 Like the italics talk was called crypto economics in 30 minutes So I was like, oh, maybe I should call this talk the theory foundation prioritization framework allocation philosophy and decision-making guidance in 30 minutes But just didn't quite have the same ring to it So welcome to subtraction in action, but really it's a theory foundation prioritization framework allocation philosophy decision-making guidance in 30 minutes So like I said, I'm Albert I spend most of my time these days helping the EF wherever I can I've been a fan of Ethereum since way back before in the Dow fork but needless to say a lot has changed and One of the most important things that has changed is that the EF has become one small part of a big Vibrating Ethereum ecosystem and that's not just good. I think it's essential for Ethereum to thrive long term One reason is because you know when it comes to the future We are all like this parable that I love and it's used in every talk, which is the blind man and the elephant So most of you probably heard this parable. You have blind men. They're feeling different parts of an elephant for whatever reason They each get an incomplete picture out of this, you know, they make different and incorrect assumptions about what they're touching I find this to be a really like even though I have no idea why the blind man are doing this I find this to be really valuable because in the real world There's a lot of situations that are now like in today's in the real world There's a lot of situations where we don't see the full picture of something including Ethereum And even right now you have this like new critique that no one can say what Ethereum is You know, it's like is it this or is it that and so we're having this much trouble describing what Ethereum is today Well, you know what can only imagine how hard it is to see the picture of what a thing is going to be in five years So, you know, since I went through all the trouble making this this animation and we're gonna use it twice in 2019 and then There even in 2024 and this is not a price prediction. It might be a state-sized prediction. I'm just kidding It is an impact goal, right for Ethereum, you know For everybody who's in one of the their communities today There are a lot of people hundred probably more than that still to join And something that I had talked about in her talk was how this independent flourishing that we have this vast vibrant ecosystem This makes Ethereum special. This is key to us growing into this 2024 potential So one of my favorite books from this book or fun One of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite books titled good strategy bad strategy You can read the quote, but it essentially says that, you know, life doesn't work like the movies In the movies the hero has this like crazy elaborate plan You know, sometimes they manage to dodge a bullet by like a few inches and they never show what happens in the movie they didn't manage to dodge the bullet and The real world doesn't work that way and the real world is more important to have create options and to have flexibility Then have this like master 12-step plan and so When I think about the ability to create options, I'll take what was said by IA a step further I think what we have here in the Ethereum ecosystem isn't just what makes it special I think it's an outright superpower And so one of the things that we've been trying to explain better is that this this like subtraction mindset, you know It's about creating options. It's about leveraging unfair advantages And it also recognizes and embraces that there's this unique opportunity and responsibility In a theory one thing that I think is important to note is it's not even like everyone I think can't effectively apply the the subtraction mindset And another thing that I want to note is that this is not the EF claiming everyone has to operate this way But we do think that it's crucial to the EF's future operations so that it can like fulfill its Responsibilities and its potential as a steward and supporter of the theory So some of you a lot of you have probably seen it now, especially after IA's talk But I'll just do a really quick speed review of some of the aspects of the subtraction mindset You know, you have this like whole In an addition mindset you're trying to capture opportunities and subtraction mindset you're trying to distribute them I think that this contrast between trying to increase prestige and increase effectiveness is very interesting For instance universities don't seek to grow, you know in terms of number of personnel or things like that necessarily But every university cares about its prestige and one could argue that it has come at the cost of the effectiveness over time You know the basic one that I really like is just what do you think when other people other organizations create value and I honestly I I really just did this speed review just so I could reuse this slide because I love it so much It's from this. It's a fictional quote, but I think it actually says, you know Like like many good fictional quotes. It says something really crisp about the real world And so, you know, this is obviously not the mindset that we are taking And so ultimately It's not that the point is that the EF needs like is trying to avoid responsibility or you know do all this other stuff it's just noting that what matters most here is ethereum and how much the ethereum foundation matters that that's kind of secondary or hopefully in service to ethereum So that's nice But why is this so tricky because you know every organization cares about just doing the right things or being impactful or whatever And it took I think at least for me it took a while to better understand And articulate the challenge so on the one hand obviously, you know what we do matters, right? And there's like and there's all these direct consequences to what we do but How we do things also really matters. This is true everywhere But I think when you have an organization with the history of the ethereum foundation and you have something like ethereum That is itself unprecedented Then there's like how things are done and the second order effects or the indirect