Program Notes
Guest speakers: Joh Isaac Mitchell & Michael Goldstein
Today we feature two interesting talks: Art as Technology and Crypto-anarchy. The first talk is from the 2013 Palenque Norte Lectures that were held at the Burning Man Festival. And that story is followed by a concise explanation of how bitcoin technology evolved and that cryptocurrency is only the tip of its iceberg. And should you harbor fears that bitcoin is a government operation, there is this quote by Michael Goldsetin:
“Satoshi could have been an NSA backed totalitarian, but his protocol is strictly anarchist. He could have easily been paid by the government to create it, but he created something that the government itself cannot shut down. And the protocol itself is strictly anti-government in the sense that it does not allow for government.”
Follow Michael Goldstein on Twitter
Satoshi Nakamoto Institute
Cypherpunk in Wikipedia
A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto
Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities
John Gilmore on the Psychedelic Salon
Cryptonomicon
by Neal Stephenson
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396 - A Freely Evolving Topology of Light & Sound
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
00:00:23 ►
salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:31 ►
And as some of our fellow salonners already know, our community has suffered a great loss.
00:00:34 ►
Daniel Jabbour died just a few days ago.
00:00:40 ►
If you aren’t familiar with Daniel and his work, well, maybe a good place to begin might be my podcast number 376, which features the 2013 Palenque Norte lecture that
00:00:47 ►
Daniel gave. It’s titled, Coming Out of the Psychedelic Closet. And I’ve received several
00:00:53 ►
comments about how this particular talk has made a really positive impact on the lives of some of
00:00:59 ►
our fellow salonners. At this very moment that I’m recording these words, there is a memorial for Daniel that’s taking place in Northern California,
00:01:08 ►
where he made his home and where so many of his close friends also live.
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In future podcasts, I hope to play some of the tributes to the life and work of Daniel Jabbour that are now taking place.
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He was an amazing young man who, among many other civic activities, co-founded the Psychedelic Society of San Francisco, and who has now died before his 30th birthday.
00:01:33 ►
For many of our fellow salonners, Daniel’s death is the first time that any of your peers have died, and will no doubt weigh heavily on your hearts for some time now.
00:01:43 ►
and will no doubt weigh heavily on your hearts for some time now.
00:01:48 ►
There’s no easy or quick solution for that, but in your pain,
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maybe you can try to figure out what there is that you can do with whatever resources you have that in the spirit of Daniel Jabbour will help make this world a better place for those who will be coming after us.
00:02:00 ►
And after speaking with several of Daniel’s friends I’m confident that all of the many projects that he began
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and well even some that he was only dreaming about
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are going to continue on with his spirit in mind
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so stay tuned
00:02:15 ►
we’re not going to let memories of this beautiful soul be forgotten
00:02:19 ►
now I’ve got one more thing to pass along
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but it’s not any more sad news, so you can relax.
00:02:27 ►
This past week, I had to leave town for a few days, so I thought that I’d be really clever and post a podcast late on Monday night,
00:02:35 ►
which I did, but only through the RSS feed.
00:02:38 ►
My plan was to do the program notes on Wednesday night when I returned.
00:02:46 ►
program notes on Wednesday night when I returned. But unbeknownst to me, the salon’s website crashed at almost exactly the same minute I was pulling out of the driveway. And when I returned
00:02:52 ►
on Wednesday, after being out of touch and not able to access the net for two days, I discovered
00:02:58 ►
that the site had been dark all of the time I was gone. And so once I finally got the site working again, I finally posted the program
00:03:06 ►
notes. But then, only about 30 minutes later, I got a phone call from Pez telling me that I’d
00:03:12 ►
made a slight mistake, and that I had to take the podcast down. So that’s the reason that you see
00:03:18 ►
the number of this podcast as 397A, just so as to not confuse any of the few people who downloaded a copy of the
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first version of today’s program. So now, even if you’re a little confused, well, don’t worry about
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it. I’m confused most of the time. So let’s get on with the show. And just a quick note to our
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fellow salonners who made a donation during our pledge drive. I haven’t forgotten about you in case you haven’t received an email message from me yet.
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But like usual, I’ve been running a little behind lately.
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But never fear, anyone who made a donation of any amount will for sure hear from me before June
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when the thumb drives will be shipped and the sponsors page goes live.
00:04:05 ►
Now today I’ve got something for you that I’m really looking forward to hearing once again.
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Two somethings, actually.
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First, I’m going to play another of the Palenque Norte lectures that were held at last year’s Burning Man Festival.
00:04:18 ►
And following that, I’ll introduce the next speaker.
00:04:21 ►
But let’s begin at Burning Man.
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introduce the next speaker. But let’s begin at Burning Man. And what we are about to hear is the 2013 Palenque Norte lecture by John Isaac Mitchell, who has a novel take on the
00:04:33 ►
nature of art, both the end result of the artistic process and the process itself as art.
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Hi, guys. Welcome to Planké Norte. Thank you all for coming out so early at 2 p.m. on Tuesday.
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Very happy to have you here. Our next speaker is John Isaac Mitchell. And John is going to be giving a talk today called Art is a Technology. And I met John a couple years ago through Students for Sensible Drug Policy.
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And we were both moving to the Bay Area at the time,
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and he was working as a tech reporter
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and got to know each other.
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And yeah, John has done some incredible work.
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He’s an amazing writer,
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and he’s had some wild experiences out here at Burning Man
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that have sent him in some interesting directions with his writing. Now with a new blog he’s created
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called The Daily Portal, which I’m sure he’s going to tell you all about. So without further ado,
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here’s John Mitchell, Art as a Technology. Thanks, Chris. I’m here to talk about freedom.
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Just kidding. I mean, I am going to talk about freedom,
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but not like red, white, and blue kind of freedom. I want to talk about art because that’s what we do
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out here. To explain briefly who I am, as Chris said, my background is in media. I wrote about
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technology, Silicon Valley stuff for a while. And then I cut to the chase
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and started making weird stuff,
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which I’ll probably get into.
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But I want to just cut to the chase here today
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because we’re at Burning Man.
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We’re in a philosophical setting.
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And so what I’d really like to do
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is start an argument about what art is
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with all of you.
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And at best, we’ll have that argument.
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And maybe to my surprise, we’ll all agree.
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And then we can all just leave thinking about it.
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The thing I have to talk about is really just one sentence, which is that art is a technology.
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And that might sound offensive.
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So let me explain why I think so.
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Tell me if this sounds familiar.
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You’re at Burning Man, and you’re looking around at night
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at this spectacle, just incredible amounts of labor and and effort and energy and uh
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you know money and power and gasoline and uh blinky stuff and thinking this is so beautiful why did we bring this here? And if you’re like me,
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that question out here
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quickly spirals off into questions about,
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the same question about kind of anything
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in your default world,
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in your social world.
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Why do we do what we do?
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That’s a question that I was first asked, I think, here, too.
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And this is like another version of that question. Why do we make art? Why do we build the stuff
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that’s out here? Through pondering this question, I came to this conclusion that art is a technology,
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and I guess it would help to define what a technology is and what art is.
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That’s the touchy one.
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So a technology, let’s say, is something that humans do, work that humans do on their environment, on their conditions to change it.
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Does that sound acceptable as a definition of technology?
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Things we do to our environment?
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Does that sound acceptable as a definition of technology?
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Things we do to our environment?
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Art, then, I think, is a technology for making our internal conditions intelligible to us.
00:08:38 ►
And that is…
00:08:42 ►
I used to think that maybe
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it was to communicate our internal conditions to other people,
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but I think we know that that’s not a necessary condition for making something.
