Permissionless systems support collaboration and drive innovations that benefit everyone. Progress is lumpy. Breakthroughs emerge unexpectedly, across many environments and contexts. By closing doors to stop others from taking part, we only limit our own horizons. We stand in a world today that is on the cusp of a great revolution. The current industrial revolution is the information revolution. But false starts, mistakes and centralisation of power have led us to a potentially dystopian world - somewhere between The Truman Show and The Matrix. However, these are only false starts, the failure to recognise what we are actually building – not a network of computers and hardware, but a network of information.
The solution to the problems of today is not to "fix" the path we are on but to get on the right path. Start by asking what the far future looks like. Then paint a clear picture of how we get there. It is not building from here to there; instead we build from there to here. This talk will concentrate on the goals and hopefully encourage the audience to consider that path.
1 / 2 Use ← → to navigate
Auto-generated transcript - may contain errors.
Tap a timestamp to jump the video.
Thanks very much. Can you hear me okay with us? We'll probably get to that title, but I I like to start by just having a look at things from a side view or look at things backwards. There's some we think it's really bad, actually quite good.
And also look at first principles, I'll build up to this story eventually. But, you know, we used to do things like shove children up chimneys, put mercury in their face, radium in tights. Sometimes we do things that are really pretty bad and keep doing them.
And if you try to change people or people's opinions, they'll hold on to, I love mercury in my face. My child looks fantastic covered in coal. So there's this change thing that happens, which is quite difficult for people. Change is very difficult for engineers as well for some reason.
And when you look at where we're going, we're doing all this climate stuff, were killing things and we're now realizing maybe we shouldn't kill everything. The world continually forces us to change. Evolution forces us to change. Evolution does another thing though which is interesting.
It seems to it's it's sometimes not always survival of the fittest, it's survival of the people who are smartest, the ones who get the most by doing least. And that's that's I think where we've went with the Internet. So when the Internet started, when you think about it, it was data, it was websites, and maybe some news sites and stuff.
And that was fine. You just beat a website up. You didn't care if somebody really copied it too much. Of course, the corporate folk involved did their usual stuff. But we started this internet and we're sharing data, putting stuff on servers. Then things progressed, we started thinking, well, I've got all this private data.
I could put private data somewhere, but I have to back it up and I use tapes and all the rest and then Google and Dropbox and folk came about and said don't worry about a thing, just give us all your secret information, give us your private stuff, we'll not look at it or anything and keep it for you.
And we don't care if we're the world you're from. So private information became a little bit weird because we weren't holding our own private information anymore and these people charged us money sometimes to do that. And the website information which was public, more kind of like Facebook if you like, they were saying put your stuff here, it's your public chat to your friends, can speak to the world, Twitter, all the rest of it.
And that that seemed okay as well. It's like, wow, it's all public information until the technology starts to be able to graph that information and know everything about you. So you'd have on one hand the Googles, or I'm not mentioning names, but Google, spying on your data and reading all your emails and altering your search results to give the version of reality that they believed that you wanted.
Then you get Facebook and again, not mentioning names, but definitely Facebook, who would take this graph information and rather than giving you the search results that you thought you wanted, they would give you a different view of the world which leads to different things happening, know, like people getting into power, political parties, know, if you think fascism is good, you've got all this fascist stuff.
You have to actually have a glossary to see what all the isms are now. So the laziness of humans was what's caused us to be here rather than figuring out how do we handle this ability for everybody to have their own information, all be connected to this thing called the Internet, and just share information between themselves.
And that's what we should have done all those years ago. We should have said, how do we do that? If you you took someone out of oh, that's going down. Jesus. Thank God. If you took someone out of college and said, you're an engineer.
This is a computer. Here's some wires and routers and stuff, and they're all connected together. Build a system to share information. The last thing they would do would say, well I'll take another computer and have all of them just connect to my computer and I'll give them access, maybe not give them access.
So the server based infrastructure is pure laziness. It happened because human greed, if you like, looking for something for nothing. We thought these guys were doing us a favor by holding our data, holding our secrets, feeding us information, giving us a different view of the world.
We thought that was good just like we thought fracking was good. You know, various other things I shouldn't say, but these are these are things that we we just let happen because it's this something for nothing mentality. And, again, going back to First Principles, you do go back to First Principles, go back to this student coming out of college, let's get the information about how computers work and how networks work and not tell them about servers.
