Implementing Advanced Knowledge
bits
7 .1.1 IaaC Lecture Series
Andreas Antonopoulou
IaaC Lecture Series:
Thoughts on the future of money / Andreas Antonopoulou (IaaC Lecture Series 24 March 2016; synopsis by Jordi Vivaldi)
When we speak about the notion of bit coin, it’s important to understand that we are not talking about the currency, but about a broader concept: the notion of a completely flat and decentralised network to provide trusted applications. The implementation of this notion as a currency, it is just the first step, which aims to restructure society by restructuring its institutions. In this sense, institutions have played a crucial role since its invention in the industrialisation era, when they were extremely useful to break the monopoly of kings and its aristocracy. It is important that, every 30-40 years, things that have settled are being disrupted, because as they settle, power becomes accumulated and corruption happens: Absolute power produces absolute corruption, and the biggest symbol of power is money. In a world where the banking was a big liberation, financial activities moved from the realm of kings to the realm of people, and this system was a big liberation at that time. But soon, accumulation started to happen and therefore it lost its power of freedom. The challenge of Bitcoin is to fix that: Centralised institutions produce outcomes that instead of being egalitarian are restrictive. They express nationalism, tribalism, class structure, and all those notions that make the world a smaller place. Over the last 15 years, we have seen Internet as an enormous power that aims to its decentralisation. Because actually, if we carefully look at which have been the results of banking, we realise that economic inclusion is being reduced, and this is because isolated structures of finances are raising borders in society, economy etc. We live in a global and interconnected world and yet our financial systems are separated and insular. In this sense, what Bitcoin gives us is a new manner to organise the world because it gives the power of banking to all the people. The notion of Desktop Banking means that all the power of the banks can be concentrated in your personal desktop. Imagine a world where everyone has the ability not only to execute transactions but also the power to create complex bank systems without asking any permission. Cover - OMA project, IaaC Archive. Figure 1 - How bitcoins work?, IaaC Archive. Figure 2 - How to use bitcoins?, IaaC Archive. 2
Obviously centralised systems cannot provide equal access to financial services, something that Bitcoin does. Moreover, the only thing that you need to create a new banking application is two nodes, two people. And that application with two people is as valid as any other application. When you look to internet, people think that the power of internet comes from the ability of transmitting fast information, but the real power reposes on the net neutrality. Bitcoin is the first financial network that exhibits neutrality, because it does not care about the identification of the user and about the amount of the transaction, it just checks that you have paid the light fee required to use the network resources. Nowadays, one of the main topics when you speak about Bitcoin, has to do with the notion of spam-transaction. But actually, spam-transaction is a meaningless term. When you decide what is spam or not, you are doing a top-down judgement, and in the Bitcoin realm, if the transaction has been produced is because it is carrying enough fee, and that’s all. There are no top-down controls of what is good and what is bad: if you paid the tiny fee required, your transaction is valuable and it is not spam. Starting in the 1970 s, we have seen the world using digital currencies. And this term is crucial in our discussion: if we would define the Bitcoin as a digital currency, we would be missing the point. Euro is a digital currency, US dollar is a digital currency. Less than 8% of this currencies exist in physical form, the other 92% are bits. The fundamental difference is that these bits are centralised and controlled, while Bitcoin is an open system that distributes truth without any top-down control. Actually, in the 70s our currencies became digital in order to culminate the dream to control every financial transaction of every human: everything became visible to the power structures, any transaction became surveilled and required identification to provide a limited access to banking (2500 millions of people has no access to banking today). It is really astonishing what economic exclusion means. As a member of a privilege elite, it is possible to open a bank account in 24 hours and consume in Vienna or make a transaction to Japan. The only price is to sacrify privacy and freedom. And beside that, there are some things that I cannot do, as donating for example to an activist entity as Wikileaks, which few years ago became completely out of any financial possibility. Banking transfers, paypal visa, master card‌ none of these services are operative for Wikileaks. Without any legal process and without any crime, Wikileaks became out of the financial power. On the contrary, with Bitcoin you cannot control where money is transmitted. It is not attached to identities or geographies. Surveillance is not possible, and in fact, it is going to get harder because privacy is increasing. Privacy is a very important notion, but is a term with a strong Figure 4 - Bitcoin Mine, IaaC Archive. Figure 5 - Transactions, IaaC Archive. 4