00:08:54 ►
But so we have this technology that we use to express something inside of us so we can understand it.
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The reason I think this might start an argument
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is because I think
00:09:13 ►
the idea that art has a purpose
00:09:17 ►
is troublesome to some people.
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But I think that leaves you with this question
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of why do you do it?
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Why do you make
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the things you make? And maybe you don’t have to have an answer, but I don’t find that satisfying.
00:09:32 ►
That’s what has driven me to make the things that I’ve made lately.
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And like I said, it all started started here I could tell that story
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I think maybe I should
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about what exactly happened
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there’s an artist here
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named Harlan Gruber
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who makes portals
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anybody seen them?
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they’re really far out
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by far out I mean literally far out
00:10:04 ►
they are like Anybody seen them? They’re really far out. And I mean, by far out, I mean far, literally far out.
00:10:18 ►
They are like geometrically intricate, colorful, like gazebos out in deep playa.
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And you can see them from the city in the daytime, but they’re really far away, and at night you wouldn’t know they were out there
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until you bumped into one.
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And they contain this musical instrument that he invented
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called the Quasar Wave Transducer.
00:10:38 ►
What that is is a bass guitar amplifier
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with two very loose bass strings
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with a giant pickup underneath
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sitting underneath
00:10:49 ►
this structure.
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And it’s
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turned up really loud and
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the strings are tuned down really low
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which
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creates crazy harmonics
00:11:02 ►
that feed back.
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So as long as you’re pumping electricity into this thing,
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it keeps shaking.
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And it’s not a pitch.
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It’s really a big cluster of messy noises
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that sounds like purring.
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Like that.
00:11:25 ►
I’ve practiced my impression of it a lot.
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And, I don’t know, on a bad night at Burning Man once,
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I wandered out deep, which I tend to do anyway,
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and found the portal empty. There’s a different one every year. This year,
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he brought a couple of them, I think. I haven’t been out there yet. They’re in the art map,
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if you’re interested. I think they’re called the 1111 portals. This year, the number is always in
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the name. They’re always put in a numerologically significant place on the playa.
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And it’s at 1111 and a mile out, exactly 5,000 to 280 feet from the man.
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So go to the temple and bang a left and walk a lot and you’ll get there.
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I advise biking, actually.
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Anyway, I found it out there.
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This was last year.
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I found it.
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It was empty.
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It was purring.
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And I was just at my wits end about Burning Man.
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Why did we come out here?
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Why did we do all of this?
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Why did we spend all of this money?
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Why did that camp have their music on so loud?
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You know, like, there are…
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People are making artistic decisions out here all the time
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without even realizing it sometimes.
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They’re changing the environment.
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They’re expressing their internal conditions,
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and they’re working on people with it.
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Art is a technology.
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And so out of this frustration, I went out. Out of frustration with how people were using it, what they were
00:13:11 ►
making. I know this is like the most hipster way to be a burner possible, I realize, but
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this is what took me out there. So I just said, you know what, I’m going to sit in this thing all night long.
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And I was barely prepared.
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I didn’t have enough layers to do that, really.
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I had a full water bottle, but not all night’s worth.
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But it just had to happen. So I climbed up, and I sat in there by myself
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and listened to the purring.
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And it’s so far out that you can see the city,
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all of it, through the window.
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It’s just, like, glittering.
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It’s like you’re in orbit around it.
00:14:03 ►
And that perspective really helped
00:14:05 ►
but mostly what helped was the purring machine
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underneath me
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and inevitably the sort of good
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vibrations attracted other
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weirdos wandering deep playa
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and they climbed up and sat with me
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and in fact the first couple people who
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did stayed all night with me uh which i found astonishing like why like
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what i felt just blessed by that.
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It was lonely out there, as you might imagine.
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And more people came, and some people left.
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Many of them stayed for hours at a time, though.
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And inevitably, at one point,
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somebody walks up and starts fiddling with
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the controls underneath and I figure
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this must be Harlan Gruber. He’s here to
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check out the
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change the battery or something.
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And we asked him to come up
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and he did and he came and he sat with us.
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And so this was kind of a
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big deal.
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I didn’t explain that I’ve seen his portals in past years
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i’d never really had an experience with them like this but i loved them i knew they were there
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um and so now the artist is like in the portal with me um and and all these other people who
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love it too um and he’s stoked obviously um that so many people are there enjoying this thing
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um and he explains all about how the quasar wave transducer works and what the geometry of the
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shape means and all this intention that went into it um and uh it. And he sort of looked at me at one point and was like, thanks for, you know, keeping it for me.
00:16:13 ►
I was like, what do you mean? He’s like, you’re doing a job here. And I like that. I enjoy it.
00:16:30 ►
like that i enjoy it um and uh i realized i guess that the thing that he had made is really useful suddenly i was convening this meeting of like cold lonely people who wanted to talk to each other
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um and we were it was it was it was healing us.
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And this, you know, it stayed until sunrise,
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and all held hands, and, you know, fed each other
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what little food we had in our packs,
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and walked home, and that was it.
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Except it wasn’t at all
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because I’d been transformed by this thing.
00:17:12 ►
And I hope that you see something out here
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that does work on you like that
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and makes you come out differently and ideally bonds you to some people that
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are there with you too.
00:17:32 ►
So that’s the story of the most meaningful work of art I’ve ever seen at Burning Man.
00:17:37 ►
And it has changed the way I make things and the way I think about art and technology
00:17:48 ►
in ways that I could talk about
00:17:50 ►
but I’d really rather just
00:17:51 ►
think about
00:17:54 ►
I’d rather leave you with the intention
00:17:56 ►
and I want to hear if anyone disagrees
00:17:59 ►
with the idea that art is a technology
00:18:01 ►
that art should have a purpose
00:18:03 ►
I want to know if any of you have stories like that
00:18:06 ►
about art at Burning Man or anywhere
00:18:09 ►
that has done work on you.
00:18:15 ►
And maybe if we want to talk about tech
00:18:18 ►
and all that other stuff
00:18:20 ►
that I’m intentionally not talking about
00:18:23 ►
because we’re not in the default world right now,
00:18:24 ►
we can do that too art is a technology yeah okay so uh the the challenge
00:18:36 ►
is basically um lots of kinds of uh media to do work and they aren’t all art. Pornography is an example. Um, I do, I did,
00:18:48 ►
I did sort of describe my category for art. I’ll say it again more clearly. Um, I definitely agree
00:18:55 ►
with you that, uh, doing like media that do work on you is not a sufficient definition. Um, art,
00:19:02 ►
is not a sufficient definition.
00:19:06 ►
Art, I only said one time,
00:19:11 ►
I think is a technology that we use to make our internal state intelligible to us.
00:19:14 ►
Intelligible, period.
00:19:16 ►
And I don’t think pornography does that.
00:19:18 ►
I think that it kind of does the opposite of that, maybe.
00:19:22 ►
So that’s what the definition of art that i’m using is she asked uh why i feel
00:19:31 ►
like it’s important to do this why why comparing art and technology matters to me what to be clear
00:19:38 ►
um i’m saying that art is a kind of technology.
00:19:47 ►
Technology isn’t… I think so…
00:19:49 ►
As someone who wrote about tech,
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and by tech,
00:19:53 ►
what I mean right now is
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startups that make apps for telephones.
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That’s a very narrow definition of tech.
