 Just a little bit about lasagna love so the reason why I made that impact certificate is because I think sometimes we focus on things That scale and we forget about the things that don't scale right the things that happen in our in our neighborhoods in our communities The things that happen just you know from one person to another right? So I wanted to kind of bring attention to that and bring attention to lasagna love dot org So you can check that out if you're interested So my name is Kate Sills and I'm an engineer a software engineer in the blockchain space And today I'm going to be talking about blockchain education as a public good So I have a problem and you might have a similar problem to the one that I have and the problem that I have is this When I tell someone what I do I get one of two responses Right, so the first response that I get and none of these are good by the way So the first response that I get is isn't it just a bunch of scams, right? And then the second response that I get is right on I actually just put all of my retirement savings in insert scam here, right so There's a problem and I think it's actually a knowledge problem and I think it's that people are unable to evaluate blockchain projects and it goes beyond just my own, you know personal discomfort in this conversation People are actually losing their life savings and Good projects are unfairly maligned if everything seems equally risky or scammy, right? So I think this is a problem that at least I personally am very motivated to work on So why am I talking about this at funding the Commons so blockchain education is a public good And so if we look at like for instance Eleanor Ostrom's Matrix of what a public good is in her diagram of you know common pool resources public goods private goods and toll goods We see that knowledge. It's in the area of low subtractability of use And it's also in the area of high difficulty of excluding potential beneficiaries. So it is Non-rivalrous and also non-excludable, right? So it's a public good and that makes it really really hard to fund because you can imagine in the blockchain space one company Spends all of their time doing all of this education and then another company can just free write on that or worse a third company might be in the space and Benefiting from the kind of the the ambiguity and lack of information, right whether they intend to or not so One one part of my background I double-majored in computer science and cognitive science and I have never used the cognitive science aspect until today So it's come in handy, but What I learned was that effective education is understanding and correcting a students already existing mental model So this is very different than how we used to think about education, right? We used to think about education as You know, I'm a teacher. I'm taking knowledge that it is that is in my brain And I'm inserting it in your brain, right? It's just this like direct transfer of knowledge and now you have it and you can go off and do things with that knowledge But that's not how knowledge works. I mean, you know, we've all studied for an exam And then basically forgotten everything after that, right? So how it actually works is that we construct mental models So there's this great paper that I like by Edward Reddish who's a physics professor And he talks about how to use the learnings from cognitive science in teaching physics And it turns out the students come into his class with all kinds of incorrect mental models that they've learned just through experiencing life And so one thing that he points out is that these mental models, they may be contradictory They may be incomplete. They may be confused with similar things. So we might you know Finds the similarities confusing you might be confusing similar things and It may be used as a heuristic to save time that we would otherwise be spending thinking so He says that how to change someone's mind if you really want to change someone's mind Here's how you do it you have to propose a replacement model and that model must be Understandable it has to be plausible It has to be seen as useful and then the most important thing is that you have to show that there's a strong conflict With predictions based on the existing model Okay, so now let's get into blockchain mental models So what I chose to do was to look at two Main blockchain books These are actually books that an econ professor told me that he uses with the students in his classroom so these are things that people actually are using as teaching tools and The first is the truth machine And the second book is blockchain revolution And so it's going to seem like I'm picking on these two books but I think they're actually just representative of the types of books that are out there and In fact, if you look at like the blurbs for for instance the blockchain revolution It's kind of a who's who's list of of everyone, right? So the biggest people in business are saying these are the books that you should be looking at I want it comes to learning about blockchains. So there's more of this, but that's just a little bit of that so There's a lot that I want to talk about in regards to the mental models of these books But I'm going to focus on one specific thing and that is digital signatures so I'm going to go over what I see as the the correct mental model for digital signatures and then we'll see what mental model the books might be Thinking or might be creating and compare the two So just a little overview of digital signatures they're not new they've been around since the 70s and The way that it works is basically you create a very random number and that's effectively your private key And it should be kept secret And so now you can sign messages, which creates a digital signature and that's unforgeable And so no one else can create this digital signature only