Ether's Phoenix with Optimism's Karl Floersch | GreenPill #2

✨ Subscribe to the Green Pill Podcast ✨ https://availableon.com/greenpill 🟢 Get the GreenPilled Book 🟢 https://greenpill.party/ Apple Show Link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/greenpill/id1609313639 Spotify Show Link: https://open.spotify.com/show/0l6aXWC94dd0RA3tkKfxjd?si=5fdadfbcd8d34bd4 ----- Karl Floersch is the co-founder of Optimism, the Ethereum rollup scaling solution, as well as one of the primary advocates in the space for public goods funding. Karl is inspiring on many levels—both individually with his seemingly boundless optimism and energy, and also his prolific work in the Ethereum ecosystem. Optimism is simultaneously scaling Ethereum’s transaction space and its values & ethos, pledging to recycle its fees into public goods. A central goal of regenerative finance is to align economic value with our moral values, and Karl’s work on retroactive public goods funding is pushing us towards that brighter, solarpunk future. We also explore the concept of ‘Ether’s Phoenix,’ a hypothetical being that rewards you for manifesting it—directly contrasting the concept of Roko’s Basilisk (research at your own risk). Take the Green Pill, anon. ------ SPONSOR PILLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants 💳 LEDGER | THE CRYPTO LIFE CARD https://bankless.cc/Ledger 🧙‍♂️ ALCHEMIX | SELF REPAYING LOANS https://bankless.cc/Alchemix ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 2:40 Karl Floersch 4:38 Optimism & Public Goods 7:30 Solving Governance 11:32 Retroactive Public Goods Funding 18:09 The Endgame 21:18 Karl’s Favorite Public Goods 28:25 Ether’s Phoenix 32:12 Grinding & Mindset 34:02 Memes & Narratives 37:49 Closing ------ Resources: Karl on Twitter: https://twitter.com/karl_dot_tech?s=20&t=-oO_ckIiZ6BKahlmZVvB8w https://twitter.com/karl_dot_tech?s=20&t=-oO_ckIiZ6BKahlmZVvB8w Kevin on Twitter: https://twitter.com/owocki?s=20&t=A1yy1WYtQlNAOiSxXtGuNQ https://twitter.com/owocki?s=20&t=A1yy1WYtQlNAOiSxXtGuNQ Vitalik on Twitter: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin?s=20&t=6oPk84CaEN12Es6e7Nze3A https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin?s=20&t=6oPk84CaEN12Es6e7Nze3A Optimism: https://twitter.com/optimismPBC?s=20&t=-oO_ckIiZ6BKahlmZVvB8w https://twitter.com/optimismPBC?s=20&t=-oO_ckIiZ6BKahlmZVvB8w ----- Music by WABI SABI - snowflake - https://thmatc.co/?l=7786B012 ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  How can I make the highest impact today? Right? That is like the only thing on your mind. How do I make the highest impact?

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Hello and welcome to The Green Pill. I'm Kevin Waki and this is the podcast about public goods and regenerative crypto economics. This episode is with Carl Flourish, who is the co-founder of Optimism and one of the primary advocates in the Ethereum ecosystem for public goods funding. I've known Carl for a couple of years now and he inspires me on many levels. The first is just the level of energy and optimism through which he operates. The second is his sheer brilliance in working at the Plasma Group and then later on, Optimistic Rollups and launching the Optimism Layer 2 Network. So I think that Optimism is a really exciting place because it's one of the best Layer 2s out there in the Ethereum ecosystem.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  And they've also pledged to give $1 million of their first sequencer fees to public goods in the Ethereum ecosystem through what's called retroactive public goods funding. So Carl continues to be a source of inspiration for for me and I hope that he gives you inspiration for what public goods in the Ethereum ecosystem could become. Without further ado, I give you Carl Flourish.

• 1:17Speaker 02

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• 2:18David Hoffman?

  Bankless is proud to be sponsored by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum that lets you trade any token at the current market price. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. The Uniswap Grants Program is accepting applications for grants. Do you have something of value that you think you want to contribute to the Uniswap ecosystem? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a unique grant at uniswapgrant.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Bankless.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  I am here with my co-conspirator in regenerative crypto economics, Carl Florish, co-founder of Optimism and the retroactive public goods funding. Carl, what's up? How you doing?