consequences of what is done That also really matters it often matters more. And so when we talk about doing what's best for ethereum It's like, okay, of course we want to do that then the tensions arise for example Short-term versus long-term. This isn't just an ethereum specific thing and all kinds of organizations face challenges around this They're setting direction, but then on the other hand, you have this like huge ecosystem and does that curtail creativity? Similarly, you know Coordination is often extremely valuable to do something But of course decentralization is this hedge against a lot of the bad things that can happen in the world How do those play off each other and even something like I think that is often Overlook which is you know when you endorse something you'd also might come with a chilling effect because if for example EF says hey look this project We're supporting them and someone else might be like well I'm not going to work on something that does something similar because you know this other project already being endorsed by the EF So that's not saying there's no no way around that but how you go about doing an endorsement how you go about doing those things also matters So to try to like at least make it a little simpler at a very hallowing the EF today is focused on two complementary goals There's there's working towards this world where ethereum is widely used hopefully for good and also trying to build towards a world where ethereum values are widely found and Like in this talk I won't have enough time to say like what is used for good necessarily mean or what the ethereum values are and those are extraordinarily important and I'm not trying to like sweep it aside But it's really also not my place to say or our place to say But I do think that like it's obviously merits discussion and that we can also agree that in theory There is some version of widespread good use of ethereum and some version of you know widespread ethereum values that would be desirable So figuring that out if it wasn't complicated enough figuring that out is also something that we want to work on To like me a little shorter We've got grow ethereum usage and you know spread ethereum values and to do dive into these a little bit For me at least grow usage is really this like shorthand way of talking about measureables It's not just about like transactions on chain or unique addresses or things like that Not you know not everything can be quantified that easily, but some measurements can still help us calibrate And I think another thing to note is that it's we can be a lot more systematic about this at times You don't have to be like extremely precise like I I don't the exact number is but I think it's it's got to be like 99.5% of software developers either have not done anything with ethereum or not like actively You know working on a theory. I don't need to know what that exact number is I can tell you that anything that can plausibly increase the rate at which we can penetrate at that market is probably worth exploring Similarly, you know spread values is a shorthand way of saying that there are things that matter that cannot be easily Quantified and as I alluded to earlier. I expect and seek enormous debate over what the quote value should be Like I said, it's not for the you have to decide alone And I think it's actually one of the reasons why a subtraction mindset is so important because you know maybe to folks in this room It's obvious that you wouldn't want to do this But we have people all the time they're like telling us you should just say exactly what your values are until everyone How they should be operating in your ecosystem? But yeah, really the most important party here is that this this like hard to quantify stuff is just as important I think it might even be more important than the quantifiable stuff. Let me just have quick examples I think just even just the example that Ethereum sets for others, you know being an inspiration I know that for me personally seeing a different way of operating as a community than say like the Bitcoin community was operating Several years ago was very attractive to me and then things like this are not going to be adequately captured by stats There's also things that we have to be wary of compromising right like if they're in becomes more centralized You know, let's say partners with projects or companies or governments to get quote more usage Then maybe it's still called a theory, but I'm not sure that it's still a theory. That's being used And so to tie it back to what I was talking about earlier You can look at it as usage being primarily about first-order, you know effects threat consequences and Values being about like second-order effects or indirect consequences And so as I noted earlier the subtraction line set creates options It leverages unfair advantages and it embraces this like unique opportunity and responsibility Another thing that I think has really shaped the way we think about things at the yeah Is observing that this amazing ecosystem is now at a point where it seems like 90% of what Ethereum needs Happens organically and a lot of it happens better than quote central planning alone would lead to But there's still definitely at least a 10% that could benefit from additional coordination or direction Or accountability and so we take this like first order effect lens naturally you'd want to identify this this 10% You know, Ethereum is a normal company, but I think I mean said this to me And I really liked it. You also don't want it to fail in ways that like any normal company never would Now on the second order effect lens There's how you go about approaching this, right? So we prefer approaches that would move things in this like 10% Bucket to the 90% moving from insufficient coordination for instance to like organic flourishing And so I'm calling this the 10 to 90 philosophy So mapping back to a slide from IA's talk, you know, she referenced, you know incubation Community support and going beyond Ethereum is like three of the many classes of support we're trying to provide and I think looking more closely especially at these particular Examples almost all of them are examples of this 10 