Translator: Paulo Oliveros Reviewer: Denise RQ
For millions of years, humans lived together
in small decentralized network communities
of about 30 to 70 people.
Everybody knew everybody,
and it was hard to get away with doing bad things.
But then, about 10,000 years ago, something happened
that changed the course of history:
the invention of agriculture.
Agriculture allowed people
to produce food on a scale
they hadn't been able to before.
It allowed not just a few people,
but thousands and even millions of people
to live together in large societies.
But humans have a memory limit
known as Dunbar's number.
We can only remember about 150 people well.
So in these large societies,
of thousands and even millions of people,
we could no longer remember
everyone that we interacted with.
There was the rise of anonymity
and anonymity threatened the social order.
This created an opportunity for strong men to arise
to restore social order.
These strong men instituted social systems
that were top-down,
centralized, command-and-control.
This kept the social order,
but with great power comes great abuse.
So the people that lived in these centralized societies
suffered great abuses, they paid a big price.
But this was the only way to organize society
on a large-scale.
So people put up with these abuses for 10,000 years,
the entire span of recorded history.
Then about 500 years ago,
there was another change
that started turning the tide of human history
back to the decentralized society
that we'd lived in for millions of years.
So when you look at the whole span of human social evolution,
the span of 10,000 years of centralized society,
which is really all that we remember,
is actually just a blip in time.
It's a short transition phase
that takes us from the decentralized society of our past -
which was on a small scale -
to a decentralized society of our future,
which allows millions and billions of people
to live together in a decentralized way.
But what is it that allowed us
to, again, live together in a decentralized way
without those centralized structures?
What is it that allowed us
to bridge and transcend Dunbar's number?
People-based trust systems don't scale beyond Dunbar's number,
but technology-based systems scale virtually without limit.
So it's the emergence of technology-based trust systems
that allowed us to organize society on a large scale without centralization.
The first of these technologies was the printing press.
It started with the printing press about 500 years ago.
The printing press has no memory limit,
and the economics of printing allowed ordinary people everywhere
to cheaply record and communicate ideas across the whole world,
free from the restrictions of the centralized state
and the centralized church.
Communicating these ideas with people freely,
without censorship,
inspired the first democracy movements.
People started challenging the state,
started challenging the church,
developed their own ideas about how they could do things.
But the printing press was only the first of a long series of technologies,
the most recent of which are the Internet and Bitcoin.
I refer to all these technologies put together as the Technology of Trust.
Where human-based trust systems don't scale,
technology-based systems scale virtually without limit
beyond Dunbar's number,
so we can once again, live together in a decentralized way
but on a large scale.
The technology of trust has four pillars.
The first of these pillars is decentralized communications.
Before we can do anything,
we need to communicate what we want to do.
And decentralized communications has two essential components
in the modern world: the Internet and cryptography.
The Internet and peer-to-peer decentralized technologies
such as BitTorrent,
are now enabling people to communicate without censorship.
So centralized power structures can no longer control
the flow of information.
However, the Internet by itself is not enough, we need cryptography,
because without cryptography,
the centralized structures can still use surveillance and censorship
of what we communicate;
and this impacts our freedom of speech, our freedom of thought.
To have freedom of thought,
freedom of speech, and freedom of action,
we need privacy-enabled communication systems.
So the Internet plus cryptography gives us that.
The second pillar of a decentralized society
is decentralized law.
So first, we communicate about what we want to do,
and then we come to an agreement on how we want to cooperate;
and for that we need decentralized law.
The three essential components of a decentralized legal system are:
choice of law, choice of adjudicator, and choice of enforcer.
Choice of law means that we can choose the law
that applies to our agreements in our interactions.
So for example, we do a contract,
and we can choose the law of England,
or the law of Switzerland,
or we can even make up our own law.
Choice of adjudicator means
we can choose who hears our disputes, who resolves our disputes.
And, finally, choice of enforcer means
we can choose who it is that enforces our contracts and legal judgments.
These three principles sound like very radical ideas,
but it may surprise you to hear
that these are actually not untested theories;
this is the original way that our legal systems operated.
These ideas date from prehistory.
These were the cornerstones of the legal system of our past.
It's only in the past 10,000 years
of increasingly centralized societies,
and increasingly centralized legal systems,
that we've gradually forgotten about these building blocks;
and today it's almost impossible for us to imagine
how we could have a legal system that's decentralized
in the way that I've just described.
It's time to bring back these ideas
and to reintroduce them into the modern world
so that we can really operate a decentralized society.
