Creating a Humanist Blockchain Future #5: Blockchain Social Entrepreneurship with Vince Meens of Techruption
Creating a Humanist Blockchain Future focuses on the intersection of:
- Effective Altruism (How can we do good?)
- Universal Basic Income (How can we allocate scarce capital?)
- The Attention Economy (How can we allocate scarce time?)
- Blockchain (What technology can we leverage?)
In this podcast (Youtube, Soundcloud, iTunes), we dive into Blockchain for Social Good with Vince Meens. He leads the blockchain social entrepreneurship ecosystem in the Netherlands at Techruption and Brightlands. Show notes below:
Why Are You Working In Blockchain For Social Good?
- Blockchain helps us incentivize better equilibrium in game theory: The Prisoner’s Dilemma, Tragedy of the Commons, and Hive Commons (1:00)
Brightlands and Techruption
- Mini garden of Eden: Techruption is playground for using AI and Blockchain to tackle climate change. (3:00)
- Root-cause incentivization of behavior through blockchain. (4:30)
- Blockchain-based collaboration mindset. Nasdaq + Citi + Chain. Platform Cooperativism. (5:30)
- Crowd from Machine, Platform, Crowd (a16z podcast) and the power of changing habits. (7:00)
Funding Projects for Social Good
- “Peak Capitalism”, new mindsets, and a mini revolution for doing good. Pension funds in the Netherlands are required to put ~10% of their funds towards climate change. (8:00)
- New types of corporations (see bottom list here). B corporations, Founders Pledge, Giving Pledge, Pledge 1%. Zuckerberg commencement address arguing for measuring non-GDP outcomes. (11:00)
Tracking Data, Reputation, and Trust
- 4B Smartphones and 70B IoT devices by 2025 means textured data slices of reality. Even emotions—new Techruption startup developing a device to track emotional impact on others. (12:30)
- Reputation, inevitability (book), China’s Social Credit System, and the Black Mirror reputation episode “Nosedive”. (15:00)
- Your “self” will be defined as your profile of smart contracts (Uber, etc.). Moral Persona attached to uPort. (17:00)
- “Blockchain as a trust machine.” Web of Trust in refugees and young people. Social Capital’s Emergent Layers + Abundance of Trust Theory. (19:30)
Externalities and Supply Chains
- Externalities, provenance, and a carbon tax on transportation. Incentivize green cars by paying for gallons of fuel by usage, rather than amount. (22:00)
- Decentralized water grids, not just energy grids (like Grid+). (23:00)
- Blockchain-based emergent behavior: a bimodal distribution of hyper decentralization/globalization vs. hyper local. (24:30)
Smart Contracts for an Altruistic Value Exchange?
- Smart contracts enable transparent Value for Value transactions well, but don’t enable charity-style value exchange as clearly. “Every transaction starts with finding the moral values in each other before exchanging money.” See giveth.io, alice.si, and the circular economy. (26:30)
- “Gamified sense of purpose.” The quantification self-actualization (min 24 here). (29:00)
- CryptoUBI Resilience and Taxemes as a way to incentivize working with other “do gooders”. (31:00)
- Blockchain-based tracking incentivizes multi-generational long-term thinking. It took 3 generations to build the pyramids! :)
Thanks to Keith Klundt, John Desmond, Colin Wielga, Harry Lindmark, John Lindmark, Veronica Stamats, Jacob Zax, Katie Powell, Jonathan Isaac, Ryan X Charles, Chris Edmonds, Ramsay Devereux, Ned Mills, Kenji Williams, David Long, Scott Levi, Peter Rodgers, Kenzie Jacobs, Jon Frechin and Kash Dhanda for supporting me on Patreon!
About Me: My name is Rhys Lindmark and I’m a social entrepreneur. I’m creating a humanist blockchain future by writing, speaking, and advising at the intersection of Effective Altruism, UBI, the Attention Economy, and Blockchain. I lead the Colorado chapters of Effective Altruism and the Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition. I’m an alumnus of Techstars Boulder 2015. Please reach out if you’d like to connect or have feedback! I’m curious about what you’re working on. You can support me on Patreon, follow me on Twitter, or connect on LinkedIn.
Disclaimer: I own less than $100 of any given cryptocurrency, so my monetary incentive is not directly aligned with Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.
