Summary and transcript of Let's Talk EOS with Tomas Cox VP of Product Development at Block.One

04:09 respecting the rights and the needs of folks who may not be in the majority

Note this is a big problem on Steem — Author

There's got to be some some more human factors to taken into consideration if it can't be automated, of course, you should and then for everything else, there's there's dialogue and relationship and community and ways of both taking collective action and respecting the rights and the needs of Folks, who may not be in the majority and in being able to create a shared consensus, that's greater than what any one of us could come up with ourselves, which requires listening and modeling listening and then summarizing things back to people. So it's like all my career. First in technology, and then leaders of leadership, trainer and coach and leadership consultant and as an executive. It'S all combined into this this space right here, because my role as VP of product is to sit in between the developers, the user community, the c-suite for our organization. Our partner organizations that we work with on a daily basis and monitoring the industry and the technology trends and where the user community hook might go next next year and create out of that a strategic plan.

05:29 I'm a libertarian so much so that I ran for governor of the state of Oregon

I'm a libertarian so much so that I ran for governor of the state of Oregon as a libertarian in 2002, and I ought to have gotten about 1/2 of 1 % of the vote, because that's what a libertarian candidate for governor typically gets in a state like Ours, it's one-half of 1 %. I got 5 %, I've got 11 times what I was projected to get and completely the winner beat the loser in that race by half a 1-point so really highlighted the incredible importance of small constituencies with big ideas, which is how I view the libertarians or really Anybody if you've got an idea II should be listened to, and if people don't listen to you, you can make a big impact. So that's that's the less one of the many lessons I took away from that.

07:23 The way that strong encryption empowers, the individual

The whole point of technology is to get something done, that people care about. Yes, help as well right? So, and this is of course, the philosophy that how in crypto I was fascinated by the RSA technology and the introduction of public key encryption when it first came out and it was classified as ammunition by the federal government and you couldn't export.

Like there was this t-shirt - you could buy that had the RSA algorithm silk-screened onto it and like if you wore it out of the country, you were exporting munitions. This is hilarious and and in wicked all at the same time.

The way that strong encryption empowers the individual was what really struck me back at that time, and I was fascinated by it, but I didn't really take it anywhere because it didn't seem to link indirectly with any of the things I was doing, but it got filed away and then just this past year in 2017, as I'm doing more more about initial coin offerings and I've got friends in the space who are starting to join startups and create ICO's and projects and whatnot, and that a very good friend of mine, who I first met back when we both worked at, were called way back in the day, got hired. David Moss, who was the senior VP of Operations? I think that's his title for block one. He got brought on board and hired me and gave me a very important responsibility.

09:48 I haven't been this excited about technology since the early 90s

we're a lot further along the open-source path and we were back then so we're learning from each other at a much faster rate.

A young industry full of promise and potential and no one's quite sure what's going to work so you have to kind of try everything.

When you get mature, you consolidate, but in the early days you've got to have a thousand flowers bloom and we're in the thousand flowers blooming phase right now.

11:30 if you sit there and trying to come up with the one correct answer: you're doomed.

For the people who are new cryptocurrency, I think it's very important what you just said, and I think I probably found myself realizing that you can't know without trying. This is one of those spaces where, if you sit there and trying to come up with the one correct answer: you're doomed.

All of that ethos is really fairly new. That'slike what 10, 15 years old, and so this is for me, a wonderful adjunct. A wonderful thing to mix in with the promise of crypto and the promise of blockchain is that people are not afraid to pivot they're, not afraid to put out Minimum Viable products, they're, not afraid to collaborate and be open source. And that to me is a very, very big deal.

12:51 EOS between the Bitcoin and the the hyper ledger universes

Because bitcoin is a wonderful free-for-all like elbowing your face, hey if the transaction went through, then it's right and if it didn't go through it's wrong and it's black and white and it's is like the code - is the truth.

