 Thank you. Great to be here. I'd like to start with a little story. So the Internet Archive started accepting bitcoins in 2011 as donations. I kind of wish we hadn't sold those 2,700 bitcoins that we got then for mere $5,000, but by 2012 we were wiseening up a bit and we were getting these donations and we were paying our employees optionally in Bitcoin. We set up an ATM doing these things and this I was getting interviewed by Bitcoin Magazine and the conversation went completely fun in interesting areas. I was getting to talk with this young man, Vitalik. And it was, I now realize I really, it would have been a much better article if I had interviewed him as to his and gotten that on paper as to what he saw and how he saw this whole thing evolving. But I think it's actually kind of great that when I wanted to upgrade from Bitcoin.QT it was Vitalik himself that sort of said, yeah, you might want to use these wallets and the like and it's worked out pretty well ever since. What I want is a game with many winners. I want a game that evolves. I want a game that isn't monopolized, isn't structured in such a way that there are no room for surprises and evolution and coolness. I like games that are fun and inviting and don't do what you expect. The only games that I've ever known like this are fundamentally open. And by open I mean no centralized points of control. I mean decentralized games and I've had the pleasure in my career to be involved in a couple of them. One is the internet itself. So during the late 1970s and 80s helped participate in putting this thing together where if you just played by the protocols you were welcome. There wasn't a permission based you weren't on somebody's platform. It just evolved and mutated along in conferences kind of like this called the IETF and it worked very well. There's another game was the World Wide Web where you could go and set up and just be part of it just by playing by the rules. But then you could bend the rules and you're welcome to go and transform this thing of the World Wide Web for many, many years. Those have been great and there were people that were involved in those whether it's Vint Cerf and Al Gore and their thousands of us that were involved in the internet era of trying to get that whole thing to work. I think we felt very successful but we didn't necessarily all get rich. There was just a way of sort of participating in this game with many winners but not everybody was a winner. In the World Wide Web Tim Burners Lee actually never became completely wealthy but he helped make something very, very important happen. I think that this area that this conference is based on is all a base around making games with many, many winners and let's do what we can to try to keep it that way because the internet and the World Wide Web have seen some real closures, some real collapsing. In the early 1990s there were 40,000 ISPs in the United States but now they're only really a handful that make any difference at all. So something's gone wrong. Now instead of the World Wide Web where we have lots of blogs and the like, it's collapsed down to Facebook or Twitter. So we have basically a, it's not that the web is failing, it's that people are setting up castles or closed gardens in the open pastures. It's something that I think we really have to watch out for and when we were looking at sort of the structure of the internet archive and what we were doing, we thought that we really needed to be involved in building a new game and that's what got us involved in the whole decentralized Bitcoin world and beyond and that's what I'd like to talk about today. So the internet archive, I get to work here, this cool place, we bought a church in San Francisco and converted it to be our headquarters and our mission is universal access to all knowledge. The thing that I signed up for in the internet is to try to build the internet into the Library of Alexandria version 2. Could we make it so that all the published works of humankind, books, music, video, web pages, software could be made available to anybody, wherever they were, forever for free? How many people here have used the internet archive? Oh yay, fantastic. The Wayback Machine probably, did you know that we do books? No, did you know we do television? Okay, a few people, okay. So anyway, we do a lot of these other things at the internet archive as well. We basically are trying to take all of the existing materials, digitize it and put it online permanently. We're trying to take what's born digital and make it permanently available because the average life of a web page is 100 days and it goes away. So we have 300 billion web pages and grows anyway a lot. But what I'm going to talk about now is the restructuring of the web itself. The web itself is being, we're being betrayed. The commons is being poisoned. The people that were supposed to be trustable haven't turned out to be. And the real wake-up call for me was Snowden to go and show that a lot of the people that helped build the web had then turned to use it as a massive surveillance tool. Then the last election in the United States, no matter who you think should be elected or not, the actual process of it went very, very wrong. That we had people trolling and packaging and manipulating fake news structures were rampant and they're still around. So we have basically structures that