organization conglomerate whatever you
want to call it and it has a bunch of
different teams that all work you know
across teams and come up with their own
projects and then eventually some of
them spin out into their own companies
others stay in and provide
infrastructure it's kind of a very it's
very hard to pin down what consensus is
unless you've worked there so Oh even
though you don't know okay yeah so then
there's the web 3 Foundation which is
working really hard across different
technologies including Definity
aetherium obviously polka dot and others
to bring about the web 3 future that's
been envisioned by people like Gavin
wood in the past parody technologies
they build the second biggest aetherium
client that was founded by Gavin wood as
one of the spin-offs from aetherium
foundation the etherium foundation
they're hosting Def Con I think they're
pretty cool I work there and what they
do is they provide funding support
grants other things to the etherium
ecosystem it's pretty much all about
supporting the eCos
system and making sure things get done
AEA that's for enterprise aetherium
people fellowship of ethereal magicians
is a disorganization as force but it of
people coming together to make technical
standards or to not make but to
basically review and talk about
technical and sometimes philosophical
standards within aetherium we have the
client devs they get together during the
all core developer meetings which I'll
show you a little bit more about a
second that is those client devs you
know have a lot of input and they don't
even always want it but that's kind of
what they end up doing then we have a
theory of improvement proposal editors
this is like our IETF standards and I'm
an EIP editor so is Nick Johnson for
instance and Greg Colvin who's around
here somewhere and so then there's also
highly used infrastructure tools such as
in fear of my crypto and meta masks and
they have a good say in the ecosystem as
well here's an example of a IPS there's
the front page of the e ip's repo it
says you know the status terms how to
contribute the types and again the most
famous example of any IP is the ERC 20
token standard which defines the most
basic type of token you can have in the
etherium ecosystem that's
cross-compatible
via the smart contracts it produces this
is a screenshot of the core developer
call this one in particular had about 30
people because it was a very contentious
issue about issuance reduction or
developer meetings happen every two
weeks on Fridays I think it's like 10
a.m. eastern US time and what we do is
we try not to talk about controversial
topics unless we absolutely have to but
it's all about low-level client and
protocol development stuff what's the
next hard Fork happening how do we fix
the network layer if there's something
wrong what are we going to do
whenever Rob stand messes up what's
everyone's client updates every time
there's a new client that comes out such
as Pantheon such as X the areum
we invite them to the call at this point
I believe there is nine clients that are
compatible with the current etherium
network which is incredible and all of
them are represented on this call the
all core devs call kind of sparked other
calls including the e wasum community
call the plasma implementers call and
the f implementers 2.0 call death and
lunar 2.0 call is incredibly interesting
because it's people from across many
many different ecosystem organizations
plasma and pointers calls well is very
very diverse I would say it's hard for
Vitalik to keep up attending all of
these because he's definitely someone
who would be valued at all of these but
there's just too many calls now too many
here's the problems the IPS in the all
core devs meetings are the only formal
way where the decisions are made the
most technical stuff we don't have
enough people to actually help us out on
these things there's the same people
making decisions over and over again
because there's a lot to understand at
the very complicated underlying
aetherium protocol and we have a few
good signaling systems or other methods
to gauge community consensus whenever
things happen you can think back to the
dow for example that was a very hard
decision at the time I can go on all day
about the Dow but the point is it was
hard to gauge the community sentiment at
the time and then eventually the call
was made for what defaults were
presented on the clients to go forward
solution
involve more diverse groups and
participants make a loaf of Doge bread
create safe places for people to discuss
things encourage participation and
outspoken opinions so safe places for
discord is important because we don't
want to become toxic like a Bitcoin just
straight up so in order to do that we
need to have like variety of places
where we're all you know just nice to
each other and not
encourage participation and outspoken
opinions same vein just listen to people
more governance structures aetherium
magicians came in and I believe they're
saving the day right now because we just
had the all core dev meetings in the IPS
and now they're coming in to really help
structure the future of a IPS and other
governance things with their rings model
which you may hear about later and then
continuous improvement on current
structures we're always trying to
improve the court have meetings the EEI
peace process things like that are we
centralized nope were too disorganized
to be centralized what can we do don't
panic we needed to develop good
governance structures I truly believe
that the idea of figureheads are good
early on in a blockchain project but
influence needs to be lessened over time
specifically in the case of Vitalik you
know he's been basically the earlier on
he had a lot more influence and today
he's stepping back into more of a
research role and you won't even see him
on the core dev calls you won't see him
commenting on major issues as much
anymore he's out of the decision-making
process in a lot of ways and I think
that's great and I think that's
purposeful and I mean I've confirmed
that's purposeful from him so that's
something that I think is really really
important for the ecosystem to thrive
and become more decentralized and more
people takeover and then look at
traditional Ike old school things like
IETF and see how they're running and
what you can do about things like rough
consensus I'm at Hudson Jameson on
Twitter and at Hudson Jameson comm thank
you all so much I hope I didn't go over
my time
you