🧙 Magicians & Bureaucrats 🧑‍💼
in the Ethereum galaxy

🧙

What do we think a Magician is?

🧑‍💼

What do we think a Bureaucrat is?

Who Am I?

Our eosystem is challenging to navigate

There is a lot to understand

Ethereum galactic history

Why is it so bright and violent?

How did the structures form?

What factors created the social norms?

Ethereum's primordial soup

• Hacker culture
• Cypherpunks
• Dissolution of the Soviet Union
• Burning Man
• Open Source
• Internet culture / memes
• Austrian economics
• 2008-9 Financial Meltdown
• Occupy Wall Street
• Bitcoin culture

The big bang

Late 2013: Vitalik Buterin's WP

BTC Miami, January 2014

"The project is driven by the idea,
not by a personality or group of personalities"

- Heather Marsh, "Binding Chaos"

Bright and violent history

Late 2013 - 2014

• Ideas, proposals, papers
• Self-organizing teams
• Search for a non-hostile jurisdiction

Devcon0: November 2014

"leadership in a swarm is received through inspiring others:
standing up, doing without asking permission, leading by example"

- Rick Falkvinge, Pirate Party

Bright and violent history

2014-15: Systems begin to form

• Exits due to 💔 "differences in principles"
• Client and dapp development teams emerge
• Capital is in motion, the Project is funded

Devcon1: November 2015

"No individual needs permission (competitive) or consensus
(cooperative) to propose an idea or initiate a project"

- Heather Marsh, Occupy Movement

Bright and violent history

2015-16: Basic structures of the community recognizable

• Non-profit 💔 For-profit bifurcation - The EF
• Stakeholders and maintainers emerge
• Protocol gov: private channels ➡ public process - EIPs

Bright and violent history

2016-17: Infrastructure and crises

• Jurisdiction-based 💔 Decentralized bifurcation - The DAO
• Code Is Law 💔 Humans In Charge bifurcation - DAO Fork
• Infrastructure is attacked, systems are tested

🧙

A moment of appreciation for the Magicians

Ethereum community dynamics

• Adversarial environment
• Anti-authoritarian culture
• Contention between stakeholders, drama, exits
• Networks of trust between people

Ethereum community dynamics

• Online forums, comms channels, events
• Over-funded systems vs. under-funded systems
• Magicians explore, create, expand systems
  Bureaucrats stabilize systems

Now add even more matter & energy

Bright and violent history

2017-2018: Ignition

• First killer app: ICOs
• Systems under pressure as crypto soars
• Protocol governance goes pro

Bright and violent history

2018-2019: Aftermath

• Libertarian 💔 Socialist bifurcation - block rewards
• Libertarian 💔 Technocrat bifurcation - ProgPOW
• DeFi gets early traction
• Ethereum Foundation expands support

What is constraining the
explosive energy?

We might point to organizations...

Ethereum Foundation, ConsenSys, Parity Tech, Status, Aragon

...yet there are hundreds of indie teams!

Teams cluster around resources

Resource allocation requires guidance

What is the guidance system here?

Who manages access to the resources?

The bureaucracy!

Challenges for crypto bureaucracy

• Power corrupts us
• Widespread mistrust of authority
• Widespread inexperience
• Magicians want to build w/o interference
• "This is crypto"

🧑‍💼

A moment of appreciation for the Bureaucrats

Cybernetics

kybernētikḗ, meaning "governance"

kybernḗtēs, meaning "helm-person" of the "ship"

Cybernetics

Control systems

→

Self-organized systems

Norbert Wiener

Idea: Negative feedback can keep systems in balance

Idea: Use of info ➡ localized decrease in entropy

Friedrich Hayek

Catallaxy: "self-organizing system of voluntary co-operation"

Idea: The price mechanism as a means to transmit information in the cybernetic system.

Heather Marsh

Idea: Stigmergic society

"With stigmergy, an initial idea is freely given, and the project is driven by the idea, not by a personality or group of personalities."

Rick Falkvinge

"Swarmwise", 2013

Structure to escape Dunbar's number / social cognitive limit

Joe Freeman

"Tyranny of Structurelessness", 1970

"As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules."

🧑‍💼

Applied cybernetics / decentralized planning

Enable 🧙s to research, build, and launch

Enable 🧑‍💼s to lead, support, and constrain

Declare your principles!

Delegation of specific responsibility to specific individuals
for specific tasks by consensus-based procedures

Distribution of responsibility
among as many people as is reasonably possible

Practice pragmatic openness
and pragmatic reformism

Every 🚀 needs a control system

Who Am I?