Decentralizing Power and Value with P2P Models
For this week's episode I spoke with Samer Hassan (@SamerP2P), activist, researcher, and Associate Professor at Universidad Complutense Madrid and Faculty Associate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center. His current focus is his work on P2P Models (@P2PMod), a project to build collaborative economy organizations that are decentralized, democratic & distribute their profits through the use of decentralized technology like blockchain. During the interview we talk about Samer's research and act...
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So hello, everyone. You're listening to the Blockchain Socialist Podcast. And for today's guest, I have Samar Hassan. He is an activist, researcher, and associate professor at Universidad Complutense Madrid and Harvard. He is working on peer to peer models, which is a project that's looking to build a build collaborative economy organizations that are decentralized, democratic, and distribute their profits. So hi, Samir. How are you doing? Fine. How how are you? I'm good. Thanks for the minute inviting me here. Yeah. Of course. And thanks for, thanks for coming on. But maybe as a as a preface for for our conversation, it would be good if you could give a an introduction, of yourself and explain how you came to the blockchain space and got started on peer to peer models since it's a it's a really interesting project, and I think a lot of listeners would be interested in in learning more about it.
Basically, I have been well, I'm a researcher within academia. Right? But I have I typically find myself more as an activist, typically involving grassroots initiatives, both offline, online. So when I was back in the day with, when I started, I studied both computer science and social sciences. And when I was doing my PhD, I typically did my activism on the side. Right? Like, I would do more academic stuff, write my research publications. Okay. It was interdisciplinary. It was interesting using AI and social sciences and simulations, and it was cool. But eventually, I got sick of not having social impact with the work that I was basically spending my life on. So I spent some time away from academia, actually doing activism in Lebanon or in the Spain or whatever, and eventually came back. But I came back changing fields and trying to mix everything up. So I instead of working on communities outside of academia, I tried to study communities in within academia. And instead of getting about decentralized tech or platforms for social movements or stuff like that outside of academia, I would research that kind of stuff within academia. So these two lines, studying communities on one hand and building tools relying on free open source centralized technologies on the other has been what I have been busy for the last, I don't know, ten, twelve years.
Wow.
So
be well, before blockchain, to be honest. Yeah. Yeah. That's great you're able to mix those two together.
Yeah. Sometimes sometimes I work on one, sometimes I work on the other. But, typically, I try to mix the two research lines, which is what has the most potential, I believe. Mhmm.
Did your acquisition include a lot of, I guess, technical did it include a lot of technology, I guess?
So depends on the moment. Sometimes it did. I I back in the day, I cofounded a nonprofit that we were working on building or supporting software for for social movements. But also, I have been involved in a social center where I would belong to the, let's say, computer science commission, but I would also do other management, other coordination, going, you know, weakest assemblies and all this stuff, which has nothing to do with technology. Right? The organizing part. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Yeah. And so then, I guess, how did you end up coming to the blockchain space?
I was already involved with decentralized tech. So I was, of course, aware of when the Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies started to be something. But I was especially interested when the when Ethereum began to be on the works. Right? Because then it it it implied to be able to build decentralized applications different than a a cryptocurrency, which, to be honest, I don't love Bitcoin model at all. Yeah. I I think I've it has so many issues. But I believe that it has potentials. The not not the Bitcoin, but the blockchain technology to to yeah. I mean, to tackle the power imbalances when we build infrastructure.
Right? That When you say you were working on decentralized tech before that, I guess it was already on different types of peer to peer, peer to peer models of technology.
Well, I was more into federated, to be honest. Okay. To federated protocols and software because we had peer to peer, but it was more like BitTorrent for sharing. And the peer to peer solutions that were for, out there for building applications were not really awesome. But in federated, protocols, federated, infrastructure, we had we saw potential there because we could have benefits of of of centralized platforms using, the frameworks or the development frameworks and stuff like that from there. But with interoperate strong interoperability, so there is no, let's say, central overload controlling the ecosystem. Right? Mhmm. And we try to build build the stuff to facilitate the development of of federated collaborative applications.
Do you have any examples of, like, a type of federated application? Email. Oh, okay.
Classic. Email email is is federated. Right? And we all use it. Doesn't matter where you do you have your account. You can have even your local server. You can have it at at work. You can have it in on one of the huge platforms, and we can always communicate. You give me whatever at whatever dot whatever, and we can communicate because servers are interoperable interoperable with each other, and we can, communicate. And there is no central overload controlling all the ecosystem. Doesn't matter how big Gmail is. They cannot read all the emails that are sent everywhere. Right? There will be always, I don't know, ProtonMail, Geeks use sending price up, emails, and those emails are not in Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, whatever.
But what about, like, the NSA? Would the NSA still be able to be
Well, then we get into encryption and Yeah. We have to cap. Because it it it's true it's true that email is not as it it was done so many decades ago. Right? So it it it doesn't have secure, security within the protocol or at least not really have security. So then but but we can create new protocols. We can develop new federated protocols
with with similar ideas. Right? You can also build on top of email, I guess, to make it more secure in certain ways
You you you you could. You you you're good to a to a limit exactly because then you are not you if Gmail doesn't comply with your protocol, then so many people will not use it. Right? So Yeah. It has limitations. But still, I I mean, at back in the day, we saw potential there. Today, it's true that having so many tests out there that have been a failure in practice, I'm more, skeptical over the potential success of federated platforms over decentralized ones. For example, Gmail, when they started providing a chat service, they joined XMPP and Jabber protocol because they were the minority while competing with Messenger with Microsoft Messenger. But in the moment that they become they become an important player, they doubt the protocol and interoperability. So all of us that were using that, I mean, XMPP to communicate with others, well, had problems now interoperable, making interoperable applications with Gmail.
