CCG Chronicles #1 - Interview with Jeff Emmett of The Commons Stack
Hi all, I have a pretty big announcement to make which is that I'm filming a documentary about the cryptocurrency space! As part of the film I've been doing a bit of traveling going to different crypto-related conferences and filming the events. The first event I joined was the Crypto Commons Gathering (CCG) in Austria back in August 2021 where we also shot full podcast episode-worthy interviews with some of the attendees as well. For the first episode in the CCG Chronicles series, I interv...
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Transcript
Hi, everyone. I have a very special announcement to make. So for the past few months, I have been traveling to a few different crypto conferences and doing some filming. And that's because I've been filming a documentary with a friend of mine. One of the conferences that I went to was called the Crypto Commons Gathering, which was based in Austria. This conference was basically probably by far the most, let's say, left wing crypto conference I have ever been to, and it was really a, an amazing experience. But while I was there filming the event itself, we also filmed a few interviews of the people who were attending the conference as a way to try to capture what the feeling was like, at the conference. And so this is the very first interview that I'm going to release as part of the series of the Crypto Commons Gathering Chronicles, which are essentially going to be the full interviews of the interviews that we did while there. Meanwhile, for the documentary itself, we would only take, of course, the different highlights that fit within the narrative of the story for the documentary. I'm not yet sure when exactly the full documentary is going to be released, but the hope is that the full feature documentary film will be released within the next year. If you look into the show notes, you'll be able to find the website that we have so far for the documentary, where if you want to, you're able to donate some cryptocurrency if you want to help out in the development of the film itself. And if you have any video production skills, if you want to help out, feel free to reach out in the email on the website or just reach out directly to me if you want. We've also gone to a couple of other conferences so far but haven't done any full interviews like the ones that we did at the Crypto Commons gathering. So the film itself is going to have quite a bit of content, and we already have well over thirty hours of film that we need to go through and decide on what should go into the documentary and start building that story. So So every once in a while, you can expect that one of these full interviews are going to be published for the podcast itself as a way to promote the documentary. What you'll notice as well about these types of interviews is that they happened in an open room while we were filming. So sometimes the audio is a little bit different than what you would expect in a normal interview that I usually do. So I hope it doesn't bother you guys too much. And then of course if you enjoy the interview or the content that I make and you think it's important, you can pitch into my efforts starting at $3 a month on patreon.com/theblockchainsocialist to help me out and join the newest patrons like Aiden, Stella, Christopher, and Robert. Any amount really helps since making this stuff isn't free in terms of money or time. As a patron, you'll get a shout out on an episode like I just did and access to Patreon exclusive content like q and a episodes where you can submit and vote on questions you'd like me to answer, and I'll give my thoughts in roughly twenty minutes. Of course, I'll still be making free content like like this interview to help spread the message that blockchain does not need to be used to further change capitalist exploitation if we put our efforts into it. So if that message resonates with you, I hope you'll consider helping out. Alright. Let's start the interview with Jeff Ennitz from Commonstack. Cool. This is a very exciting interview because I've interviewed you before, except it was right when I started to the second person I interviewed. And when I was doing it, I basically just recorded, I think, on my phone, the audio and maybe on my computer as well at the same time, just so I had a backup. And then I transcribed everything from the audio into text. It was probably one of the worst experiences of my life. So I think Sorry. This is gonna be way better Cool. Type of interview, and I think, what we can get out of it. But yeah. So I'm here with Jeff Emmett at the Crypto Commons gathering. So hey, Jeff. How are you doing?
Pretty good, actually. Yeah. Really happy to be here. Wouldn't wouldn't be anywhere else. That's for sure.
Maybe to start off, in case anybody hasn't read the transcribed interview that I wrote, I think now, almost more than a year ago, if you can just introduce yourself very quickly, who you are and and what you're doing with the common stack. Sure.
So my name is Jeff. We started the common stack about three years ago now. It actually went through kind of several, pivots in its in its early inception, but, where we're at today is, we are building these modular composable libraries of different cryptoeconomic components that can fit together in different ways to provide purpose driven communities, a cyber physical infrastructure for accumulating capital, you know, under their own terms, not, you know, signing deals with VCs with strings attached and and and all these things, that we can sort of gather our money and decide, democratically how to allocate it to solve our problems, whether that's, you know, a neighborhood coming together to fund filling their potholes on the road. I mean, generally, governments are pretty good at this, but there's a lot of other things that we have, sort of these larger collective action problems, like climate change, like, I mean, any number of, ecological crises. And we're trying to innovate on new tools to bring the power back to, the community, and allowing them to sort of address their collective action problems at, at the local level and then scale that up, through sort of federated scaling. So it's communities on communities on communities that can, you know, solve by a regional issues or national issues or even global issues. And that's sort of our our theory is that the the current institutions we have to address these problems are not able to process the amount of information coming from the ground up. They're centralized institutions, whether they're nation states or conglomerates thereof, the EU, and just having this sort of improved signal processing from what the people need on the ground to what the institutions can deliver to them without being prescriptive and judgmental, or, you know, putting the wrong incentives on it. And, these kind of subsidy systems, other things just aren't adaptive to the needs of the people on the ground.
