so I'm gonna go back and really try and nail this thing down so that you wind up with an operational understanding of the
blockchain that will allow you to correctly interpret its significance in
your life right and to do that we have to go back really 50 or so years into
the early days of computing because what what is making this so confusing is that
most of the practitioners in the blockchain space have 50 years of
history parked into their heads which forms an implicit matrix in which words
like distributed database hang so to really get this to hang together we've
got to go all the way back and we're gonna go through this kind of quickly
but I want to try and lay out the foundations in the past so that we can
meaningfully talk about the future so we conveniently have this stage which is set out in lumps and I'm gonna make
each one of these basically a ten year span so right back somewhere over here
in the darkness of history we've got the Second World War which is where the
computer was was originally created right the computer as it currently
exists was developed as a weapon to defeat the Nazis it was used to crack
the codes that allowed the Allies to paralyze the German war effort and
eventually defeat them and the link between cryptography and computation
goes all the way back to the birth in fact if you go even further back the
analog computers these monsters brass devices which were used way back in the day were actually created to calculate
gunnery tables for naval ships at war they wanted to be able to calculate the
trajectory of artillery so you come forward into the 1950s and you get this
kind of demilitarized computing all these machines and all these engineers
that have left of services and are coming in to you know create a new
generation and we're gonna take all this former military gear and we're gonna put it in the hands of businesses and back
in this prehistory the computers are the size of this room they weighed tons the
guy from IBM famously says that there might be a world market for perhaps five
computers a year right the data is stored on
cards and then eventually one inch wide magnetic tapes and the complexity of
these systems is such that it takes a roomful of programmers to get a simple
reliable system to do something a process an invoice right this is the prehistory and this is the mid mid-1960s
that were talking about so the game really begins to be recognizable in 1970
when you get the creation of an abstraction called
SQL in IBM by a guy called coder Edward Cod and it caught so SQL is this extremely forceful application of
mathematics to bring order to the chaos of tape machines back here you've got a
whole bunch of data basically just spattered across magnetic tape and
you've got huge machines that process the tape but when you want to retrieve
something you have to go and fish for the day to yourself move tape number
three forward 17 feet find me the record and give me back the first name and programming these things is glacially
slow it's a nightmarish so here is the first place where the heavy mouth really
enters the picture in this story which is the SQL abstraction assumes that you
create a multi-dimensional cube one tape machine per axis of the cube five tape
machines five dimensional cube you can imagine it kind of hanging in space you then have an abstract algebra which
allows you to take a locus a set space inside of the five dimensional cube
specify in ways which make sense the programmers fairly intuitively see where there might be a gap there and pull that
and that set of data out into something that looks like a spreadsheet and that
conceptual jump was at the time so revolutionary it took people were five
years to accept that it had happened and that actually worked and what came out
of that was the golden age of SQL right 1970 to 1990 just about all that we did
was take every single thing that we could fit into a database in business or
in the white world and we shoved it into a database
and right here in 1970 the machines were incredibly expensive and incredibly
fragile the people working with the machines actually wore white coats
because if you weren't wearing a white coat stray fibers from your clothing could interfere with the tapes Jam the
tape machines and destroy your customer data Ron so amount in this very fragile very
arcane very expensive system it's only just become technically feasible these
things are like laboratory artifacts right it's like going into you know CERN
or something like that when you want to inspect one of them and this sets the
mindset for databases right the way through 70s up until the beginning of the 80s that's the psychological
condition of the database and the organization's become siloed because all
the information that makes your organization work is stored inside of
one of these data temples right right around 84 you get the microcomputer
revolution the IBM PC the Apple all this kind of stuff and these are appliances
there are things that you can buy like a television and plug into your office
they are robust they're reasonably cheap as as well as four or five thousand
dollars amazing they are fairly easy to maintain and repair they are relatively
resistant to dust and humidity they're pretty much like a television in terms
of their operating characteristics one per desk seems possible and weirdly enough they can absolutely run database
software on them you can actually have a database kind of sort of like the big
thing you had over here but actually living on the machine that you have in
front of you and the kind of first real heavy use of an application that works
in that environment is a thing called Lotus 1-2-3 which is the first spreadsheet and this begins a revolution
that goes all the way through accounting but we're not gonna talk about
accounting too much but if you want to think about computers and Ledger's
starts here back in the 80s now this is 15 years from you know enormous with
fragile machinery and enormous expanse through to its
on a desktop can you imagine how disoriented the people that live through that technological transformation were
it was just as weird as what's happening now but it was happening somewhere over