aren't working all that well. What I suggest we need is a web that's decentralized. A web that has got a peer-to-peer back end on it that preserves some of the values that we wanted but doesn't go backwards but it's going forwards into the technologies that many of you are really pioneering and putting together. To try to do this two years ago, we put together a call for the decentralized web summit. Wouldn't it be great if we could build a web that's decentralized? Tim Berners-Lee and Vinsurf came but also the IPFS folks, all sorts of people were building this. When we did this again just last year, a lot of these people had startups that were well funded, it's on its way. But it's still not all together there yet. Building decentralized systems is fundamentally harder than building centralized systems and so we're all trying to get there. The way that I wanted to try to help was to be a convener but also by going and putting our own stuff online. Could the Internet Archive make itself decentralized? Could the 45 petabytes of the Internet Archive store, the 3 million users a day that are using the Internet Archive, could we make that decentralized? Could we make it so that it could get to it from anywhere and nowhere? And so that is the journey that I thought I'd go over today and to list a bunch of the problem areas that we're finding that frankly we could really use help. And it's not just we use, we as the whole web community, the Internet community could use help on a laundry list of projects that I think you guys already know the answers to many of them. Building a decentralized Internet Archive, I realized there are about five central magic properties that we're based on that is, I think it's time to just take a little notice of just like, holy crap, that the idea of content addressability is wild, it's sort of Merlin stuff that if you just have a hash of a file, you can just call it from the universe and it can come together and you can have it and you can check that you have the right thing. At the first time I think you never, you don't actually need provenance, you don't know who you got it from as long as it checks out with your hash, you know you have it right. This is a big interesting technological step. The magic of encryption, public key encryption particularly is woven into all our systems, yeah, yeah, yeah, but just take a moment, it's pretty amazing in terms of being able to build in a decentralized environment private communications that are extremely difficult to bug. Another that's not quite technology, it's sociology and politics and economics is a well connected internet but we're all very much based on it and we have to do what we can to try to keep it around and alive. Yes there are these country wide firewalls going up and their problems but in general we have a well connected internet, two more things. That we have an ability now to have downloadable code that's safe. So it used to be that we had to wait for a standards committee to come around to go and then it gets implemented and then it gets finally deployed. It's super slow evolution especially in the web browser space. Can we go and download JavaScript to make our web browsers into something else? And you guys are doing it within the Ethereum contract structures with web assembly which is excellent but this is magic in the sense that you can evolve much, much faster and lastly cryptocurrencies. How do we get beyond the original sin of the web which is advertising? How do we do that? How do we make it so you can make money by publishing on the internet? Right now you have to pretty much sign up to Amazon or iTunes or something like that to go and host your stuff. Can we go and use cryptocurrencies and I think that's a big opportunity. Okay I'm going to do something that they always suggest not to, it actually made people in the conference very nervous. I'm going to try to do a live demo of a decentralized internet archive. If this works you're going to have to applaud. Okay don't applaud yet because it doesn't work yet. Okay I did try this a month ago in front of a group and too many people went to this website before and things crashed. It was a kind of problem. So don't go there yet. Here I go. This is the internet archive website so just normal archive.org sort of see what it is. What I'm going to try to show is a decentralized version of this that is a lot like this. So you're going to say well how are you going to show that anything new has happened. I'm going to go and turn on the JavaScript console and show how much mechanism is going on. So when I change this to dweb.archive.org it's going to bootstrap all sorts of systems web torrent, ipfs, gun, yjs, all in JavaScript not just as clients but as servers of these and then bootstrap all of that and then start getting all of the assets to be the internet archive site. Okay wish me luck. Okay here. Okay they booted up. Okay we've got them all spanners up. Okay so now we have the basic home page up in terms of all of these images. Let's try going to get a movie. So here again it's going and getting a lot of assets of the Pralinger archives which is old archival movies. These are old educational films that anyway they're completely dorky and wonderful and popular. So let's let's go for health your posture. You know you gotta stand up straight they're going to tell you how. And okay this is