A Better Home of Mind

Transcript

I would like to welcome Mihai elizena his founder of Akasha and co-founder of ethereal and founder of Bitcoin magazine so he's very very innovative just come on Akasha is a new type of social networks that's his idea for the future of the Internet and I think he will tell us

much more about that in a few seconds welcome so Hollow and gutentag Heidelberg I'm very excited to be here and deeply honored this is in my opinion truly one of those standing on the shoulders of giants scenarios and I hope to showcase some of the applications the work of some of the Heidelberg laureates in the field of mathematics and computer science have enabled and I'd just like to make clear from the beginning that this is not going to be a presentation about cryptocurrency I think Demelza is from the University of Liechtenstein

made a great job at covering that angle this is going to be more about the deeper implications and applications of this technology and if you look at the bigger picture we are now approaching the first decade since blockchain technology so to say has entered our reality and I think the laureates in in this audience or those that will watch online have contributed greatly and today it's almost as these applications and the stuff that we are able to build on top of their work is a ripple through time of some of the work that they have done decades ago like for example elliptic curve cryptography so my goal today here is to share some of our like

our story as a kashaf at the foundation our research areas which I hope will be interesting for some of you and also I invite you to collaborate this is not by no means a charted territory on the contrary so this is gonna be another self-discovery and for everyone like the on this note I don't think there is such a thing as a blotch inexpert yet because it's too early and that being said one of the team that made us want to start on this road is that we have we find ourselves today in this society and Dextre touched a bit about the implications there were the deeper

implications in our daily lives where we have outsourced our privacy our freedom of expression and collective memory as a species to a handful of corporations and I'm talking about planetary scale here and this would be an overly simplified view of the interactions we have on a daily base you know you post something on Facebook you read an email but at all times you are going through at least one entity in most cases we are talking about tens or even hundreds of third parties that access and monetize in all kinds of way your data and to kind of you know showcase a dark side of this like what happens when you change that data when you post that message when you

add that reaction a Facebook and this is not very well known and it surprised me that actually has a pattern that can predict when you'll die so this also kind of makes you wonder like Google and all these big corporations where where this is going as an information society and what it means for for our future and the children that will follow on that you know today are born with smartphones in their hands so to say and how will their future look like especially when you add AI to the picture and that being said Akasha is a nonprofit born at the intersection of blockchain and collective intelligence and I'll touch about on the collective intelligence a bit later and we seek to

advance the design and application of technologies for sustainable systems at city country and planetary scale so it's all about localizing and trying to find the solution in the right context but also heavy having it interoperable at the global scale and we're doing this because we want to see a world where human rights are default rather than features and I'm talking about things like freedom of speech and privacy a world where people own their own line lives and identities so not like a service that grants you access to the service and which can be revoked at any time and the world where you're you know human relations so to say your social

graph is not owned by a corporation which again like your friends that you're talking with and you're exchanging information at any point if Facebook or whatever social network you are using that is centralized can determine if you are still able to contact your friends she's not okay right kinda makes you wonder what kind of world will leave to the next generation and I hope with this work and the work that will continue to go on in this space we believe a better world you know what to be proud of like yes I remember Facebook maybe ten years from now and to give you a bit of a context my story in this space began in 2011 when I discovered Bitcoin and it was one of those moments like is this real and

when I was trying to understand the technology and if this is a really innovation or you know scam I I spotted the need for a coherent source of information both for people that are trying to learn about it and also for journalists that were trying to find someone to talk with like what is this thing how does it how does it work and a few weeks later after I you know made an impression I okay this is real I got in touch with Vitaly put her in and then that was kind of the early days of Bitcoin magazine and my story continues in 2012 where I served as editor-in-chief for the magazine and in this time I think this was a you know an

invaluable opportunity to immerse ourselves in this space and to see it from inside out not from outside in and that gave us the opportunity to meet interesting people share interest ideas and see many projects rise and fall in this period of time it also kind of gave us an idea of what this technology can do what it cannot do where reality meets expectations you know it's not gonna solve all our problems but maybe it can help us all some at least and this is how in 2013 the idea behind the theorem started to take shape in Vitalis mind and I joined him in in this project as a co-founder and it's worth mentioning that aetherium as a as a concept came in an era where

