 Hi, afternoon, everyone. Sorry for the delay. I was slightly technologically challenged. My hardware is a bit old for the projector system here. So this might have come across as a slightly oddly titled talk. So to give you a bit of background, I'm the jester in the court. My favorite comedian is, one of my favorite comedians is John Oliver, who's a very popular and controversial commentator on US and other world politics. And if you can sort of see my talk in that light, it might be hopefully mildly enjoyable. Anyway, so from the title, obviously there's a few complex words in there. I'm sort of assuming that most people here have been following cryptocurrency and or the blockchain and have some context about the background from which the blockchain and cryptocurrency arose. There's a lot of body of work that preceded what we today know as the blockchain. So I want to kind of touch upon a few points here and there. And if it doesn't make sense in the beginning, hopefully it will eventually. So let's start with anarchy. This is arguably the picture that comes into most people's minds when we think about the word anarchy, some sort of violence and loss of control in government. This is the public image of anarchy. This is a terrifying thought for most of the general public. And I've used a word there that you can read yourself slightly derogatory. But in general, this is the public understanding of the effects of anarchy. And Bitcoin came out of a sort of software developers' anarchic world. It came from a world of software anarchists. This is what governments see. It's terrifying. Anarchy is terrifying for governments. It's the individual that wants to challenge authority and do their own thing. Very terrifying. This is what corporations see. Now, interesting. I couldn't find a public domain picture anywhere online. So you'll have to go and do the googling or duck duck going yourselves to find the image. But basically, if you can imagine Nicholas Cage in his role as Yuri Orlov, if there's anarchy, then I can sell a lot of weapons and make a lot of money out of it. This is what corporations see. And obviously, if you've heard about the paperclip maximizer, that's what a corporation is supposed to do. It's supposed to maximize profits for its shareholders. If it doesn't doing that, then it's not doing its job properly. It's an AI. So moving on. This is what anarchists see themselves as, actually. It's not threatening at all. I've got this public domain picture from online. This is a completely random picture. I don't know the person involved. But essentially, they put across the idea the most accurately, as far as I can tell. And the basic fundamental idea behind anarchy is sovereignty over your own mind, your own consciousness. There's no implication for other people or for other systems or for the world. And essentially, a crypto-anarchist comes from this perspective. I want to be able to control the way I do commerce with other people, trade with other people. And cryptography is the means by which I know software. This is what I do. And so this is the tool with which I'm going to implement this idea. What is crypto? Well, I'm sure you've all watched the famous technology-based movie. I won't name which one it is. But this is the idea of some really complex stuff, just like scrolling down your screen. It's all cryptic. This is the idea of something really complicated, really, in everyday parlance. This is what a computer scientist would see cryptography as. Don't know if many of you have heard of the computer science idea of complexity and the big O notation. But essentially, cryptography is, to put it in really oversimplified terms, it is to weaponize computational complexity in a way that is advantageous to the programmer. So all to the person who does the algorithm. And the best way to illustrate this is the one-way hashing function. So it's easy to calculate the result going in one direction. And you get an answer, which is essentially a hash. But it's really difficult to go the other way. So if you're given A and you run it through one-way hashing function, and you get B, or is it X and Z? I don't know, anyway. And that's easy, and it happens very quickly. And the algorithm makes sure that calculating B from A happens in order one complexity. But going the other way around is extremely difficult. So you'll have to really crunch it through brute force. And the function is designed mathematically to make sure that this happens. And so this is what I mean by weaponizing complexity. And so people figured out how to put together these algorithms and then arrange them in interesting ways. And so if you follow the blockchain terminology, you'll hear things like the Merkle tree and the Bloom filter and stuff like that. And essentially, these are putting together these basic ideas of crypto into more interesting data structures where you could, for example, search through large volumes of data with a specific question in mind, which is, is this key that I'm searching for part of the set that I'm looking for or not? And a Bloom filter, for example, would definitively tell you no, but maybe yes. So there are a few mathematical ideas. But what I'm throwing out here is basically trying to kind of give some context about the word crypto. Currency, controversial again. But we'll have to step out of the world of software and move into the world of political economy. In the 80s, when hash cash and e-gold and all these things were going on, the world had gone through a period where global economics had basically disappointed people with any sense of what money is. If you look at the 30s, the phenomenal sort of big event that happened in economics was that Franklin Roosevelt basically banned private ownership of gold. You'd have to have a license in the United States of America to own gold privately. And what this meant was by the 40s, the United States government was basically the largest gold owner in the entire world. And people who had been used to trading with gold understood what this meant. With gold, you could trade with anybody like people instinctively understood what gold was