[Music]
hi
everybody so I'm going to try and do a
summary of basically my entire adult
life H as it's related to crypto graphy
um so I was the kind of you know
archetypal teenage Cipher punk in the
1990s uh I was tangentially very quietly
involved with an organization called
crypto rights which was doing software
to get human rights abuse they out of
China around 1997 or 1998 heavily
involved in the eold economy uh once
upon a time I had a bearer share a
pendon general ledger based stock market
uh which was all done by you know Pearl
scripts that would shell out to gpg to
do the actual encryption multi-party
computation kind of stuff uh but in
those days there was no decentralized
hash table so you really couldn't push
it the rest of the way I think even hash
cach hadn't been invented at that point
you know there was a period of my life
when the same kind of optimism and
forward thrust that you now associate
with the blockchain was associated with
just uh you know private key
cryptography right we really thought
that asymmetric key he in the form of
https and gpg was going to provide us
with all the tools that we needed to
completely change the world and we were
entirely confident of this and we were
absolutely sure that it was a dead C
that you were going to see this spread
of Civilian cryptography and that you
were going to see the kind of cyphon
Nomicon vision of the fading away of the
state and the replacement of you know uh
the sort of government run domain with a
citizen run domain as an historical
inevitability um and that period of
certainty ran right up until about 911
at which point people began to seriously
question viability of that vision and
then everything kind of ground to a halt
really until Bitcoin so what I want to
talk about a little is what went right
and what went wrong in the '90s crypto
era in terms of the psychology and the
politics of the crypto community and
what we can learn from that about what's
working with ethereum and the proc C
that restarted with
Bitcoin so the first thing that I'd like
to do is the traditional evil show of
hands how many people encrypt 100% of
their
email okay how many people people people
could uh encrypt five or 10% of their
email right thank you for helping
traffic analysis so the fact that even
at this point in history 25 years after
the invention or the leaking of these
codes we still have a position in which
even the technical Elite don't encrypt
all of their Communications tells us
that there's a fundamental problem
getting things encrypted and if you're
not getting the stuff encrypted given
everything we know from Snowden uh
you're in a very direct sense feeding
the beast in a manner that it's as
direct as taxation is right we're in a
position where we failed to deploy even
the first run of technical measures
because we say it's usability issues we
say it's a sof
this that and the next thing but the
bottom line is it's lack of investment
in public goods and this is the first
kind of platform problem that 90s
vintage Cypher Punk hit which is we had
no really clear model of how one would
do investment in public goods inside of
a
cryptographic uh sort of community
worldview if you think of there as being
an us and that us was the cipher Punk
movement the cipher punks had no model
of how you funded Public Works because
the only thing that you could really do
at the limit of possibility was put all
of your money into an eold account and
Trust the person running the eold
account not to immigrate to Bolivia with
the
proceeds so if you can't fund Public
Works in a collaborative way it's almost
impossible to build
infrastructure uh because you just can't
pull enough money and if you've got to
rely on state functions like charity to
build something that has the ability to
accept those funds you wind up inside of
a regulatory environment that can be
very hostile to the kinds of things that
people want to
build and the sort of platform nature of
large scale software engineering where
you need a lot of people working
together for a long time before you
could get the kind of breakthroughs and
usability or security or convenience
that result in kind of Step function
jumps in adoption the inability to get
those step function jumps in adoption
comes from the inability to keep teams
in the field long enough to finish jobs
uh you also the stuff recently about was
it op SSL that had been on half a
programmer for years and was riddled
with bugs and gpg was in roughly the
same condition this is what I mean about
the failure to be able to do public
works because you just can't get enough
people together to work on it for long
enough mail pile was the most recent
major effort to get a shot at long-term
sustainable creation of an email client
that would be able to make everything uh
easy to use so we could get mass adopter
of encryption didn't manage to get that
done because they could raise money at
the beginning of a project in a spike
but then after that you get a kind of
ASM totic decay of the donations and if
that long tail doesn't happen uh if the
long tail if you hit the long tail on
donations at the point where you no
longer have uh full heavy engineering to
do you could go into maintenance mode
but if the heavy engineering isn't
finished then the project starts how
many half complete really clever crypto
projects are there in the
world 60 if you talk to the red de
centralized people they have an
enormously long list of half complete
cryptography projects that they're
trying to figure out how to get finished
so this is the first large failure of
Cipher pank that we didn't manage to
sort out which was we didn't manage to
do sufficiently heavyweight funding of
Public Works and we didn't keep the
money flowing in after the initial push
was made which results in projects going
into maintenance mode and then get
walking getting locked into this kind of
long slow decline as the donations begin
to decrease now of course the classical
