18/ Lets dive into the nature of these coordination failures; If u havent read “meditations on moloch” - https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ u should! it is a thoughtful analysis of the animalistic forces that inhabit civilization.

In this story, Moloch is the god of coordination failure.

19/ There are other Gods in this story too. Gnon is the god of nature

“Gnon” is short for “Nature And Nature’s God”. Gnon is a God that forces you to spend resources to placate him - Tributes to Gnon include food + shelter, clothing to warm yourself.

20/ So be it with Gnon. Our job is to placate him insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and invasion. And that only for a short time, until we come into our full power.

21/ Somewhere in this darkness is another god. He has also had many names - named “Elua”. He is the god of flowers and free love and all soft and fragile things. Of art and science and philosophy and love. Of niceness, community, and civilization. He is a god of humans.

22/ The other gods sit on their dark thrones and think “Ha ha, a god who doesn’t even control any hell-monsters or command his worshippers to become killing machines. What a weakling! This is going to be so easy!”

23/ But somehow Elua is still here. No one knows exactly how. And the gods who oppose Him tend to find Themselves meeting with a surprising number of unfortunate accidents.

There are many gods, but this one is considered the “highest”.

24; In this narrative; humanity’s role is to placate Gnon for as long as we need to.. To commune with Eula + to defeat Moloch.

So why is it that Moloch is so hard to defeat? Why is it that one can advance their economic agenda while externalizing harm to society?

25/ In a way this is a form of the game theoretic classic: “The Prisoners Dilemma”. - In which two agents, seperated and unable to coordinate, will statisitcally choose the most suboptimal outcomes, rather than the optimal outcome.

26/ In this narrative.. Moloch is the reason we have overfished lakes and oceans.

So how do we defeat Moloch?

27/ If only there was some sort of substrate where we could better coordiante human economic activity!

IF ONLY!

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.

28/ To me; Ethereum is a shelling Point for the Hopeful.

A community where we can collectively move on from our industrial age institutions and build new information age institutuions that are fundamentally more fair, transparent, and native to an internet native world.!

29/ The stakes have never been higher.

We’ve inherited a lot of civlizational debt from the boomers.

We should all refuse to let our children inherit a world like this!

30/ I think that in order to solve these problems, we need to scale our collective sense making abilities.

I’m overjoyed to say that Ethereum is starting to fulfill it’s founding promise - it’s working. 2019 was the year of the DAO + of DEFI

31/ This space moves really fast; and its because of  all of you that we have DEFI working!

We see thousands of transactions per day in the new financial system

ht @alethio

32/ I dream of a world in which people are transacting peer to peer so much that we can start to rebuild the stability & reliability of the old system on top of the new one.

33/ A world where there is so much quadratic funding on Gitcoin Grants that a coder can rely on it. & we can build reliable social services / safety net on top of it..

34/ We are building Ethereum OS- the substrate for the p2p financial system.

It's inevitable that this disrupts the status quo.

35/ Ethereum OS is inclusive & permissionless - Anyone can create a dapp on the Ethereum dapp store!

36/ We are all lucky and privileged to be in the Ethereum city. A city thats disrupting the status quo and I truly believe is building the substrate of finance for the information age.

To my fellow citizens: Lets be explicit about the world we are creating.

All art above was created on @gitcoin & is licensed Creative Commons. Use it to inspire someone in your local community! Start a conversation about what the p2p financial system could look like with them :)

Art: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BSo7eCVNnV41M8p1Aji2MKGg0RayjtbKfWHGFsLX9Yk/edit
Deck: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1_iPLoPpHs_ZPxWN_S3LCImzc6XBDfPtu0Ma0w9-JPWY/edit#slide=id.g65be178d4d_0_40

/fin