00:20:02 ►
But when people use that little shortened version of the word
00:20:05 ►
technology oftentimes that’s what they mean i think that’s a pretty bad definition of technology
00:20:11 ►
i work in tech like does does does selling software mean that you work in tech um arguably yes but
00:20:19 ►
but the but the but tech working in tech like what i’m trying to say is we all work in tech.
00:20:28 ►
Technology isn’t just… The internet is often thrown around as a noun, as a description of technology.
00:20:33 ►
Is the internet a technology? Well, maybe.
00:20:36 ►
But it’s a very high-level abstract one.
00:20:39 ►
It’s made of computers and networking equipment and you know satellites and other kinds of
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technologies that have their own separate industries around them um uh interesting
00:20:54 ►
so why isn’t technology and art but i would challenge the idea that art predates technology
00:21:02 ►
because i would argue that fire is technology and i would argue that throwing predates technology, because I would argue that fire is technology,
00:21:05 ►
and I would argue that throwing rocks is technology.
00:21:11 ►
Right, you use tech first.
00:21:14 ►
Right.
00:21:15 ►
That really elegantly states
00:21:17 ►
the reason I’m sitting on this pillow right now.
00:21:20 ►
That, like, if technology is something
00:21:23 ►
that’s meant to improve our lives,
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it should stand to reason that something that we do to make our internal worlds make sense uh is is a way of improving our lives
00:21:36 ►
okay can i can i try do you mind if i try to boil down what you what you’re saying tell me if this is what you
00:21:46 ►
mean i think that i think that you pointed to um it’s similar to what what you asked me before about
00:21:55 ►
um technology coming before art um that the media the medium the technological medium we use to
00:22:01 ►
produce the art we shouldn’t be mistaken for the art itself.
00:22:07 ►
Does that sound right?
00:22:11 ►
So like the art is the product of the use of technology.
00:22:17 ►
So now we’re asking whether the thing you made is the art or the state you were in when you made it is the art.
00:22:21 ►
And so, I mean, I don’t think it’s necessary to separate those things. What
00:22:27 ►
I would say is that we have to remember that there are internal technologies. Like, how
00:22:37 ►
do you feel about the idea that language is a technology? Because it seems obvious to
00:22:44 ►
me. It has all of the components except for like the outside world
00:22:47 ►
tool that you use but then how can you really draw that line between things something you
00:22:52 ►
hold in your hand and something that you hold in your brain so um sorry right that’s true. And so the…
00:23:05 ►
But the cognitive component of it internally is, you know…
00:23:12 ►
So that’s really analogous then to the process of producing something
00:23:17 ►
versus the end result.
00:23:21 ►
So art is like comparable than in the world of tech with the capital T that we’re usually talking about.
00:23:31 ►
Art then could be compared to the programming language that you prefer in terms of the process.
00:23:40 ►
And that language in your head, I would argue, is still technology.
00:23:43 ►
And that language in your head, I would argue, is still technology.
00:23:52 ►
I want to back up from the idea that it was the other people showing up that made it into the profound experience that it was, the portal.
00:23:57 ►
The second I sat down in there, it started working on me.
00:24:02 ►
It was me showing up by myself.
00:24:04 ►
And so this comes back to something that you just said
00:24:07 ►
about art not being necessarily for other people,
00:24:09 ►
which I tried to sort of explain at the beginning
00:24:11 ►
is something I had to moderate my stance about,
00:24:14 ►
that when I first started realizing
00:24:15 ►
I might have a working definition
00:24:17 ►
of what art is for in my head,
00:24:19 ►
it was about communicating internal states to other people,
00:24:22 ►
and I don’t think that that’s a necessary condition.
00:24:25 ►
It’s just about making it intelligible at all.
00:24:29 ►
As to the part about justifying,
00:24:35 ►
making something concrete,
00:24:37 ►
and that comes back to a question that I didn’t,
00:24:40 ►
that I sort of dodged from you up front
00:24:43 ►
about why I feel like this is important to do at all.
00:24:50 ►
It’s hard.
00:24:53 ►
So I think this is probably the reason
00:24:56 ►
why I felt like coming up to talk about this
00:24:57 ►
would start an argument.
00:24:59 ►
Because I do, I think, if you press me on it,
00:25:04 ►
feel like I have to justify making things.
00:25:07 ►
There has to be a purpose.
00:25:11 ►
What I hope to do as I keep making things
00:25:16 ►
under this working model
00:25:19 ►
is make the justifications less and less materialistic, maybe.
00:25:27 ►
That, you know, if it helps you,
00:25:32 ►
it’s justified.
00:25:34 ►
And there isn’t a good way to measure that.
00:25:37 ►
You have to be helped in order to know that it worked.
00:25:44 ►
I don’t know how to pick.
00:25:44 ►
You’ve been itching for it.
00:25:46 ►
What’s up?
00:25:49 ►
I think you might be revealing my secret agenda here,
00:25:53 ►
which is to argue that the definition of technology
00:25:58 ►
is politically motivated.
00:26:01 ►
Because, as you said,
00:26:08 ►
part of the confusing thing about this conversation is that things fall in and out of
00:26:10 ►
the category of technology
00:26:13 ►
and that you know the idea that language is a technology
00:26:16 ►
or let alone art is a technology
00:26:17 ►
it seems bizarre
00:26:20 ►
because we have a specific set of working ideas
00:26:23 ►
of what is technology
00:26:24 ►
and your example of the pitchfork is really interesting
00:26:26 ►
because since we don’t use it every day anymore,
00:26:29 ►
it falls out a favor as a technology.
00:26:33 ►
I would argue that it is a technology.
00:26:34 ►
I would argue, as you said,
00:26:35 ►
that everything is a technology, kind of, not really.
00:26:38 ►
But my criteria for defining something as technology
00:26:44 ►
are very basic here.
00:26:47 ►
And so what I’m really doing since I quit my job writing about startups and stuff
00:26:57 ►
is trying to impress upon people who work in technology
00:27:02 ►
that their set of problems is bigger than they
00:27:05 ►
might realize.
00:27:11 ►
I’m really proud of us for not
00:27:14 ►
playing horrible word games
00:27:15 ►
very much yet,
00:27:17 ►
but if I might
00:27:19 ►
play one quickly,
00:27:22 ►
the
00:27:23 ►
other purpose breaks the definition of art
00:27:28 ►
that i’ve been working with anyway that like that that the art i mean there could be certainly
00:27:33 ►
as you say actually a really a really instructive way of thinking about this is that is the
00:27:39 ►
accidental thing that you mentioned that like whoops that made me feel something uh and and that i think
00:27:47 ►
it’s fair to relate to that part as art the art as i defined it is in the making an internal state
00:27:56 ►
intelligible and now this is going to start to get weird if we go too far down this road because
00:28:01 ►
it starts to get into like is it artistic to see the art in something that wasn’t intended as a work of art is that an artistic act and i would
00:28:11 ►
say yes because i’m a hippie but uh the the the art then is in that is that is in that understanding
00:28:20 ►
of the of the of that making intelligible of the internal state so in in
00:28:26 ►
imposing a desire on someone is not uh necessarily one or the other um the advertising could be
00:28:37 ►
really authentic uh it’s all in the it’s so a lot of the responsibilities on the viewer now
00:28:43 ►
which is good, I think.
00:28:46 ►
That’s why I wanted to talk about this here.
00:28:49 ►
Not because I think that being in a critical mindset
00:28:54 ►
is a very good way to go to Burning Man.
00:28:58 ►
Only because I think that it’s…
00:29:04 ►
It might applied well it might make it more fun
00:29:10 ►
because if you because if you’re making uh a portal out of whatever weird platform you’re
00:29:18 ►
sitting on and uh looking for that meaning while you’re there,
00:29:26 ►
cool things will happen.
