[00:03.830 --> 00:04.270]  Hello.
[00:05.230 --> 00:05.970]  Here I am.
[00:06.930 --> 00:08.410]  Okay, good evening, HOPE.
[00:08.710 --> 00:15.110]  From this strange position, it is my pleasure to introduce the next presentation.
[00:16.470 --> 00:18.670]  But before I do that, just a couple of announcements.
[00:20.110 --> 00:21.970]  First of all, you all look really weird from this angle.
[00:24.290 --> 00:30.350]  Second of all, just a reminder that the concert is going on tonight at 10 p.m. by the escalator that leads up to the mezzanine on the first floor.
[00:34.730 --> 00:37.990]  If you were there last night, you know how insane and wonderful it was.
[00:38.130 --> 00:43.170]  If you weren't there last night, this is your chance to make up for that dreadful, dreadful state of affairs.
[00:43.690 --> 00:46.270]  So tonight at 10 p.m., check that out.
[00:47.370 --> 00:48.850]  A couple other things going on.
[00:49.850 --> 00:53.250]  As you know, the talks are all pushed forward an hour, but I'll mention it anyway.
[00:53.370 --> 00:54.610]  All the talks are pushed forward an hour.
[00:55.890 --> 00:59.170]  And due to stuff running over earlier today.
[01:01.010 --> 01:08.630]  Also, as a result also, the how to install Linux on your time machine talk has been postponed to 3 p.m. yesterday, but it's going to have been wonderful.
[01:15.660 --> 01:20.360]  If you got your TV-B-Gone when you registered and there was a stack of batteries for you to take a battery.
[01:22.800 --> 01:23.760]  Trip glasses, rather.
[01:23.940 --> 01:24.520]  Not TV-B-Gones.
[01:24.680 --> 01:24.920]  Thank you.
[01:26.960 --> 01:33.020]  If you got your trip glasses and you saw the little packages of batteries, the batteries seem to have taken a walk somewhere.
[01:33.320 --> 01:39.160]  So if you have If you find them, please turn them in at any desk and we will very much appreciate getting those back.
[01:41.900 --> 01:45.520]  I saw a bunch of those on the table next to the Free Software Foundation table.
[01:47.300 --> 01:48.660]  Oh, Stalin did it!
[01:51.600 --> 01:54.040]  I needed them for my Gen 2 time machine.
[01:55.060 --> 01:56.520]  Can we get the...
[01:57.140 --> 01:57.520]  Are we good?
[01:58.180 --> 01:58.440]  Yes?
[01:58.600 --> 01:58.740]  No?
[01:58.860 --> 01:59.040]  Maybe?
[02:00.860 --> 02:01.840]  Back over here again.
[02:04.520 --> 02:05.540]  So, um...
[02:06.540 --> 02:07.520]  I do, I do.
[02:07.980 --> 02:09.380]  So for our...
[02:09.380 --> 02:11.940]  It's a great pleasure for me to introduce our next talk.
[02:12.160 --> 02:16.400]  Our next speaker is a good friend and a brilliant fellow.
[02:16.720 --> 02:20.060]  And this is his presentation on hacking money.
[02:20.360 --> 02:21.980]  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome Finn Brunton.
[02:26.740 --> 02:27.460]  All right.
[02:28.580 --> 02:30.300]  Thank you very much for that kind introduction.
[02:30.660 --> 02:31.240]  Does this work?
[02:31.560 --> 02:32.560]  There's no hope for this?
[02:32.920 --> 02:33.040]  Okay.
[02:34.280 --> 02:35.200]  Yeah, I think I might...
[02:35.200 --> 02:37.780]  I kind of like this because I feel like I should have a cigarette, you know?
[02:39.100 --> 02:41.740]  It's got kind of a put the blame on MAME thing happening.
[02:42.160 --> 02:44.000]  Um, so hi everybody.
[02:44.240 --> 02:44.880]  Hello, HOPE.
[02:46.260 --> 02:46.620]  Um...
[02:47.500 --> 02:47.860]  Oh!
[02:48.120 --> 02:49.340]  Oh yeah, that's a very good idea.
[02:55.740 --> 02:59.460]  I need to whistle the Mission Impossible theme song.
[02:59.560 --> 03:01.020]  I just need a cave, actually.
[03:01.680 --> 03:06.860]  This is the miracle worker who totally figured out how to fix the bizarre projection problem we were having in seconds.
[03:07.840 --> 03:08.220]  Um...
[03:08.220 --> 03:09.120]  Turn it on and off again?
[03:09.240 --> 03:09.380]  Yeah.
[03:19.160 --> 03:20.080]  All right.
[03:23.830 --> 03:24.610]  It's his fault.
[03:28.650 --> 03:31.390]  No, trust me, if I was doing this, I would be missing a thumb by now.
[03:31.510 --> 03:33.110]  There'd be blood all over the stage.
[03:33.710 --> 03:36.010]  There's a reason we use keyboard to thumb on shoes.
[03:36.310 --> 03:36.670]  Yes.
[03:37.610 --> 03:37.730]  Do
[03:40.780 --> 03:41.520]  you have a wrench on it?
[03:41.680 --> 03:41.880]  Yeah.
[03:42.900 --> 03:43.460]  It's false.
[03:43.740 --> 03:45.160]  Oh yeah, thank you so much.
[03:46.120 --> 03:46.840]  All right.
[03:49.660 --> 03:50.380]  Good stuff.
[03:50.600 --> 03:51.060]  Thank you, sir.
[03:54.100 --> 03:56.260]  Hi, so my name's Finn Brunton.
[03:56.540 --> 03:58.940]  Um, I, uh, I'm an assistant professor at NYU.
[03:58.940 --> 04:01.440]  I live at, uh, finb.net.
[04:01.660 --> 04:03.600]  Um, that's also where you can email me.
[04:03.780 --> 04:06.600]  Um, I wrote a book about the history of spam.
[04:06.980 --> 04:15.040]  Um, which, uh, you know, you're hardly encouraged to buy, but I just learned that another copy has been uploaded to Libgen, if you want to go there instead.
[04:15.580 --> 04:19.680]  Um, and, uh, and yeah, and I am, I am super nervous.
[04:19.680 --> 04:22.860]  I am currently working on a book about obfuscation with Helen Nissenbaum.
[04:23.400 --> 04:26.480]  If you saw Daniel Howe's talk, it, uh, touched a little bit on some of those things.
[04:26.640 --> 04:29.460]  And I'm researching a book about digital cash and cryptocurrencies.
[04:30.040 --> 04:32.220]  And, uh, I'm a huge money nerd.
[04:32.220 --> 04:33.060]  And this is proof.
[04:33.180 --> 04:37.320]  This is me posing at the site of the Bretton Woods Monetary Conference.
[04:37.320 --> 04:41.280]  We actually had a bunch of pictures inside the hotel, but they kicked us out after a while.
[04:41.900 --> 04:50.060]  Um, so, uh, yeah, you know, if you go on tour to find places where major money policy events happened, I think that kind of qualifies you for nerd cred.
[04:50.420 --> 04:54.440]  Um, and, uh, and HOPE is pretty much the best conference that I attend.
[04:54.800 --> 04:59.380]  And I understand how brutally high the opportunity cost is for choosing one thing over another.
[04:59.520 --> 05:02.660]  So I really appreciate you giving me an hour of your precious HOPE time.
[05:03.220 --> 05:05.660]  Um, and so what can you get from this talk?
[05:05.660 --> 05:07.920]  Uh, for your sort of, your, your hour of attention.
[05:08.160 --> 05:12.660]  Especially given that, like, you all have been primed for, like, world historical significance.
[05:13.700 --> 05:13.960]  You know?
[05:14.220 --> 05:15.840]  The Ellsberg-Snowden thing.
[05:15.980 --> 05:18.360]  And then we took a deep dive into what I'm about to do.
[05:18.800 --> 05:20.240]  So just brace yourselves.
[05:20.900 --> 05:33.580]  Um, what I want to give you over the course of the next 45 minutes or so are some big ideas and the room to use them for the project of transforming money, technologically, as a way of transforming society for the better.
[05:35.340 --> 05:39.640]  And my, my sort of bona fides for that is that I'm actually mostly a historian.
[05:39.860 --> 05:45.260]  I work on the history of, of science, technology, especially things like digital computation, which is part of why I love being here.
[05:45.360 --> 05:47.780]  Because this, this place is a living tradition.
[05:48.100 --> 05:55.340]  This is a place that goes straight back to the dawn of what we can think of as kind of the 20th century radical use of, uh, of technologies.
[05:55.340 --> 05:58.060]  Which is very, so it's very exciting to be here and talk about the future.
[05:58.640 --> 06:03.960]  And what I want to suggest is that money is something that you can and should hack on.
[06:04.280 --> 06:09.920]  I want to say, to sort of paraphrase Ted Nelson, you can and must understand money now.
[06:10.620 --> 06:20.580]  Um, and, uh, and I want to suggest that we do this not just by making contributions to altcoin development or pitching in on building better exchanges.
[06:20.580 --> 06:23.360]  Although those are both good things, very useful and valuable.