going to bring in things using ipfs, gun, and yjs and then the actual video if it works. Okay we've got one peer five peers now so it's downloading. It's five peers coming in. So this is basically trying to weave peer to peer into the web itself but there's all sorts of other magic here. Oh I know you're all going to really want to go see this movie to make sure you're standing up straight and uh and the like. But web torrent was doing a lot of this and so it's not only downloading but this web browser is uploading this file already. Can we go and make this smoothly easy to do? And how do we get the bootstrapping system such that this can happen in censorship uh in a censorship resistant way? The internet archive is completely blocked in China for instance and sometimes blocked in Russia and occasionally in India blah blah blah blah blah. Can we go and keep things up and available um through these technologies and I think so but we're not quite there yet. So what's the benefits of going through all of this work right? We have ability to go into our websites our home pages or whatever. Well I'd say there are four big ones. One is we can make things more reliable. They can be archivable it's like get it's it's you can roll things back you could fork all sorts of nice things uh censorship resistant and even works in poorly connected zones like say a lot of the United States. It offers more privacy. One thing that was really spooky to me as the uh in the Stone Revelations is the GCHQ the the NSA of the United Kingdom stood in front of the WikiLeaks website and recorded all the IP addresses that came in and it turned over a large number of those to the NSA for further whatever they wanted to do um then the papers we don't know what the NSA did with that but the idea of people being rounded up for what it is they've read and had bad things happen to them is had a very long bad tradition in the library world. So this is sort of you know puts a big red flag of the idea of just getting in trouble for what you're reading is not good enough. It's not how the world's supposed to work. So let's build a better system. Two more things is we can build a business model that works better than an advertising and we can make it fun and malleable. I think we could make a system that works a whole lot better and and does better. Okay here's my laundry list of 13 projects that has been evolving out of the decentralized web summit and and the upcoming in the summer next summer the dd web camp in San Francisco these are areas that can really use some help for instance naming in the whole decentralized web world if we're going to move beyond dns how should that work that's actually probably a very good place for registries and ledgers and and and the like. How do we do key management on the dweb this is really tricky it's um uh dimitri uh excuse me on dtrick uh of mozilla talked yesterday of wanting to build better key management into the browsers let's help them let's try to figure out what we should do to be able to do that in such a way that it works well for normal people identity reputation how to do mutable data at scale so with uh bit torrent we implemented bit torrent on all of our materials so we have 45 petabytes of materials available in bit torrent it's kind of cool um but it's all static uh if any of those files change if you don't get the new torrent it will go and just continuously download thinking that it didn't get a a proper version so we have problems by having things be more mutable than the bit torrent or ipfs worlds currently work how do we do archiving in the decentralized web do we need incentivized structures i'm hoping that we can get um uh isps to go and make their own cached decentralized web nodes even if it's just to serve to their con customers so it's basically a content distribution network that's open access so it's not akamai that's only the big boys can netflix can go and put in that anybody materials just get faster by they're getting out there so the internet archive can play a role but can we have lots of different organizations play a role in archiving and caching materials reader privacy is notoriously hard if zucco says that privacy is sort of not easy to get obsec absolute then geez what a what a mere mortals supposed to be able to do here um but we can make progress uh we can make it so at least the gchq attack on wiki leaks readers is is much more difficult uh to do takedowns in the era of hashes rather than urls what does that look like um and should they be avoided are they opt in is it kind of like spam how does it how is it going to work another row of challenges again and what i'm trying to do is is is trying to excite you guys to help out and say i think i've got an idea on how to help on say web beyond advertising um i i've got a puzzle for you it's a crypto puzzle that i've even posed to wet diffie and he hasn't come back with an answer is can you make a d purchase on the d web what does i what do i mean by that let that my kid is a is a guitarist he plays songs and so he he has an album what if he wants to make a decentralized website that has his album on it the first one's free you can just play it but the others he wants to sell so he wants to sell for some amount of money what i imagine is we would encrypt those songs with a key and then if then it would go and advertise on the decentralized web