Transcript of Exploring Geo - The decentralized world awaits by Yaniv Tal

"Thank you all for coming. I want to start tonight by asking you a question. What is the truth? If you want to know the facts, do you search on Google, or do you go on Wikipedia, maybe now ChatGPT, or is the government the source of truth, or science? The scientific method, peer review, right, that always works, unless of course, the science gets politicized by governments or large corporations. So, what is the truth? It really depends on what you trust. And I don't know about you, but I don't know what I trust right now. That's why the crypto space has been working for a very long time on building Web3. And Web3 is a new platform for decentralized applications, and it allows us to build new internet-native institutions that we can trust. And we can trust them because they're decentralized. They're not controlled by anyone, and they provide verifiable information.

So, how does it work? It starts with cryptography. With public key cryptography, everybody has a private key and a public key. The private key you have to keep secret, and if you've created a crypto wallet, that's what you're generating, is one of these key pairs. And modern devices have a dedicated place in their chips, like the iPhone, to store these private keys. And then your public key is your public address that people can use to interact with you. And so, if you want to send a message in a verifiable way, you can sign that message, and people, any recipient, can verify that you're the one that sent that message. And today we have things like generative AIs that can generate deepfakes, photos and videos where we can't even tell what we're seeing anymore and whether it's true. So this kind of cryptographically signed data might actually be the closest thing that we have to truth and to facts, going forward.

Then you need storage networks, so we have these decentralized storage networks like Arweave, IPFS, and Filecoin, and they let you store files in a decentralized way on a decentralized network of these storage providers that will store that data or those files for you. They have economic incentives to store that, and what's special about the way we use these in Web3 is that we use content address storage. So, if you put a file or some data on something like a Google Drive or Dropbox, you get a link, and that link points to Google servers, and that Google can choose to send you back whatever file they want, and you don't really know if what they're giving you back is correct. So with content address storage, you have essentially a hash, it's a string of letters and numbers that uniquely identifies that file. And so, if you ask for it, you can verify that the file that you got back is correct. And it also allows you to get that file or that data from any peers that you want. So, these storage networks are a really important component.

Then we have blockchains, and blockchains allow you to have essentially a distributed database that nobody controls but that everyone can agree on the state of the database at any point in time. And so, when we were talking about a cryptographically signed message, if I say that I'm in San Francisco, and I sign that, it's not necessarily a fact that I'm in San Francisco, but it is a fact that I said that I was in San Francisco. And if you anchor that message on chain, now it's also a fact that I said that at a specific point in time. And so now, you get time, and you can have global consensus on the state of a database without any companies, any participants having control over the system. Over the last few years, the crypto industry has been working on scaling these blockchains so that we can process many more transactions much faster and much cheaper. And we do that using layer twos, which is basically a way of stacking blockchains on top of each other so you can have many more of these chains that kind of anchor their security, as well as with app-specific chains where applications can have their own chains. And it really depends on the security properties that you want, but all of this is ways that the crypto space has successfully scaled blockchains.

And then you need indexing, and this is where The Graph comes in. So, when we're producing all of this data that's being stored on all of these different storage networks and with all of these different blockchains and layer twos, you need a way to process and organize that data so that you can efficiently serve it to applications. And so, The Graph is a decentralized network that processes all of this data. Developers or anyone can build what's called a subgraph, which is an API that's organizing some subset of the graph, and that runs on this decentralized network of nodes that then anybody can query. And in the data that comes back, it's all verifiable. And so, we have the infrastructure now, right? We have all of these, you know, infrastructure protocols, and so we can now build a global graph of all of the world's public knowledge and information, organized and served in a decentralized way.

But where is it? You know, we should have Web3 by now. Are you guys using it? You know, I'm still looking for it. And we are just missing one more piece. So we describe Geo as a Web3 browser and a decentralized knowledge graph app. And I announced Geo at Graph Day nine months ago in June, and I previewed an early version of the browser. And we gave it out to 20, 50 people to test, and we learned a lot. One of the things that we learned is that we really needed to start this with a web-based version. And so, we've been working on that for the last nine months, and we call it Geo Genesis. It's a decentralized knowledge graph app, and you can access it from any web browser, and that's what I'm going to be showing you today.