They could build a phenomenal system where all the computers just talk to each other and all the data is shared between those computers. Same with an alien coming down from outer space. I think it's something I've said before, like, would look at us as a species and think, they're very good.
They're very advanced. They're shooting rockets up into space, and they're doing all sorts of in fact, there's a car just been shooting past me. So they would be actually quite impressed by us in our Tesla Mars bound motor. But then they would look a bit closer and say, hang on a second, they've just wiped out forty percent of the bird species in the last thirty years have just, you know, burned down as a rainforest.
Good God. They've given away all of their thoughts, all of their information to a third party that they don't know, who's manipulating them. So there's a planet of people at the moment that are somewhere between, I don't know, The Truman Show and The Matrix.
And we're all wondering about quite happily thinking, I'll just Google somebody else, I'll Facebook this, my God, how did we get that guy as president and how are we doing this? All these political things. So now we get to the how would you do it?
How would you do it? If there wasn't Google existing and if there wasn't Facebook existing and there wasn't Twitter and there wasn't Dropbox and there wasn't how would you actually do it? And if you look at servers, even NSA and GCHQ, which are apparently the smartest security people, they get hacked.
Their servers get hacked. Every server gets hacked. Every company's server gets hacked. People who say they can't be hacked get hacked. The government, DVLA, NHS, they all do, why do they get hacked? How could you stop a server getting hacked? How could you have a network that's immune to hacks like that?
Well, have a network with no servers. If you know servers, you've got no servers getting hacked. So what about the other thing that happens is quite bad at passwords. Passwords are getting stolen all the time, all of our credentials, of our data, all of our ID, so that we can be you can have all this ID to folk you kid on it for me if you wanted to.
So how do you get away from that? How can you stop that? And that really is where we start saying, well, we'll put the server in a nuclear shelter. We'll put loads of concrete around it, we'll have intrusion detection systems and VPN access, we'll have all sorts of fingerprint stuff going on, and it still gets hacked.
The passwords are on the network. When the passwords are on the network, the passwords are going to get stolen. When the servers are on the network, servers are going to get hacked. So that student coming out of uni or this alien that comes down and gets over the fact that we're destroying the place So hang on a second.
All your computers are already connected together. What's important to you with these computers? Does it need to sit in a nuclear shelter? Does it need to be fireproof? Does it need to have all this stuff on it? What is it that's important to you?
And this is the first principle thing. You know, if you want white face, stop breathing so much, don't put mercury on it. But if you're if you look at what what is it that computers are for? It's just information. It's data. Data is an interesting thing.
Data is like the do you know the story of the thought, if I've got an apple, give it to you. You've got an apple. If I've got a thought and I give it to you, we've both got the thought. That's what data is.
So you've got this public data. So we don't really want that public data to change. We don't mind if we'll copy it all over the place because it's public for trying to talk about it. Having a distributed system where there's multiple copies of that data would make absolute sense.
But private data, what about private information? Private information is like your thoughts and all the rest of it, and this is another thing we need to look out for. Folk can forget things and need to use Google remember folks' telephone numbers and stuff.
That happened a long time ago, to to just remember things folk are using. So Google's already taken the job of part of our brain. That's just that is gonna get much worse. But so what do you do with your data if you don't want folk reading it?
Well, you don't try and hide it and lock it and put in a USB stick and shove it in a safe and sit on top of the safe. We're in a k forty seven. You just encrypt it. Nothing to do with hardware. Nothing to do with hardware whatsoever.
The focus that we've got on fixing the hardware is completely mental. Who cares about hardware? And in that piece of data, it has its ones and zeros. It weighs nothing. You can do a weird thing where you can measure it like the weight of a one or a zero on a magnetic disk and not so much SSD. But anyway, data is just data. That's all it is.
It's information. It's thought. Computers are just this metal thing. That's all that they are. We don't need to be secure in those things. They're just bits of metal. And we should never own a computer and think, that's my computer, that's where all my stuff is, and I can only get my stuff in this computer.
Because as we said, everybody's computer's already connected. So what we do in what made safe, there's other people trying to do the same thing as well, in the SAFE network is we say, let's by default encrypt all the data. Just by default. So assume everyone's encrypted.