• 3:12Speaker 00

  I'm pretty good. I'm really excited to be here and excited to take the green pill.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  So tell us, how did you get into crypto and how did you come to founding Optimism?

• 3:23Speaker 00

  Well, I guess it all started with my mom and my dad, actually. My dad being a kind of radical political contrarian and my mom being a Hindu, you know, universal consciousness kind of person. And then, and then growing up on things like World of Warcraft getting me into the metaverse, kind of all of those things combined. It was just, it was such a natural fit in around like 2015 where I just saw these DevCon Zero videos with Vitalik and I was like, oh my gosh, I gotta, I gotta get involved. I gotta start doing peer-to-peer stuff. Google is not for me.

• 4:07Speaker 00

  And yeah, dove right in, worked at Consensus and then stopped doing that and worked on Casper with Vitalik and Vlad and traveled around the world and talked about

• 4:20Speaker 00

  Ethereum and it is, it has been a whirling roller coaster ride ever since.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Sure. I'm realizing now that you and I overlapped at consensus probably in 2017 back in the day.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  That's where Gitcoin got it started as well. So I recall that you were a founder of Plasma Group, which was doing research on plasma and that's become optimism, which is one of the top layer twos based off optimistic rollups. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

• 4:51Speaker 00

  Oh, definitely. Okay. So what happened was, you know, was working at, was working at Ethereum and we needed to scale this thing. It was known from, you know, from the inception that we needed to scale up the, the core software, the core protocol. And there was really a question of whether or not, you know, we scale it at the kind of base layer using layer one, or if we allow for a little bit of permissionless innovation and start scaling it layer two. And so myself, Jing, Ben, Kelvin, we all kind of formed this group, this ragtag coalition called Plasma Group,

• 5:32Speaker 00

  which is, which was exploring and researching kind of the, the, the deepest depths of plasma, which was a layer two technology that is now being kind of brought into fruition, kind of evolved into this whole optimistic rollup, rollup space and has served as a lot of foundational elements. So we, for that, for that technology. So we worked on it from 2018, 2019, and then realized that there were some fundamental limits that made plasma not quite perfect for scaling Ethereum,

• 6:12Speaker 00

  that we needed to really scale Ethereum at its essence. And we were like, okay, let's do this. Let's fund optimism PBC, a public benefit corporation to scale Ethereum using layer two, because we can innovate, we can permissionlessly change the protocol and build what we needed to build. So that was, that was really amazing. But there was actually a side story that I think is relevant to this podcast. And that actually has to do more with the, the public benefit corporation side of things. Plasma Group was a nonprofit.

• 6:48Speaker 00

  And we set out to scale Ethereum. And clearly, scaling Ethereum is a quintessential public good for the Ethereum ecosystem. It is extremely, extremely important for everyone. And it turned out that it was extremely difficult to get the funding, to get the talent, to get people to rally behind scaling Ethereum at a normal nonprofit. And that's just because there's no potential upside. There's no kind of path forward once you actually do scale Ethereum.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:23Speaker 00

  And there wasn't even a lot of funding for scalability research in Ethereum. Like, the block reward.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  What was the Vitalik post that said that billions of dollars per year is given to the block reward, which is a public good? It's securing the Ethereum network. But 1/1,000 of that actually goes to researchers. And I wonder if that's because we don't value that, that public good? Or if it's just because it's hard to prove the usefulness of it? With proof of work, you have the proof of work. But you can't have a proof of knowledge work for code because it's almost like, well, the code I wrote this morning, I don't know if it'll ever go live. And even if it does, does it even provide value? So do you think it's, it's combined with people not appreciating public goods? Or the unprovability of, of the value of that public good? Or, or both, or, or something else?

• 8:06Speaker 00

  Without question, it's both. I think that it was the case, it is the case that we did not build these, okay. Ethereum solved a lot of problems, right? It really did amazing. There was, it's a full technology stack from the peer-to-peer layer to the consensus layer, everything. So they did not solve governance as well, right? And governance is probably the hardest problem to solve. Because what you're talking about with like determining what is valuable is really a governance question. So it was so natural that we just say, okay, you know what? We can't solve governance. We know that we need to be supporting and building these public goods. Let's just kick the problem down the road. And let's give the money to the miners.