So is it fair to say that, like, the common stack is a, it's a toolset largely made up of smart contracts that are sort of, I mean, on the blockchain on the Ethereum blockchain?
A lot of our reference implementations are built on Ethereum just because that's where our kind of most interested development community is. Our aim is to produce sort of agnostic, chain agnostic, and actually even implementation agnostic. It doesn't have to be a blockchain. It's it's token engineering is systems engineering and whatever. The token is just the unit of information. So if that's in a closed database with a group that you trust, that's fine. What what Blockchain introduces is the disintermediate disintermediation of those, central actors. So if you want to govern it via, you know, smart contract that's just autonomous and, yeah, it's an option. So there's lots of different ways it can be deployed. You know, we're working with groups like Cosmos. We're working, a lot of our stuff is deployed actually on, Hollow chain. You know, there's all sorts of substrates that, these tools could be deployed on. And where we mostly focus is in the system design and then modeling that in tools like CADCAD, and then producing specifications off of those models that dev teams on any different chain can run with and deploy for their purposes. Right.
So then the vision as, like, of common stack, is that communities have these type of tools available to them, so that they can fix their own problems. Right. Is that kind of how
Yep. So it's still pretty early days. We're working very closely with the token engineering community to deploy the first, commons, the token engineering commons. And this is, again, the first time there's a lot of things to get through. There's a lot of things to explain. We hope to make it much more easy to sort of copy, customize, deploy because we're not saying that this, you know, one toolkit will work for everybody. There are different needs for different communities, and we just aim to have a library of different governance tools, different voting tools, signaling tools, you know, capital accumulation tools, reputation tools, identity can all be tied in, different medium exchange, whether that's even mutual credit currencies, like, it's all kind of interoperable within the system design. So we're kind of at the the the this end, the the it's a design pattern that can be deployed. So we're class of tools, and then they can be deployed into instances like the token engineering commons, And we hope to learn from that and then bring it back, you know, what happened, you know, especially in the cultural build. It's a really huge focus of the the TEC because these are social institutions ultimately. So it's really interesting to continue to build that open source knowledge base in the common stack, but also deploy, instances, learn from them, improve the toolkit so that as we move forward, we can, yeah, continue solving those problems.
So then, can you explain quickly what is the token engineering's comments? Some people this this is, like, the first time that you guys are really putting these tools to the test, if I don't understand.
Right. So actually, I have some diagrams that I am gonna show in a in a talk on Friday, which I'll I'll get over to you guys in case the visuals are helpful. Sure. But there's essentially a number of things that you can do when you join the token engineering common. So, well, one of them is, to co vest. You know, it's not investing. We're we're investing together. This was a term, I think I heard it from Michelle Bowens, but it's, you know, the commons commoners investing in them in themselves. So it's not really external investment, although it could come from outside, but then once you hold the token, you're inside. So it kind of, you know, Elinor Ostrom's, boundary of the commons if you hold a token. A token, you are a member. And that may be providing capital, that may be providing labor, because the other thing you can do in this commons is work. So you can put up a proposal and say, I'm doing, you know, this type of token engineering work, or I'm doing a documentary on token engineering or pretty much anything. Put that to the community as a proposal, and then everyone uses their tokens, which are both a claim on the reserve pool. So in other words, you can sell it to take money out, or you can use it to vote. So as you're doing more work in the community, you're earning more tokens, you have more say, and all of a sudden, you can allocate a portion of the collective pool, to your proposal if you're so interested. And, of course, you might have to go and convince other people in the community depending how much you're asking for, that they also vote for your proposal. And then, the way conviction voting works, it's kind of a real time. It's like vote streaming. And it actually works like, neurons in in the brain. So there's an action potential, and everyone can signal. So you kind of, like, charge up, the the proposal with your conviction that this is the right proposal for the community. And then it charges up over time, and when it hits a threshold, it fires like a neuron, and then the the proposal is active. So this kind of cuts down on the the deadlock, in a lot of DAOs where they have ad hoc voting. So you vote from Tuesday to Saturday, and we need at least, you know, 30% of the people, to vote, and we need a quorum of, 80% to pass or something like that. What we see happening in a lot of the DAO space is that important, critical changes to the protocol are being voted on by less than 2% of the voters, and the whales control the outcome anyway. So there's this, last minute, you know, the people are kind of voting over the first couple of days, and you can see that it's a yes or no. And someone actually did an analysis on this, in one of the early DAO frameworks that essentially there was a lot of vote flipping. So a whale stepped in at the last minute and said, oh, this is like 58% towards yes. I'm gonna put in a lot of votes towards no and just flip it last minute. So they're kind of doing lots of, like, wait for quiet, different mechanisms to, allow for that to not happen, and conviction voting is one of those. You know, you can't come in at the last minute and exert all your power compared to the people who have been, voting all along, and they've been growing conviction. So it, it kind of smooths out, some of these temporal issues, especially with, flash loans are gonna be a huge governance attack factor because you can, within one block, take out, you know, a million tokens, governance tokens, vote, and then redeem those million tokens within one block. So there's all sorts of if you don't include the temporal dynamics of the vote, progression, then you can have all these sort of governance attack vectors. And there's a there's a bunch of different ways to protect against it, but conviction voting is sort of, very mycelial in nature because you're allowing a small subgroup of the network to decide if this is important to them, and they have enough, tokens among them to exert that conviction that it passes. If it's a larger proposal, of course, you have to convince more of the network, which makes sense. It's kinda matching our social processes with our political processes. A lot of what we see today is, you know, the social process is opposed to political processes, but there's kind of these unseen structures. It's really hard to change the system. So we're just trying to match them more to natural patterns and decentralized collaboration as we see it occurring in nature.
