Cryptopia: Bitcoin, Blockchains and the Internet Future

CRYPTOPIA - Bitcoin, Blockchains and the Future of the Internet Transcription:

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[Music]

Finally, we have Thorsten Hoffman, the producer of the Cryptopia film. Thanks, Peter. Five years ago, I made a film about the history of money, banking, and Bitcoin. Buckle up, we said; it's gonna be a bumpy ride. And now, some of the big brains and big egos who championed cryptocurrency claim they are building a crypto utopia. Magical things will happen. It's something called blockchain technology, and it just might change your life. They really could compete with, if not even take down, the Facebooks and the Googles and the Amazons.

My name is Thorsten Hoffman, and I'm going to put some of these claims to the test. Some critics say you kind of hurt the community. What's your response to that? This innovation has enabled a lot of criminals and scammers, but basically looking at it now, you lie to us. Forget all the hype. We'll explore the true potential of this new invention, see who is already using it, making it really easy and simple for people to own a piece of a solar farm or a wind farm, and go deep into a secret bunker that holds billions in Bitcoin.

And we cannot talk too much about it because it's pretty secret. What is down there, right? If Bitcoin succeeds, it will be at least a million dollars per coin. We learn lessons from the past and meet those building the future. But there are those who want to kill it. Join with me in introducing a bill to outlaw cryptocurrency so that we nip this in the bud, control it. Next year, people are going to start seeing that we have hundreds of patents, and everything changes or change the world with it. Welcome to ground zero in the battle for the future of the internet, Web 3.0. They wanted a science fiction dream. What they actually did was build a forthcoming disaster. A lot of people were not willing to learn and were not willing to admit they were wrong. They're idiots. Stop telling me that I have no clues. That's just if you don't support free speech, you don't support Bitcoin. You're an enemy of Bitcoin. This is bigger than the internet, the Iron Age, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution. This affects the entire world.

[Music]

For years and years, I've been researching blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies, the market booms and busts, and many have asked me to explain Bitcoin to them. But I think this is why it's so difficult. Cryptocurrencies, everything you don't understand about money, combined with everything you don't understand about computers.

Okay, let's start slowly with the basics of money and its creation. The total value of all the world's money is about 120 trillion dollars. What you probably didn't know is that each new dollar is created by governments and banks as debt, which needs to be paid back by someone in the future with interest. That's why there isn't enough money in the world to repay all that debt, and there never will be. Oh, and almost all of the world's money is already digital, just entries in a ledger, usually managed by a bank. Only a small portion exists as physical currency, like cash or coins.

Think of it this way: your employer deposits a thousand dollars into your bank account. Then you pay 200 in taxes, 500 for rent, 200 for bills and shopping, and so forth. Whether you use credit cards, debit cards, PayPal, or bank transfers, they're all just pluses and minuses in different digital ledgers. That's why there's almost no need for physical money in our daily lives.

During the financial crisis in 2008, a mysterious figure called Satoshi Nakamoto published this nine-page white paper. It said, with Bitcoin's open-source software, we can create our own money without banks or governments.

[Music] This new nerd money called cryptocurrency is created and stored in computers, and before long, there was a growing fan club, mostly guys like Roger Ver. Today, he's a polarizing figure, but back then, he gave away thousands of coins to kickstart the movement, and they all called him Bitcoin Jesus. I think that for many years, he brought more people to Bitcoin than anyone else, and we will forever be grateful to him for doing that.

When I was a kid, I was reading all these science fiction books. They were talking about how the world is going to be when we have this anonymous digital cash that people can use on the internet that's not controllable by anybody. And then when Bitcoin came along, it was like, wow, the science fiction money that I've been reading about as a kid is finally here. So I got so excited about it. I heard about it about 10 in the morning, and I was planning to go to work that day, but I didn't. I stayed home the entire day reading about it, didn't leave. I stayed up all night that night reading about it, stayed up all night the next night. He went deep down that rabbit hole to the point of physical exhaustion. The hospital said, I called up a friend of mine; I said, please help me. I'm so sick. Can you bring me to the hospital? Yeah, Roger got bit bad by the Bitcoin bug because it's truly one of the most exciting inventions ever in the entire history of humankind.

