Edition 1

In today's edition we hit you with:

• 🏛 The 101 Stuff: the basics, this time on Public Goods (no mention of Elon x Twitter)

• 🧠 The Deep Stuff: Schelling Point conference fave, but no Mr Musk in 140 characters

• 🔥 The New Stuff: It’s almost as if the newest most interesting thing that happened didn’t just wipe $124Bn of Tesla’s stock market valuation

• 🌎 The IRL Stuff: which remarkably avoids any mention of a certain social media company going private

• 📜 The Long Stuff: a piece where some of the things Elon wet-dreams about are tangentially described (still no mention of what he actually did, which if it isn’t obvious, is buy Twitter)

• 🏫 The Jobs Stuff: No jobs available at Twitter. Or Tesla

What are Public Goods?

“Knowledge is a public good and increases in value as the number of people possessing it increases.” John Wilbanks, Chief Commons Officer at Sage Bionetworks.

So, you know there’s something wrong with the world, but you don’t know where to start to change it? Thinking ‘public goods’ could be what you’re searching for.

Public goods are equally accessible, and freely available things in our society that we do not deplete when we reasonably use them. They belong to all and should be used by all. Indeed, as John Wilbanks says in the quote, some public goods, like knowledge, both increase, and become more widespread, the more people have and use them.

In contrast, a private good is something produced privately and subject to some kind of commercial or intellectual property protection. The rewards from private goods tend to be centralised to the producers. They can be in a zero sum game: one person’s use depletes the resource, thereby making it harder for another (through increased scarcity, for example) to access and enjoy them.

Public goods, on the other hand, are non-excludable – everyone can enjoy them because its costly for one user to prevent another’s access - and they are non-rivalrous – equality of access is baked in because one person’s use of them doesn’t hinder another’s. An example of a famous public good is clean oceans. Yet another, is air. Also, forests, or protection from the sun’s harmful rays (the ozone layer). Public goods can be physical (streetlights, fire stations, etc), or intangible (the rule of law, democracy, etc.).

Public goods matter because we build society around the use of them. In early societies, for example, common practices emerged around living in proximity to the sea (practices like seafaring, passage of goods, and fishing). Laws and rights around access to forests and wider ecosystems emerged in communities elsewhere. Now, access to markets for almost everything relies on the degree to which cultures build and sustain public goods.

Why do Public Goods matter to crypto? Because while we all graft hard at ‘being early’ and 'cashing in' (degen), the original goals of crypto were different. The idea was to create global commons that transformed the way people coordinated their efforts, so that centralisation of power and finance, was replaced with decentralised organisms that benefitted more than a privileged minority. Through stakeholder ownership, autonomous structures, and transparent and guaranteed transactions, could we democratise systems that were supposed to function for all, but instead seem to benefit a few.

How can we trust each other to chase this aim in the long term? This challenge is the prisoner’s dilemma of our time: why create and support new regen systems when it seemingly benefits us short term, to cash in? Moreover, where do we start to recapture this early essence of crypto, and how do we all meet there? We need a Schelling Point – an assumed zone of departure and shared direction of travel, that we can guess most people would agree, given an absence of knowledge about each other – to build consensus around. Its highly likely that this common ground will be building, and sustaining, one or more public goods.

Identifying and building eco-systems on blockchains that are net regenerative to public goods, and rewarding people for doing so, is the grail the regen movement is chasing. There’s a great explainer in this episode of the Green Pill podcast, which describes the dilemma and a possible route to the solution brilliantly. Impact DAOs like Seeds, and Bankless, funding projects that work on Public Good solutions are one such route we can see in the crypto space right now. But the really compelling ideas, based on decentralised and trustless systems, are yet to be discovered.

The Schelling Point Conference took place on April 21st in Amsterdam, and some people’s fave talk was Juan Benet's Achieving Paretotopia with Regenerative Cryptoecon. Our summary for you:

• Conditions across the globe have improved, in particular over the last few centuries: across a vast majority of metrics (well explained in this Hans Rosling talk).

• We are about to experience the sci-fi potential of the computer age: within our lifetimes. With both terrible and amazing outcomes!.

• These are not the only risks: climate, biotech and nuclear weapons.

• Our current macro system are inadequate: states and alliances have served us well but aren't designed to solve these new x-risks.

• Combo= Extremely Critical Century: yet crypto-economics has the power to incubate solutions.

• All improvements compounding: this leads to a huge capability explosion.

• Coordination is key to allow a paretotopian future: we need coordination! Nation states playing zero-sum games = net losses.

• Borrow value from the future to fund impact now: incentivising the highest impact projects solving the issues that we care about now.

• Civilisations can be rebased on top of (blockchain) software: Let's lock in the good and protect from negative forces.

• Simple incentive structure can change the world: Simple incentive structures can create tidal waves of positive change - let's build them.

• An incentive is a field within a hyperspace, warp them: If you warp the incentive field you can pull people through with you.