• 8:50Speaker 00

  We know we need to fund them. And it worked for a while, but it eventually has become very obvious that there is a huge market failure here. Like, this is absolutely the most egregious market failure in the Ethereum ecosystem, in my opinion, is the lack of public goods funding that we have seen thus far.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Right. Okay. And so it was these insights that kind of led you just to fund to it. Well, it was moving from plasma, which I understand to optimism, which is about generalizable computation at a layer two, but also bundling in maybe an economic model into the work that you were doing, going from a nonprofit to a public benefit corporation, which I understand is focused on the is a for profit entity, but it is focused on public benefit as well. Is that right?

• 9:40Speaker 00

  Exactly. So we have a charter to enshrine fair access to public goods. That means that that is, you know, the number one thing we need to do that to fulfill our mission as a corporation. And that mentality is it's great and and public benefit corporations are really great vehicles for doing public goods work, but it was not just the structure of the entity that that we care about. In fact, the entity structure is just a temporary thing. The real lasting change is going to be rewiring the economic system that exists on Ethereum

• 10:20Speaker 00

  today, where transaction fees, instead of just going to miners, can actually go back to fund public goods for the whole community. That's that was a key motivating factor. That is, in fact, that is why it's so important that we scale Ethereum. It's because we have an opportunity to create that system that will fund public goods and will govern those public goods and the, you know, the protocol in a fair and representative way.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  What I think is interesting about what optimism is doing is that it's bundling a bleeding edge technology with almost a sort of political belief, which is that public goods are good. And when you use the optimism network, you're not only benefiting from that technology, but you're getting that bundled ethos. Would you agree with that?

• 11:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. It's really like the financial infrastructure that you use should support your values and carry care about your values. And so I want to use optimism, right? Because I care because I because I will be benefiting from the public goods and I believe in the pursuit of public goods and the green pill and all that.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Right, okay. Well, I guess what I want to like, the big idea to me here is bundling one of the most successful layer twos in the Ethereum ecosystem. And by the way, the Ethereum scaling roadmap is all about shards in layer two, bundling that with retroactive public goods funding. So could you tell us about retroactive public goods funding in the world that you want to create using that?

• 11:56Speaker 00

  Absolutely. So Vitalik really had, I mean, Vitalik is the genesis of literally like every idea. It's pretty ridiculous, honestly. But one idea that Vitalik has had recently and just has captivated me ever since was this, this idea that you should fund public goods that have already had an impact. And this idea is like really simple, right? It's literally just retroactive, something that has already happened, that has already had a positive impact, you give money to the people who did that. And the point is that you'd give it to them without an expectation that they're going to do more

• 12:38Speaker 00

  work, right? It is a literal reward for their impact, for their, the public good that they have created. And the weird thing about retroactive public goods funding is that the immediately you're like, okay, if everything was retroactive, then how am I going to get paid a salary, right? How am I going to actually get paid for my work? And the funny thing is, it's actually a second order effect. This is the key, the key insight is that if you consistently pay people for the work that they provide and the value that they contribute to the public, to the public good, then you will start to see people investing in the public goods.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  It's not this like immediate, you know, feedback. You're not paying someone a salary. You are instead incentivizing the investment in public goods. And so the, the way that this kind of hooks in is it's like, okay, if, if you're transacting and/or whether or not, whether or not you're, uh, whatever the source of funding is, right? You, you can accumulate these, these huge payouts based on the massive amounts of economic, financial activity that we will have as a globe, right? You generate all this stuff and then you use that to essentially reward people who helped you get there, right? You look at their contributions, you see who has been unfairly rewarded. Let me give back to them.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Right. So, um, would it be fair to say that this is an original insight back at Plasma Group, which is that it's hard to rally talent around nonprofits? What if we created a world in which public goods are as investable as the average VC startup that has a thousand X upside? Because we've created a world where public goods funding has billions of dollars of capital flowing towards it, then you get this upstream effect where VCs will start looking for projects that, uh, create public goods in open source software or climate or journalism or whatever public good. So it's about creating that world in which you can rally capital around, uh, public goods. Is, is that fair to say?

• 14:45Speaker 00

  Beautifully put, beautifully put.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  So how's the, how'd the first experiment go? You all just finished, uh, retroactive public goods round one. Tell us about that.

• 14:54Speaker 00

  Indeed, we did. So we gave away a million dollars. We had a collection of 24, what we call badge holders, who were essentially evaluating these projects, discussing them in the open and, uh, kind of considering, figuring out what good Ethereum, what Ethereum public goods should, should we retroactively reward? And, and it was great. It was, I mean, it was honestly pretty amazing to be able to do that in the first place. And just, you know, that is the very beginning, right? Uh, this is, this will be table stakes when, uh, you know, a year from now.

