Recognizing value in open source communities with SourceCred feat. Dandelion Mané
For this episode I interview Dandelion Mané (@decentralion) and talk about their work on SourceCred (@sourcecred), a tool for communities to measure and reward value creation, which they founded. As the name suggests, Cred is the core idea of SourceCred. Cred is a score which is earned by making contributions to a project. A participant's score reflects how valuable their contributions were to the project. Participants are then rewarded with digital currency, or "Grain", based on their Cred. ...
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Transcript
Are we talking about again?
We're talking about definition of socialism. I think the thing that I would say is, like, you you kind of identified socialism as, like, particularly meaning anti capitalist. Yeah. And I I don't actually identify as anti capitalist so much as post capitalist. I think that we need to, like, have a new system that is able to leverage some of the, like, structural features of capitalism that have proven to work well while actually, like, embedding it within the theory of economic justice and, like, within a, like, framing that emphasizes the, like, dignity and autonomy of people, because I think that's where, like, the lack of justice and the lack of dignity and lack of autonomy are really what makes capitalism part of what makes capitalism so, like, toxic at present.
Yeah. No. That that's that's really interesting that you're saying that because, like, that's the particular space in the blockchain world that I'm interested in are these post capitalist type of spaces and thinking that Yeah. You know, whether or not they wanna call themselves socialist, I mean, whatever. I think that's, at the end of the day, socialist and post capitalist can probably
learn from each other. Yeah. I mean, to the extent that, like, you need to find a little bit before we started recording. Socialism is kind of, like, broadly being oriented on anti capitalism. And I I think the problem is that, like, it's very easy to be opposed to things. What's really difficult is to come up with new solutions that are, like, super solutions in the sense that they solve the same problems the existing thing solves. Because if it's taken over the world, it's probably at least solving some problems. And, like, we like, I think the issue that I have is with the people who want to, like, essentially tear down capitalism, which is not hard to find, you know, this dismantle capitalism. It's like, okay. But you do realize that everyone on Earth is getting fed by the system, and it's, like, producing enormously more food than was ever thought possible, you know, in the past. Like, you look at, like, the green revolution. And it may be doing it in ways that are environmentally unsustainable, that are, like, deeply unethical, that are, like, you know, just kind of, like, destroying the earth in some ways, but it is feeding a lot of people. So, like, if we're going to take it apart, we need to be building something else as well that is going to also feed us because people need food.
Yeah. I mean, I think there'll be, you'll get a lot of, maybe pushback on the food parts if you look at, just I mean, in America, the situation right now, I think, America has some of the worst rates of childhood poverty and and lack of food, and it's one of the most capitalist countries. But, anyways, maybe we should start off with an introduction. Yeah. So I'm speaking to Dandelion Monet, who's the founder of Sourcecred. And Sourcecred is a really interesting project. But maybe before maybe instead of me, explaining what it is, maybe I should just let Dandelion talk and explain, what Source Credit is and what is the story behind it.
So, yeah, my name is Dandelion. I use they, them pronouns. And as for source grad so I think, like, to make this to there there's always I think that always with things, there are different there are lots of different narratives that will attach any complex thing. And, you know, there's a story of history, like, how did things come to be? And then there's a story of, like, current intent. Like, what is the thing now? And I'm gonna start with the the story of history, which is for a long time, I've I've been really interested in the question of trust and the question of how can we use technological systems to, like, mediate or, like, enhance our ability to trust each other and to coordinate. If you think about what life is like in a small village, like, you know, one of the things not having actually spent time living in small villages, admittedly. One of the things I imagine is that people are, like, there's a lot of communal trust. There's a lot of context. You, like, know everyone, and you know that they can watch your kids, and you can, like, get their help with stuff and you'll help them back. And then once you switch to a much larger social context and you go to a city, now everyone's a stranger and you have to be kind of afraid, you know, maybe everyone. Like, everyone could be a potential, like, attacker or something. And I think that we with the technology we have, it feels like we should be able to create new ways of scaling trust. And the existing systems we have for scaling trust are stuff like institutions. You know? If you got a degree from Harvard, then I trust that you, like, were smart enough to get accepted to Harvard. So that probably, like, tells me some things about you. But by delegating our trust to these institutions, we wind up, like, really needing to, like, depend on these centralized and often unaccountable institutions for our own ability to relate to with each other and, like, coordinate together, and that kind of sucks. And so I was thinking for a long time about trying to make, a sort of algorithmic system for helping people discover who they trust. But yeah. So I was really interested in these networks of trust trust and, like, how could we build, like, a scalable system for enabling communities of people to trust each other. And at the time, you know, I was in Silicon Valley. I was surrounded by this kind of, like, startup mentality where the thing you should do is, like, found a company and raise a bunch of capital from VCs and then go and try to grow your business as quickly as possible, and become a billionaire. And I kind of realized that trying to create a trustworthy system for people to trust each other in the context of Silicon Valley capitalism, there was basically zero chance that that would actually be a trustworthy and, like, ethically aligned system. And in fact, it was very likely that I'd create something out of black mirror. If you've watched the episode nosedive it's a system it's a it's an episode in black mirror where people have got this app where they're constantly giving ratings to each other and these like reputation scores basically determine your place in society and it's an incredibly like like, neurotic and, like, in human society. And I decided not to build this because I just saw that, you know, basically making the Facebook of, like, who trusts whom, would not be something we want.
