Our panelists today are all people working in this space and are building solutions that
are much more than just the person-to-person payment that Satoshi had described in his
original white paper as the peer-to-peer digital cash system.
I'm hoping that today you guys can get an idea of the things that people are actually
working on and what people will be building in the future.
So our first panelist today is Jameson.
And Jameson previously was actually here in Durham, North Carolina, working at Bronto,
as he described, and now is currently a software engineer at BitGo, and he's also the creator
of Satoshi, which is one of the clients for Bitcoin that allows you to infer tons of information.
Andy Beal works with Crowley Corporate Attorneys.
He is an entrepreneur himself, as I understand it, having built Lumagu, which is a marketplace
for a student textbook exchange.
And Shannon Code, who is an engineer at Ribbit.me.
He's also a local entrepreneur and engineering consultant.
So thank you guys for joining us.
So I'd like to typically start with what do you think, in your words, the blockchain is?
How do you typically describe what the blockchain is?
So let's go ahead and start with Jameson here.
Sure.
Well, one thing that I usually start off with is that the blockchain is whatever you want
it to be.
But I, of course, am an engineer, so I see it from an engineering standpoint.
So personally, I see the blockchain as a new type of time-stamped, immutable database.
Or accounting ledger, if you will.
It's not like any type of database that we've ever seen before, but due to its simplicity
and a lot of the unique aspects of the blockchain, we can do just a number of things with this
new type of database that we're never possible.
OK.
Shannon?
Sure.
So Jameson described it pretty well.
I typically describe it as a cryptographically provable database, or a database that can't
be edited after the fact.
So when things are put into it, they're time-stamped and they're locked in the future.
In the future, we can go back and see exactly what the state was at any given time.
Well, can you describe a little bit more, what is the importance of time-standing?
Why is that so important?
In my opinion, the fact that we can prove that a certain entity existed at a certain
point in time is extremely valuable.
Later on, or in the future, somebody can't say, you can't prove that this particular
thing existed if we have this cryptographically provable blockchain, because we can say mathematically,
we can prove that this existed at this given point in time, and there's no way around
any of this universe.
This is fact.
My time-stamped databases have existed for a long time, but they were always just timestamps
of whatever you wanted to put into it.
So now you actually know that that was the time.
Yeah.
OK.
Now, Andy, you have, I think, a unique perspective on this, and your description of the blockchain
might come from a different angle.
Is that accurate?
Well, no, I mean, I would, instead of calling it a ledger, I would call it, use a different
phrase, which is a recording system, and it just shows the state of things at a particular
time, as they were.
So I think it's most commonly used now to show the state of the Bitcoins that are controlled
by certain addresses, but it's certainly not limited to that.
OK.
So I love to geek out about all the various uses of the Bitcoin blockchain.
I will go on for hours just talking about what can actually be done with it, but what
is it that excites you guys?
And this is an open question.
What is it that excites you most about the blockchain, and why is that impactful?
Well, I mean, the fancy $2 word would be, of course, disintermediation.
And so when I give talks about the future of Bitcoin, and I'm just trying to plant
seeds in people's minds, the main thing that I tell them is, if you can think of any economic
interaction that occurs today that requires a trusted third party, then a blockchain system
may enable you to completely remove the third party from that equation.
And of course, that can result in any number of efficiencies, or speed ups, or remove potential
for corruption.
So it's an ideological sense.
It's this idea that we have something in history that has plagued us, and that you think the
blockchain offers the opportunity to remove that.
OK?
Somebody else?
Who else?
So one of the things that really excites me is that we're on the cusp of discovering
this new technology that might solve a lot of problems in the future.
There's a couple of problems that we know that it solves very well right now.
And there's a whole lot of experimentation going on.
And as an entrepreneur, as an engineer, I really enjoy experimenting and being involved
in that, and watching what's going to come about in the cusp.
So I think a lot of people right now are trying to discover what it's going to be most valuable
for.
