my name is Sepp and I work on the cellar
protocol and today I'm going to be
talking about the future of value and
what I'm gonna start with what hold on
guys guys I want to start off by talking
about painting in the 1800's there was
in the mid 1800s there was a real big
explosion in technology innovation in
painting in about 80 in 1841 there was
the invention of the paint tube and the
paint tube we don't think of much about
it now but it was a real technology
innovation because before the paint tube
the technology to hold paint was a pig's
bladder and you can imagine that a pig's
bladder wasn't very portable there's a
reason why you didn't see a lot of
people painting outside of paintings are
the outdoors it's because people were
pretty confined to their studio where
they could hold their paints and mix
their pants another invention around
this time was the metal ferule the fur
Yule is the piece between the handle and
the brush itself and prior to the metal
ferial people use string or wire as the
ferule and the problem with this is that
it only allowed for round brushes with
the metal funeral you all of a sudden
could have flat brushes and so that in
turn allowed for the impasto effect and
effect where people put paint heavily on
top of the of the brush and very quickly
paint and so together these two
technologies along with a third
technology which is which was the
collapsible easel led to a style of
painting that we now call Impressionism
and this is both amazing and the story
of the world there were these new
technological innovations and these
technical in it for an expressive medium
and the technological innovations
increase the expressive rein
of the of the medium and that allowed
then lots of things but including this
these works of unspeakable beauty and
this talk is is not about painting it's
about money
but I wanted to start with this because
money is also an expressive medium it
can express its expressive range is very
narrow it can only express one thing
which is value but it does a reasonable
job at that and as we are now in a place
where we're thinking about what we're in
a place of technological innovation in
the technology behind this expressive
medium it's useful to think about what
are the features of money that would
lead to more beauty what are the futures
that would lead to a more beautiful
world and I would posit five none of
these are new ideas all of these are all
idea old ideas but I believe they're
ideas whose time has come the first is a
universal basic income or a universal
basic dividend that is tied directly
into the money system so that doesn't
need to be implemented on top of the
money system but it's native to the
money system a basic income or a basic
dividend we see this a lot in natures
like sunlight or rain they're a
consistent source of energy that's
reasonably evenly distributed in a
region and we see in nature in places
where there's lots of sunlight and lots
of rain we have biodiversity and buyer
prosperity
and so that's the first feature is a
universal basic income or a universal
basic dividend the second feature is
demurrage and demerant is an idea by the
economist Silvio Gesell who is active in
the late 19th and early 20th century and
he observed that you know during times
of recession people tend to hoard money
and that hoarding of money ends up
intensifying the recession and so he
said well what's what's the path out of
this and what he proposed was a small
fee on the holding of money he called
this negative interest or damage and the
way that he implemented it was he had
these dollar bills he proposed these
dollar bills but in order for the dollar
bills to be valid you'd have to fix a
stamp each month to the dollar bill and
the stamped cost one cent and during the
Great Depression there were lots of
experiments with Demarest charge
currencies most notably in most notably
in virgle Austria and this is actually
the for gold shilling of the DeMars
charts chillin you can see the stamps on
the right hand side when it was issued
in burgle burgle became this oasis of
prosperity in the midst of the Great
Depression people called it the miracle
of Orgel and he saw these interesting
things like people started paying their
taxes early because in the demarest arts
world it actually makes sense to pay
your taxes early so that's the second
feature is damage and Emeric if you
think about a ubi as rain dem rage can
be seen as evaporation so it it it helps
to circulate the energy and avoid
stagnation the third features is an idea
by a philosopher I love named Charles
Eisenstein called natural capital back
currencies and he basically observed he
says you know whatever backs money
people tend to make more of because it's
like printing money so when gold back
money there was this intense incentive
to mine gold and so what Charles said is
he said well why don't we back money
with things that we like like pristine
forests and clean rivers and I think
that's a lovely idea so that's the third
feature is called natural capital back
currencies the fourth feature for lack
of a better term I'll call an ecology of
value and I think the best way I can
describe it is to give an analogy to the
early days of the internet I remember in
the early internet there was this
excitement around like wow like we could
use this to put the Encyclopedia
Britannica online and yes we could and
yes that was useful but what it did was
it actually borrowed an earlier metaphor
where information was an R
jekt rather than in ecology we had a
monoculture information and what we
thought about was to make that
monoculture more efficient but in
practice what the internet allowed was a
poly culture of information it allowed
an ecosystem of information and I can
imagine the same thing for value I can
imagine that we will have a diversity of
local currencies of regional currencies
of national fiat currencies of global
reference parenthesis of utility
currencies of store of value currencies
medium of exchange currencies all
filling niches that it doesn't make
sense for the others to fill and
creating a poly culture with all of the
resilience that that that entails and
finally the fifth feature is the
creation of money in a manner that's not
concomitant with the creation of new
debt so right now all money is created
through debt and the consequence of that
is that there's always more debt than
there is money we can never pay off our
debts and I'd argue that at the
beginning of the Industrial Age that was
actually a feature it impels growth it
incentivizes growth and growth has been
good to us but I think now as we start
to reach the carrying capacity of the
earth it's not clear to me that growth
and mean consumption is the way to solve
our problems and it certainly is not
clear to me that we should tie the
medium of exchange to the incentive for
that growth so those are the five
features they're universal basic income
damage natural capital back currencies
an ecology of value and creating money
in a manner that's not concomitant with
the creation of new debt those of you
here will probably recognize that a lot