to 90 philosophy in action some other examples include just this general increased emphasis on the ecosystem support that some of you heard about and will be continuing to communicate more about Something I mentioned a bit earlier, but there's a chilling effect when you have a quote official project Or even just when you give a grant to something or when you partner with something And so that doesn't mean you never do that, but I think recognizing that this effect exists is important to Determine the best ways to really support the outcomes we're trying to achieve Another one is just biasing towards being a commonly Collaborative, you know, I'm not gonna and if the EF is a very decentralized organization in spite of what some might say I'm not gonna sit here and say that when I first saw for instance some of the sponsors for DevCon I was like oh that makes perfect sense like you've all these competitors you've all these other things But I think what's what's really interesting is For me one of the things that drew me to Ethereum is Well, if you operate in a way that everyone operated that way Like you know, does that make the world a better place and Ethereum seemed to be this environment that kind of most Gave the opportunity to express that and I think being uncommonly collaborative not blindly or naively But at least uncommonly collaborative is a really important part of making it possible for things to you know move 10 to 90 So all this you know ties into the support stuff that I has been talking about and improving our support capabilities is like Obviously, how well we allocate is a huge part of that and so sometimes I think about it's like yeah You just figure out what's allocated towards how hard can that be? And then when I sit down and I try to think about it more and I talk with all the people throughout the ecosystem Well, you're just like an incomplete list of needs when we talk about Ethereum over the next five years Right like obviously we'd like to see and usage grow With that there's community growth. That's important to cultivate developer base needs to grow And then developer output, you know, it's just not just quantity But like what each developer is capable of doing which is which is very different and very important Of course researcher base is still going to be important researchers often produce things that you know enable developers to be much much more effective And then broadly speaking we also just need to support the research you get to screw the researcher base We also need to find ways to support these researchers that are building towards Ethereum tomorrow Similarly, there's a ton of development going into the future of Ethereum and While we're talking about future we can't forget that there's also an Ethereum today and the security and upkeep of Ethereum today Which I think does get a little bit overlooked at times is equally as important An extension of security and upkeep is just this notion of downside protection, right? Like There's there's still many things that can happen that can single-handedly set back or destroy it all that we build more towards But then the flip side of downside protection is this general notion of out-of-the-box ideas But I think if we get too locked into precisely defined categories We're going to lose a lot of the essence that made Ethereum, you know Ethereum itself was an out-of-the-box idea in the first place And of course, you know, I haven't even I don't think I covered everything but but before I forget There's also it's important to support everything in a way that's consistent or whatever that's even going to mean with Ethereum's values so Yeah, take a look at all that and also tell me what I missed because I'm sure I have or tell me how you would break These things down further And this is a big part of what not just we at the EF, but we you know, it's an Ethereum ecosystem have to do together So my response to this is Well, we don't have any choice. So challenge accepted And so in order to do all these things like what is it going to take? Well first I want to talk a little bit about what mediocre decision making looks like because I think like Sometimes making less mistakes is just as important as having more hits often. It's much easier to prevent than to fix You know fixing gets you glory and prevention doesn't I think that's one of the reasons we know and maybe notice it as much But prevention is also extremely important. And so we might have that I'll start with some common patterns that we try to avoid There's in a wishful thinking confirmation or narrative bias Just like a general lack of nuance like sometimes when you just infinitely wait one thing in lieu of everything else and of course just pattern matching in general especially since like If you don't really know why the pattern that you are matching like maybe make sense to be matched Then it might very well be coincidental. So these are just some you know basic things to keep in mind easier said than done But something that we try to keep in mind with everything So now I want to talk a little bit about how we would for instance evaluate an allocation proposal There's a few big components here. One is to precisely identify the goals Another is to think holistically, you know independent of the proposal What are the best ways to achieve the goals and then there's you know evaluating the proposal itself. So So coming back briefly to Aya's presentation in it She showed some of the things that the other foundations been supporting and just a quickly run through them again We had grantees, you know, we had these other support designations And then these additional areas which I also showed earlier when I was talking about the 10 to 90 And obviously wouldn't have time to go and teach every one of them But I did think that what might be helpful is to kind of do a case study Of what allocation looks like in practice because what's important is not like to be able to Justify a mediocre decision is just to make a good decision And so we can talk about theory and framework all day But let's see like what happens when you really put into practice and to illustrate this I chose a particularly interesting allocation story