Yeah. Yeah. So
yeah.
Yeah. Is that when you started thinking more about peer to peer, I guess?
Well, I mean, first, we, we tried to do some stuff. Like, swell SwellRT is one of the, back end as a service and frame development framework that we built for, I mean, on top of actually, some technology open source technology by Google that was wave. Google Wave that became eventually Apache Wave. We tried to build on top of that protocol that was kind of an email two point o incompatible with email, just, rethinking the concept. And we tried to build on top of that. We were, I don't know, successful to extent, and eventually, we gave the IP to the Apache Foundation as part of the Apache Waypoint. But I mean, when Apache adopting the software was, of course, a success, but didn't grow as much as we had hoped.
Right.
And, yeah, eventually, Blockchain, Ethereum, and this and IPFS, not only Blockchain. I mean, this new generation peer to peer technologies opened up the decentralized then centralization ecosystem way more than federated technologies
ever could. Yeah. Yeah. I have to say, like, definitely for me as well, when I when Bitcoin was out, I wasn't really that that keen on it. It didn't feel like it was solving any I mean, it was attempting to solve a problem, but from a particular point of view, it didn't really make all that much sense. But then, I guess, with the, the composability of smart contracts and, like, that idea of smart contracts, I think it it the light bulb sort of goes off a little bit more, on what you're able to do. And, you get you have more design choices than you do with Bitcoin. With Bitcoin, it's like, nope. Just 21,000,000 or however much. Just you're only able to transact and you have to do it this way. So yeah. But I can say for the same for me, it was it was Ethereum that sort of, was a light bulb moment. But so, if we talk about so your project today now is peer to peer models. That's, I think, the biggest project that you're working on at the moment. Is that correct?
Yep.
And could you explain a bit more what, yeah, what are the goals of peer to peer models and what you guys hope to achieve? I know you guys have received already quite some money from the European Research Council. So you guys have funds. And I think I've seen every once in a while, you guys are maybe looking for, some potential, grad students to help out. So maybe someone listening might be interested in in knowing more about the peer to peer models.
Sure. And so the way we see it, we see it when we focus on the collaborative economy mostly, And we mean by that the the Internet today has a lot of people belonging to communities that are maybe whose interaction is mediated via platform. Right? And they they collaborate. They share the stuff. They work together, and yet the platform is always the intermediary. So we see three main problems there. So first one, the infrastructure issue in which the owner of the infrastructure, the one that, deployed the software that controls where it's the server is deployed, that are deployed, and whatever. Well, they they they they are built with centralized technologies. This means that in order to scale, you have to deal with more and more people. Your poor servers and your poor software has to scale to thousand, tens of thousands, 100 thousands, millions of interactions, and that's very costly. So you are forced to monetize or die of success. If you are forced to monetize, then you have to monetize what you have that is typically the user data. And then we have all the troubles of privacy of this huge data hubs that are trying to use personalized advertisement and and all this stuff, right, that we I will not get into because we are more or less all familiar with these issues. But I would say that regardless if you are a very good entrepreneur that wants to do it somewhere else, the the way the infrastructure works, it's very difficult to do it in other ways. You don't need to be an evil Max Zuckerberg to do it to do it wrong. You can because the pressure to monetize monetization is so big that if you want to grow, if you want to give service while keeping your centralized centralized service, it's very difficult not to monetize what you have. And this derives into immediate problems. There is a power imbalance between the owners of the infrastructure and the communities of users. So regardless of how many scandals the platforms suffer like Uber or Facebook, I mean, the users have no voice because they are typically governed by a corporate structure. Right? And but when we talk about Walmart having a corporate structure and having consumers, buying and having no employees, this makes more sense for for from the customer approach. But when you are at YouTube where you are just an empty shell where the users create all that you are monetizing, well, you don't ask the Walmart consumers to take the food to the to the supermarket. Right? So you are asking all the users to provide all the value, and yet you give them no voice and no power whatsoever. Right? And, of course, the third problem is the economic issue. You don't only give them you know, don't give them decision making power. You also don't give them a penny or sometimes you give them a bit, sometimes. Like, YouTube YouTube YouTubers okay. So the top of them can live with it, top 1%, but most of YouTubers cannot. Or the top 1% of medium can live from what they are writing. Most of them cannot. Right? Yeah. So we have these issues relate that I see very related with the centralized infrastructure. So Peter Penman expressed to answer the question of, can we build platforms in another way? Can we build platforms that do not rely on it? But that by definition, by default, they don't rely on a centralized infrastructure. So by default, there is an open ecosystem in which you do not control all the ecosystem. You do not control all the user data, and users can move to others to other easily because you don't control all the layers, basically. Can can we have platforms in which users have decision making power at least to some extent on how the platform evolves? Can we have platforms in which the benefit is not concentrated the profit is not concentrated just on the owners of infrastructure, but also on the people that are participating, creating value, what's up what and and so on and so on. Right? So we are researching this space and trying to respond to these platforms, obviously, using blockchain and other decentralized technologies. I don't think more or less covers
