Translator: David Hsu Reviewer: Denise RQ
Internet has dramatically changed our life.
If we have a question, we simply google it,
we read most of our news online,
and we socialize with Facebook and Twitter.
We take it for granted,
but in the 1960s,
even the simplest collaboration among peers around the world
in a shared document in real time
was probably unimaginable.
More than lacking proper technological tools,
I believe that, conceptually, it was just too big a place for that to happen.
I believe we are on the brink of a much greater transition.
This will not only impact every facet of our life, every industry,
but it will also lead
to new, social, organizational structures in our society.
I believe that "decentralized networks"
- I will keep getting back to this terminology -
will take over the roles of banks, corporations, and insurance companies
within a decade or two.
I believe that will be just the beginning.
So if you look at the murmuration of those starlings
- to me, they look a lot more like a living creature
rather than a flock.
Look at their movement and the flow.
Beyond the beauty of that movement, what fascinates me
is it seems there's no single bird responsible
for coordinating that movement.
Imagine having in these decentralized networks
millions of people and computers, rather than birds,
cooperating around shared goals.
How will it look like?
What will it take to do it?
And would it be a good or a bad thing?
The basis for this revolution is the blockchain technology,
the technology underlying bitcoin.
It was introduced in 2008
by Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous inventor of bitcoin.
Blockchain is this decentralized platform
that stores and manages records of value transfer.
It sounds a little complicated, so let me explain.
Middlemen are everywhere in our economy.
They are there to store records,
they are there to keep agreements on those records,
and to take decisions.
I own something if there is a social agreement that I own that thing.
It is as simple as that.
Ownership is set by social agreement,
and if there's no such agreement, then I don't own anything.
This agreement needs to sit somewhere.
For example, if the bank says I own 20 dollars, but I want 30,
then we just trust the bank's records to hold to the truth.
But as long as this record needs to be somewhere,
it also needs to be in someone's hands,
which gives that person enormous power.
Blockchain is this decentralized platform that tracks the records of value exchange
so it keeps tracking who owns what at any point in time.
By being decentralized,
it means that it sits nowhere and everywhere,
or rather that each computer in the network
will store a copy of that ledger, that public ledger,
and can confirm the validity of that copy.
So the entire network consents simultaneously.
Everyone can access the records,
can control the records of his own assets,
so I can transact money to my friend in China with a click of a button,
and the money just goes through instantaneously.
The whole magic of blockchain
is its ability to maintain continuously that consensus.
This is a resolution
to a long-standing problem in computer science
called the "double-spending problem."
So let me give you an example:
if I hold one bitcoin, and then let's say,
I publish on this side the network I send this bitcoin to a friend "A,"
and at the same time,
I publish on that side of the network that I send a bitcoin to a friend "B,"
this part of the network will hear the message
that I sent it to friend "A" first, will process that,
and when it will hear about the other message,
it will render it illegal;
whereas this part of the network will see reality the opposite way.
So we have just diffracted the network.
The whole magic of blockchain
is that, somehow, that network is being able to organically recover,
and, in mere seconds, agrees with consensus about a single reality.
We rely on intermediaries more than just to store our records,
we also rely on them to process our agreements.
Let me give you an example.
Let's say you and I want to place a bet.
From the beginning of recorded history,
we had to rely on a third party to place that agreement
and give it the funds to secure and process the contract.
So, whenever we have economic interaction,
we need intermediaries, we need middlemen
to execute our contracts,
to execute our economy.
With the advent of Blockchain 2.0,
we can also remove the intermediaries from that,
whereas before that, we wrote that agreement on paper or in code,
and we placed it in the hands of a third-party both of us trusted
together with the funds.
Now we can simply write it in code.
We can place that code onto the blockchain.
It has an address
- We call it a smart contract. -
and then we can transact money to that contract.
From that point onwards,
the blockchain guarantees to self-execute the contract by the code,
unambiguously;
no middleman. no friction whatsoever.
So, if the magic of the Blockchain 1.0
was that somehow the entire network agreed with consensus about records,
in Blockchain 2.0, the entire network consents to the records,
the agreements over the records, and the execution of those agreements.
If you want, if Blockchain 1.0 is some sort of public ledger,
then Blockchain 2.0 is a public computer, a decentralized computer.
This technology is already in process of replacing and reforming
basically the entire today's financial infrastructure.
The largest corporations, governments, banks, insurance companies
are all racing to develop and implement this technology.
But in economy, we also rely on intermediaries at a deeper level:
we rely on middlemen to take decisions for us,
to direct and to coordinate.
We need a CEO to run a company;
we need governments to collect and distribute taxes;
and we need a mayor to run a city.
We also need Airbnb
to coordinate among people and the value flow between those people
in a home rental network.
There's already a movement
towards the decentralization of opinion and the decentralization of coordination.
For example, today, if I'm hungry,
I wouldn't probably ask professionals
for what's the best solution in the neighborhood,
but rather, I would just check up Yelp for the crowd's opinion.
But as long as the power is in the hands of the platform owners,
as long as the power is concentrated,
there is an unavoidable conflict of interests
and a single point of failure.
So then, what if we had something like a Facebook network,
but operated by peers and the computers in that network?
Just a peer-to-peer service
with no central server, no company, and no management;
just self-organization?
What if we had a social version of Uber
with the right chain app living in everyone's mobile phones,
speaking with each other, peer-to-peer,
with no central management, no central server, no central control?
What if thousands of software developers
could spontaneously cooperate and develop software together?
Shares of the network will be distributed to participants
according to their contribution, the value of their contribution,
as perceived by other peers in that network.
But you may ask, "How do those crowds make decisions together?"
Clearly, each participant has her or his own opinion,
but how do they consent to a single action?
How do we design such a system to be resistant to fraudulent behavior?
How do we incentivize people to participate
in their best professional way?
And how do we maximally align everyone's interests?
These are exactly the typical questions
I have researched with my colleagues over the past two years,
the outcome of which we called a "decentralized governance protocol,"
which forms the game-theoretic basis for decentralized donor organizations.
It is still a work in progress, but we are very close to completion,
and we anticipate we'll launch
the first decentralized organization in the coming year.
Going back to those starlings,
you can again try to imagine decentralized networks
of millions of people and computers cooperating around shared goals.
Those networks will have their own personality,
their own value system, and even their own identity.
To the external observer,
they'll look a lot more like a living organism than an organization.
In the end, it must raise the question,
"Would it be a good thing or a bad thing?"
"Would it drive us towards a better or worse future?"
And my answer to that is that technology, as always, is neutral,
and thus, it only depends on us and on the way we use it.
Thank you.
(Applause)