way that governments solve that problem
is through taxation but for us it has to
be solved through ongoing donation so
projects like ethereum we've already
established a pretty good model for the
initial cash dump that gets the project
started but you'll always have this
problem that continuing to raise funds
is difficult so one of the things I want
to suggest as a key challenge is how do
we make sure that you have an ongoing
funding stream which is funneled into a
variety of projects some is maintenance
mode some of creation of new systems but
with the perspective that what we're
doing is funding Public Works to create
a new world and what I'm suggesting here
is essentially that for the cipher bankk
movement to succeed what we needed was
voluntarist taxation we needed people to
put you know a tithe of their income
maybe 10% as an allocated pre-ordained
amount that would be spent building a
future in which people had Liberty and
that if you don't make those kind of
long-term structural funding decisions
you wind up in a position where the
tools get built and then they don't get
maintained and if there's a bit of an
overrun you end up without the tools at
all obviously ethereum is in a position
where we did a very large range
initially and have shipped an enormous
number of tools but you note that the
business plan was that we would spend
the money to build the stuff and then
after that there were a series of large
question marks about how we would
sustain the foundation and you know that
is an example of a situation where we've
got the social fabric required to do
large spontaneous raises but we don't
yet have the institutional Consciousness
among ordinary people that they have to
continue to donate if they're going to
continue to innovate so this is the
first major challenge funding of Public
Works and it's obvious that what I'm
really discussing here is DAP based
donation systems where you can subscribe
to a set of projects and can continue to
inject money into those projects in an
ongoing way I'm also talking about Dao
based governance of those public works
infrastructures because how else are you
going to sub your uh you know Chief
programmer departing for Bolivia with
the eold not that that ever actually
happened but you know the kind of thing
that
could uh does this all make sense as a
kind of starting piece this is the first
of three ideas I'm going to outline
in checking the
time yeah we're okay this will still
work so second piece I want to talk
about is the great devil which is
identity infr infastructure uh could
anybody raise their hands if they're
working on an identity
project right how many of you knew that
the other people that you were saw
raising their hands are currently
working on identity projects okay
everybody who's working on an identity
project come and meet me at the podium
at the end of this talk and say hello to
all of your
compatriots the idea that identity is
going to turn out to be a simple problem
where a small team can write a bunch of
code and have a bunch of breakthroughs
at the end of that process we have fixed
identity is so far uh an unproven
hypothesis what I do know is that there
must have been 60 or 100 teams that
tried that and we still have only two
pieces of globally
deployed uh non-state or par State
identity
infrastructure um maybe three so the
first is the gpg web of trust um does
anybody feel really confident they
understand everything to do with the gpg
web at Trust
right Point's a good one so at that
point if in a room like this nobody's
100% on how the web trust Works
including me I'm not sure uh you know
well because there's all this F fussy
stuff about validity of revocation
certificates and you know multiple
levels of signatures how many you know
how do you set the parameters for
tertiary oh it's nightmare right so the
fact that nobody understands gpg well
web of trust well enough to stick their
hand up in the air and say I can explain
it tells you that it just just didn't
work for people so we've got key servers
with enormous numbers of keys just piled
up in them and very little verification
of those keys people do key signing
parties at hacker conventions even now
but this is almost entirely a cargo cult
activity we get together we look at each
other's passports we sign each other's
Keys the keys go into the key servers
but because the trust model is so poorly
understood all that really happens is
that people go to the key server
download the key that has the most
signature and decide it's valid
if they even do that right most of the
time you actually get the key by taking
a look at the fingerprint on somebody's
business card and that's just about all
we
do uh the other one of these is the x509
infrastructure uh X500 was a telepan
standard x509 I think originally was a
certificate structure for secure Tony
something like that hierarchical
certificate chains where everything is
signed by everything else down these
pyramids currently instanciated as
https so everybody is using websites
with https to verify their digital
signatures all the time for all the
credit card
transactions uh 1500 certificate
authorities recognized by the major
browsers last time I checked lots of
fake certificates that have been issued
because of people uh spoofing identities
when they went to a regist in a small
country or they got a Unicode
certificate where you've got a Unicode
letter so you got a Microsoft domain
that looks like Microsoft but one of the
characters is unicode all of these kind
of things that infrastructure is rotting
out to the point where somebody sneezes
hard it will completely collapse and as
a result we might be left in a situation
where you can no longer give credit
cards to anybody in the internet not
that you really feel like doing that
anyway because what we've discovered so
far about Security on the other side of
the net means that generally speaking I
at least I'm very reluctant to give a
credit card to anything which is not