• 15:29Speaker 00

  But it was, there were, there were actually some interesting challenges that we, that we found there that, that we weren't really expecting. One of them was, uh, that it wasn't immediately obvious what a public good wa-is or how to really, you know, what to retroactively fund.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  Because in reality, it's kind of, there's a little bit of a gradient in terms of, you know, how you define public goods, what a good is, who's benefiting, all that kind of stuff.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  And so, yeah, so it was really not, not super easy. But we came, one, one framework that actually was really helpful in thinking about this was the fairness ratio. So the fairness ratio is something that some, you know, folks over at Uniswap during a dinner conversation suggested, shout out to, you know, those folks. Anyway, it is impact over profit, so impact divided by profit. So essentially, what you want is you want to, you want everything to be fair, right? You want everyone to give one value, you know, one unit of impact and receive one unit of profit. Right? You want value in to equal value out, right? Because that's, that's like, if we can define what we value as a society, as a collective, as a public,

• 16:48Speaker 00

  and then we can give people the value that they have put into the system, to the public, then you can start operating as an actor in that system, knowing that you'll be rewarded. You think, okay, how can I make the highest impact today? Right? That is like the only thing on your mind. How do I make the highest impact? So the, so we realized that, okay, projects that have made a bunch of profits, even though they have added a huge amount of like value and they have had a huge impact, but if they've made a huge amount of profits, maybe they're not the right targets for these retroactive rewards. And instead, we should be giving profits, like increasing the profits of the public goods that are underfunded right now.

• 17:31Speaker 00

  And so actually, in some ways, public goods funding is, is almost about, you know, making the economy a little bit fairer and, and correcting market inefficiencies. So anyway, that was an, I did not expect that kind of discussion when going into experiment one.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  It's an interesting governance problem. It reminds me about how on Gitcoin grants, there has been backlash against people who have raised tokens or VCs continuing to get Gitcoin grants funding, like, hands off, keep your money, keep the money for the public goods that have not raised that money. And like, it's like the same governance problem, but chopped up in different bits in both ecosystem. And it's, it's kind of fun to look in the mirror and to, to hear how y'all have handled it.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Um, I do want to ask us like, what's the end game with retroactive public goods funding? You know, paint me a picture of, let's say it's 2025. What does the world look like? What is the world that you want to build with retro public goods funding?

• 18:27Speaker 00

  The world that I want, that I hope exists, that I hope I can participate in. Cause that's what this is about, right?

• 18:36Speaker 00

  It's a world where all of my digital assets, my financial activity, my crazy web three metaverse activity, all of that stuff contributes to values that I believe in and contributes to making a fairer, more just society where I know that I can focus on value add, right? I don't need to think about anything other than let me make a real big impact. That if, if, if, if that exists, right? I, I, I mean, I'm obsessed with emergent complexity. I'm obsessed with like emergence generally as a thing. And I had this sneaking suspicion that the, the crazy, like the world, I mean, you talk

• 19:21Speaker 00

  about this, the solar punk stuff, right? Like the, the incredible just potential future that we can live in, that the simple rule that gets us there. Well, couple, there are a couple of simple rules, but you know what I mean? Is there's one correctly aligning the values, determining what we value, right? Coming up with systems for, for deciding the values of our society as a, you know, species, right? That's, that's one. And then the other one is reflecting those values in our economic infrastructure and making sure people who put in value get out value.

• 20:01Speaker 00

  So I'm really hopeful that in, in 2025, I can work for a Dow, doing whatever I want to do, uh, that I think is going to really have a huge impact. I don't have to worry about profit. I know it's covered and I just, I'm just, I'm just contributing. I'm just a, a worker bee, you know?

• 20:20Speaker 01

  Right. So, so is there an, like, would it be fair to say that there's an asymmetry between value created and value captured with legacy business models and the way that the world works right now? And the more that we can close that asymmetry between the value you create in the world and the value you can capture, the more people can just focus on creating value as opposed to capturing value. Is that a fair reflection of what you said?