[06:24.440 --> 06:29.380]  I'm going to talk about what I really mean by changing money, by hacking on money in a second.
[06:29.860 --> 06:34.440]  Now I want to also have one quick preface here, which is that I had this kind of initial impulse.
[06:34.700 --> 06:36.460]  I was really nervous because this is hope.
[06:36.640 --> 06:39.260]  This is like, you know, the best audience basically ever.
[06:39.820 --> 06:45.660]  So I thought I would give this like totally responsible talk that was full of like careful points of historical reference.
[06:45.880 --> 06:48.300]  A friend of mine said, your slides are always really boring.
[06:48.420 --> 06:50.320]  You should like start to jazz them up a little bit.
[06:50.560 --> 06:54.420]  So, uh, so I decided that for all the things that were said in the eighties, it would kind of look like that.
[06:54.980 --> 06:56.980]  Eighties, eighties through the, eighties through the mid nineties.
[06:56.980 --> 07:01.240]  It looked like two analog synthesizers, like f*cking in front of a Nagel print or something.
[07:01.620 --> 07:04.380]  Um, I just love that nice gradient.
[07:04.580 --> 07:16.700]  Anyway, um, it's, I was going to give this really responsible talk that was going to kind of like build on historical precedent and talk about R and D and cash cards and electronic purses in the 1990s.
[07:16.780 --> 07:19.280]  You're welcome to come up and talk to me about that afterwards if you'd like.
[07:19.380 --> 07:20.840]  It's an amazing area of history.
[07:20.980 --> 07:22.660]  It's incredibly understudied.
[07:22.660 --> 07:29.120]  Um, and you know, early hash cash style systems and lessons learned and all that sort of thing.
[07:29.280 --> 07:31.300]  But then I realized like, this is hope.
[07:31.520 --> 07:37.520]  So instead I'm just going to rant and be completely irresponsible and hope that no one that I work with is watching the live stream.
[07:38.000 --> 07:45.180]  Um, and, uh, and part of what I would like to do is, uh, forecast some future stuff a little bit.
[07:45.180 --> 07:49.380]  And obviously telling the truth and telling the future are very different things.
[07:49.540 --> 07:52.300]  So I'm going to tell you a story about a place that I think the future can go.
[07:52.440 --> 07:58.880]  About a way that I think we can fork history in a positive, uh, in a positive direction with the kinds of technologies that we have available.
[07:59.260 --> 08:02.340]  So let's start this off with a very big bet.
[08:04.160 --> 08:10.140]  I bet that the next century plus is going to have a recurring theme.
[08:10.400 --> 08:14.680]  And that recurring theme is going to be infrastructural struggles for autonomy.
[08:16.460 --> 08:17.060]  Infrastructural.
[08:18.120 --> 08:26.540]  These events will have profound consequences, but they will play out at levels well below the visibility of a war or an insurgency or an election.
[08:27.080 --> 08:31.040]  They will be contested and fought in the kind of domains that you think of.
[08:31.300 --> 08:32.440]  When you think of...
[08:32.440 --> 08:35.920]  I'm going to move this so I'm not constantly wandering away from the damn microphone.
[08:37.240 --> 08:38.140]  There we go.
[08:38.500 --> 08:38.900]  Okay.
[08:39.180 --> 08:39.540]  Very nice.
[08:39.740 --> 08:39.820]  Yeah.
[08:40.460 --> 08:40.860]  I did...
[08:40.860 --> 08:45.340]  When I'm up here and nervous, I didn't realize that it kind of sounded like a really bad cell phone call.
[08:45.600 --> 08:45.780]  You know?
[08:46.100 --> 08:46.820]  Quieter, louder.
[08:47.320 --> 08:47.620]  So...
[08:48.120 --> 08:48.520]  So.
[08:48.960 --> 08:50.140]  Infrastructural struggles for autonomy.
[08:50.620 --> 08:51.020]  Infrastructural.
[08:51.440 --> 08:51.900]  These are...
[08:51.900 --> 09:08.200]  This means these struggles are going to be played out in the places that you think when you think of phrases, words like standards, architectures, gateway, spectrum, interoperation, airspace, routes, borders, protocols, logistics, regulations, chips, licensing,
[09:08.680 --> 09:12.940]  algorithm, identification and authentication, property, things like that.
[09:13.440 --> 09:14.860]  And they will be struggles.
[09:15.500 --> 09:19.660]  These will play out anywhere on the spectrum between disputes and war.
[09:19.660 --> 09:22.940]  The world will always be stricken.
[09:23.200 --> 09:24.020]  Thank you.
[09:24.480 --> 09:25.460]  Getty images.
[09:26.220 --> 09:26.780]  Looping.
[09:27.040 --> 09:28.640]  GIF, which I didn't pay for.
[09:29.420 --> 09:31.160]  And yes, I pronounce it GIF.
[09:31.300 --> 09:32.240]  F*cking come at me.
[09:32.320 --> 09:32.760]  I don't care.
[09:34.880 --> 09:35.440]  Um...
[09:35.440 --> 09:39.080]  These struggles will play out anywhere on the spectrum between disputes and war.
[09:39.240 --> 09:43.400]  Because the world will always be stricken with thugs, bullies and tyrants.
[09:43.400 --> 09:47.220]  And the quizlings, enforcers and functionaries who do their bidding.
[09:47.540 --> 09:54.040]  But now their loathsome work will be taking place in the amazing technologies that we are starting to live with and helping to build here.
[09:54.260 --> 10:01.540]  Just as it always has in the exclusion zones, the slave ships, the star chambers, the supermax prisons and the cabinets noirs.
[10:02.360 --> 10:03.820]  They always have throughout history.
[10:04.020 --> 10:08.760]  And we need to oppose them with the same level of energy and inventiveness that we have always brought to the table.
[10:08.760 --> 10:10.620]  And finally, autonomy.
[10:11.280 --> 10:16.980]  These struggles will be over many domains, but I believe that likely and encompassing concern will be autonomy.
[10:17.200 --> 10:22.660]  Self-governance, horizontality, decentralized and distributed systems, processes and people.
[10:23.000 --> 10:34.640]  Things that can be disarticulated from one of the handful of major global historical dynamics of the last three and a half centuries, which is the steady escalating ratchet of consolidation and centralized control.
[10:35.500 --> 10:40.480]  We're right on the front lines at HOPE of a number of early forms of these infrastructural struggles.
[10:40.800 --> 10:44.940]  And we've heard many fascinating talks about versions of them over the last two days.
[10:45.240 --> 10:49.180]  They're only going to get bigger and crazier and more consequential, these battles.
[10:49.460 --> 10:58.360]  And yet they're going to get more invisible, harder to see, and therefore more urgently requiring our explanation and advocacy, as well as technical additions from here on out.
[10:58.360 --> 11:05.780]  And I believe that money will be one of the five or six primary theaters in which this 21st century struggle is going to happen.
[11:06.400 --> 11:08.800]  So what the hell is money?
[11:12.040 --> 11:13.960]  Money is a puzzle, first.
[11:14.260 --> 11:15.380]  First and foremost.
[11:16.060 --> 11:22.520]  There are fossils of beautiful... and there are fossils in the beautiful limestone of the Piacenza Mountains in Italy.
[11:22.520 --> 11:29.600]  The shells of creatures from teeming Mesozoic seas interred in the bare rocks of the highest peaks of the mountain range.
[11:29.980 --> 11:33.680]  How did they come, asked Leonardo da Vinci, to be up so high?
[11:34.320 --> 11:43.160]  There are cowrie shells, huge piles of cowrie shells, in the arid regions of West Africa, thousands of miles from the Indian Ocean where the sea snails lived.
[11:43.400 --> 11:47.700]  We can ask with da Vinci, are we to believe that the flood reached so far?
[11:48.640 --> 11:57.240]  Of course, the cowrie shells, which appear here in a radical from ancient Chinese, which gradually transforms into the current classical Chinese symbol for money.
[11:57.840 --> 12:01.880]  These fossils, these cowrie shells... sorry, not fossils.
[12:02.040 --> 12:05.820]  Cowrie shells are removed by a force even more powerful in some ways than geology.
[12:05.820 --> 12:08.900]  The force of trade, of things being tokened as money.
[12:09.320 --> 12:15.500]  To be more exact, cowrie shells were one of the things that oiled the operation of the terrible machine of the West African slave trade.
[12:16.980 --> 12:20.000]  So if cowrie shells can be money, then where do we draw the line?
[12:20.100 --> 12:20.720]  Where does it end?
[12:21.120 --> 12:22.660]  This is the great Martin Shubick.
[12:22.800 --> 12:29.920]  And I love this because this seems like a classic kind of like trippy 90s, like high theory abstract thing, you know?
[12:30.080 --> 12:31.000]  There is no basis.
[12:31.280 --> 12:31.940]  Money is whatever.
[12:32.420 --> 12:35.220]  But Shubick is not some kind of trippy guy.
[12:35.500 --> 12:38.620]  Shubick is the guy who wrote theory of money and financial institutions.
[12:38.680 --> 12:41.320]  He's one of the great monetary theorists of the 20th century.
[12:41.420 --> 12:42.400]  He's a game theory dude.