But how does it work? When my friends ask me to explain, well, I often start with this analogy. Imagine a bank vault where you have a safety deposit box. Your key opens one of the boxes where you can securely store physical valuables like gold coins. In Bitcoin, there are digital keys. Think of them as very long passwords. Your private key gives you access to a wallet, which unlocks billions of unique Bitcoin addresses. Each one is a virtual safety deposit box that only you can open with your key. And there are more addresses in this virtual vault than atoms in the universe. The doors to these boxes are transparent; you can see inside them. Here's one with digital money, 0.21 bitcoins.

Sending them from one box to another is what's called a Bitcoin transaction. We'll explain that later. But for now, just remember that these digital coins can only exist inside these transparent address boxes. Can't be copied and can't ever leave the vault. And this vault is owned by no single entity. You don't need permission from a government, a bank, or a corporation to use it.

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For most early adopters of Bitcoin, it was all about global peer-to-peer electronic cash. Room 77 in Berlin was one of the very first businesses to accept Bitcoins as payment for physical things, beers and burgers. Back in 2011, there were no mobile wallets, right? So you had to go there, bring your laptop, type this long address, you know, risk losing the money if you didn't type it correctly. So the first guy who built the motorbike was some guy in Berlin who built it in order to buy his beer with his phone instead of his computer.

The Octopian.

Credit cards are an old technology and actually pretty complex. And your payment details are shared with many middlemen. Each of these parties is also taking a cut of the action, which is built into the price of nearly everything you buy. If you purchase something internationally, double the number of middlemen

and triple the fees. Credit cards handle almost 20 trillion dollars of transactions per year. Early Bitcoin adopters like Room 77 avoided paying credit card fees, but York's real beef was with the bankers who collect them from problems.

Too big to fail. Too big to jail.

In HSBC's arctic spacecraft...

Collapsing economies. Murder. I didn't sign up for this. Let me get a drink.

Well, actually, I need to buy my German crew some hot glue vine and explain why they won't get paid until after Christmas. You see, transferring money from Australia where I live to Germany can take several days, and it will cost 30 plus exchange fees just for updating numbers in digital ledgers.

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After all, it's just moving data. I can send a picture or video to anyone on the planet almost instantly for free. We live in the age of the internet, but the banks won't send the data after 5 pm or on a weekend. That doesn't make any sense. So what if those slow and expensive middlemen with their multiple ledgers could be replaced by a giant database synchronized over the internet? That's the big idea behind Bitcoin, and it's run by a decentralized global network of powerful mining computers and regular laptops. Here's how it works.

When I pay my cameraman, what's really happening is that I use my key to open my wallet and then instruct the network to send Bitcoins to his address. Most Bitcoin apps use QR codes to identify an address. You scan it, then swipe to use your key and approve the transaction. This information is shared throughout the global network within seconds.

Every 10 minutes or so, one miner using a tremendous amount of energy beats all the others in a contest to solve a very difficult math problem. That miner is authorized to arrange the most recent transactions into a structured block and is rewarded in Bitcoins for this work.

All of the data contained inside each block is represented by a checksum. The miner now adds the new block to the previous one. That's why it's called the blockchain. Now, the ledger will be updated globally. The checksums of the previous block match the beginning of the new one, which are baked together forever. It's impossible to tinker with the data inside the block without changing the checksums and breaking the chain.

This immutability is the first rule of Bitcoin. It means no one can ever change what was once recorded in the blockchain or spend the same coin twice. That's also called censorship resistance, and it's critical to Bitcoin being used as real money.

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Award-winning journalist Laura Shin tells me a story about women bloggers in Afghanistan being paid in Bitcoin. One of the women had an abusive husband and saved up her Bitcoins and eventually was able to divorce him because she was able to control her money when she earned the Bitcoins.

In my first film, the early adopter said that this kind of financial freedom for everyone was just around the corner. The world's most populous network is adopting Bitcoin. That's the internet. The world's largest economy is adopting Bitcoin. That's the internet. We have transcended borders. It's totally filed as electronic cash. David Gerard says it has unbanked the bank more than it has banked the unbanked. He's an outspoken critic of this technology.