political meaning. In this sense, the difference between privacy and secrecy is crucial. Ultimately and practically, privacy is the right of all the individuals of not being surveilled, while secrecy is the power to scape of some of them in order to avoid transparency. Nowadays, every individual transaction is catalogue and distributed to suffer a deep analysis. And yet, we have no idea what governments do with money. They are completely opaque, while our transactions are completely visible. World is upside down: privacy is a human right, and secrecy is a privilege of power. We need a world with strong privacy for billions of people because it is a human right, is a corner stone. Secrecy appears when power has to face accountability, because they are under the spotlight of transparency. The difference in between the french terms “surveillance” and “sousveillance” is capital to deeply understand this point: while “surveillance” is the control from “above”, “sousveillance” is the
opposite of it, which means to pay attention and control from the bottom. In this sense, Bitcoin is one of the first steps in that direction. And moreover, Bitcoin has the capacity to extend financial services to billions of people that nowadays have no access:18% of population is 100 miles from banks, and they cannot be served. Yet, even in the remotest places in earth, there is a cellphone tower and a little solar panel. Billions of nokia models are available, being the most produced device; each one of them could be not just a bank account, but a bank. Indeed, Bitcoin is the internet of money. However, there is a fundamental question that challenges the idiosyncrasy of Bitcoin: Will become easy for professionals to hack Bitcoin? The answer is very simple: Bitcoin is an adaptable system, and therefore it evolves and becomes resistant. Something similar was happening at the start of Internet: It was said that Internet was neither secure nor scalable, and sometimes, for hours or even for days, services were not working. In this sense, the example
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of Google it is quite relevant: How many times Google went down? Has people stopped to attack it? Google can sustain it and dynamically resist. And the same counts for all the internet applications: Attacks do not stop them, because the system becomes immune as it would do our human system of defences when faces a virus. Actually, in security we have a term called “honey-pot�, which refers to a system that is designed to attract hackers. In the case of Bitcoin, there is even an award for anyone that could hack the system, but it has not happened yet. Systems as Bitcoin are resilient, and this is because Bitcoin is not just a currency, but it is a platform that is rethinking the societal system of organisations that failed us. Indeed, the XVIII century system of hierarchies do not scale up to all the world, and it needs to be replaced by neutral flat networks as Bitcoin and many others.
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IAAC BITS
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DIRECTOR:
IAAC SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE:
Manuel Gausa, IaaC Co-Founder
EDITORIAL COORDINATOR Jordi Vivaldi, IaaC bits Editorial Coordinator
EDITORIAL TEAM Manuel Gausa, IaaC Co-Founder Silvia Brandi, Communication & Publication Jordi Vivaldi, IaaC bits Editorial Coordinator
ADVISORY BOARD: Areti Markopoulou, IaaC Academic Director Tomas Diez, Fab Lab Bcn Director Mathilde Marengo, Academic Coordinator Ricardo Devesa, Advanced Theory Concepts Maite Bravo, Advanced Theory Concepts
Nader Tehrani, Architect, Director MIT School Architecture, Boston Juan Herreros, Architect, Professor ETSAM, Madrid Neil Gershenfeld, Physic, Director CBA MIT, Boston Hanif Kara, Engineer, Director AKT, London Vicente Guallart, IaaC Co-Founder Willy Muller, IaaC Co-Founder Aaron Betsky, Architect & Art Critic, Director Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati Hugh Whitehead, Engineer, Director Foster+ Partners technology, London Nikos A. Salingaros, Professor at the University of Texas, San Antonio Salvador Rueda, Ecologist, Director Agencia Ecologia Urbana, Barcelona Artur Serra, Anthropologist, Director I2CAT, Barcelona
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