00:29:31 ►
So that’s why I’m putting responsibility on the viewer,
00:29:36 ►
because we’re all participants, like we love to say here at Burning Man,
00:29:37 ►
and that’s for sure,
00:29:39 ►
and every interaction that we have is a work of art.
00:29:43 ►
Maybe by accident but yes right
00:29:46 ►
beauty is in the eye of the beholder he says and there’s a reason
00:29:49 ►
we still
00:29:51 ►
say that
00:29:51 ►
that’s a very good point
00:29:55 ►
a very good point has been made that we haven’t
00:29:58 ►
we haven’t decided whether the art and the technology
00:30:01 ►
that we’re talking about are the end result
00:30:03 ►
or the process
00:30:03 ►
and I’m on team process the art and the technology that we’re talking about are the end result or the process um and uh
00:30:06 ►
i’m on team process but uh the uh just because i sort of relate to objects as ongoing processes
00:30:15 ►
uh and that and that’s that’s what we’re so the argument that first of, start an argument. Talk, objective, achieve.
00:30:33 ►
The argument was over whether the… Well, there are plenty more examples.
00:30:36 ►
I didn’t really actually want to get into
00:30:38 ►
internet technology business stuff, and I won’t. But there are so
00:30:47 ►
many examples of giant enterprises that were started as byproducts. And this is actually
00:30:54 ►
an idea that is really motivating me in my work right now. Like when I start, so Chris alluded
00:31:00 ►
to this site that I built called the Daily Portal, which is obviously named after the portal at Burning Man.
00:31:08 ►
And it was a publication that I was building
00:31:12 ►
to demonstrate some of my objections to the kinds of media
00:31:19 ►
that I was working in before.
00:31:22 ►
And I built the site, and it’s awesome.
00:31:26 ►
And I really like writing things for it.
00:31:28 ►
But what I realized a few months into it is that as a
00:31:33 ►
byproduct, I had pretty successfully managed a web
00:31:38 ►
development project, which I had never done before at all,
00:31:43 ►
and executed it.
00:31:44 ►
And so I realized I need to…
00:31:46 ►
And then I read…
00:31:47 ►
I can’t link you to something right now,
00:31:51 ►
but there’s a great blog post
00:31:54 ►
by someone from 37signals
00:31:56 ►
that introduced me to the idea of selling your…
00:32:01 ►
How does it go?
00:32:04 ►
Selling your byproducts is the title.
00:32:07 ►
And there was an industry example of logging,
00:32:11 ►
realizing they could sell sawdust or something like that.
00:32:15 ►
And I realized that that’s what I had just enabled for myself.
00:32:18 ►
And so the site that I built had given me this byproduct
00:32:24 ►
that could then be a business for me
00:32:26 ►
much more viably than writing stuff on a purple website
00:32:30 ►
that’s very psychedelic looking.
00:32:36 ►
So did I make a work of art with that website or not?
00:32:42 ►
Or was I just building a business plan?
00:32:42 ►
make a work of art with that website or not?
00:32:44 ►
Or was I just building a business plan? Like, I would argue that the art and the byproduct are,
00:32:55 ►
it doesn’t compromise anything.
00:32:58 ►
And the reason I brought that up is because the 37 Signals cellular byproduct idea
00:33:03 ►
is exactly what we’re describing.
00:33:04 ►
And the reason I brought that up is because the 37 signals cellular byproduct idea is exactly what we’re describing. That a technology can very much be a playground in the same way that creativity can.
00:33:16 ►
Well, both.
00:33:17 ►
I mean, sometimes it develops in a pragmatically determined way.
00:33:23 ►
And sometimes it develops in a creative way. But the reason why it’s hard to think, to me, I think,
00:33:31 ►
about art and technology as similar processes
00:33:36 ►
is that the set of problems being solved,
00:33:40 ►
and this is a really technological way of talking about art,
00:33:42 ►
but I’m arguing here that you use art to solve a problem but it’s a different problem every time and it could be a different
00:33:48 ►
problem when you pick up your brush tomorrow after putting it down yesterday uh so that that
00:33:54 ►
because it’s a radically bigger set of uh challenges um it doesn’t develop in a linear way as an engineering-driven technology would.
00:34:09 ►
Because the process happens at a time scale that’s ridiculous for engineering purposes.
00:34:17 ►
Does that make any sense?
00:34:20 ►
You could have a timeline for engineering a solution to a problem.
00:34:28 ►
But, like, you don’t have a timeline to deal with what’s going on in you right now.
00:34:29 ►
You have to deal with it.
00:34:30 ►
Right?
00:34:35 ►
So because that changes constantly, you don’t have that time frame.
00:34:36 ►
And that’s why it’s weird. But I’m arguing that those are just, that’s a spectrum.
00:34:40 ►
I think I’m getting the nod.
00:34:41 ►
Am I getting the nod?
00:34:43 ►
Thank you so much.
00:34:44 ►
That was awesome. I love you. getting the nod. Am I getting the nod? Thank you so much. That was awesome.
00:34:45 ►
I love you.
00:34:46 ►
Go make stuff.
00:34:54 ►
Now, in case you haven’t already picked up on this,
00:34:57 ►
what I’m doing today is the second of my Wave of Action podcasts.
00:35:02 ►
However, had I said that in the beginning,
00:35:04 ►
we may have lost some of our fellow salonners
00:35:06 ►
who aren’t very interested in these things.
00:35:09 ►
Now, why do I say that this talk,
00:35:11 ►
which was given in August of 2013,
00:35:14 ►
seven months before the wave began to roll,
00:35:17 ►
is representative of actions underway
00:35:19 ►
with the Wave of Action?
00:35:21 ►
Well, as the old saying goes,
00:35:23 ►
no explanation is necessary for those who already understand goes, no explanation is necessary for those who already
00:35:26 ►
understand, and no explanation is possible for those who don’t. So if it doesn’t all make sense
00:35:31 ►
to you just yet, well, I hope you’ll hang around for a bit and see if by summer it doesn’t begin
00:35:36 ►
to come into better focus for you. Which leads me to our next talk for today. It is by Michael Goldstein of the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute,
00:35:46 ►
and he explores the crypto-anarchist and cypherpunk roots of Bitcoin and analyzes the
00:35:52 ►
cryptocurrency from an anarchist perspective. This talk was given at the Texas Bitcoin Conference,
00:35:59 ►
which was held on March 6th of this year. Now, as you listen to this, don’t think that Bitcoin is just about money,
00:36:06 ►
or cryptocurrency as it’s called.
00:36:09 ►
There are two primary facets of Bitcoin as I see it,
00:36:12 ►
the digital currency itself and the underlying protocol,
00:36:17 ►
which is running on the infrastructure that’s already been built.
00:36:21 ►
Now, if you’re over 60 or so and have a bank account and credit cards,
00:36:24 ►
then you probably
00:36:25 ►
have other priorities to pay attention to right now. But if, however, you are, say, under 60 years
00:36:32 ►
old or so, the sooner you can get your head around what is actually taking place in the world of
00:36:37 ►
Bitcoin technology, the better off you’re going to be as it evolves and becomes more complex.
00:36:43 ►
going to be as it evolves and becomes more complex.
00:36:49 ►
In my opinion, this is the most disruptive technology to come along since the web was overlaid on the internet back in the early 90s.
00:36:52 ►
I was there and involved in that work at the time, and it was incredibly exciting.
00:36:57 ►
Much more exciting, actually, than the 60s that everyone seems so nostalgic for.