Was it before or after that watching the episode?
I think that I had not seen the episode, and then I later watched Ghost Eye because I jumped. That's exactly, like, exactly what I but I think that could have been. Yeah. And so I wound up instead joining Google just to kind of have a place to, like, hang out and, like, code on stuff while I figure out what it is I actually wanna do. And as the crypto bubble of twenty seventeen started spinning up, I've been interested in crypto for a long time since, you know, early days, with Bitcoin and the dark web. And as the crypto bubble was spinning up, I was finding myself just so fascinated by all the projects that were getting launched. I was, like, you know, sitting there reading white papers for, like, augur and thinking how fascinating it was. They're setting up this oracle, reading, like, the white paper from Maker. And I kind of was feeling a renewed pull to come to the crypto sphere. And so I went and I started hanging out with my friend, Juan Benet, who's the CEO of protocol labs. And we were just kind of riffing and he was talking about how they were working in file coin and how file coin is built on all of these, open source projects that really couldn't exist without an enormous stack of open source software, which was developed for free. And how he really wished that they could find a way to distribute file coin tokens back to the creators of all this open source corpus that file coin depended on. But but there wasn't really any way to do that because there's just no, like, metric that exists that, like, would you you know, you'd pay people based on, like, number of lines of code, like, that's clearly a dysfunctional solution, because it's so easy to gain. Pay people a number of open pull requests. Like, it's it's really hard to see how that could work. And then I made the connection back to this reputation network concept where I've been thinking about a reputation network, where you are people are kind of vouching for each other. And one of the issues there is that you need people to put in a lot of manual information that they're unlikely to do, so it's hard to spin that up. And I realized that you could instead make a reputation network on the contributions to projects. You could say, oh, you know, this pull request was merged, so it gets a lot of a little bit of reputation, and this pull request references this GitHub issue, and then this GitHub issue references this, like, forum post. And so you can start to, like, have the transitive flow of reputation, in terms of the value of the contributions themselves. And that was the core idea of source code, was that we could make a reputation metric for open source projects, and that that metric would meaningfully correspond to how much value people had brought to the projects. Because if you have made a lot of pull requests that got merged or you wrote a lot of forum post that got referenced and liked and so forth, then you would get cred. And the dual idea was to create, a system of crypto tokens called Grain Crypto Assets, where the idea is that every community would be issuing its own grain, and, you would earn it based on your credit. So based on your contributions and this is a key part that actually what I'm describing so far credit grain we've built that, we can get into it more. But the other key part is setting up an ecosystem where the norm is that every project is going to be flowing cred to its dependencies. And so the hope is we can finally solve this problem where, like, we all depend on open source infrastructure that no one is paying for, that we can actually build an ecosystem in which this is all all of the valuable labor is getting rewarded, whether or not that valuable labor had pricing power or not. Yeah. So maybe There's a lot more here, but I wanna kind of give you yeah. Well, I was I was gonna say that,
maybe we get to talk about what are some of the issues that open source projects face, on the regular, like, in particularly that, you know, source credit tries to,
to answer? Yeah. So I think that there's just there's a really, like, fundamental mismatch in that open source software is tremendously valuable. You know, if you look at companies like Google, companies like Amazon, companies like Facebook, and if you actually look at their stack, like, all of their tech is built on top of open source technologies, you know, whether it's c plus plus, whether it's like yeah. The programming language is a great example, like, the open specs for, like, HTTP. Linux is basically powering their data centers. And so the software is enormously valuable. The software has generated, you know, billions of dollars of revenue for these companies, And yet open source projects don't have the ability to charge because by nature of being open source, they are freely accessible for anyone to use. And so we've got this weird kind of parasitic relationship. Right? Where, like, I mean, lots of people are just, like, getting tons of value from the open source ecosystem and, like, putting value back in the form of, like, working in it. But we also have these massive tech giants that are getting huge amounts of value that they extract as profits without paying more than, like, token amounts back into the system. And I think for me fundamentally, like, I think that open source is sort of a fundamentally liberatory paradigm. Like, if you imagine the possibility of like, what if all technology were open source? What if Facebook were open source? And so rather than Facebook choosing an algorithm to show you the most, like, upsetting content because that'll keep your eyes glued to the screen and get as many ad impressions. What if because it was open source, you can choose the algorithm that you want on your feed and you can choose to have the algorithm be, I wanna hear good news about my friends. I wanna hear all news about my really close friends and from all other stuff in the world. Like, if it's, like, something that's, like, outrage oriented, just, like, don't show it to me. Like, Facebook will not give you the setting because they would lose ad revenue. But if we're open system, then anyone could just build this for themselves. And so I think for me, like, I see open source as, in a large part of the future of the economy. I think it's just going to be better because it's going to free more people to be more creative. It's going to allow everyone in the world to, like, contribute to the technology we're building rather than live with saying, you know, this set of people in a particular building in Mountain View, California are allowed to update Google Calendar. And it turns out they don't care about Google Calendar, so it will never get updated. And, like, if you like, I have tons of ideas. Google Calendar could be better, you know, because I use it, and it's neglected. But because it's closed source, it's just impossible to touch.