you can and So by digital signatures, I want to make sure that you know We're not talking about just a digital representation of you know your handwritten signature, right? We're talking about data the signature that is produced looks a lot more like the signature on the right than the signature on the left and Then once a signature is created you can give it to someone else and they can verify it so the way that that's done is that you Drive a new number from your private key and this one you can share publicly So let's call it your public key and then anyone who has that public key can verify that your signature is valid for that particular message So one thing that's important to note is that digital signatures do not do any encryption So you can kind of think of it as like a stamp on a document You can still see what's on the document nothing about the document is hidden, but there's a stamp on it And then assigned messages are tamper evident So because a signature is only valid for a particular message if that message changes at all that signature is invalid and Digital signatures don't require a blockchain. So blockchains like Bitcoin or Ethereum They make extensive use of digital signatures, but digital signatures existed long before Bitcoin And they're one of the cryptographic primitives that decentralized blockchains use along with cryptographic caches and proof-of-work and things like that so Many of you have already probably created digital signatures if you've submitted a transaction to a blockchain right so when you sign to submit a transaction you're actually creating a digitally signed message with your private key Okay, so That's kind of the correct model now Let's get into some of quotes and then you know I kind of want to do this as an exercise So if you can kind of think with me and think about the mental model that these people might have or they might be trying to create in the reader and Compare that to how we think about digital signatures. Generally. I think you come to some really interesting conclusions So let's look at some of these quotes So we need to worry about weak firewalls leaving employees or insurance hackers if we're both using Bitcoin if we can store and exchange Bitcoin securely Then we can store and exchange highly confidential information and digital assets securely on the blockchain Okay, so it seems like they think that because we can store and exchange Bitcoin securely We can exchange highly confidential information on the blockchain. Okay, so that is not quite right So I'm going to be compiling a mental model here And I'm going to put a check for something that I view is correct and an X for something that I think is not quite right But but we'll try to compile it and see where we get so they do say that Bitcoin is secure But they get it wrong that we can I like actually put highly confidential information on the blockchain Okay, and then the truth machine says one of the most important Non-currency applications of Bitcoin's blockchain could be security itself So that's interesting. They think that there's something there's something very secure about blockchain Beyond what we might get from the cryptographic primitives Um So and I think where they're coming from is that they might think that block chains protect against hacks that reveal private data Right, so that's not accurate So the blockchain revolution says the blockchain is encrypted. It uses heavy-duty encryption involving public and private keys That is not correct. Everything's in the clear So let's add that But they were correct that block chains do involve public and private keys Okay, so why do they think that things are encrypted? I think this is where it gets really interesting So they say that it is rather like the two key system to access a safety deposit box Okay, this this is also very incorrect, but I didn't know how a safety deposit box worked so I looked up and This is what it looks like and the point of it is that you know, you are renting this from a bank You put your stuff in there and then when you want to access it The bank employee has a key and you have a key and you have to use the two keys together To be able to access what's in the box So you can kind of see where they're coming from where they think that there are two keys And then you know you can put something securely in there And then you have to have the two keys to access it turns out to be completely wrong But you can see what their mental model is So let's let's add that All right, so they say When the user signs their public key with their private key that action Mathematically proves to outsiders that the user has control of the underlying Information and can then assign or send it to another person's public key. All right, so it seems like they're saying that the user uses their private key to sign their public key somehow, so that's not quite accurate and and Let's see so they say that the concept of a signature entails combining two associated numbers or keys one publicly known in the other Private so we can see there's this idea of like combining keys Which which is not right, but it's very interesting because I think it goes back to that two keys of the safety deposit box model All right, so now these quotes are going to be a little bit bigger So I'm going to try to summarize but if we have a crypto cryptographically signed certificate from some institution We're vulnerable to that institution's unilateral power to revoke its signature Okay, so they think that digital signatures can somehow be made invalid, right? And somehow this is connected to President Trump revoking the rights of transgender soldiers okay, and The same risks always apply with digitally signed rights when they don't reside in an immutable record, so it seems like they think that there is Something that digital signatures are lacking that you might