page put a coin in this slot and then you'll get the key to go and unlock the the song right you could go and rip them off by going in you know encrypting and then passing it to your friends or whatever but that's always the case but at least if you wanted to play the game can we make it work without any amazon or itunes or even an escrow agent and i can't figure out how to do that because it requires having a secret key that lives say in a public contract and then i'm don't know enough about zero uh uh knowledge proofs to be able to figure out whether that works but anyway if we can crack that then you could feel confident putting a coin in the slot and knowing you're going to be able to get uh some decentralized content uh that's for pay can we make the decentralized web work in the browser itself i'd say one of the cool things that these guys did in the uh area of this decentralized internet archive that you just saw is there was no extension there was no new browser it was it works on your phone and actually now go ahead please do go to dweb.archive.org and just try it out because you're gonna be basically using everybody else that's here to be going and starting to access the internet archive site um so can we make it work in browsers completely unchanged and i think the answer is kind of but we're going to need some help from the browser companies themselves but can't we really get going storage in the decentralized web is it going to be file coin is going to be the internet archive how are we going to do a larger scale storage than what's actually on a blockchain uh governance in the dweb i'd say uh this community is thinking harder about governance than anything i've ever seen in terms of these the whole dowel thing is terrific that we need many models to be played with what are we going to do about the dweb and that the standards that are kind of evolved in that space and who can help and lastly can we define our decentralized terms i mean i'm old enough to to remember e when e was supposed to mean something um or open remember open seemed to have some definition at least stallman had some real definitions of what free software meant he had principles um and i think we need the same kinds of things around decentralization or it could just become a marketing term that is just wasted and we sort of would have built up a lot of good will around a term that will mean as much as organic um and so if we can go and do something in that area um i think it would be a very good long term investment and of course rethinking the ui and ux because i don't know about you but i i always have these cool things that i want my wife to use and it just if it's not actually working well she'll just sort of choose my good qa department it's like not good enough um to to survive so let's go and make the dweb uh a fun and interesting area to play in to help i would suggest what we what i've been doing is i've been trying out the puzzle if you're driving around or in a shower blank but decentralized so just try it out on your favorite piece of tech i think google docs is freaking magic i it is an amazing technology but it's creepy so anything that's creepy i want to go and think can i make blank but decentralized google docs but decentralized google maps but decentralized slack but decentralized twitter but decentralized facebook but decentralized um we just bought a tesla which is kind of cool um and it is like driving a phone it is really strange it is a connected device it the company knows everywhere we are it is it is creepy um so how do you make cars that are as cool as a tesla but decentralized it is absolutely possible uh to do and one thing you might want to try out is your own thing that you're doing and i know if you're doing things in decentralized uh tech you say oh well i'm already doing that but maybe your homepage isn't maybe your blog isn't um so how do we go and make all of this uh work i want to just say thank you to mitra and the internet archive uh engineers that made this demo all work and thank god it did uh web torrent ipfs gun yjs and others really put in a lot over the last year to make this work and they're continuing to make it so that it would uh work in censorship resistance and for mass back uploading and replicating petabytes of information let's build the web we want and the only way we're going to do that is together i'm hoping that this uh was somewhat useful and i look forward to talking with you any questions was i really that un provocative rooster this isn't like a question per se but i work with ipfs on a like almost daily basis and my company and i have i believe solved already some of those 13 challenges that you so my question is would we be able to like talk to you after absolutely you can talk to any of a number of people because it's not just me it's now groups of people and we're trying to basically put these together so yes if you have real clues as to how to make progress on these um they are this sort of the outstanding list fantastic thank you uh great talk thank you so much um i'm wondering how you think about incentivization for obscure data stuff that like from the fifties these movies that probably nobody will ever really look at how do you keep those around um how do we how do we do deal with the long term preservation of stuff that the long tail right the you know the Hollywood movies