Yeah. So it's sort of that open source has a lot of potential, but at the moment, it's being co opted a lot of the time by big corporate players who are able to take advantage of the value being created by people who are wanting to create the software meant to be open for everyone with probably the intention of creating, products that are available to everyone. But I think corporations largely use open source technology to then create something that they profit off of.
Yeah. I I will say so, like, it's interesting because corporations are also big investors open source. You know, when I was at Google, I was working on TensorFlow, which is an open source machine learning framework that's extremely valuable. And Google open source, you know, Facebook, open source, React. Like, the these the corporate players do invest in open source, but they invest in open source only in ways that are complementary to their business models. Yeah. I I think the real issue here is that, like like, to scale things and to to create scalable, stable social systems, you need incentives. And right now, the incentives for working on open source are basically the incentive of doing work or, you know, the value of doing work that you think is good and the positive feedback from other people in the community also working on it, and maybe, like, professional status or pride. And so I think partly the reason why if you look at open source technology, it tends to be really focused on programmers. You know? We've got great open source, like, text editors for coders. We've got great open source, like, programming language and frameworks. I think that's in part because programmers are willing to work approximately for free together on stuff for other programmers. But I think we could have so much more in the way of open source. I think we could have, like, open source products. You know, what if, like, what if by default your expectation was the software that on your computer or on your phone is all open source and you can, like, read its code, you can see that it's not, like, stealing your information and exporting it to all kinds of weird servers, and you can change it in any one. And the thing is that to get to that point, like, building consumer grade software is actually very, like, difficult and expensive and requires lots and lots of different kinds of talent, you know, documentation, design, QA, lots of engineers to implement it, product managers. And right now, because open source, there's no incentive. We don't have a way to coordinate open source projects where people actually will get paid for working on them. This just isn't happening. And so we're kind of left with, like, you know, what's open source exists and, you know, they're like, you're the corporations are, like, able to, like, make a lot of benefit from it because then they can go and invest in all the pieces required to make the product because then they'll, like, find some way to extract value directly from the product. And then that value doesn't flow back to the underlying technology.
So we get the issues of what's happening in open source and the difficulties in creating, consumer products through open source, I think, is especially difficult. But so then maybe you can explain now how source cred works and how you know, what would it look like a open source project using source cred, how would it lead to a good open source consumer product, for example? And so so it's a little bit interesting here because we started here asking about the history of source code.
And the history of source code was really focused on this open source narrative, that, like, source code is going to, like, enable, like, open source projects at large to, like, kind of, like, economically flourish. And I still believe that, but I've kind of realized it's actually not the first step. Open source is I I feel like what source credit is doing right now most immediately is allowing, like, decentralized crypto communities to self organize. And so maybe, like, I'll kind of start there by talking about, like, what source credit actually, like, is right now and what it's doing kind of practically, and then we can, like, connect the dots out to different scales. Yeah. Source cred is basically a decentralized technology for communities to, like, come to agreement about how valuable different things are. I would say in a sense, it's like a decentralized form of community governance where the, like, nature of the governance right now is, like, deciding these scores over the values of contributions because that then determines how people get, like, remunerated for that. Basically, what happens when a community is using source cred is, source cred starts collecting data from the community, or rather the it's more like the community uses source cred to collect their own data. I I wanna be clear. This is not like there's no, like, central source code server that's, like, hovering up your data and running algorithms. It really is just like you run this and you put the scores on GitHub because that's where people tend to put open source stuff. But if you're if you can take the source code community, for an example, like, every time someone posts on our forms, if that post gets liked by other people, then those people liking it will flow a little bit of cred to the post. When people make a pull request on GitHub, if the pull request gets merged, that will, like, flow a little cred to the pull request.
And and it's not that it's not that the person liking it is paying them.
Like, I'm not paying for my like on a post. Right? It's So the idea is basically, like, you've got an amount of cred that is based on the value of the contributions you did. And the rule of credit is credit is always flowing. And so the amount of cred you have, let's say you have a 100 cred, is always going to be flowing out. And maybe by default, it kind of your 100 cred will flow back to just like everything else in the project. But then when you exercise when you, like, communicate what you evaluate, if you, like, like something, then more of that credit instead of flowing to everything in the project will flow to the specific things you liked. So it's not at all that you lose the credit because it was always gonna flow away from you, but you just kind of get to, like, influence where the next step of the cred flowing is going to be. And so because of this, everyone who's contributing to source cred, you know the other thing I forgot to mention is, like, a really big issue here is that we need to be able to recognize contributions that are not occurring on a platform like GitHub or discourse or so forth. And so to take an example, like, there's no discourse post for, like, us recording this podcast, but clearly is relevant to source code. So what we're doing right now is we've got a channel called props in our Discord, where anyone can write a props for someone else being, like, you know, props to LP for hosting the community call. And then if people value that, they'll react to the message in Discord, and then that will create more cred. So we're kind of, like, are able to use that channel to, like, as a catchall for off platform contributions. We're we're building better tools to do this in, like, a native way. But it's just really important that we, like like, it's really important to us that we're not just for rewarding techies or rewarding coders. Like, we want a technology that can work for all the different kinds of labor, that go into a community.