So I think what you what you described is, like, some of the, some of the details and some of the tools of, sort of what maybe token engineering can sort of take from. Grace, what so, yeah, the the token the token engineering is like, I I would describe it as, like, not thinking about systems through the use of blockchain tokens more or less at the moment, is, like so the this token engineering commons group is basically, I guess people who are aspiring to be engineers of what these token systems will look like and begin to create maybe standards or things like that. And they're using the common stack to, facilitate this because they are recognizing this body as a commons as opposed to, like, as a traditional startup, like, a tech startup or something like that.
Right. So that the token engineering field, has, I mean, a lot of players, and a lot of that is, you know, kind of hey ocean protocol, the first token engineer. Michael Zargan at Block Sciences is doing a lot of, like, client work, which, of course, a lot of those clients then choose to open source and put their work out into the commons, which then it kind of filters into the common stack library once we've taken sort of that, you know, theoretical or or, mathematical research and turn it into a tool sort of, you know, focusing on what benefit can this bring communities in a commons, in a cyber physical commons, and then we put that in our library and, you know, smart contracts, are developed by multiple teams and get deployed. But the the there's also sorry. Further in the token engineering space, there's a token engineering academy, who are focusing heavily on education, you know, bringing, bringing together projects that wanna do token engineering initiatives with the community who want to upscale and also experts often from block science, other groups who are kind of innovating in this area, and then putting them together and doing workshops and, you know, training up, within the academy. So the token engineering commons is sort of the funding engine and and all of these groups could benefit from this ideally. So the token engineering commons is a vehicle for collective funding. So this was the the hatch, that just went on a couple of weeks ago was basically opened to all of the members in the common stock trusted seed. So the trusted seed is a community of, you know, altruists, token engineers, decentralized governance experts. We we don't let people on who are there for the money, like, if, you know, if they apply for the trusted seed and their Twitter is just all, oh, airdrops airdrops. We're like, no. Sorry. Like, this isn't the community for you. We're looking for people who are aligned, people who are philanthropic, altruistic, and also interested in learning to govern these communities because then they can sort of sit as a, I mean I've compared it to dragon's den or shark's tank you know, all of these cyber physical commons using the common stack toolkit can invite the trusted seed to covet in their commons. You know, they might want to do NFTs to save the old growth or, you know, any number of, social impact initiatives. And the trust and seed isn't the only group who can invest, but they could be invited to and anyone on that list, can kind of contribute to this co funding. And then, of course, what happens, you you put your money in and a portion of that goes to the common pool. So this is what sets the augmented bonding curve apart from pretty much all other bonding curves and automated market makers. In those in those tools, you have reserve and supply. So you put in some reserve, say dollars, and you get out some supply, say token x. And then the bonding curve always guarantees that there's a buyer and a seller. So it's like a one-sided market. You're not buying from an order book on an exchange where you and I are actually, you know, exchanging money for tokens. You're buying and selling to and from the smart contract. So in a generic bonding curve, there's these two pools, and that's generally how they facilitate liquidity because you always have liquidity for trades, which solves a key problem in, in the web three spaces. You know, if you don't have liquidity, you might as well not have a token because nobody wants to buy it. The value is to zero sort of thing. So you have this, like, these big problems. So bonding curve solved the key problem in, in the crypto space. And now we are augmenting that with the addition of a common pool. So there's the reserve and supply, there's also a common pool. And the common it's literally a common pool resource that is allocated using a a token. Now what form that token takes is up to the system design. In ours, it's a very simple, you know, the, what you earn from working is the governance token. What you earn by putting money into the bonding curve is the governance token. So you are connecting governance and money in some ways, but, of course, you could have different tokens for that in more sophisticated ecosystems once we have the models, once we, you know, we don't need to jump into two or three token ecosystem before you build one. So, you know, there's no saying that, and these things could work in different contexts all over the place, but, yeah. We're just kind of starting with the basic and then building the models from there.
