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Santiago Siri: Crypto Governance, DAOs, Digital Identity and Voting.

Santiago Siri: Crypto Governance, DAOs, Digital Identity and Voting.

Episode 68 Published 3 years, 9 months ago
Description

0:00 -- Intro.

1:30 -- Start of interview.

3:32 -- Santi's "origin story". He was  born and grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina. "The year 1983 was a symbolic year in Argentina because it's the year that democracy came back to the country." "My generation was tainted by two events: the hyperinflation of 1989 and the collapse of 2001 (peso devaluation and bank deposit freezes)."

5:11 -- Argentina's strange political case. 

7:24 -- Santi's professional background going from gaming, to founding "Partido de la Red" (the "Net Party") in 2012 - a political party in Argentina (inspired by Giorgio Jackson), and his pivot to crypto.

14:04 -- His endeavors with Democracy Earth Foundation and UBI (Universal Basic Income through the Ethereum blockchain). The impact of Bitcoin and the new generation of builders in Argentina, with global leaders such as Decentraland. The strong adoption of crypto in countries like Argentina, Venezuela and Cuba: "There is a real need for crypto in countries that need an alternative."

16:12  -- The connection of crypto with corporate governance. His interest on voting "we realized that whoever controls the registry of voters can decide the outcome of elections." The concept of Proof of Humanity ("the protocol got activated in March 2021 and it has had 50 proposals since then." How voting works in this DAO. "You see how contested the positions are to the extent of how people are willing to cheat in order to win." 

23:19 -- Explaining DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations). Different DAO applications. Token voting. On The DAO hack (2016).

25:59 -- On the evolution of DAOs. On Vitalik Buterin (co-founder of Ethereum): "I think he's today's most inspiring leader in technology, by far. In the same rank as Elon Musk, and many other great ones." "A lot of the [crypto] community looks up to him as a role model who really understands what it means to lead through the process of creation of a decentralized network." "It's a very counter-intuitive exercise in leadership because you actually need to reject being in control, in order to gain legitimacy." "The role that founders play in these networks I think is a determinant factor in the outcome of how projects evolve over time." "Nothing ever begins decentralized, it needs to be progressively decentralized throughout time." "Building institutionality in cyberspace I think has tremendous power for coordination of humans and capital in a global, more legitimate way."

28:46 -- On the role of founders, contrast between 'traditional' founder-controlled startups and new decentralized crypto projects. On Vitalik's founder's take in a reply to Balaji Sirinivasan's book the Network State. Santi has personally dealt with some of these founder debates, he's currently a

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