So I might get some cred inadvertently for doing this podcast. Yeah. Exactly. Nice.
Yeah. It's funny how well that has worked. Like, you know, people are so used to the idea that you never get paid unless you, like, you know, negotiated it upfront. Right. And some of the people in the source credit community who have been the most valuable are people who kind of came and, like, made some art related to source credit and, like, posted the art on the forms, and then got a bunch of likes, and then got paid a bunch of grain. Grain being the token that, like, gets distributed based on credit scores. And then this artist comes back a month later and is like, woah. I just got, like, paid a bunch of money for, like, doing art. Like, that never happens. Like, wait. What's going on here? And then, like, you know, that's where you start going down the rabbit hole. I think that so far, like, for, like like, this is the thing is that I started by thinking about source credit as an algorithm, and I'm really coming to understand that source credit is first and foremost a community technology. You know? It's about helping people work together and helping people, like, be able to, like, reward each other and appreciate each other, in a way that's, like, transparent and robust to gaming.
Because I know there's a couple of more different ways that you can make Grain or or or Cred. What are some of the other ways that someone in the community could, like, have the value that they're making for a community be counted?
I'm not exactly sure what you mean. Like, I think there's you've mentioned,
in other interviews that I've that I've listened to that there's, like, this page ranking system, similar to how Google works that is sort of can be taken into consideration at the end, you know, once all the calculations are made for the for the, the grain or cred to be, dispersed?
So, basically, the first step, so so the first step in computing cred scores is to come up with a sort of network map of all of the contributions in the project. This is called a graph, a contribution graph in the computer science sense of the word graph, which is basically a network of nodes and connections between nodes. And so we we produce this data structure. We're going to say, okay. Let's, like, download every issue and comment from GitHub. Let's get every single form post and like from Discord. Let's get every message and reaction from Discord, and weave these altogether into a single data structure that shows how everything interrelated. Then we run an algorithm called cred rank on those scores. Cred rank on the graph. Sorry. Cred rank is sort of a a, like, derivative of Google's page rank algorithm. Page rank, the basic intuition is the score of web page is based on the score of all the web pages that linked to it. So your web page is important if important web pages link to you. And credit rank, the intuition is the credit of a contribution is based on the credit of the contributions that linked to it. And the credit of a contributor is based on the credit of the contributions that they author or were referenced by or participated with with a bunch of added features around tracking credit over time. So PageRank doesn't have a concept of time. You know, there's just like a single score, but we realized it's really helpful to be able to say, like, oh, you know, this person did, like, earned a ton of credit in, like, December, and then they went on vacation in January and didn't earn a bunch of credit. But then, like, February, they're back at it because this allows us to do things like, say, you know, maybe we want to have a grain distribution policy that is trying to reward people, based on their current level of activity to kind of, like, be a salary and, like, make sure people who are focused on source credit can afford or other projects using source credit can, like, afford to stay focused on it. And maybe run a different range of contribution policy that's just, like, looking and, like, trying to reward people based on, like, their long run contributions and, like, especially find people who are, like, undervalued in the past and now should get, like, paid more to, like, catch them up. And this is where the timing information is really important. But yeah. So the basic process the the key thing to know about producing this contribution graph is that it's organized around a plug in architecture. So we wrote a plug in for GitHub, a plug in for discourse, and so forth. But, you know, right now, I think some people are working on a plugin for Slack. You could maybe imagine having, like, a plugin for Figma. You could have we're also going to build dedicated interfaces where we're planning to work on our first, like like, creditor, as in cred editor. So the things we're editing the cred graph and, like, connecting, making revealing the connections that didn't just appear from the platforms. So giving you an example of a way that I would really like to see source code used, I think it's not just for digital stuff. I would like to organize a physical community house for the source credit community that would run on its own credit instance. So the contributions in this community in this, like, credit instance would be, like, you know, so and so did the gardening, so and so took out the trash, so and so, like, hosted a party, and then it's all fractal. Right? So, like, you know, there's the work of hosting the party, and then that decomposes into, like, okay. Who did the venue set up? Who did the, like, manage, like, invites? Who managed food? And then, like, within food, okay, you cooked dinner, you made those tacos, you did the booze run, and we'd be, like, flowing cred for out to, like, all of the individual contributions, with the the net goal being that, like, the house would be owned by everyone who had made these contributions to it, and that, like, if you, had made a lot of contributions, then you could either, like, get paid by the house for that labor or you could get privileges. You could use it to be like, yeah. I really think that we should reorganize this whole, like, laundry area because it's a mess, and I'm willing to, like, boost that with my grain. Or, I really want us to, like, throw this awesome party or, like, have this event, like, I'm gonna boost that with my grain. So you'd be able to, like, either, like, kind of exit so that you can, like, pay rent or use your stake in the community to direct the community towards the things you care about. And, of course, since it's a house, you'd also be able to, like, pay actual rent in the house and just, like, live there if you're contributing to it enough. And I think this is something
go ahead. Yeah. I was just gonna go into because it's touching on something that I find really interesting, which is that it takes sort of the,
business model of Google or, like, these big tech giants in a way where like the business model of Google at all, just to be clear. There's no similarity to Google's business model. It takes algorithms that Google used.