Amazon right because we've got such
problems with security on the uh process
side on the e-commerce side we're
getting into a position where we're
trusting the large Brands again
essentially like a cargo CP well these
guys are so big there's no way they
could get hacked right Amazon is not
going to wind up at Ashley Madison is it
but at that point we no longer have a
technical trust infrastructure what
we've got is a brand trust
infrastructure which is completely cargo
cult right we're trusting the big guys
to be competent and therefore the big
guys will continue to win it kills
Innovation stone called Dead you just
wind up with Monopoly platforms
processing payments because they're
security monopolies does that sound a
bit like a state to
you right a security Monopoly which
exists as a brand because you don't
trust anything else to process your
payments that's essentially the core
functions of the state reinstantiate as
a technology company that processes
credit
cards right
securitization so how did we get into
that situation bunch of Cipher punks in
the late
1990s uh the one that I knew personally
was a guy called Samir par who later on
became a marine or Le
tried um you know sat down and decided
that they were going to build a
certificate processing web server that
would take advantage of all this new
technology called htps they started a
tech company that was going to
revolutionize payments on the internet
and they were one of a few companies
that succeeded in producing secure web
servers the certificate authorities
stood up and 15 years years later one
generation later that entire system has
essentially become bankrupt we just
can't trust the certificates and we
can't really trust the browsers because
they become so complex that you can poke
holes in them really easily and we're in
a constant cycle of playing cat up with
people producing zero days so what went
wrong right two things first thing is we
wound up in a position where when the
Trust Systems began to corrode we didn't
build new Trust Systems so the first
time we began to see actual use of fake
certificates in the wild was a position
where we should have stood up and done
something about it and built a second
version of the certificate
infrastructure that didn't have those
problems and there were plenty of
proposals for things like pinned
certificates and other things along
these lines but we didn't actually get a
much of a push behind that even in the
technology community and as a result we
just allowed the certificate Authority
infrastructure to degrade over time uh
and to Res in a position where you
cannot rationally trust https anymore
except on large sites with big security
infrastructure behind them um the second
thing that goes wrong is that we provide
a solution to the corporate world in the
form of
https but we never build a solution for
individuals so what happens is you get
this kind of pyramidal certificate
deployment structure which in theory was
going to support a whole bunch of stuff
around what they call client sign
certificates which would have extended
that privacy to us so I hold up my
certificate and I show it to the web
server and say I want you to encrypt
your communication with me with this key
and that tells you who I am and if you
poke around in your browsers you will
find that almost all the major browsers
still have this Legacy support for
client side https certificates clients
side x509 that nobody ever uses for
anything even though it's actually
really powerful stuff why usability
issues essentially so over and over and
over again you'll see this pattern
repeat a bunch of guys hack together a
solution it's good enough for industrial
use it doesn't have the right set of
business models to be able to sustain
itself so it goes through a spike of
initial capital investment and then as
the capital spending begins to slow down
you wind up with the base infrastructure
corroding https is an example of that
not so much because they ran out of
money but because they ran out of smart
people just stopped caring and paying
attention because it was a technology
that worked and everybody stopped being
worried about
it um can you see the parallels to what
we're building now sure you can how do
we make sure that you continue to get
ongoing investment in the fundamental
security work underlying ethereum such
that we don't wind up in a position
where the system becomes insecure and
kind of rots out because all of the
attention is going into something
else right Spike of funding at the
beginning long-term maintenance problem
gpg op SSL question mark question mark
question mark could ethereum go the same
way the hope is is that a technology
that's being used by hundreds of
millions of people every day would be in
a position where it wouldn't rot out but
op SSL is an extremely strong indication
that a security te technology without an
ongoing business model that generates
support ceases to be a security
technology because without a constant
injection of the entire lives of very
smart people security Technologies
degrade you don't just get them right
and walk away you need constant
Innovation and constant watchfulness for
them to
work and we're in a position right now
where we need to structure the ethereum
effort in such a way as we avoid this
Core lesson of the cipher panira which
is if you don't figure out how to pay
for the maintenance and the continual
reinvention of your tools eventually
your tools are no longer
trusted right we must secure the base
and that means Public Works style
spending going into the core under
structures that pay for the ongoing
development but especially the
maintenance of the core Technologies
this is the Core lesson um I'm going to
talk very briefly about user interface
and then I'm going to come to the third
hypothesis so everybody knows that user
interface on security
sucks however the problem with user
interface on security is usually that
the security model sucks and there's no