from this past year This was definitely like way more elaborate than most I want to emphasize It's not like everything needs to go through all the stuff that happened here Because again, the goal is not to produce better justifications It's actually just to make better decisions as often as possible that often requires incomplete information Yeah, operating with incomplete information But I chose this story because I think it just illustrates so many of the things that I've been talking about in a way That hopefully makes it more tangible So what was the catalyst? We learned that a popular game developer is doing great work and is looking for funding support This wasn't even a direct application by the way It wasn't like this There was an application of the grants program or the EF It's just something that we were paying noticing and paying attention to And I should be clear that this actually happens quite a bit. This is a very dynamic space There's people moving around all the time doing lots of people doing great work And the EF is often making introductions exploring grant opportunities and so on with such people And at the same time the EF it can't and probably shouldn't react every single time something like this comes up but this particular situation caught our eye The work that this person had been doing had been contributing to onboarding more people to And an effect on improving a theorem UX and so we thought it maybe it does make sense to give them more freedom Let's break this down Now remember I mentioned precisely identifying goals and what I said here about an onboarding or improving UX or giving more freedom I don't think that's precise enough. So let's try to go deeper when we talk about onboarding more people to Ethereum, you know, why do we want to do that and One obvious reason is we think this is going to lead to more Ethereum usage But of course an important implication of that is that people will continue finding Ethereum useful and not just want it done So you're not just looking for like a gimmick to onboard somebody, right? You're actually looking for a sustainable like outcome Another reason might just be that like when you onboard people do Ethereum The people themselves might be developers and you know, maybe those developer They become an Ethereum developer and then maybe that Ethereum developer then creates new cases And you know the cycle kind of starts where it begins and there's many other possible reasons Similarly with Ethereum UX, right? Like when we talk about improving Ethereum user experience, you know, for what impact? Is it maybe increased accessibility? Maybe that increased accessibility leads to increased user growth maybe increased security like less user error and Just in general like I think products are more useful when the UX is better and of course There's so many other reasons why improving UX would be good Lastly further for this whole give more freedom Well, there was this hypothesis that would lead them to be more impactful on Ethereum by an increased contributions to Maybe the onboarding that I mentioned the UX stuff I mentioned and perhaps also other stuff We shouldn't restrict to like what their work had been doing so far when there was evidence that they were doing lots of good work One thing I think is really cool here is not any obvious at all who this is because there's so many people in the ecosystem That fit a lot of these attributes So moving forward step two holistically like how can we best achieve these goals? And I think this is a really important step that often gets skipped I think oftentimes we jump too quickly to like providing an answer when instead we should be improving the question That's being asked out of the box ideas Often come from the question prompted by better questions not just directly answering a question So what is onboarding for onboarding more people to Ethereum right like these are all these reasons I was at earlier But breaking it down. I think the more questions that we want to discard What are the best ways to grow Ethereum usage or one of the best ways to grow the developer base? They're one of the best ways to create more use cases and Similarly with UX, you know, we talked about these things increasing accessibility security usefulness But breaking that down. Where do we need to most increase accessibility? What are the best ways again to grow the usage? In what ways do we most need to improve security or just decrease user error, which might not be strictly a security thing How can we improve Ethereum's usefulness in general? And of course, how can we make Ethereum products? Whatever that even might mean easier to use And then finally with give this person more freedom. Well, like we thought it might increase their impact So what would the best ways to improve the onboarding? Like in general be whether it's involves this person or not and same with UX But then also with the person, you know, what type of environment would help them be Most impactful like is their guidance or mentorship and obviously financial support that would enable them to do their best work And so off of one situation Easily come up with 20 goals are potentially worth pursuing And at a meta level, it's clear that increasing ES ability to provide support is going to be necessary To be able to be able to just work on more of these goals And and then another thing that's really important is that if you want to improve your allocations A big part of that is actually improving what opportunities you have to allocate, right? If sometimes you have these options in front of you, but if you can create more options That's often the best way to like, you know, be able to make a better decision So earlier I talked about evaluating an allocation proposal, but there's kind of this like analog Which is to create an allocation opportunity and then you do that like it's still very similar to evaluating a proposal But for instance Inviting and seeking out proposals is obviously a very different step than evaluating them Now remember I showed this slide just a moment ago about how to jump in too quickly And I actually skipped over one extremely important question that should be asked Remember