Yeah. The overall abstract approach. Let's see. Yeah. No. That's that that is really interesting. Yeah. One of the things that sort of bothers me about, like, how reliant we are on centralized platforms, is sometimes that I think it's something that hasn't been analyzed property properly within, like, a political context sometimes. That's you know, Twitter basically makes the rules about how you communicate with each other on Twitter and that how you're only allowed to use, you know, however many characters. So it makes Twitter very, like, confrontational because you have to get to the point within your one tweet. So you have to go so everything sounds almost like a like an insult. When maybe like, if you were in person, you would be saying things a lot more nuance and you would like you know, of course, in in person, you have body language as well. So it's a bit it's a bit you know, it's a more natural form of communication and, like, Twitter or something like it's very unnatural, but we all feel forced to sort of use it because it's this huge platform with so many people on it. So we have you know, we don't really have much of a choice, and we can't tell Twitter very much to, hey. Can you change it? Instead, we just sort of complain that's, I hate using Twitter. You know, that that that meme that always pops up, you're like, open up the Twitter app and, like, you know, be depressed. You know, it's, yeah, it's unfortunate that we that I feel like we're sort of missing the ball here where we could be in a way seizing our own means of means of production, but in the form of social media maybe, to create the ways that we want to communicate with each other. And I feel like peer to peer model seems to be on that track of trying to explore, well, how do we do that and how do we do it well?
Yeah. That's the struggle. Right? I completely agree. I mean, that that's why we we say I mean, code is, I mean, is not neutral. Code is very political. And interfaces, user interfaces are very political. They have sociopolitical values embedded in them regardless if the developer is aware or not. Doesn't matter. Yeah. Because they have a vision of the world, and they will implement with that vision of the world. And they will prioritize certain things. And so why spend to tweet and why spend if you have to count your characters, why saying say thanks or please. Right? It doesn't make sense because it's wasting characters of content.
Yeah. No. And the and even, like, one one example I've been thinking about how it actually is, like, kind of really political is, like, dating applications. Like Bumble, is one of the dating applications. And you can put your political affiliation, but you can only put conservative and liberal. There's nothing else. You're either conservative or you're liberal or, like, or, like, a centrist or something like that. Like, you know, so it it it there's a there's an ideology behind the code in the in the product design, which is pretty funny. That what I've noticed is that peer to peer model seems to be one of the largest projects that is explicitly exploring blockchain for some type of social good. And as I mentioned earlier, you guys received quite a lot of funding from Europe, from that. So I'm curious why you think peer to peer models is seems to be one of the few that's doing it. Of course, you know, probably because, you know, cryptocurrency gives a lot of money and you can, like, easily raise a bunch of funds and, like, start your own company and then but, yeah, I'm curious why you think peer to peer models is one of the few. And if maybe there are any other projects that you're aware of that you you would shout out as also being, I guess, looking at blockchain and decentralized technology from a social good lens.
So that's a really good question. Then in practice, the majority of the blockchain ecosystem follows the within finance. Right? It's I guess it's normal. The Bitcoin was the first application of the technology. The the boom of cryptocurrencies have is there, right, and cannot be ignored, especially by the finance world. It's especially threatening or disrupting, like, with the banking financial sectors. So they are the ones investing most on it as well. So it makes sense that and now with, DeFi trend, it's more of the same history, more financial applications. But also because blockchain is a very mature technology practice, it has not that many years, to be honest. And when we talk about social networks, social networks have been decades here, way before Facebook. Right? But, but Blockchain has not been decades here. Yeah. Well, Bitcoin has one decade to count. Yeah. Yeah. But, and in practice, even though there is a lot of funding moving blockchain applications, in practice, blockchain is very good for startups, very good for research projects, but has we don't have large scale applications, successful applications of blockchain outside of finance. We don't have them. In fact, this question that you made, it was very interesting for us to explore. And we were hired by the European commission in a separate contract from b to b models to explore that, to map the ecosystem of blockchain for social code. And we did a mapping of of the initiatives that we found, and we found one one hundred thirty that, I mean, discarding paperwork, discarding, just white papers or ICOs that were a failure or something like that. No. No. We we focused on the staff that has real users, that has pilots running. Right? So so I invite everyone to to check out the report because we have the plenty plenty of, very interesting projects. It's I mean, you can Google scanning the European ecosystem of distributed ledger technologies for social and public good. I can put the link in the I can put the link in the description so that I mean, Prad is searching for DLT for Sherwood. You can find it. Oh, yeah. But but yeah. It's it's I mean, I I I was very happy with the with the report, and it's a great work from the gender search center from the European Commission together with our work and some others.
What were some of the things that you that you found?