as a value exchange. So you give me 10 cows, and I give you so much gold. And there are these biblical stories and so on, historical stories of people carrying around metal coins. And this is where coinage came from. And now this was gone. It was illegal to hold gold. And there were justifiable reasons. As a politician in a democratic country, obviously, FDR could not write his personal writ. It was obviously based on a series of economic events that happened. But de facto, this is what happened. And post-World War, you've got a situation where the only exchangeable commodity with the three properties that real money should hold were embodied in gold. And the US held control of more than 50% of that commodity. And so they basically helped come across with this global currency exchange system called the Bretton Woods Agreement, where people actually agreed to the US dollar being the global currency of exchange. But people are not fools. They wouldn't agree to this either without sufficient amounts of coercion or sufficient amounts of greed. And obviously, the fact that the US government had 50% of the gold was a large part of why this was to be pulled off. And come 1971, Richard Nixon basically said, so the Bretton Woods Agreement was basically a situation where any country could go to the US government and say, oh, look, I've got $100 million. I want gold worth $100 million. And the agreement said that the US government would have to actually give them physical gold in exchange for $100 million. And in 1971, Nixon said, sorry, we're not going to give you any more gold. You can get lost. We're just going to say that a dollar is a dollar, and that's it. That's whatever we decided it is. This is basically known as the Nixon shock. So what's the situation now globally? Basically, governments print paper money, and they play games with it. And this is a situation in which cryptocurrency was born. If you look at the original email by the person allegedly known as Satoshi Nakamoto, he talks about, let's go there, he talks about, sorry, I sort of have to switch slides here, but he talks about, so this is from his original paper, the Bitcoin paper, and he says, commerce on the internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions, serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. So it's coming from a very anarchist perspective. It's coming from this perspective that we don't have control over what we use as currency. And so what the tech community, the sort of crypto anarchist tech community did was they said, OK, well, we're going to put all this stuff together. We're going to put software and crypto and the internet together and use our weaponized big O and the innovative thing that today we know of as the public blockchain to create this trusted third party. And what does the trusted third party algorithm look like? If you want to understand how the blockchain really works as a trust mechanism, you have to go back to Lesley and Pamp, who is a pioneer in distributed systems. And this is a paper from 1986 called the Byzantine Generals Problem, where the problem of consensus, now when we talk about consensus, we mean if you have multiple people who do not trust each other completely or at all, what does it take for them to collectively be able to agree on something? And basically it boils down to the problem that is illustrated in this diagram, which is the problem of that of one person in a three person situation giving an order to two people to agree to attack or not, basically, in the Byzantine Generals Problem. And it turns out that in order for the group of three to actually agree completely in consensus, you need to have at least two n plus one, so at least two thirds of the people trying to do consensus need to agree on whatever that is that they are agreeing on. And so this idea basically means that, for example, on the blockchain, if you have less than a third, sorry, more than a third of people deciding that they don't want to talk the gossip protocol and they want to do their own thing, the blockchain is in trouble. And why do I say that? Well, I just pulled this off the Bitcoin blockchain.info pools website. This is the distribution of mining pools for blockchain in the world. And if you look at this distribution, you'll see that there's a lot of labels distributed around. And then there's this very visible highlight in red that says, a large portion of unknown blocks does not mean an attack on the network. It simply means that we have been unable to determine the number of blockchains in the region. So why is it that if you look at the unknown percentage, it's 9%. It's not even 30%. You need to have at least 33% or 34% for argument's sake of the participants of the blockchain network to mount an attack. But why is it that this is very visibly put on the web page? So it says, we're unable to determine the origin. And then it seems to be something that needs to be clarified. Well, the reason for that is that there is an unwritten consensus, which is the consensus of a trust network, which is human. It's completely outside of the algorithm. You know the mining pools. You know who the people are involved are. Or at least you have some sense of what they stand for and what's in it for them. And the unknown is terrifying. The unknown is terrifying in the same way that the unknown is terrifying for a government. I hope you can see the parallels here. So this brings us to what I call the Trojan horse narrative, which is, and going back to Nakamoto's original quote, where he recognizes this obviously, he invented the thing. So he recognizes it. He says, the system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes. So we're in a situation where everybody knows that as long as, so this is not about individuals. This is not about miners who are individuals. This is about miners who are computers. And as long as the cooperating group that agrees on the consensus controls the largest amount of CPU power, then everything's all right. And the blockchain algorithm for Bitcoin specifically, in this case, would be safe. But really, is that the narrative? I mean, anybody