It's not very good as a payment system. There's a small payment use case. If you want to trade things that the government doesn't want you to trade in. That's David's polite way of saying illegal stuff. In 2011, most of my partner colleagues were saying three things: drugs, pornography, arm sales.

The Silk Road was a black market on the dark web where buyers and sellers used Bitcoins to fly under the radar of the authorities. It had 1 million users until the FBI showed up and shut it down.

They caught this guy for running it and confiscated the coins held in escrow by snatching his computer. And then they locked him away for life. Seems like a pretty straightforward case of law enforcement doing their job. But in crypto, not everybody sees it that way.

People have an absolute right to put whatever they want in their own bodies because their bodies belong to them. That makes Ross Ulbricht and the users of the Silk Road heroes, not criminal lawbreakers in a bad sense. They were criminal lawbreakers in a good sense, the same way that Harriet Tubman or Rosa Parks or Thomas Jefferson or George Washington were.

No doubt, cryptocurrencies can be a tool for criminal activity, but so are dollar bills or the banking system. And let's not forget, the blockchain is a public ledger. It's actually been quite useful for uncovering crimes. A former federal prosecutor named Katherine Haun, she was the one who discovered that there were a couple of federal agents that were pilfering the Bitcoins that the government had obtained from the Silk Road case for their own gain. And what was interesting was she got a tip that there might be one agent that was doing this, but from looking at the movements on the blockchain itself, she realized that there were two people.

The first open crypto war is playing out in Venezuela, where the local currency depreciates rapidly due to hyperinflation. In response, many Venezuelans turn to mining cryptocurrencies, seen as a threat by the government. The government provides electricity to residents, monitoring increased usage that may indicate mining activities, leading to confiscations.

The documentary questions whether governments or banks can ban Bitcoin. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, expressed skepticism, claiming Bitcoin would eventually be shut down. This statement was countered by the cryptocurrency community, highlighting the absurdity of trying to shut down a decentralized system.

Politicians also weigh in, with some proposing bills to outlaw cryptocurrency purchases by Americans, citing concerns about the dollar's international standing. The debate underscores how cryptocurrency challenges governments' control over money.

The film explores the unique features of different cryptocurrencies. IOTA's Tangle technology aims to solve scalability issues, while Ethereum introduces smart contracts. EOS addresses scalability concerns but faces criticism for potential centralization. Ripple targets the banking industry with its digital payment protocol, and Monero focuses on privacy, utilizing advanced cryptographic techniques.

Tether, a stablecoin pegged to traditional fiat currencies, faces controversy and legal scrutiny over transparency issues. Cardano, a blockchain platform, emphasizes academic research and a layered architecture in its development.

The rise of decentralized finance (DeFi) introduces blockchain-based solutions for traditional financial systems. Decentralized exchanges and various DeFi projects offer alternatives to traditional banking intermediaries.

Chainlink, a decentralized oracle network, connects smart contracts with real-world data, enhancing the capabilities of decentralized applications.

The documentary visits Zappo's secure facilities in Switzerland, emphasizing the importance of safeguarding private keys and addressing security concerns in the cryptocurrency space.

The film touches on the scalability challenge faced by Bitcoin, with debates on how to address transaction speed and fees. The differing philosophies within the community range from viewing Bitcoin as digital gold to emphasizing its role as digital cash.

Roger Ver, known as "Bitcoin Jesus," advocates for larger block sizes to increase transaction capacity and reduce fees, leading to the creation of Bitcoin Cash through a contentious hard fork.

The documentary explores the emotional and ideological debates within the cryptocurrency community, with contrasting visions for the future of digital currencies. It highlights the passion and tribalism in the space and how these factors influence the ongoing evolution of cryptocurrencies.

People are literally dying because of this. I'm not exaggerating; this is a life and death matter. And remember that list of promises the early Bitcoin has championed: cheap, easy, fast, unstoppable. I forgot one. If you don't support free speech, you don't support Bitcoin; you're an enemy of Bitcoin. Censorship shall not be abided. In fact, I myself have tried posting just a direct quote from Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. I think Roger complains a lot about censorship on Reddit, but Reddit is just one of many platforms.