If you go to geobrowser.io, this is what you see. And you can click this 'Launch GeoGenesis' button. And what you see is a bunch of top-level spaces. So, each space has its own subset of the knowledge graph. It has its own knowledge graph that communities can organize for themselves. And each community can define its own governance process that it wants to use, how it wants to admit its members, whatever kind of roles that it wants, and they can organize and get to consensus on the state of their knowledge graph. So, a knowledge graph is the most flexible way of representing information. So, you have entities, and anything, any concept is like an entity. The entities have attributes, so like my name is, and then a value, so my name is Yaniv. And these entities can relate to any other entities however they want, and that forms a graph.

So for example, we can hop into the philosophy space. And this is a place to organize all information related to philosophy. So we've been having a series of meetups called the Future Thinkers Collective, where people that want to think deeply about how we structure society and how we want to build this new decentralized system, can talk about these deep questions. And we're organizing some topics here, and for example, we can take a look at a topic like privacy versus transparency. So, everybody has a basic human right to privacy, right? It's important to give you space to not feel judged, and to be able to experiment. There are governments right now that want to force everybody to KYC, have your identity known, they want to look at your communications, that is kind of under threat. On the other side, we do need transparency, in order to have accountability, especially for our public systems. You have a right to know public information about people so you can make informed decisions and so, there is kind of a trade-off between privacy and transparency, and we have just like a few claims here that are kind of examples of claims that people might make. You might agree or disagree with any one of the claims. But with Geo, you, we can add arguments for and arguments against any of these claims, and soon people will be able to come in and upvote and downvote and rank, and so in this way, we can organize really any information, but here, starting with claims about this specific topic. You know, I think we're not used to organizing our arguments and our claims in this way. But I think it's really important, as technology moves faster, for us to be able to think critically about the decisions that we make and the ways that we organize ourselves. You have to wonder whether it's the AIs that are getting smarter or whether it's we that are getting dumber. But if we could learn to reason and argue and elevate the quality of the debates and the conversation that we had, I think we'd be really well off.

Another example is democracy versus meritocracy. So, in the U.S., you could look at our elections and the way that governance happens and wonder whether this is the best way to organize ourselves. I think there are a lot of interesting merits to meritocracy, where you give more power to people who have a demonstrated ability in a certain area. If you had to show that you knew a basic thing about something that you were voting on, would that produce better outcomes? Maybe. On the other hand, there are risks with that, you could have a group of people that gain power that make decisions that aren't in the best interest of everybody else. So, interesting philosophical questions to look at: what are the pros and cons of democracy and meritocracy? And we can organize that debate in Geo. One more concept: look at pluralism, which is a concept of having multiple different points of view or versions of something that can coexist in the same system. So, like with Wikipedia, you have one canonical page for every concept, and if you disagree with the majority, that sucks, your position doesn't exist. It could be good to have pluralism to allow for divergent points of view, but if you do that, you also risk having fragmentation, and so there are trade-offs. So, let's organize those trade-offs and try to understand as we're building these new information systems how to allow for pluralism, but in a way that can doesn't fragment society. So, there's lots of interesting questions like this, and if you're interested, you can dive in, and we're going to be diving a lot deeper on a lot of these philosophical topics.