• Progress gets stuck in an Innovation Chasm: often the solution has been found but the effective coordination systems are missing for that solution to be broadly diffused into the world.

This week Ketan Joshi (@KetanJ0) continued to challenge the effeciency of carbon offsets: 

"~90% of offsets: Dropping your plastic wrapper but paying someone else somewhere in the world to not drop a wrapper they're saying they were planning to drop"

Some inspiration on why impact DAOs have an important voice in the conversations and efforts to improve the efficiency of the carbon offset system.

Related to new stuff: Mangroves. Yes, those places on tropical coastlines with trees growing out of salt water (that I’m scared to walk barefoot in, in case something in the roots takes a nip at my toes).

They’re important! Here’s why: did you know that if all the people who could offset their emissions chose to do so through forest-based carbon sequestering, we would have nowhere near the absorptive capacity in carbon offset supply, to meet demand? In fact, if we forested all the available land that could be put to this objective, we would only absorb enough carbon emissions for ten years’ worth of human activity. There’s no chance, using trees alone, for the earth to ever sustain current levels of carbon emissions.

So, we need an age of expansionism in offset markets to meet the demand we hope for (plus reductions. One ecosystem with high potential are peat bogs. Another is mangroves.

Mangroves are exciting in the carbon sequestration space because they solve a dual purpose: first, they absorb carbon at incredible rates. Potentially four times as much as rainforests. And second, they protect vulnerable coastline communities and ecosystems from the effects of climate change. Some cities such as Miami, Mumbai, Singapore, Jakarta, and Manilla, are prime candidates for such projects.

Solutions are out there: Earth Security Group have established a fund to focus on 40 key areas in the world where mangroves are concentrated, which can be sustainably invested in to create adaptation and sequestering solutions.

Regen Totems - Part 1A series on how regen became 'a thing'

Everything gets a name, then it becomes a thing. It’s like before it gets a handle it was just a feeling. But when named, that feeling becomes a zeitgeist. A ‘yes! That’s it!’ moment.

Named things have origins, antecedents; alpha that gives ‘a thing’ its intellectual and popular credibility. Higher order thoughts that the new concept rests upon, even if it was only for the briefest moment in time.

Working out the origins of named concepts – like regen – is tricky, and always tangential. But a loosely connected rabbit hole is our thing. Why stop now?

We can’t. We won’t. So, now let’s turn our wasted efforts to tracing the intellectual threads of regen.

Regen is already confusing. It’s the name of a defi protocol for ecological projects, an energy thinktank in the UK, and the name of a regenerative housing development in the Netherlands. There’s even a town in Germany called Regen.

Most have regenerative practices at their heart (maybe the town in Germany does also; if so, write and tell us). But regen, when we use it, is in part regenerative in the way these projects use it, but in other ways different.

Regen, which we find most commonly in the amazing talks and writings of Kevin Owocki - the founder of Gitcoin - refers to a movement to install the sustenance of public goods at the heart of crypto. He gave us that wrapper, and if he wasn’t the first, he was certainly the most concise. It’s about reversing the quick wins to long term societal goals we can all agree are good things. In that way its related to ‘regenerative’ as its used IRL: it’s about a reaction to a seemingly negative trend in society; in the case of regen, that trend was degen (also confusing, as Degen was also a football player).

As a direction of travel, regen’s about using the power of Web3 to overcome key problems societies tend to encounter when trying to overcome challenges: problems of coordination.

In our view, regen – the movement, that is - has the best chance of becoming ‘the thing’ of our time (if by our thing, we can mean, the way we use crypto to create the kind of change we want to see in the world). It’s this use of regen that you find in the Schelling Joint. And when we explore the world of regen, it unlocks connections to other theoretical and IRL pillars from the recent canon of Web3 (and even beyond).

Why totems? There’s lots of language we could use here: bricks, foundations, heroes, theories. All have their strengths, and they all carry some baggage. But ‘totem’ elides some of the empirical baggage by serving as an emblem around which a group of people can both attach meaning and draw their own. And though it’s been anglicised, the term’s etymology draws from outside traditional Western European linguistic imperialism, and goes beyond anthropocentrism (a totem can be a plant or animal). These evasions, in tech anyway, go against the norm. So, in a way, the name ‘totem’ has a kind of rebellion baked into its heart. We like that.

We also like that totems, as artefacts have a kind of permanence, often in physical form, whilst retaining a kind of fluid sacred quality. Meaning derived from them might change, but the totems themselves remain. We like that too.

Next week begins the regen totem series proper, and we start where we always start: with our heads in the clouds.

Let’s call these pillars ‘totems’.

• Head of Marketing - Toucan Protocol - Berlin

• Product Manager - Toucan Protocol - Berlin

• Senior Product Designer - Gitcoin - Remote

• Project Manager - Blocknative - Remote

• Community Lead - Ceramic - Remote

• Lead Blockchain Engineer - Ceramic - NYC/Berlin/Remote

• Smart Contract Developer - Outplay Games - Remote

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Thanks for reading!