Presenting First Round ETC Grants DAO Winner POW Summit

We are happy to present POW Summit as one of the winners of the first round of the ETC Grants DAO program!

You can watch this interview here:

In our video interview, we spoke with Bob Summerwill, Executive Director at the ETC Cooperative, about the following topics:

• What is the POW Summit?
• What is the team behind the project?
• How much money did the POW Summit get in the grant?
• How do the POW Summit and this grant benefit ETC?

This Is the Transcription of the Interview

Donald McIntyre (DM): Hi, I am Donald McIntyre, Senior Editor of the ETC Cooperative. Today we’re going to talk about the ETC Grant DAO, one of the winners, the Proof of Work Summit (POW Summit) project, and for that we have Bob Summerwill with us, Executive Director of the ETC Cooperative to talk about that project. Hello Bob, how are you?

Bob Summerwill (BS): Hello, I’m very good, thank you. Thanks for having me.

DM: Congratulations! Today we’re going to talk about the POW Summit rather than the ETC Cooperative although the ETC Cooperative must be part of that but, congratulations for getting the grant in the first place.

BS: Thank you.

DM: So, I’m going to ask you four questions and the first one is, what is the Proof of Work Summit?

BS: Okay, yeah. So, Proof of Work Summit is, it’s a novel undertaking. We’ve had conferences within ETC in 2017, 2018, and 2019. So, that was a the ETC summit, first of them in Hong Kong, then in Korea, and then in Vancouver in 2019. But, it hasn’t been a conference within this ecosystem now for four years. I mean, you know, some of that was COVID, but a lot of it was the fact that because the ETC on its own was so niche, you know, we couldn’t really attract big names, sponsors, anything, and it was just basically a dead loss for the coop. Some years it was nearly as much as half of the funding that we had for. Each year was subsidizing the conference so, anyway. There hasn’t been one for quite a while, but when the collaboration that we had with BITMAIN started, Litecoin have a similar kind of setup with BITMAIN. It’s a little different, they actually have a joint venture which is called LCC Labs, which is receiving funding from BITMAIN to do things within the Litecoin ecosystem, and one of the first things that they did was, there was a Litecoin Summit. Anyway, so I was at BITMAIN’s WDMS Conference and I said, well hey, could you introduce me to the people at Litecoin, right? You know, we’re doing parallel, similar kinds of things, you know, both sort of, you know, proof of work sort of fair launch, a similar kind of projects, so I thought, you know, that maybe there’s something that we can do with that. So, they introduced me Charlie Lee and Alan Austin, who’s their managing director, and one of the first things that Charlie suggested is, well hey, maybe we could do a joint conference and I thought, well maybe, okay. And, quickly, sort of came to the conclusion, well you know, maybe it’s more than just the two of us, you know, maybe it’s major proof of work chains, you know, to give it more appeal. So, that’s what we’ve been working towards for the last well quite a lot of months. What’s really the thought that we could really use a counterpunch against lazy mainstream narratives that would paint proof of work as, you know, and obsolete technology, you know, which has no merits, there’s positively harmful to the planet, and, you know, if you like proof of work, you know, you’re just completely and obstinate planet hating monster. So, especially, you know, with the Ethereum proof of stake transition, you know, you get out that kind of stuff even more, you know. Well, Ethereum changed, well why can’t you change? You know, even for Bitcoin, you know, you’ve got Greenpeace USA it’s funded by a donation from Chris Larson of Ripple, to attack proof of work. You know, and just this ongoing “change the code”. It’s quite funny just “change the code”. Bitcoin is running on this obsolete thing and you can’t just change the code? You know, completely missing the point there, so yeah , you know, the thought of POW Summit is, you know, we should get together, you know, we should get together the major proof of work chains and, you know, and tell the story, you know, get back to those cypherpunk fundamentals and, you know, well what happened before, why was Bitcoin created, you know, what happened here, you know, because it was a huge, you know, revolutionary technology breakthrough, which gets very discounted, right? “Oh yeah, yeah, that was just the beginning” right? “But, all that shit’s gone”. So, so yeah, so we’ve been collaborating on that. What we’ve been able to do with that broader collaboration is bringing, you know, significant top tier speakers, you know, get a good degree of sponsorship. So, that we can have a really, you know, a really, like, top level conference. So, you know Phil Zimmerman of PGP fame is going to be keynoting, Jameson Lopp, Charlie Lee, Charlie Shrem, Caitlyn Long, and many many more. So, you know, I’m really excited for what we’re going to have, you know, I think it’s going to be really very awesome. I think it’s sort of like the kind of, I think it’s sort of like "here’s the conference that that Bitcoiners would organize if they weren’t Maxis.