And that's a very exciting time to be in, because there's a whole bunch of innovation
going on really fast.
And it's something that everybody doesn't get to experience in their lives.
Andy, what do you get excited about?
Three things.
One is transfer.
It's a revolutionary way to transfer something online and have that be audible.
It's also a really powerful way to secure data, I think, and it gives you the ability
to distribute control of that data.
I think we'll see the convergence of cybersecurity and the way we store control money on the
blockchain.
If you can distribute control of Bitcoins, we should be able to distribute control of
information as well.
At the end of the day, it's all just data.
And then I also think it's a really powerful tool for rights management, whether it's property
rights or intellectual property rights.
It goes back to the timestamp tool.
That's really, really important if you're an artist, showing when you created something.
So in that, I think all those things will create a ton of value for the people that
are responsible for that data.
Okay.
So you mentioned the artist use case.
I think that's a really good instance where you have a particular work of art and through
something called proof of existence, which is one of the earliest ideas in using this
database that we have as record of account, this ledger, and using a mathematical function
called a hash function, you can represent that work of art absolutely provably as actually
a small piece of data.
And you use the Bitcoin blockchain to store that piece of data.
And the moment that transaction hits the Bitcoin blockchain, it is stored there forever.
So if anyone else produces a copy of that piece of art, they can rerun that same calculation,
that hash function, and go look at it and see if it ever had existed before.
And if it has, then you know when it existed, provably so.
Let's unwrap these use cases a little bit though.
So beyond just simple artists, movies, music, things like that, you talk about asset management
more than just simply Bitcoin.
It's pretty obvious that Bitcoin is something that people are moving in this blockchain.
Andy, why don't you talk about some of those other types of properties or things that you
might represent in the blockchain?
Yeah, I think securities is probably the one that's most covered in the media right now.
Bitcoin has, that technology has been adopted by a lot, well not a lot, but several traditional
financial institutions or markets.
And I think, use the analogy, but you're just, you're coloring a small amount of Bitcoin
and assigning an asset class to that color.
And that's a really, really powerful thing.
And I think you can, I mean you can take that model and use it across any other industry
where ownership of something is moving back and forth, and it's a really easy thing to
do.
So you're talking about equities a little bit.
I think it's overstock.com has launched Project Medici and I think more recently has launched
T-Zero where the trade is the settlement, it's this idea that rather than going through
a clearing house or an exchange, you can actually represent ownership of a company, part of
an equity, as one of these tokens on the blockchain.
Simple possession of that token is the share itself and that entitles you to participate
in anything that that means in the construction of that organization.
So rather than having to wait T plus three days, which is the traditional model for when
you actually execute a trade on an exchange, you wait three days for settlement and that's
actually what happens behind the scenes.
Here in this model, there is a really interesting case where there might be something like cross
chain where one chain is tracking equities, one chain is tracking Bitcoin, and there's
going to be a swap between those two chains to prove provably exchange a crypto equity
for a cryptocurrency.
That's one really clear case and I'm really excited about that myself.
Jameson, you've done some things I think related to auditing and other uses of the blockchain.
Can you describe a little bit about that, like your work at BitGo?
So most of my work at BitGo is really low level blockchain indexing, which has just
led me to understand how the data structures work.
So at the low level, as I said in my talk, a Bitcoin itself is really an unspent transaction
output and you're using all of these cryptographic mechanisms to lock it so that only you or
the holder of the private key or set of private keys unlock it.
So if we then think of this unspent output as like the actual ownership of a thing, then
when we start to tie that to other data, that's where we start to get colored coins and other
types of assets that can come into play.
So really, you only are limited by your imagination and your ability to convince other people
to use whatever system of rules you create that says that this data represents this real
world asset or this other digital asset.
So I think that's where the real power of this system of Bitcoin is proof of ownership
of an asset and transfer of ownership of an asset in a permissionless manner.
And permissionless in this context means I don't have to go to the notary to stamp the
title when I sell my car.
