[Music]
Buckminster Fuller he was a a great guy
he had a lot of interesting and
insightful quotes and I’m gonna start a
talk with one of them here is pointing
out that if you actually want to change
things and it’s it’s no good fighting
right that doesn’t lead to anything in
fact the way to change things is to
create something new that obsoletes the
existing order so I want to explore what
the existing order is because unless we
know that it’s going to be difficult to
understand how it can change here’s a
few pictures of some buildings places
does anyone know can anyone identify any
of these feel free to shout out New York
Stock Exchange yep yeah that’s right
Sega Montecarlo indeed yep okay so the
UK Land Registry is the top right
PayPal’s headquarters top middle and
actually the bottom right isn’t quite
the existing order the bottom right is
the now-defunct Lehman Brothers Bank
what do they all have in common
institutions right they do things they
they they sit at the center of society
they manage people’s business they
manage people’s assets they manage
people’s transactions but I want to look
a bit deeper I want to understand better
what these all have in common
in fact they operate in a pretty similar
way they all have very specific
operational building blocks they begin
by accepting instructions instructions
from their clients or from the external
world really these are just messages
they’re messages that are authenticated
in some way for example a bank might by
virtue of seeing me in person sign an
order maybe it was a phone call a casino
might often to get a message by simply
having a croupier that sees that I am
placing a bet with my chips on the table
by moving them on to a particular
portion
the other two things are in fact
computation and record storage so
different institutions manage their
computation and record storage in
different ways a bank of course has lots
of records of people’s account balances
and the computation is relatively simple
it’s addition and subtraction by and
large with some multiplication for
managing interest rates Casino might
have a little bit more multiplication in
there but very similar activities now if
you break it down in this way we find we
don’t quite get what it is to be one of
these institutions there’s something
missing this is what we would call a
computer in the 1940s it’s it’s really
the inner workings of an institution
it’s a lot of people who are processing
information they’re doing arithmetic
there are some records at the back you
can see in the back of the picture some
drawers where they will get up and go to
in all the store will retrieve some
information and all the instructions
coming in periodically from the
mathematicians that actually want those
computations to be done but this misses
the point
in fact the institution cannot simply be
boiled down into these three things with
a large building around them
institutions deal with contention
they’d have to deal with contention
because they are managing economically
important data the land registry office
manages the information that determines
whether I own some property or I do not
banks have numbers in them the numbers
are not meaningless numbers they
determine the difference between rich
and poor they manage contention by
virtue of having this fourth attribute
in addition to the three attributes of
operation they have authority and it’s
with this authority that they can
determine that they can give semantics
to these numbers to this data its
authority which is the difference
between the Land Registry being a
shopping list of property that I would
like to own
and the difference between owning a
house and not we can then build a better
model of what it means to be an
institution an institution is this
information processing but it’s backed
up with authority some institutions like
for example aspects of the government
their their authority is actually the
military right the police force the
security forces others rely on the
government in order to exert their
authority by virtue of civil law such as
PayPal the banks and so forth and this
is pretty a pretty good model of what it
actually is to be an institution and
therefore a pretty good model of how
society works economically speaking in
its innards we can model the way that
society works as being a bunch of these
institutions each of course with their
own cartman their own authority and this
is pretty much how society has worked
for centuries now of course in the mean
time there have been improvements to how
we can determine whether a message is
authenticated instead of using telephone
calls or signatures we increasingly use
things like elliptic curve cryptography
a branch of mathematics that allows us
to know whether someone purporting to be
a particular identity is actually that
identity without giving any of the
information that could allow others to
claim the same thing away instead of
storing things in books we store things
instead of magnetic media or
increasingly little microchips
solid-state media and rather than using
abacuses or handwriting arithmetic we
use of course silicon we end up with
computers unfortunately within while
within an institution that computers can
allow things to go much faster than they
would otherwise have been going between
institutions and across trust boundaries
they are of no use in fact the world is
much like a set of walled gardens within
the garden you’re free to play you can
take in too
you are you accept the authority of the
household that actually owns the garden
but it’s very difficult to get between
the gardens in reality this boils down
to banks and various financial
institutions make having it very
difficult time consolidating
transactions that go between them but
the more important thing is that as
individuals and small business owners
it’s very difficult for us to interact
with each other if we don’t yet know or
trust each other instead we have to go
to these guardians of society these
intermediaries these trusted authorities
the middlemen in order to interact and
this comes down we can see this every
day if I want to interact with my
friends I go to a website the website is
called facebook.com I go and contact
Mark Zuckerberg company in order to pass
on a message to tell my friends hey
maybe we should go out this is not quite
the way the world was meant to be
I should not need to contact Mark
Zuckerberg
in order to actually say hello to my
friends there is a new technology which
was mentioned just before I came on
stage which changes things which
obsoletes this old order this is my
artistic rendition of this new
technology atop the picture reads a
pluribus unum from the many one and what
the technology allows us to do is to
come together globally speaking and form
a consensus form a single opinion on
what happened and when it happened and
what should happen because of it
effectively to form a single institution
now the institution will operate
correctly down to the rules of
mathematics and economics that this
system works on in effect everybody can
ensure that the the system as a whole is
operating correctly from their own point
of view everybody has the
to check in that sense blockchain has
solved this issue of multi-party
contention and it’s done so without
having to have redress to a human
organization we don’t anymore need to
trust strictly speaking in order to
interact economically with somebody that
we do not know and that’s the first time
that we’ve been able to do that in
society which means practically speaking
we’ve just commoditized this crazy asset
probably the the most expensive asset to
hold of all trust and I put it to you
that in the future trusting an opaque
institution a middleman
merchant or intermediary with our
interests will be as archaic a concept
as reckoning on abacuses today thank you
[Applause]
Buckminster Fuller he was a a great guy