DM: So, this is interesting because there were the ETC Summits in 2017, 2018, 2019, then we had COVID, then we had this thing that when you spend in a Summit it is a big expenditure and you prefer to do something, maybe a broader topic rather than exclusive ETC, so that you can get more sponsors and balance the budget, no? of the conference, so the idea was to create the POW Summit, and it is the concept, or the purpose of the conference, then, is to respond to the world that is a attacking proof of work and saying that it’s bad for the world and that it’s a waste of energy and things like that.

BS: Yeah, and, you know, fundamental, you know, just fundamental, you know, philosophical, ethical value prop, you know, the basics of saying, you know, if you look across the whole blockchain ecosystem, because of the rate of growth, you know, a huge number of people are new. You know, they weren’t around, they don’t know that history they don’t know, you know, how things were in those early days, you know, where, you know, you’ve got this world of possibility open and it was really like “well, we’re gonna change the world” right? “we’re gonna make a difference” not just money, shallow, you know, stuff. Really, you know, well, we’re building non-state money, I mean, that’s amazing.

DM: I think that is important because there are real threats in the world that are advancing, especially technologically. I mean, if you combineCentral Bank Digital Currencies, plus artificial intelligence, machine learning, the internet, the advances in cloud computing, for example, and computing power, and all these things, then centralization is a general trend. Technological centralization of the world. And, that enables central government, central control, and things like that. We saw it with COVID. And, I think that the only technology that addresses that, and is a counter punch to that, is proof of work. So, I think that the the POW Summit to be a channel to explain these things is excellent. The other thing is that to debunk the two typical, no? The old argument that it’s a waste and that it’s bad for the planet when it’s exactly the opposite, it’s not a waste, it’s extremely useful and it’s good for the world. It’s much better than proof of stake. I actually said that Ethereum by moving to proof of stake is killing trees now. And, so, but that’s amazing, so my second question is if you can describe the team. Who are then, you spoke about the Litecoin, Charlie Lee, you. Can you explain then the team, who is organizing this?

BS: Yeah, absolutely. So, Emma Todd, of MMH Group, signed on as event coordinator for what at the start was, okay we’re probably going to do a new ETC Summit, right? We should consider that, but then, you know, that walked across into POW Summit very early. Anyway, so Emma has done conferences a number of which I’ve attended back to back to 2017 or so. MMH are also providing a good chunk of the comms team for the Cooperative. So, that started last November where we have Andrew Dick as marketing manager, you have Angela Liu who is doing social media and translation and then they work with yourself. So, Emma’s been sort of driving on the operational side. Myself and Andrew are frequently been involved. We’ve had all of this sort of like, I’m trying to find a venue and building a website, and ticketing. And, then our partners on that, you know, are people with similar roles on the Litecoin side. So Alan Austin is the managing director, you’ve got Jay Milla on the marketing side, so, yeah, you know, we’ve been meeting weekly really for a long long time. Something else to know, just on the timing was that we were initially aiming for Prague in May to collaborate with Monero. So, Monero have their conference there and we were trying to co-locate and co-tine with them, but things fell through on the venue so we ended up delaying until later in the year. We have actually got a another collaboration, which is with HCPP, which is “Hackers Congress Paralelní Polis” so Paralelní Polis is this really unique kind of, I don’t know what you would call it, it’s a group which came really from Czech dissidents and activists and hackers, where during the Communist era in Czechoslovakia, as it was at this time, you had these people forming, so “parallel polis” is “parallel society”, so really this thought of saying "well look we’re in this communist hell and what we need to do is organize, we need to get together these poets and dissidents and activists, and not only do we need to build this alternate society in terms of activism, but also just in terms of things like education. Well, look, we need what are our narratives and our stories and what do people need to know, and we’ve got to educate people, and we’ve got to basically, well, the existing one is broken, we need to make a new one off to the side, right? And, over time more and more get slewed into that, and so obviously, you know, those kind of efforts were effective ultimately and overthrowing communism. But, then you had an ongoing threat of those kinds of people and the fight is not over. So, a number of years later you have this group, which went "well, actually we need a physical manifestation of this, we want, you know, we need a headquarters, so Parallelní Polis is a an event space and a co-working space and a Bitcoin Cafe, and the hosts for The Institute of Crypto Anarchy, so they’ve been having this event for the last 10 years, which has really interesting speakers. It is blockchain oriented, but you have a whole load of of fellow travelers in these kinds of areas, so it, you know, it looks like a really you know deep philosophical, it’s not like “hey we’re going to be talking about the specifics of my DeFi project”. It’s like the absolute opposite of that. So, we are collaborating with that, and that’s so that happens directly after hours, so you can actually get joint ticketing for both, and we’re working together because it’s, you know, it’s quite complementary if you look at some of the list of their speakers and things that we have. There’s a lot of overlap.