way to take a security model that sucks
and then put your layer user interface
over the top of it and make it not suck
so in GP G the suck is produced by the
fact that you cannot directly attribute
a key to a person you have to go person
to email address email address to key so
you have a two-step mapping problem and
building a user interface for two-step
mapping problem is a nightmare what you
actually wanted was a simple mechanism
human being to key and then I take the
key and I look up a server and the
server tells me what the delivery
mechanism is that is attached to that
key so you have essentially a key server
I signed an instruction that says send
all the messages to this key that are in
email format to this address and all
messages for this key which are in trap
form out of that address does anybody
know about a thing called Web
finger it's a thing invented by guy
called Blaine cook who was I think the
first CTO for Twitter certainly wrote a
lot of the early Twitter stuff and
Blaine has a technology called Web figer
which basically uh is a method of
finding all of the entry points for
communicating with somebody using a
simple protocol and something like web
finger for crypto uh would allow you to
do this kind of very elegant management
of I want to talk to this person this is
the key I then identify all the
different methods the end points for
communicating them automatically then
you could continue to innovate from
technology to technology for
communication but keep the same
identities in the key space all of these
usability problems when you drill all
the way down turn out to be conceptual
problems viciously complicated method of
thinking about the security problem that
result in terrible decadent user
interfaces you have to get back to the
absolute Primal fundamentals of security
design if you're going to build toolkits
that Ordinary People could use how many
people want to see a world with mass
adoption of cryptography by civilians
because they're using smart contracts
and daps if so you got a nailed down
exactly what you're trying to build
because you cannot fix the conceptual
problems in security at the user
interface level they have to be fixed at
the fundamental level simple clear
thinking about the core idea resulted
simple clean interfaces uh the way the
truth in the white on this is a standard
called spki Simple public key
infrastructure that lost out to both the
gpg web of trust and the x509
infrastructure but it could have fixed
both
problems um now the final principle that
I want to talk about is generative
complexity and this is quite slippery
and hard to describe
but I think it is a fundamental uh
analytical tool for framing the
difference between systems that live and
systems that
stall so the cipher Punk Vision was
essentially that individual to
individual communication was going to
result in the magical ability to
construct increasingly complex social
structures that would eventually rise to
the point of being
institutions and the problem with this
approach is that it just doesn't work it
ain't that way at all anytime you want
to build an institution anytime you want
to build a game with rules if there's
any degree of complexity you wind up
building things which are meta
structures on top of your initial core
structure so a typical meta structure
would be a game of soccer in which you
have a refuge a referee Refugee sorry
game of soccer in which you have a
referee right if you're playing cards
you might have dealer um if you are
playing chess you would typically have
adjudicators and cl guys that manage the
clock timers and all the rest of this
sort of stuff um those kind of functions
if you're dealing with software are
played by software so if you've got
mailing list the mailing list is a peer
structure but you also have this meta
structure which is automated which is
the list manager software and that
handles subscribe unsubscribe ban spam
catching and a bunch of other stuff the
cipher Punk vision succeeded in building
point-to-point communication tools that
were theoretically effective but
practically speaking awful for all the
afor mentions but what they never built
was any good tools for handling meta
complexity so one of the big questions
used to kick around in the late ' 90s
was where is the encrypted mailing list
manager and how will it work I got 50
people at a mailing list I want the
mailing list to be fully encrypted do I
encrypt a message to the mailing list
which then decrypt it and recpt crys it
to those 50 people or do I encrypt it to
all 50 people client side and then send
it to the mailing list manager and it
sends it back out again right and I
don't remember that anybody ever wrote
an encrypted mailing list manager that
worked in either
direction right there were some little
fiddly problems like you had to get the
mailing list with all of the keys sent
to the person that wanted to send the
message in such way that their mail
client was able to interpret it
correctly to do the key management for
sending all the stuff back out again and
that sounds like a trivial little
problem but it was a trivial little
problem that meant that we we never got
an encrypted mailing list manager that
worked can somebody find me some
water justum up here oh here we are
found it it's
here so you get into this position where
You' have an encrypted mailing list
manager problem that stands for year
after year after year after year because
it's got hard user interface problems
because it's encrypted email it's a
public works issue that nobody cares
enough about the problem to sit down and
solve it because it's actually quite
tricky and nobody's pulling money in a
way that will allow them to gather the
funds to get at that problem and as a
result you wind up with this entire kind
of Cipher Punk fantasy world being run
on unencrypted email over mailing lists
that always had terrible problems with
things like civil attacks you know sock
puppets now right what we have in
