The secretary of The Robin Hood Group — that once stole 10 percent of circulating ETH from under a black hat hacker’s nose — wants to change the way we think about childbirth.
A former chemical engineer, Griff Green, 36, traded in his savings for valuable metals, which he used to travel the world for years before settling as a Bitcoin missionary in Ecuador. He led a white hat hacker warfare against the infamous black hat of The DAO, and he chased cryptocurrency camps at Burning Man to spread the word about crypto — while dressed as Santa and riding a massive metallic Doge.
His next major mission, with the blockchain-based charity endeavors Giveth and Commons Stack, would be to change the game of economics into one in which contributions transform into investments… investments that could even wind up with the donor making a gain.
DAO master
The morning of June 17, 2016, was a pivotal day at cryptocurrency — it was the day The DAO was hacked. The DAO was arguably the first major decentralized autonomous company, having raised 14% of circulating Ether in existence in the time from over 11,000 investors in May 2016. It served as an investor-driven venture fund, with tokenholders able to vote investment suggestions.
However a malicious actor found an exploit allowing funds to be progressively drained in The DAO’s accounts. Green immediately organized his white hat hacker collective, The Robin Hood Group, to launch a counteroffensive.
He was hired by Slock.it, a firm developing on ETH, as a community director responsible for coordinating and teaching The DAO’s community.
Green jumped onto a Slack station for The DAO’s investors, imploring them not to fear as his team hurried to drain what was left of their job’s holdings before the Turks could. He encouraged users to spam the system as much as you possibly can slow down it and increase gas fees, making it harder for the Actual hacker:
„The DAO is being assaulted. It’s been going on for 3-4 hours, it is draining ETH at a rapid speed. This is not a drill… We need to spam the Network so that we could mount a counter strike all of the brightest minds in the ETH world are in this.“
At the exact same time, his group started replicating the hacker’s attacks for itself, draining The DAO’s pockets of ETH before the hacker could take it.
„We had 10 percent of Ether in existence.“
„We had been taking a massive threat,“ Green acknowledges regarding the legality of preemptively stealing tens of millions in Ether therefore the hacker couldn’t. The ETH series was controversially forked after the hack in order to“return time“ to before the hackbut ETH Classic emerged as a still-valuable token. This meant that Green and team effectively held 10 percent of ETC with the funds they had stolen.
Legal threats started pouring in, telling the group that the ETC should be distributed, regardless of the fact that“We’re just normal people, we did not have a business,“ he says looking back. All the members of this group jumped on planes and“flew to Switzerland to find legal representation, and it was the very first time we met in person.“ At some point, the funds were returned via a DApp that Green’s team coded.
About a year later in November 2017, the group had comparable success rescuing $210 million in the Parity multisig wallet hack. We stole all this money, but you can trust us because we already gave back all the money in The DAO,“‘ Green recalls. But he clarifies that this was insecure for the now-public group because anybody can use Google to learn where they — and thus, the personal keys — are available. This night, Green“slept on a mattress having a baseball bat before the doorway,“ stressing someone might come to choose the keys by force.
Hacking is not the sole way in which Green has put himself at risk in the name of his principles. After the autonomous region of Catalonia tried to vote for independence from Spain in 2017, Green moved into a polling station to serve as a human shield to protect the electoral process from“the authorities, who had been beating people to steal the ballots.“ This experience convinced Green that decentralized governance on the blockchain can only work efficiently if individuals can conduct their habitats without relying on centralized net providers. The result was DAppNode, which assists individuals around the world set up peer-to-peer infrastructure.
My girlfriend got envious — we literally broke up because she was envious of Bitcoin.“
In Ecuador, Green went around college campuses, popping into random computer science classes to give demonstrations about Bitcoin and teach everybody how to set up a pocket, that he would then finance with a small amount, asking every individual to locate three new people to send a portion of their coins.
„I’d knock on the classroom door unannounced, and I’d be like,’Hey, I want to give everybody in this classroom just a bit of Bitcoin and describe it to them.‘ I’d say five times out of seven, they allow me ,“ Green recalls with a laugh. Soon, however, he noticed that Ecuador was moving to prohibit Bitcoin, so that he abandoned his missionary post. „I needed to bond,“ he recounts.
The lending principle
Green organizes DECENTRAL and DOGECENTRAL, two cryptocurrency-themed camps at Burning Man, that will be a radically oriented 10-day festival founded upon 10 principles such as radical inclusion, gifting, revolutionary self-reliance and civic obligation. With the camps, Green intends to“build a bridge between the Burning Man community and the crypto community therefore there may be an exchange of ideas and culture,“ something that he feels“can change the world somehow.“ Both communities have much in common as socially significant movements but tend toward conflicting extremes regarding economic philosophy.
Swayed by his own adventures in both political activism and engineering, Green is critical of their“hyper capitalism“ that he sees in the cryptocurrency market. „If all you know is self explanatory, then you’re just going to do capitalism better, and that I do not know if that’s always the right thing. But hey, look, there’s this gift economy!“ He says, referring to what’s referred to as the“gifting principle“ at Burning Man, where money and any type of trade or barter is banned.
Consider what economics really is — let’s go a step beyond citizenship and start studying how we could coordinate value production. ‚„
Green thinks of economies like games — one can play the game in a philosophical way to gain themselves or else they could play for the advantage of others. This desire to create an economic environment that rewards people for doing social good inspired him to start crypto contribution platform Giveth in late 2016. „Imagine if we integrate values and culture as part of this economic system?“ he ponders.
Giveth currently functions as a“transparent and traceable donation platform“ where anybody can trace how their donated funds are spent. „I’d say it’s like an Indiegogo for donations,“ Green says. In the coming months, there are plans to launch a government token, to be handed out to all donors in accordance with their contributions on the stage. These governance tokens could be the something akin to a tax return, where donors receive some money back for making contributions.
Commons Stack, a Giveth spinoff that Green co-founded, is producing a“general-purpose framework for nonprofit economies“ by allowing donors to effectively invest in charity-related tokens. „If more people also purchase that token because they believe that this nonprofit economy will create value, then you as an early supporter would actually make money — the exact same way it works in the stock exchange,“ Green explains. Obviously, it is totally possible that donors will never get all their money back, however, Green is convinced that that’s OK because“the other option is a 100% reduction“ of donated funds.
„Every economy is a game. The principles of this game determine your score, and your goal is to find a high score. When you play the’American economy game,‘ you attempt to earn as much money as possible. However, while you play the’help orphans game,‘ you attempt and get as much money as possible by assisting orphans.“