Right. Right. So it takes, like, this type of technology where in the case of Google or, like, these, or social media companies in particular, they are able to extract value from something that we don't consider to be work. Right? When I if I send a message to so and so and, you know, I have this network of friends that I'm sending, different messages to back and forth, then these companies are able to extract data from those interactions in which they can then sell to advertisers. And, like, that's how they capture the value of basically socializing with someone, which you don't consider, like, work when you're in your normal life. You just consider, like, having fun. But source credit is sort of flipping that upside down and saying, you can capture all these type of things that you do, like, with your friends and within your community that you may not be rewarded for, but that actually does create value because your community values it. It, like, creates a platform for your community to decide the the value creation, and what you value, to be evident and to, like, basic bring it out of the darkness. Because I think before, you know, Internet, really, you would never consider, like, talking to your friends, as being some value generating thing. But then after, you know, these big tech giants kind of grew, they found a way to extract value out of that. And I think that's, you know, that's sort of led to a lot of the issues that we have today with the Internet and sort of the dystopian futures that people imagine with it at the moment. But source code, I think, is a very different way of looking at how to how to, capture that value that's generated by, yeah, I mean, just like social So I I community.
I actually I disagree with the term value capture. I think that, like, value capture is actually, like, kind of, like, like, toxic in a weird way. There's gonna be this chain of value, you know, where there's, like, a whole set of, like, people who work together to achieve a valuable outcome. And the idea of value capture is everyone should be always trying to get all this value as much as possible and extract it personally. And so, like like, let's take an an example where, let's suppose that, you know, I'm using Instacart. Right? And so I'm getting a grocery order. And when I when I order something off of Amazon, there is, like, value that's happening where I'm, like, getting delivered, some package. And let's think about, like, in the chain of this value of this package is getting delivered to me. There are lots of workers in Amazon's warehouses. Right? And these people are doing the work that causes my package to arrive to me. And so they are valuable. Amazon has got control over the system and has got enormously more power than any of the workers in the warehouse. And so Amazon can go and say, okay. You know, you worker added $2 of value through the work of, like, getting this package to Dandelion. But since you have no market power and I could replace you with anyone else off the street, I'm gonna pay you 10¢. And the other dollar and 90¢ gets captured by Amazon. Right? Amazon's very good at value capture in that sense. I want us to be in a world in which value is not getting captured but flowing. In which, like like, take, like, source credit as an example. Like, let's suppose that source credit becomes, like, really, like, an important project that lots of other projects are depending on and flowing value too. I don't want source credit to be in this mentality of great. Let's, like, catch as much of this as possible and then, like, I'll be super rich and drive Lamborghinis to the moon or something. I wanted to be like, cool. Let's keep a proportion here. Let's harness the value that we're flowing so that we can, like, sustain ourselves and sustain our organization. And then let's keep flowing it to the projects that are using it, to the other parts of the ecosystem, to the, like, ecology around us, to, like, the communities that our people are living in. Like, let's flow that value on to, like, the rest of the value chain. And I think that way we will not see these, like, weirdly, like, starved like, I think our communities are starved because corporations are really good at value capture, you know. And just if we if we try to just create, like, a new system that's supposed to be laboratory that, like, has in its assumptions that it's going to be really good at value capture, I think we're going to wind up in a similar place.
Oh, yeah. I I go ahead.
Like, I I think for me, a principle in, like like, the sort of, like, economic logic of source cred, It's different from the economic logic of capitalism. In capitalism, you're valued based on your replaceability in the market. Right? So, I, as a software engineer, have got low replaceability comparatively speaking because software engineers are scarce. Someone who's like a community support person has got high replaceability because it's, like, easier to find people who are not being valued with that skill set. And so if someone who's really good at, like, community support and someone and me both going through a job interview, I'll probably get a salary that's, like, you know, significantly higher. And then maybe I'll even be a, like, a bad employee and just, like, kinda fuck off mostly and, like, play weird office politics game, like, hang out with my, like, coworkers or something. But because I got valued by the market, I'll just keep on getting rewarded so much better than this community server. So it might be doing much better and much more valuable work. And so in source cred, the principle is you should get rewarded based on the value you provided, not based on your replaceability in the market. So, like, if someone is coming and, like, doing super valuable community support and source spread, who cares that if they were working for a big tech company, they would have, like, gotten, like, a super, like, you know, bare minimum wage. Like, the stuff that they're in here is valuable. Let's, like, reward it. You know? Yeah. So I think that's part of where they're just, like, different foundational assumptions about value than within source spread than are, like, the case in capitalism.