of the technologies that the crypto
community has been building addresses
some of these so for example block
rewards are a way to create new money
without creating without creating new
debt tokens are a technology by which we
can create an ecology of value smart
contracts will allow for dem rich
although Ford Emirates really work we'd
also want stability of value and the ubi
and natural capital back currencies are
the hardest because the technologies
that were that we're building are the
most nascent they are technologies
around identity and stability so what I
want to do today is I want to just take
a little dive into the idea of natural
capital capital back currencies and
proposals sketches of an implementation
for it I I'm interested in the proposal
and the sketch but I'm more interested
in the kind of thinking that it all it
will provoke so let's start with stable
value coin a decentralized cryptokey
lobby solo
has a reserve of other coins and it's
over collateralized it also has
transaction fees and mining rewards go
to the reserve variable so that based on
the reserve ratios so that we can
mitigate volatility but kind of add base
we can think about it as an over
collateralized crypto backed coin the
key insight here is that the more the
demand for the stable coin the more
algorithmic purchases of the reserve
assets so the because it's fully back so
the the greater the demand for the
stable coin the greater the demand for
the reserve assets and so that gives us
a lot of flexibility when we think about
making it back that makes it interesting
when we think about reserve asset
composition so I mean right now there's
not a lot of assets that we could
imagine putting into the reserve but
over time there will be you could
imagine tokenization of real assets
you can't imagine tokenization of
commodities that get put into reserve
you can also imagine that over time
people will start tokenizing pristine
forests and so then if we if the
community through governance says
something like 10 percent of the reserve
is allocated to
tokenized forestland what it does is it
gives an immediate demand for tokenized
forests and as the monetize realm and
the stable coin grows so does the demand
for natural capital it's lovely
so the only challenge is that well how
do we know that this tokenized forest
land is actually for real one way we
could do it is we can have somebody like
the World Wildlife Fund sign sign the
coin basically a testing saying this is
legitimately a tokenized forest but what
what if we don't know enough about the
World Wildlife Fund or what if it's
local NGO or a local municipality well
we really need is we need a trust score
for the a tester and so I'll talk a
little bit about I gave a talk on a
protocol that I worked on several years
ago called eigen trust earlier this week
and I'll give like the two slides
summary of it of it in in this context
so we take that a tester and we say okay
we want to find some way to trust how
much should we trust that a tester a
naive way to is to say well how many
people know that a tester and trust that
a tester and so we can just sum over all
the people who trust that a tester the
problem is that that the tester could
create a thousand civils and those
thousand civils could all say that they
trust this a tester and so what we'll do
is we'll just make a little tweak on it
where we will say you know we're going
to sum all of the people who trust the
ax tester but wait their trust by their
global trust scores and then and so what
you do what we do is we define a
recursive algorithm in which somebody's
trust is defined by a global trust score
is defined by how many people trust them
weighted by their global trust scores
which is in turn
defined by how many people trust them
weighted by their global trust goes and
so on and so forth there's a ton of
there's a ton of detail in the paper on
how to address adversarial collect
collectives or how to do this in a
decentralized way but I'm going to be
I'm not going to talk about it in this
talk mostly what I wanted to do in this
talk is briefly introduce three
high-level ideas from narrow to broad
the first high-level idea is that I
think as a community we can have a
really big impact on the environment
through the introduction of things like
natural capital back currencies and even
more specifically in the idea of having
stable coins with forest reserves of
forest forest tokens in the reserve the
second the second idea that I wanted to
bring out bring up is there are a lot of
things that we want to both incentivize
and reward through through certain
protocols that are not done through
machines and because they're not done
through machines they're difficult to
have cryptographic proofs around for
example we may want to incentivize an
award planting trees or putting solar
panels on your roof or even more
basically we may want to incentivize an
award being a person and well these are
very difficult to do through
cryptographic proofs I can trust
weighted attestations are great step a
great initial step forward in thinking
about how to evaluate clans
that can't be done through the
cryptographic loops and then the third
and this comes very much at the
beginning of the talk is that I think as
we're in this space of rapid innovation
around this expressive medium I think
beauty is really important like I think
if we can envision in detail a more
beautiful world it'll help to guide the
kinds of technologies that we've built
so I want to conclude with a story and
this is the story of a city in Brazil
called Curitiba and in early 90s they
had a really thoughtful mayor and the
mayor noticed well he had observed that
basically in the favelas around Curitiba
the roads were too narrow for the
garbage trucks and so garbage was
collecting in the favelas and spilling
over into the river so what he did was
was amazing it was fascinating he
started a program in which there was
also an underutilized bus service so he
started a program in which people were
given bus tokens in exchange for garbage
and so what happened was people started
collecting garbage getting bus tokens
and using them to go downtown to find
work and what happened next was even
more amazing at a certain point those
tokens started circulating in the
favelas as currency and that currency
ended up being making it possible for
people to collect more garbage than they
needed bus tokens and so what we had is
we had this this is token that was
really a stable value token backed by
public transportation earned into
existence through environmental
remediation and it gave dignity and
meaningful work and environmental
remediation to a community that needed
it
I can imagine thousands of these so
that's this is the kind of story that I
think I'd love for us as a community to
enable just to finish up as I said I
work on the cellar protocol in the solar
community we're thinking about problems
like this all the time so if you're
interested in these kinds of problems
we'd love to have you join us you can
follow us at sell away to you or seller
org thank you very much
[Applause]
you