So, yeah, folk can get as many copies of it as they want. That's good encryption. You can give it to your worst enemy, it's not a problem. Encrypted data to start with. Forget about the hardware. Security. Encrypted data. Once you've encrypted that data, can make some of it public.
It just decrypts and shows it to be make copies of that data on multiple computers. Have each computer watching the computer beside them. If it goes off, the data gets moved somewhere else. And don't have passwords. And how does that work? So and it's quite if you say to an engineer, you've got this network here and you need to log in to it, like people will say to us, oh, there appear to be a network.
Know, whatever they were called, Nutella and all these kind of guys. There appear to be a network. It's this thing that you're doing. We actually I've got a whole bunch of patents because we had to take investment, but we actually hold a patent for the ability to log in to peer to peer network.
Do you know what? Nobody ever tried to create a peer to peer network you could log in to and get your private data. Insane. Nobody ever tried it. So that's what we had to do, create that login. So what that means is, and that's another very interesting thing, you put in two passwords.
The first password gets a unique location in the network you're going to store something. The second one encrypts a blob of data which is your keys. It's all your it's all the stuff you need for your account and that's stored in it. So what's not stored in the network is passwords because passwords are yours.
It's in your head, between your head and your fingers and your keyboard. That's it. And that's quite interesting. There's two things about that that's quite interesting. You could choose biometrics because nothing's been there's no password being transmitted. If you don't transmit it, it's pretty hard to nick it.
That's a pretty major thing that you've got to be careful of. If you're transmitting biometric fingerprint data and some somebody hacks the database or hacks the transmission, you need to start whipping off your thumb and replacing it, which is rubbish. And it's rubbish because you shouldn't be sending it in the first place.
So have a have a network where everything's every computer's connected. They're all measuring each other. They're all whole replicated encrypted data, you log in. And you get your private data, and you can upload websites. Can like, a safe network. Can do everything you can do on the Internet, plus an awful lot more.
You buy a lot more cause you get access to everybody's data that wants to give you access to it. And with homomorphic encryption, you can do some pretty amazing things. But the other interesting thing about that is that takes the takes the middleman out.
That takes out your Googles, your Facebooks, and your So it allows anybody so the network has infrastructure. Any developer in his bedroom in Trune or Ghana, which is quite similar places, can just build the next Dropbox or build the next Facebook or build the next and they don't need to go and get oodles of cash from a venture capitalist and buy a server stuff or rent it from Amazon.
That's a good thing. It's a level playing field then. The other thing is when you make an account with such a decentralized network, nobody knows you did it. It's between you and the network. Nobody else, if there's somebody else involved that's not secure, it's between you and the network.
That means that is that fifty minutes to go? Right, that's good. So that means that no company knows that you're using that. So you're completely anonymous until you create an ID that you don't want to be anonymous. So you're completely anonymous. So from a marketing perspective, it's really quite scary because it's how many users, I don't know how many users, who are they? Have no idea.
And the a one b, I don't know what that means, they're just people that are doing stuff. So marketing turns it back to marketing. And it's like the Mars Bars for sale sign outside the shop, and we get away from drilling down and identifying people and pigeonholing them.
So if you look at things from this angle that I look at them from, where are we just now? We're in a really destructive place. We're in a very destructive place. We all know it's a destructive place. Everybody knows that these big companies are doing terrible things.
We've got the answer, we've already got the answer, all of our computers are already connected, we just need to run a little bit of software on them. But importantly, as engineers and people in this industry, we all need to look at it different.
We all need to look and say, don't need the server, you don't need the intermediary, you don't need the third party. And if you think you do, take a look at Bitcoin. Bitcoin has been great so far. I hope it continues to be, but regulators may come in and try and do stuff with it.
But it showed that you can have a peer to peer network if you get incentivization. Incentivization of Bitcoin is money, blockchain, when it comes to money transactions, fantastic. It's secured by greed. The more greedy people that want to get Bitcoin, the more secure it gets because hashing power goes up.
So Bitcoin's a great example of a peer to peer network. And what does that Bitcoin thing do? It means I could send money just now to somebody on the other side of the world. Nobody else needs to really know. It's a pseudo anonymous thingy.