there because we hadn't invented the Internet to bring you the news that
something weird it happened with computers now we get to kill in 1990 the
networking push really starts a long way back but it takes a long time to get the networking stuff to work 1990 is about
where you begin to get networking that's practical for real stuff yeah I got my
first email account about 91 and at that point there was no World Wide Web there
was a computer there was email there were chat programs but if you wanted a
document from another machine you got an interface that looked a bit like a file
browser and you clicked on the document you want then it loaded it onto your machine and then you opened it in
something to take a look at it and the notion that you could build the thing to
read the document into the thing that got you the document was quite radical
that was sort of a big deal and that was why the web was a big deal no one were bit weird paradigm stuff over here
through this period the computing is very much centered around data it's
structured it's hard it's rigid it's formulated it's tabulated the stuff is
very rigid the web builds on a different model of computing which is called
document-centric right document-centric computers are paper simulators right
they harm do things which look like documents you get email it looks like a
letter am you open up a graphics program it looks like a canvas there are things
that look like paintbrushes in term model of computing that we're using
right now is document-centric computing and the connection between databases and
that sort of data centric computing and document-centric computing is extremely
weak there are two completely different ways of getting the machine to do stuff
for you and getting data into documents is tricky as anybody who's ever done in
Excel merge knows and seriously right it's hard
getting documents into data is even harder which is the entire mass of
content management systems right scanning documents all of us these two
things don't mix together at all well so we come out through the 90s and you kind
of get to mid 95 maybe early 96 and people suddenly realize that one day in
the future you'll be able to make money on the internet there's just one problem there's no security which means if you
type your credit card into an internet form it will be bounced all around the
internet anybody can read it and they can steal money out of your account it's another five years until we get a
widely deployed solution that allows us to have encryption which lets us move
credit cards around the internet e-commerce doesn't really become a thing into hot 1999 2000 so we were already
here by the time you've got a computer that is capable of taking a payment from
you know the the internet again how fast is the rate of change does anybody even
remember when you couldn't put credit cards into the internet but you were all
alive pretty much but we forget so quickly what was possible or impossible
when you technology arrived so we're just gonna wash the memory out it's
quite hard even to think about what it was like before we had cell phones so you come forward to 2010 by 2010 I'm
gonna suggest that more or less everything you could do in a webpage had
been done to at least the first approximation more or less all the basic
stuff was there if you could do it with a computer that was basically a paper
simulator it had been done more or less now this is also roughly when Bitcoin
gets started and Bitcoin starts in some you know festering little weird
counterculture on the internet which I spent my entire 1990s and called
cyberpunk and the cypherpunks are straight out of science fiction they can't tell the difference between
science fiction and reality they generally speaking have an emotional intelligence Koecher around 75 to 50 it
took me a long time to grow over and one of the things which makes that scene
work the way that does is the enormous prevalence of autism so whenever you
hear somebody ragging on the Nerds right but ever you hear somebody ragging
on the nerds remember what they're doing generally speaking is picking on autistic people right it's really
important to understand that the people building the technologies on put your
society completely depends the people without whom the lights go out and the
food stays cold are heavily heavily heavily tending towards being on the
autistic spectrum so when you hear people laughing at the Nerds remember
they're often at people that are disabled there are also the people that
your civilization depends on so don't screw with them right so the cypherpunks come out and basically say in a very
naive way why do we need government and they go and they build this thing which
is essentially a central bank of the internet now you sort of think well that
was a bit of a big jump how did we go from we can finally take a credit card to central bank of the internet that's
what all of us spent about five years wondering as well what the hell did they
do because the technology arrived raw we could go to ask what satoshis intent was
because Satoshi was a ghost right the software was dropped onto the internet
there was some early discussion and then the guy vanished so we have no idea who
Satoshi was we don't know what the intent was there is nobody to go to
conferences and pitch the technology we were left with an artifact that to all intents and purposes might have been
created by a time-travel or under dropped it's about bigger jump um so
what did they do what they did was this right back over here the databases were
singular they existed in an atomic state one database per enterprise the network existed in some relational sense between
enterprises but because the database was perceived has been too fragile to let
anybody touch the database never directly communicated with the network
you always had a lots and lots and lots of guards and buffers and other stuff in
between to prevent the two things working properly and if you did actually
connect the databases kind of directly to each other you got another problem which was the database encoded the
worldview of the organization to organizations to different world views
you always needed something in between to translate