00:37:03 ►
You know, I’ve had quite a few fellow Saloners tell me on many occasions
00:37:06 ►
that they regretted the fact that they missed the 60s
00:37:09 ►
and then also missed the birth of the World Wide Web.
00:37:12 ►
Well, we won’t know for another 20 years or so,
00:37:15 ►
but I’m going to try to stick around long enough for you to tell me that I was wrong
00:37:20 ►
when I say that Bitcoin technology is going to be orders of magnitude more disruptive
00:37:25 ►
than even the web technology that was built on top of the Internet.
00:37:30 ►
Now comes Bitcoin, and I think it’s going to make past technological innovations seem like tinker toys.
00:37:37 ►
But if you think I’m wrong about this, well, please hold your comments until 2034.
00:37:44 ►
Now with that silly introduction, let’s get on with the show.
00:37:47 ►
And don’t let the geekiness of some of this talk turn you off.
00:37:51 ►
Although Michael begins with a little tech talk about public key encryption,
00:37:55 ►
don’t let that throw you off.
00:37:57 ►
Just hang in there and grab a hold of the parts that are most clear to you.
00:38:01 ►
If you’re like me and you really want to understand the tech behind Bitcoin, it’s,
00:38:05 ►
well, it isn’t going to be completely clear until you’ve worked with it for a while.
00:38:10 ►
But trust me, your grandchildren, I think, are going to thank you for laying the family’s
00:38:15 ►
foundation in this brave new world of digital anarchy. So I’d like to take you through a
00:38:21 ►
history of some of the ideas that went into Bitcoin.
00:38:28 ►
So let’s talk about the building blocks.
00:38:34 ►
The best place to probably start is back in 1976 with Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman,
00:38:37 ►
two cryptographers who have these feelings.
00:38:40 ►
You know, if only the people that are Bitcoin were talking about its potential for good instead of how they need to overthrow all government and fiat.
00:38:43 ►
Missing, of course, the point that overthrowing all government and fiat is its potential for good instead of how they need to overthrow all government and fiat. Missing, of course, the point that overthrowing all government and fiat is its potential for good.
00:38:50 ►
And there’s also these ideas such as, you know, the fact that you’re a libertarian and like Bitcoins
00:38:54 ►
does not mean it was built by people who hate the government like you do.
00:38:58 ►
Which I would like to go into why that is completely false.
00:39:02 ►
So I’d like to take you through a history of some of the ideas
00:39:05 ►
that went into Bitcoin. So let’s talk about the building blocks. The best place to probably start
00:39:13 ►
is back in 1976 with Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, two cryptographers who came out with a
00:39:19 ►
paper called New Directions in Cryptography. And this paper talked about something new called public key cryptography,
00:39:26 ►
where instead of needing to share a key
00:39:30 ►
with both people,
00:39:33 ►
the two people can have their own sets of keys,
00:39:36 ►
where a public one allows people to send messages to them,
00:39:40 ►
and the private one that they keep to themselves
00:39:42 ►
can be used to decrypt it.
00:39:44 ►
And this allows people to set up secure channels of communication between each other
00:39:48 ►
where otherwise it wouldn’t be able to exist before
00:39:53 ►
because of problems of key distribution,
00:39:55 ►
making sure that this secret between people can be shared.
00:39:59 ►
Another important thing is David Chaum,
00:40:03 ►
and he had two papers in the early 1980s.
00:40:06 ►
This one about untraceable electronic mail,
00:40:09 ►
where you could send email essentially anonymously.
00:40:13 ►
No one could find out where it came from or who it was going to.
00:40:17 ►
And also blind signatures for untraceable payments,
00:40:20 ►
which described how you could send basically digital cash.
00:40:26 ►
payments, which described how you could send basically digital cash, but it sets it up in a way where you can sign something with a digital signature, which verifies who it
00:40:32 ►
was sent to, and that’s using that private key that you keep to yourself.
00:40:36 ►
It can do so in such a way where you don’t even have to see what you’re signing, but
00:40:41 ►
you can verify that you signed it.
00:40:43 ►
Kind of like if you put carbon paper within an envelope
00:40:47 ►
and then you sign the outside of it,
00:40:49 ►
the inside paper is signed, but you didn’t actually see it.
00:40:54 ►
So these are just a couple really interesting ideas
00:40:56 ►
that came out in the late 70s, early 80s.
00:41:00 ►
And while they just seem, you know,
00:41:02 ►
they’re cool cryptography stuff,
00:41:03 ►
they have specific implications.
00:41:06 ►
And that’s where these guys came in, the cypherpunks.
00:41:09 ►
The cypherpunks were founded in 1992 by Eric Hughes, Timothy C. May, and John Gilmore.
00:41:15 ►
It was a group of guys that met up in Silicon Valley and talked about these cool new ideas in cryptography, but they also held a lot of ideals
00:41:25 ►
about online privacy
00:41:27 ►
and keeping yourself safe from government.
00:41:34 ►
And a great example would be
00:41:35 ►
Hughes’ own Cypherpunks Manifesto,
00:41:38 ►
where he says,
00:41:40 ►
Cypherpunks write code,
00:41:41 ►
which I’ll get back to in a second,
00:41:43 ►
and we don’t care if you don’t approve of what we write,
00:41:46 ►
but we’re going to write it in such a way
00:41:48 ►
that can be spread and not shut down.
00:41:51 ►
And these programs
00:41:52 ►
were because it was using
00:41:54 ►
this public key cryptography
00:41:56 ►
to set up anonymous ways
00:41:58 ►
of communicating, and doing so in a way
00:42:00 ►
that the government can’t really do anything about it.
00:42:05 ►
And Cypherp’s right code was an important
00:42:07 ►
maxim of the group. They were basically saying, instead of just talking about
00:42:12 ►
these political ideals, we create software that makes it happen.
00:42:17 ►
But it was really Timothy May who
00:42:19 ►
saw these ideas and took them to their logical conclusions in terms of
00:42:24 ►
what they mean for society as a whole.
00:42:27 ►
Timothy May wrote the Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto the same year.
00:42:31 ►
And in it, he had this phrase which kind of sums up the market that he envisioned,
00:42:37 ►
which, combined with emerging information markets,
00:42:39 ►
crypto-anarchy will create a liquid market for any and all material
00:42:43 ►
which can be put into words and pictures.
00:42:45 ►
And I actually slightly disagree with that because it’s not even just words and pictures now, but physical goods.
00:42:51 ►
You can send 3D printable guns through the internet now.
00:42:56 ►
So he was imagining a world where any sort of information can be shared.
00:43:01 ►
And with this, we obviously need some way of doing economic calculation and such.
00:43:09 ►
So he also wrote a great paper called Crypto Anarchy in Virtual Communities. And in this,
00:43:14 ►
he talks about how digital money is obviously something we need, but at this point in time,
00:43:18 ►
it’s not something that we really know how to do. We understand Chowmian blind cash. We know that
00:43:23 ►
we can do such a thing, but we don’t really know how to implement. We understand Chowmian blind cache. We know that we can do such a thing, but we don’t really
00:43:26 ►
know how to implement it
00:43:28 ►
quite yet.
00:43:30 ►
He also wrote a very long
00:43:31 ►
essay.
00:43:34 ►
It’s a very bizarre
00:43:36 ►
style of writing,
00:43:38 ►
but the Cyphernomicon,
00:43:39 ►
the Cypherpunk FAQ.
00:43:44 ►
Once again, he goes into how crypto has very specific social implications
00:43:51 ►
to the point where governments cannot really do anything about it.