But but you're taking out the banking system there. You're taking out all the third party people in between you and your money, which is quite interesting. Skype did something similar. Skype's incentivization the Skype network was peer to peer, and that worked before Microsoft.
It did not peer to peer and broke it. And the incentivization model there was people wanted free phone calls. So people run computers and they'll run these peer to peer systems if there's something in it for them. So you go back to the to the original thing of greed, the human greed.
We we get greedy the wrong way. We get greedy wanting other people to look after us, believing that they would look after us. What we need to do is be greedy with looking after ourselves in running these sort of peer to peer network.
It's it's definitely the future. With AI coming along, it's actually going to get even more interesting. The core, core, core message here is think about what we're doing with technology. It's all about data. It's about nothing else. All the other stuff is just junk. It's all about data.
And if you secure the data, you worry much less about the hardware. I don't know what to do with the nuclear shelters. We'll probably put Airbnbs in them or something, but we don't need them for servers, that's for sure. So that's really the gist of this very short talk.
I hope some of it made sense, but we've got ten minutes for questions. If anybody has got questions, I think there's some controversial points that maybe you want to or maybe there isn't. I think I read somewhere that you were working with Silicon Valley on the production team. Is that really true?
We were maybe about that because I think that would probably be interesting for you. Yeah. We were we advised them the pipe paper network that they were going on about in series four. It was our network design that they were using. So we took over to Hollywood, which was quite interesting.
So that was a particularly interesting thing, that shows you even the chap there that was a producer of that now goes to decentralised web conferences, along with people like we were at the Internet Archive recently, and that was also a decentralised web. So the movement towards decentralisation or towards us looking after ourselves automatically and securely and more efficiently than abdicating responsibility or whatever to the large companies is quite significant.
It's very significant in America, but in the USA anyway, roundabout, Silicon Valley. So the fact it gets into those type of shows that there's kind of networking and apparently we showed up in some Disney film about some Ralph wrecking some intimate. There's been a few things.
For us as a company, it's interesting because we were over in America twenty fourteen. Was doing quite a bit of stuff there in the Washington Post, and all these different people were, like, interviewing us and were, you know, doing all this stuff, then you come back to Scotland and you're, you know, jumping a bus with everybody.
It's great, it's a great leveler, but it would be a shame if all of the innovation stayed in Silicon Valley and it didn't come out of Silicon Valley. And that's the thing that's, I think, for Scotland, it's incredibly important we look at this properly.
I've said to few people as well, f equals ma and v equals ir both derive from a universal flux equation. We were the best mechanical engineers in the world. We should be the best electronic engineers and computer scientists in the world. It's the same thinking. It's the exact same way of thinking.
If you take a big hydraulic thing or a big pneumatic thing with, you know, valves on it. You've got AND gates, like, and OR gates and things in parallel OR gates and things in series and AND gates. We've been doing stuff like that for years better than any other country in the world.
So the fact that we lost some engineering through mechanic I started some mechanical engineer. We lost some engineering through mechanical engineering, and then when those companies dried up, we all did that. I don't know, was a particularly Scottish thing of, oh, we're too stupid for computers.
And we really should redress that balance because the psyche of the culture and whatnot of Scotland for many, many, many years has been engineering excellence. And all we're talking about here with computers is just it's the same as a pneumatic or hydraulic system.
It's just and and or stuff if you take it to its basic level. So this country should be able to shine. One of the reasons that we can't is, at the moment, we've got a server infrastructure. We need to go to Amazon and buy a bazillion servers.
If if you build an application which gets very popular, it'll just crash, and you won't fund it in Scotland, unfortunately. So if we can get to a place where there's a level playing field, like what we're discussing here in peer to peer networking is a classic way for people from poor, poor, poor countries or from countries where funding and financing can be quite difficult.
It's a classic way to get to get global domination. And I think Scotland should have global domination. Cheers. Thanks very much. One of the primary counter arguments to widely accessible encryption for individuals is that governments, for example, will no longer have access to your personal information.
So we can't tell who's using it. How do you how do you control then searches for the bad guys, terrorists, etcetera? So what what's the argument to make mainstream extremely high levels of encryption for personal data? I think it's a really interesting point.