get from putting the record on a blockchain for instance Okay, and so then they say note the deliberate choice of the most secure permissionless blockchain bitcoins in a permissions Blockchain the central authority controlling the network could always override the public keys of the individual and could revoke their educational certificates so it seems like They think that if someone has central control over a blockchain they could somehow Override or invalidate the digital signatures, and that's not correct. So let's add that both to our mental model They seem to think that the signed message can be tampered with without anyone knowing They seem to think that control of a blockchain allows you to control the private keys or signatures or public keys or something like that Right, so you know I might be getting this mental model wrong. Maybe they meant something else entirely I don't know but I think there are some significant differences between that and what I see is the correct mental model So that was just one example As I was reading this there were a number of other things that were that I saw as wrong So for instance that blockchain consensus produces truth and that providing a solution to the quote-unquote double-spend problem Allows blockchains to guarantee the uniqueness of assets generally So then there's the question of how do we fix wrong ideas right and it's really hard to do So if we go back to what the physics professor reddish said We have to understand the audience's particular mental model and everyone has their own unique mental model right their own version And then we have to somehow convey the correct mental model and Then in order to actually perform the switch in order to replace someone's mental model There must be a strong conflict with predictions based on the existing model So the way that I would view this is that we have to tell people something true that contradicts their current model And another way to think about that is we have to tell them something surprising So I see kind of three ways in which we can do this the first is basically what I've been doing so far is you know, we have to read and critique and That's great but I think it can only take you so far because Critiquing things is not particularly fun right like no one wants to be the person being like oh, that's not right You know and raining on someone's parade, right? The second thing is user studies and then the third thing is and I'll talk about this a bit later is creating surprising products so First so there have been user studies that have been done and they're really interesting I'm sure people in the audience know of many more than I do But so here's one of them where they brought in I believe it was 29 people into a lab ask them their ideas about how a blockchain works and This is actually one of their diagrams so you can see it's kind of hard to read But I think there's a minor up there and like the admin zone or something like that So, you know, it's just like really fascinating what people might be thinking because if you're just Making a transaction and submitting it There's no particular reason why you might know how any of this works, right? Like it makes sense that people may not know how it works, but how they think about it is really interesting So the takeaway that I want to leave you all with is that I want to propose that we create surprising products And I'm going to call this products that break people's brains So I'll give an example So there's this thing on Ethereum that you might be familiar with called the proof of attendance protocol it's it's just for fun, but you get a token if you attend an event and I think we can change this to be entirely off-chain and the reason why I want to do this is because I think it will actually create the kind of conflicts that we need in people's mental models so that we can bring them to a better understanding and so the way that this would work is that an event organizer would use their private key to Sign a claim that the attendee attended the event and that would produce a signature that can be verified by anyone Who knows the public key of the organizer? So it would not be on a blockchain is just the digital signature just data that you could pass around you could send in an email You could send in a text message. You could put it on a website You could you know have a gallery of all these different badges that sort of thing and it creates I think exactly the right kind of conflicts There's no blockchain, but we still get this tamper evident document if we store the signature And it uses public and private keys, but it's not encrypted So if we go back to the mental model that we you know that we talked through this Violates a number of those assumptions and hopefully it would make people rethink things So while knowledge is a public good, I think we can create products that aren't so the products themselves can be Excludable and therefore they might be profitable. So for instance for you might be able to Have people pay five dollars to make one of these fun event badges Without a watermark and have like the free version, you know be with the watermark or something like that and I think going against the common mental model might indicate a market opportunity Because if no one's thinking this way Then no one's thinking this way, right? So you know the danger here is that you might make something that Breaks the mental model so much that people find it implausible, right? So that is always a danger But I think the more that we can build fun little products like this the more we can actually Produce knowledge in a way that makes it a public good But we're doing so in a way that we know how to do we know how to make these products We know how to make them profitable. So Thank you so much. I don't know if I have time for one question. Maybe but Thanks again