i gave a talk at @efdevcon entitled ‘The Future History of the Open Internet’

this thread is a few dozen slides of eye candy! read it on the airplane home from Japan :)
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As an engineer; abstract talks like this are out of my comfort zone.

But this topic is important to me; as our industrial age institutions crumble + we migrate to the information age... We should articulate what kind of networked species we want to evolve into.

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Lets start by talking about the PRESENT History of the Open Internet

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Richard Stallman’s work in founding the FSF in 1985 was foundational.

The goal of the Free Software Movement is obtaining and guaranteeing certain freedoms:
•run the software
•to study and change the software
•to redistribute copies with or without changes

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Why does freedom of software matter?

Is the creator of the device in your pocket serving your interests as a user?  Or is it serving the profit driven interests of the Apple Corporation?

Software increasingly intermediates our lives.. This is about control/influence.

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Next up; Linus Trovalds in 1991 created the Linux kernel.

Linux was important and is important today because its the most widely used computer operating system in the world.

It set the precedent that an open source project could be more successful than commercial software!

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NEXT - In 2008; the founding of Bitcoin in 2008 by the individual or group of individuals collectively known as Satoshi Nakamoto.

For the First Time Ever a group of p2p individuals can send value across the internet without an intermediary or it being double spent.

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This was followed on in 2015 by the launch of Ethereum; which has many of the same properties of Bitcoin; but now allows developers to build programmable applications on top of the decentralized money layer of the blockchain.

EAT YOUR HEART OUT BTC MAXI'S

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That is the history of the free and open internet from 1985 to 2019.

We are in a historic time; TODAY we stand where we are because of the rich history of our predecessors fight for an open internet.

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What does the future look like? 

As the stakes are raised by the world being more networked and more connected, what does the future history of the open internet look like?

Imagine you are retiring in 2035; what is our collective legacy at that time?

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There is a famous story of blind men, who learn what an elephant is like by touching it. Each man feels a different part of the body. They describe the elephant based on their limited experience & their descriptions r different.

Understanding this space is kinda like that.

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I conceptualize the journey into this space through a narrative I call “The Heroes Journey”.

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Like many of you I grew up in a small town with small town values.  Community. Family. Peace; Brotherhood

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And things change as you grow up; go off to college..  You travel the world..

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Move to a big city for your first job with nothing.   Just trying to make it.

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Then you work your way up some corporate ladder. You have a boss and you please your boss so he or she can please their boss.

But what hill are we really climbing here? I found this path kind of distasteful.. Like I was doing work that didnt reflect my own values..

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In order to feed your family in the modern world you have to work for some fat cat.. Who has a monopoly over some service..And they will pay you to help keep that monopoly… But they’re really in service to their shareholders.. Not to the values that you started off with.

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This is why people are so excited about Ethereum.   Its a design space where you can marry your career goals w your values..

Instead of climbing the local maxima of choosing between your values/economics; you can choose both.

This Heroes Journey is all of us. /18

Ethereum at its core is about creating games with transparent rules that can't change on you. That's the founding myth of Ethereum and it's still true to me.

With immutable/transparent rules we can provably create alignment of all stakeholder interests..   /19

The internet changed our politics, entertainment, etc bc it allowed computers 2 send info over a network

The internet of value could change ANYTHING that relies on money bc now we can send value over a network. Banks, Jobs, etc.

Scale of this new economic system could be huge!

I’m hopeful that using this new system we can scale past Dunbars number.

Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships

For example, you can have stable social relationships with
* 5 people in your kin
* 15 in superfamily
* 50 in clan
* 150 in tribe

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It’s generally accepted that in order to create stable social relationships you can design a system that has these properties:
- Repeat interactions
- Possible win wins
- Low miscomunication

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These are attributes of my interactions in the locl community in Colorado; and they work in our local community ( #shillcolorado). My grand hope is that we can design economic/social systems that deploy these design principles beyond geographic constraints!
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The internet allowed us to interact with people across the world; but it didnt allow us to have stable social relationships across the world. We can generate economic relationships that create social norms that approximate whats working in our local communities.
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My great hope is that we can use Ethereum’s attributes of immutability/transparency scale to prevent/reverse the matthew effect.

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The Matthew effect of accumulated advantage can be observed in many aspects of life. It is sometimes summarized by "the rich get richer”. The concept is applicable to matters of fame or status, but may also be applied literally to cumulative advantage of economic capital.

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One of the great things about DeFi is that it allows access to financial instruments that were previously only available to those with the accumulated advantage of being rich/in the west.

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All of these tools exist out of the box and ARE LIVE TODAY.

- Bounties on @ethBounties and Gitcoin
- Funding for Public Goods on Gitcoin Grants and @oscoin
- StableCoins on DAI @MakerDAO
- Return on Investments on @compoundfinance

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cont'd https://twitter.com/owocki/status/1182525065629319168