ethereum is frankly a staggeringly good
like by far the world's best set of
mechanisms for building meta structures
it's like an endless Swiss Army Chainsaw
for building meta structures and all the
indications are that it's only going to
get better at that job right you've got
a whole bunch of people it's just wait
you think it's a Swiss Army chainsaw now
once we get blockchain scaling it's
going to be a Swiss Army
lightsaber so we've got the ability to
generate complex social Machinery in the
form of meta structures and that complex
social Machinery in the form of meta
structures should pay for the public
works necessary to build the rest of the
Machinery that all seems fairly simple
right but this is what I mean by
generative complexity right if you've
got a set of systems that allow you to
organize money and you can then organize
to spend money to do essentially task
tax like or tith like payments into a
set of pools which are then managed by
some appropriate set of structures which
then put the money into the hands of
people that will spend their lives
building more of those tools then you've
got the potential for an ongoing
ecosystem which gradually grows in
complexity and I think that it's quite
important to differentiate between you
know dap development in either a
commercial sector or a charity sector
with adap development which is
essentially Public Works right because
Public Works money looks really
different from
investment right it looks really
different because what supports it is a
different social contract between the
people building the Public Works
infrastructure and the people that are
actually doing the support of the core
structures so in the future right it
would be very interesting to see if we
could create a situation in which much
of the utility stuff that we need every
day to operate in the set systems was
simply maintained by Public Works
process right and I think that that
might be one way of squaring the circle
because we're in a position where very
few of the funding mechanisms we've got
access to really suit the Public Works
use case which was at the heart of the
cyper frun vision and I think is still
at the heart of the ethereum vision we
would all be deeply uncomfortable if the
core of ethereum was actually commercial
proprietary software and the only reason
it's not is because we raised enough
money to get that Core built uh while we
were still on the spike fund but in the
long run what we'd like is the ability
to chip away at these problems over time
and build more and more interesting
things and I think that's only going to
happen if we can figure out how to keep
the people that want to do Public Works
building doing Public
Works does this make any kind of sense
at all as a system and we've got this
fantastic set of architectures for doing
Public Works systems so what I'd like to
suggest is that as we kind of move
forward in this we pay attention to
these core lessons right we understand
that keeping these system is running is
as much about you know social compacts
and social contract theory as is about a
given piece of technology it's about
ongoing continual Innovation it's about
cooperation between open source between
commercial Enterprises between Charities
individual activists and everybody else
but if we're going to build this kind of
kind of road to the Future stuff you
wind up meeting systems which look a lot
like local government we have a bug in
this piece of software who has assigned
this bug 38 Mill milon people are using
this piece of software how do we make
sure that the core team are
appropriately paid if it is something
that inherently doesn't have a business
model uh that will allow you to raise a
bunch of money and then spend it
carefully how do you get into position
where you could keep this kind of stuff
running and this is the kind of core
message at the heart of what I'm saying
the cipher punks had nothing between
open source and
proprietary and as a result they took on
the challenges which would have made
them kind of sort of peer to government
but didn't have the staying power to
finish the job which is why there was a
10year dead period from 911 until
Bitcoin and what Bitcoin created because
it put an enormous injection of capital
into this space where people were
writing code to ensure human Freedom was
it created this enormous Spike of
innovation and we're in the middle of
the ongoing you know boom period
produced by that Spike the fortunes made
in Bitcoin turn into the basic core
infrastructure funding for ethereum and
we continue to roll that forward the
stuff is becoming more sustainable as
dos become businesses and hopefully
those businesses will re-inject some Pro
portion of their proceeds into the
maintenance and the ongoing work on the
infrastructure but if we can use this
wonderful meta Machinery that we have to
build a social contract that allows us
to continue to put funding in at the
core this is how we generate the staying
power to get right the way down the rest
of the path and build what we all want
which is essentially a world in which
we've got non-state public goods which
cover the needs that Humanity has that
the states have never been able to
fulfill and maybe in the long run we
find more efficient ways of doing a lot
of the jobs that the state currently
does so that we can leave the state to
do the hard work that nobody else seems
to know how to do like running Public
Health Systems efficiently but get it
out of the areas where it consistently
underperforms which is pretty much
everything else um so I think I have two
more little points and then we should
stop and take a couple of questions and
fingers crossed somebody very special
should arrive in a taxi immediately
thereafter the two little details I want
to refine are this when I say social
contract I don't necessarily mean smart
contract what I mean is the willingness
of ordinary individuals who are making a
good living out of these ecosystems to