so you never got large-scale computer-to-computer connections that
allows you to create a shared model of reality between lots of different organizations and this shows up everyday
when you try and do something like process a claim on insurance and you
have to fill in the name and address details seventy four times for different organizations often three or four times
for the same organization the databases are kept separate from each other
there's no real connectivity between them and when you try and build
connections between the systems the complexity builds to the point where
it's too expensive to do so what they say you know mean when they say the word
distributed database is a database which is both like a database and like a network and this is the genius of
Bitcoin it fuses together the database and the network into a seamless hole
called blockchain everywhere there is data there is Network and everywhere there is Network there is data they're
completely fused inside of these systems so what that means is rather than having
all of these individual kind of ivory tower computer systems connected by a
network and then all the costs of moving things in and out you have a single
shared story of reality spread across all the machines simultaneously and when
it changes in one place it changes everywhere and this is such a powerful
abstraction it's such a powerful technology that the first thing they
implemented was the central bank of the internet that was the first thing they
did can you imagine to write you open by creating a single global currency which
is the first thing that has worked that way since we went off the gold standard
and the technology deployed is so powerful that it was done by either one
individual or a small group that remained a secret they basically
reinvented gold and that was the first move this is unimaginable strangeness to
somebody that spent their entire lifetime monkeying around with computers
oh my god what have we done so you get up to kind of where we are now right
basically 2015-2016 we're sort of midway through the process Bitcoin is well
established as a reality everybody is comfortable with bitcoins existence to
some degree what is it it's a bank account that stores magic internet money
that comes from the central bank of the internet which is a decentralized
database which is everywhere anoher maintained by a bunch of people you
don't understand but the funny thing is that if I describe to you how your
government works it's even worse right so every four years we hold a popularity
contest regionally we pick the person that is most likeable on television more
or less regardless of their values we know nothing about them because they're
protected by privacy that surrounds most individuals so they could be a person
playing a role and then we assemble these people into a large group that
gets to decide who lives and who dies every day right so you know don't assume
that because the new stuff is weird it's any weirder than the old stuff the old
stuff is just weird stuff you got used to now let me move a little forward to
this whole smart contract thing right so the smart contract is the third big
integrative step first we merge the network and the database to make the
blockchain then we take computer software code and put it into the shared
database into the blockchain so we take a little program and they can only be
little because it's just the beginning of the story and we take the little
program and we store it in the blockchain and that means everybody
that's connected to the block chain has the copy of exactly the same program and
programs when you run the program same data same code same result so now
everybody's got a copy of the database everybody's got a copy the code we all run the code at the same time we all put
the output back into the blockchain if there's a disagreement we find it
immediately we sort it out so in that sort of environment you have these
little programs which are just as transactional sending people money it's
like a wire transfer you go here and my fools across the network
it pops up there it's like a Bitcoin payment what kind of things the world programs do if this job has been done
pay bob if the job hasn't been done by the 31st of March send the money back to ours how you tiny little pieces of
business logic pulled out of the application stack and put onto the box
chain instead and this is the third big unification I work for a company called
consensus systems that uses aetherium which is the first really durable smart contract platform to build lots of
applications and those little programs do things like make sure the artists get
paid when their music is listened to they do things like streamline
transactions between banks through all kinds of simple useful things and we're
still only at the very beginning of the story right now the Bitcoin system processes about seven transactions a
second the etherium system does something like 20 so these are way back
in terms of speed they're way back over there her computers were in the 1960s on
punched cards now brace yourselves right now the challenge is to produce a thing
called a scaled blockchain and a scaled blockchain is watch-chain that doesn't
do 20 transactions a second it does roughly the same number of transactions
a second as Visa or Swift ten thousand 50 thousand a hundred thousand
transactions a second quarter of a million transactions a second and the
scaled blockchain is something that begins to provide us with something that
looks like a global computing surface onto which things like the internet
things could be loaded you could take the entire global financial system and
push it into a scale box chain you could take the entire Internet of Things and
push it into a scale blockchain you could take all of those machines in the
cloud you could put blockchain software onto them as Microsoft recently did with
a thing called a Dewar and then you could have a single global computing
surface that took all of our different bits and pieces of computing power and
turned them into a global knowledge resource that basically manages the
fundamental infrastructure of our society
instead of the cobbled-together nonsense that you get every time you talk to your