And then you've got hyper ledger and and the other its competitors who are very much well you we will control everything and it'll run on our servers and we'll give you a login to give you access to this blockchain. Only we will write to it or read from it great, so those are poles on a continuum what's going to be in the middle and that's where the governance conversation really gets interesting.

14:17 consensus algorithms were actually created like in the 70s just as theoretical exercises

Never in dreaming that we'd have computers to run them on and so now making them extremely practical we're seeing, I think, a wave of innovation coming out and so the ability that I think most blockchains are going to need to have them in the future. The ability to plug in and maybe even replace or or have multiple consensus mechanisms on the same blockchain, potentially.

15:13 Why did you choose EOS?

With Bitcoin, I know that proof of work is becoming very expensive and from the lecture to the point of view and people getting extremely worried about its impact on the environment. And if it can, there can be a way to do that. Sort of consensus. In a less damaging or expensive way, that would be lovely

Then you get off into Ethereum and smart contracts and that's where starts to get really interesting and sexy and subtle.

19:08 Elinor Ostrom "Governing the Commons"

Algorithms can anticipate stuff, it knows how to anticipate but you're gon na come up with questions you can't answer. You need a system outside the course of the code system, where humans get together and figure out what we're going to do.

Here's some questions for you:

Should we have one person, one vote?

One token, one vote?

One wallet, one vote?

Should everything be majority rule supermajority?

How do we decide how to decide what? If we all get what if we decide that majorities not working, and we want to go to supermajority for certain things, but not other things.

And that's where see, if I bring the book up here, the excellent book by Elinor Ostrom called governing the Commons, my god, it's one of the most underappreciated awesome books, you're going to find on this topic potentially.

Elinor Ostrom studied a dozen different examples of real-world people who have a public shared pool, commons like a fishery or a watershed, or something. They've all got something at stake and they've all got to cooperate and there's a big risk of Free Riders and there's a big risk of defection and all the prisoner dilemma stuff you hear about.

She studies how they make it work and what they do and how they do it, and by the way it involves a lot of trial and error and a lot of conversation, and so that's the kind of background thinking and background reading we can tap into.

21:18 when in doubt head towards the sound of the loudest fighting

I've never been in the military, but I admire it a lot, and so I sometimes use military analogies and they apparently teach West Point cadets when in doubt head towards the sound of the loudest fighting, because there's probably something going on.

21:55 The four layers of EOS

You can think of the eos.io software as having four layers of abstraction. The bottom one is the heart crypto, it's the the distributed proof of state consensus. It's how you build blocks.

The next layer up is the governance model. It's how do you do things like freeze a contract, recover a stolen account things like that.

The third layer up is the developer experience. How do we make developers highly productive with a good set of core contracts and a good language and a good command line tool, and eventually a good GUI tool and so forth?

And then the top layer will be stuff that you end users will see the end user experience.

The bottommost layer it has undergone actually multiple revisions already and we're working on the developer experience very very aggressively right now, because it's so important to get developers productive so they can create distributed apps. Otherwise, why have a blockchain if you're not gon na run apps on it?

But the governance piece is really it's interesting and it requires its own way of thinking. We've got developers working a developer experience. We've got some developers working on core code and we even got some folks working on that top layer, but the governance piece is much more of a dialogue.

So the reason you're seeing me active there is at the moment, I think of myself as one of the core team for that, at least on the block one side, and I see it as my role to start moving this dialogue out into the community to raise as many issues as we can and get as many ideas as we can thrown in and start to see what patterns emerge that are on people's concerns.

What are the problems that people are worried about, and do we already have solutions? I mean steem and bitshares have been running a very similar technology stack for years, but not identical but similar, and so what do we want to learn from them?

What about the you know the Bitcoin community who've been doing governance. Well, I would have to say very effectively since it's still a going concern for nine or 10 years now, and so what are the formal, the semi, formal and the informal structures that we want to have ready for this June. First end of the our beta period. In the beginning of our production period.