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 communities on Discord or Reddit, which you can find in the links in the show notes. If you wanna be sure that more content like this be created you can donate to my efforts through Patreon. So if you go to patreon.com/theblockchainsocialist you can donate starting at $3 a month and help me out and join the newest patrons like Sean and Enki. At the moment I've spent more on this project than I've ever earned from it due to hosting costs so any amount really helps. As a patron, you'll get a shout out on an episode like I just did and access to monthly Patreon exclusive Q and A episodes. You can submit questions you'd like me to answer and I'll give my thoughts in roughly twenty minutes. On the latest episode of the Patreon exclusive Q and A episode, I gave my thoughts on the question about markets versus planning under socialism using Blockchain. 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 entrenched capitalist exploitation if we put our efforts into it. So if that message resonates with you, I hope you'll consider helping out. As you probably heard, there was an increase in quality in my audio because at first I forgot to start recording on my own end to make sure I have better audio quality, which is what I usually do, but maybe it's important thing to point out that with the money I get from Patreon, I can buy a better microphone, for example, to give a more pleasant listening experience. And really quickly I just wanna add because as I was relistening to the interview I thought maybe some of the things I said could be misconstrued. Socialism is of course a lot more than just anti capitalism since you can be anti capitalist and think that feudalism or slavery were better economic systems, but those aren't commonly held beliefs, or at least I'd like to think. Sometimes I say things during interviews that aren't fully thought out because it's very literally me thinking on the spot while recording, and I don't want to try to edit every little thing I say that I might cringe at myself for because I'm trying to be as authentic as possible. And honestly, it's really annoying to do that much editing. But I think that's enough for me. Let's go back to talking about source cred. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And and this touches on something that we were talking about a bit before, but, and I I I know that you're not you don't you don't consider yourself socialist but what I found interesting is that it touches on a pretty common argument that happens between anti and pro capitalists where pro capitalists will say that socialism is bad because doctors will get paid the same as janitors. But this argument, I think, is a bit funny because it actually goes against the logic of the markets, which doesn't actually care about this misconstrued, like, sense of utility, since, like, market logic is basically whatever the market values and whether or not there is utility or not doesn't really matter. I mean, just look at the example of, you know, people who work in finance get paid extraordinary amounts compared to, like, teachers. You know, the amount of utility, I think, is probably, I think you can argue is more for teachers.
But so It's funny you bring that up because that's actually an example I use a lot. I think that in, like, the source cred paradigm, teachers will get paid a lot more than private equity analysts.
Yes. Comrades, under source cred, we will devalue better. But so, yeah, I I think it's it's pretty interesting because, yeah, source cred goes against this, it's an example of a type of anti capitalist value accounting.
I guess you would agree with that. Again, I use I just identified as the term post capitalist. Like, I I think that I think that, like, capitalism's flaws make it weak, make it, like, ripe for replacement. I I don't feel like I feel like once we can create a system that just I I think people know that capitalism is not fucking working. Right? This is not, like, some well kept secret where only the, like, privileged few of, like, pierce the veil. Like, no. Like, we are living in this world. We know that shit is fucked. It's, like, very transparently fucked. And I think the issue is, like, that this is why I don't identify as a socialist. I feel like what I see as, like, socialist policy is, like, let's have some top down policy from the federal government to, like, try to, like, intervene in the market to, like, make things better. And the idea that top down federal intervention is going to fix anything, like, at least I'm speaking from an American perspective where we've got an entirely dysfunctional government. You know, we've got a government where, like, whether or not to support people who are, like, you know, being thrown into, like, homelessness and poverty to buy 10 the pandemic. Like, it's not really clear if the government wants to do that or if it only wants to support corporations. And so the idea that, like, we're going to, like, enact, like, policy through this means of the state in order to rectify capitalism feels far fetched to me. I think we need to just fundamentally build a post capitalist system that is, like, a better paradigm that is, like, a paradigm that will give people more, like, autonomy that will let people be valued multidimensionally for all of the, like, value that they bring to the world. And that once we can do that, it will just out compete capitalism. People will be like, cool. Yeah. We're done with capitalism. Like, it's an abusive shitty system. Now that there's something else, let's just switch to it. But it's the, like, there being something else that we need so we can make the switch. Because if what you're telling people is like, hey, capitalism sucks, and I have another solution, but let's tear it down and just, like, be in the darkness together. People are terrified of having no system at all. Rightly justly so, I think. And so I think that's why this is such a flash button issue. And I don't think it's actually because there's, like, a real disagreement about whether or not capitalism is working. I think people are just protesting against the lack of people people I feel like a lot of the people who are, like, anchored in supporting capitalism are really just expressing their fear of the unknown.