Instead, that title is an actual crypto asset stored in the blockchain, if not the Bitcoin
blockchain.
Can you talk a little bit about proof of reserves?
Yes, so BitGo has rolled out a proof of reserve that was based on a concept that I believe
Gregory Maxwell came up with a while ago.
But essentially, this is an interesting part of some of the cryptographic data structures
of Merkle trees.
But it essentially allows you to prove that an entity is holding the amount of bitcoins
or assets that they claim to hold without explicitly exposing the addresses where they're
stored.
So it's another interesting aspect of Bitcoin where you can have both privacy and transparency
simultaneously.
So that's really interesting.
There's a lot of use cases from the privacy and transparency aspect in nonprofits and NGOs
where there are people's donations going in and being used.
So what if, rather than having to see their books to see exactly where the money is at
all times, they can simply prove what allocations they have, that they are holding the funds,
etc.
This would also be immensely powerful for banks.
Imagine if a bank could prove that it actually has the reserves it claims to have without
requiring some large regulatory body to expend the manpower, time, and energy to regularly
audit those banks, or if they get audited at all.
Shannon, what is Ribbit.me doing in the context of this entire discussion?
So Ribbit.me is taking traditional rewards programs and issuing those rewards on a blockchain.
So similar to a colored coin, it would be on our own blockchain that's going to be maintained
by the participants in the rewards program.
So for instance, your frequent flyer miles, your grocery store rewards points, your video
store points, they would all be individual tokens on this blockchain.
And depending on how the different businesses choose to allow their tokens to intermingle,
sometimes basically what this allows is for customers to trade one type of point for another.
Or you can do more creative things like your frequent flyer miles, if they're not used
they might deteriorate into another type of token that can be therefore traded for other
types that you might use.
Or if you don't have the right amount that you are interested in this particular airline,
you can take some of the tokens that you do have and trade them for the token that you
need and trade them for the reward points that you need.
That's what's reducing a lot of friction in the system.
Yeah, which is I think one of the biggest things that's prevented interesting projects
like this from gaining traction is because it's very difficult for this to work when
you're just keeping track of it on paper.
Especially if you're maybe a small to medium sized business and you don't have the ability
to build the systems to track all this stuff the way that these organizations do.
The ribbon that means solution also allows several companies to participate in the same
rewards program together.
Yes.
So maybe where the scale of a company, they didn't have the opportunity to offer rewards
like the single mom and pop restaurant, might be able to pool together with the local community
to other businesses to share some of the rewards program?
Definitely.
It makes the barrier of entry for a rewards program almost nothing.
As a matter of fact, our model is, we're adopting a freemium model and we're going to take a
number of clients and offer them free rewards programs that they can issue rewards to their
customers for no onboarding fee.
That's really exciting.
And that's unheard of in the industry.
But that's just an example of the different types of things that can be done with this
blockchain technology.
I'd like to really quickly address another sort of out of the box approach for the use
of this technology.
And one of the things that's difficult right now in the space is that, you know, everybody
is trying to figure out how to use it and we've got assets and we've got currencies
and we've got all these different things that we're familiar with.
So one of the things that excites me is trying to think a little bit out of the box, how
can we use this technology to do something different?
One of the things that's been in the news recently is police dash cams and controversy
around whether this footage is authentic, whether it's been edited, whether it's been
modified.
Well, if there was a blockchain backing the video or every single frame was cryptographically
provable that it came next to the series, anybody can take a look at that video and
say, oh, there's a gap here.
It doesn't actually, the math doesn't add up or this frame has been edited.
It doesn't match the frames between it or the frames around it.
So that's sort of an example, a quick example of an out of the box way of appliance technology.
That's really fascinating.
And so a frame for frame Merkle tree, I think that's pretty clever.
I like that.
You know, you're touching on something, Shannon, that I think has prevailed for a long time
that people just haven't really been talking about except for the past few years.
We're starting to see more and more of this discussion of the police state and the arguments
that the Bitcoin community is bringing to the table about governance.
