I just spent a week in Bangkok, attending two conferences in the Ethereum ecosystem, and it was an incredible breath of fresh air.
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Death of Idealism
When delving into the world of crypto online, most of what I see is financial nihilism - a relentless whirlpool of scams, tokens not even pretending to have any value, and narratives lacking a semblance of logic - all in pursuit of higher prices. I originally became interested in the sector for the promise of uncensorable, private money, free from authoritarian control or institutional gatekeepers, and an even global playing field. That idealism is mostly dead, and the sector - at least what’s publicly visible of it - is fairly repulsive today.
Funding the Commons and DevCon 7 - the two conferences I attended - gave me a renewed sense of hope in the technology and those building on it, and showed me communities which were mostly drowned out by the internet’s echo chambers over the last few years.
Funding The Commons
Funding the Commons - an organisation aimed at acting as a bridge between builders and researchers to establish new mechanisms for digital public goods funding - was the best-possible introduction to the Ethereum ecosystem. Public goods are products or services that are available to everyone in a community without exclusion, and having sustainable ways to fund them in perpetuity is critical for avoiding a world in which all services and goods are for-profit and extractive, so given my love of the institution of Waqf, this mission resonates greatly, and it was fascinating to hear about new experiments to create models, mechanisms and deep infrastructure to provide that funding at scale in a digital world, while leveraging open source technologies.
It wasn’t what I expected from a crypto conference. At all. As a long-term Bitcoiner it made me think deeply about the values of the Bitcoin ecosystem, which seems to have long-since lost much of this excitement and optimism, as well as most of the desire to change the world beyond the money supply. Many of Bitcoin’s most prominent public figures today (in contrast with a decade ago) primarily preach a self-interested philosophy of stacking sats within your fortress as you wait for society to collapse.
DevCon
A couple of days later, after dealing with the lingering effects of the worst jet lag I’ve ever experienced, I went to DevCon - the bi-annual conference of the Ethereum Foundation for the ecosystem’s developers and thinkers, which travels between continents.
I think lots of people - including myself - underestimate the extent to which Ethereum is not just a community centred around a specific blockchain, but a community of builders with a particular ethos and set of values: Privacy-preservation; decentralisation; and a do-it-yourself/maker attitude; the idea that we can build and implement these things ourselves without waiting around for large organisations and governments to do so.
There were lots of different projects showcased which had nothing to do with blockchains; Nym, a new VPN which uses mixnets to provide greatly enhanced privacy to users; GrapheneOS, a modified open-source version of Android with better privacy; Tor, the famed open source anonymity network; and projects using Zero-Knowledge Proofs to prove ID without compromising privacy.
In fact, the 3rd day of the program - centred on Vitalik Buterin’s D/Acc philosophy - didn’t feature any crypto at all that I noticed. Discussions covered biosafety and pandemic-preparedness, neurotechnology, anti-ageing, open-source epistemics (community notes), futarchy, and AI. The digital ticket to enter the DevCon venue existed on a purpose-built app, Zupass, which was my first direct interaction with ZK cryptography, which I had thought was entirely theoretical until now, and really showed the potential of the tech.
This community has arguably transcended a particular blockchain, and the gathering gave a glimpse of what an alternative world could look like - one mostly free of gatekeeping, and with no attachment to legacy systems. In its inversion of society’s standard status systems, the people who are held in highest social status here are the nerds who spend all their time hyper focused on independently solving a problem that they really deeply care about, not playing a game to climb the hierarchies of legacy institutions and amass power. Almost all the power here was soft power. I found it beautiful and very inspiring - it makes you feel like anything would be possible in a world like this, and that a world like this is actually within reach.
More Human Rights Engagement
My contribution to Devcon was a talk on what institutional failure looks like in the context of failing governance systems in the MENA region. I hoped to inject a sense of urgency and bring an understanding of the human stakes to those studying and building futuristic governance mechanisms. I also spoke on a panel which was half about the failure of western liberalism, and half about possible more globalised alternatives which apply the values less hypocritically (especially in the context of Ethereum itself).
The conference was beautifully-diverse, with over 50% of the 12,000 attendees coming from South East Asia, and with attendees from every inhabited continent - although to my sadness I didn’t manage to connect with any builders from the MENA region. I’m still rewatching recordings of talks that I didn’t manage to attend, and I think the human rights movement would be very mistaken not to engage with this space a lot more. It’s certainly more likely to lead to a positive impact than the millionth lobbying effort towards passive western governments.
And I didn’t hear token prices discussed the entire week.