are going to take care of themselves just fine uh how do you deal with the long tail um i think it's by making compatible systems that are easy enough to use that even libraries know how to use the cool thing about libraries is they're paid to give stuff away it's about a 12 billion dollar a year industry in the united states it's about a 21 billion dollar a year industry in the world um they've just haven't modernized so the internet archive i think i was pretty modern um but uh the the library system hasn't modernized but boy are they up for it so when um the last election happened um uh i got worried about being in the united states and said gosh let's accelerate this make copies of multiple places so the internet archive has got two copies in the united states partial copy in amsterdam and a partial copy in alexandria egypt for real actually it's kind of cool um but we also then said how about canada let what what can what can we do there so i went around to our canadian friends and they said sure sign us up we're up for for spending money in our universities to go and help back up parts if not all the whole thing but i didn't have the tech for them well the idea of having just dead dumb storage someplace is good but not great you really need continuous usability so they wanted to go and have copies of parts of the collections but also serve them that's i think the opportunity of a decentralized internet archive so if we did this there's plenty of money for keeping oh i don't know mere exabytes alive which basically is everything written plus basically published we're 45 petabytes of data and we're small so it's it's i'd say the long tail we can count on that part of the system as long as it's compatible with the thriving commercial system the library world is difficult to go and drive forward technologies but it can ride other people's technologies it's an idea thank you actually sorry regarding this just this question i built a system at the ethereum san francisco hackathon it's called laser port which is a decentralized optical storage system precisely for this long-term archiving sign that man up great we we need more ideas than this and i think it's a lot of these things are bottom up if we just wait for the library congress to do something it's going to be a long freaking time so it's going to be bottom up and that sounds like uh there's freedom box there's a bunch of other boxes that people have have tried to make let's make them useful and used um yes your answer about moving the archive uh thank you uh in the trump moment was part of my answer is part of my question the question is in the trump moment what projects maybe that you didn't even mention here should we be focused on slash what norms give you pause what project should we be focused on now there's a lot more excitement around the nonprofit sector than there was even 10 years ago and people were just trying to make some crappy app and you know buy a house for cash or whatever just yeah um so there's a lot more interest in these uh the efs uh public knowledge um wikipedia internet archive um our biggest donations from uh ever other than from from me um have been from the crypto world actually but pineapple fund gave us two million dollars a theory of foundation gave us a hundred thousand handshake gave us a hundred thousand uh amis go gave us 30 thousand we've gotten a lot of support actually so that's just i guess that's my shilling uh moment here um but there is interest in these spaces and i i really feel it i you know i was invited here i think is kind of cool because we're really from a non-commercial space uh we are for the public good and that that's being involved in the conversations i think is a really good uh good sign um in terms of what to actually do is i've got a list of 13 things that if we solve those i think that we can crack through and make a awful lot of the websites we use decentralized and you wouldn't even know it that would be the best case is like oh yeah of course it's decentralized it's like of course it's htds um all right all of course it's and just how do we go and make it all just go decentralized uh my question is kind of two part i you mentioned earlier about china and not being able to access i wondered if the dweb.archive.org is accessible in any way in a place like china that has not yet china is actually really difficult to crack uh it will probably be easier in turkey uh or iran or some of the other places that were blocked um i think no we're up in in ron now um so there's um but because you have to go and get rid of every um access to the dns for instance um and that is challenging so uh china blocks us largely by messing with our dns and by blocking things going to our ip addresses um so we don't have that yet and it's a lot of the bootstrapping problem and that i think is going to require either browser um manufacturer cooperation or extensions okay that was part of my second question when you mentioned going beyond dns i just wondered if you could expound more on which um mitra who's been working on this has been making a cool system to go and make it so that if you have dweb in your domain name dweb.archive.org it mutates that into a dweb me slash arc slash archive org or something like that and it'll do it for any prepend like that so if you have dweb in any domain name it'll swap these around and it then