Original Gangsters with a Real Vision of Money

Laden with my Vanity Fair laurels as “Hollywood’s Original Gangster Futurist” (I owe the coinage to Rapper Ice-T), I am bringing my show to London where I will keynote and fireside-chat at CoinGeek 2020.

Here I will preen and prophesize with “Satoshi” Craig Wright, the Original Gangster CoinGeek who is running the conference after launching a new release of his “Bitcoin Satoshi Version” on February 4.

BSV brilliantly solves most of the scaling problems and feature defects of the original bitcoin and confirms Satoshi’s genius.

It’s altogether a gas, this trip, laced with CO2, crypto, Starbucks caffeine, elliptical curve hashing algorithms, Four Season’s panache, Merkle Trees, Old Vine Zin, and the Tower of London outside the window of my suite.

I am preparing to explain the role of Satoshi’s blockchain invention as a “unity” addressing both sides of the two-fold crisis of the world economy: the collapse of internet security and the scandal of money.

The sure sign of a failed paradigm: the more money you spend the worse the results.

With estimated breaches of some eight million items of personal data in 2019, up from one million in 2018, the internet security paradigm is entirely broken. We spend some 20% more on internet security every year, while the hacks and breaches become more brazen and voluminous.

The result is we cannot trust anyone or anything on the net, even the servers and switches, Facebook timelines, Google searches, facial recognition, Amazon cloud services, and Border Gateway Protocol shuffles. We are putting all the sleazy slant-eyed backdoor routers from Huawei on the “entities list” along with poison gas and weapons of mass destruction (though Huawei gear is full of American chips and is based on US standards).

The Scandal of Money

We are breaking up the internet into national and corporate walled gardens. We are sicicng the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Justice Department beadles against all our leading tech companies, from Google to Amazon.

We imagine the threat to our technology is China. But it’s Washington (and Sacramento) that are suing, fining, manipulating, and probing our leading corporations into the ground.

Meanwhile, the scandal of money becomes ever more outrageous. Every three years, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) totes up the damage. In its Triennial Survey of 2016, it reported total daily foreign exchange trading (net of redundancies) at $5.1 trillion. This was some 25 times all global GDP and some 70 times all trade in goods and services.

In its 2019 survey, released in December, BIS reported that the daily level of currency trading has increased some 30% in three years, to $6.6 trillion every 24 hours. I call it the hypertrophy of finance, the fiasco of floating monies.

Out of it we don’t get more efficient and seamless international transactions.

What we get are trade wars and monetary conflicts. It’s a scandal.

Preparing for my speech on Thursday, I returned to Life After Google and its “10 Laws of the Cryptocosm.” Then I compared it to Kevin Werbach’s excellent exploration of the techno-legal complexities of blockchains. Entitled The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust, Werbach’s 2018 book reflects his consulting at the Supernova group and the Federal Communications Commission.

Summing up Werbach’s and my insights, I will distill a series of 10 key blockchain rules to remember for 2020:

Blockchain offers four key architectural benefits: decentralization, shared view of truth, collaboration across boundaries, and direct value exchange through tokens. Blockchain are organizationally decentralized but logically centralized — with one view or state. The key to decentralization: no one entity is indispensable to its functionality. A central point of control is a central point of failure. A centralized system such as Visa or Mastercard becomes more insecure the more nodes it creates (because each additional node is a potential attack vector). A decentralized blockchain system becomes more secure the more nodes it has (because each additional node adds stability to the consensus). Bet against the large firm consortia attempting to create establishment blockchain and distributed ledger technology. The larger the firm the more projects it can launch with no real commitment to their success. The internet separates the data structure (IP) from the traffic management layer (TCP). As long as the spanning (network) layer of the internet lies below the transactions and trust layer, trust will be a force for centralized control in banks and governments. Look to the blockchain as a new spanning layer for the internet, putting the trust and transactions layer below the network layer. On a blockchain, recording each individual transaction takes longer, but recording the overall ground state consensus is far faster — accomplished through a synchronized global process rather than through myriad small and separate transactions. The new architecture for the internet and the world economy, fixing the porous internet and Ponzi money, is the blockchain. The new blockchain architecture for the internet combines public key addresses and private key identities and transactions. The new architecture for world finance can accommodates entrepreneurs around the world. It is a bottoms-up structure that provides a new foundation for world commerce and personal data. Let us hope that CoinGeek 2020 achieves its goal.

But remember that Craig Wright and I are both original gangsters and each of us have a personal vision of real money. I hope we will have some illuminating exchanges and prophecies on the nature of money.

Is it a commodity? Or a measuring stick for all commodities? Is it time or is it trust? That’s a philosophical issue for CoinGeek 2020.

Regards,

George Gilder

Editor, Gilder’s Daily Prophecy