In this talk, recorded at D10E in San Francisco in July 2016, Andreas discusses the architecture of power, how decentralization compares to centralization and how each scales. Architecture determines how power is concentrated and has important implications for liberty.
Transcript
[AUDIENCE] To me, what Bitcoin is doing looks like another leap forward ahead of PayPal. Examples of previous leaps we have seen... Ten years ago, PayPal allowed people to pay each other over the internet, without much regulation. If you look twenty years back, the internet has disrupted power structures by allowing free flow of information.
Control of information is one of the methods of [power]. If you look one hundred years ago, the banking system... did something similar by introducing an alternative to transfer in the physical world. But people tend to reproduce the same system where they are being screwed, again and again, no matter how advanced the instruments are.
What do you think is the root cause of this behaviour? [ANDREAS] That is a great question. I think the root cause is, humans are prone to tribalism. We make false assumptions and have cognitive biases..
that are self-destructive as a species. If you look at these periods of disruption, system [transitions] where [at first] only royalty has access... to what we now call banking, and then banking is available to the broader population, starting in the 15th and 16th century... [Then] fiat is introduced.
Then the internet and PayPal. [Now we have] Bitcoin. You may have noticed that, every time, we have a halving of power (to use a bitcoin metaphor). The [disruption] period keeps accelerating.
We are accelerating the time in which we apply a new disruptive [technology] to the previous power structure. Power is diffusing more and more. Some people look at the past and say, "Oh, it was a glorious time!" But I think the world today [is better], where the vast majority of people have more freedom than ever before. [They have] more access to resources, information, and a higher standard of living than ever before.
We are just accelerating the cycles. I am not married to the specific implementation of decentralization that Bitcoin [represents]. I am looking at decentralisation as a trend, and Bitcoin is the incarnation that is currently achieving success. If or when it stops fulfilling the needs of the people, we will do something else.