Dangerous Old Men: Cypherpunk's Failure, Ethereum's Success

Transcript

[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 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 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