Yeah. It seems to me that the the augmented body curve is sort of like, well, the smart contract itself because of the nature of the blockchain maybe, you could argue, is it's, it's recognizing you're basically trading with the comments Mhmm. When you're interacting with the augmented moniker. Yeah. Like, as as one like, I guess it's sort of I mean, it's actually the reason why you guys call it common stack. Right? You're you're it's it's, I guess you guys are trying to trying to find ways in which you can, where you're recognizing that these things are in common and that, and and, like, how do we facilitate for nurturing that? Whereas maybe other projects don't really recognize that what they're doing is in the common and then just sort of letting, like, the vultures rip apart at it or something like that. Right? I feel like a lot of the tools that you guys talk about in the common sack is, around maybe limiting the influence of capital to a certain extent. Mhmm. And, yeah, I I get that. I I imagine there are probably other considerations, of course, but one of the big things that I noticed is it's about, it's, I mean, it's almost anti free market a little bit. It's it's changing the rules of, of of the market. It's it's you it's it's recognizing that markets have rules, and those rules, are created by people, and there's a certain you know, you're you're setting boundaries, for those rules. Exactly.
We are setting the boundaries for our rules. Right. That's the key. It's it's not someone coming in and setting I mean, this is basically what's happening in the technocracy of the Web three space today is some shadowy supercoder creates an algorithm and says, hey. Or a a protocol and says, hey. You can all participate. And, I mean, this is the earliest, versions, but, I mean, we in the TEC, this is another, like, kind of rallying cry, your economy, your choice. You can decide the parameters. You can change the parameters. Maybe, you know, as you are operating your commons, you're realizing that the parametrizations you chose are no longer suiting, you know, maybe the tax rate or, you know, there's a million different parameters you can kind of tweak your essentially, your fiscal and monetary policy is all controlled by these things. And some things you don't wanna expose to everybody. We shouldn't all change everything all the time. There's some need for viscosity in the system, which, I mean, bureaucracy serves, but maybe we could do it better than just, like, deadlocking decision making, you know, and and just building in the viscosity on the parameters that need to be slower changing, but also having things that can rapidly change according with, you know, evolving social needs or the the realization we need to give more people rights for certain things. You know, these things should be able to change quickly, but, not everything should change every day. Right? If we depending what it is, I suppose it's highly contextual.
Yeah. I think this is and this is it's super relevant for
cybernetics.
Yeah. I mean, it's we're basically yeah. I mean, it's not a term that I've been I think I've seen you guys use very much, but it's very much it's basically yeah, it's it's one form of of cybernetics, which is sort of like an untapped field around blockchain or like a way of thinking about blockchain as a cybernetic system.
And even the second order cybernetic system. So this is where, the original cybernetic system, and there was this second wave of second order cyberneticist realizing that the cyberneticist is not outside of the system. We are part of those systems. So those systems have to also evolve. So that's the totally. We I think we mentioned in a couple I try to avoid, big words that need a lot of explanation. But I mean, that's your your exact hand point. Yeah. I just like the word because,
of its relevance to, to Chile in the in the nineteen seventies and the the presidency of Salvador Allende and the cyber scene project. So, yeah, I I think that's something that's, I mean, relevant for people who may be listening to my podcast because they're socialist, and it's a it's a field that could have been if it weren't for the US coup in June in nineteen seventies. Right. Yeah. Totally. And this is the cyber behind the cyber physical. It's not, a lot of people think cyber physical. They think like a cyborg arm or something.
Cybernetics is not actually the the metal robot thing, it's the steering thing. So cyber physical systems I mean, cyber physical systems exist all around us. Our international power grids, the Internet, anything where highly technical and highly social components kind of, merge and and digital and physical and temporal and all these other dynamics. And we are take we're not inventing all these things new, we're just taking what exists in cyber physical systems design and bringing it into, designing for, like, functional commons units, almost like business unit templates if we can be crude and call the commons of business. You know, there are donation streams, there are investment streams, there are revenue streams from products and outputs, and we're making kind of, like, copy pastable, functional units for the commons. And I would argue this is why the corporation is the dominant organizational form, in terms of power exerted today. I'm dominant, maybe, who knows? There's some couple of big players, but, bringing the commons back with a infrastructural form and being able to yeah. I think it's it's the business model could be you know, it could chase all the others out. You know? We could have this kind of it's using the same, like, viral growth of capitalism. And you mentioned, you know, kind of restricting the the use of capital or the limits of capital, like, it's a trade off because you and this is, I think, a a failing of the maybe not failing, but something that will not scale the comments is, ignoring that, you know, saying we can't use that, something like speculation, for example. But in the cyber physical comments, we align incentives or realign incentives by saying, hey, you you can speculate on this. You can vested in, the climate change commons. But every time you sell that token, a tax, you're imposing a friction and the tax goes into the common pool. So you're feeding it back in as a income stream. So you're imposing frictions on behaviors you don't want, and you are incentivizing, those funds to sort of spark new new revenue, which can then be used for more commons, common good production, public goods production, etcetera. Yeah.