[12:42.580 --> 12:43.880]  He's actually really into computers.
[12:44.560 --> 12:46.640]  And this was the best he could do.
[12:46.840 --> 12:48.120]  And I think this is very accurate.
[12:48.320 --> 12:50.360]  And the rules of the game are really complicated.
[12:50.400 --> 12:53.120]  And who gets to make those rules is enormously important.
[12:54.140 --> 12:55.740]  Because let's get back to cowrie shells.
[12:56.360 --> 13:01.100]  Once you'd actually use them in trade, it's not like you could actually do anything with them aside from make jewelry.
[13:01.640 --> 13:03.980]  But as it turns out, jewelry really matters.
[13:04.700 --> 13:06.140]  Jewelry does social signaling.
[13:06.140 --> 13:08.040]  It signifies prestige.
[13:08.500 --> 13:10.540]  Sharing it or giving it or demanding it.
[13:10.800 --> 13:14.260]  Cements bonds and relationships and alliances and it knits groups together.
[13:15.160 --> 13:17.320]  Jewelry is a high bandwidth communication system.
[13:18.560 --> 13:23.460]  And maybe we can think of cowrie shell jewelry as being kind of like a terrific Google query ranking.
[13:23.700 --> 13:26.380]  I mean modulo all the various problems with Google query rankings.
[13:26.580 --> 13:30.100]  But when you Google something, the first thing that comes up, that's a powerful symbol.
[13:30.100 --> 13:31.340]  That's who comes first.
[13:31.500 --> 13:32.580]  That's what really matters.
[13:32.740 --> 13:36.260]  That's the most important thing for the vast majority of people who only look at the first three results.
[13:37.020 --> 13:38.900]  And now, cowrie shells are kind of like that.
[13:38.960 --> 13:40.760]  You see who has the most when you go into a space.
[13:40.760 --> 13:41.940]  You know who you need to talk to.
[13:42.100 --> 13:43.420]  You know who you need to ask favors of.
[13:43.600 --> 13:48.140]  Except these are also, unlike many Google search query rankings, these are negotiable.
[13:48.240 --> 13:48.800]  These are liquid.
[13:49.020 --> 13:50.900]  You can give them to your friends and your cronies.
[13:50.920 --> 13:53.140]  You can move influence and power around.
[13:53.360 --> 13:57.700]  You can do business from the Maldives to Timbuktu to the trade bazaars of western China.
[13:58.880 --> 14:02.340]  And, of course, that means that these are also about moving power around.
[14:02.720 --> 14:06.340]  Notice all of these words like status and prestige and, of course, slaves.
[14:06.780 --> 14:10.000]  The property of moneyness is shaped by the rules of the game.
[14:10.200 --> 14:15.260]  And making the rules of money lets you restructure society itself at a very fundamental level.
[14:15.980 --> 14:21.380]  The rules of money can help to enforce and build on existing social and political structures.
[14:21.380 --> 14:22.700]  Or they can undermine them.
[14:22.860 --> 14:25.220]  And we can see these powers with extra clarity.
[14:25.220 --> 14:29.560]  When we see whatever passes for conventional money run low or run out.
[14:30.620 --> 14:31.300]  Ta-da!
[14:31.860 --> 14:33.320]  So, take the Knights Hospitallers.
[14:34.180 --> 14:35.420]  The Knights of Malta.
[14:35.820 --> 14:37.880]  Who'd received the privilege of mintage.
[14:38.160 --> 14:39.580]  The right to strike coin.
[14:39.740 --> 14:40.780]  To function as tender.
[14:41.540 --> 14:44.100]  And we'll come back to that privilege and how you get it and what it means.
[14:44.200 --> 14:45.240]  In the 1530s.
[14:46.380 --> 14:48.640]  They were put under siege by the Ottoman Empire.
[14:48.920 --> 14:50.420]  This is a depiction of them on their island.
[14:50.420 --> 14:52.540]  I really like for cartography geeks out there.
[14:52.600 --> 14:55.680]  I really like how this projection works to sort of gang everything together.
[14:56.220 --> 14:57.780]  They were under siege by the Ottoman Empire.
[14:57.780 --> 15:01.200]  It was an extraordinarily brutal siege even by early modern standards.
[15:01.340 --> 15:04.760]  People shot the decapitated heads of Turks out of cannons.
[15:05.100 --> 15:08.200]  The Turks put dead people on crucifixes and floated them out to sea.
[15:08.920 --> 15:12.040]  The Knights had torched all the crops before they retreated into the fortress.
[15:12.040 --> 15:13.360]  They poisoned all the wells.
[15:14.100 --> 15:15.860]  And then the Turks left.
[15:16.000 --> 15:16.560]  The siege broke.
[15:16.780 --> 15:18.980]  Now, the Knights had a problem.
[15:18.980 --> 15:20.680]  Because they were sitting on a rock.
[15:20.980 --> 15:24.360]  With completely annihilated cities and towns.
[15:24.580 --> 15:25.920]  And shattered fortresses.
[15:26.020 --> 15:27.680]  And almost no access to resources.
[15:27.920 --> 15:29.540]  And wells that they had filled with a mix.
[15:30.020 --> 15:31.620]  And this is one of my favorite little details.
[15:32.000 --> 15:33.120]  Of dead animals.
[15:33.480 --> 15:33.920]  Hemp.
[15:34.260 --> 15:35.480]  Fungally diseased wheat.
[15:35.660 --> 15:36.400]  And arsenic.
[15:36.480 --> 15:39.340]  To make sure that the Turks couldn't successfully extract water from it.
[15:40.540 --> 15:41.540]  They were in the...
[15:41.540 --> 15:42.080]  No.
[15:42.300 --> 15:42.560]  Yum.
[15:42.760 --> 15:43.020]  Yum.
[15:44.160 --> 15:44.560]  Yes.
[15:44.700 --> 15:44.800]  Yeah.
[15:45.980 --> 15:49.640]  Claude Mattei also has, you know, God knows, taurine and nicotine in there somewhere.
[15:51.520 --> 15:51.920]  Yes.
[15:52.800 --> 15:53.140]  Yes.
[15:53.520 --> 15:54.760]  So, they were on this...
[15:54.760 --> 15:55.820]  They were in this disaster zone.
[15:55.940 --> 15:58.140]  And they knew that the Ottomans were actually coming back.
[15:59.160 --> 16:01.340]  They had very, very little in the way of money.
[16:01.480 --> 16:02.640]  They'd run out of bullion.
[16:02.760 --> 16:04.900]  Out of the precious metals that they could mint coins from.
[16:05.120 --> 16:09.340]  You'd think being sacred knights with the backing of the Pope, they could just order people around.
[16:09.620 --> 16:12.160]  But even in the early modern period, there was no dice.
[16:12.360 --> 16:13.680]  So, they did something kind of incredible.
[16:13.920 --> 16:15.480]  They took their privilege to make money.
[16:16.160 --> 16:19.260]  And they started striking these coins made of copper.
[16:19.540 --> 16:21.260]  With the device of a handshake.
[16:21.540 --> 16:23.920]  And the insignia that you can see around the rim there.
[16:24.300 --> 16:25.620]  Non aes sed fides.
[16:26.260 --> 16:28.820]  Not the copper, or not the metal, but the trust.
[16:30.340 --> 16:32.620]  These coins are traded on trust.
[16:32.840 --> 16:33.920]  That's sort of what they do.
[16:34.060 --> 16:35.560]  You'll notice also the date is way later.
[16:35.560 --> 16:37.180]  They kept issuing these coins for a long time.
[16:37.280 --> 16:39.280]  This is just the highest resolution image I could find of one.
[16:40.260 --> 16:46.340]  This issue, these coins, came with a promise that the coinage could be redeemed in silver once the knights were back on their feet.
[16:46.760 --> 16:53.560]  So, they would buy with the coins and the value of silver to get the stuff they needed to rebuild the cities and the fortresses and get the cannons and all the rest of it.
[16:53.820 --> 16:56.240]  And then eventually you'd be able to redeem it once everything worked out.
[16:56.980 --> 16:57.900]  And it worked.
[16:58.080 --> 17:01.380]  They actually, you can rebuild a whole city on trust if you have enough trust.
[17:01.380 --> 17:05.240]  Of course, it helps to be legendary religious war heroes and have your own island.
[17:05.500 --> 17:07.240]  But still, it's a starting point.
[17:08.140 --> 17:12.960]  Or, take the Irish banking strike moving closer to the present day of 1970.
[17:13.420 --> 17:18.100]  The banks went on strike on the first of May and they didn't reopen until mid-November.
[17:18.940 --> 17:20.280]  So, think about this.
[17:20.420 --> 17:21.480]  All the banks close.
[17:21.900 --> 17:23.300]  You can't deposit checks.
[17:23.480 --> 17:24.780]  You can't get money out.
[17:25.120 --> 17:27.000]  No one can do anything financial.
[17:27.000 --> 17:28.480]  This is the era before ATMs.
[17:28.620 --> 17:32.080]  But even so, the ATMs wouldn't have been restocked after a limited period in any case.
[17:32.520 --> 17:33.880]  There was some advance warning.