Encryption used properly is a very powerful thing, and the first thing that people think is, Oh, encryption, bad guy. And I know you're not saying that, but that's what people think. But it's like saying, who's got their curtains closed? They must be bad.
Encryption is a very powerful tool, and used correctly, the sort of systems that we are talking about. If you've got, like, homomorphic encryption, which is like a blob where you can ask it things, but it won't reveal anything else, or ZK SNARKS, which is a really interesting technology based on zero knowledge proofs, you can have things where different government departments could recognise an identity, like you've got a driving licence, you're over a certain age, you're under a certain age, those kind of things can be done with encryption where you
don't really care if somebody goes and steals that. But just now, if you get like the NHS, TVLC, all these, they're just getting hacked left right in the centre when they're not selling the stuff, they're getting it stolen from them. Know, and if you if you did those systems properly, you would have a centralised identity which could be your own public key or something like that from a cryptography perspective where you could prove stuff a bit like a passport.
In terms of the bad guys using it, I think that's where, again, some people think, oh, you know, a bad person could use this and you wouldn't be able to. The cryptography has been about for thirty odd years, so you don't get Al Kide Hickorn onto Facebook going, do you know what, we'll have a Rami here and, you know, everybody bring your bag.
It doesn't happen. They're already using really good encryption because they'll take the effort to get that encryption working, and they do satellite phones and various things. I think they found out not to use WhatsApp though. But bad guys already can use these tools.
So what what we are proposing is that we give these tools to every single person that and and make it automatic. Just that your your data is the most vital thing. And a bit like, you know, you build cars and good people drive them and bad people drive them.
The answer for the small percentage of bad people isn't to stop cars. Although, I would love to stop cars. But any really good innovation in the history, I think, of mankind is able to be used for evil. And when we when we look and when you look at the the Internet just now, I think what you see is potentially evil where I think governments should be terrified at the moment.
But that's one of the things as well we spoke about. If you take all the servers out of the network, you've lost something else which could be quite important. Cyber warfare doesn't exist anymore. There's no servers to go in and and attack. So they it's a bit like saying earlier on, love radon and my tights, know, it makes my legs look nice and white.
People potentially can argue for those things for a little bit until they realise it's actually wrong. Just like we look for protection in all other areas of our life, you know, cars that don't like burst into flames and planes that don't crash, we really should be wanting data that doesn't get stolen or corrupted or whatever.
And realize, yeah, that other people will everybody will use that good, bad and indifferent people will use it. But we should relish that, we should absolutely relish it. You know, it wasn't for the bad guys, we wouldn't have such great video stuff on the internet.
That's where a lot of this technology comes from bad places. But if you use it's the same when Bitcoin came out at first. Was sort of adopted for stuff that people were seeing. But now folks are starting to say, oh, hang on a second.
This is actually a really valuable tool. Not maybe Bitcoin per se, but that sort of electronic cash. So I think initially initially things can be seen as being used for evil, but I would I would say that it probably shows you're on the right trajectory, and and it's good to have everybody talking about it.
Thanks. I suppose, just following on from that, how do you make it accessible? I'm just thinking we develop a product for people who aren't very good at using computers and we constantly talk about easy enough, secure enough. So how about older people? How about people without high levels of education?
That's critical. That's been the failing of if you look at the kind of cryptocurrency market just now, that's a complete failing of Bitcoin and all of those projects. That even if you know IT very well, you'll still be sweating blood transferring coins and stuff.
It's the UX is horrendous. So this this new version of the Internet that we're we're looking to release is the UX is is vital. People shouldn't realize that you're using something that's more secure than they they currently are. They should just think it's easier, a bit like the transition from desktop apps where you're downloading and doing all that stuff to maybe mobile where you click and you're using it quite quickly.
I think the UX is absolutely critical. And it's just a typical thing. Look, we'll go and we'll talk about things, the technology's phenomenal and it's stunning what it does, but it's absolutely of no use to people. Like, you really want engineers to understand and to be able to say to their mom or their grandfather, oh, this is really good.
It's very secure and all the rest of it. But you want the person using it to just have a really good experience in that. And also to be that experience means being able to uninstall it and no trace being left on their computer as well.
I think that's that's very important. Oh, no. Is it okay? I think that's perfect for timing. Unless there's any last minute. Perfect. Thanks very much.