Yeah. I mean, I think, I mean, to your first point, I think one of the problems that socialism has had in the in recent history is largely a problem of misinformation and, like, sort of marketing. Like, I think that, people think that socialism is when the government does stuff, and that the more stuff that the government does, eventually, it's socialism. And that's a problem, I think, you know, I think related to the cold war and all these other things, which has, misconstrued the idea of socialism as being, like, oh, it's when the federal government imposes a new regulation or something like that, which is, I think, a detriment to the actual progress of society and trying to think of, like, new ways to do it. But I do agree with, I mean, the other point you're making. Trying telling people that capitalism isn't working, but then not having a clear alternative of what the of what the alternative world to capitalism looks like and, like, how that would look like in their everyday lives. I do agree. I mean, that's something that should be made a lot more clear to people, so that they can, I mean, support moving beyond capitalism, moving to a post capitalist, society? So my next question was, what types of communities would you see, do you see as being the most interested in source cred at the moment? And are there any types of communities that you would recommend as being better or worse for the use of source cred?
So first thing I'll note is, like, source code is still it's still very early days for source code. This is, like, a really, like, like, complex piece of technology that sits at the intersection of, like, how people are valued and, like, what contributions matter. And, there's a lot of nuance to it. The communities, we've got a couple communities who are actively using source code. And the shared thing tends to be communities that want to be truly decentralized, because, you know, traditionally in the blockchain world, like, we really, value decentralization, but we aren't actually good at paying people in decentralized ways to, like, work together on stuff. And so if you look at all these decentralized protocols, you'll often find that there actually is a centralized team building the protocol where, you know, there's, like, a company formed a company. They raised a couple million dollars from, like, some VCs, and they hired employees to go on, like, build this decentralized tech. And it's a kind of inherent contradiction in the space right now, but it reflects the fact that we don't really know how to organize labor in decentralized ways. We know how to do it in a centralized way. And so we're starting to see experiments with source credit of, like, basically, DAOs, distributed autonomous organizations that really, like, don't want to have that centralized, like, CEO deciding everyone's salary. And so that's an area where I think, like, even though source credit is currently still immature and even though source credits still has got, like, issues to work through, it's better than having a CEO because that goes against the whole point. And it's definitely better than, like, counting your pull requests or, like, you know, just kind of, like like, naive systems, like, based on counting. And I think it's better than having everyone vote on everyone else's salary because that's actually, like, not a healthy social dynamic. You need, like, a a more, like, accountable framework that isn't just about people having popularity contests. So those have been the communities that have been most, like, keen on source code. I would say the the most, like, prominent is, MakerDAO, which has got a kind of very active governance community of people discussing, like, how to keep the MakerDAO system working well economically and how to change, like, the amounts of different forms of, collateral that are accepted in the system. And they are now all getting paid for their contributions on the forms through source code, where basically the MakerDAO Foundation is paying a die budget, to reward everyone to contribute to governance. And we've got plans in motion to actually, bring that kind of on, onto the Maker protocol directly, where the funding would come from the protocol and not from the maker
foundation. What are SourceGrid's plans for also decentralizing? I know that SourceGrid has basically its own, essentially, it's it is a DAO in a way, isn't
it? I would say SourceGrid is like a DAO that's, like, in the process of being born. Right now, it's not like right now, it's got a fair bit of centralization. The most notable centralization is around, me personally because I'm the temporary benevolent dictator of source credit. And so our, like, formal governance process is that we try to do stuff by consensus. And then if there's, like, a serious dispute, then I can, like, make the call, which in practice hasn't happened very much, but it's clearly not a decentralized model. I want to push oh, we also got centralization in the sense that, like, our our funds are, like, managed by a treasurer with, like, a crypto wallet that's, like, redeeming, like, die to people rather than just all being on chain through trustless infrastructure. I think it's a real priority for source code to decentralize. I would really like to not be the temporary benevolent dictator this time next year. I'd really like us to switch over, like, to just be using credit scores as, like, an input to a governance process. So I think I think there's a couple different dimensions of decentralization here. There's, like, governance decentralization, how can we make decisions without me being a special actor? There's, like, economic infrastructure decentralization. How can we, like, have all of our grain and currencies be managed on chain rather than, kind of like like ad hoc off chain? There's leadership decentralization. How can we come up with a, like, leader full organization where there are still clear leaders making decisions? Because you need leaders and you need them to make decisions. I don't think you can have an organization function without that. But we know those leaders to be not embedded in a hierarchy where, like, every leader has got, like, a super leader onto the top, but instead a model where parts of the community can select their own leaders and there isn't, like, a central super leader controlling it. And then there's also, like, questions of technical decentralization. Like, it's it's how can we make really good Oracles for the source credit scores so that you don't need to trust whoever was, like, happening to run the algorithm for you. So that's that's kind of like the the landscape of decentralization around source credit. And I think that in the coming year, it's going to be a pretty, high priority for us to make some progress here.