Word for word quote from Satoshi without any additional commentary from myself at all, and I've had that post deleted. Even though I may not agree with a lot of things that Roger Ver is doing, now I do sympathize with him and his frustration with being censored. They're literally censoring the words of the creator of Bitcoin. Ultimately, this is a forum that these guys set up to talk about Bitcoin, and they can do whatever they want with it.

When I first started covering the space, everyone was united in their struggle against the establishment. Now, the industry has grown so much that their competing parties' propaganda machines, conspiracy theories, look a lot like politics. The biggest fight within the Bitcoin ecosystem is over who has the right to the name Bitcoin. But at the end of the day, I think the version of Bitcoin described in the Bitcoin white paper has the strongest claim to the name Bitcoin than anything else, and that's Bitcoin Cash.

Roger owns Bitcoin.com, and he has every intention of bringing Bitcoin Cash to the masses, even if it means that some people coming to his website think that they're buying Bitcoin, but they're getting Bitcoin Cash. I think it's fraudulent to say that and causing people to buy Bitcoin Cash when they actually want Bitcoin.

So Bitcoin Core fans say Roger is hijacking the brand name, and Bitcoin Cash supporters claim that Blockstream is hijacking Bitcoin's development. I mean, yeah, it is a conflict of interest because they're developing this open-source protocol in a way where their company can benefit from it. Everything we're doing is open source, so it's not like there's some secrecy or anything. You can see all the code that's committed, and it does go through this vetting process. They have had influence, and I wouldn't say it's not true, but I don't think they have enough influence to actually corrupt Bitcoin.

We no longer have anyone maintaining the project just because we don't want that potential conflict of interest. But in a way, now they've won the battle. Anyway, so who won Bitcoin's first war? Well, both parties got their way. After the split, the market valued Bitcoin much higher, and Bitcoin Cash transaction fees were much lower. The benefit of the scaling debate or civil war was Bitcoin was battle-tested.

Like a lot of companies and a lot of powerful people tried very hard to change Bitcoin, and they failed. This thing that Satoshi Nakamoto launched is much more resilient than anyone even hoped.

I know, I know. You want to find out what any of this has to do with this new Cryptopia, a revolutionary internet. We'll get there. I promise. But first, we need to go from Bitcoin's original blockchain to hundreds of blockchains.

Back in 2011, when Charlie Lee was a Google engineer, he wanted a faster and lighter version of Satoshi's cryptocurrency and was one of the first to experiment with the open-source software. The actual coding, in terms of the code differences between Bitcoin and Litecoin, was actually pretty trivial. What does that mean in time? Like, I would say, like, four or five hours. Litecoin was positioned as silver to Bitcoin's gold, and its network value grew to billions of dollars.

Some critics say, "Well, you sold at the highest point and you kind of hurt the community." What's your response to that? When I sold, no one knew it was the highest point. I didn't know it was going to be the highest point. So everyone thought it was going to keep going up. In hindsight, it was good timing, selling it at the high. But I'm still focused full-time on Litecoin adoption and working on Litecoin and micro-development. So it's not like I sold and just quit.

Nobody gets to dictate how Bitcoin improves or grows, whereas with Litecoin, I have a strong influence on the growth of Litecoin, which is good and bad. It's kind of like the difference between a benevolent dictator versus a democracy. The benevolent dictator is more efficient, but you have to assume that the benevolent dictator stays benevolent. Let's put a pin in that.

Litecoin was one of the first alternative cryptocurrencies or altcoins. Some of the early adopters, like Charlie, made fortunes. Soon, there were hundreds of coins made by cryptographers, copycats, and conmen. There's a coin for bloggers, a currency for online gamers, one with anonymity, and even one for banks. But can this invention unleash something even more powerful than digital currencies?

Back in 2014, I met the kid who knew how to do it. Hi, I'm Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine, founder of Ethereum, and just a general Bitcoin and cryptocurrency advocate. Just 19 years old, Vitalik was on a mission to make money programmable.