Yeah. I think what like, what CommonSec is doing, at least in in the terms of the crypto world, is sort of thinking about governance. But governance governance of the commons specifically being, I guess, like, mindful of that, and thereby, like, creating systems, therefore, like, governance systems, therefore, like, cybernetic design of how we treat these assets which we hold in common. Exactly. Kind of like how how I see it. Yep. Nailed it. What were some of the influences of starting the common stack?
I mean, my influences, are we talking to sort of, like, more,
literary references? Or Well, whatever you want to.
Whatever you need to I mean pleasure. I I kind of went down the rabbit hole with some of Simon de la Riviere's work. That's actually kind of what what keyed the breakthroughs in my mind, back in 2017 when he was writing about bonding curves and token curated registries, TCRs, curation markets, which kind of combined a bonding curve with a token curated registry, which is not that different from conviction voting. Conviction voting is kind of a continuous token curated registry as opposed to a discreet, like, you stake your tokens, you unstake your tokens, you're kind of continuously staking or not. So that, really kind of connected some ideas in my mind. And, I mean, at the same time, there were, Simona Pop over at Bounties Network was running a bounties for the ocean, where it was, you know, you would basically put kind of like a bag of money on the Internet. And it was just like hanging in the Internet, and it was like, go clean up some trash. Take a picture of yourself with your name, your date, or maybe date, location, and and post it on the bounties networks on a blockchain, so it's provable. I mean, it could be game, but, of course, we're early days. And I earned 10 die for cleaning up some trash around the the river near my house. And I thought this is really neat, but it kind of lacks the, the generative effect. The, like I thought, you know, instead of paying out and die, why don't you pay out in trash token? And now trash token is kind of a mutual investment token, and the more trash gets cleaned up, the more value this ecosystem has. And and as it grows, it kind of has this, you know, capital accumulation effect, this, you know, oh, we should buy trash token because hello. A, they're cleaning up trash, and b, you know, could could you up in value. And, of course, that's not the only dynamic is token go up. But it definitely has the ability to accumulate capital and then use it for good as opposed to, you know, things like Bitcoin that accumulate capital and then
just dead capital. Right?
So, so I wrote I wrote a piece, a blog. I did a, meet up in in Calgary and kinda said this is local Bitcoin nerds there and, they were like, wow, this is really cool. But, you know, no one's really connected with the, the innovate innovation layer. So I sent it to, the Boundaries Network. I also sent it to Griff at Giveth, and a couple of other groups just saying, hey. I think this stuff's really neat, and here's my thought on how we can do that with this to make this. And, Griff got back to me a couple months later. Was that your first contact with him? Just, sending this, yep. I I'd seen him on, Crypto's news. And, yeah, I was just like, wow. Giveith is you know, it's super cool. But can we augment those? You know, it's the future of giving, but donation always requires sacrifice. And this is, like, the ultra burnout. It's a free rider problem of why nonprofits will never, you know, solve the actual all all the problems because they'll never have enough capital because it relies on sacrifice. So we kind of started chatting about how we can, well, he got back to me and said, this is this is really cool. You know, I've been seeing some of that work as well along with Michael Zargam, of course. His work in, you know, in those days was around complex systems and actually bringing the engineering aspect, a lot of the tools from electrical engineering, control system engineering, which was my background was was electrical. And then realizing that, you know, we have this whole toolkit that needed to be contextualized to not electrons, but tokens, which, you know, function the same way. They can move around in circuits, whether those are governance tokens or money tokens or any kind of, yeah. So that that was a lot of my, influence in getting here. Griffin and I then, started up the common stack, with with a number of others, Michael Zargam, and, I mean, team collaborations along the way. We we it wasn't commons oriented in the beginning. It was just, hey. Neat tool. Neat tool. Neat tool. What are these what's the what's why? You know, what's the and then that was kind of on me as the narrative guide to go and be like, what what do we build with this? And we had the flash of insight, chatting with Simon de la Riviere, to use, you know, token engineering to fund token engineering. So we started talking about bootstrapping essentially the discipline of token engineering using the tools of token engineering by creating the token engineering commons. But it wasn't I mean, it wasn't the token engineering commons just yet. Because, yeah, I guess I guess I was reading a lot about Ostrom at the time, and I've read, yeah, Derek Wall's rules for radicals. And, it just kinda clicked that I was like, oh, damn. That's, like, we could we're building tools for that, and, I mean, every other purpose under that. Like, that's the that's the umbrella. It's like we can do this for the public good in the open, not, you know, for and just completely re innovate on, you know, organizational models. It's outside of the nation and the state, but you're you're using the market, but you're also using, you know, appropriate control of the market, not top down, like, censorship control, but, you know, people democratic control. What do we think these things should do? How should we design these? What is the balance between capital and labor that we wanna put into these? Because it's not exclude capital or you're never gonna have enough money to do what you wanna do. And it's, you know, it's it's about finding the balance and being able
to, reward everyone commensurately in the context that they agree on. Alright. You you spoke about Eleanor Ostrom, which I think might be, a fairly important person to mention. But as far as I understand, she is the economist that basically figured out that the tragedy of the commons was a bit bogus.