00:43:57 ►
But along comes in 1998, ideas are starting to come about
00:44:01 ►
about how we can actually create these pseudonymous or anonymous monies.
00:44:07 ►
An important paper was by Wei Dai called Be Money.
00:44:11 ►
And this was actually released on the Cypherpunk mailing list.
00:44:17 ►
And what’s really interesting about this paper is that the first two paragraphs
00:44:21 ►
don’t talk about how the money will actually work. What it started off with was him talking about
00:44:27 ►
why Timothy May’s vision of anarchy is so interesting and important
00:44:34 ►
by creating a situation where the government is not, as he says,
00:44:40 ►
not temporarily destroyed, but permanently forbidden and permanently unnecessary.
00:44:45 ►
And he goes on to say, of course, until now, we didn’t really have the tools to make it.
00:44:50 ►
But money being one of the most important tools for a functioning economy, obviously,
00:44:56 ►
if we can create a way to have a digital money,
00:45:00 ►
we can have ways of creating these digital anarchies.
00:45:07 ►
And then he goes on to provide some ideas for protocols that could do such a thing. Some of them mirroring
00:45:11 ►
what we now see in Bitcoin.
00:45:16 ►
Moving on, there was a great thinker, one of my favorites, Nick Szabo.
00:45:21 ►
And he took the
00:45:23 ►
idea of, he molded
00:45:26 ►
property theory with
00:45:28 ►
these ideas of cryptography
00:45:31 ►
to have a very full
00:45:33 ►
and rich social theory
00:45:34 ►
in 1997 he wrote this paper
00:45:37 ►
in which he came up with basically
00:45:39 ►
the idea of smart contracts
00:45:40 ►
which he showed by using
00:45:43 ►
computers
00:45:44 ►
to do what have traditionally been done by human minds
00:45:48 ►
through paper techniques instead of digital
00:45:52 ►
contracts. You can reduce
00:45:55 ►
the cost of law. You can also
00:46:00 ►
reduce the need for third parties. And third parties, as he
00:46:04 ►
describes in another important paper,
00:46:06 ►
you can
00:46:07 ►
call a third party what it really is, and that’s a vulnerability.
00:46:13 ►
A trusted third party, mind you.
00:46:16 ►
So being able to move these things
00:46:18 ►
into the digital world makes it safer, cheaper,
00:46:21 ►
more secure, etc.
00:46:25 ►
He later
00:46:25 ►
in 1998, so this was the same year that B-Money came out
00:46:29 ►
he wrote this paper, Secure Property Titles with Owner Authority
00:46:32 ►
and I think
00:46:35 ►
this sentence kind of sums up
00:46:37 ►
what he was talking about. While thugs can still take physical
00:46:41 ►
property by force, the continued existence of correct ownership
00:46:43 ►
records will remain a thorn in the side of usurping claimants.
00:46:47 ►
Now, how did he say we could protect these property ownership claims
00:46:52 ►
in such a way that can protect it from these thugs?
00:46:56 ►
Well, he actually described a protocol for a distributed timestamp database,
00:47:03 ►
which today we use that
00:47:05 ►
with the Bitcoin blockchain. So this is one of the very first notions of a blockchain.
00:47:10 ►
And here he was describing that blockchain not because it’s a cool way of doing payments,
00:47:15 ►
but because it provides a secure way to protect the property from these malicious
00:47:20 ►
third parties, especially that of government. Today, the government has a monopoly on the legal system,
00:47:27 ►
and because we have to trust them,
00:47:30 ►
we also have to trust them not to forge documents,
00:47:33 ►
not to change the history of property ownership.
00:47:37 ►
We have to trust them,
00:47:38 ►
and that is simply not a good security model.
00:47:42 ►
Later, he wrote a paper called Shelling Out, which I
00:47:46 ►
highly recommend to anyone who’s interested in the
00:47:47 ►
Austrian theory of money.
00:47:49 ►
It brings in a lot
00:47:52 ►
of Austrian thought, but it also
00:47:53 ►
deepens our ideas of money.
00:47:56 ►
He quoted
00:47:57 ►
biologist Richard Dawkins,
00:47:59 ►
interestingly enough.
00:48:01 ►
Money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal
00:48:04 ►
altruism.
00:48:05 ►
He was able to kind of whittle down money
00:48:08 ►
to its most abstract concept,
00:48:10 ►
which was sort of what we now call proof of work with Bitcoin,
00:48:14 ►
but a way of sacrificing your energies
00:48:17 ►
towards creating some good that has value
00:48:20 ►
simply to be able to reciprocate in an exchange.
00:48:24 ►
And then you can take that good and redeem it for another exchange elsewhere.
00:48:28 ►
Finally, a important one, Bitgold, which might
00:48:32 ►
sound kind of familiar. It actually described a protocol very similar
00:48:36 ►
to Bitcoin using a distributed database
00:48:38 ►
creating mathematical puzzles and solving those puzzles allows for
00:48:43 ►
issuance of money.
00:48:46 ►
Probably sounds pretty familiar.
00:48:51 ►
And doing this once again, it reduces dependence on third parties.
00:48:53 ►
It securely stores value. And you can transfer and exchange with minimal trust in third parties.
00:49:02 ►
And then there was Bitcoin.
00:49:03 ►
parties. And then there was Bitcoin.
00:49:07 ►
So here we have had this history of ideas that questions the need for a trusted third party
00:49:11 ►
and has pointed to the need to create
00:49:16 ►
such a money so that we can have freedom in this world to create these digital
00:49:19 ►
anarchies. And Bitcoin is able to come along.
00:49:23 ►
And Satoshi himself understood that Bitcoin had this sort of libertarian properties to it.
00:49:30 ►
He said it’s very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly.
00:49:34 ►
I’m better with code than with words though.
00:49:38 ►
And he also mentions how while centralized systems such as Napster have been taken down,
00:49:46 ►
distributed systems do not have this same problem.
00:49:49 ►
They don’t have as many risks of being shut down so easily,
00:49:53 ►
which is why distributed networks have been able to flourish so well.
00:49:58 ►
So I’m better with codes than with words.
00:50:02 ►
The code has very specific implications,
00:50:06 ►
and I’d like to get that in just a little bit, so remember that.
00:50:09 ►
I want to talk a little bit about crypto-anarchy as a whole, though.
00:50:14 ►
So there’s sort of the private law society model,
00:50:18 ►
kind of anarcho-capitalism, and crypto-anarchists
00:50:22 ►
recognize the state as an unjustifiable aggressor
00:50:24 ►
against person and property.
00:50:26 ►
It’s a legal monopoly on force that’s able to wield that force
00:50:31 ►
in ways that contradict the rights of man.
00:50:36 ►
However, so the anarcho-capitalist vision,
00:50:39 ►
it sees the way of solving this problem,
00:50:42 ►
like a better vision of the world would be one with competitive legal orders,
00:50:46 ►
where instead of having this one entity that’s able to make all decisions,
00:50:50 ►
you can have a bunch of different people offering their services,
00:50:53 ►
and the market will get to choose based on which one offers it best.
00:50:57 ►
And they can provide the services of law, security, etc.
00:51:01 ►
So that there’s not a monopoly
00:51:05 ►
aggressing. However,
00:51:08 ►
crypto-anarchy is
00:51:09 ►
well, it’s not like a
00:51:11 ►
philosophy in itself, it’s a great strategy
00:51:13 ►
because what it does is gives this anarcho-capitalist
00:51:16 ►
vision a better security
00:51:17 ►
model. Because instead of
00:51:19 ►
relying on these third parties once again
00:51:22 ►
with a competitive
00:51:23 ►
legal order, you can use digital signatures and smart contracts and cryptographic protocols
00:51:30 ►
to create secure peer-to-peer legal orders.
