Owocki was a rock star at the convention. He is credited with coining the term BUIDL in 2017. Managers approached him non-stop to talk, express their support or request a copy of his book, GreenPilled: How Cryptocurrencies Can Reinvent the World, that was the talk of the conference, and quickly sold out the 400 copies he had ordered. Owocki is far from a casino player like you would find in the crypto world. In several of the presentations he gave, Owocki told the crowd that since research shows that money doesn’t increase happiness after an annual income of about $100,000, the founders of Web3 should maximize their happiness by putting their excess money into a public good that everyone is entitled to. “There’s cypherpunk, it’s all about privacy, decentralization: strict libertarian shit,” he told me. “I am leftist. I am more interested in solar energy, that is, how do we address contemporary issues around sustainability and equitable economic systems? It’s a set of different values. “
He explains that the Internet helps move information between computers. This has created a revolution in communication. Blockchains have made it possible to move units of value between computers. Owocki believes this can be harnessed to revolutionize the way humans interact through what he calls a “renewable crypto-economy.” Cryptoeconomics, he writes in GreenPilled“The use of blockchain-based incentives to design new types of systems, applications, or networks.” Regeneration Cryptoeconomics means doing this in a way that makes the world a better place for everyone. The goal is to break away from the zero-sum, richer-richer model of capitalism. Owocki believes that the right crypto-economic structure can help address collective action issues such as climate change, misinformation, and inadequate digital infrastructure.
The key tool to achieve this is decentralized autonomous organization. In theory, a DAO (yes, pronounced like the Middle Chinese word for the way of the universe) uses cryptocurrency to promote collective action. Usually, members join by purchasing a custom number of tokens issued by the DAO. That allows them to have an ownership stake in the DAO itself. Member holders vote on what the DAO does — this essentially dictates what it spends money on, as a blockchain-based entity can do little other than move funds from address to address other.
The young concept has had a checkered history. The first DAO, simply named “The DAO,” collapsed in 2016 after someone exploited a flaw in its code to extract what was then approximately $50 million worth in Ethereum coins. . Similarly, colorful failures followed. However, the DAOs caused outrage at ETHDenver, where attendees discussed their world-changing potential. Kimbal Musk, Elon’s photogenic brother, talks about Big Green DAO, a food-related charity. Giving away money through the DAO, he insisted, eliminates all the painful bureaucracy of charitable nonprofits. “It’s the better way,” he says, though he also thinks “there are ways to fail, and this one can fail spectacularly.”
What is it about a DAO that — unlike the Kickstarter site — frees humanity from the collective action problems that threaten the species’ extinction? According to Owocki, it’s the ability to code in ways that one tinkers with incentive constructs. (In this sense, the first DAO is arguably Bitcoin itself.) “Our weapon of choice is new mechanism designs, based on logical game theory, implemented for decentralized blockchain networks. as transparent open source code,” he wrote in GreenPilled. Indeed, the book has very little to say about technology, and much more to say about various game theory concepts. These range from things you’ll learn in a college econ class—“public goods are non-excludable and non-rivalry”—to things that wouldn’t happen in a science fiction novel. Fiction: “monetary inclusion,” “fractal DAO protocol,” retroactive public goods financing. “
According to Owocki, one of the most powerful incentive design techniques is called quadratic voting. Standing near the edge of the Shill Region, Owocki turns to show me the back of his purple baseball jacket, which reads “Quadraland.” The Quadratic Land, Owocki explains, is a mythical place where economic laws have been redesigned to produce public goods. “It was just a meme,” he said. “I don’t want to tell you it already exists.” (Everyone at ETHDenver is concerned about my ability to separate metaphorical statements from literal statements.)
In a quadratic voting system, you have a budget to allocate between different options. Let’s say it’s dollars, although it could be any unit. The more dollars you allocate to a particular selection, the more votes you will receive for it. But there’s one important caveat: Each marginal dollar you commit to the same option is worth less than the previous dollar. (Technically, the “cost” of your vote increases quadratic, rather than linear.) This makes it harder for the richest in the group to dominate the vote. GitCoin uses adaptation, quadratic funding, to fund Web3 projects. The number of people who contribute to a given project is counted more than the amount they contributed. This rewards ideas that have more supporters than the richest: renewable cryptocurrency in action.