invest their money some of their
discretionary spending in supporting the
people that are dedicating their lives
to keeping the platform infrastructure
healthy and existent right there's a
real need for people to continue to plow
in into that work a lot of which is
frankly quite D and very very difficult
and on the other side The Innovation
work associate is often quite obstru and
highly Technical and you never know
whether you're going down a rabbit hole
or a vein of gold so you know it's about
a creation of a conscious willingness to
put back our winnings from these
extraordinary games that we play into
the Machinery that allows those games to
exist in the first place right how do we
make sure that vavic always has a team
of guys and girls to get to the bottom
of the questions that he's interested in
that day right it's a pretty simple
question let me tell you the people that
have been trying to answer that question
are having a hard time with it right
second piece of this how do we get into
a position where people understand that
although we are extremely diverse in our
politics and everything else there is a
fundamental sense that we know that a
better world is possible and that these
tools are in some sense common human
Assets in the same way that Wikipedia is
you know I'd really like us to see a
firming up of our relationship with the
other great public works you know Global
Public Works processes all that the
internet has produced so that people
understand that ethereum is a project
like Wikipedia it's a global public work
it's a global public good and language
like the world computer language is
excellent for communicating the idea
that it's a single global system what
I'd like us to do is build out the rest
of the story so that 5 years from now or
three years from now when you ask an
ordinary person what is ethereum they
frame it as being something like
Wikipedia rather than something like or
something like
Oracle so that's it that's what I had to
say thank
you sure
questions uh before
we before we totally conclude does
anyone have a question or two for
vet hey Ian where'd he go find a
question Ian can you find out when she's
arriving come on somebody has a question
don't be afraid I won't bite
hard hey how do you drive Global
adoption how do you get the people using
ethereum Okay so the question is how do
we drive Global adoption I think the
answer to that frankly is that if we
knew how many people were using ethereum
right now we' probably observe that it's
doubling something like once every 3
months right I I suspect that if we had
actual numbers uh and we were measuring
the right things so it might be the
number of people that are sitting in
their bedrooms you know hacking away on
a chunk of solidity code that they're
running on a
testet uh I suspect that that number is
doubling every 3 months if it's spending
in the space by larger Institution
it could well be doubling every 3 weeks
I mean it's just crazy how fast people
are pouring into the
space you know trying to buy knowledge
and expertise I think we're worrying a
little bit too much about adoption um oh
fantastic come
on yeah they're Ming her so I think
they're worrying I think we're worrying
too much about adoption and not enough
about fundamental value once we get daps
that people can use the real adoption
questions will be about getting people
to use the daps but right now I think in
terms of adoption of the technology we
we're basically getting adopted from
like a house that is burning you know
the thing is just covered in fire right
now everywhere you look something goes
so I don't think getting people to use
the technology or invest in the
technology is the hard part once there
are usable daps that we want people to
get using I think all of that will
change yeah okay one more short question
and then we shall do the fun
thing uh so who's going to like set up
the the target the place where we where
we tithe 1% of our wallet spending or
whatever like where does that go and
who's going to tell us where to point
that well okay so question is how do we
know who's going to you know how how who
who gets the direct where the 1% is
gathered and what it's done with it so I
mean we have a a very fortunate thing
which is that vitalic acts as a center
of political legitimacy for the entire
show so
right she's
so one possibility is that vitalic
basically gives you know some kind of a
steer in that direction as people get
their acts together and sort it out on
the other hand falic generally hates
politics so maybe somebody needs to come
up with a solid proposal and then he can
basically choose not to turn it down
right but this is the core question
right are we a democracy are we a
monarchy are we ruled by a
theocrat f First Church of calic veran
uh so that's a question of fundamental
you know politics and I think that's a
question for us to have a bit of a think
about how do we want to do these things
right now special guest come on in how
are
you how are you doing too
bad fabulous hi
hi so do do we how do we want to do this
do you want to talk to the sles or
should we do Q&A or do you want to talk
to the people what would you like to do
I don't know I literally just walked in
from another uh event so I have no idea
what just was said I hope it was good um
we just finished up so you're telling is
perect okay cool cool um so yeah v um
I've met actually I've known V for for a
few years actually few years a Twitter
what's that every days a Twitter every
days of Twitter early days the early
Twitter parties we that's true that's
true I forgot about um yeah and it's
only just in the last few months that
I've been back in touch with VIN on a
more daily basis um because of this uh
this sharing this idea called
myia um it was inspired by lots of
different people over the years you know
having conversations about wouldn't it
be nice if the music industry was like
this or like this um and then kind of in
the last few months becoming aware