Another example of data that you can organize in Geo is health. I don't know about you, but I get so many wildly conflicting pieces of advice around health, nutrition, exercise, everything, and it's really hard to know how to make sense of that. If people cite studies, was it a study done correctly? Like, I don't know, I don't have time to do all of that research, but if you had an entity for every paper and research study and source, and the experts could go through and upvote, downvote, give reasons why this study was flawed or whatever, and then you have a canonical version of all of these things and individual facts, and it actually helps you be able to understand things around your health better. So, for example, we can dive into yoga, and learn a bunch of things related to yoga. So, let's see, I mean, these are just claims, they may or may not be true. But here's a claim that when compared to the control group, those who practice yoga showed significant decreases in stress and anxiety. So, that's cool, but maybe I'm coming in here and I'm like, this thing is saying that it's related to yoga, but it's also really relevant to anxiety and stress, so let's update this entity. So, I can just switch into edit mode here, and when I add another topic, I can say that this is also related to anxiety. And up here, there's a content area, and maybe I want to leave some content, this seems like something that more people should do. And I can review that. So, I can see a diff, these are the changes that I'm making. I added the anxiety topic to add anxiety to the yoga claim, and now I can actually make changes to as many entities and pages as I want, all at the same time. So, I could change like a thousand things, go in, update a bunch of topics, and then publish it with a single transaction on chain. So, I can hit publish there, and I'm going to use my phone to sign, and right here, it's adding the changes to the graph. And this is using Polygon, and so it happened pretty fast, and that cost me just about two cents. If you guys care about my two cents.

We can look at the crypto space. So, lots of people are working in the crypto space, and people have been building really great projects, protocols, DAOs, applications, dapps. And so, we can see them all here by category. I'm going to refresh to go back into browse mode. For example, maybe I want to search, and actually, I can just pull up this global search, and I can actually search the entire graph just from here. And so, maybe I want to see like the music category, and I can see all of the projects that are in the music category in the crypto space. I can see, for example, here, there's a bunch of roles, and so we have these are all different job roles that people could do that are relevant to the crypto space, and associated skills, and you can imagine that with these skills, maybe you want to actually link to educational content and tutorials, and here's how you get certified. Or so, we can organize all of this stuff, so that if someone wants to work in the crypto space, they can find out ways to get involved.

So maybe I want to look at, for example, solidity engineer, and here, I can see at the bottom of every entity, you also have the backlinks, so these are all of the entities that are referencing this one, and so in this case, there's a specific job opening to be a solidity engineer at EdgeNode. I can click on it, and I can see the job posting. And at the bottom here, these are all of the different facts about this entity, and I can see like the company is EdgeNode, so I can click to that. So, you can just traverse all of these different entities across the entire graph, really seamlessly. And all of the information here has been curated and organized by this whole space, and so, you're no longer trusting an individual, you're no longer trusting a company, you're trusting a community that is curating all of this information, and you can see the history of any change. And so, if you want to know why did this thing become the way it is, how did it get into this state, you can see the history of any page, of any entity, and of an entire space.

And so, people in crypto like to talk about mainstream adoption, and when is that coming? But I would invite anyone who's working in crypto, that we should start using these tools ourselves. Let's organize everything in the crypto economy natively on Web3, right, not using these old web tools. Let's make sure that we have every single project on here and what they're working on and the people that are working at these companies and events that are coming up and job openings, and if we can organize all of that stuff natively in Web3, then we can actually show how effective these tools are for coordinating within an industry. And let's do it first ourselves.

If we want to look at the people space, this is a place where we have public profiles for everybody in Geo. And in the future, there's going to be like interesting ways that we can aggregate data across different spaces, to show kind of a public profile. And this is basically a place where you want to showcase the work that you've done, your work experience, your skills, maybe your portfolio. And based on this, you can build up a reputation that people within your space and in other spaces can use. There are reputation systems that kind of exist implicitly on the web today, like on Twitter, you have a number of followers, for example, maybe that's a type of reputation. But I don't know what having a lot of Twitter followers really buys you except maybe some mean tweets. Wikipedia uses reputation-weighted voting, and so they use reputation, and it seems to work for them. But just because you're an expert on mammals on Wikipedia, it doesn't mean that you have any more weight when it comes to wildlife policy or something like that, right? And so having portable reputation natively on Web3 is going to allow us to build much better meritocratic systems where we can really look at what have people done and weight that to give people more power, to decentralize power.