Well, we found that innovation is not only driven by a startup. There were, like, a 30% of nonprofits, which was very interesting. We found that there was really a lot of European initiatives, which is very interesting. As compared to maybe, like, American initiatives or or something. I mean, the thing is that many so so some of many from that the staff from America have moved to Switzerland. So that Ah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. So so that makes them To Zouk. Yeah. Zouk is attracting a lot. So oh, anyway, we were not only looking for things that were based on Europe, but also related to Europe in some way. So that expanded a bit more. And, well, we we saw things that expect that we expected, like the Ethereum was the most famous was the most popular public blockchain. Hyperledger, the most popular private one. But we were shocked about the huge diversity around that. It was very interesting that a lot of sectors beyond finance, a lot of, fields, a lot plenty of countries, and and plenty of open source software. And sadly, way too many white male gigs, but that was as expected, sadly.
Yeah. Yeah. It's when when you define social good, like, because what what type of definition did you guys use to find those those projects?
We were, fuzzy there. I mean, we were flexible, of course. They they we were looking for projects that the state that they want explicitly, that they want to achieve some kind of social impact, being social impact understood in many ways. I mean, it could be helping public services from a state. It could be being more inclusive. It could be being, being caring about the environment. It could be multiple things. There's two properties, let's say. We'll have some we'll have some inclusive criteria, inclusive I mean, some, selection criteria, sorry, to I mean, everything is in the report. I probably wouldn't get very scientific.
Okay. Fair enough. So I'm really interested in hearing your perspective about this because you have so much technological experience as well as political experience in terms of activism. Like, why do you think the left should be interested in peer to peer technology like blockchain? Especially considering your your background, I would hope that people would would really appreciate your opinion on that. I do have mixed feelings with the technology, I have to say. And there are
so many, libertarians
in the field. Right? Tell me about it. Tell me about it. Yeah.
Still, there are a lot of people that, let's say, social democratic libertarian ish Yeah. Yeah. I get I get what you mean. I get what you mean. Yeah. Hard to define. So more more I mean, we which I guess, I'm fine with it. It's very postmodern, post label, but whatever. So I do think that the technology has some, aspects that are very for example, so many of the blockchain projects try to solve new problems creating new currency solve social problems creating new currencies and new markets as if markets can't solve social problems like that. Right? Well, sometimes market work markets work. I will not deny that. I'm completely okay with that notion that sometimes market help, but sometimes they don't, and often they don't. And efficient markets are an exception rather than the rule. So we shouldn't expect that that can work in every context in any way. Right? At the same time and also and also the blockchain has some individualistic notions and and it gives power to the token or to the to the token holder, and that may, push for giving more power to those with more tokens and stuff like that and relies on a mining mechanism, especially with proof of work, but also with proper stake to some extent in which, well, big players have more concern. And yet it's helping to decentralize power. It's helping to create logically centralized, but but the structurally decentralized, projects in which we can get benefits of having one place to go. And yet there is not one controller, which we didn't have before, not as such. It makes visible things that were not that visible before. So it visibilizes, for example, reproductive work or maintenance work. Or if you if we are making a DAO, decentralized autonomous organization with smart contracts and whatever, and we want to reward with tokens the work that every person is doing for the community, then we have to get into the details of which types of work people are doing. Not only the productive work, but also the productive work, also organizational aspects, also caring or emotional labor or whatever and then and give it value and be visibility in the community and may being inclusive with whoever is work. You know what I mean? It forces collectives and organizations to discuss things that are typically under the table, which I think is positive. Maybe they don't put forward the best solutions. Yeah. That's too way too common, but they were not before either. At least now we are pushing them to talk about it and gives me hope for experimentation, and I think this is the key here. It opens the box for experimentation, experimenting new ways of handling of of of of deploying platforms, of of collaborating online, of rewarding work. And that's super interesting because there are a lot of people saying it's true that people that concentrate most tokens shouldn't have the most decision making. So then let's do quadratic voting. No. Let's do this, this other or this other models of governors that that that try in practice to reduce the power of the elites. And it's like, fuck. Why don't you do this in other platforms, please? Yeah. And life. Or or or ideally, we are live. Right? But these questions of let's redistribute wealth are being discussed in in DAOs in the ecosystem today. And it's like, okay. I mean, welcome then.
Yeah. It is very socialistic.
It but but it is. But in practically, even if it's libertarians talking about it. Do you know what I mean? That's a good thing, maybe. That's that's a very good thing. I don't have I mean, I can definitely discuss with me with the variance. At Lorna, if they are open minded, I have no problem with that. And I think and I think it's good when when projects have a wide, wide, base ideologically wise. So we can we we have people from different not only diverse in terms of gender or race or ability or class or whatever, But also for ideology, it's it it would be fantastic if we can convince people not from the left of doing things that are reaching agreements and pushing forward technologies and platforms that benefit us all. Right? It would be awesome.