really or the last half a year becoming
aware of blockchain Technology um and
really when I realized that the the
technology was here to enable um music
to be played and kind of uh verified and
and that the the that moment of play can
come directly into a digital wallet of
an artist was kind of mindblowing for me
I was like wow I don't have to worry
about Banks don't have to worry about
record labels don't have about
Publishers um you know that all of these
problems that we have in the music
industry of um who owns what who owns
the copyright the licensing who was the
writer of that song all of that stuff is
like one of the biggest problems in the
music industry because it's so so
complex over so many years of you know
old technology
well new technology built on top of old
technology and again and again and again
so we're kind of left with this really
messy um business and when I re see a
statement for instance of you know some
songs that I may have written a while
ago that may have been on the radio Once
Upon a Time um I get that many many like
months and months later and often have
to get bank loans to kind of you know um
put take take me through uh the year
sometimes when actually it would have
been very nice to get that money
instantly um so I also thinking that you
know uh obviously we know there's lots
and lots of music um being made uh many
millions of tracks in the world um 30
million apparently online um even just
on Spotify or iTunes um but we have to
think about the next 70 million um that
are going to come just in the next 10
years um hello um and uh that's a that's
a really amazing thing to think about
that you know there are all these Legacy
artists and tracks that the industry is
built on currently but what about all
the amazing KNE music of the future how
can we help sustain the artist of the
future um to uh to not have to have the
problems that we're living in um you
know as a new artist I don't know I
don't know how they do it it's so
complicated even just as a kind of
middle class Artist as I say uh as Zoe
kind of put it Zoe keting put it once
the the artist who's not like the top 1%
but we're not um starting off we're
somewhere in the middle um it's becoming
increasingly harder to to make um to
make a living from making just music any
if you like yes right here thank you um
so this concept by Celia yeah it's it's
it's not very new I suppose to many of
you this this idea so um here we are at
the bottom we've got um we've got uh my
VJ a fan Sarah Michael video director
Sennheiser Audio company so at the base
layer um this is what I see as Melia the
the artists the content the people that
drive the creative content of the music
industry um underneath you know the
hidden layer um that actually at the
moment we're kind of right at the end of
the food chain the artists and the
musicians are the last people to get
paid and we are the people that most
need the money um because we're the
we're the musicians um so it's imagining
very exciting world where um here is my
song Perhaps um so I call this this
Melia like the the system um beneath our
feet these tens of kilometers of organic
uh ecosystem systems um where mushrooms
pop out of the ground um and it
obviously it uh it works across great
networks um so that's why I like the
idea my CIA um so here is a Spore and in
this Spore um is uh what I now realize
is uh is what is a smart contract but at
the time I didn't know that that existed
so I was like wouldn't it be amazing to
be able to put up your music and then in
that to be able to say I want to you
know pay this percent to this person
this percent to this person and also in
that information I want to put you know
what was my inspiration what are the
lyrics what's the music um what's the
music video all the people that were
involved because our listening
experience well our experience of Music
in the days now is like reduced to an
MP3 squashed m music file um with no
like idea of the artwork or anyone who
was involved in musicians there's no way
to look through that information it is
there somewhere in the world but it's
not it's not on a database oh it's gone
to sleep hopefully you haven't either um
thank you um so yes so these are the
spores and this is like my melum so
these are all my different songs um and
uh and these are the people that enable
these songs to get above ground um so
here we have so do I just where's the oh
clicker I've got a clicker have I got a
clicker oh do I not use that no just use
them okay so here we go mushrooms um so
here we have um
o um we have Ojo here um and then
YouTube Spotify so these are I imagine
the services that live upon the the
nutrients of the music uh that we create
um and so every time you uh as the as
the user would like to find out about um
you know what's exciting musically cated
ujo might find you some music and you
might discover imag and Heat's got a new
track out so all these people you know
the people of the planet who like
listening to music um we might have uh
Johnny there so he's like oh I'm going
to listen to Imaging heap's new song
they play it through time through ujo
but ujo is going directly onto a kind of
bass layer so this is as an artist it's
stopping me from having to go through
like it's just really annoying to have
to upload to or to give to um you know
to put it up onto YouTube iTunes uh Udo
Streamliner all these different all the
Spotify all these different places where
I have each individual identities I have
a different biography different press
picture it's often out of date it's
often misrepresenting me this way I
could have all of my information my
current press pictures you know it's
like beaming out as a beacon going this
is I'm image and Heap and here's my new
information and then all of these
Services could go oh thank you very much
I'll take the new biography and the new
picture for imagion and rather than me
have to put it into multiple different
places I put it into one place I put it