00:51:38 ►
And that’s what we’re starting to see.
00:51:39 ►
That’s really what Bitcoin is.
00:51:40 ►
So Bitcoin, he was not very good at writing with words apparently, but
00:51:45 ►
he was with code. And with the code that Satoshi wrote, we can see some very specific properties
00:51:50 ►
that mimic this anarcho-capitalist vision of society and what the rights of man are.
00:52:01 ►
So first off, Bitcoin is completely voluntary. No one forces you to use it.
00:52:06 ►
You can enter the market as you wish.
00:52:08 ►
You can leave the market as you wish.
00:52:10 ►
It is completely voluntary.
00:52:14 ►
Furthermore, it mimics private property.
00:52:17 ►
Each Bitcoin is assigned to a specific private key,
00:52:19 ►
and only that private key is allowed to make use of those Bitcoins.
00:52:29 ►
That also mimics the individual rights formulation of private property.
00:52:35 ►
There’s only one key that can use it,
00:52:37 ►
or if you want to make larger agreements,
00:52:42 ►
you have to voluntarily enter them.
00:52:44 ►
There’s no monopolization of money production, so the Federal Reserve
00:52:48 ►
is one of the biggest thorns in the sides of anarcho-capitalists
00:52:53 ►
and many other libertarians as well, but Bitcoin strictly prohibits
00:52:57 ►
this. The only way that there would be able to be monopolization was if there
00:53:01 ►
was only one person mining, but because of the Bitcoin protocol being as it is,
00:53:06 ►
anyone can enter that market.
00:53:07 ►
Anyone can voluntarily enter the protocol
00:53:09 ►
and start providing their own computational power.
00:53:15 ►
Smart contracts are enforced by protocol,
00:53:18 ►
so people can make these agreements with one another.
00:53:21 ►
And instead of having to go to a monopolist
00:53:24 ►
or even any kind of third party,
00:53:26 ►
the protocol itself is handling these. You set the rules of the protocol ahead of time
00:53:33 ►
and it just works. And because of all of this, there is an exponential increase of cost of
00:53:39 ►
intervention. If the government is unable to force you to sign a message that sends Bitcoins to them,
00:53:47 ►
there’s no way they can get the Bitcoins unless perhaps some rubber hose and cryptanalysis
00:53:52 ►
where they actually beat you with a rubber hose.
00:53:55 ►
But while this is possible, someone could come and beat you up for your keys.
00:54:01 ►
The cost of doing so increases greatly.
00:54:04 ►
They can’t just go straight to JPMorgan Chase
00:54:07 ►
and say, oh, can we have all your money?
00:54:09 ►
We’re going to do a bail-in.
00:54:10 ►
They can’t do that.
00:54:11 ►
They have to be able to go to each and every individual.
00:54:14 ►
The state has finite resources
00:54:16 ►
so there’s a limit to how much they can actually get away with.
00:54:21 ►
So the cost of actually being able to
00:54:25 ►
force the protocol to do something
00:54:29 ►
that is against voluntary action
00:54:32 ►
is nearly impossible
00:54:34 ►
if the network is able to grow to a large enough size
00:54:38 ►
so Satoshi could have been
00:54:41 ►
an NSA backed totalitarian but his protocol is strictly anarchist
00:54:44 ►
he could have easily been paid-backed totalitarian, but his protocol is strictly anarchist.
00:54:49 ►
He could have easily been paid by the government to create it,
00:54:52 ►
but he created something that the government itself cannot shut down.
00:54:59 ►
And the protocol itself is strictly anti-government, in the sense that it does not allow for government.
00:55:01 ►
So with this, we can start to also imagine Bitcoin
00:55:05 ►
as the bedrock of agorist business models.
00:55:10 ►
So one of the best examples is the Silk Road.
00:55:15 ►
Now, the Silk Road was, I’m sure, as everyone here knows,
00:55:18 ►
an anonymous digital marketplace for anything and nearly everything.
00:55:24 ►
But it was also completely voluntary. People could get on and trade
00:55:27 ►
whatever goods they would like. It was anonymous, so
00:55:31 ►
you didn’t have to supply your name, and no one did.
00:55:35 ►
All you had was perhaps a username at most.
00:55:39 ►
And it was violence-free. Allegations of murders
00:55:44 ►
aside,
00:55:50 ►
there was actually no way to commit violence against someone that you thought wronged you.
00:55:52 ►
If you had a dispute on the site,
00:55:54 ►
people would laugh if you wanted to say,
00:55:58 ►
oh, I’ll come beat you up if you don’t give me my money.
00:56:01 ►
Instead, the way it worked is you had an escrow system
00:56:04 ►
where the
00:56:05 ►
Dread Pirate Roberts’ third party would hold
00:56:07 ►
on to money until both sides were happy
00:56:09 ►
with their agreement. And only then
00:56:11 ►
would money be transferred
00:56:13 ►
and if there was a dispute, the
00:56:15 ►
Dread Pirate Roberts would handle it.
00:56:17 ►
And then from there be able to decide where
00:56:19 ►
the money should go.
00:56:23 ►
However,
00:56:23 ►
they first off had to voluntarily agree to that transaction ahead
00:56:29 ►
of time, which is what libertarians have seen as the right business model for law. You create
00:56:37 ►
the contract ahead of time and with all the possible contingencies.
00:56:48 ►
So you created a way where violence was out of the picture.
00:56:51 ►
And this was incredible.
00:56:54 ►
However, it still had a trusted third party,
00:56:57 ►
the Dread Pirate Roberts, the site itself, the one server.
00:56:59 ►
And that was able to be shut down.
00:57:12 ►
However, just as Napster was shut down, the market for file sharing did not go away.
00:57:19 ►
Just with that, with the Silk Road being shut down, the market for drugs surely did not go away.
00:57:27 ►
And now people are already thinking of ways to make the security model better and better protect anarchy.
00:57:32 ►
One of the best ways to do this coming in the future is with a protocol called Open Transactions,
00:57:35 ►
and Chris Odom, the creator of that, will be speaking later today,
00:57:41 ►
and also using an idea by Justice Ranvir called Lex Cryptographia
00:57:46 ►
or cryptographic law.
00:57:48 ►
Here we can create a
00:57:49 ►
decentralized market and borderless
00:57:52 ►
law. So open transactions will
00:57:54 ►
soon feature
00:57:54 ►
a feature called the
00:57:57 ►
Bazaar, which is a digital marketplace.
00:57:59 ►
Any open transaction server can be set up.
00:58:02 ►
If you want to set one up
00:58:03 ►
yourself, you can.
00:58:07 ►
And you can start broadcasting advertisements for whatever kind of good you would like.
00:58:09 ►
And Lex Cryptographia is a set of ideas
00:58:12 ►
of setting up surety bonds, restitution, insurance,
00:58:16 ►
and general smart contracts
00:58:18 ►
to be able to cryptographically and securely
00:58:21 ►
lay out the rules
00:58:25 ►
for how funds should be distributed in the case of dispute.
00:58:28 ►
So if I’m selling a good, I can put up a bond of X amount,
00:58:36 ►
and if the buyer is not happy with the good,
00:58:40 ►
the cryptography has it set in place for an arbiter of our choice,
00:58:45 ►
also free market and competitive.
00:58:48 ►
You get to choose anyone ahead of time.
