 My name is Kevin Iwaki. I am one of the co-founders of Gitcoin, which is made possible by Consensus, and a community member out of Boulder, Colorado, Schill, Colorado. The talk that I pitched at DevCon is entitled The Future History of the Open Internet, and I think I've given a lot of talks about dev relations and building open source communities. This is by and large the most abstract talk that I've ever given. And I think that for that reason, it's one that's a little bit outside of my comfort zone because as a software engineer, I really like to focus on being pragmatic and on things that are tangible to me, and at the same time, I do not have a crystal ball, I do not know what the future history of the open internet is going to be, but I do feel strongly as a community member, as an Ethereum, and as a father, and as a member of the Colorado scene that this is one of the most important talks that I could be giving at DevCon this year. And it's because I'm increasingly worried about the direction of the world at a time in which you could argue that our industrial age institutions are crumbling in terms of credibility, and the world struggles with the inability to do collective sense making because of fake news and other challenges like climate change. For me, Ethereum is a shelling point where I can come together with other people who have hope of building a new world and new systems that are not subject to the same sort of issues. And so I think that it would be appropriate for me to start my talk about the future history of the open internet with talking about the present history of the open internet. And I think that for me, that starts in 1985 with Richard Stallman and the founding of the Free Software Foundation. And say what you will about Richard Stallman's politics these days, I believe that the work that the Free Software Foundation did in 1985 was really important in defining a category of software that was free as in Libre, as in freedom, not as in free beer. And the goal of this community was to advocate for software which would give you the right to A, run the software, B, study the software and make changes to it, and C, redistribute the software with or without changes. And the reason why this rule set was important to Richard Stallman was that in a world increasingly intermediated by software, the decisions that we make could be influenced by software creators. And so the question in my mind is always, is this software doing the right thing for me as the end user? Does it have my interests in mind? Or does it have the interests of, say, a for-profit corporation and by proxy maybe a government behind it in mind? And so I think that Richard's work in advocating that we create open source, or that we create free software that we can inspect and look and see is this in the best interest of users and then redistribute the software that we modify, which is in the best interest of users, was foundational. The next event in the history of the open internet that I think is important is Linus Traveld's creating Linux, the Linux kernel in 1991. Linux went on to compete with Microsoft for the backbone, the sort of infrastructure of the internet in the 90s, and today is one of the most popular distributions of software in the world today, and it's all available for free. Linux is an important operating system because, A, it proved that open source software, a group of people who had never met each other, could create a product that compete with for-profit corporations. The next event that I think is important in the history of the open internet is the founding of Bitcoin by an individual or a group of individuals known as Satoshi Nakamoto, which solved the double-spend problem and the Byzantine general problem and created a new open source money that we could use to transact online. This was further extended by Vitalik Buterin in 2015. I'd like to stop my monologue and say if you guys want to take a picture of this and tag your favorite Bitcoin maximalist with it, I think that I'd get a real kick out of that conversation. Vitalik extended the Bitcoin system by creating a system that would allow for programmable smart contracts and therefore the ability for the Ethereum blockchain to do more than just move money across the world. So a lot of people don't know this in this space, but we're actually sitting in 2019 at the apex of a long history of people who have been advocates for end users and for peer-to-peer digital systems. And I think that that's important to think about when we're wondering what is our legacy in the Ethereum space and in the blockchain space and what will the world look like in 2035 when I'm retired or retiring and looking back on the work that we've done. So as I transition from the present history of the open internet to the future history, I want to say, I want to set expectations by saying that I don't think that I could possibly cover that entire scope within this 20 minutes. And even if I could, this subject matter is so abstract that I don't know that we would all come away with the same conception of it. There's this fable that's actually quite famous where several blind men try to conceptualize what an elephant is by feeling it, by touching the elephant. And they come to disagree because the person who felt the trunk said, this is a tree. And the person who felt the tusk said, oh, this is a weapon. And I think that that's a great metaphor for what is Web 3 and what we're building today. And I think that in some versions of this fable, these blind men actually come to blows because they disagree about what they're conceptualizing. And I think that's a great metaphor for some of the sense-making that we've been doing on crypto Twitter about what Web 3 is. So with that caveat aside, I'd like to move on by talking about what I view as the primary story of the creation of the