[17:34.060 --> 17:36.220]  So, people had some time to stockpile cash.
[17:36.440 --> 17:39.280]  But within a few weeks, the supply had already begun to run low.
[17:39.920 --> 17:48.400]  Employers were cutting deals with retail stores and churches to get their hands on enough, right, because churches have like tithe, you know, tithing and, yeah, poor boxes.
[17:48.680 --> 17:49.680]  And they have a lot of cash around.
[17:49.960 --> 17:52.300]  So, to get enough ready money to pay wages.
[17:52.300 --> 18:01.780]  And as I'm sure you know, things shortly afterwards collapsed into lawlessness with roving gangs of new wave cannibals and post-apocalyptic Thunderdomes.
[18:03.940 --> 18:05.000]  Or not.
[18:05.120 --> 18:06.180]  Or not, actually.
[18:06.960 --> 18:07.980]  No, that's...
[18:07.980 --> 18:09.460]  Yeah, that's basically accurate.
[18:09.620 --> 18:10.840]  This is just outside of Dublin.
[18:12.680 --> 18:13.340]  Um...
[18:13.340 --> 18:15.200]  They literally had ice cream.
[18:15.720 --> 18:18.480]  They were treating the ice cream.
[18:19.060 --> 18:21.960]  Admittedly, but bearing in mind the money issue.
[18:22.520 --> 18:23.000]  Um...
[18:23.000 --> 18:25.600]  Because instead, people started using their checkbooks.
[18:26.180 --> 18:27.900]  They'd write checks for what they needed.
[18:28.280 --> 18:33.800]  And within smaller communities, the checks themselves started to become a kind of negotiable paper, backed by the social graph.
[18:34.720 --> 18:37.640]  Individuals, families, and businesses all kept their own ledgers.
[18:37.900 --> 18:39.920]  These are the checks I'm holding from others.
[18:39.960 --> 18:41.920]  So that's kind of roughly what I have to work with.
[18:42.040 --> 18:44.100]  And these are the checks I have out to everyone else.
[18:44.680 --> 18:50.420]  In less tight-knit environments, like neighborhoods and cities, the reservoir of trust became the local pub.
[18:50.700 --> 18:57.420]  If someone was trying to float a substantial check, you'd go in and ask the bartender at their local whether they were an acceptable credit risk.
[18:57.740 --> 19:02.340]  The person who's chronicled most of this economic history phrased it this way.
[19:02.340 --> 19:03.960]  I love it when economists make jokes.
[19:06.180 --> 19:12.540]  Because bartenders could be trusted in a way that might be very difficult for other kinds of backing.
[19:14.900 --> 19:25.740]  And as the blank checks started to run out, people began to make their own wonderfully elaborate IOUs with their banking information on it, countersigned by neighbors and friends and relatives.
[19:26.620 --> 19:28.600]  The strike did eventually end, of course.
[19:28.780 --> 19:32.740]  And it took the banks months to reconcile the intricate layers of transactions.
[19:32.740 --> 19:36.000]  Because you couldn't just go through all the checks in one person's hands.
[19:36.420 --> 19:39.300]  Because then they were leaning on other people's checks.
[19:39.440 --> 19:40.860]  There was this whole house of cards.
[19:42.240 --> 19:45.480]  Person A had issued against person B who issued against person C.
[19:45.740 --> 19:48.320]  But nonetheless, there was astonishingly little fraud.
[19:48.540 --> 19:49.740]  Like shockingly little.
[19:49.900 --> 19:50.920]  Much less than you would expect.
[19:51.700 --> 19:55.300]  Of course, this wasn't a blissful utopia of mutual aid and social credit.
[19:55.300 --> 19:59.740]  As you can imagine, if you had any need for imports or foreign exchange, you were pretty well screwed.
[20:00.300 --> 20:04.480]  And of course, all this did lean on the fact that the banks would, in fact, eventually reopen.
[20:05.080 --> 20:09.240]  But to an astonishing degree, this system of moving social credit around worked.
[20:09.400 --> 20:10.940]  Indeed, the economy actually grew a bit.
[20:11.200 --> 20:22.040]  So to oversimplify, within a few months, you were drawing assets that weren't backed by government-issued notes, but by the social resiliency and internal trust of a tight-knit community of which you were a part.
[20:23.060 --> 20:25.380]  A reputation economy, essentially.
[20:25.680 --> 20:32.060]  So we have tons of examples of things like this and related systems that you can buy into, because they work for you and you believe in them.
[20:32.620 --> 20:34.220]  Money is a form of allegiance.
[20:34.560 --> 20:36.520]  And this is where we're going to start circling back to cryptocurrencies.
[20:37.200 --> 20:39.140]  So what do you have an allegiance to?
[20:39.480 --> 20:45.560]  Well, maybe it's the local economy of the colonies, and eventually the notes issued by the revolutionary government of the United States.
[20:45.920 --> 20:47.560]  These were printed by Benjamin Franklin.
[20:47.900 --> 20:55.960]  I love his little... if you see over there on the note on your right, the counterfeit is death in the kick-ass, metal, gothic font there.
[20:57.600 --> 20:59.240]  But also notice the leaf print.
[20:59.240 --> 21:02.940]  I just want to point this at what an amazing badass Franklin could be.
[21:03.400 --> 21:15.020]  He had done these books for a British naturalist who had wandered around in America getting leaf prints, and Benjamin had figured out how to print the leaves against plaster, cast, metal against that.
[21:15.140 --> 21:19.000]  And he soon realized, wait a second, these leaves are really easy for me to print.
[21:19.140 --> 21:24.820]  They're really hard for people to reproduce by hand if they're trying to engrave their own plates to counterfeit this money.
[21:24.820 --> 21:28.820]  He had discovered something like the PNP problem of stuff.
[21:29.280 --> 21:33.940]  He had found a way of using something that was easy to verify but very hard to fake.
[21:34.820 --> 21:36.560]  Anyway, Franklin was pretty amazing.
[21:37.240 --> 21:42.520]  But yeah, so maybe you have an allegiance to these new colonies and their weird half-assed system of money with leaves on it.
[21:43.640 --> 21:51.360]  Or maybe you have an allegiance to the Limerick Soviet, where you are actually being issued money in which you are being promised by the workers of Limerick.
[21:51.980 --> 21:53.600]  It only lasted for a few months.
[21:53.600 --> 22:06.380]  Or maybe you have an allegiance to the idea that human time is the only really valuable commodity, in which case you very likely held notes from Uzziah Warren's Time Store in Cincinnati in the 1820s.
[22:06.440 --> 22:13.680]  This was an incredible project, which really did attempt to denominate the value of everything in the time a skilled person would spend on it.
[22:13.840 --> 22:14.640]  So who's skilled?
[22:14.860 --> 22:23.180]  Warren debated for a while and then eventually settled on carpenters, which is why the benchmark for value here is hours a skilled carpenter can work and corn.
[22:23.380 --> 22:26.940]  Those are the major sort of modes of exchangeability.
[22:27.380 --> 22:47.440]  Or maybe it's the anarchist economics of Silvio Gesell, who wanted to build local demurrage currencies, which is to say currencies that actually lose value with time deliberately, to put people who hold money on the same footing as people who hold things like food or crops or other things that can kind of rust or rot or go away.
[22:48.680 --> 22:54.540]  But I love this so much because this is the flip side of one of Gesell's Freigeld notes.
[22:54.780 --> 22:56.600]  This is money that has its own man page.
[22:56.960 --> 23:03.540]  This is money that has its own instructions for use and manifesto explaining why you should be using it, which is pretty awesome.
[23:03.860 --> 23:12.220]  And needless to say, because this is so wonderfully geeky, naturally there's a cryptocurrency version now too, Freycoin with an incredibly elaborate system of related things.
[23:12.340 --> 23:14.700]  If there's a Freycoin person here, please come talk to me.
[23:14.800 --> 23:15.480]  I love you guys.
[23:15.480 --> 23:16.560]  You are so amazing.
[23:17.800 --> 23:21.620]  Or maybe, hell, let's look at something that doesn't even look like money as we recognize it.
[23:22.460 --> 23:31.660]  Maybe it's something like tally sticks, a physical database made out of wood that lets you keep track of who has rights to which cow on a particular Alp.
[23:31.880 --> 23:39.320]  This is a Swiss set of tally sticks here, and like it says at the bottom, this really does keep track of 87 cows among 23 different people.
[23:40.500 --> 23:50.040]  The beauty of it is that you can actually make these out of wood, carve them in certain ways, split them, so that it's impossible for someone to change theirs without changing the other, because otherwise you identify the difference.
[23:50.520 --> 23:53.100]  And don't necessarily laugh at this as a mechanism.
[23:53.460 --> 24:02.060]  The entire financial architecture of Britain for centuries was built on tally sticks issued by the Exchequer, made from the willows that grew by the Thames.
[24:02.560 --> 24:04.540]  They did big money with this stuff.
[24:04.720 --> 24:10.000]  You know, money you owed to the king, money the king owed to you, the barons gambling land away, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
[24:10.000 --> 24:15.000]  They don't get the prominence they deserve, because when they decided to modernize their financial system, they burned them.
