Oct 2, 2019
Highlights from First RadicalxChange Taipei Meetup
RadicalxChange Taipei chapter is here. On Tuesday, July 16 RadicalxChange Taipei kicked off their first event in Taipei, Taiwan. The 2.5-hour meetup drew more than 50 researchers, developers, and community leaders. Below are some highlights from the event, which was moderated by Yahsin Huang, the featured speaker was Jennifer Lyn Morone, CEO of the RadicalxChange Foundation.
“So, this is a chapter now, right, Yahsin? (Yeah!) So you’re one of the other 150 global chapters now. That’s what we want. We want the connection. Not us in the middle, but we are trying to support [the chapters] in many different ways,” said Ms. Morone in her speech. Before visiting Taiwan, Jennifer traveled to Beijing, Shanghai and some other parts of China to support the growing RadicalxChange movement.
In her presentation, Jennifer talked about how the RadicalxChange movement and the Foundation came about. Everyone was fascinated to learn more about the positive philosophy of the movement, and its commitment to change.
Following Jennifer, Chih-Cheng Liang, a co-organizer of Taipei Ethereum Meetup, gave a brief overview of the book, “Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society,” to the Taipei local community in Mandarin. In his presentation, Liang talked about the Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax, the possibility of private property to be converted into a public auction system, as well as several figures, such as Henry George and Sun Yat-Sen, who inspired the book.
Taiwan Digital Minister Audrey Tang (who is on the board of the RadicalxChange Foundation) shared how the Taiwanese Presidential Hackathon used QV to vote on projects. (A transcript of what Tang shared at the Taipei event can be found on Medium.)
Tang said: “In previous year’s hackathon, what we’ve done is that we ask 10 judges to select 20 teams out of 100 teams. However, the selection tends to reflect the tendency of the judges to basically have a follow-about effect and a small circle,” She added that this year, for the first time, 30% of the entire scoring mechanism were opened up to people who had SMS and email authentication to allocate 99 points.
“It’s 99 rather than 100 points — as in Colorado — because then people won’t even have the possibility of just going there and voting everything on the same project, right? After voting for nine votes which sent 81 points, you still have like 18 left. So people will get motivated to look across the board to find synergies and the teams that are working closely with each other,” added Tang.
Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum, discussed the possibility of applying Harberger taxes on ENS domain names. ENS domain names have the following characteristics that make them particularly suitable: 1) are non-fungible (every name is unique), 2) have monopoly issues (you can squat on a domain name and then nobody can use it), 3) need investment efficiency (when you purchase a domain name, you invest a lot of efforts to make the name famous) , 4) are fine with less than perfect ownership (if you can’t own your domain name for the rest of your life, that’s not a serious issue for most people).
He discussed several design proposals on the issue, including the existing simple auction, a simple Harberger tax, and auction-set annual fees. Vitalik noted that Harberger taxes could be applied in digital assets in games and virtual worlds. (Highlights of Vitalik’s presentation at the Taipei event can be viewed in this blog post.)
Below are some announcements and news from the RadicalxChange Taipei.
1. RadicalxChange Taipei chapter is officially started; Yahsin is leading the group. Stay connected on Twitter: (https://twitter.com/rxctaipei)
2. The second meetup of RadicalxChange Taipei was held on Tuesday, August 6, at Maicoin HQ in Taipei. Event details can be found on Meetup.com: https://www.meetup.com/RadicalxChange-Taipei/events/263390587/
3. The next meetup of RadicalxChange Taipei will be held in mid November. More event details to be announced.
4. Presentation slides from the first and second meetups are available on Github. https://github.com/radicalxchange-taipei/PublicGoods
5. The simplified Chinese edition of the Radical Markets book is available. The book is coming out in traditional Chinese in Taiwan next year from Gusa Press.
6. The results of the Taiwanese Presidential hackathon’s use of quadratic voting are now publicly available online on Github (front-end code). https://github.com/PDIS/quadratic-voting-frontend?fbclid=IwAR2l61zUjqOvhSfKywem2UoO4AZVd7UD-v0Y1FtSvSvNgpXCvfjlNX1uD1s
Below is the entire video of meetup coverage. (Audrey Tang starts at 41:22; Jennifer Lyn Morone starts at 49:20; Vitalik Buterin starts at 1:50:42)
YouTube video link: https://youtu.be/6S5j35Y9AzQ
Thank you to our venue sponsor, HTC, for arranging the space at Trust Café. Thanks to HTC Phil Chen and Lisa Chu for your support. Thanks to Chien-Te Lee for making the trip to Taipei to take photos and to help set up a live-stream broadcast studio. Special thanks go to our dear friends from the Taipei Ethereum Meetup, blockchain community, and open-source communities in Taiwan. Without your help the event would not have run so smoothly.
