 Hi everybody! Can y'all hear me? Okay. It's too early in the morning for that man. Welcome to Plutus Fest. Thank you all for coming. So this is a special event that's pretty near and dear to my heart. About two years ago I asked Rebecca to write an ontology for smart contracts and she gladly did that and then shortly thereafter started working on the Plutus programming language and we realized that we were a bit in over our head and we needed some proper adult supervision. And right around the same time Phil Wadler came on board and we found the proper adult supervision. Then we needed some adult supervision for Wadler so we brought in Manuel Chavardi. And it just all just kind of came together and we said well you know Simon Peyton Jones needs to be involved in some way with this and we couldn't get him so we got his son so that's good enough and we've been working our way through it. But it's really remarkable to see things come together. You know you've got something elegant when you can put it on a napkin and we actually achieved that. So anyway what am I going to talk about today? Well let's talk about five things. First let's talk about money and markets. Kind of the why are we doing what we do and why are we doing what we do. Is that better? Especially for the people in the back. Ah Jason King. He's got the most epic beard in all of crypto. No man can compete. He also ran across the entire United States. It's a pretty cool dude. So anyway we're going to talk about money and markets and I'm going to begin with a story. I love stories because they kind of are very human in nature. So has anybody heard of the island of Yap? Yap. Is there a pen? A marker? A board? No markers. Ah sad. Alright so Yap. Oh brilliant. Here we go. Y-A-P. A small Polynesian island and they're famous for having the world's largest money. So what they would do is they would take these canoes to a nearby island and they'd go and quarry out these giant stone rings. They'd weigh thousands and thousands of pounds and they'd roll them to their canoes and then in a very dangerous journey sail back to Yap and they put it in the village and they use social traditions to decide who owns those giant stone wheels. Well somewhere along the way because you know you're while transporting in a small canoe a large piece of stone a storm is bound to happen and guess what happened? The canoe sunk and the stone ring went to the bottom of the sea and then suddenly a magic innovation happened because they traded these things by oral traditions they agreed in the village that that stone ring that sunk to the bottom of the ocean must still be there and therefore is tradable. So they said that's the sea stone and then people would actually own it and trade for it even though they couldn't see it they couldn't touch it wasn't there they still cognitively agreed that this thing exists and money is much the same way it doesn't actually require physical representation it doesn't actually require you to hold it to be there you just have to come to some sort of social consensus that what you're dealing with actually exists and is worth your time and you should be willing to accept it for products and services so you don't have to back things by gold you don't actually have to hold it you just have to agree it's there that's the nature of money it's always going to be social market places are just mechanisms we've constructed as a society to move this value between people and it could be as simple as an Agora thousands of years ago where people meet up they see something they buy something to as complicated as Wall Street the concept is still basically the same you have something a product or service and you're trying to find a price for that product or that service and it turns out that most of society religion most of what we accept as reality is kind of built around these concepts money and markets so it's no coincidence that most of our day-to-day thought is in some way constrained or controlled or attached to this our social systems are built by this so the 20th century was really an amazing century it was the first century where we started seeing a global world it was the first century where countries started coming together and we saw all of the social systems of the 19th century the 18th century the monarchies collapse these systems are subject to what's called the sinkhole effect what the heck is that well you know a sinkhole doesn't work by being eroded from the top down gradually creating a hole it's from the bottom up you know basically what occurs is over time erosion happens and suddenly the car drives over the road and falls right into it and turns out there's this big pit that you didn't know was there and there's no greater example I think in a picture of how social systems can suffer the same fate then a picture that was taken around May of 2019 10 do you guys know what happened you know you're all English you should know you know UK King Edward the 7th died it was his funeral and nine of the leading monarchs of Europe got together they assembled for this beautiful picture and they're in their full regalia they have their their sashes and their medals and these prominent powerful men who basically controlled half of the world's armies and money they were the people to talk to if you wanted to get something done all in the same funeral because Edward the 7th was related to basically everyone thanks to the Victorian age well just 10 years later on the closing of World War one most of them had either been deposed or depowered so here we have the social paradigm of how the world works who's in control of the types of governments that can dominate our lives our markets our money and then suddenly it's all gone now was it just a world war that ended them no the sinkhole effect was in progress there was erosion decades and decades of erosion at Karl Marx and you had the French Revolution and the American Revolution there was little symptoms and signs that if you're watching them closely would be good indications that that social order that the world had dominated was coming to a close markets are no different money is no different and our social system is having a bit of a challenge right now you see things like the 2008 financial crisis you see things like the election of Donald Trump things like Brexit all of these events in isolation you could explain as maybe an anomaly or now things happen black swan events happen but really they're the same type of indications as we were getting in the 19th century that the world is becoming different why it's because we live in an old world that was based upon the notions of a cemetery and silos information didn't flow to everybody at the same time we built cities and palaces and universities to centralize this information we have New York and London and Tokyo we have Harvard and Cornell and great universities like Edinburgh by the way older than Harvard and we'd assemble these things and the people who live there got first accessed all the goodies and they were the ones who succeeded they're the ones who are in charge then suddenly the internet comes around and what does the internet do well it changes