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