open internet of the people here at DevCon, which I call the hero's journey. So like many of you, I grew up in a small town with small town values, community, family, peace, and brotherhood. And like many of you, I went off to college to get educated. I have a computer science degree, but studied a few other things in school, eventually launched my career by moving to a big city, Philadelphia, then New York City. And then I got a big person job. So you work your way up the corporate ladder, and you're trying to please your boss so that they can please their boss. But what hill are we really climbing when we're trying to support our families by working for these for-profit corporations and we're climbing the corporate ladder? I found this path really distasteful, and I felt like I was doing work that didn't match my values. And I was working in finance. I was working in a place where in order to feed my family to stay afloat in the world and in order to advance my personal agenda, I was working for some big corporate fat cat who was making more money than me. And in my case, specifically, I felt like they were externalizing harm with the work that I was getting paid to do for them. So I hated going into this office. I hated everything about the meetings and the software that I was writing. And this is what I mean when I say that Ethereum is a shelling point for hope, is my feeling is that in the Ethereum space, we can do work that not only can advance our pocketbooks and I can support my family, but I can also do work that's creating a new economy that can be better than the old economy and I can do work that aligns with my values. And this hero's journey isn't just me. I've talked to many of you all here at DevCon and I know that there are other people out there that feel this way. The founding myth of Ethereum is that we can create new transparent economic systems that can fundamentally be less corruptible than the old systems because the users can be owners of the economic systems because they're transparent and because we can program immutability into the economic system. So even if the creator of these software systems becomes evil, then the software system itself will still be a free piece of software that would still have the end-user interest in mind. And then I think that this is even multiplied in importance because from first principles, the Internet of money could be huge. If you think about what the Internet of Information did to our society, because it was the core innovation was that a group of computers could transmit information across the Internet without an intermediary. Everything that was based on top of information in society was fundamentally changed by the Internet. Our media, our politics, the way we're entertained. And if you reason about the Internet of money in that way and you ask yourself, what is built on top of money? Well, the answer to me is jobs, is banking, insurance, investments, gaming and gambling. There are so many things in society that are built on top of money. And if we can build them based upon the Ethereum mainnet and the Ethereum-based technologies, then we're going to be able to create an economic system that is hopefully freer, fairer and more open than the one that existed before. And as someone who, as I said before, has small-town community values, and I believe what we're doing in Colorado with respect to community is working. It's a really great place to live and work. The neighbors are friendly. We have an economic system in which we can transact in our local economy, and we can take care of each other. I'm really hopeful that the Ethereum-based Internet will allow us to take what's working in our local communities and scale it past what's the suggested cognitive limit in humans called Dunbar's number. So Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit in which says that you can basically only have stable relationships with up to five people in your kin, 15 people in your super family, or 150 people in your tribe. And so this is a cognitive limit in humans that exists, and it's basically something that we evolved in our hunter-gatherer days. And the sort of like composable things that are working in our local communities is that we're having repeat interactions, we're having possible win-wins in our interactions with people in our local communities, and we're having low miscommunication, ideally with people in our local communities. So my hope is that with Ethereum, creating a new Internet in which trust is able to be managed and move around, that we're going to be able to scale Dunbar's number. So the Internet was a fundamentally changed the way we interact with each other because it allowed you to access someone from across the world, but it didn't allow you to trust someone from across the world, and it didn't allow you to create a meaningful relationship or a stable social relationship with people across the world. And I think that if we can program our incentives into our money, then we can create incentives which will allow us to have more stable social relationships across the world. The final principle that I want to talk about really quick is the Matthew effect, which is basically explained sometimes as the cumulative effect of a cumulative advantage, and it can be observed in many aspects of life in systems where the rich get richer, the people who have resources continue to monopolize the resources. And my hope is that because we have a new financial system that we're building in the Ethereum space, not that these new systems that we're building in the Ethereum space will just magically be better. But because we have the properties of transparency and immutability, we can build systems that are fundamentally resistant to the accumulation of capital over time. And what's really exciting is that this year at DevCon, we can all point at