the game it doesn't matter where you live anymore you have access to the same information as the king did in fact today all of you have access to more information than Bill Clinton did as president of the United States just think about that leader of the most powerful country in the world for its time surrounded by all these advisors all these departments hundreds of thousands of people wake up every morning to basically give him the information he needs to run things and you have more information than he did and that wasn't too long ago so that's one dimension of it the information is cemeteries are coming down the other dimension is globalism people are traveling I was just in Las Vegas just about 24 hours ago I've traveled to over 50 countries in the last few years this year alone 30 30th country was Thailand so I travel a lot of people travel when they travel they bring with them new ideas they bring with them different perspectives on how the world ought to operate and it starts waking people up and saying hey the social systems that govern my life I don't like them so much I like their system over there a lot like for example being an international businessman I do business in 16 countries including Switzerland I love the fact that I can go and ask the Swiss government for clarity on something I have a tax question just talked to them about that you go to the IRS doesn't work that way and you may you just it's amazing to you that the world's largest most prominent economy tells you to basically go hire an expensive lawyer to get a maybe and you go to was much smaller nation much smaller economy like Singapore Switzerland and you can get clarity in a matter of weeks without having to do that so I say why don't I have that at home and if I'm asking that other people are asking that and what does it mean it means it's eroding at the way the social system works and it's creating that social sinkhole and over time eventually it becomes so hollow that cars start falling through and you see them in terms of market collapses you see them in terms of civil unrest you see them in terms of people like Trump getting elected now these types of systems are a special type of system they're called complex adaptive systems if you're interested Scott Page and John Miller and others write about them and they're quite interesting see this is a watch this is what's called a complicated system and it's a composition of a lot of well designed well thought out components each has its purpose and if one of them doesn't work the watch doesn't work a complex adaptive system by contrast is a system made up of simple rules and those rules are emergently produced something very elegant whether that be sand dunes or a marketplace but they're resilient so even if certain components don't work the system still functions markets are like this social networks are like this governments are like this you can have something fail and it still goes on so anyway what we do at I which K as a company is we take a formal rigorous process and we think about how to build complex adaptive systems for the 21st century systems to better organize your information your privacy your money and so forth and probably the most important component behind that is how do you represent assets and how do you tell the story of these things who owns it how do they move between people the terms and conditions the metadata behind it see things that Agalos does he thinks about the ledger and the consensus he thinks about a lot of the nuts and bolts of how these systems come together that what Phil does with Manuel and the others is how do we actually create languages to represent these things so when you think about a language you tend to think of an ontological side of things the basic with the set of concepts and categories that in a subject or an area of the main that shows their I can't even read my own handwriting shows their properties and their relations between them there you go that's the formal definition of an ontology but in other words if we're thinking of an ontological view of a programming language something like Plutus or Marlowe or yellow we're talking about who are the actors the assets the environments the events that can happen and the rules for how they move between people okay so two years ago we started the research thread for Plutus much along these ways and we asked well what can we do what's possible and we realized some really magical innovative things that they've already been mentioned by Phil but this concept of saying you need to look at development in terms of the client the blockchain and the server so the Ethereum world they tend to focus only on this and they say ah here we go we've done our job on the rest of this stuff that's for the developer to figure out oh and by the way this centralizes every single application you write so the minute you create this ride-sharing app somebody will say hey we want to kill Uber or hey we want to kill eBay or hey we want to kill Airbnb and they say great here's your web 3 and here's your Solidity go ahead and put these things together write some smart contracts and they write it you know what happens it's too expensive and too slow and it does nothing and they can't even verify if it works or not and they say well you know okay we'll we'll take some of that logic and push it to the client oh you know actually you know we need to introduce a matching server or we need to introduce some other component and sure enough 95 percent of your application is now running off blockchain on a centralized service that if it goes down the DAP no longer works is that decentralized Uber is that decentralized Dropbox is that decentralized Airbnb no it's not so the whole point of Plutus was saying okay how do we reason about a system where we look at all of these things together we bring them all together and when we do that we can actually understand if the system is decentralized if the system works it's one code base and we can share these things and have some common standards and it was a lot of work it was about as I mentioned two years of it a lot of stress a lot of ups and lots of downs and we learned a lot of lessons along the way and the speakers that come after me will take you through that journey and it's a pretty magical and exciting one in addition to that we also learned that you need to have special purpose languages for special purpose domains you can't really just build one language that fits everything that's why there's Marlowe it's why there's Simon Thompson here in his postdoc Pablo and they're going to talk a little bit about well maybe some cases it's not good to have too much control and power you need to specialize things a little bit and that's going to be a fun conversation okay so ontologically Plutus is all about basically saying how do I write software for this new paradigm where I have decentralized infrastructure but I accept the client has some power and the server has some power and how do I reason about what am I giving up who am I trusting what does it cost to actually run this and how do I know if it's correct or not and Marlowe is basically about saying let's do