Yeah. Nice. Then, yeah, I guess, how how do you see source code growing in in the next couple of years in the future besides the the decentralization part? I mean, in terms of maybe features or, like, things that technically you guys you would like Source Credit to work on. Yeah. So the biggest thing is that we're going to be working,
in the beginning of next year, we're gonna start work on the creditor, which is basically going to be a tool for letting anyone in the community, a, like, express that there was some contribution that happened, you know, whether it was not, it was, like, on a platform. B, express how contributions relate to each other. Like, saying, oh, you know, actually, like, this pull request was really related to the fact that on a community call, so and so suggested, like, a change or a feature and, like, connect that cred. And then that would mean that some cred would go to the person suggesting it. Some cred would go to the community call itself and the host and all the other people participating in that discussion. You should be able to add those missing connections in the cred graph. And also to let people boost things where you could use your grain rather than, like, withdrawing it for, like, cash. You could use it to kind of fund other things in the project that you think are important. So maybe I could, like, you know, maybe I could boost, like, oh, we really need to, like, have a new feature or we need to fund a translation of the documentation because there's, like, a really big community coming in, like, a Spanish speaking world. Or it could be, like, I wanna boost the idea that we should have, like, throw a super awesome, like, little conference for ourselves in the mountains in Colorado and, like, then have a party. Like, you know, just so get over your value in the community. So that's a really big part that I want to build. I think generally building out the ability to use source credit for governance where I think that one of the issues that you really have, in current blockchain governance systems is that they assume you know nothing about the humans. You know nothing about the human relationships and all you have is like token balances. So you kind of get stuck with like plutocratic systems. And with source code, you actually have a lot of context in the community. You know, you can go and say like things like, okay, you know, maybe in the governance system, if it's a design question, then all of the people who have the most design cred are going to have voting power. If it's a question that affects a particular community, then the people who have got cred that's related to working with that community will have voting power. If it's a question that affects everyone, like, you know, what are, like, core policies should be, then everyone gets to vote in proportion to their cred. But you wouldn't have to worry about the civil attacks because it's not like you can just spin up a thousand new bot accounts and vote with them because they won't have any cred. Like, it won't it won't carry any weight. I'm also really, really excited to start building out the source code ecosystem. The first rule of the source code ecosystem is you pay your dependencies. And so any project that, like, wants to use source code and be part of the ecosystem needs to pay their dependencies. Right now that, like, one way in which that could be manifest is, like, paying source code because source code is a dependency. But we really want to, like, actually just, like, build out the whole vision of, like, eco projects getting paid for the value they bring. And I'm starting to see projects, like, I've spent some time talking to the balancer team, the past couple weeks. And I think that they've built a super valuable technology that, like, source cred and many other projects in this first good ecosystem are going to need. So I want to get them in the source good ecosystem, and I want us to all start paying them, you know, because, like, they built something really valuable that, like, I think we should do. So, like, let's let's reward that. And we're gonna build it to build more, to, like, overtime to, like, support this, like, ecosystem, in terms of, like, institutionalizing the connections between the credit instances. Yeah. There's there's a lot to do. There's it's, like, can be kind of, like, overwhelming how many different things we need to build, but I'm just, like, excited that we're getting more people involved in building it. So it's less and less, all on my shoulders and more, like, you know, we'll work together and get it done.
Decentralization is nice for you, I guess, as well
in a sense. I can't wait to, like, not feel a I I can't wait to, like, not feel, like, the personal the responsibility is, like, all sitting on, like, my shoulders as the TBD. I'm, like, you know, in the past year, I went from being basically the only core person on source cred to being one of, like, 10 core people on source cred. And, like, that alone, like, is so nice to see other people who also care and, like, know that I just don't need to all do it myself.
Yeah. It's really nice to, to grow a community for sure. So, yeah, I guess, to top it off, where can people go and keep up with the progress of SourceGrid and keep up with you and learn more?
Well, the best place to learn more about source cred is the source cred website, which is sourcecred.io. You can read some docs. You can learn a bit more about source cred there. I would really recommend coming to a source cred community call. They are every Tuesday at 11AM Pacific. You can see it on the calendar by going to sourcecred.io/calendar. And they're just a super, like, lovely welcoming, space. You know, people who come, like, we all, like, kind of share who we are, talk about how we're doing, and then kind of, like, just start answering questions about source code.
I think it's the best community call in crypto. I think you should, like, come and hang out, and you'll just enjoy yourself. And I I I was in I was in one of those calls once, and, there was a bit of talk about communism. Just wanna add that.
Yeah. If you wanna follow me, I'm on Twitter. I frankly don't tweet that much right now, but, like, I might again. So sure. Follow me. Maybe you'll get, like, a good a little a little pearl of of dandelion wisdom here and there, but I'm decentralized lion. Like decentralized lion, you know, not decentralized land, which people often confuse it for. But, yeah, I'm decentralized on Twitter. Very cool, man. Yeah. And I'd also say, like like, I think that source credit is unusual among crypto projects and that we, like, just we really value, like, technically skilled people, but we also really value emotionally intelligent people. And we've, like, kind of identified that, like, to have a healthy community, you need a lot of, like, like, emotionally aware humans, like, working together to, like, make that, like, a safe and healthy space. And so if you feel, like, you don't have the skills that are usually, like, required by, like, tech projects, I would still encourage you to, like, come hang out, have a nice chat, and you might be surprised.
No. Nice. I was definitely surprised when I went. Alright. Thanks a lot, Dandelion, for taking the time. I'm really looking forward to how, source code develops, and I'll definitely be keeping it