DM: And, is it in the same venue? Both events?

BS: They’re not in the same venue, no, but our event, we’ve got like a dinner on the Monday the 25th, the conference is on 26th and 27th. 28th is actually a national holiday, this is in September, so that should be a lot of interesting, Czech events in the city that day, and then HCPP runs the Friday, Saturday, Sunday. But not on the same venue but they are like 10 or 15 minutes.

DM: SO, the collaboration is joint ticketing, and first go to the ETC Cooperative, and then after the holiday is the Parallelní Polis conference, and the whole thing of both is very similar not because they are technology to guarantee self-sovereignty and things like that and…

BS: Yeah, I mean, HCPP is more of a privacy, but yeah, I mean, they, I think they’re very complementary kind of events. You know, if you’re going to a city, you know, you don’t really want to go for just three days, so, you know, the two of them together form pretty much a week’s worth of stuff with a with a break day in the middle. So, and I mean Prague is a location, was chosen because a lot of people don’t want to go to the USA, no interest in that, you know, and in Europe you’re kind of in the middle of Asia and North America, so it’s something that’s sort of reachable for most places, and also, you know, there’s a lot of population, obviously, in Europe and it’s very travelable and you have a lot of blockchain people, you know, in what all other areas of Europe but especially, like, Germany and Eastern Europe, there’s a lot of people there, so. Prague is the home of Trezor and also of the first Bitcoin mining pool.

DM: Okay, so for people to know if they want to attend the POW Summit, where do they have to go?

BS: Yeah, so it’s powsummit.com.

DM: Very good, and how much money did the POW Summit project get from the ETC Grants DAO? And, what is it going to be used for?

BS: Okay, so the application for grants was for twenty thousand dollars. Which is for sponsorship of POW Summit. So, you know, even if it sort of looks like, well, is the Cooperative just paying themselves and it’s all just this circle jerk? Well, the grants program is a collaboration between the Cooperative and BITMAIN and AntPool, and the majority of the funding in there is from BITMAIN, and though it’s not purely them, it’s the collaboration. So, you know, one of the one of the goals of the grants program was community, projects and media and promotion and community. On the conference side itself, that is a collaboration between the Coop and the Litecoin foundation so that’s this great 50/50 sort of deal, where any losses will be 50/50 sucked up both ways, and any gains the same, would be capped around for future conferences. The hope is, is this is going to be a really successful conference? and is it going to be something that we can do year after year? And, yeah, you know, the goal of sponsoring the conference really is to get more eyes on the grants program. You know and on ETC in general obviously as well, but really on that grants side that going into future rounds or ongoing stuff in the rounds, it would be absolutely great if we can get more groups, more people, more teams to really understand, well, you know, ETC is, you know, it’s not dead!

DM: There’s definitely a lot of synergy for the ETC Grants DAO as a project to advertise in the POW Summit to bring people to build on ETC. So, there’s clearly a synergy.

