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Channel / Source:
TEDx Talks
Published: 2014-07-07
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oeiOeDq_Nc
for millions of years humans live together in small decentralized network communities of about thirty two seventy people everybody knew everybody and it was hard to get away with doing bad things but then about ten thousand years ago something happened that changed the course of history the invention of agriculture agricultural out people produce food on a scale that 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 humans have a memory limit numbness Dunbar's number we can only remember about a hundred fifty people well so in these large societies of thousands and even millions of people we could no longer remember everyone that we interacted with it was the rise of anonymity and anonymity let threaten the social order
this created an opportunity for strong mentor rise to restore social order strong men into 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 the centralized societies suffered great abuses that paid a big price but this was the only way to organize society on a large scale the
people put up with these abuses for ten thousand years the entire span of recorded history then about five hundred years ago there was another change that started turning the tide of human history back decentralized decided that we'd lived in for millions of years so when you look at the whole span of human social evolution span of ten thousand 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 decentralized side of our past which was on a small scale to decentralize 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 two again live together and decentralized way without those centralized structures what
is it that allowed us to bridge and transcend Dunbar's number people base trust systems don't scale beyond Dunbar's number but technology based systems scale virtually without limit so it's technology based of the emergence of technology based trust system that allowed us to organize society on a large scale without centralization the first of these technologies was the printing press start with the printing press about five years
ago the printing press has no memory limit and the economics of printing allowed ordinary people everywhere 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 spired the first democracy movements start challenging the state started challenge in church develop 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 of the internet and but corn I refer to all these technologies put together as the technology of trust we're human based trust systems don't scale technology based system 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 it's 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 technology such as BitTorrent are now enabling people to communicate without censorship so centralized power structures
can no longer controlled in the flow of information however the internet by itself is not enough we need cryptography because without cryptography the centralized structures console use surveillance and censorship of what we communicate and this impacts our freedom of speech and freedom of thought Jeff freedom of thought freedom of speech and freedom of action we need privacy enabled communications so internet plus cryptography gives us that
the second pillar of a decentralized society decentralized law the first we communicate about what we wanted to and then we come to an agreement how we want to cooperate and for that we need decentralized loyal 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 and 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 little choice of adjudicator means we can choose who here is our dispute %HESITATION results out disputes and finally choice of enforcer means we can choose who it is that enforces our contracts and legal judgments
these these three principles sound like read 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 system is operated these ideas date from prehistory these were the cornerstones of the legal system of our past it's only in the past ten thousand years of increasingly centralized societies and increasingly centralized legal system but
we've gradually forgotten about this is 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 time to bring back these ideas and to re introduce them into the modern world so that we can really operate to decentralize side I and other researchers have developed a complete legal framework for decentralized
society that operates on these principles and in fact we already implementing these principles and these ecosystems in our businesses and in so called startups cities following the examples of Hong Kong and Singapore they are now entrepreneurs building so called startups cities in developing countries autonomous regions of developing countries that desperately need jobs and we're building these sort of cities with these advanced legal systems that allow
people to create jobs and generate wealth on a scale that hasn't been possible today's world today's world is suffering from so many laws that it's the impossible to do anything and these countries desperately need drops they desperately need wealth creation so these are very exciting developments the third pillar of a decentralized society is decentralize production it's like we've had with decentralized communications decentralize production allows us
to bypass the censorship of centralized system and these two essential elements of decentralize production first of all decentralized materials production and secondly decentralized energy production decentralized materials production includes technologies such as three D. printing three D. printing anyone anywhere in the world can download a design from the internet print this out at home print out their own products so this bypasses the restrictions that seek to
control the flow of goods across national boundaries the second component is decentralized energy production we are now starting to see where in the early days of decentralized energy production that allows that will allow people to produce their energy cheaply at home added virtually unlimited quantities and together these will move us from 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 too 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 or first a decentralized currency secondly a centralized contracting system the
invention of bitcoin is one of the most important breakthroughs in human his the first time we have a decentralized currency it cannot be censored it cannot be controlled by any entity by any government the invention of bitcoin spark the emergence of a whole new digital finance industry that is building an ecosystem around it bit corn that'll develop digital for %HESITATION digital financial services goods and service
products and services the most important of these a centralized contract exists these contracting systems for the first time offer a complete universal transaction platform so you want a single integrated platform you can do literature 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 few people
pull the levers of power and we are at the mercy stark example of that for example is Cyprus one day people thought they had money saved up over thirty forty years and the next day they heard that the government's was gonna confiscate forty percent of the assets and there's nothing they can do about it but with these technologies you have the power back in your own
hands so those of 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 corporation then we produce what we've agreed to cooperate on finally we trade the goods and services that we produced together these technologies forum what I call the technology of trust they will enable ordinary
people to communicates to come to legal agreements to build products and services trade without interference and third parties so what does the world of the future look like imagine a Masai warrior on the plains of Africa who has no access to the banks financial services and the whole infrastructure that we take for granted in the developed world he is cut off from the gold global economy
yes 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 a few clicks on his mobile phone you can incorporate a legal entity and it 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 you cannot trust 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 gonna be raced 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 the products and services the combined force of these technologies will force the old centralized coercive monopolists change they will have to become competing service providers serve the needs of all of us this is going to lead to a radical transformation of our communications financial system our governments and legal system the end result is that we will once again