Hey, everyone. If you're enjoying this episode so far, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and join the crypto leftist community on Discord or Reddit, which you can find links to in the show notes. If you're enjoying the interview or find the content I make important, you could pitch into my efforts starting at $3 a month on patreon.com/theblockchainsocialist to help me out and join the newest patrons like Nicholas, Luke, and Andy. Any amount really helps since making this stuff isn't free in terms of money or time. And 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 this interview to help spread the message that blockchain does not need to be used to further entrench capitalist exploitation if we put our efforts into it. So if that message resonates with you, I hope you'll consider helping out. Also, if you're interested in what's going on lately at Breadchain, be sure to check out the first blog post that was published last week as it goes into more detail about the project that I've been working on with a few others in the community. Thanks again for listening, and let's get back to the interview with Samar. It it's been really interesting for me keeping track, of the Ethereum space, how important or how how much more they're emphasizing public goods. Like, it's a huge topic in the sort of Ethereum, DAO. This this this specific, like, libertarian social democrats weird space that you're talking about. So a lot of talk about public goods. I can, like, I can criticize their definition of public good. I don't I don't think it's, like, necessarily always correct in how they want to think about it. And sometimes it's a little bit, like, wishy washy how they want to go about it and how they define it. But at least they're talking about public good, which is I mean, yeah, no libertarian talks about that otherwise, you know, unless it's, like, it's something bad that the government does. You know? So it's it's certainly opened a lot. There's a lot of socialistic, not socialism, but socialistic, elements to it that I think if the left were there, you we would be able to have a bit more pressure to, like, press that button a little bit further to to push those people who are maybe already in these in in these positions or to create, you know, to have other people who are socialists in these type of positions to sort of push push for that vision rather than the, yeah, the usual libertarian vision of of thinking of of markets to try and fix every problem.
Yeah. In in fact, we have tried to do I mean, we have to understand that even though, predictive models is a very large project research wise, It's a very small compared with titans that have been successful in getting tens of millions in an SEO. Right? We we cannot compare with with those. And yet, we have tried to to introduce our view that is very commons oriented. So we don't talk we talk more about the commons more about the public good. Yeah. But because I I I think it's it's very loaded, the work the work of commons, positively loaded. Mhmm. And and it you don't use the word public, which is also, I think, good for attracting other people. Yeah. But, also, there is there are awesome works on the common space like the Nobel Prize, Eleanor of economics, Eleanor Ostrom, proving that common's local management is more efficient than it the state or the market. Right? So that's awesome. That's an empirical result that we want to get behind. Right? Because, like, you give a community management over a common good, a public good, and you'll expect this this simple rules that is a bit the principles of the governance principles of Austin, and it will be more efficient than than if a private company does it with a market, approach or with a central administration trying to manage it from a public approach. And we can apply this to Blockchain very easily. It's not that difficult. And and I think there are some projects that are that are already going there. Right? The common stack is Exactly. One of them, of course. Of course.
But, yeah, there's what yeah. One of my criticisms of, like, the the word public good I mentioned this in a in a previous episode, but when you say public good when you say good, you're thinking that it's already a positive thing, but it's not like a public something that is public isn't always necessarily good or, like, how it's being used is necessarily good. Understand. So, like, the I was her name is, Annalise Milano. She's doing a lot of she's doing her PhD, looking at public goods and, and blockchain. And, so she she preferred using public things, which I think Oh. Is may maybe a probably a bit better of a description because it's it's more neutral and there are things that are, you know, things that are publicly available but are used for maybe bad ends or, like, you know, open source projects being used by companies to to profit off of. You know, it's a common example. But yeah.
I I see your point.
So, yeah, that that was a great answer. I know some of the other things that peer to peer models has been doing is looking at the DAO space. Because the DAO space, I think, is an explicit, it's an explicit, like, need to deal with this issue of the commons, and, like, how you deal when you gather a bunch of people together and you pool all these resources, you have to know what you're going to do with it. And most of the people in this DAO space are sort of, at least unconsciously sort of against the against wage slavery of, like, thinking about we're not creating a DAO that is just like your standard, you know, corporate structure. So they need to build something else. So they need to they now need to go back to the, like, the root of what a corporate of what a corporation does and think about how do we distribute these these resources. But I know you guys have done a lot of analytics into that DAO space. Some of, like, three, bigger platforms called the DAO analyzer.
Yeah. This is a research line that I have with my colleague Javier Arroyo. We call it this it's it's a smaller, we have a bit of funding from the Spanish ministry. We call it chain community because it's exploring communities on blockchain. And, we have been doing mostly data science on the, like, on the ecosystem of, we have looked at mostly the Stack and DAO house rather than although we have also, looked a bit up on Aragon because, well, for technical reasons, they were using the graph, so it was much easier directly pinching the extracting the data. And and, yeah, we have built that dashboard, Youssef Al Fakir, to thank for, that he developed. A a dashboard to try to visualize some metrics and graphs on how these DAOs evolve over time and how even the DAO members could go and look for their DAO in their main platforms and see how they are doing. What are the, different well, for now, a few metrics. But, eventually, we would like to grow it as much as we did with another another effort that we did with Wiki Communities. We explored especially focused on the inequality of participation in in other types of online communities that are Wiki Communities. So we explore thousands of wikis, and we build a dashboard to show them WikiGron. Yeah. So
yeah. It's really interesting because one of the, I guess, sort of issues with a DAO is that these are organizations within a digital space, and we don't live in a digital space. So there are things that happen that are sort of a bit invisible that you don't you know, you may not actually see, unless you're, like, constantly scanning the blockchain to see, to see what's going on. But if you're able to build a type of dashboard that is getting all of this that, you know, visualize all the data that's that's being accrued in into the blockchain. You can probably derive some insights that better inform the members of those communities on what is actually happening inside of their communities, which is, I think, a bit of a blind spot in the DAO space at the moment is that, you know, there you know, everything everything is recorded, but everything isn't human readable.
