Trust Machine: The Story of Blockchain

I'm Lauri Love.

I'm a electrical engineerstudent and activist,

internet busybody, believer in freedom

and autonomy andopportunity and franchise,

and try to do the thingsthat I can do to help those.

We're here at the site of theGrenfell Tower atrocity, where

people burned to their death.

So there's a few hundred people here

to have a silent walk to markthe fact that there's still

unfinished business here.

And that happened in aself-organized, decentralized

way.

And one of the benefits of the internet,

as long as we maintain that freedom,

is that there's low barriers of entry

to being involved in a protest action

or in a community responseto address a problem.

And we'll need that whenthe things that we rely on

to address problems fall short.

And increasingly,they're seeming to do so.

A lot of people usetechnology on a daily basis.

They don't really understand it.

They don't understand the waythat it can be used to control,

or it can be used to liberate.

When we use Twitter or when we use Facebook,

we're not really the users,we're not really the customers.

We're the product.

Every day that you're on that internet,

on that social network,you're being strip mined.

Your consumption habits, your choice

of what entertainment to watch, tie

down to a fixed identity that's correlated

with your purchasing.

You are being monetized on a daily basis,

and there's no informed bargaining there

because people didn't understandthat this was potentially

a system of control until it became one.

The internet is now a tool of the accumulation

of central power.

What that means is we're in a precarious position

if we don't take back someof that freedom and autonomy.

The blockchain enables differentkinds of pattern and structure

to grow.

It enables you to collaborate,not just on the level of ideas,

but on the level ofvalue and value creation.

Gives you an actual power toeffect change in the world.

And it's going to scare the shit out

of some very powerful people.

I've also told people

that it can trade at $100,000before it trades to zero.

If you're stupid enough to buyit, you'll pay the price for it

one day.

I don't personally understand it.

Who cares about Bitcoin?

Bitcoin's rollercoaster ride has seemingly

come from virtually nowhere andinto the public consciousness,

of course, over the last couple years--

If you're a modern criminal,

chances are you've used to buy guns, drugs,

and even launder money.

So there is a use case for Bitcoin--

if you're a criminal.

Great, great product.

I mean that.

I don't know who started it.

Who's actually there?

Is it ISIS?

Bitcoin is still in that sort of dark period

that most people don't understand it,

but are willing to trade because they think--

Make no mistake.

This is the Wild West.

There are now 1,300 cryptocurrencies--

Don't want to see investors make

the mistake of getting in here if they

are getting into somethingthat's fraudulent.

-no consumer protection.

-going up in thenext three to five years.

Is it a risk?

Absolutely.

Why not make a buck?

-biggest--

Why not make a buck?

I don't understand it.

Why not make a buck?

We don't know--

Why not make a buck?

The charts are ugly.

Why not make a-- why not make a-- why not

make a-- why not make a buck?

The underlying technology,it's called blockchain.

--Bitcoin price might be in a bubble,

but I think the blockchaintechnology behind it

is here to stay.

The next generation of the internet.

The informationage is only in its infancy,

and yet we have already seen a barrage

of disruptive technologies.

Perhaps the most captivating andpolarizing of these innovations

is cryptocurrency and blockchain.

Do they represent a revolution that

will drive the next phase of this era,

or are they a sham createdby overzealous hackers

and fraudsters?

To find the answer requires going

back to the early days of the internet itself.

Late 1970s, early 1980s.

One of the beautiful things about internet

back in those days, there was nocentral point of control in it.

If you could talk anybody on the Net

into being your neighbor on the Usenet,

then you could get copiesof any message they got.

It was sort of like a forum,but distributed worldwide.

You could post messages in couple

of hundred different topic areas,

and that message would go into your computer.

And then the next time it made a phone call out

to one of its neighboring computers,

that message would get transferred.

So it would spreadthroughout the whole network.

There was a very utopian ideal dream

with the internet.

It was a realized ideal of not being vested

in centralized power or authority,

but being a network that is opento all that anyone can access.

The internet was democratized.

A goal of theproject is to permit everyone--

young and old, rich and poor--

to be linked through computer networks.

There was a rapidadvance in the '80s and '90s.

Sort of, like, private internets.

And then, boom, the wholepublic thing just exploded.

We saw the warning signs

when the first centralizedservices were introduced.

The negotiation changed betweenthe user and the provider

of the service.

Imagine if you bought a house,and the basement was locked,

and only the original buildingcontractor had the key.

If you needed to make a change, repair anything,

you had to go to him.

You're at that person's mercy.

The internet becamean integral part of our lives,

upending many establishedforms of business

and promising a connected,democratized world

through social networks.

Criticism began to grow as the internet became

more centralized.

While its worldwide user base expanded,

power was being concentratedin only a handful

of giant services and platforms.

But in 2008, everything started to change.

We're in the midst

of a serious financial crisis.

I cannot underscore enoughhow serious an issue this is.

Amid a world economyon the verge of collapse,

a theoretical manifesto emergedby a pseudonymous creator named

Satoshi Nakamoto.

While some have been falsely identified

as Bitcoin's creator--

I just believe that somebodyput that fictitious name

in there.

-and othershave claimed to be Satoshi

in the flesh--

So you're going to show methat Satoshi Nakamoto is you.

Yes.

-the true identityof Satoshi is still unconfirmed.

We don't knowwho Satoshi Nakamoto really is.

Satoshi Nakamoto might be Satoshi Nakamoto.

It might be the NSA.

It might be a company.

It might be a smallwoman living in Arkansas.

We literally have no idea.

But one thing seems clear--

whoever created Bitcoin andits underlying technology

had their sights set onupending centralized power

on the internet and beyond.

How would you explainthe appearance of Bitcoin?

Well, I think what's interesting

there is suddenly thisthing came out of nowhere.

It actually made a lot of newtypes of transaction possible

that wouldn't have been possible before.

This website called Silk Road was starting

to actually use cryptocurrency to do

these illegal transactions.

And it also brought Bitcoinonto everybody's radar.

You want heroin,opium, cannabis, ecstasy,

psychedelics, stimulants.

You name it, they have it.

So people were panicked.

A lot of people in law enforcement

didn't really know what to do about this.

They thought that this wasgoing to completely undermine

all of our legal systems and our law enforcement.

And to a certain extent, it did.

Government needs to payattention to this technology.

This was made all the more clear last month,

when federal law enforcementtook down and seized

an online marketplace called the Silk

Road, on which many illegalproducts and services were

bought and sold via Bitcoin.