I want to talk a little bit about maybe some of the more dangerous ideas.
I think that's a very powerful, good idea.
What are some of the dangerous ideas that the blockchain could be used for?
Open forum.
Assassination markets.
Assassination market.
Why don't you describe what an assassination market is?
Yeah, sure.
I mean, just like we had the Silk Road and its predecessors on the dark net, you can
essentially create a similar type of anonymous market where people will actually either one
at a time or pool together funds for the assassination of an individual.
And then upon completion of that job, escrow would get signed off by everyone who paid
into the pool and the assassin would get their bounty.
So I don't recall the name of the philosopher that originally proposed this, but it was
created basically in theory that it actually could be a positive benefit, that there would
be an incentive then to not be corrupted.
Is that roughly accurate?
Well from a philosophical standpoint, I guess, but the moral problem that I find is you can
piss off any number of people and be in the moral riots.
They might have more economic incentive to use the system.
So a dangerous idea indeed.
What other dangerous ideas are there that you guys have heard of at this point?
So one of the things that I see quite often is untraceable payments for hostage situations.
So somebody will go browsing around on their computer, happens at work a lot of times,
they'll be at work, they'll be using their computer, they'll visit a site, they're making
work supposed to, or they'll click on an email, all of a sudden they've now got a message
on their computer that says your computer is completely encrypted and the only way that
you'll be able to unencrypt it is to go ahead and send Bitcoin to this address and we'll
send you at the key.
That payment can't be reversed, it's very difficult to trace, so that's why it's one
of the payments of choice, it clears instantly, they can almost immediately within ten minutes
to an hour transfer it to multiple different currencies.
Okay, so Andy, let's give you a chance to talk a little bit about what type of clients
are you accepting, what are you guys' interests in the blockchain technology space?
For the last two years it's been companies that are somehow involved in the financial
aspect of it, just because that's been the business model that's been popular, but I
think as other industries are learning about how the blockchain can disrupt their existing
models, I was a music industry major in college so I've read a lot about copyrights and the
pain points for artists when it comes to trying to figure out who actually owns something,
how income from those various properties should be distributed and recording who consumes
their content so they know that they need to get paid by.
That's a really compelling thing for me, so I would love to explore that with a client.
I think you've got a lot of companies that are interested in tokenizing other things,
you've got rewards points and making those transferable is a really, really cool thing,
but I think tokenizing anything naturally just makes it transferable and so that right
there is a really, really powerful thing and you can transfer for free essentially too.
I would think there's going to be a whole generation of entrepreneurs that are focused
on digitizing assets or a product or a right or an obligation to deliver a service or anything
and then being able to move that around.
Because my background is a start-up and not a lot of the clients have staged financial
regulation, I've had to learn that because my clients have to do those things, but I'm
much more interested in the technology side of things and I think once you get outside
of the financial use cases and you start getting into the music industry or start working with
state governments to build databases and registries for properties and things like that, that's
me, the cost of doing business in those industries is a lot lower, but I think the technology
is just as exciting.
So I think you've just actually said a lot of very interesting things and I'm not sure
that we're unwrapped.
Okay, so first of all you talk about tokenization and tokenization represents this idea that
things that if you can digitize something, you can turn it into an asset that's digital
and we call these tokens.
A bitcoin is a token, a transaction output is a token if you will, you can move the ownership
of these tokens around in this blockchain.
It's not really an asset, it's just the ledger, it's not something you physically hold.
There's a discussion that tokenization unlocks a lot of capital that otherwise simply couldn't
have been moved.
For example, things that are just extremely, not extremely low value, but low enough value,
sufficiently low that there wasn't a system that developed to track them, to move them,
or use them in service for example.
Are there things you might imagine in this context that you find interesting that you
might think that there might be an entire opportunity for a whole new industry?