DeFi and OpenFi and say, you can do transactions on Gitcoin in order to work for open source software, you can transact with a stable coin, you can make investments with Compound, and now we even have extensibility of Compound and we can do transactions that benefit other people with RDI. And it's with this in mind that I'm a little bit worried that we're just going to see a reemergence of the existing financial system and the incentive structures that exist in the existing financial system reemerge but with Ethereum-based technology. So I think the Ethereum community is bundled up as a set of technologies, but it's also a set of values around censorship resistance, around decentralization, around pushing power to the edges. And we've seen a lot of VC chains launch over the last several years or the last year or so that are basically taking technology that looks and sounds a lot like Ethereum, but I don't fundamentally think it's bundled up with the same sort of values that we're seeing from the Ethereum space and in the founding myth of Ethereum. So the thought that I would leave you with today is that we're designing these power structures now. In 20 years, you will look back at DevCon 5 in Japan and the work that we've done in the Ethereum space and it'll be shaped by the contours of the bull and bear market and probably by the regulatory regimes that we go back and forth with in our various governments. It'll be shaped by the trade-off between surveillance, the capitalist need to surveil your users and make money off of the data and the fundamental user right to have privacy and we're going to decide what kind of network we're building for our networked species, what kind of power structures there's going to be. Is it going to be a one-to-many relationship with power brokers that have monopolies over our investment and our employment relationships or will the power be slightly more distributed in an oligarchical type model where we all have local lords that we deal with? In the U.S., we call our system of government a representative democracy in which we have about 100 senators, 300-something House of Representatives that we defer our power to and our decision-making power. One of the things that I've been sharing ideas with at the halls of DevCon and Overshockey in the bars of DevCon has been what would the world look like if we were a completely peer-to-peer network species? If there was government and a financial system that was by and for the people. And I think that it's really interesting to think about deconstructing jobs and deconstructing investments, pushing them into a peer-to-peer network and then rebuilding a financial system on top of that. The work that we're doing at Gitcoin is designed to create peer-to-peer jobs for software developers. And this is a real visualization of what our mesh network of jobs looks like. You can see that there are super connectors that are brokers on the network, but you can see that there's also a lot of peer-to-peer activity. My vision is that we will all work for the open Internet one day and we will be able to transact with each other, support open-source software and support our families by doing that. And one of the things that I try to remember as a design principal at Gitcoin is that these nodes in these networks are three-dimensional humans that have families, that have needs, that have their own sets of values, that have their own backgrounds. And communication across the edges of these networks will be fundamentally hard to facilitate value because of the communication barriers across this network. And one of the things that we're really trying to program into our system is empathy. We're all spending face-to-face time with each other this week and we won't get to do that probably for another year or so. And so when you're transacting in this peer-to-peer network building in ethical design considerations that remind you that your work transacting with an actual three-dimensional human will be important because the contours of this peer-to-peer financial system that we're building are going to be the way value flows in this peer-to-peer, this network species that we're building. And we can always choose between building something that enriches ourselves at the expense of others and building something that climbs both hills at once. And we're doing this all collectively in the Ethereum space when we build the Ethereum OS, which I've started to conceptualize as the operating system for a new financial system. And then the DAPS store that we're building on top of this new financial system, which includes things like DAOs, which includes things like peer-to-peer jobs, which includes your investments and probably many more things by DevCon 6. At Gitcoin, our mission is to grow and sustain open-source software. We believe that open-source software creates billions of dollars of value in the world and that software developers don't get to work on and they don't get to capture as much value as they create. And so we're fundamentally trying to create a better world for software engineers and trying to create a world where software developers work just for the Internet. I'm really lucky to be working on a use case that has highly technical people involved in the transactions that we're creating because they'll get through the barriers of signing MetaMask transactions, of getting gas, of figuring out how to resubmit their transactions on MetaMask when the gas network is clogged. But we all have a lot of work to do as a community to make sure that the most decentralized chain that's out there is the one that's the most transacted. And I hope that when you're building the new financial system, you'll remember the rich history that comes from the open-source and free software movements because we're building the future of our network species. Thank you very much.