070. Kevin Owocki on Gitcoin, Open Source, and Earning Crypto on the New Internet

Open Source Technology and Blockchain Technology have created these base layer technologies with billions of dollars’ worth of value. Like what happened open source and the internet, now with blockchain, a few large players with buckets of money are going after only a small segment of developers to maximize profits for their investors. But what about developers? Shouldn’t they be able to capture some of that value – whether they’re building on open source or blockchain platforms?

“Open source software creates billions of dollars a year in economic value for the world, and software developers don't have the opportunity to capture the value that they've created in the world because of because of open source… and in a lot of ways, it's a tragedy of the commons.”

Kevin Owocki, founded Gitcoin, which brings together funders and developers in a peer to peer job network.  We talk about what Gitcoin is all about and how to get started. I asked him about how it would work if I wanted to hire a developer to create an online shopping cart for speakingofcrypto.com to sell SOC podcast merch and walks me through it.

We also talk about the new paradigm of getting paid in ways we couldn’t in the past (like earning crypto for block rewards or for maintaining a network).

“Since we value the work that miners are doing, we're paying them a block reward. But what if you also added a 10% overhead for the people who are actually building the open source software that the miners are running in order to secure the network, then you could have point to either go to a group of software developers who built the who built the ecosystem. And I think that that's the ultimate example of programming your values into your money, because it's a fundamentally new thing that could exists before the blockchain internet.”

We also chat about globalization and the exportability of law and culture through blockchain’s borderless structure. Can developers from countries in Venezuela, Argentina, or Egypt where there has been a history of extreme inflation benefit from accessing American systems of freelance work structure?

“We talk about the exportability of law through blockchain’s borderless structure. “one of the primary features of blockchain is that you can export the rule of law and faith in faith in your investments that you would get in somewhere like America, to a place where they don't have great rule of law and there's a lot of corruption.”

We also talk about the idea of nations competing for citizens and Kevin recommends the book, The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg 

https://www.amazon.ca/Sovereign-Individual-Mastering-Transition-Information/dp/0684832720

Kevin also shares some great things about the  Boulder, Colorado developer community.

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Kevin Owocki

https://twitter.com/owocki

Gitcoin

https://gitcoin.co/mission

Gitcoin Mission

https://gitcoin.co/mission

How is Gitcoin doing? Check out their earnings here: 

https://gitcoin.co/results