We can really organize any kind of information for any interest area, area of study, industry, but the vision for Web3, it's very expansive, but where you, how should we prioritize what we tackle? And I do think that we should organize all of those things and create spaces in all of these areas, but one way that I like to look at things is how can we have the most impact? And if you want to approach it from that angle, the way that we have the most impact as an industry is it means that we want to go solve big challenges, things that are real problems that are hurting people, and let's try to solve those. And if we want to do that, a really effective strategy can be to try to start local, because the world's a really big place, and so, let's try to make change at home before we try to get other people to do the same. And so, we're here in San Francisco, and San Francisco is a beautiful city with so much rich culture and creativity, like so much has come from this place, right? The gay rights movement, the hippie anti-war movement, technology, the personal computer, Burning Man was started right here at Baker Beach, so we have a history of creating these kinds of movements, but we also have a lot of problems, people all around the world love to look at and talk about the problems that we have here in San Francisco, so why don't we do something about it?

So, if we wanted to try to solve San Francisco's biggest challenges, it would help to start with a list of, well, what are the challenges, what are the problems, or another way of framing it could also be, on the more positive side, looking at the goals. And some goals that we might look at are things like clean streets, public safety, abundant housing, and ending homelessness, quality education, urban development, revitalizing downtown, reliable transportation, environmental sustainability, if we did these things and we did them well, San Francisco would be an incredible place to live. So if we look at these types of challenges, I mean they're challenges for a reason, right, like, they're hard. And I think you can really look at it in two parts. The first is public policy, these are all things where the laws make a big difference. So how do we come up with the right public policy in each of these areas? Well, to start, you need to get people to get to consensus on what the goals are, if people are trying to do different things, and they're all at odds with each other, they can't even agree on the goals, there's no way that we can solve any of these problems. Once you have your public policy, then you can look at how do we deploy our resources to effectively achieve those goals? So let's start with policy. And we can look at, for example, housing policy, which has a big impact on things like abundant housing, as well as homelessness. And so here's a list of goals. They're by no means exhaustive, and a lot of people might disagree with these. But some goals might be increasing tax revenue, make it easier to build housing, increase average tenure of residence, increase real estate utilization rates, lower rents by increasing rental property supply, provide subsidized housing based on merit or disability, reduce the market price of housing by increasing supply, and maintain the character and charm of our unique neighborhoods. Now there are a lot of people that actually disagree with these goals, right? There are plenty of people that think that free markets and market price housing is bad, and is evil, and that all housing should be priced and given out by the government. There are a lot of people that don't want to build, they don't want the price of housing to come down. And so how do we agree? Let's talk about it, let's organize the claims, the arguments for and against each of these parts, and let's bring people together to participate in this process. So we have regular meetings here at House of Web3 called We Heart SF, where we talk about a lot of these kinds of issues. We came up with this list of policy goals in one of those meetings, and so if you're interested in participating in these sorts of policy discussions and getting involved, you can join us here for the We Heart SF meetups. And if we look at an issue like homelessness, part of it is housing, and a big problem that we have here in San Francisco is related to substance abuse. So, if we want to look at drug policy, it's a thorny topic. So here's an example list of goals, by no means extensive, you may not believe in them, but some goals could be eliminate open-air drug markets, reduce deaths from drug overdose, eliminate hard drug use in public, provide quality recovery services to anyone who wants it, and respect the choice of individuals who use soft drugs in a way that doesn't negatively affect others. So, it's an example, people might agree, disagree with any one of these, but we have a platform now, a place where we can have these discussions, you can link to your studies, we can talk about the quality of those studies, people can vote, participate, upvote, downvote, and we can start to understand a little bit better and maybe get to consensus on what the right policies are, as a city.

