He who controls the past controls the future, warned George Orwell. This dictum is particularly true in the digital world, where history can be deleted very easily, and without anyone noticing.
The underlying technology of Bitcoin creates "proof of publication" that has the ability "to defend itself and the people who use it against the full might of a superpower," Assange said. This technology has never existed before, and it has applications far beyond the economic role that Bitcoin can play.
Transcript
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tell me about the benefits that come with the online banking with the virtualization the digitalization of the social function of banking if you abstract away and you think what is the problem with just having one Bank in one town where it's Prett pretty obvious uh your Market size is extremely small and to put this in less uh sort of put it into more Continental uh terms the problem is uh that you don't have bargaining power so people in the town don't have bargaining power because they have to deal with that one bank and if it if it has problems then you can't really Escape those problems and it can engage in um uh rent syn rent sinking on the people who are in that town so when you have a globalized market to differing degrees which we're entering into on banking uh people are able to have greater bargaining power in relation to Banks and so this keeps the banks more honest in relation to their conduct with individuals we think of course if uh you have a globalized market and something else happens where all your Banks pull together and end up as One Bank uh then you're in a far you're in a far worse position but right now the most interesting thing happening uh is Bitcoin uh it's probably the most interesting intellectual development on the internet in The Last 5 Years can you talk about Bitcoin a bit for people it it's pH sure okay so a lot of people have heard about Bitcoin but not really understand it so you think okay it's some online currency what's the big deal there's you know you can have a PayPal account or that's kind of like an online currency or even your us card well actually all the pro all the processing occurs online isn't that really like an online currency or you can buy a gold that's kind of like an online currency but Bitcoin is different because it is a currency that cryptographically backed multi-jurisdictional uh which means that it's very hard for any one Power Group in any particular jurisdiction to start turning it into a rent seeking apparatus uh and um the the underlying technology of Bitcoin uh is cryptography on the one hand and the ability for cryptography to uh create situations that can defend them defend itself or the people who use it against even the full might of a superpower you know a full might of a superpower doesn't help you smash a mass problem a mass problem is a mass problem and it's something that is connected to the existence of intelligence in the universe or basic physics uh it's not something you can get at simply through overwhelming coercive power or lots of people and the other uh component of Bitcoin the the other underlying basic technology is proof of publication at a particular time and we have never really had that uh in so far as okay um if you look at the great Soviet encyclopedia back in 1954 and the nkvd head barrier had just gone out of favor uh with the death of Stalin and so he had a page and a half entry in an encyclopedia and it was It was decided it was time to remove that and put in an expanded entry of the bearing straight that's that body of water between Alaska and Vladivostok and uh of course to actually do that the encyclopedia maker had to write the new entry and posted out to all the libraries that had encyclopedia say tear out that page and stick this page in and that's why I'm telling you this story right now because everyone notice uh but in the digital world we can delete history extremely easily and history even without an attempt to delete it starts disappearing uh as a result of startup companies going under or particular bits of History not becoming profitable anymore and that um notion of being able to disappear history entered into Orwell's writing and you can look at what is I think his most substantive intellectual comment which is he who controls the present controls the past he controls the past controls the future it's this notion that the past as an archive as a history of our civilization as a history of development is in fact present right now in something physically contained in the library in computer servers in human beings heads that history doesn't exist except it's remnants that exist in the present and so if you can get at these remnants you can make particular inconvenient parts of History uh disappear and amplify others I'm going to stop you for a moment anyway Bitcoin in its underlying technology breaks Orwell's dictum it breaks Orwell's dictum by providing proof of publishing at a certain time and that is the intellectual underpinning of that whole system and can be used for lots and lots of other things and so that's the big expansion we're about to see in Bitcoin all derives from this basic premise that you can prove that a particular statement a particular consensus a particular contract happened at a particular time globally uh and it requires the subversion of every single jurisdiction where people are running Bitcoin to overturn that am I right in understanding that you're saying that the Bitcoin architecture has applications far beyond the economic role that Bitcoin can play and that that architecture is very strengthening to the life of information in the digital space m making it less vulnerable to the kind of Mischief you talked about in Russia or elsewhere is that what you're saying exactly exactly that underlying architecture can be used uh for Publishers for example uh so that as an example we are starting to use Bitcoin WikiLeaks uh stuffing our um cryptographic keys of stuff that we publish so we proved that we have published stuff at a particular time uh by stuffing it in Bitcoin in the blockchain and then if someone were to come and try and modify the material that we have published to take out particular parts that would be detectable an interesting thing a lot of systems can be built on that okay I I've spoken to you before whenever you come to an international agreement between companies at a particular time for example that could be documented in bitco Bitcoin and the the types of agreements even automated and so that allows you to start building what I call a full Financial stack which is the the types of like Futures and stocks and multi party Investments and so on you can start building on this because you can