looks it up in a in a sequence of uh databases to find who has the authority for that part of the subtree is there something we can read more about yeah it's all it's all open source but i'm not sure it's the perfect thing but people are trying um and to to basically build a sort of dns that's open uh and resilient and um doesn't have some of the problems we saw in the last time uh around all right thank you hello and whenever i should get the yank uh please yank me but yes yes sorry uh thank for the talk um who this um who can upload content to the internet archive you can't and and how did that content govern or curated it can it get deleted somehow who is okay in the platform so how do you upload to the internet archive and can it get deleted somehow is that the question so on archive.org there's a button upload please hit it please hit it now just hit hit it hit hit upload and just try uploading something it's a little clunky it's worse than but it supports youtube it's videos and books and all sorts of things and makes it into lots of different formats and keeps them alive forever but we do take things down um and we do under us law we try to push back um but we are uh under us law so if people make a valid copyright complaint and prove it then we will um make it not available uh publicly if you want to go and use the archive at scale use s3.archive.org we're trying to be bug compatible with amazon.com's s3 cloud s3.amazon.com so you can use your bucket and upload things at scale please let us know if you're going to do many terabytes or many petabytes but we're very interested so we you that's how all of the materials we get 23 terabytes a day coming into the internet archive um all of it comes through our s3 implementation so you can use s3 really easy um or just go to the website and hit upload and and and please do okay thanks um yeah thank you for the talk i thought there were a lot of um you know really great points that you made i guess this is the last question so um in terms of you know just trying to get more people oh can it be the second the last question okay sorry yeah um so more people from around the world accessing the same internet trying to not move into this two internet parallel that's emerging with you know nations like china kind of having a separate internet yes um so how can we prevent that with better interfaces slash what could we do to um like you said earlier you have to take some things down based upon us law that seems to be you know both a good thing in terms of preventing uh malicious content but then also a bad thing in terms of potentially having a burning down of the alexandria library yeah moment like how do we prevent that i i'm not sure i've talked about this in public why we're blocked in china as best i can tell so um in general countries will come to us and go and say this particular thing is not legal in germany or whatever under our expansive copyright terms and so if if they basically make a good case that it's illegal in their country then we'll block it for users in that country and that has allowed us to survive very well um the us is actually pretty liberal unless you talk about child porn or almost anything dealing with muslims but otherwise the united states allows a lot to be put out there in china there were some uploaded videos to the internet archive and they came and said you have to take them down and we said are they illegal in china and they said yes those are illegal in china we said fine we'll block them in china and they said that's not good enough you have to block them for the whole world and um because they said that we said we can't do that that's not how we operate and they said okay so 45 petabytes went offline including um millions of books digitized by the department of of education in china um that have been done as a collaborative project so i i think we have to um for those of us that work within the governments and the like is we just have to make sure that we're not overstepping our bounds and allow some of this experiment to continue um that's i bet that's the only thing i can think of and make multiple copies all right bruster i i know he's gonna hate me so go fast okay i'll be really fast uh this is the same question i asked you the last time you gave the speech which is if advertising is the root of all evil and getting people to pay for it we'll fix it then what do we do about the fact that we have a hugely unequal world and uh the ability to pay is very very widely dispersed and that all the stuff you pay for right now is just as abusive as the advertising stuff netflix buys a new apple locked you down and so on damn i i think i've got to go now um uh so yeah uh how do you how do you have payments work in sliding scale structures and um and have an an equal world when there's vast inequality in wealth should i don't know um i think we need a lot more experiments going on than the few that we've got going and i just want to see more things happen out there um monocultures don't work very well advertising based systems end up with uh newspapers uh television uh facebook google um so that's not good enough i'm i'm i'm i'm i'm generally a free for all kind of guy uh there's ways of making that work um i just like to see some more tools in our in our toolbox um sorry to not be more satisfying thank you very much we're around for the rest of the day