with common sense knows that this is a given, and it's mathematically proven by a lamport. I would contend that the real Trojan horse is an idea which spans across more things than just cryptocurrency. I would contend that the real Trojan horse is this idea of technotopinism. And if you look it up, you'll find some really interesting things. There's a brilliant documentary by Adam Curtis, and it's called Hyponormalization, in which he talks about this narrative where essentially these entities, more or less, in a broad grouping, are enforcing a fake narrative, today known as fake news. I mean, it's very popular now. But actually, there is a strong discourse which disconnects the public from the reality of life. So I've been to different countries with very drastic political systems. I've lived and taught in North Korea, for example. And then when I step out of North Korea into the real world, my mind is boggled by the amount of propaganda actually that's hitting me when I step into the Western world and vice versa. So when you're in a fish and water, you don't really realize that you are in water. But so what I'm trying to say is that there is this situation where that's OK. It's normal. And this idea of technotropianism is I have a hypothesis that this idea of technotropianism is now sort of getting into the world of economics and sort of driving the narratives that the blockchain is useful for everything. The blockchain is that hammer for which every problem is a nail. Thank you. I have a little plug. This is a $10 device called the Adafruit. It's an NFC reader. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to demonstrate it. But it reads NFC cards. And if you've used Visa PayWave, I read my card today. It's really interesting to see where information comes out of it. And I actually went around stuck some of these with a Raspberry Pi under your chairs. So no, no, I'm kidding. But if you want to have a go and read your card, I'm happy to display to you what your NFC readable card holds information about. It's very interesting. I did not invent this. A friend of mine put it together, Tavish. And we're going to actually showcase this at Hill Hacks and Hack Beach, which is the organized whatever, the communities that I represent at FOS Asia. So we're going to have a go at this properly. That'll be in May. So more than welcome to come. That's my plug. Hill Hacks. No, no, that's fine. This is an Adafruit, A-D-A-F-R-U-I-T. Yep. Sorry, did I get you right? You're saying that you believe on the technical equipment that the government's pushing the blockchain? I'm honest. What I'm saying is that the narrative that the blockchain is independent so that the technology can create the neutrality required in commerce is a false. It's a false narrative. Sorry. You're saying that they're saying it's a false narrative or they're saying that it can do this. Therefore, they're promoting the blockchain. I'm saying either. I'm saying that the whole idea behind the blockchain is that you're applying technology to a human problem. And so, for example, the newer narratives of having AI drive the trust issues in blockchain networks, for example, is again giving up human control in that system and allowing the technology to look after issues like trust, for example. I'm more of a technical libertarian, as well. But I see that it's an issue of where your consensus comes from and what you're placing trust in. And the question is, can technology support mechanisms for actually the only thing you need to trust is the code and algorithm? The answer is yes. Then smart contracts and such. I prefer the word crypto-ledger than blockchain. The blockchain is a solution for what a crypto-ledger provides. It's not exactly the same. But if a crypto-ledger can actually execute contracts in a crudely correct manner, it replaces 80% of what the nation-state does for us. And it does so using a voluntary mechanism, rather than a mechanism that's based on the board, called government power. So I get the impression that governments should be afraid of this rather than exposing an area that's supporting them. Excuse me. How is it that it doesn't continue to be a voluntary mechanism that conducts commerce? It becomes a sports mechanism. You're assuming that the major application of crypto-ledger is commerce. And I'm telling you that's a minor application. No, no, any form of enterprise. How does it become voluntary when it is the only way to do it? It becomes a sports mechanism. You're just replacing one side with another. Nobody's pointing a gun to your head and saying, you have to choose that coin or this. You can use whatever you can create your own. You can branch it any one time. In theory, except that you need to have the resources, which are expensive. Well, that's assuming that you're going off a group of workers, a group of waiters, which is absolutely not anything that's going to last us more than a couple more years. That's going away. Even in theory, I'm just getting off of that. Well, yeah. So that boils down to, again, trust networks. So you have this narrative that was built upon the sort of you can have the absolutely perfect, anonymous, individualistic existence, which is the Crypto Anarchist Dream. And then you have this sort of the realities that it's slipping in, which is that trust networks are actually creeping in. And the people that are participating in calling the shots in those trust networks are not necessarily the end users who have promised this Crypto Anarchist Dream. Exactly. I don't disagree with you. I think you're going to love it tomorrow. I don't think you're talking about it. Oh, brilliant. I look forward to that. Thank you. I think I've run out of time. Oh, there's one more. Yeah. About the currency slide, there's one bit I think that's missing in the general narrative. I think that most people who are interested in the topic should read the book, Debt, the first 5,000 years with David Frazier. Brilliant. It'll be available on Archmage or more. Yes, absolutely brilliant. Yeah, I'll try and pop that in there in a later presentation if I do this later on. Thank you, Hitler. Thanks.