Translator: Yanting Qian Reviewer: Julie Quynh Nguyen
Today I'm going to tell you
about how I fell in love with the internet.
And how I realize that the internet
is fundamentally broken in certain ways.
But we can fix it.
I still remember that I was a kid growing up in Pakistan.
It was in 90s.
And there was this one night
where we had this big result in the morning,
and my mom told us that if you and your brother
both get all As,
I will buy you a computer.
And we were so stressed
that we couldn't even sleep that night.
At some point my mom realized that
and she was like
you know what
even if you get one B
you will still get a computer.
Next day we woke up,
our results turned out to be great,
and we went there
we got that machine.
I remember that I was the most excited
not when I got the computer
but when I went online for the first time.
For those of you in the audience who are under 25,
think of this as the old Chrome.
This was the browser.
This was the first browser of the internet:
Netscape.
that actually introduce the internet to millions of people
including me.
I was the only kid on the block
who had access to this magical thing
and who had access to all this information
and that's where I fell in love with internet.
I ended up dedicating my entire life to this.
I kind of like bomb the hood open
and started studying the engine inside
that how does this actually work.
I ended up doing a PHD in Computer Science,
focusing on the internet.
So today what I'm going to do is,
I'm going to bomb the hood open
and show you how the internet works a little bit.
For most of you, the internet is like a black box.
You have no idea how this really works.
You just open up chrome
and you go to facebook.com.
That's pretty much it.
What most people don't realize
is that when they are going to things like facebook.com,
there are so many middle hidden men
and companies that you are trusting
and they are there.
They include companies
who made your browser software,
your internet service provider,
the servers where you are asking
"hey, where's facebook.com?"
"where is CNN.com?"
and these companies that issue security certificates.
Remember these green blocks signs
that make you feel really secure?
that "hey, I'm on the secure internet"?
It's mostly just this one company
that says "Hey, trust me.
You are talking to the right facebook!"
And people just blindly trust that company.
Things don't go well all the time.
For example, recently in Turkey
the company that was supposed to issue
the security certificates for Google
was actually issuing the wrong certificates.
So an entire country is thinking
that they are talking to Gmail
or they are talking to the correct Google,
but they actually weren't.
So this is the first big problem with the internet
that we blindly trust these companies
and these third parties
that we don't even know exist.
So once you do connect to the right website,
the right facebook that you wanted to talk to,
what is happen all the years
is that now there are these big companies in the middle.
You are just a screen.
Your laptop is just a screen
and you are talking to these big companies
that have all your data.
They have so much power and control over you.
The internet is Google and Facebook.
And, if you want to talk to your friend,
your friend connects to facebook,
you connect to facebook
and then you talk to each other.
So the second big problem with the internet,
is that you don't own your own data.
These big companies own all of your data.
But we want an internet that is open.
We want it to be transparent.
We want an internet that is fair.
For that, I'm proposing two requirements.
One, there can be no middle man.
Two, users have to own their data.
Google has this famous tag line.
"Don't be evil."
But maybe it should be
"Can't be evil."
A company shouldn't have that much power
to begin with
where they are making this decision that
should I be evil or not.
So today I'm going to tell you
about this new revolutionary technology
called the blockchain.
I've been doing researchs in computer systems
for almost 15 years now.
The blockchian is the most sophisticated,
complex,
yet elegant and beautiful technology
that I've ever came across.
The main thing that it does
is that it gives the power back to the people.
So it started off as an application
for payments
that if you just want to send money
to your friend,
there are all these banks
and payment processors
and third parties in the middle
that you have to go through.
So the first application
of the blockchian technology
was called Bitcoin.
You might have hearded about it
in the newspapers.
What Bitcoin said was
we can replace all these banks
with a open network,
a network that is made secure
by mathematics and cryptography.
And in this open network,
people can own digital money directly
and they can just send transactions
directly to whoever they want to
send them to.
So how do you use this network?
There is this thing called a private key.
Think of it as a really really long,
and really really strong password.
With the private key,
it's like you have a key to a locker
that has cash in it
or the key of your house
where you keep all of your belongings.
This private key is so secure
that if someone wants to
randomly guess it or crack it,
they would need more energy
than is present in this entire solar system.
This is mathematics and cryptography
keeping you secure.
So Bitcoin
focused on the payments usecase
and what we realize is that
just like there are banks
where you keep your money,
facebook is like a data bank
you keep all your data there
So you can actually take the same techonolgy
and apply it to internet in general.
If you go back and you see how the internet started,
it was roughly 1990
when the main technology
for the World Wide Web came about.
And then in 1994,
Netscape,
the browser that made me
fall in love with the internet
came out.
And in 2009,
the main technology for the blockchian came out.
And now,
our company has made
the first major browser
for this blockchain backed internet.
And just like in 1994,
there were so many companies
and people making businesses
on the internet,
the same thing is happening again.
There are these developers.
We have thousands of developers
and community members
who are coming together
and building applications
on this new internet.
This is what the browser looks like
and the really cool thing about this browser
is that you are actually not
on the traditional internet.
You are on a parallel universe
where it's more secure.
And just like on the normal internet,
you download
something like Chrome,
which is your window
to how to use this thing,
you download the Blockstack browser
and that is your window
to using this blockchian
backed new internet.
And just like you go to CNN.com
or Facebook.com
you can go to something like Werner.id
and see the profile of Werner Vogels
who is the CTO of Amazon.
He registered this profile
using that private key
directly.
He didn't have to go through
any company at all.
And this profile
is so secure
that to change a single character
in his profile,
you will have to take down
the entire blockchian network,
which would cost you
hundreds of millions of dollars
and even if you do it,
the entire world would notice
that someone just took down
the entire network.
So on this new internet,
I can go and register
muneeb.id
and you can go
and get your user name.
Then what happens is
because now this user name is yours.
You own it.
You can actually use it
anywhere you go
on all the websites
on all the applications.
So passwords basically just disappear.
You don't need passwords anymore.
You are using your own username
wherever you are going.
In the real world,
we had a concept
of property rights.
You can buy land.
You can build a house there.
You can keep all of your belongings inside.
But we never had that concept online.
We were always renting
from these big companies.
What's happening with the new internet
is that
it has a concept of ownership.
You can now go and own
your own username.
You can have your own storage space online.
where you can go and keep all of your data.
Once that happens,
and I want to talk to a friend,
I want to send a massage,
that communication is between two individuals
and there is no company in the middle.
Not our company.
Not any other company.
It is pure mathematics and cryptography.
So the old internet
made us blindly trust
these middle man
and didn't give us ownership
of our data.
The new internet fixes that.
And what this does,
is that this is a dynamic change
in the power dynamics
between large companies and people.
The new internet takes away power
from these large companies
and takes it to where it always belong:
with the people.
On this new internet,
the power belongs to all of you.
Thank you.