Yeah. So Garrett Hardin, you know, the tragedy of the commons is actually the tragedy of the the noncommons, the tragedy of maybe the free market. Although free market is all sorts of misnomers. But, yeah, I mean, Ostrom basically studied grounded communities, like, in in the real world and under and distilled a set of eight, you know, you can some people say one more or one less. These rules for appropriate commons management. So you're putting boundary around it. What is it that you're managing? Understanding the the rights and, I mean, you can read about her stuff. We also put out a piece about automating Ostrom, like, what this means in the context of smart contracts. So the boundary of our commons is your tokens. You know, you hold it, you're in. If you burn it, you're out. So and then, of course, once you're in, you have this membership token. You can use it to vote. You can use it to work, or or vote on work and then do the work and earn more tokens. You can claim a portion of the reserve pool, but, of course, you pay some tax to the common pool whenever you extract or, you know, free ride on the commons. Well, it's not free riding anymore because we're building in the reciprocity loop rather than having it, you know, go out through government and then they tax, and then it's just a much closer loop, that we can kind of limit speculative action, or, you know, make sure it pays into the commons from which it's extracting.
I want to talk about mushrooms. Me too. Because throughout the conference, you made a lot of interesting connections with mushrooms and mycelial networks. You mentioned, I think, once earlier, to some of the work that you're doing. So I was wondering if you could talk a bit about mushrooms Sure. And mycelial networks, how those work and how that relates with commons.
Yeah. Totally. So mycelium are really interesting because they are the first, like, multicelled, organism. They are they figured out ways to coordinate. They they colonized the land. You know, they came out of the ocean. They ate the rock, until it turned into topsoil, and then they actually, you know, merged with algae to become lichen. They did all sorts of amazing things as lichen for millions and millions and millions of years before any of us existed. And they're still, you know, the the, the largest organism on earth is the armillaria, fungus in somewhere in The US, several, you know, square kilometers and so on. They're they're just these fantastic problem solving machines. They problem solve without top down direction, and they problem solve at the edge of the network. So subsidiarity. You know, they they are fully empowered to explore their, environment, exploit resources that they find in that environment, and then spread. And so it's a totally viable systems model. So this is kind of the, a guiding design or, I mean, the the structures of these systems are very similar. It's, creating bottom up emergence, with problem solving at the edge of the network, which is the same thing as this proposal pool. So when you put a proposal or a common pool, out in the open and you say anyone who holds tokens can apply to this. You suddenly change it from a top down subsidy say, you know, the Canadian government wants to increase the use of solar. So they say, hey, everyone gets a discount of 10,000 or 5,000 off your solar. What if I'm in a cloudy city? Or what if I'm in a windy city and I want, tidal or I want solar or sorry wind or geothermal? These top down subsidies are just too clunky. So if we make instead bottom up, then everyone can just apply for what they need instead of, having someone coming around or I mean, with the permaculture analogy, you could say it's, the gardener who is pouring from the top, in a from a bucket versus a drip hose. Like, a drip hose is bottom up. It just provides the moistness and all the plants can draw as opposed to, you know, a gardener is applying top down. Well, what if he forgets the plant on the end, it dies? So it's kind of creating the the conditions for emergence, rather than imposing from top down, yeah, how that needs to happen.
Could you explain a little bit more what cyber physical comments are?