BS: Yeah, and the unique thing that you have there in ETC that you don’t have in these other major proof of work chains is the smart contracts and programmability. So, if you are a POW ethos aligned, ETC has a unique value prop there that you simply can’t do on these other chains. So, yeah it’s exposure of ETC, and its exposure of the grants program to try and attract people in. The other thing on the grants program is it was never the intention that Coop and BITMAIN will get to be the only participants if we can get more sponsors to be involved. More donors, that would be great. Like the more the merrier. So, there’s also the thought there that for the POW Summit, you know, we are getting pretty decent amount of sponsorship from other mining companies and they also are going to have the same aligned incentives as BITMAIN have. BITMAIN have led that charge of being a first into a post-merge ETC, but there are many many companies both making ASICs or all just other mining related companies be they pools or service providers and, so, yeah it’s really about getting that exposure for ETC of saying “well, look here we’re having this major proof of work a conference and we’re organizing it, and here we’ve got the ETC grants program, and, look, these are the projects”. So, the proof of work, sorry, that when we had the ETC Summit, you weren’t getting the same benefits from that because you had to be into ETC before you’d even think about it, so that isn’t really something that was effective at growing the ecosystem. It’s nice, it’s great to get the people together and to talk about projects that are happening, but it was, you know, here’s this little, this little group and we’re talking to each other and maybe you get some, you know, evergreen content of videos and things out of it, but it wasn’t really serving a great purpose for making things better yeah and I think you can have that at POW Summit. Maybe you can have that sort of stuff by sponsoring other conferences, you know, maybe there are other ones around, but a lot of them, you know, are going to be Bitcoin conferences that are probably Bitcoin only, right? You’re not even going to be welcome there.

BS: I think that the ETC Summit, specifically, was, is, or was an Ethereum Classic community summit, which is also a very good function for that kind of event and the POW Summit is more open and brings new people to ETC, so it’s two different purposes, but economically the ETC Summit was at a loss, a hundred thousand two hundred thousand, whatever was the money that the ETC Cooperative had to spend you didn’t recover it and with a POW Summit maybe you recover it all, or even a profit. Let’s see what happens. So, it’s a different.

BS: And, yeah, I mean, in terms of deciding to sort of, like, pause the ETC Summit at the time, you know, a primary thing there is like if, you know, if you’re paying because I think, you know, the losses were like, you know, $120k $150k something like that, or $180k, I think even one year, like, that’s way better deployed as a grant or something to try and build, than it was for that kind of social only function. And, the other thing is on POW Summit, well, you know, if you wanted to have these community get togethers, well, come here, you know, like, it’s, you know, it’s both for that broader thing but also, you know, to get together. You’d see people. You know, come on over guys! It’s happening!

DM: I think both products have a different function, and that they both are important, but one has a cost and the other one may even create a revenue and in a world of scarcity you have to allocate your funding as best as possible. Maybe in the future we can do first semester the ETC Summit and the second semester of the POW Summit and they synergistic both, and we have both functions, no? Because the community, you have acquisition and you have retention, and both functions are very important. Okay, so the last question I think is already answered, which is, what is the benefit to ETC? I think the POW Summit, and the fact that ETCC grants program is a sponsor now, you said it’s twenty thousand dollars?

BS: Yeah, that’s right.

DM: That’s a gold sponsor?

BS: Yeah.

DM: So, the ETC grants program is promoting to potentially bring new projects to ETC, so it’s clearly, it’s clearly those are the benefits for ETC. So, bueno, that’s great, Bob. Thank you very much for the information, congratulations for getting this money, for the POW Summit. Also, for for the POW Summit, I mean on the website, like you said some of the speakers the speakers are amazing, the lineup, and I think that you said that you have sponsors and it’s becoming, like, a very impactful event. In a good spot, I mean in Prague, in Europe. I think it’s a very good spot.

BS: Yeah, it’s gonna be fun.

DM: And, so people to go and see who are the speakers and to get tickets and to see where to organize their logistics to get there, they have to go to?

BS: powsummit.com

DM: Good, powsummit.com

BS: That’s right.

DM: Excellent all right. Bueno, thank you very much, Bob.

BS: Okay, have a great day everyone!

DM: You too! Bye-bye.

BS: Bye-bye.

Stay tuned for more interviews and presentations of our winners!

To learn more about the POW Summit or to get tickets go to: https://powsummit.com/

To see the full list of winners go here: https://etcgrants.softr.app/projects-list-en

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