Yeah. I agree. I mean, there are some tools that we can use that, for example, Aragon provides for for for for understanding a bit what's going on. And yet, it's it's it's too geeky right now. I think also there is very interesting research to be done on not only showing the the the data, but using that data to test if the governance models are working or not. Like, we took the holographic consensus from the stack and that also Aragon has implemented. But it's the default governance model of the stack. And we checked if it's true that it facilitates if it's working facilitating governance for large organizations because that's the idea. And at least with the preliminary data, it does work, which is very interesting. It does work. The staking predict predicts the the the end result and the interest, and it's aligned with the interest of the
of How does holographic consensus work? Can you explain a little bit?
So, basically, it's a prediction market on top of so so the very quickly. Typically, if you want everyone to vote on every proposal, if we all fit in a room, it's easy. But the more it grows, well, it's kind of complicated. Right? So if if you still expect, voting majority I mean, if you expect 90% majority, it it grows very it just scales terribly. Even if you expect 51% majority, it still scales terribly because you need everyone to be checking all the proposals in order to be voting for each proposal if yes or no for each. Right? So what they do after a certain size, you can use well, you can use it in any case, I think. But, the idea is people could vote stake, like a prediction market. Oh, this new proposal, I'm sure that if the community read it, it will pass. No. No. This proposal, for sure, it will not pass if the community. Right? So on this based on that, the our proposal can be boosted solely as smaller percentage of people, read it. If there is a lot of stake on it, will be it will pass eventually. So if there is a lot of if the prediction market says, yes. Yes. This for sure will pass, it can be eventually boosted with certain percentages and certain calculations or whatever. So people not everybody in the community not not the 51% need to vote for it to pass. So we wanted to check if if it's working, basically. If it does work, if the communities is basically, the amount of proposals is filtered by this prediction market in practice. Giving power to prediction market is dangerous because, of course, you are giving power to people that are token holders. And yet, well, if their values are aligned with the values of the community, well, it it can benefit. It can do a service, and it's still the community can always vote them again. So you is the stake,
the stake is meant to move it up the list of proposals? Okay. And so if if a lot of people are predicting that it's going to pass, a lot of people will be like, okay. Then I guess, I'll pass it. That probably means that probably signals that it's a good proposal and I don't need to go into that much detail to read it or something.
I mean, you can go as much detail as you want, but the the idea is that you don't need that 51% majority. Maybe with a 30%, positive votes, it would pass. Okay.
So based on, maybe your research, on these decentralized communities and organizations, are there any sort of, clear implications, in terms of, like, benefits and drawbacks maybe for using a decentralized, for creating a decentralized organization as opposed to, like, a centralized organization. I mean, there's there is this, like yeah. Whenever I think about this, I sort of think about, like, the the usual inter left conflicts between, like, anarchists and and and communists or something like that. But I think yeah. Part of part of the the the the the conflict I feel like is that sometimes we don't have the tools and we don't know when to use a specific type of organization. And isn't I don't know if it's necessarily helpful to think about, oh, we always need to use a centralized or we always need to use a decentralized. If if we're, you know, if we are materialists, then we should think about the situation that we're in and which one would better answer that problem. But, I'm curious from you if if you found any sort of clear,
clear benefits and drawbacks maybe. So I would differentiate here when we're talking about technologies or centralization and decentralization in general. Right? I think in general, decentralization is good in the sense that there is no concentration of power or or money or whatever in a few hands. So if we decentralize, it's typically better. If we centralize privilege in a few kinds of people, that's bad. If we centralized power in a few kind in in a few people, that's bad. In a few companies, in a few states, we typically prefer to decentralize.
Could could we think about it as being bad? Because similar to centralized, organizations, maybe, like, having that single failure single single points of failure almost where, you know, if if the people at the top all of a sudden decide to do something or make a mistake, then it's sort of like, well, you know, they were the only ones that held the power and and they made a mistake. So it's it's a point of failure. Is that is that sort of how maybe we could think of it?
