Commoditizing Trust and Disrupting the System | Gavin Wood | TEDxVienna

[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]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 20,225

Rating: 4.9147725 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Technology, Computers, Innovation, Internet

Id: UIBR99gOLOQ

Length: 9min 59sec (599 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 06 2017