You know, there's a lot of things that go into something like ending homelessness, and for me, I think that if there was one thing that we accomplished in the next few years, I would love it if it was this. I mean, how different of a city would San Francisco be if we ended homelessness? And I think we can do it. There's no reason why a rich country like ours can't do this. Right? And so we need to start by coming up with the right policies, and then, if we can agree on what the goals are that can get us here, then we need to be able to effectively marshal resources to achieve those goals. And we're not lacking resources in the San Francisco Bay Area, San Francisco spent 1.4 billion dollars last year on non-profits, and there's very little accountability and results for where that money goes. And so, this is where Web3 can come in, because Web3 is meant for open, transparent coordination. And in Web3, we have something that are called DAOs. And DAOs are decentralized organizations. You can think of them as companies or some kind of entity that has a public bank account, right on the blockchain. And you can have different governance structures over these things, and it's all transparent and enforced by the blockchain. And so, one way to think about this would be like, we had car transportation services, the cabs, and when you have this central dispatch, things tend to be pretty slow, pretty expensive, not that convenient. But then Uber came around and it created a much more decentralized marketplace of the drivers and connecting them to riders. And when you decentralize that, when you give people freedom, where people can clock in and decide to work when they want, and get matched with people who need their services, the quality of the service can just go through the roof, right? And so, DAOs can enable those kinds of open, permissionless markets, but with transparency, where you can see where's all the money going. And so we want to help spawn DAOs to do a bunch of things that can help us end homelessness. So, for example, build and staff transitional housing, people that want to get help, that want to get off the streets. A lot of times, they just need help to kind of get off their feet. And so, building small, for example, tiny homes where people can have dignity, and they're not being shoved into these large spaces with a bunch of other people, and then providing services to them can be a really helpful way to help get people off the street and get back on their feet. If you're going to be here in San Francisco next week, and you're interested in this topic, Dan and Anne-Marie are going to be giving a talk here at House of Web3 on the work that they're doing, building small tiny homes to help with homelessness in the Bay Area. Things like workforce development, can we onboard a bunch of people who can organize the different job opportunities and training to get people the skills they need to find fulfilling work? Things like recovery, for people that want to get clean. It's not always easy to get shelter beds in San Francisco. Often, you have to wait weeks before you can get a detox bed, or to bring on substance abuse counselors that can provide therapy sessions, either individually or in group settings. So, a DAO focused on recovery for people who want it, I can make a really huge difference. And finally here, mentorship. A lot of times, people just need someone who takes an interest in their lives, it's really hard to get back on your feet when nobody even knows or cares what you're doing. And so, could we create a network of people who volunteered, or even get paid to just spend 30 minutes, an hour, a week, just checking in and talking to someone and being a mentor for them? How big of a change could that make in somebody's life, and how many people would be willing to do that, if they had something easy like that, that they could do to clock in and help? And so, with these types of tools, I think that we could make progress on a goal like getting homelessness in San Francisco. And I really believe in the power of Web3, and I think that when we get this engine up and running, that we can see transformative change a lot faster than anybody would currently expect or hope.

That is a look at Geo, and the work that we're doing here. And it's just the beginning, it's just a starting point. If you want to get involved, we are opening up sign-ups for Early Access editor access to Geo. We've started a Geo Explorers program, actually, a month ago. And so, we've had our first 10 editors coming in and adding projects to the crypto space and organizing information for the crypto space, but we're ready to start onboarding editors in any kind of area that you're interested in, whatever your interest groups, areas of study, your industry, we can start to organize information related to that in a verifiable way on Geo.

If you're interested in the philosophy topics and you want to participate in these discussions where we're thinking through the ethics and these deeper questions around the society that we want to build collectively on Web3, you can scan this QR code and sign up to join the Future Thinkers Collective. We meet online, and so you can join from anywhere. And if you want to get involved with these issues here in the Bay Area, you want to help solve San Francisco's biggest challenges, we meet here at House of Web3 regularly, and we're building a vibrant community here of people that want to make change. So, you can scan this code to get involved with We Heart SF. And I hope that with this talk, I've inspired you to think a little bit differently about how we can build new systems that we can trust, and that you can see that the technology is there. We're just missing some of the organization, getting the people together, and that's what we're doing here. So, I'd love for you to join us, and thank you very much for listening."