[24:15.460 --> 24:17.640]  Because, you know, who wants to have these embarrassing relics around?
[24:17.720 --> 24:22.760]  So they destroyed this beautiful wealth of financial history, and also overheated the chimney and burned down Parliament.
[24:23.860 --> 24:25.320]  Which didn't turn out...
[24:25.320 --> 24:32.000]  So to have a little Jason Scott interlude here, this is further proof, don't f*cking throw things away.
[24:32.300 --> 24:34.640]  Don't needlessly destroy things you don't need to destroy.
[24:34.640 --> 24:42.060]  You can never tell when you're trying to like, you know, scrub all those old hard drives, you might accidentally like degauss everything, who knows.
[24:43.340 --> 24:50.140]  So this is all to say, money is a significant part of what Benedict Anderson, the great political theorist, called imagined communities.
[24:50.200 --> 24:59.960]  The way we feel that we belong in a deep sense to groups, countries, nations, peoples, whom we'll never entirely know, who may not even have territory or formal structure.
[25:00.400 --> 25:04.320]  Money is a way that we can sort of vote, that we can ally ourselves with things.
[25:04.760 --> 25:06.200]  But of course, we all do this.
[25:06.340 --> 25:08.120]  We all show which allegiances we have.
[25:09.100 --> 25:14.760]  Everyone in this room has probably done multiple transactions in United States Federal Reserve notes today.
[25:14.960 --> 25:16.680]  And those are based on trust, too.
[25:17.080 --> 25:28.360]  Both that we trust that the notes we're accepting and passing aren't counterfeit, and in a deeper sense, that the Federal Reserve will not print too much money at once, and thereby render what we hold valuable, or less valuable, or even worthless.
[25:28.780 --> 25:31.320]  And this, of course, requires backing in multiple forms.
[25:31.320 --> 25:33.780]  This is a very brief interlude, but I couldn't resist.
[25:34.000 --> 25:36.120]  Confidence in money is so fascinating.
[25:36.400 --> 25:51.140]  Because to mean that money is not easily counterfeited, they have to put an amazing amount of technological thought into the architecture of physical currency, ranging from reading systems, which no longer really serve this purpose because there's not a lot of value in the metal in coins,
[25:51.280 --> 26:02.820]  but back in the old days, it was designed so you couldn't trim the edges of the coins off with a very sharp knife to get the little fine filings of silver while still letting the coin keep its initial face value.
[26:03.320 --> 26:07.660]  So yeah, they had to widely implement this so they could really see when you were starting to scrape stuff away.
[26:08.400 --> 26:11.500]  Isaac Newton had people drawn and quartered for doing things like this.
[26:12.920 --> 26:15.980]  This used to be a way more barbaric field than it is now.
[26:16.180 --> 26:22.100]  The sheer amount of technology that goes into securing a single note is an absolutely extraordinary thing.
[26:22.100 --> 26:26.760]  And forget about like the thermoreactive inks and the security threads and all the rest of it.
[26:26.980 --> 26:42.120]  Let's talk about one of my personal favorite things, which I bet a number of you are familiar with, because this is hope, which is when you look at a U.S. 20, notice the little yellow 20s that are scattered around in a cloud on one corner of the bill, and then notice the O's in that cloud,
[26:42.140 --> 26:56.760]  which fall into an arrangement called the Urien constellation, which is the subject of a collective agreement among quite a lot of different currency issuing countries and central banks and mints, and also the people who work on the firmware for color photocopy machines.
[26:57.200 --> 27:02.920]  That something that has the Urien constellation in it will not let itself be scanned or photocopied.
[27:03.100 --> 27:05.920]  It will not generate a page as a result of that.
[27:06.040 --> 27:06.920]  It is identifiable.
[27:07.140 --> 27:09.740]  You should look into the patents for this, because the patents are fascinating.
[27:09.880 --> 27:10.520]  They're very thoughtful.
[27:11.060 --> 27:20.800]  And this is kind of a real-world version of the William Gibson sci-fi idea of the ugliest t-shirt in the world, the t-shirt that exempts whoever is wearing it from being able to be digitally captured.
[27:21.480 --> 27:24.720]  But it goes even beyond that in other ways.
[27:25.000 --> 27:28.820]  There's really incredible research going on right now into trying to figure out...
[27:28.820 --> 27:30.360]  Because it's not just the Urien constellation.
[27:30.740 --> 27:42.960]  There's fascinating work going into trying to figure out what it is that is in money that makes it so that things like Adobe Photoshop can recognize when you're attempting to scan a note in or make changes to banknotes from particular countries.
[27:43.340 --> 27:45.840]  People are trying to sort of break down precisely how that works.
[27:46.780 --> 27:52.180]  Yeah, the policing of images of notes, again, to maintain confidence in the currency, is an extraordinary project.
[27:52.420 --> 27:58.500]  You have to write to this dude in order to get high-resolution images of banknotes that you can do things with.
[27:58.520 --> 28:02.800]  You have to make a case to this guy and send a letter to his office, which is just delightful to me.
[28:04.280 --> 28:06.580]  But then there's the question, of course, of long-term value.
[28:06.660 --> 28:08.160]  And we're going to circle back to that in a second.
[28:08.220 --> 28:13.920]  Not just the question of whether or not whatever you're holding is counterfeit or not, but the question of how valuable it's going to be in the long term.
[28:13.920 --> 28:15.860]  Let's stay with the question of trust.
[28:16.300 --> 28:20.200]  Because talking about trust means talking about the privilege to mint and specify currency.
[28:20.560 --> 28:24.660]  And that's the second most important privilege of the sovereign or the sovereign nation.
[28:24.840 --> 28:27.780]  And that's part of why cryptocurrencies are so important.
[28:28.140 --> 28:33.820]  Because as it turns out, being able to specify currency and mint currency is a great way to get people to do what you want.
[28:34.960 --> 28:37.000]  Let's say you want to conquer the world.
[28:38.180 --> 28:39.180]  You need an army.
[28:39.420 --> 28:42.200]  And that army is going to have a lot of foreign mercenaries in it.
[28:42.660 --> 28:54.160]  And these foreign mercenaries are not going to be cool with some kind of magic social credit scheme where you have to go talk to a bartender and then look at someone's GitHub stats, and then you get a special coupon that lets you have two hours of carpentry.
[28:56.120 --> 28:57.180]  They want cash.
[28:57.260 --> 28:59.440]  They want cash that they can spend in their home countries.
[29:00.020 --> 29:01.300]  So now you have two problems.
[29:01.300 --> 29:05.220]  You need to get cash for them, and you need to make that cash good wherever they travel.
[29:05.560 --> 29:14.740]  So if you're Alexander the Great, who faced exactly these problems, you realize, or rather some very smart people who work for you realize, that each problem is actually the solution to the other problem.
[29:15.200 --> 29:19.480]  As the sovereign, you can order the issue of coin in silver as soldiers' wages.
[29:19.800 --> 29:26.580]  And then as your soldiers conquer, you can demand payment of taxes and ransoms and tributes in your currency.
[29:26.580 --> 29:28.400]  So you've created instant demand.
[29:28.820 --> 29:33.120]  Suddenly everyone would really like to get their hands on some, so they can pay their taxes and not get killed.
[29:34.000 --> 29:43.000]  And of course, war is also a terrific source of slaves, which is what you need to work the silver mines in Macedonia, and Thrace, and Budi, like the hordes of bullion from the Persians.
[29:43.200 --> 29:54.780]  So soon you've got this insane, proto-military industrial complex going, where the demand for soldiers' pay stokes the fires of a moloch of enslaved miners in the expansion of the imperial tax base.
[29:55.220 --> 29:57.040]  It turns out to be like drinking seawater.
[29:57.140 --> 29:58.700]  The more you have, the more you need.
[29:59.420 --> 30:03.540]  Now, the thing is, as monstrous as this plan is, it can actually kind of work okay.
[30:03.720 --> 30:04.620]  But let's say it doesn't.
[30:04.740 --> 30:06.000]  Some battles fall through.
[30:06.340 --> 30:07.740]  The sun is in your eyes.
[30:07.900 --> 30:08.880]  You know, who gives a shit?
[30:09.140 --> 30:12.880]  Something goes wrong with your amazing plan, and you kind of need to make a lot more money.
[30:13.880 --> 30:16.780]  Ancient Rome is where we get the term money.
[30:20.680 --> 30:26.420]  Ancient Rome is actually where we get the term money from the Temple of Juno Moneta, which was the point of issue of the denarius.
[30:27.240 --> 30:32.640]  And it was probably one of the most densely populated cities in the world, to this day, in parts, little districts of it.
[30:32.720 --> 30:33.860]  Think of Lagos or Mumbai.
[30:34.240 --> 30:43.200]  And it was a near total consumption and service economy city, with a metropolitan culture obsessed with the trappings of lifestyle, with elite goods and sumptuary excess.
[30:43.760 --> 30:47.600]  And it had a restive population, which was not afraid of the occasional riot.
[30:48.340 --> 30:55.920]  So when things get a little rough, you kind of can pad out the trouble, if you're in charge of making the currency, by adding some extra copper to the bullion.