bank right and because these computer systems don't create new woe curses of
political control when they're built because they're decentralized what you
don't get is a position where the basic infrastructure of your society a stock
that your society runs on is automatically owned by a set of
corporations or even a set of governments what you have is something
which is constituted by the will of the people and serves their purposes which
is after all the original intention of government now this is where we have to
go back and separate reality from fantasy because this is the mistake that's made it almost impossible for
people to understand Bitcoin remember I mentioned the cypherpunks back here and their inability to tell the difference
between science fiction and political reality the notion that we're simply
going to automate away all of the things which constitute government makes a ton
of sense to people that spend 23 hours a day online and I'm really framing this
very carefully because this is causing enormous trouble but if you're somebody
that spends only a little bit of your time interacting with computers it's
pretty obvious that the computer only exists as a rectangle of glowing light somewhere in your room or in your hand
and and out here from that perspective it's pretty clear that if you teach
computers governed resources a lot of trivial stuff in your life gets a lot easier like paying your taxes or making
sure that your telephone works or you know doing your banking whatever happens
to be but it's not obvious that this is a replacement for the general edifice of
government and the tension between the way the world looks to the technologists
and the way the world looks to everybody else is what's at the heart of the fight
with entities like uber because uber makes perfect sense to a technologist
and it really upsets people that have run a taxi monopoly for 150 years and
those kind of discussions and tensions are as much about the different
neurological makeup of the people who developed the world view as they are
about the technology what we're really having here is a discussion about what
kinds of minds run our society is our society predominantly run by charming
glib slightly sociopathic people who are good on television or is it
predominantly run by people that live in front of computers and control the world
with numbers and that debate has gone on inside of our culture since the two
cultures period of British history where there was this discussion about whether
arts and sciences could ever get along well turns out the sciences guys are now figuring out how to govern instead of
the lawyers and this is creating an enormous amount of turbulence but the
turbulence is not well described because it's happening extremely quickly and the
only place that there's a literary canon that really describes these processes is science fiction right if you want mental
models of how to think about the reality that we're currently in you have to go
back to the science fiction a thirty years ago published under a general
title of cyberpunk right and cyberpunk was the fiction that describes the reality that we're now in it's about
virtual reality it's about drones it's about biotechnology that regrows your
nervous system it's about virtual currencies and
artificial intelligence and we would all have a much better grip on the reality
that we found ourselves in if science fiction hadn't been kicked out of the
Witter recon and sometime after World War two
there's a definite push where science fiction is pushed away from the
mainstream of literature and into its own kind of genre box and as a result
the place where most of the thinking and analysis has been done about these technologies and what they mean to us as
a society has been banished from polite company it all exists in a place called
genre fiction and it's no longer considered to be real literature as a
result the mainstream can arts population have been left without mythic
narratives to allow them to interpret the reality that the technicians have
created and what we've seen this evening is a perfect demonstration of that gap
because actually getting the message across requires a completely different
perspective to the one which is natural to the technicians
you know I'm lucky in that I've managed to bridge that gap because I was always as much a writer as I was a programmer
and I've done about you comments are both in my life so the thing that I
wanted to leave you with is this the dialogue about how these technologies
are going to fit into our society is going to be a dialogue about class
it's going to be about whether the society is run by lawyers or technicians
both are the wrong answer it has to be run by the people but for the people to
be able to intelligently make decisions in a society where the core technologies
that run our society are rapidly becoming so complicated we no longer
understand them we have to do better the guessing which technocrat or which
lawyer to put in charge without a fundamental reawaken event of
reawakening of interest in science and technology and without reclaiming
science fiction as a fundamental literacy for the present that we're in
we're going to be left making decisions more or less at random depending on what
charming person tells us the news story so my challenge to all of you is start
reading cyberpunk it's painful right it's painful right it's much of it is
not very well written many of the ideas look almost like it's kind of weird
potboiler fiction about the present but if you sift through carefully and it
suggests starting with an anthology called mirror shades which is a short
will book with short stories nothing to challenge you too much if you go back and read that stuff what you could begin
to flash out is the stories that all of the programmers hand in their heads when they built these technologies and that's
how you get your head around what's happening if you share the myths at the
technical class half when they create these things you can begin to understand
the technology in a mythic way which is how we understand it you have to learn
the ways of our people because you're living in the world that we create for
you