00:58:51 ►
They can decide the dispute and know where to send the money.
00:58:54 ►
But the only way it can be sent is by using the cryptography.
00:58:57 ►
You cannot run off with any funds.
00:59:01 ►
So this allows people to engage in a fully free market law
00:59:06 ►
on the internet
00:59:07 ►
with absolutely no regard
00:59:09 ►
for the lines in the sand
00:59:11 ►
created by the nation states
00:59:13 ►
and like I said
00:59:15 ►
this allows for insurance and restitution
00:59:17 ►
so people can put up this money
00:59:18 ►
ahead of time in case something goes off
00:59:21 ►
this also has the benefits of allowing
00:59:23 ►
people who would otherwise not have access to legal systems,
00:59:27 ►
those people finding themselves in markets that are not as trusted.
00:59:33 ►
Nigerian princes, for instance, have a hard time
00:59:35 ►
getting people to trust them on the internet,
00:59:38 ►
but they can put up a bond for the money transfers that they wish to do.
00:59:43 ►
Finally, there’s also an idea of voting pools,
00:59:46 ►
which allows web services to be able to set up sort of an M of N contract
00:59:52 ►
among a group of services so that if one of them goes down,
00:59:57 ►
well, it still takes a majority of them to be able to sign a broadcast
01:00:01 ►
to be able to go through with cryptography.
01:00:05 ►
So there’s no single point of failure.
01:00:07 ►
A trusted third party,
01:00:08 ►
even on trusted web services,
01:00:11 ►
are completely gone.
01:00:14 ►
So once again, we’re able to use cryptography
01:00:15 ►
to make better business models,
01:00:19 ►
better security models
01:00:20 ►
that better allow for anarchy.
01:00:25 ►
So my friends and I have started the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute,
01:00:31 ►
and we’re trying to learn from this history of cryptographic ideas
01:00:34 ►
so that we can fully understand where Bitcoin came from,
01:00:39 ►
the social movement of the crypto-anarchists and the cypherpunks,
01:00:43 ►
so we can really see when these ideas are created and implemented,
01:00:48 ►
what are the ends that they’re actually going for?
01:00:50 ►
Bitcoin was not made simply to have a better payment system and a better PayPal.
01:00:55 ►
It was created instead because people like Wei Dai,
01:00:59 ►
people like Timothy May and Xabo,
01:01:01 ►
they wanted to create systems that could not be forged,
01:01:08 ►
changed through violent plunder or just
01:01:12 ►
any general malicious third party. We also want to
01:01:16 ►
do scholarship. We want to take these ideas of
01:01:20 ►
having a decentralized distributed timestamp
01:01:24 ►
database, having this public ledger,
01:01:26 ►
and you find out what are the social implications of them.
01:01:29 ►
What can we learn about society?
01:01:30 ►
If this is implemented in a society,
01:01:35 ►
what are the necessary effects?
01:01:40 ►
For instance, with the removal of monopolization of money,
01:01:46 ►
there will be no such thing as a Federal Reserve anymore.
01:01:49 ►
And with no Federal Reserve, we no longer have a malicious entity
01:01:53 ►
able to print any amount of money they want to fund basically mass murder.
01:02:00 ►
This is important and revolutionary.
01:02:04 ►
And finally, we want to work to the future.
01:02:06 ►
Bitcoin is not the beginning.
01:02:07 ►
It’s not the end.
01:02:08 ►
It’s part of a larger move to use cryptography
01:02:11 ►
to secure anarchy in our world.
01:02:15 ►
And after all, cypherpunks write code.
01:02:18 ►
So you can visit us at nakamotoinstitute.org.
01:02:22 ►
Most of the papers that I mentioned today are available.
01:02:25 ►
Some not because of intellectual monopoly restrictions,
01:02:29 ►
but Google can be your friend if you still want to read those.
01:02:35 ►
So, end with a couple quotes.
01:02:38 ►
Bitcoin is a single package.
01:02:40 ►
Either it completely fails or it turns all people
01:02:42 ►
into wealthy, peaceful anarchists.
01:02:46 ►
And as Timothy May said, arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences.
01:02:50 ►
So Bitcoin is inherently anarchist.
01:02:54 ►
The properties of it are anarchist.
01:02:57 ►
And for that, you should thank it.
01:02:59 ►
And if you use Bitcoin, you are buying into anarchy and losing your faith in government.
01:03:06 ►
And for that, you should thank yourself. So thank you.
01:03:12 ►
You’re listening to the Psychedelic
01:03:14 ►
Salon, where people are changing
01:03:16 ►
their lives one thought at a time.
01:03:20 ►
So, I hope
01:03:22 ►
this leaves no doubt in your mind now about
01:03:24 ►
where I stand on all of this.
01:03:26 ►
I only wish that I was as well informed back when I was as young as Michael is.
01:03:31 ►
It’s people like him who give me great hope for the future success of our species.
01:03:36 ►
And for what may be the single most complete reference source about the Bitcoin protocol,
01:03:42 ►
Michael’s website is fantastic.
01:03:44 ►
In one place, you’ll find not only Satoshi’s original paper,
01:03:48 ►
but also copies of his emails and forum postings about Bitcoin
01:03:51 ►
when he was still active in the community.
01:03:54 ►
But that’s only the tip of the iceberg,
01:03:56 ►
because, well, this is one of the best places I’ve found
01:03:59 ►
for gathering of links to information about crypto-anarchy.
01:04:03 ►
Check it out at nakamotoinstitute.org.
01:04:07 ►
That’s N-A-K-A-M-O-T-O-institute, all one word, dot org.
01:04:13 ►
I think you’ll find it quite interesting.
01:04:16 ►
Now before I close, I want to be sure that you caught the reference
01:04:20 ►
in the beginning of this talk to John Gilmore and the cypherpunks.
01:04:24 ►
As you know, John has also been a Planque Norte lecturer in the beginning of this talk to John Gilmore and the cypherpunks. As you know,
01:04:25 ►
John has also been a Planque Norte lecturer in the past, and you can hear several of his talks
01:04:31 ►
here in the salon. His most recent one is titled Civil Rights in Cyberspace and is podcast number
01:04:37 ►
- And I’ll link to John’s talks in the program notes, which, as you know, you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.
01:04:45 ►
And in case you are unclear about the term cypherpunk, in general, I think it means any
01:04:51 ►
activist who advocates widespread use of strong cryptography as a route to social and political
01:04:58 ►
change. And I’ll include a few other links to cypherpunk activities in the program notes as well.
01:05:08 ►
Now, as much as I’d like to talk more about some of my own ideas concerning the use of Bitcoin technology,
01:05:11 ►
we’ve gone a little too long already today,
01:05:13 ►
so at the Arizona Wild Wild West Festival
01:05:17 ►
that will take place over the last weekend of this month,
01:05:20 ►
well, that’s going to be one of the topics that I’ll be covering.
01:05:23 ►
And you can get more
01:05:25 ►
information about that festival, by the way, at www.azwildwildwestfest.com. And at the festival,
01:05:36 ►
I’ll be hosting the first and most likely the only ever live sessions of the Psychedelic Salon.
01:05:43 ►
One of the topics that we’ll be covering will be my ideas on ways that the worldwide
01:05:49 ►
psychedelic community can use Bitcoin technology to perhaps bring together a multicultural
01:05:55 ►
global community of people like you and me.
01:05:58 ►
And hopefully we’ll get a recording of that session that I can play for you here in the
01:06:02 ►
salon.
01:06:03 ►
But for now, this is Lorenzo signing off
01:06:05 ►
from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.