into one place as the artist that's
looked after and tended over by other
artists and fans it's a foundation
perhaps maybe it's somewhere um that you
know has bodies that of people that
really really know what they're talking
about like the featured artist Coalition
who represent featured artists you know
kind of government level fighting for
you know our rights the different ways
um so this is who I see as the kind of
mycelial lever level and then we got the
mushrooms and then the people um so then
there we go I mean I'm speaking to the
converted here right because you know
all about this um but this is I did this
for some other conference um so um here
we go writer image and heat percussion
Scout that's my young little little
one-year-old daughter um she played some
little scrunchy things on the song um
cello might have been Zoe trombone Simon
and I can pay each one of these
individually like that's never been able
to happen before to be able to not have
to like write out checks or you know um
pay in advance because that's often not
possible when you're a musician you
don't have the money in advance um you
might it it means that people can be
invested in you like you know video
director can say I really really love
your work um and you know or nor they
might take five grand or 50 grand for a
video but if they really really believe
in you they invest in you so they take
percent um so this kind of model as you
know would would help that so here they
go the the somebody pays for something
and then I go to Sarah and maybe Sarah
is a fan and she's hosting the music so
she gets a piece of it as well and then
the video director Michael um would get
some of that and maybe Andy who's done
the um front cover design um or all of
the internal uh you know artwork cuz you
could do that in this lovely digital
world that we live in um and then up it
goes music and the pictures um so and
then Billy this is something I can't do
at the moment I'd love to be able to do
it um I'd love to be able to say anyone
under 16 can have our music entirely
free on all platforms because that's
what I would like as the artist and the
and the the the services that don't
allow that then I just don't let my
music on there um so say if I want to
have Billy who's under 16 yeah I want I
want him to have my music for free
because he's probably going to take it
for free anyway um but I'd like to just
give him it because why not you know he
hasn't got a job so that's fair enough
um so there we go the hosting comes from
Sarah and me um and you know maybe I
give Sarah free tickets um for concerts
in thanks for hosting it even though she
doesn't get a payment out of that and
there we go and then the next person
might be Mary who's over 60 that's why
she's gray um and uh maybe I would like
her to have you know free uh free music
because she's worked hard enough as it
is you know and so I want to thank her
and give her some free music it um there
we go and that is basically the idea um
and then you can see I wrote a song with
Taylor Swift that was very nice she is
one of the 1% that does make money so
therefore I actually can make some money
this year um and uh so she would then be
connected to my melium um because she
would then divide up her payments from
that song directly to me across the
network um so that's basically it it's
just like I'm I know that we're at this
really amazing time now like I know you
guys have known about blockchain for for
e on um but it's I know that it's a a
real massive point in in the industry
and music and Technology are always like
hand in hand like moving to the Future
um and each time the music uh industry
adopts a piece of new technology
something incredible happens and that's
what's happening now the blockchain and
music are going to you know mesh
together in beautiful Harmony um but I
just want to make sure from the artist
perspective that what are kind of our
concerns about the music industry are
being heard at the time of developing
these new tools so I'm kind of it's
really amazing to be able to share this
idea so people are if they're thinking
about developing these Technologies um
maybe they could think from the artist
perspective also that wouldn't it be
nice just to have one place we can just
get on with right our music you know and
and just deal with all of these things
so that we don't have to deal with them
all later um and uh yeah and massive
thank you to um to Vin um and the guys
at ethereum for you know helping me
flesh out ideas um and uh and kind of
opening their arms up to me uh with
these with these ideas and I look
forward to working in the future with
some of
you thank you thank you IM
[Applause]
he word uh from vitalic before we end
thank you image and Heap again yeah so I
me I definitely just want to thank
everyone for coming for this entire week
it's I think it's been a great
conference I think it's particularly
showed just how far the ecosystem has
the E theorum ecosystem has come ever
since uh last year is Defcon zero back
when we were still about 30 people
huddled up in this uh tiny little office
at 37 V marasa in Berlin
and you know I think it's clearly showed
that you know the ethereum ethereum
community is grown it's attracted people
from all part parts of the world and one
of my favorite Parts about the space is
just
the the sheer diversity the the quality
the kinds the kinds of different kinds
of people that we've attracted you know
this is this isn't just this isn't just
about about a currency this isn't just
just
about even one particular platform you
know this is a movement it's a movement
of software developers of mathematicians
of uh political activists
uh entrepreneurs social social
entrepreneurs Bank you know banking
Executives and you know I think this
week we've seen just about everyone
represented
and you know the community to me is I
think probably my fa my favorite part of
this whole thing so thank you all and
hope to see you next year
[Applause]
[Music]