I mean, there are many ways. I mean, I was trying to simplify a lot. Okay? I was very being very very reductionist, of course. I mean, we have the typical dilemma of the what's better, a benevolent dictator or a democracy? Right? Democracy, the people are all the time discussing and whatever, and you know, don't know who will win now, or the benevolent dictator that is thinking of the people and whatever. Yeah. But in the dictatorship, you don't tend to choose who who the the dictator. That's the whole point of it. And, someone that seems benevolent in certain context, certain moment can be not that benevolent tomorrow in this sort of other so having more democratic, more decentralized, more balances of power, it's typically seen as good for inclusiveness, for inequality, for centralized, you know, power. It's related with a single point of failure thing because if you depend on a single person or a single company or a single whatever, well, you have to trust them a lot because either you align perfectly with this person's mind or you might be in trouble. While, of course, there are more many models of decentralizing each each and power. I am not saying that representative democratic the representative democratic are the best at all. I'm just saying that, well, at least it's decentralized. At least there are multiple actors that I mean, probably, I I would try to experiment more with models of governance so we don't depend on the typical party based democracy with a few parties competing for power because I don't think that it's super healthy that that approach or or or fantastic in many ways. But this I'm I'm just saying that, typically, we see the centralization of positive force because of these issues that centralization tends to have a lot. At the same time, if we are talking about another scale and, and this institution that is controlling this resource is an assembly is organized as an assembly, is organized including all the voices, has rules that are, giving hearing a lot of people, including the voice of a lot of people, the the representative if or delegates if any rotate and whatever. Well, then it maybe it's not that bad to have a centralized institution managing that. Right? So when when I I'm not a blockchain maximalist, so I don't think that every everything should be decentralized. Everything should be on the blockchain or everything all the technology. I I I think that depends on the use case. Yeah. I call myself I call myself a a socialism maximalist. That works. Okay. So yeah. The I I think that there are many use cases that we don't want to use blockchain. I mean, why do why my health data should be in a blockchain or even in IPFS? I don't want that. In any even if it's encrypted, the encryption will be broken in ten years. And what happens with my health data? It will be public. I mean, I don't trust the encryption enough. You know what I mean? So there are use cases that do not make sense, at least not for now, to rely on decentralized technologies. And yet, this helps to decentralize power so we can experiment with models combining decentralized aspects, centralized aspects, you know, and explore there, experiment. And, again, I don't think that we should seek up one solution for everything. Yeah. I think depends on the context, depends on the model. Different things require. Because even if even if this institution, social center, whatever is centralized for managing a space or a neighborhood resource or whatever, maybe they do want to have a decentralized platform to man to coordinate with other social centers or with other initiatives that are related to them. Right? So
Yeah. I do you think the left maybe needs to be a little bit more decentralized? Sometimes, I think, yeah, I don't know. There's a bit like, I feel like we are sometimes dependent on like, we think about The US. As soon as Bernie Sanders lost, I mean, there's everyone was depressed, everyone on the left in America because we depended so much on this one guy, like like flying through the the eye of a needle and getting into the presidency. But unfortunately, it didn't happen and maybe I think it I think it broke a lot of people's brains to be honest, sometimes. But, yeah, do you do you have, thoughts on that?
I would differentiate the representative democracy politics from the left. I think the left is already very decentralized. We have a lot of we have a lot of initiatives. We have a lot of in no. But, seriously, we we have a huge ecosystem of initiatives. I don't think that is very well it doesn't work very well together. We discuss and fight internally way too much, and it's there are also many egos and then many, you know, many splits and constant inner fighting, which is not awesome. As a safety disease manager.
I I saw, like, I saw this meme or something where, like I mean, the the people who hate leftist the most are other leftists.
Exactly. Exactly. So which is sad. Right? Yeah. Because, typically, we see the right much more aligned. Yeah. Yeah. Much more disciplined, much more falling under one flag whenever it's convenient. Yeah. And, and and we don't we are very critical. We are very proud of it, and then we just we are not very flexible, at least not as much as we claim, generally. Of course, I'm generalizing here. So I do think that the left is very centralized. I do think as well that representative democracy and parties force us towards central towards centralization, and we are not that very good there. So we need to personalize in order to attract the masses. So we need to one simple message to attract people. You know what I mean? Yeah. Because it's what works on TV or it's what works on on a on a debate in in TV when you are competing with other candidates in a primary or something like that. It's, it's just a bit desparating because we do have multiple phases. Right now with, AOC, right, reaching, reaching the parliament or or not only her, but more diverse voices from progressive backgrounds or or having different people in I mean, even if they are not that progressive, but they're still bringing interesting voices like Melissa McWarren. Right? Or or, trying to bring, alt alternatives. I mean, people that don't like Verney that could have other voices to hear. Well, I mean, I think that there are there are stuff there. It's just that we seek one voice because regardless if we have a lot, we need only one running for election or we need only that. Right? So I think it's part. It's different what we have than what it's required by the strong constraints of party democracy and democracy,
especially in The US. Yeah. It's it's sort of because the state makes these rules towards centralization that it sort of yeah. It it rubs off on us as well. And it's difficult to Yeah. Get out of that thinking because the state has so much power over, over politics. Of course.
I know. Of course. Yeah. Yeah.
So I did want to ask you this question because I know there tends to be quite a few people who are in academia who listen to my podcast, I've noticed. One of the projects that, one of your PhD students started was call is called decentralized.science. So I was wondering to explain that, that project a little bit because I think it's it's pretty it's a pretty interesting way of, of decentralized peer review.
I mean, this was incubated within peer to peer models and eventually speak was a spin off from the project. So it was part of us and now it's a independent enterprise led by
by my PhD student, by Amber. So peer to peer models is sort of like an incubator as well sometimes. So a y combinator. I mean,
I wish.
With less money maybe.