[30:56.100 --> 31:00.480]  You need to pay more troops, and keep the flows of grain moving into the capital, so then you add some more.
[31:00.640 --> 31:03.540]  And slowly over time, the money becomes less and less valuable in trade.
[31:03.680 --> 31:05.420]  All kinds of problems begin to appear.
[31:05.800 --> 31:12.040]  And this problem, this crisis, is massively increased by the transition to heavily leveraged paper money.
[31:12.040 --> 31:19.540]  That's Gutenberg freaking out, from a cartoon in 1921, as huge amounts of money pour out of printing press.
[31:19.880 --> 31:27.620]  If you're facing a crisis, or a brutal trade deficit, or you want to fund yet another f*cking war, you can always just open the spigot and print more money.
[31:28.320 --> 31:32.860]  A little inflation can be a very good thing, encouraging investment, and too much of it can be a catastrophe.
[31:33.300 --> 31:45.100]  And even though this happens all the time, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Poland, Brazil, Taiwan, you name it, it still very rarely gets discussed as the constant reality that it actually is.
[31:45.240 --> 31:47.640]  And it's really almost overwhelmingly shocking.
[31:47.900 --> 31:52.540]  I've spent a lot of time reading about the Weimar hyperinflation, which is sort of the touchstone for this in many ways.
[31:52.660 --> 31:55.840]  And it's astonishing the degree to which it turns the world upside down.
[31:56.380 --> 32:11.260]  Being a responsible person, being a person who carefully accumulates savings, and puts away money for your future, or your children's future, who gets a pension from a lifetime of hard work, is actually an enormous, enormous failing on your part.
[32:11.400 --> 32:12.780]  You're immediately penalized.
[32:12.880 --> 32:13.420]  You're wiped out.
[32:13.560 --> 32:17.460]  But as it turns out, being a debt-ridden, compulsive gambler, you're good, you know?
[32:17.640 --> 32:20.280]  You're actually set in a hyperinflation state.
[32:20.420 --> 32:25.020]  Because the money becoming rapidly more worthless means your debts are suddenly much smaller than they were.
[32:25.140 --> 32:26.340]  You can gamble a lot more.
[32:26.520 --> 32:27.480]  Everyone starts gambling.
[32:28.020 --> 32:29.360]  It makes people crazy.
[32:29.560 --> 32:41.800]  It damages people to go through that experience of suddenly having all of your weaknesses exposed, and having to be paid every single day at lunchtime, so you can sprint out and buy groceries before the prices go up by mid-afternoon.
[32:44.400 --> 32:50.040]  So, on that extremely grim note, let's start to kind of shift towards people who are beginning to think about what to do about this.
[32:50.180 --> 32:56.320]  This is just a beautiful image of Notgeld, which was money that was issued by everyone other than the state during the hyperinflation period.
[32:56.320 --> 33:01.580]  So you could at least transact in cash that was issued by, like, your church, or your town, or your friends.
[33:02.240 --> 33:03.940]  Which actually, again, worked pretty well.
[33:04.420 --> 33:16.700]  There are people who take the possibility of hyperinflation as the inevitable tendency of the state that they must prepare for now by stockpiling things like water filters and heirloom seeds and ammunition and silver, and by building...
[33:16.700 --> 33:22.760]  I hope that was for heirloom seeds and not necessarily the ammo part, but we're going to talk about ammo a little bit, too.
[33:24.900 --> 33:34.100]  Because I wanted to go in the world where the people were who were really trying to live this concept of alternative currency systems, who were really trying to actually apply it.
[33:34.200 --> 33:35.260]  So I've been doing a lot of travel.
[33:35.460 --> 33:42.220]  And I just wanted to briefly mention, seeing a lot of this in practice, most recently in New Hampshire a couple weeks ago, among the utilikilts.
[33:43.700 --> 33:45.340]  And nothing against utilikilts.
[33:45.440 --> 33:45.980]  They're so awesome.
[33:46.080 --> 33:55.660]  But there was just something about that image of a guy with a utilikilt and he's vaping and he's got a giant braided beard and he's wearing a Debian t-shirt.
[33:55.840 --> 33:58.040]  And I was like, this is kind of like hope, you know, actually.
[34:00.040 --> 34:02.120]  Except that he also has an assault rifle.
[34:02.640 --> 34:07.980]  But yeah, this was hanging out with radical libertarians and anarcho-capitalists and stuff.
[34:07.980 --> 34:11.200]  And what was really fascinating, and I'm happy to discuss this more.
[34:11.340 --> 34:13.200]  I learned a lot of bacon-related recipes.
[34:13.740 --> 34:21.280]  What was fascinating about this was to see precisely how this adoption was playing out in ways that I think have useful things to tell us about the near future.
[34:21.620 --> 34:24.300]  People very rarely transacted in one thing.
[34:24.520 --> 34:26.720]  They transacted in baskets of different things.
[34:27.040 --> 34:31.960]  You can see the spread of different cryptocurrencies here, as well as U.S. dollars, silver, and hugs.
[34:33.640 --> 34:36.800]  But they still denominated everything in dollars, which is interesting.
[34:36.800 --> 34:53.240]  It's almost like historically, for centuries, Europe denominated almost all transactions in a kind of imaginary money, pounds, shillings, and pence, which people used to sort of set terms by which they could trade, even though they might be using completely different coins and completely different sets of things for their exchange.
[34:53.460 --> 34:55.000]  But yeah, you could see all this in practice.
[34:55.180 --> 34:59.620]  Publishers paid their authors in Bitcoin or Dogecoin or Litecoin or whatever.
[35:00.240 --> 35:02.240]  People paid Afghani bloggers.
[35:02.400 --> 35:03.220]  It was fantastic.
[35:04.780 --> 35:10.760]  And yeah, it was enormously interesting to see the kind of constant exchange projects that were taking place.
[35:10.980 --> 35:29.740]  And, and I'm not sure if you can read this on this slide, but the attempts to explain to people who are like anarcho-primitivists, you know, who like lived like hobbits in the depths of the woods and, you know, made their own like biltong to try to explain to them that you have to include a few Satoshis as a miner's fee because otherwise your transaction won't go through and be added to the blockchain.
[35:32.180 --> 35:34.380]  And of course, they were also obsessed with precious metals.
[35:34.620 --> 35:37.920]  But you can see that there's a whole dialogue that's starting to take place here.
[35:38.580 --> 35:40.560]  The hemp pretzels were really disgusting.
[35:40.800 --> 35:41.560]  It broke my heart.
[35:41.660 --> 35:44.120]  You wanted to love them because they were making them themselves.
[35:44.120 --> 35:46.020]  It was very innovative, but they were so gross.
[35:48.280 --> 35:59.240]  But, but you can see how there's actually kind of a whole dialogue happening here, a really fruitful dialogue, a dialogue I think we could be having within the hacker community about what it is that makes money valuable, about the kinds of value that money can provide.
[35:59.500 --> 36:08.660]  And I just have to mention the moment when a blogger and cryptocurrency activist, I kept asking people like a lot of the tools that make up Bitcoin have actually been around for a while in different forms.
[36:08.760 --> 36:09.940]  Why did it really click now?
[36:10.300 --> 36:18.260]  And she grabbed my arm and said, because the earth is fertile with unrest, which is a pretty kick-ass sort of, you know, thing to, thing to hear.
[36:18.260 --> 36:28.140]  And, and what unified all these different people, the people who are making bacon pancakes, the people who are only taking silver quarters from pre a certain period, etc.
[36:28.440 --> 36:36.100]  And this is where we move towards the future, is that they were starting to develop new and nuanced models of community, collaboration, and trust.
[36:37.100 --> 36:45.880]  Hacking money, this is getting back to the central point, what it's based on, how it's issued, and how it moves around, is again, this is an opportunity to hack the social architecture itself.
[36:45.880 --> 36:50.920]  Because what backs money is one of the fundamental statements of value that a society can make.
[36:51.280 --> 36:52.420]  Is it human time?
[36:52.660 --> 36:54.780]  Is it the God-given right of the sovereign to rule?
[36:55.020 --> 36:57.040]  Is it post-war American military might?
[36:57.220 --> 37:01.660]  Or is it cryptography, mathematics, the shallowness of bugs given enough eyes?
[37:02.560 --> 37:06.220]  Science fiction is a wonderful source of thought experiments for this.
[37:06.820 --> 37:13.760]  Ian Banks, and how could I not include this as a slide with my topic this time around?
[37:14.320 --> 37:22.920]  Ian Banks imagines currencies that are convertible for categories of different things, like land, fixed quantities of elements, and computational work.
[37:23.180 --> 37:26.940]  Which is an enormously interesting sense of like, yeah, those things are actually really pretty valuable.
[37:27.500 --> 37:29.880]  In particular ways, stable elements, of course.
[37:30.000 --> 37:31.900]  No one's gonna give you hafnium for your coins.
[37:33.020 --> 37:40.560]  And people often forget, I find, that Margaret Atwood's masterpiece, or one of her masterpieces, is partially a book about economic warfare.
[37:40.560 --> 37:42.660]  In fact, it's a book about data mining.