I believe that you actually mentioned this earlier, but especially with regard to micro
payments and tokenization, truly being able to pay for things on demand, whether you're
paying for internet streaming by the second or by the kilobyte, it's being able to transfer
I think these really tiny amounts of value, it can be both valuable for paying as you
go rather than having to estimate ahead of time, but it can also be powerful from I believe
the standpoint that we heard Dr. Campbell Hartley talk about yesterday of unlocking
the human capital in the world.
At the moment, we have vast amounts of human capital that are in third world countries
that probably don't have any internet connectivity, and there are a ton of smart people that are
just out there waiting to be pulled into the global economy, and once we are able to distribute
cheap internet access on smartphones to these people, we'll begin to be able to unlock their
intellect and their human capital and even be able to pay them, and if they're in a third
world country, they might not need $7 an hour or $10 an hour, and all of a sudden, if people
in first world countries are able to leverage this human capital at greatly reduced expenses,
I can only say that being good for the global economy.
It might be bad for the first world economy for them to have some leveraging changing,
but...
That speaks a little bit to the incentives, right?
I think the numbers are something like there are only three billion people in the world
out of the seven something that we actually have that have internet access at all, so
I think that the prerequisite here is we get them internet access, right, so that once
they do and they have the means to leverage themselves, they become globally connected.
We're wiring in another four billion plus people into the economy, and the net gain
of that is massive, right, think of the global GDP, if you will, the GGDP, and how much that'll
increase when there's so much more ability for people to produce and earn in return for
that.
We're already seeing what both Google and Facebook both having initiatives because they
know that in order to grow their user base and increase the value of their company, they
need to reach more people.
The paper micro units case is massive, and I think that's very valuable.
I am going to go back to Andy here just again because I'm curious, this tokenization idea,
we're unlocking all this capital, and maybe we're even representing a song in the blockchain
and the ownership and the rights or even the smart contracts of who gets money when that
song is listened to.
Maybe that's all represented in the blockchain, but are we really anywhere close to a legal
framework recognizing that as valid?
I think the phrases that we've used to describe some of this technology I think is kind of
confusing.
I don't think smart contracts are all that accurate.
I think the self-executing contract is probably a better description.
In the financial aspect of the contract, I think you can hard code that, and you can
lock in funds in an escrow environment, but there's always going to be situations that
sort of fall outside of what somebody could have predicted when they designed something,
and that's really what the legal system's for.
If everybody behaved like they were supposed to in a contract, then we wouldn't need court
rooms and prosecutors and civil attorneys.
I think you will see this wave of software being a bigger part of entering into an agreement
and executing it.
If you and I have some sort of agreement online and I'm supposed to send you something, you're
supposed to send me something back, that's something that we can very easily hard code
with the software.
But if I'm supposed to mow your lawn and you're supposed to pay me when I'm finished, it's
not really up for that.
That kind of gets into arbitration almost.
If we enter into an agreement right now, the legal framework in place, there's only one
legal framework.
Those are settlements, independent civil settlements, but there's only one mechanism in place where
we can go to settle that.
Does the blockchain offer other opportunities here for arbitration?
It does.
I think the ability to... The blockchain can control funds autonomously for a period of
time, and that can be set by the party, so I think that's a really powerful thing.
Being able to distribute control of those funds, and we can all do that right now, and
I think a lot of people would use it probably for security right now, because that is such
an issue.
But you can also go for dispute, as opposed to distributing funds that way.
I think distributing control is one of the... You asked me what gets me excited about
the blockchain.
I think that's it right there.
It's great for security, but yeah, I would say being able to take multiple keys and distribute
them.
Maybe you could form a two of three multi-sig, and that's our agreement.
If we disagree, we've agreed upon a third party to sign the transaction and move the
assets.
Yeah, even for something as simple as a landlord and a tenant with a security deposit.
That's the example that gets talked about, but it's a good one.
Smart contracts, I think, are only going to be as powerful as we can create the oracles
that will power them.
In order to have self-executing contracts, you have to have some... This is just a nebulous
idea, but an oracle out there who operates an API that you can call to get the true or
false conditionals of whatever the smart contract is based upon.