• 20:44Speaker 00

  Precisely, yes. And, and it just, one of the dependencies of that is that people do feel like the right values are being rewarded, right? We do reward things that we value in some messed up sense, right? But we don't have good mechanisms right now for, for collectively determining our values. And so that is a key ingredient, this whole governance question. And I think for that, it's really gonna, it's gonna require a lot of, a lot of iterations and innovations. But yes, that is the future I want to live in.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  So you mentioned, what is the mechanism through which we determine our values? And I don't want to double click on that because I think it's really interesting. One of the things that I've realized is that when I buy something on Amazon and like it improves my life, like a new computer monitor or something like that, I really appreciate it because I like, I spent money on that and, and I know that I value it. One of the things I've noticed is that people, public goods are kind of like out of sight, out of mind. And there's like a, there's, there's, there's kind of like an asymmetry there where public goods are actually really, really important, but because they're out of sight, out of mind, I don't, I don't appreciate them on as much. So like, you know, what's, what's the value of having a new computer monitor if the sky is on fire? Or if you have lung cancer because of like not clean air or like, you know, you, you don't have open source

• 22:03Speaker 01

  software. And so I think that there's an asymmetry there. And I guess what I'm teeing up for you, Carl, is, you know, what's your favorite public good? Or like, what's your top three list of, of public goods that you think are good?

• 22:14Speaker 00

  Hmm. Okay. Wow. I got a long list. Okay. I'll just say my.

• 22:22Speaker 00

  Okay, I'm not, there is not an ordered list. It's too hard to choose. You can't rank these kinds of things. My God.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course, yeah.

• 22:29Speaker 00

  One of them is definitely information dissemination. So, one public good is I want open source software that allows me to better reflect my values, or my, I want my software that I use every day to better reflect my values. And that can go from, anything from my Twitter feed, what things get populated there, the way that I'm able to spread information. Like, I want public goods that help us spread pro-cooperative information, or pro, like, you know, societally helpful information. I think that's a really, that's gonna enable a lot of other public goods.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  Right. Okay. So like, Wasmee Media, like, reminds us that we're all in it together, and helps us disseminate information that reflects our values and helps us work together?

• 23:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I mean, look, I wanna, I wanna get like, mad at people too, you know, like, I wanna feel like angry at the other tribes too. But like, I just want that to be like correctly channeled into some, the right avenues. So I'm not, yes. Anyway, that's one thing. The other one is of course, I mean, low key, I, okay, this is my recent, I've recently just been listening to some podcasts on environmental protection, and I'm like, my God, it is legit. Like, this is, this is the long-term future of humanity. Really, really interesting to think about. I definitely am very wasteful, but I don't want to be. I would love to improve that. And then, the last one, which

• 24:06Speaker 00

  is of course, the most key to my current existence, is the scalability of this financial infrastructure. I do, I do want, I really want Ethereum to succeed and to support the global economy, because I think every human matters, and we should include every human, and be able to include every human.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Amazing. Yeah, if you didn't put the scalability of Ethereum on there, I think I would have to kick you under the table and say, hey, man, show some optimism or some Bitcoin grants, that'd be fine, too.

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• 26:25Speaker 01

  So I want to ask you a couple of closing questions. And I think that this last one is kind of meta, because you work for a project called Optimism. But Carl, you're consistently one of the most charismatic, energetic, and optimistic speakers for public goods, and I want to ask where your optimism comes from, where that energy comes from when you're rapping about this stuff.

• 26:46Speaker 00

  Rapping is the opportune word.

• 26:51Speaker 00

  I would say that there's a level of, I mean, okay, first off, I feel blessed to be in this community and so I feel grateful and so the energy that I put out, I really do feel like I get it, you know, and it's more of a reflection, like, the, the people here are just unbelievable. And I, I am really excited to, to like, see where it goes and I, okay, here, here's the thing, right? We can either, we can either choose to be, uh, to, you know, not think that there's a possibility for change and not think that we can actually make an impact and, and

• 27:31Speaker 00

  change and, and go somewhere good. And, or we can try to make, try to make that world actually come about and then have a good time as we do it. So like, I, here's my, you know, if the, if the ship is gonna sink, I wanna be like plugging the holes and singing and like having a good time as we're like, you know, fighting for our lives to make sure that, you know, humanity actually succeeds and, uh, you know, consciousness pervades. Um, and like, if I was all, you know, depressed and sad while the thing was happening, like, that's like, that's lame, you know, have a, have a journey, have a, have fun, keep it light, you know?