Kind of. I mean, in it's the only thing that we incubated so far, so I I I I would have loved that we do more of those. But right now, yeah, they they they have managed to attract independent funding. They have their own they have their own group. They have won several grants, and they are working with clients already, co designing and experimenting on the process of open science. So we I don't know if the audience is very familiar with, how science works, but it's it follows a lot this approach of platforms owning everything. So when I'm an author of a research paper, I submit a paper, I don't get paid, I often have to pay for getting published. When some reviewers will review my paper, my article, and give me feedback, but the reviewers are not paid either. It's volunteering because it's good for their CVs. The editor that chooses reviewers is often not paid at all because it's good for the CVs of the person. So in practice, who's making money here? Well, those that the publishers that have the PDFs of the publications Elsevier. Are basically yeah. Elsevier. It's a it's a it's a most typical example. Right? But also Springer, others. And they build, paywalls behind the articles, and universities have to pay for accessing the papers of their own researchers, which is a total nonsense. Right? It's crazy. So there have been interesting open access initiatives. So Sci Hub including maybe? Yeah. I mean, Sci Hub is criminalized by typically by science science
It's journals. Yeah.
Status quo, let's say. Because I Scifab is like, okay. Let's do piracy and fuck it. Right? Which I totally support It's it's on the side. Extremely
admirable, what she's doing. I mean,
I I mean and, I mean And it's huge comments. She's she's she's yeah. It's true. That's true. That's true. So so the I don't Alexandra, El Bakian? Yeah. Yeah. So the the idea is that I mean, of course, I have does plays its role, and at the same time, we need to attract institutions to do it in another way. Right? So we believe that we can rely on decentralized infrastructure to do it in another way. For example, papers to be on the open by default, so it's so they rely on a they they are uploaded to the centralized infrastructure. So then the owner of the infrastructure doesn't have the power to co opt it. But, also, the the reviewers make the reviews openly as open peer reviews. So it's public. The content of the review, it's not only private both for the author, which has issues and yet more and more journals are adopting some open reviews, especially especially more recent modern ones. And even Nature is experimenting there. So but the if the reviews are open, then we can rate the quality of the reviews, and we can give reputation to these reviewers. And we can differentiate with the quality of our review of our of of of our reviewer based on other reviewers or which reviewers ship the review early and which take, three months. Right? Or which ones they give, feedback that is crappy and which one they give very good feedback to improve the work. So then the journals can access to a pool of reviewers that can be rewarded by the for the work in exchange of quality reviews and being, fast and and and being fast delivery delivery. The idea is that even me as an author, I would sometimes I depend on the due of an article being published for, for example, an accreditation or a position that I want to apply for or whatever. But sometimes when you submit to a journal, they take one year, two years, even three years waiting for maybe they tell you that they reject it, but you don't know. You know? Yeah. Or maybe they give you feedback. You send a new article, and they don't reply, and you don't it's frustrating. Yeah. So I would very frequently, I would pay for it to to finish the process in three months. And, well, why not that money can go to a reviewer that to do the money fast, to to sort of process fast. Right? So we can we are ex I mean, what the centralized science right now is doing is experimenting with this. How which kind of rewards? How how the journal would the, what what what's interesting for the journal? What's interesting for the reviewer? Let's experiment with different types of price of of of of rewards, different types of monetary and nonmonetary rewards, and how can they mix, and which is the reputation algorithm that we're playing here, and how can you know what I mean? And what are the metrics that should we use this kind of stuff, which is very interesting to be honest. Yeah. Yeah.
The scientific journal world to me is, like, the perfect example of how the market has messed up, how inefficient markets are.
Yeah. I mean, if if it's a nonrelated market, they tend to concentration way too often. Right?
Yeah. It's and when whenever whenever I learned that, like, even if you buy an article from a journal, the author gets nothing. Yeah. That's it's insane that you like, you think you're buying it because, like, oh, you know, they thank thank you to the the the scientist needs to, like, you know, making a little bit of extra money off of, off of his papers at least. But no. It's just going to these journals who all they do is put a paywall. You know, when 90% of the time their research is being funded by, you know, funded by your tax dollars, then you then you still have to pay for it again and you wanna read it. It's it's it seems like a very good, a good space to experiment with these type of governance structures and potentially I mean if you need to you could make uh-uh you know use blockchain in some sort of in some sort of way in that
Yeah. That's the idea. That's what Ambar is trying to do there. So it's,
it's, yeah, governance around a digital commons using blockchain. Like, it's it's a real maybe if anyone's listening and is still skeptical, like, it's a real, example of how it can use be used for sort of communal governance and Mhmm. Joint decision making, let's say. So maybe to to finish off the interview, you can let us know where or how people can, keep up with you and what's going on with, peer to peer models. Where should they go?
Well, well, we use Twitter. Like you said, we cannot run away from from it. So the Twitter of peer to peer model is p two p mod Yeah. M o d. It's, the creation from peer to peer models. And, my own Twitter is Samer, s a m e r, p two p again. And, we have a newsletter in the p2pmodels.eu from Europe where people can subscribe to our newsletter if they're interested. Or if they are, if they think that there are some points of interest or potential ways of collaboration, please drop us an an email. Is it easy to find my email in my website or in my or in the model's, general email? And if you Google Samir Hassan, you can find my research
or my main website or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. You're quite you're quite high up on the, on the Google rank.
Thanks.
Alright. Cool. Thanks. This has been really interesting. So thanks a lot, Samaj. Yeah. I will let's stay in touch. I'm really interested in seeing how Big Tier models develops.
Thanks so much.