we started with this we have a popular team developer doing great work And and so another question that should be asked is how do we increase the amount of great work being done in the space? And that's already such a huge question. So just to keep this a like a little bit simpler I'm going to focus on how do we increase the great work being done by developers even though You know by no means is that the only category of work that's important So there's some dimensions here be nice to increase the number of developers You know by improving evangelism onboarding and retention There's also it'd be nice to improve productivity per developer via like tooling education Or even just like this market like implicit market that exists for mentorship and collaboration opportunities, right? Like like sometimes you thrive in the right company But if you can't discover that company then you know, you're never going to have a chance to thrive So what we did to work on this was we formed a few working groups And these working groups did the following things in parallel They identified potential goals that we should focus on ASAP And they also performed deeper investigation of the topics, you know Just general research interviewing people and even asking experts outside of the Ethereum ecosystem So when it came to goals to focus on ASAP Among other things for developer onboarding. We worked on studio at ethereum.org Thank you to the super blocks team and help out that and you know, I think in less than a couple of weeks now That's going to be be live And on the developer experience side, there were so many things But I think one of the most notable ones that came out very recently was was biddler stack traces by the no make labs team Furthermore, you know this deeper research On developer experience it led us to seek out like developers who themselves are experienced with ethereum Are passionate about dev acts and have the bandwidth To help or you know, maybe can we can help them create the bandwidth to help And so for instance, as I mentioned that the biddler stack traces, you know We've been collaborating a lot more with the no make labs teams No make labs team and with them and with a lot of other folks throughout the EF have been identifying a whole suite of developer experience Improvement opportunities that maybe we can go 10 to 90 in terms of improving. So also from an ethereum value standpoint This is cool because We're continuing to support in the ecosystem rather than you know trying to do things entirely in-house And I think that is a huge part of everything here Another interesting aspect was this developer evangelism research, right? You know, I kind of wrote it all up there But we connected a lot of the best developer evangelists in the world And these conversations confirmed like the value of having great developer evangelism And it also taught us a lot about what that might mean But we in addition learned how hard it might be to hire people for this So what's interesting here is like, you know, the best not only are the best developer evangelists extremely hard to post Because they're often extremely valued But they also might not be great at being ethereum evangelists anyway Right because ethereum is quite different than a lot of the other development stacks out there So how does it all like tie together? Remember this all started with a popular ethereum developer doing great work And you know, we were thinking about what it might like we were trying to assess different goals And one question we asked was is there an environment that they could be more impactful in? What type of guidance or mentorship would enable them to do their best work? That also led to us thinking about how do we increase the amount of great work being done Which you know, this whole value of developer evangelism in addition Finding out how hard it is to hire for that So you might even have noticed earlier if you're eagle eye developer evangelism program was kind of varied In this like incubation section that I showed and I've showed a few times here So putting off the other we are now working on starting a developer evangelism program You know and on the back end we have, you know, robby benn and myself and the ef other folks From this developer evangelism working group and on the front end Popular ethereum developer doing great work. You know, we learned this particular person here was Austin Griffith who many of you know worked on the burner wallet and all kinds of other things and This was really cool. I think it's when I think about all how this came together I think it's really like we're going to work together with Austin to build this program We're going to be able to leverage his passion and enthusiasm for evangelizing ethereum And I think it's just really fitting that we start with one of the most kind Authentic passionate and prolific builders in ethereum, you know when we're talking to these various dev evangelists A lot of them were really builders at heart They were actually more like evangelists at heart who happened to be able to build And for ethereum, it didn't feel right to have anyone other than like someone who's just first and foremost a builder And if anyone here knows Austin, you know, that's like all he can do I think like the birth of his child is literally the only thing that ever stops him and even then it's for like 36 hours Um So anyway to wrap everything up here Uh, we've gone, you know from the top kind of all the way down And I'll close by zooming back out ethereum is going to have enormous direct consequences Um, and perhaps even more enormous indirect consequences So we have a long way to go and because of that one of my favorite quotes is to hold tightly to the problems Um, but loosely to the solutions For us because right now it seems to becoming more flexible dynamic and capable at providing support That's the best way that def can, you know, practice this subtraction discipline Um, but as I said, hold loosely to the solutions like hopefully as a result of this talk You'll both better understand our reasoning and more importantly be able to give us feedback So thank you everyone for coming to talk. Hope you've been enjoying that time