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Totally, yeah. Well, one of the things I'll say is that if, if we're gonna try to plug the holes in the, in the ship, then it's more fun to do it all together and I find your energy to be completely infectious. And there's this feedback loop where we all choose coordinate over defect and the more people choose coordinate, the better, uh, the coordinate decision becomes for everyone else. And it's, it's that feedback loop that I'm really excited about.

• 28:32Speaker 00

  Ether's Phoenix, you will be rewarded for your coordination in the future. Public good, solar punk, utopia.

• 28:40Speaker 04

  Hello, hello. This is an Ether's Phoenix TLDR. So Ethereum is all about building systems which enable mass coordination. And the most fundamental coordination game that we're trying to solve in Ethereum is the Tragedy of the Commons, aka Free Rider problem, aka Prisoners' Dilemma. In these games, you have two choices: you can either defect, or you can cooperate. Defecting maximizes your short-term payouts, but cooperation maximizes your long-term payouts. And right now, if you think about it, right now it feels like we're living in a world

• 29:21Speaker 04

  where everyone is defecting. Cooperation is in scarce supply. So how do we stay strong and cooperate in a world full of defectors? I got an answer for you: it's Ether's Phoenix! Put a little faith into your life. So what's Ether's Phoenix? I'm glad you asked. So picture a future where public goods are being rewarded with profits equal to their impact. Fairness ratio: we are rewarding public goods. Well, we can call this future, this utopian future, Ether's Phoenix. In this world, one of the most critical things that deserves retroactive public goods funding

• 30:06Speaker 04

  — reminder, that's just paying people rewards for the public goods they create — one of the things that deserves retroactive public goods funding is not just the futuristic public goods, but it's the early contributors who made that future a reality. That's the contributors like you and me today. So Ether's Phoenix will look back in time and reward us, the early cooperators, the early public goods creators. It's kind of like a reverse Roko's Basilisk, which is an evil AI that punishes you if you don't summon it. But instead, Ether's Phoenix rewards you for your early investment in public goods. So let's build public goods, let's invest in public goods,

• 30:50Speaker 04

  and let's start a retroactive public goods revolution. That's Ether's Phoenix for you. We just heard from Carl Florish talking about Ether's Phoenix, which is the opposite of Roko's Basilisk. Roko's Basilisk is a demon that punishes you for not summoning it.

• 31:08Speaker 05

  And Ether's Phoenix is a angel that rewards you for summoning it. So it's basically a recursive algorithm that retroactively rewards public goods funders in order for bringing public goods into existence. One of the things that's most interesting to me about Ether's Phoenix is like, how do you know that it's good? So basically, in the X-Men series, there's a character that becomes the Phoenix, and she like turns on the X-Men for a little bit. And so I'm wondering, if you're building the, bringing this Phoenix into the world, how do you know that it's a good Phoenix? And I think the answer is that, at the center of it, is that the algorithm only rewards you if you fund public goods. And that's a really hard problem to know, like, which public goods to invest in, but in the present moment. But if you do it retroactive, then basically, there's a lot of consensus about how much public goods,

• 31:53Speaker 05

  say, Lib P2P has created, or Scaffold ETH, or other public goods in the ecosystem. So basically, you've got a recursive algorithm that rewards public goods funders for creating public goods. And then the result of that is Ether's Phoenix. So really interesting take from Carl Floersch.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  So I, my experience with Bitcoin grants is I've been doing this for four years, and it is sometimes a grind. I work long hours and sometimes things blow up in my face. And I want to ask, like, have you found, do you feel like you've been grinding? And like, you know, how do you keep that optimism alive when you're just working really hard on this to, on such a huge ambitious mission?

• 32:33Speaker 00

  Wow, a lot of things. One, know your boundaries. Make sure that you don't stretch yourself too thin. I have become extremely depressed to the point of, you know, being like suicidal, being very scared, very, very depressed. Because I pushed my boundaries and did not know what I needed to like be a happy and healthy human being. So that is very real, mental health is very real. Um, another thing is just during the grind, trying to keep the, trying to keep the, the, you know, everything in perspective, right? Like we are, we are very small. We are very insignificant. We are part of these like