I and other researchers have developed a complete legal framework
for a decentralized society that operates on these principles
and, in fact,
we're already implementing these principles
and these legal systems in our businesses
and in so-called startup cities.
Following the examples of Hong Kong and Singapore,
there are now entrepreneurs building so-called startup cities
in developing countries,
autonomous regions of developing countries
that desperately need jobs
and we're building these startup cities
with these advanced legal systems
that allow people to create jobs and generate wealth
on a scale that hasn't been possible in today's world.
Today's world is suffering from so many laws
that it's virtually impossible to do anything,
and these countries desperately need jobs,
they desperately need wealth creation.
So these are very exciting developments.
The third pillar of a decentralized society
is decentralized production.
Just like we've had with decentralized communications,
decentralized production allows us
to bypass the censorship of centralized systems.
And there are two essential elements of decentralized production.
The first of all, decentralized materials production,
and, secondly, decentralized energy production.
Decentralized materials production includes technologies such as 3D printing.
With 3D printing, anyone, anywhere in the world,
can download a design from the Internet
and print this out at home, print out their own products.
So this bypasses the restrictions that seek control
of the flow of goods across national boundaries.
The second component is decentralized energy production.
We are now starting to see,
we are in the early days of decentralized energy production
that will allow people to produce their energy
cheaply at home, at virtually unlimited quantities.
And together these will move us from
the systems we've had like the diet days of the Pharaoh -
one guy controlling an army of thousands of slaves -
today we've got Apple having factories in China
with tens of thousands of workers.
This will move us to much smaller systems where people can produce
their own goods and services at home without censorship.
The fourth pillar of a decentralized society
is decentralized finance.
And the essential components of a decentralized financial system
are first, a decentralized currency,
and secondly, decentralized contracting systems.
The invention of Bitcoin
is one of the most important breakthroughs in human history.
For the first time, we have a decentralized currency
that cannot be censored,
that cannot be controlled by any entity, by any government.
The invention of bitcoin has sparked the emergence
of a whole new digital finance industry
that is building an ecosystem around bitcoin
that will develop digital financial products and services.
The most important of these is decentralized contracting systems.
These contracting systems, for the first time,
offer a complete, universal transaction platform.
So on a single integrated platform,
you can do literally any kind of financial or legal transaction.
And these two technologies put together,
so decentralized currency with decentralized contracting platforms,
give power to ordinary people.
Today's financial system is highly centralized:
a few people pull the levers of power,
and we are at their mercy.
A stark example of that for example, is Cyprus.
One day, people thought they had money saved up over 30-40 years,
and the next day, they heard
that the government was going to confiscate 40% of their assets,
and there's nothing that they can do about it.
But with these technologies,
you have the power back in your own hands.
So those are the four pillars of a decentralized society,
and there's a logical order to them.
First, we communicate about what we want to do,
then, we agree the terms of our cooperation,
then we produce what we've agreed to cooperate on,
and finally, we trade the goods and services that we've produced.
Together, these technologies form what I call the technology of trust.
They will enable ordinary people to communicate,
to come to legal agreements,
to build products and services,
and to trade without interference from third parties.
So what does the world of the future look like?
Imagine a Maasai warrior on the plains of Africa
who has no access to the banks, the financial services,
and the whole infrastructure that we take for granted
in the developed world.
He is cut off from the global economy.
He has no bank account, no lawyer, no financial services.
This severely limits his ability to generate wealth.
But he has a mobile phone,
and soon, using that mobile phone,
he can start with a business idea, and within minutes,
with a few clicks on his mobile phone,
he can incorporate a legal entity,
and he connects to a global transaction platform
that allows him to safely and securely do business
with anyone in the world, including people that he's never met,
people that he cannot trust;
and the transactions,
the integrity of the transactions is guaranteed by the technology.
This dramatically improves his ability to generate wealth.
Billions of people in Africa, Asia, and South America and elsewhere
are going to be raised out of poverty,
dramatically improving their standard of living.
With just a mobile phone,
everyone is going to have access to all the world's knowledge,
technologies, and products and services.
The combined force of these technologies
will force the old, centralized, coercive monopolists to change.
They will have to become competing service providers
that serve the needs of all of us.
This is going to lead to a radical transformation
of our communication systems,
our financial systems, our governments and legal systems.
The end result is that we will once again
live together in a small and decentralized network community
where we'll have the power in our own hands
to live lives of our own choosing,
in peace, freedom, and prosperity.
A new generation of entrepreneurs is building society 3.0;
Join us!
(Applause)