Vitalik is a very, very smart guy. The thing about Vitalik is he was pushed away from Bitcoin because he had gone to Bitcoin core developers and tried to build Ethereum on top of Bitcoin. They basically said, "Nope, not interested." So he built a separate blockchain called Ethereum with its own currency called Ether. A comparison might be Bitcoin is like a spreadsheet, and Ethereum is like a spreadsheet with macros. Using our analogy, Ethereum allows you to store cryptocurrency and computer code in the same secure box.

Here's how a smart contract might work. Let's say I bet Charlie that a Litecoin will be worth 200 on January 1st of next year. We each put an Ether into a box along with a smart contract, a simple program that automatically checks the price of Litecoins on that future date. If I'm right, the money goes to me. If I'm wrong, it's sent to Charlie. A smart contract is neither smart nor a contract; it's a dumb program. And once you understand that, all it is is one program that clarifies a lot of stuff. And the word "contract" there is in the meaning of finance. Most financial arrangements are pretty simple and clear-cut, like a bet with Charlie, your home loan, an insurance policy.

Just two parties and some form of exchange of value based on a set of rules called a contract. The same is true for global financial markets, think bonds, futures, derivatives, credit default swaps. They're all just contracts, and the world economy runs on them using middlemen who all charge high fees.

Proponents say that if we used smart contracts, we could tell the bankers, lawyers, escrow agents, and Wall Street finance guys to take a hike. A soda machine is a smart contract machine, right? You stick in a dollar; you get a soda. It's very, very simple. The soda machine does take statistics, and it has to make sure that you can't scam it by stealing the soda. But Ethereum and the people that are trying to decentralize this will tell you that that transaction, that smart contract between you and the soda machine is so critical that it needs to be globally processed and saved at a hundred thousand decentralized computers because it is so sensitive.

And in reality, 99% of all of these contracts don't need this kind of censorship resistance. You know, in two years' time, and people will see this film in four years' time, I think it would be an interesting historic moment also. What we're doing is we're saying we have this Ethereum network. Inside the Ethereum network, there's this asset called Ether, and we're actually going to be selling Ether. We're going to be selling Ether at a rate of 1,000 to 2,000 Ether for one Bitcoin. And that's how we're going to raise all the money.

It worked. Vitalik figured out a way to fund the Ethereum project, and it made his investors very rich. This new model for fundraising soon had a name: an Initial Coin Offering or ICO. IPOs and ICOs sound similar, but they have nothing similar. The only thing similar about them is they both help you raise money. IPOs you don't do until you have a company, until you have revenue, until you have users. And so you can actually prove to the public investors that this is a valuable company that's worth investing and it's worth buying their stock. ICOs, it's pre-product. You have maybe a couple people on the team. It's just a white paper, and so people are just buying into trust, into faith that this is something that will exist.

And this is the guy who opened the floodgates. He created a standard called ERC-20, enabling you or me or anyone to create an ICO. So, on the one hand, you have these smart contracts, these little programs. They can talk to each other, but you have to define how do they talk to each other, and because everybody now agrees to that same standard, smart contracts can interact within the entire Ethereum network. And the ERC-20 standard allowed the creation of tokens.

The goal here is like, ultimately, I'd like to see eight-year-olds building their own financial systems. But what if some of these eight-year-olds are also scammers? So let's say I'm trying to do an ICO, and I create a smart contract where I create a million coins, and one of the transactions is that if you send me a hundred dollars, I will send you that many worth of coins. It was a mad gold rush. People realized, "Wow, if I can just pull together a project in a white paper, I can raise money. Like, a lot of money."

Some people hawking new coins didn't actually exist. This handsome chap is the graphic designer of a Bulgarian ICO. Actually, they just posted a photo of Ryan Gosling. Another project raised millions in Ether and then vanished, leaving investors with this website. Look, loser.

That's nice. Most of the scam coins were built on Vitalik's smart contract platform Ethereum using Fabian's token standard. This innovation has enabled a lot of criminals and scammers.

So, I would say the amount of scams in that system are rather low. It sometimes looks bigger than it is. I would assume that the actual scams, purposeful property scams in that system maybe were like two or three percent. I would say actually most ICOs were not scams. I would say about two to five percent of the thousands of ICOs that are happening are actually legit, and the rest is pretty scammy or just not gonna work.

