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