Sure. So the cyber physical comments is kind of the combination of I mean, at least in the early days, we talk about these four components, the augmented bonding curve, conviction voting, the giveth proposal engine, and the commons dashboard. When you combine them together, we've called this the minimum viable commons. I mean, it's it's not really, you know, there's so much more we could do. We're just kind of starting here. We're drawings, you know, these are the first four four parts we're working on. The cyber physical commons is what comes out when you combine those things. So you now have an economy. You have governance over that economy, you have, you know, escrow, for funds. So, you know, it's not just throwing money everywhere. It's like, well, when you produce output or when you produce impact, your funds are unlocked and and now you can use them. And the commons dashboard kind of ties it all together where everyone can see what's happening in their commons. This is how much money is being created. This is how much investment we have. This is how much revenue flow we have. This is, what impact we're having. You know, if it's a how's the homeless commons? How many people are actually, you know, being housed? So it's kind of bringing all the relevant metrics so that you can know, you know, at what rate are we burning money? At what rate are we, earning? At what, how many members do we have. So it's kind of bringing a a dashboard into or like a, yeah, control center into these, communities where you can understand the different leverage points and also, you know, design better as we go. Because as we see what problems come up via these dashboards, we'll know, okay, well, we need to this kind of component or we need this kind of, control levers. You know, it's kind of like the governance surface of the commons. And then opening that to everybody allows for computer aided governance where we can, have there's this trade off in governance between inclusivity and being informed. We're gonna have a small group of informed people. The more people we include, the less informed they're going to be. So there's kind of this trade off between inclusion and being informed. And with computer aided governance, hopefully, we can kind of push at that boundary because we can inform much larger groups of people. Maybe not much larger because, again, Dunbar's number, we have we're coordinating around a purpose. These aren't supposed to be I mean, they may not be global themselves. They may federate into global, but we'd still are kind of thinking at least in this early stage, you know, relatively small groups coordinating around resources to solve problems.
So then the this it seems to me like the when you say cyber physical commons, you're talking about, like, the use of digital technology and influencing the material
world and thinking of that was connected systems and as a commons. Right. So Bitcoin is a very digital commons, you know, like it's a, you know, this open source code base, you know, shared protocols, etcetera, exchange, but it doesn't really have impact in the real world. So this is the cyber physical is like that bridge from digital commons. You know, we have this blockchain infrastructure. Cool. But what does it do? It houses homeless people. Cool. Now it's cyber physical and it's, you know, there are you could probably argue that all blockchains are cyber physical because it's humans interacting with technology. But what we're doing is trying to much more concretely ground that in outcomes that are important to The physical world. Exactly.
Yeah. That's that's something that's, yeah. The only physical part of Bitcoin is really, like, the mining. Yeah. Acquiring and the energy use. Right? So now I need to ask you because I ask everyone, but what do the crypto commons mean to you?
I think it's the resurgence of comedy. I think this is now finally, we have a substrate or an infrastructure on which we can compete as the commons against, yeah, and it's not even compete. It's, you know, just a new organizational form that can, I mean, compete in the market sense? Right? Then you'll you'll now have commons going up against startups, you know, trying to produce similar things. But startups I mean, the traditional business world have a hard time producing things that aren't private goods. This is why we have governments and NGOs try to provide public goods. We're just trying to take the engine of capitalism and inserting it, into sort of a commons based paradigm where we can have this interesting blend. A lot of these things blur boundaries, and we can now blend business models from over here with producing public goods instead of just purely private goods. And, yeah, it'll be interesting to see, how the crypto commons can I think it's a resurgence of the commons? I think we finally have, like, a we can level the playing field a little bit, and actually allow, you know, public goods to be investable, to to get away from this, sort of altruist burnout. We expect people who do good in the world to do it for free, and that is part of the reason why, you know, if you graduate from McKinsey, you can make many, many figures on Wall Street somewhere, or you can make 70 k a year in a non profit. And if you take more than that, everybody's mad at you because you're greedy. Right? That's pretty weird. So if you're doing bad, we don't have this, like, shaming of, you know, you could run a tobacco company or an oil company and make as much as you want, and everybody just goes well. But where does the talent go? You know, they follow that incentive, and this is why that is the dominant space, and they have plenty of capital, and they have plenty of talent and resources. And then this space over here is just kind of neglected and full of nice people who wanna change the world, but the systemic incentives are against them. So we're trying to, like, take what works from over there and plug it in over here, and I think we'll see all sorts of new business models and things that will, you know, eventually over the long run, just drive out those extracted business models. Maybe, you know, maybe there's room for both. You know, private goods can be run under, you know, the traditional status quo as is, but public goods, which we have a across the board, we need to invest flat out in public goods, whether that's physical infrastructure, health care infrastructure, you know, climate change infrastructure, everything. We need massive capitals of pool pools of capital to go towards these public goods, and I think this is one way that we could start getting that, getting that going.