A very simple version of that is at BitGo, we are the oracle.
We're not really doing smart contracts, as I would describe them, but we are holding
one key, and people have to request permission through us for us to sign off on any policies
before we'll create transactions.
As a simple version of the oracle in utopia land, we will eventually be able to figure
out how to trustlessly create oracles that just exist out in the cloud of the internet
that can give us truthiness of any number of arbitrary real-world conditions, but I
think that's going to be the real challenge.
Let's talk about that.
We've got some challenges there, right?
Shannon, let's go through some of... What do you think the biggest hurdles are to seeing
some of these ideas through to fruition?
It's an interesting question.
I've been in software development, and my wife is a software tester, and we've been
in this industry longer than I have known about Bitcoin, and one of the things that
plagues software development and creates the need to have testers is code is not written
perfect.
I think one of the biggest hurdles that we are going to face, not now, but in the near
future, are people putting their trust in smart contracts that aren't necessarily written
as well as they could, or the complexities have gone out of hand, because in order to
make a smart contract or sub-executing contract that is going to have a whole bunch of different
conditions, you need a whole bunch of small moving pieces that might have been written
by multiple people, and it might work the way it's supposed to, but sometimes it might
not.
Immediately, we need to solve a lot of problems, but we just need to actually write the programs.
We need to invent the ways to do it.
There's a lot of smart people, and we see this blockchain technology, and we get excited
because we know a lot that it can do, but there are thousands, if not millions of man-hours
that need to be invested into it to really discover how.
I don't see too many other industries that I can look at and say, I know I can do this,
but it's going to take five years to figure out how.
As an engineering community, we often say that complexity is the enemy of simplicity,
but some of these things will take a long time to develop and a long time to figure
out a simple way that is elegant to represent these ideas that we all know are possible.
As a software engineer myself, I recognize that.
What are some of the other things that you guys are fearful of that might prevent us
from getting to this future that we are imagining?
Well, we can always speak to the current environment, and that open source development is a completely
different way of doing things from what we see in most capitalism-driven companies out
there, especially in the software space.
Even within the Bitcoin Core ecosystem, the open source development process is different
than what we usually see.
Bitcoin Core aims to have full consensus of the small set of maintainers of the code base,
and then they seek input from everyone else.
It's not a truly rigorously defined process.
It's more of a loose consensus of, if I see it, then I know that that's what it is.
I know just from my gut of what consensus is.
That can cause us to be less efficient in developing things, but it also results in
having to have much more in-depth and thoughtful discussions about making changes to the ecosystem.
It's not the fastest way to do things, but it may be the fairest way.
Again, it sounds like there's just a matter of, this is an oversight thing.
How do we figure out how to do this?
It just feels like we're going to have to take more and more time to figure out how all this stuff works.
It seems like the block size debate has really morphed into a governance of the protocol debate,
more of a meta thing.
I feel like this is a great opportunity that we have before us to try to solve fundamental issues
of human governance.
It's not just code and engineering governance.
It's human consensus governance.
Unfortunately, I don't have the answer.
I wish I did.
Again, I do think it's going to take time.
One of the fears that I personally have, if I haven't expressed myself eloquently enough,
is the burden of regulatory pressure.
We may not be given the opportunity to take this time because it's cut short.
Before we move on to questions, I hope we still have time.
Okay, good.
Excellent.
Let's assume we go through all of these hurdles.
Let's assume we smash through them.
Let's project into the future.
Let's go forward 100 years.
What is a society with a very û and if you're not comfortable with that distance of time,
I'm sure you can get back a little bit.
But what does a society look like that has been fundamentally radically transformed
by blockchain technology?
I think you see a lot more machine-to-machine payments,
payments that aren't necessarily executed by a human, I guess, at that particular time.
I think we will also interact with more sort of autonomous-type entities like cars.
I think that's probably the most predictable one.