[37:42.840 --> 38:01.620]  Because what initiates the monstrous, theocratic, patriarchal dystopia in which this novel takes place, is the fact that they can relatively easily put together the identities, the genders, of holders of money with their accounts, and thereby freeze the assets of one side of society as part of the process of consolidating control.
[38:02.360 --> 38:09.320]  But we actually live in a world that has very limited values when it comes to figuring out what backs money, what makes money valuable.
[38:09.320 --> 38:11.720]  And this is another place where we can just crack things wide open.
[38:11.880 --> 38:13.880]  This is the last old-timey thing, I promise.
[38:14.940 --> 38:20.580]  The guy on the right, you're right there, is John Locke, the enormously important theorist of liberalism and liberty.
[38:20.920 --> 38:24.540]  The guy on the right is William Laundus, Locke's contemporary secretary of the treasury.
[38:24.760 --> 38:30.820]  They had a huge throwdown that was known as the great recoinage debate, that set the terms under which we still talk about money today.
[38:31.720 --> 38:34.980]  The coin issued by the Bank of England had become hopelessly compromised.
[38:35.400 --> 38:47.260]  They had a lot of inflation, the coins had been clipped and sweated, which meant that people would like shake them up in bags so they'd rub together and rub off enough silver dust that you could like extract from the seams, while they would still notionally be good.
[38:48.340 --> 38:54.620]  And a lot of people simply couldn't get ready money at all, because the coins had become less valuable than the silver that they contained.
[38:54.620 --> 39:00.200]  So any smart person was just grabbing them right, left, and center, melting them down, and selling the bullion out of the country.
[39:01.000 --> 39:02.660]  Everyone knew they had to recoin.
[39:02.800 --> 39:04.700]  The men had to take the stuff back in and recoin.
[39:05.120 --> 39:12.020]  The question was, should they recoin the coins to their original value in silver, or should they recoin them to reflect their current value?
[39:12.220 --> 39:16.100]  This sounds very abstract, but just bear with me, because we're still stuck with this f*cking debate.
[39:17.480 --> 39:18.980]  Laundus took the latter position.
[39:19.160 --> 39:20.660]  He said, money is credit.
[39:20.900 --> 39:23.580]  The coins are just the physical representation of credit.
[39:23.580 --> 39:31.800]  The pound was in trouble because it's inflated, so let's recoin it to its actual value, which means less silver in the coin, you know, smaller coins, whatever.
[39:32.680 --> 39:34.380]  And then Locke said, well, hell no.
[39:34.540 --> 39:36.460]  Let's recoin the coins up to their original weight.
[39:36.620 --> 39:37.620]  The promise is the promise.
[39:37.740 --> 39:39.500]  These things need to have this much silver in them.
[39:40.220 --> 39:44.740]  Now, I tell you this absurd ancient debate, because it's actually an argument about power.
[39:44.880 --> 39:47.200]  And again, it's an argument that we're dealing with right now, today.
[39:47.540 --> 39:55.900]  Locke's position is actually super dumb, because what he's saying is, OK, you know how people are melting down these valueless coins and getting rid of the silver overseas?
[39:56.060 --> 39:57.880]  Let's give them more silver to do it with.
[39:58.060 --> 40:01.580]  Let's recoin the coins bigger and heavier and then give them back.
[40:02.980 --> 40:05.020]  But he was making this argument for a good reason.
[40:05.440 --> 40:08.480]  They'd been fighting a desperate war against monarchy.
[40:08.700 --> 40:12.780]  And one of the fundamental bulwarks of liberty was the concept of natural rights.
[40:12.780 --> 40:20.680]  that we have unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which is a phrase basically of Locke's that the framers took.
[40:21.600 --> 40:26.120]  We have those rights because they belong to us, not because they are given to us, but because they come to us naturally.
[40:26.480 --> 40:36.620]  So for Locke, the idea that something as important as money could become the sovereign's choice, that suddenly the king or a significant figure in power could just be like, Eh, the money's worth less now, you know, deal.
[40:37.500 --> 40:38.720]  That was a catastrophe.
[40:39.020 --> 40:43.680]  The money had to be valuable in the same way that like a rock is heavy to some given amount of heaviness.
[40:44.320 --> 40:47.160]  And Locke won this argument and it was a total catastrophe.
[40:47.540 --> 40:52.660]  The country essentially bled out for a while because the mint took in these clipped, sweated coins.
[40:52.700 --> 40:57.420]  They issued far fewer because they had to make the old weight and then they were instantly melted down and exported.
[40:58.320 --> 40:59.880]  And it was really, it was really horrific.
[41:00.020 --> 41:12.820]  You read these accounts and it's a little like reading like some of the things that happened in Greece during the height of the, well, the ongoing giant debt crisis with sudden epidemics of suicides, trade freezing, people starting to go into malnutrition.
[41:12.940 --> 41:14.180]  It was a bad, bad situation.
[41:14.600 --> 41:21.040]  And the horrible thing is that that framework, two dudes in wigs, that remains the poles of the planet of money on which we live.
[41:21.300 --> 41:31.000]  Which is to say, either you base your money, you base your value on nature, by which we mean shiny stuff that we extract from the ground at great cost and difficulty and danger.
[41:31.740 --> 41:33.400]  And it's not even necessarily that.
[41:33.560 --> 41:37.140]  The London fix is actually how the value of gold is determined, but we can go back to that later.
[41:37.920 --> 41:43.080]  Or you base the value of money on the authority of king, country, and central bankers.
[41:43.660 --> 41:44.760]  Those are your choices.
[41:45.300 --> 41:46.280]  Or rather they were.
[41:46.400 --> 41:48.080]  I'm so happy that this image worked out.
[41:48.540 --> 41:56.440]  That the monarch, the monarch on the left is Ethelred the Unready, also known as Ethelred the Ill-Advised, who seemed kind of appropriate for this.
[41:57.540 --> 41:58.800]  So those are the choices.
[41:58.960 --> 41:59.720]  Or rather they were.
[42:00.180 --> 42:03.680]  Because cryptocurrency development and the related fields...
[42:04.360 --> 42:09.760]  This is deliberately a little bit, you know, I wanted to undercut my own tendency to talk about how great the future is.
[42:10.340 --> 42:22.580]  Cryptocurrency development and the related fields of distributed organizations and autonomous corporations, voting pools, crypto equity, and new marketplaces and trading zones open up vast new fields of alternatives for us.
[42:22.580 --> 42:25.260]  So let's forget about some things for a second.
[42:25.740 --> 42:27.960]  Let's forget about this.
[42:28.940 --> 42:35.280]  And let's forget about the obsession with Satoshi and this poor son of a bitch running all over Los Angeles.
[42:36.560 --> 42:45.440]  Let's forget about the people digging through the dump in Wales to try to find the discarded hard drive with the keys to the Bitcoin stash on it.
[42:46.340 --> 42:52.840]  Let's forget about all the sort of classic criminal activity that just moves into any space that seems to offer fast return.
[42:52.920 --> 42:56.280]  This is ransomware, you know, locks up your home folder, encrypts it.
[42:56.360 --> 42:58.100]  You can get the keys by sending them some money.
[42:59.560 --> 43:07.160]  Let's forget all of the different sort of criminal manifestations that surround people trying to trick other people into giving them Bitcoin.
[43:08.620 --> 43:10.540]  Or ancient spam scams.
[43:10.680 --> 43:14.880]  I love this in a weird way just because it's like, shit, man, I wrote a book about spam.
[43:14.880 --> 43:18.780]  I've been reading about this stuff since the 1980s, and here it is, except now it's about Bitcoin.
[43:20.200 --> 43:21.260]  And all the rest of it.
[43:21.420 --> 43:23.820]  Let's forget for a second about the drugs.
[43:24.540 --> 43:27.660]  This is not my armodafinil, I hasten to add.
[43:29.480 --> 43:34.500]  Let's forget about all of the various attacks, the transaction malleability issues.
[43:34.920 --> 43:38.760]  Let's forget about the U.S. Marshals selling off the Dread Pirate Robert stash.
[43:40.140 --> 43:43.600]  Let's forget about people using Bitcoin to sell stolen identities.
[43:45.220 --> 43:56.500]  Let's momentarily forget about Weave, who is here, who I just saw downstairs, demanding payment in Bitcoins for all the time that he spent in prison from you lying subhuman garbage, the Department of Justice.
[43:58.320 --> 44:00.680]  Let's even forget about how disappointing this is.
[44:00.680 --> 44:10.620]  This is Walmart selling a Butterfly Labs miner with a one-star review, which is just so terrific.
[44:12.860 --> 44:30.100]  And let's even forget about the really exciting stuff, about the amazing implications for remittance workers, for nonprofits, for people doing transactions during banking crises, or across national borders, or around sanctions and embargoes, or, I'm just going to say it,
[44:30.140 --> 44:44.520]  oh, it's so refreshing, a model of micropayments that might actually work in browser and completely eviscerate the online advertising market, that turns every content provider into a snitch who's building the apparatus of espionage.
[44:44.960 --> 44:46.100]  God, wouldn't that be great?
[44:46.240 --> 44:47.620]  No more banner ads ever.