Yeah. It's been really great talking to you. I should probably disclose that I am also a part of the trusted seed. But, yeah, maybe to finish off, you can share with people what,
Yeah. Can can people become still a part of trusted seed? Absolutely. Alright. Yeah. So, so the tote the token engineering commons hatch is gone. So that was the first hatch, but there will be, we hope, many commons hatching. And the trusted seed, I mean, it serves multiple purposes. One, it's the the common stack is currently funded off a membership model. So to join the trusted seed, you pay $450 that goes to fund all the common stack work. It's not nearly sufficient, but it's one income stream for us. And then, you know, we are helping to launch all of these comments. So with the TEC, we've really been working hand in hand, but we are hoping to kind of have more deployable, copy customized paste templates for any community that wants to use, you know, the growing cyber physical commons toolkit. So we're back to the mycelium for a moment, you know, talking with Paul Stamets, and, the fungi profecte team. They have a lot of ideas, and they have, you know, clear path forward for using actually mycelium infused sugar water to vaccinate bees against colony collapse disorder, which is, you know, a a host of issues, mites and deformed wing virus, etcetera. And they're seeing really amazing, results from that so far. The funny thing is they weren't they weren't able to commercialize their I see them sugar water because the FDA has classified, honeybees or lump them in with a group of, you know, other livestock that cannot be fed mushrooms. So they've since worked that through. I think they're almost clear. But in the meantime, they kind of got tied in with us because they were looking for other ways to fund the production of this bee saving mycelium sugar water with an amazing amazing, results, at least in their early experiments, and they they wanna scale more research. But what do you need for that? You need capital, you know. So we are going to start up, a number of initiatives, probably starting with NFTs to save the bees, which is an easy way to rally, you know, artists, and get sort of a global, interest of of people who want to use their money to save the bees. You know, you can buy digital piece of art, and that digital piece of art in the future may do all sorts of things. Maybe you can, digitally hole punch it and claim a bee feeder when they're in full production, which may be partially funded by those NFT sales. We're talking about doing a launching a commons, potentially with them as well because they want to foster citizen science. They want to encourage schools to run the programs. And, you know, our way of explaining it to them was, you know, if you just have this proposal pool, this common pool, and schools can apply, then you don't have to, like, rubber stamp everyone. You know, they don't wanna run a, a proposal checking service, so you just put it to the cyber physical infrastructure of the commons. So here's a common pool. It has a certain amount that can be allocated. Schools can apply or, researchers can apply. You know? All of these, myco technologies, mycoremediation using mushrooms to, break down, oils and oil spills or, mycelium as styrofoam or mushroom plastics. These are, like, really promising, scalable, you know, amazing technologies that just need to be brought up to market. Right? How do we normally do that? We subsidize them from the government or from someone else top down. Capital one of those. Exactly. So now we can just crowdfund it and provide that seed funding with mycelial network structures. You know, we are we are pushing the decision making to the edge of the network just like the mycelium is. So it's really, like, sort of these micro currencies that we're working with to, you know, scale micro technologies, which, again, is a nice fractal, harmony to it.
How has the conference been for you? Because this is this is like your this is your, this is your people. Right?
Yeah. Nice. They're all in the same place. Crypto commenters, it's, It's beautiful.
They love the common stack. Yeah.
We love them. And I mean, there's there's so much that goes on in these networks, and the common stack is somewhat of an ecosystem accelerator too. Like, a lot of projects, there's so many pieces to the puzzle. But we are very much trying to, like, be as high level and, like, just show the the puzzle and then how the pieces come together is, I mean, not in our control or anyone's really. It's kind of an emergent process. So there's, you know, from data science and mathematics geniuses to, you know, researchers and system designers to modelers and technical writers and specification to, developers and, I mean, even some of the impressive technologies going on in sort of developing and and deploying these things. And then, of course, there's multiple different chains that could be on, or even no chain at all, like, interfacing with, governments who who understand the power of this. We could run, you know, municipal, experiments, and it doesn't have to be on a blockchain. You could have smart contract, execution protocols that could be executed by banks if you wanted, which is also research going on with with some of these projects here. So it's really cool to start to think how we can integrate, Web three technologies with the real world and the real existing system, but also protecting against, you know, pure extraction if you open that up without a protective membrane. If you open up the commons to capitalism, you get almost, you know, sure value extraction until there's nothing left. So we're kind of building these, membranes around the system that value can transfer in and out, but not, you know, by the will of the people inside that.
Yeah. It's been super great talking to you. Do you have any last plugs where people can keep up with the common stack and whatever you're you guys are up to? Yeah. Our Discord is pretty active.
Twitter is where most of our announcements go down. We are currently, yeah, doing a lot more to communicate and and corral our community. There's so so many people interested in deploying these tools. One thing, I guess, I should say, we're we're still engineering the combustion engine. Right? We're selling the sports car. We want the the community to get in and just be able to go from a to b, and it will get there. But a lot of people join our channels and they go, what? I don't understand any of this because it's the engineering of the engine under the hood. It will be under the hood. It's just we're not we're not there yet. But I think this engineering aspect and and this part of it is really important to integrate with everybody here, because they're all at various levels of that stack. And ultimately, we can, you know, turn it into a smooth, polished, product that communities can just use to get from a to b and solve the problems that are important to them. Nice.