Can you unfurl that one a little bit?
Yes.
I mean, it's no secret that there's a lot of people working on self-driving cars.
And I imagine that at some point, Uber will have a fleet of û they might not have any drivers in 20 years.
They may just have û they may lease a million cars and have them all out there picking up people.
And from a cost standpoint, it makes sense for them because their margins go up.
And if û we're just û we're paying the vehicle at that point.
But we're paying Uber directly.
We're not û nothing's going to the driver.
So in that sense, I guess it's not a machine-to-machine payment.
There's û our relationship with the service provider is literally just û it's a machine.
So I think you're going to see more of that, too.
I think it's û I fully expect 3D printing to become much more of a thing.
You know, my wild analogy is, you know, when we have somebody on Mars, if they break something,
we'll just print it out.
We'll send them a blueprint.
We'll print that.
We won't need to send, you know, another supply mission up there for them, hopefully.
So I think that's the case. Then, you know, I'm not having to go to a store to buy something.
I can just û you know, I'm buying a piece of software.
I'm buying a design.
I'm buying some sort of file offline.
And I put it in my printer and, you know, have a copy cut, whatever it is.
So û and I think our û as you û as more things in our house start getting û
or your apartment or whatever start getting connected to the Internet,
they can start communicating more with one another and optimizing things.
You know, I think it would become a lot cheaper.
You know, if I can û you know, we can send a penny here and a penny there
or a fraction of a penny here and a fraction of a penny there,
then I think those machines can run more optimally and everything is more efficient.
And as we take sort of the human resources out of it, too, it takes the margins û
you know, the margins are higher.
Have you given any thought to this idea that Mike Hearn proposed of the self-owning car
where the û now that the cars can drive themselves,
what if they're given a mandate to be û if they can û if they are able to carry money,
why can't they own themselves and pay û and go contract out to a repair facility
when they detect that they're damaged?
And then we don't have an Uber at all, but we have instead autonomous agents
driving around and taking contracts to pick people up and drop them off.
I think that's an interesting one.
Yeah, so one of the things that we're creating is I'm constantly thinking about how we're redefining trust
and we're ultimately going to be able to trust each other a whole lot more.
But we're also, like you just mentioned, we're opening up a way for everybody to understand
somehow to trust a machine or trust a software program more than we do already
because it's û it's consensus-based. Everybody can really take a look at how it's functioning
and everything that it's done in the past.
They can understand what it's going to do in every single situation
and that eliminates the fear and the need to trust.
So it's û I'm not sure what the society is going to look like 100 years from now,
but it's definitely fun to imagine what û how I would be raised in a society
that did not have as much fear and did not have to rely on trust as much
and so much of the human elements that make things difficult.
Is that good or bad? I'm not sure.
I mean, some people would argue that the fear and the trust issues are what drive innovation and creativity.
That's yet to be seen.
I think my co-panelists are thinking far too small.
In 100 years, I intend to be a fully digitized consciousness
existing on a plethora of servers throughout the universe,
and I will be paying for my CPU and storage time via digital currency
and try to attack it via smart contracts.
So what you're describing here is actually not an uncommon idea.
As we move forward, we're starting to understand
that more and more things are being able to be represented digitally,
and this is û that is a very, very big goal,
but the more we start thinking about this, the more we start building,
these bodies that we have, they're very, very mortal, right?
Technology gives the opportunity for things to last much longer, right?
I think that that's a very compelling reason for us to pursue this type of technology,
because then, well, you have the self-driving cars.
Well, what's the lifespan of a self-driving car?
Or perhaps you add the code into the self-driving car
that once it's built up enough profit that it goes and licenses another self-driving car.
So now you have these autonomous organizations, if you will,
going and fulfilling individual tasks and forming new types of structures,
and I think that's something you'll see and will build a bridge
to what some people think is lofty, and I think it makes it very tangible and real.
Okay, so let's go ahead and transition to questions.
Does anybody have questions for our panelists today?
No questions.