[44:47.840 --> 44:49.200]  No more sponsored content.
[44:49.720 --> 44:50.560]  The end.
[44:50.800 --> 44:51.940]  Oh, God, yeah.
[44:52.720 --> 44:53.700]  Oh, I'm a little out of breath.
[44:55.060 --> 45:08.080]  And even forget for a second about kick-ass technical stuff, like using the broadcast TV spectrum to update the blockchain across the forests of Northern Finland, so that lap-herds people can finally get on the Bitcoin train.
[45:11.760 --> 45:27.260]  This is something that's actually really kind of profound, because this is a system that offers us a chance to manage money as a community, as a collective, whether with persistent identities or as trusted anonymous strangers, which is enormous.
[45:27.820 --> 45:37.500]  This is something that lets us, us here at HOPE, us hackers, us people in this world, to make decisions about issue, about validation, about authority, and about the circulation of power.
[45:38.580 --> 45:40.740]  This is the birth of distributed sovereignty.
[45:41.020 --> 45:42.440]  Just sort of imagine it in your cell.
[45:42.440 --> 45:44.920]  You know, you can hum the Jurassic Park theme.
[45:46.180 --> 45:46.900]  This is...
[45:48.560 --> 45:55.460]  When you hear what I'm about to say, which is the last paragraph of this, it's so over the top, there's no way I could not have things get really extreme here.
[45:55.460 --> 46:10.860]  This is the birth of distributed sovereignty, and of the opportunity to construct social forms for which we do not yet have words, that can link up groups that don't need to agree, so that they can pool resources, coordinate efforts, and coexist.
[46:11.860 --> 46:18.260]  Groups anywhere... and again, I'm not just talking about Bitcoin here, I'm talking about Ethereum, about contract management systems, about all those amazing things.
[46:18.860 --> 46:23.520]  Groups anywhere that have an interest in the push against coercion and centralized control.
[46:24.400 --> 46:43.440]  Diasporic communities, oppressed minorities, undocumented immigrants, students defaulting on their loans and walking away from the credit system, radicals, holders of unpopular opinions and congregants of unpopular religions, pacifists and anti-militarists who don't want their tax money to go to the vast terrible machine,
[46:44.420 --> 46:59.500]  the unemployed, prisoners and felons, quilt bag communities in bigoted countries, nomads and vonu, squatters, lovers of mutual aid, the elderly who've been screwed out of their pensions and savings by the crisis and are now walking away from their underwater homes,
[47:00.160 --> 47:13.260]  pornographers, of course, you know, it's the Internet, pornographers, inevitable, pirates and artists who refuse to participate in a crooked intellectual property regime, underground farms, co-ops, people who make raw milk cheese, God knows what all.
[47:13.260 --> 47:21.600]  There's a lot of different groups who could actually make enormous value from having these kinds of opportunities as long as we can build them for them.
[47:22.260 --> 47:27.680]  Money is one of the fronts on which the struggle for decentralization and autonomy in the 21st century will be fought.
[47:27.680 --> 47:31.660]  And we here have opportunities to contribute to that new space.
[47:32.240 --> 47:33.720]  The technologies are here.
[47:33.980 --> 47:38.860]  Some of them have been around for decades but are now finding a whole new population of adopters and applications.
[47:39.420 --> 47:53.020]  Multi-party signatures, wireless mesh networking systems, zero-knowledge proofs, different variations on the blockchain system and rate-limiting processes, mining things that take advantage of stuff that isn't just super-hot ASICs sitting in your basement,
[47:53.020 --> 47:56.100]  voting pools and sophisticated delegation methods.
[47:57.600 --> 48:00.040]  So I've had almost exactly 50 minutes.
[48:00.280 --> 48:05.180]  And we now have the rest of our lives to actually build all of this stuff and change society for the better.
[48:05.400 --> 48:07.240]  So thank you very much for your time and attention.
[48:20.830 --> 48:22.970]  Like I said, I made some ugly-ass slides.
[48:23.270 --> 48:27.630]  So yeah, if we want to have questions, if we want to have a giant, like, groupthink get-together...
[48:27.630 --> 48:29.190]  Groupthink is a bad word about this.
[48:30.150 --> 48:30.890]  Not what I meant.
[48:32.450 --> 48:33.610]  Oh, we still got two minutes.
[48:33.610 --> 48:35.490]  I came out ahead of time.
[48:35.970 --> 48:38.430]  Can we, can we just turn up the lights and open it to questions?
[48:40.810 --> 48:43.110]  Yeah, I'm happy to rant angrily for a while.
[48:43.970 --> 48:48.510]  Okay, yeah, if people wouldn't mind coming up to the mic there, where I think there's already a little line formed here.
[48:50.190 --> 48:52.410]  The mic is actually not on, unfortunately.
[48:56.330 --> 48:56.970]  Anything yet?
[48:57.830 --> 48:59.090]  Yeah, yeah, excellent.
[49:05.810 --> 49:06.290]  Wow.
[49:06.590 --> 49:07.830]  We couldn't have planned that better.
[49:10.830 --> 49:13.210]  Okay, note to self, don't yell into a microphone.
[49:14.390 --> 49:16.770]  So I want to thank you very much for the great talk.
[49:16.910 --> 49:17.970]  It was incredibly inspirational.
[49:18.330 --> 49:30.270]  I also, I want to say I'm working on building a platform right now that allows communities to collectively decide what is valuable, and then to generate the currency to pay them for what they believe to be valuable.
[49:30.590 --> 49:30.770]  Interesting.
[49:30.770 --> 49:37.870]  So if people want to pay for a community class, they just generate the currency to pay the community class, and then everyone attends for free.
[49:37.970 --> 49:44.610]  And if the community wants to keep supporting that, they have to accept the currency into their, into their lives in exchange for the things that they can do.
[49:45.130 --> 49:45.470]  Interesting.
[49:45.630 --> 49:46.670]  I mean, plug it, you know.
[49:46.910 --> 49:49.130]  So it's called, it's the Jack of All Trades universe.
[49:49.410 --> 49:54.310]  It's JOATU, J-O-A-T-U dot com or dot org if you feel like donating.
[49:54.550 --> 49:57.410]  But if you want to contribute to it, we're building it in Ruby right now.
[49:57.510 --> 49:58.330]  We'll have an alpha.
[49:58.330 --> 50:00.990]  We're going to launch it in a couple months in Montreal.
[50:00.990 --> 50:02.770]  But the idea is that there will be pods.
[50:03.010 --> 50:10.890]  So you'll be able to exist with this currency, do the things you love, build your reputation up, travel the world with couch surfing and live nomadically.
[50:11.930 --> 50:13.390]  That's, that's what we're pushing towards.
[50:13.610 --> 50:13.690]  Awesome.
[50:13.690 --> 50:16.010]  So thank you so much for, for doing what you're doing too.
[50:16.170 --> 50:16.250]  My pleasure.
[50:16.390 --> 50:16.770]  You too.
[50:16.990 --> 50:17.230]  Absolutely.
[50:19.930 --> 50:20.750]  Hi, great talk.
[50:22.290 --> 50:23.230]  Two, two questions.
[50:23.390 --> 50:25.110]  One, Emperor Norton from San Francisco.
[50:25.110 --> 50:26.010]  Are you aware?
[50:26.210 --> 50:26.390]  Okay.
[50:26.490 --> 50:29.410]  I thought you'd be a great addition to your, like the legacy money stuff.
[50:29.610 --> 50:30.190]  Yeah, absolutely.
[50:30.470 --> 50:30.590]  Yeah.
[50:31.010 --> 50:37.650]  And two, topical, like in the past couple of days, there's been a lot of chatter in the Bitcoin community about the state's bit license proposal.
[50:37.810 --> 50:37.910]  Yes.
[50:37.910 --> 50:38.530]  Are you familiar with that?
[50:38.770 --> 50:39.030]  Yes.
[50:39.030 --> 50:41.550]  Do you have any, whatever your opinion is about that, I'd like to hear it.
[50:41.690 --> 50:49.610]  Well, so, so again, I'm hoping no one I work with is on the live stream right now because, because I, there's, and I think we're almost, we're out of time.
[50:49.790 --> 50:49.950]  Yes.
[50:50.110 --> 50:50.330]  Okay.
[50:50.530 --> 50:51.390]  So I apologize.
[50:51.530 --> 50:55.050]  I will be, I'll be hanging around, you know, drinking tons of caffeine.
[50:55.690 --> 51:02.770]  So, but yeah, very, very briefly, there is, there is value in perhaps regulating areas of cryptocurrency that have real social utility.
[51:02.930 --> 51:14.830]  But I think there's also a lot of utility to the stuff that's unregulated, to the stuff that's wild and free and strongly resistant to that, because we need to have open, resistant, problematic sectors of our society or else we're in real deep trouble.
[51:14.830 --> 51:16.930]  Thank you again very much for your time.
[51:17.170 --> 51:18.010]  Thank you.
[51:57.710 --> 51:58.190]  Thank you.
[51:58.310 --> 51:58.750]  Thank you.
[51:58.750 --> 51:59.270]  Thank you.
[51:59.730 --> 52:00.350]  Thank you.