he had a lot of interesting and
insightful quotes and I’m gonna start a
talk with one of them here is pointing
out that if you actually want to change
things and it’s it’s no good fighting
right that doesn’t lead to anything in
fact the way to change things is to
create something new that obsoletes the
existing order so I want to explore what
the existing order is because unless we
know that it’s going to be difficult to
understand how it can change here’s a
few pictures of some buildings places
does anyone know can anyone identify any
of these feel free to shout out New York
Stock Exchange yep yeah that’s right
Sega Montecarlo indeed yep okay so the
UK Land Registry is the top right
PayPal’s headquarters top middle and
actually the bottom right isn’t quite
the existing order the bottom right is
the now-defunct Lehman Brothers Bank
what do they all have in common
institutions right they do things they
they they sit at the center of society
they manage people’s business they
manage people’s assets they manage
people’s transactions but I want to look
a bit deeper I want to understand better
what these all have in common
in fact they operate in a pretty similar
way they all have very specific
operational building blocks they begin
by accepting instructions instructions
from their clients or from the external
world really these are just messages
they’re messages that are authenticated
in some way for example a bank might by
virtue of seeing me in person sign an
order maybe it was a phone call a casino
might often to get a message by simply
having a croupier that sees that I am
placing a bet with my chips on the table
by moving them on to a particular
portion
the other two things are in fact
computation and record storage so
different institutions manage their
computation and record storage in
different ways a bank of course has lots
of records of people’s account balances
and the computation is relatively simple
it’s addition and subtraction by and
large with some multiplication for
managing interest rates Casino might
have a little bit more multiplication in
there but very similar activities now if
you break it down in this way we find we
don’t quite get what it is to be one of
these institutions there’s something
missing this is what we would call a
computer in the 1940s it’s it’s really
the inner workings of an institution
it’s a lot of people who are processing
information they’re doing arithmetic
there are some records at the back you
can see in the back of the picture some
drawers where they will get up and go to
in all the store will retrieve some
information and all the instructions
coming in periodically from the
mathematicians that actually want those
computations to be done but this misses
the point
in fact the institution cannot simply be
boiled down into these three things with
a large building around them
institutions deal with contention
they’d have to deal with contention
because they are managing economically
important data the land registry office
manages the information that determines
whether I own some property or I do not
banks have numbers in them the numbers
are not meaningless numbers they
determine the difference between rich
and poor they manage contention by
virtue of having this fourth attribute
in addition to the three attributes of
operation they have authority and it’s
with this authority that they can
determine that they can give semantics
to these numbers to this data its
authority which is the difference
between the Land Registry being a
shopping list of property that I would
like to own
and the difference between owning a
house and not we can then build a better
model of what it means to be an
institution an institution is this
information processing but it’s backed
up with authority some institutions like
for example aspects of the government
their their authority is actually the
military right the police force the
security forces others rely on the
government in order to exert their
authority by virtue of civil law such as
PayPal the banks and so forth and this
is pretty a pretty good model of what it
actually is to be an institution and
therefore a pretty good model of how
society works economically speaking in
its innards we can model the way that
society works as being a bunch of these
institutions each of course with their
own cartman their own authority and this
is pretty much how society has worked
for centuries now of course in the mean
time there have been improvements to how
we can determine whether a message is
authenticated instead of using telephone
calls or signatures we increasingly use
things like elliptic curve cryptography
a branch of mathematics that allows us
to know whether someone purporting to be
a particular identity is actually that
identity without giving any of the
information that could allow others to
claim the same thing away instead of
storing things in books we store things
instead of magnetic media or
increasingly little microchips
solid-state media and rather than using
abacuses or handwriting arithmetic we
use of course silicon we end up with
computers unfortunately within while
within an institution that computers can
allow things to go much faster than they
would otherwise have been going between
institutions and across trust boundaries
they are of no use in fact the world is
much like a set of walled gardens within
the garden you’re free to play you can
take in too
you are you accept the authority of the
household that actually owns the garden
but it’s very difficult to get between
the gardens in reality this boils down
to banks and various financial
institutions make having it very
difficult time consolidating
transactions that go between them but
the more important thing is that as
individuals and small business owners
it’s very difficult for us to interact
with each other if we don’t yet know or
trust each other instead we have to go
to these guardians of society these
intermediaries these trusted authorities
the middlemen in order to interact and
this comes down we can see this every
day if I want to interact with my
friends I go to a website the website is
called facebook.com I go and contact
Mark Zuckerberg company in order to pass
on a message to tell my friends hey
maybe we should go out this is not quite
the way the world was meant to be
I should not need to contact Mark
Zuckerberg
in order to actually say hello to my
friends there is a new technology which
was mentioned just before I came on
stage which changes things which
obsoletes this old order this is my
artistic rendition of this new
technology atop the picture reads a
pluribus unum from the many one and what
the technology allows us to do is to
come together globally speaking and form
a consensus form a single opinion on
what happened and when it happened and
what should happen because of it
effectively to form a single institution
now the institution will operate
correctly down to the rules of
mathematics and economics that this
system works on in effect everybody can
ensure that the the system as a whole is
operating correctly from their own point
of view everybody has the
to check in that sense blockchain has
solved this issue of multi-party
contention and it’s done so without
having to have redress to a human
organization we don’t anymore need to
trust strictly speaking in order to
interact economically with somebody that
we do not know and that’s the first time
that we’ve been able to do that in
society which means practically speaking
we’ve just commoditized this crazy asset
probably the the most expensive asset to
hold of all trust and I put it to you
that in the future trusting an opaque
institution a middleman
merchant or intermediary with our
interests will be as archaic a concept
as reckoning on abacuses today thank you
[Applause]
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