26:23 Meetup in Portland Oregon

29:30 How to reach out to Thomas Cox?

Message me on Telegram, EOS gov channel.

We need people who are really interested in the topic of you know how to run a blockchain, how to reach group consensus, how to create collective action.

30:00 Is there an arbitration or dispute resolution being built on EOS?

We're planning to provide some primitives, some some basic code that will enable arbitration and we're expecting people to build on those different arbitration opportunities or different options, so that you and another person can shop for the arbitration system or mechanism that appeals to you at a price that you like. So yes absolutely, arbitration is a core aspect of our plan and our vision moving forward.

30:42 Can you lease your token to developers?

I can't promise you how the leasing is going to work precisely in the future. I think the general shape of the direction we're going in is, if you own tokens, you're not using and other people want tokens they don't own. There will be at least one, if not multiple mechanisms for an owner of tokens to make those tokens available to people who want them in exchange for some sort of rental fee.

31:25 will there be a constitutional convention for EOS at some point?

There's got to be some things written in code that have to do with governance and then there's going to be institutional things that we agree on and then there's going to be the opportunity to create different enclaves with different rule sets. So you may find that you've got a suite of DAPs or a community that will really believe strongly in one-person one-vote and you believe in you know, self sovereign identity and everyone's gon na have a self, a real real world, very validated identity, and so over in this space, that's how you guys are gon na run things. Which may be great and you might attract a ton of people.

And then somebody else might be very strict, a corporatist idea and it's like one share, one vote or one token one vote and that they'll be open for business too, and maybe there's like a hybrid that does some of each, and each of these will need governance layers of their own nested inside whatever the really basic governance framework is for the entire system, and so we need to view this as what is the basic playing field, the the the nouns and verbs that make up the sentences if you will. What's the grammar of the system and then how do we make it as open as possible for people to create the reality they want to create and create the agreements that they want to create and invite people in?

33:43 How does it feel to work on EOS?

I have not been this excited to go to work every morning in a long time. This is tremendous.

37:20 EOStalk and forums in general, places of contact

We're looking at different kinds of threaded forums and places where we can have more long-form conversation and develop more long-form contributions. I think about the founding fathers of the United States or any of the other people who've created and contributed to the rich history of human freedom and governments that are responsive to the will of the people. We have to be able to have detailed conversations about tough issues in nuance and that doesn't sound like telegram to me exclusively. That sounds like maybe the Federalist Papers, or you know the the collected letters of John Adams and so finding the right platform to have those portions of those conversations, in addition to lunch, acts like this and in this recording and to the telegram, chat and so on. I think all those things are each going to have their place in in what we're creating.

Like the literal forum in the old Greek sense of you show up in the marketplace and you chat with people.

Go to the meetups! You know meet people one-on-one for coffee, go out and have a beer or whatever in in be sure to talk to each other about, like your kids and your families, don't just talk shop, okay? Part of the way we build trust with each other.

Trust is made up of three elements. I believe this firmly - and I read an excellent book by John Blakey that reinforced this when we trust it's because we believe three things about the other person.

Number one, that they are reliable, that they will do what they said, they will do they'll show up and they said they'll show up that, there's a dependability there.

Number two that there's some competence that they are actually when they show up. They know what they're doing.

Thirdly, benevolence that they actually care about us not just themselves. And you demonstrate that through repeated human contact and just being willing to share a little bit of what's inside of you and be a little bit vulnerable to the other person and see how they treat you and see if they are willing to be a little bit open and vulnerable with you in return. And when you start to have that kind of human connection with other people that's when the trust really blossoms and flourishes, and that is what communities really made of.

Thanks for buying / HODLing EOS! Merry Christmas and happy New Crypto Years!

Sort:

Trending

[-]

bakhtiarzehri (50) 7 years ago

Every Summary and transcript of Let's Talk EOS with Tomas Cox VP of Product Development at Block is awesome .because the products are well product by the experts of production

$1.96

6 votes