most of the block chains were single-use case so if you take Bitcoin as the first example of this the use case of that blockchain is to be decentralized digital currency right and in in this case we proposed the idea of a general-purpose blockchain that would how to say liberate and empower developers to co-create on top of a shared infrastructure this kind of points back to Internet and how you have all these various devices from phones to laptops able to communicate with each other in the same way if you'd have a blockchain ecosystem where everything is fragmented it will be harder to inter communicate between them right so that's like the synergy kind of core value

proposition of the project in 2014 I landed in Switzerland together with a group of people where we set the base for a team Switzerland it was a search in the early days we tried to find the right jurisdiction for obvious reasons it's still gray area and most but luckily the content of truck was open-minded enough and it was very welcoming and that gave us a jurisdiction that we could call home so to say and fast forwarding a couple of months in and I suppose you know the slide that Malthus showed with the mm I see rows and coins like we I'm sorry we kind of started this it wasn't called a

nice you're back in the day but we were trying to find a way in which we can raise resources to pay developers and people that would help us to actually make the dream a reality so to say and this is how in 42 days aetherium and if you this was still an ongoing what's on number one but etherium actually set a world record eighteen point approximately eighty eighteen point five million dollars raised through a peer-to-peer currency Bitcoin in this case to build the next wave of a digital infrastructure so it's almost like a cypherpunk inception movie where it's like that digital economy is building itself out and also to frame this this was happening in a period of time where

we had this vibrant community of people self-organizing around the world so this was not top-down plan and just sharing knowledge among each other the social learning was a very important part of this in 10,000 member in 2014 and now going to 2015 in July 30 we had ATM blockchain Genesis which you know moved it theorem as a project from the dreamland to a platform where other people can build their dreams and also like to make a connection with the first presentation like if we look now like fast forward in three years like this is the top ten of the highest crowdfunded projects and you see like from eighteen point five millions like the numbers

jumped like four billions or hundreds of millions but like what's interesting and what I'd like to attract your attention is that seven out of ten are done on ETV so if this is one of the lowest hanging fruits of this technology but it enabled people to raise funds for four projects in a new way bypassing the need to go to essentially you know a VC or other set up that involves a third party and in this case like in the three years that have passed we have now surpassed 1 million people self-organizing around the world so 1 million 150 thousand people around the world like epic right

100x and going back to 2015 this was when akhirin was launched I also told it a leak and the rest that I was always excited about the things that can be built with this thing so I never saw like the launch of the blockchain as a finish line more like a starting point and this is when Akasha is an apple as a decentralized social network started to take shape and in 2016 we launched the alpha version which this is a preview of what it was able to do basically what makes this application different from other applications is that it was running completely decentralized so basically if someone would install this application on their computer in the background they would

install an aetherium node and an IP FS node and ipfs being the interplanetary file system which acts as a complementary piece of the puzzle to store the information and the blockchain being as more of an index and as you see since we are using botching for identities and people usernames every identity is also a wallet so this opens a very intriguing ways for people to not exchange only status messages and post but also wealth in their social network so this adds another dimension to social crowdfunding of sorts and then going to 2017 we unveiled our beta which is an iteration we learned like we looked at the Alpha okay we can do better but the purpose of the Alpha was to prove that this idea can actually work to have

something that does not rely on servers and the iteration was going more towards parallel experience and in this particular video we also explored the idea of having a multi-layered curation so it's not like you have just a black and white approach like you have the thumbs-up thumbs-down but you have actually a spectrum of opinions that build when you overlaid some sort of emergent picture of our reality and in the meantime you know in this time while we were focused on our own thing the ecosystem around the theorem and people building various things and not only theorem the blockchain ecosystem as a whole has underwent like like a sort of Cambrian explosion of things and if we

zoom in hopefully let's see if this is visible we have a bunch of projects in all sorts of areas from exchanges and trading you know financial services graph tech wallets and if we move down we have prediction markets utilities insurance and healthcare legal so as you can see many many many areas and somewhere here on the right we also have we have also Akasha as a social network on this area right but while we while we saw this unfolding so it was like a coevolution of sorts on the platform on Twitch which we were building was also evolving as we were moving forward and we understood