that but let's do that for financial contracts and do that in a very specialized application but I'll tell you another story story of Stanislav Petrov does anybody know him come on you all should he saved the entire world we'd all be dead if not for this guy this is the greatest computer bug of all time and any computer science professor should know this it was September 26 1983 midnight so to give you some setting for about two years the United States since Reagan was elected started really messing with the Soviet Union we started flying bombers really close to their borders and messing with their radar and doing all kinds of things to play mind games with them and there was a culture of fear and paranoia that was brewing within the Soviet Union they were absolutely convinced that there was a real possibility the United States would actually launch a preemptive nuclear strike on them in fact it got so bad they even shot down an airliner in South Korea just 25 days before this killing I think over 250 people thinking it was an American bomber so right around midnight the Soviets had recently just installed a new satellite tracking system to watch for American nuclear launches right around midnight Stanislav the commanding colonel of this nuclear weapons silo in Moscow was told that the Americans had just launched a nuclear weapon a nuclear missile at the Soviet Union now his training was very clear if this happens mutually assured destruction launched the entire silo and had he done it the rest of the silos would have launched and basically it would have started a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union and remember he grew up in a really brutal military system where you know you were always supposed to do what you were told and if you didn't you get gulagged so not really a good position to be in but he thought about it he said you know it's probably a software bug if the United States is going to launch a nuclear weapon at us they probably launch a lot of them and I'm only one of them so this has got to be a bug and then about five minutes later they said hey four more have just been launched and he's still sitting there thinking he said no no it's got to be a software bug and it turned out it was a bug we didn't launch weapons at them that I know of and and so you'd figure wow his superiors would say good job not destroying the whole world congratulations no like standard Soviet military officer he was brutally punished and his career got badly damaged but that's a software bug and here's the problem as we rewrite the social systems in the social fabric there's a trend where the world is moving towards algorithms your position in life is going to be less determined by who you are and the relationships you have and more about the raw big data behind the things you do the composition of all the little micro decisions you make instead of these being forgotten they're actually now recorded somewhere in a social network they're recorded somewhere maybe on YouTube maybe on Facebook maybe with your cell phone and what can happen is especially in dystopian governments like what we see was China and social credit is you'll get a number stamped on your forehead and that number if it's high you get discounts on travel and the good job and maybe your taxes get a little discount and if numbers low your passport gets revoked your money gets shut off this is a reality that now a billion people will have to face within the next five years in China and it will spread all throughout so if we live in a world that's increasingly governed by big data and it's increasingly governed by algorithms it is probably really important that we have some way of dealing with the bugs behind these types of systems and the problem with decentralization is that it actually starts taking human beings out so we no longer have the Sun is love Petrov that's another reason why we created the Plutus project it's another reason why we think so much about formal methods and correctness because at the end of the day these systems aren't just about the money in your pocket they're inevitably going to be about your identity your privacy inevitably going to be about your freedom of movement and so it's not only important to make sure that you're in control of them and they're as decentralized as possible it's really important that they work correctly instead of dealing with the threat of nuclear war we could just simply be dealing with the threat of you being excommunicated from society and for you that's a very personal thing and same for me so anyway what's the road ahead look like well we decided to have this event as a capstone as the development of Plutus one is coming to a close and we're now opening it up to the community but one of the reasons why I asked Jason King to be here is that we just are starting to negotiate a partnership with them and Jason runs a university and our goal is to train over the next 15 months or so 10,000 Plutus developers and so he can talk a little bit about that we're going to be putting a program together for it some MOOCs starting with our efforts in Africa in Ethiopia and then eventually have dedicated in-person training for lots of people all across the globe that kind of primes the pump and gets people sorted and we hope that we can get a lot of innovation there and when you create a programming language and you train lots of developers and they start using it then the next step is to create a governance system to manage all of those people or else you have chaos so that's going to be a next challenge for Plutus is figuring out how to manage growth and figuring out how to manage the diversity of opinion and build great things for those developers and great tools for those developers and to learn and listen from them in addition to that we need to start focusing on the correctness components of things we have to really reason about how we're going to model business logic and verify the logic is correct maybe we can do that with dependent types or refinement types there's going to be lots of debates and arguments about what's too far and what's far enough so that'll come and also I'd like to start some hack-a-thons in the next six months to 12 months Plutus will be ready for people to actually do interesting things so we should create rewards for people to do interesting things all across the world so that's going to be fun to manage and we'll have fun giving away a lot of money and enjoy people and I'd finally like to make Plutus Fest an annual event I'd love for you guys to come back next year and the year after and year after and every year see all the progress that we've made anyway that's all I wanted to talk about just basically a bit about markets where they come from a bit about social systems a bit about the consequences of bugs and how it can end the world if you're not so careful and a bit about our company so thank you all for coming and I really look forward to all the presentations today and I'll be around for questions and thank you for all the work you've done well and Rebecca and the rest of the team it really is a great honor to see all this come together so quickly cheers