• 33:15Speaker 00

  big waves up and down. And, um, it's, you know, can't, you can't get, you can't, I, I, I feel like very afraid sometimes of like losing what I have, right? I'm just like so fearful of change. And it's really hard to remind myself constantly like change is okay, whether it's up or down, like it is totally fine. And that, you know, once you, once you like let go a little bit, it's, it's a lot easier to be, um, to feel good, right? You're, you're maintaining your mental health, you're being happy, you're, you're, you know, doing that. And you're also not afraid of the future. And, you know, that helps with anxiety. So anyway, it's a, it's not trivial, you know, but, but, uh,

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 34:00Speaker 00

  But good vibes are important.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  Nice. For sure. Yeah. Um, is there anything I didn't ask you that you, that you want to say about regen finance, crypto economics, green pills, solar punk worlds? Is there anything I didn't ask that you want to say?

• 34:13Speaker 00

  Can I ask you, how would you define, what is, what is your, uh,

• 34:20Speaker 00

  I just love the term regen finance. What is regen finance?

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Well, back in DeFi summer, there was this thing called, uh, degens, like the degens score, degens became a meme. And I think it was kind of, uh, focused around people who are gambling with speculation in crypto. And, uh, what have, what we've been trying to do with Gitcoin Grant's mission is to build and fund the open web. We want to create a world where the median software engineer can quit their job at JP Morgan Chase and work for the public good, work on open source. And I think that, uh, regen for me is just the opposite of degen. Instead of focusing on instant gratification and that gambling and that race to the bottom of the brain stem. It's about creating a, uh, world where we're focused on a little bit more long-term values, where we're focused on creating.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Creating the world that we want to live in. Regenerative means that there is positive externalities to the work that you do as opposed to negative externalities. And so I think that regenerative crypto economics are mechanisms that create positive externalities. And that's what we're trying to meme into existence. But I don't know, our marketing guy is like, Kevin, just pick a meme. Is it regen finance? Are you green pilling people? Are you creating more solar punk world? And I say it's all those things. So, um, yeah, I mean, what would you call it? If you had to, if you had to meme the world we're trying to create?

• 35:40Speaker 00

  I would honestly, in, I would call it all the things and I'd find one champion for each meme. Because it's really about telling the stories in different ways and it's all the same story. Right? I really think that we are all saying the same things on 99% of the time. We're, we're all kind of, you know, we are definitely in this together in a very real way. So I think, uh, kind of to each, to each their own and, um,

• 36:06Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 36:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  One of the things I'm, one of the things I'm hoping to do is, you know, you can, you can, you can describe the world as much as you can, but if you can show, show it to people, um, you know, sort of a like ghost of Christmas future style, like show them the world that we're building is, is much better than telling them. And, and one of the things that's really exciting about me, to me, is that all of the regen projects that you're going to hear on this green till podcast all stack on top of each other. Proof of humanity, uh, and retroactive public goods funding and get coin grants and common stack. All can be, and it can create a more solar punk, public goods world. And if you can show people that world instead of tell them it, then I think that's what will really get people to turn the corner.

• 36:49Speaker 00

  Beautiful. Yeah. And I, I totally agree. And I just want to remind people that even if it's green and, and regen and all these kinds of good, you know, good vibes, things, it's also.

• 37:03Speaker 00

  Going to be fun and going to be crazy and you're gonna get your ups and downs, you know, it'll be, it'll be great. We, uh, uh, I think we can have fun while we're improving and causing positive externalities. I feel like there's a, there's maybe like it's, uh, like there's some kind of like weird appeal to self-interestness, you know, but I think that we can align our self-interests, right? That's the, that's the thing. I don't think that we should be like shunning self-interest. We should align our self-interests and have, have, have a good time with them. So anyway, that's my.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. Aligning the profit motive with the motive to do good can be a really powerful thing when those two things intersect.

• 37:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. So regen is fun.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Regen is fun. All right. Carl Flourish of Optimism. How can people find you and how can people find you, the projects you're working on online?

• 37:55Speaker 00

  Great. So I work at Optimism PBC. That's at optimism pbc. Definitely go to optimism.io. That's, that's, that's the place to be. And then I'm on Twitter at Carl underscore dot underscore tech. And yeah, definitely follow Vitalik also. I'm sure you do.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  Well, Carl Flourish, thank you so much for being on the inaugural episode of Greenfield. Great to have you and looking forward to having you back in 2024, once we've created a more green filled world. Peace out.

• 38:29Speaker 00

  Peace.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  Bye.