the need of shifting our understanding of what we are doing taking again a couple of steps back looking at what we actually want to achieve and this made us understand that we need to move beyond like thinking of the application as a social networking app and rather putting it into an ecosystem view because this was already kind of a network of sorts but what was lacking was this inter connective tissue that will leverage the synergy of this ecosystem so now even if these applications and all these projects could talk to each other they're not very good at doing so in this concept Akasha kind of starts to begin morphing into like this emergent framework rather

than something overlaid on top and moving on something that you know to summarize this to some extent the shift from the current paradigm to the next one is this Reedy centralization so the early ideas of the internet and so on all revolves around having no central point of failure but the hyper centralization we saw manifesting you know Facebook billions of people Google billions of people in half a planet have led to this like super how to call it like an information dead star of source right that is not necessarily contributing back to society and if you have that pyramid of data information knowledge wisdom like our society as a

whole even if it's an information based society has a very little knowledge and arguably less wisdom right because all that data that we are producing all that information that we are producing is not siloed captured and monetize analyzed by these corporations and that the knowledge or reason that is derived from that is not sorry to the betterment of humanity rather the betterment of the algorithm serving ads and in this paradigm you see the user in the decentralized paradigm the user as being in the control of their flows and this involves the social networks which can be you know a social network at work a social network at home a social network with your friends and

then you have your own things in the house in this context the Internet of Things and the user through this identity and security layer which could be framed as a blockchain infrastructure but you know it's not like the user has to understand blockchain in order to use it just like you don't need to understand electricity in order to turn on the light you just press something about and turn on turn off and then this feedback again can happen locally on the user's device so is there's no need for that huge data center somewhere to collect that we've moved past that stage we all basically have super computers in our pockets and to kind of give you an idea of where we're going and if there might be some overlap between our interest our research centers around three main

pillars like what who and how so when I say who it refers to who are you why are you delimited by your physicality as you know I am this trillion of cells just standing here and giving this talk am i at rate or is it my identity is limited to the passport my government gives me a same with a username that you have on a social network same with a cryptographic identity which can be represented by a key pair but you know you have hundreds of projects that operate in this field there are hundreds of initiatives that kind of search to break down and this challenge from this perspective but something to note here that this is a binary universe where you either have it

or you don't you're either in or you're out right but that's not really how the world works in reality we are more like this fluid multi-dimensional beings it's not like you can be summed up to just one trait or to one passport or to one driving license right or to one username it's more like we have this separate and sometimes sometimes only overlapping circles of friends reputation and knowledge that we can build on top of and this is the area where we focus and this is an area that's not too how to say too popular hopefully this will change in the future it's also a more complex to solve but you know what's the

point of researching something if it's not challenging and when we touch on the what you know and as you can see the presentation it does not focus very much on the technology but rather the implications and where humans and technology kind of come together and in this case how many of you are familiar with da OS can I see a show of hands okay mom not bad I've seen a few hands so basically a decentralized autonomous tributed autonomous organization is a new form of organizing for people right so if we look back a couple of hundred years ago we had the corporation as a way or a legal structure around which

people individuals could come together towards some shared goal right so in that case it could be I know a mining company which has the goal of you know extracting coal from the mine a petrol and so on but in this case you know you also have the system which has a whole if you look at the Constitution the laws and all this stuff can be seen as a sort of protocol at societal level in this jurisdiction so this is the accepted social stuff this is what's not accepted and we operate within that so it's like the green light we can go the red light no you stop so in the same way you can define this kind of rules that help us organize and coordinate it with each other and just that instead of using you know papers and complicated laws and and

so on you have this ability of creating an organization where you define these laws in a transparent manner using smart contracts by the way how many of you are familiar with smart contracts can I see a show of hands okay that's better so the smart contracts are like the building block on top of et reom which can be anything mathematically defined as a set of condition so it's like an if this then the kind of scenario but the main purpose here is that this organizational form that we come up with as a society a couple of hundred years ago we're all relying on one central point a president a CEO you know a general manager but in this scenario where everyone has connectivity everyone