All right, let's do it.
So, yes, this goes to all the panelists.
So what two-part projects are you really looking forward to?
There's Ethereum, there's FACTA, there's Aidsafe Bitshares.
I guess if you can name what you think is going to do well
and what you think is not so great.
Well, I don't know if it's considered the 2.0 project,
but I'm most excited about sidechains,
and that's because I believe sidechains will be an accelerator for evolution of Bitcoin technology.
I believe you actually spoke to it earlier,
but essentially that allows for people to experiment with the technology
without taking all the financial risks.
As for if Ethereum or any of the other 2.0 projects will succeed or fail,
I mean, I hope they all succeed.
Unfortunately, we're at the point now where the innovation is accelerating such in this space
that I can't keep up with it all, and I'm still focused on Bitcoin 1.0.
I think that we still have to solve security and usability problems in 1.0
before I feel comfortable devoting any of my time to 2.0.
But I think it's great for people to devote their time to it.
I've stuck on panels for like six months, exactly like that.
But no, I think people need to be thinking further ahead,
and they need to be taking bigger risks,
because otherwise we're only going to take one step at a time.
If we can take giant leaps at a time, I'm all for that.
We're definitely in a situation where we need more engineers
to really explore all of the facets of the technology
as fast as people are coming up with ideas.
Personally, I'm most excited about the Ethereum concept.
I think that Ethereum is very similar to the current arms race when it comes to mobile phones.
So you've got your Android and your Apple and your Windows phone,
and it all really boils down to, at the end of the day,
what developers put stuff on the App Store,
what the users can do with the technology.
I think that Ethereum will be very successful
if the developers can figure out how to use it and how to build awesome things with it.
Right now, I haven't seen hundreds of smart contract ideas,
so that applies to the whole smart contract concept.
So at the end of the day, whatever 2.0 or 3.0 or whatever Ethereum-like product exists,
whichever one is the easiest for developers to use
and is adopted the fastest by those developers to fill up the ecosystem with useful products,
it's going to be the most successful.
That's what I'm really excited to see.
I know there's a couple of other legal 2.0 projects that have started to emerge.
What are you most excited about?
My fascination isn't even necessarily with some of the legal innovations.
I'm going to go back to the cybersecurity thing.
I still think there's a ton of opportunity for somebody to secure other data using the blockchain.
From a business opportunity standpoint, I think that's one of the biggest.
The focus of any major company right now is how to secure their customer data
or payment data or medical records, whatever it is.
Whoever figures that out will win a lot more.
That's one more question.
All right, one more.
So we have this legal panel.
We're going over these cases where there was some sort of criminal law or whatnot,
but we did talk about the faults of the government, for example,
that 23 years after the internet has been widely popular with the Office of Personnel Management,
it's a database revealing contact information about many workers, including top secret CIA agents, and so forth.
So it seems to me, I'm curious, is government really strong enough to withstand all this change
in five, 40, even 10 years from now?
Will there be a mandate from the American government?
I find that to be a fascinating thought experiment because I see technology is not only advancing,
but it's accelerating, and it's difficult for the human mind to grasp the acceleration of a thing
because we extrapolate based upon previous deltas.
So whether or not the government can keep up, I'm not optimistic, but it's certainly possible.
So I'm a software engineer, so I see all these agile development technologies,
and I see the government not using any sort of agile development methods.
I think it's certainly possible for the government to change how they enact policies
and how they operate in general to be more responsive to changes on the technology side.
But as it is, we've seen this several times, and I know the legal panel talked about it,
is that it's a constant arms race of technology versus regulation, of criminals versus law enforcement.
And I don't think that is ever going to end,
whether or not the criminals are eventually going to be able to destroy the government,
or the government destroy the criminals, and I don't see that ever happening either.
But if you want to talk about techno, crypto, anarchist utopias,
I'm happy to talk about that too.
But also, those are all the utopias, and the real world is a much more complicated place.
All right, let's give our panel a round of applause.