has an access to you know to being connected with the whole group it's not so much a problem of coordination and getting people together which was a problem a couple of hundred years ago but not so much today so the stakeholders the participants in this group can all signal like where do you want to go similar to how you have the Flamingo birds you know like singling signaling with their heads and depending on where the most point that's where they go so in a similar fashion which might seem like chaotic you can have some sort of order emerge and that's the decentralized part and now coming back to you know the setup of this event this might seem familiar to some this is

a schematic from the mathematical theory of communication also known as the Shannon Weaver model which treats the consent the communication right a theory of communication and this it's fantastic this is like one of the building blocks that enabled us to build many things from like building satellites understanding black holes and you know most of the internet and applications we used today are still built on top of this and this works great because a computer's message so when you have messages signals that travel to this framework this applies very well however when you add people like humans into the picture it's almost like we're missing a

piece of the puzzle and this is a where conversation theory comes into play and again I'd like to point out that this is like decade's old research that was done by Gordon Paz and nowadays is continued by Paul pangoro through his work and in this scenario you have a set up where the participants that use the signalling the messaging framework can coordinate and come together to achieve a common goal and this is formalize this is like one of the applications of cybernetics in the context of how humans and machines can you know leverage their overlap to increase their potential and in in this

context like putting back the blockchain you know this is decades old this is all fun and so on but if you put back in the blockchain context now you have this idea of a conversational Dao so on one side you have the transactions and people being able to signal but you don't necessarily have the interface that would enable these participants to easily and efficiently come together and towards a common goal and this is quite exciting and this is a quote from Paul pangoro that says well creation has shifted from prior knowledge like patents IP and you know the classic to the ability to gain new knowledge in action because also the world around us

is like constantly shifting and accelerating in this change right it's a lot more fast than it was a couple of hundred years ago when we had this form of organization that might have been you know okay but these days I think we are reaching the limits of what this form of organization can do at the planetary and you know country or local scale and also something to note that this is taken from economy of insights conversations as transactions you know so again putting into the context of of blockchain and to kind of wrap this up and touch also on what Dexter was talking about when it comes to data as in something that can be applied also on

the medical side there is a question here is it something you own some people might say that but if you look at it as something you own you get to like some weird ethical debates as in you know you either own this jacket or you don't I have it or you do but not the both of us and I think in the in the next iteration of what this web kind of infrastructure opens we have to go beyond that and we got we have to go towards an era where our understanding of what the data is is not something we own but something we actually are because from those patterns going back

to what Facebook and you know like predicting when you can die that's actually us it's almost like a doppelganger of ourselves in a digital form and this is why again privacy and encryption and this platform should you know excite people because it can empower them and again we take control over this whole infrastructure that was developed around us while we were sleeping or scrolling to the feed and to wrap it up how we can do that self sovereign technologies are defined as something but you know there are many many definitions but one of them is that they serve you and no one else and in the context where we explored how these

entities are in the middle and exploiting basically this human desire of connecting with another because we're social humans social animals and then you have like the social network as the killer application of the Internet no surprise there right we also can create this infrastructure where that desire of each other connecting with another is done on a peer-to-peer basis like it was done hundreds of years ago like it was done thousands of years ago before we had this infrastructure developed that just captured and monetized our relations and our interactions with each other so to put it in you know in a nutshell the collaboration with Paul

pangoro for us was a was an example how transdisciplinarity can help us and how sometimes old research you know in the decades-old research can be applied in the new context and in a way in a you know in a world where things can be everything is a remix and sometimes old ideas in a new context can come up with new solutions we think it's it's the same now and I think we live in an age where the gap between when math is being invented and when it is being used is collapsed so you see we have these decades old lag and in research I for example elliptic

curve cryptography which has at the heart of many blockchain projects and it's almost like we see this ripple through time right there was this smart guys coming putting down equations and now decades later there are these cypher punks you know just stumbling upon something yes that that can work and then you just combine it in a way to make a meaningful application and I think new and all mathematics and computer science can truly make a difference in years rather than decades if we come together and we explore the the interest the shared interest and shared goals we have as you know a group of a community just appreciating the

intellectual challenge and the curiosity in finding new solutions to sometimes all problems and the idea here is that we invite everyone that is interested in exploring this or has some inclination towards blockchain as a you know a tangible application in our real world to get in touch and basically to turn that beautiful mathematics into a meaningful application that can truly make a difference for people around the world thank you [Applause] [Music]