Can you define for me what a coin is? I think it's just a derogatory term people use on coins that they don't like. For Bitcoin maximalists, people who only care about Bitcoin, everything else is a coin. In my point of view, I think a coin that is kind of a scam is a coin. So people create coins just to get rich from it, print a lot of tokens out of thin air, try to pump the price up and make a lot of money from it. And that's not really providing a lot of value to the world.

No value for the world, but they did add value for their creators. If you can print billions of tokens out of thin air like a central bank, well, that's why this guy was one of the wealthiest men on earth for a brief moment. Here's how that happened. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins, and its inventor had to earn them by mining with his computers, just like everyone else. There are more Litecoins and even more Ether in circulation. The Ethereum Foundation portion to fund the development team, and then there's Ripple. They created a hundred billion XRP but kept 80% for themselves and their clients, and the other 20%, they gave as a bonus to the founders. That's how you get to be one of the richest men on earth.

Okay, maybe I was a bit too harsh on ICOs. Democratizing startup finance can be a good thing. There were many legit companies raising capital too. Over the years, I've met many founders who have real offices with real people trying to solve real problems. But to Bitcoin maximalists, Bitcoin is the be-all and all of cryptocurrency.

The documentary explores diverse perspectives on blockchain technology and its potential applications. Critics dismiss other blockchains, ICOs, and smart contracts as a waste of time. They argue against the idea of blockchain revolutionizing healthcare and automotive production. The documentary challenges a maximalist viewpoint, emphasizing the diversity of blockchains and their evolutionary nature.

In contrast, big corporations, especially in Germany, view blockchain as valuable. Companies like BMW, Lufthansa, and Deutsche Telekom are exploring blockchain for electric cars, parts tracking, and smart contracts for roaming costs. Private centralized blockchains, like Walmart's trial with IBM's Hyperledger, raise questions about the need for decentralization.

The documentary delves into the future of decentralized finance, envisioning tokenized securities for traditional assets like stock certificates, corporate bonds, and property deeds. Examples such as MakerDAO and Binance Coin showcase novel digital securities with unique features.

A case study involves Power Ledger, an Australian company using blockchain for electricity trading, energy asset financing, and carbon markets. The system incentivizes investments in sustainable energy projects, allowing individuals to own portions of solar or wind farms through tokenization.

The irony emerges as traditional banks invest heavily in blockchain research, leveraging the technology initially created to challenge their dominance. The documentary draws parallels with the early days of the internet, highlighting how military-funded innovations transformed into commercial giants.

Mark Van Trusca, an economic sociologist at Oxford University, compares blockchain's development to the evolution of automobiles. He emphasizes the lengthy process from invention to innovation, citing the importance of complementary assets and infrastructure.

The journey concludes with a visit to the Computer History Museum, exploring the origins of computer networks. The internet's success, from TCP/IP to the world wide web, is linked to military funding, revealing the complex forces shaping technological evolution.

The narrative shifts to the dot-com era, emphasizing the wild hype cycles and subsequent domestication of the internet by trillion-dollar companies. The documentary reflects on how technologies, initially perceived as liberating, become shaped by commercial and regulatory interests.

The final segment explores the control governments exert over the internet, leading to the emergence of a "splinternet." Censorship and restrictions are observed globally, raising concerns about the overreach of government control. The documentary ends with a reminder of the Australian government's role in internet governance.

Do you have something to hide? We've taken the UK's spying law and made it even more fascist to test this. We chose Australia, the weakest of the Five Eyes alliance, thanks to a lack of a bill of rights. So international data requests will now be funneled through us, compromising not just Aussies but all of you too. You're welcome.

Hold on, Satoshi turned money into code. Code is just letters and numbers, which is speech, right? So, money now is speech, which is a pretty powerful idea if you think about it. But if Bitcoin is this uncontrollable, unsensible technology, can the blockchain also enable global free speech? In some places, it already does. One Chinese student tried to report a sexual assault and was silenced by her college. But she knew that she could attach a message into the metadata of an Ethereum transaction. So, she spent 15 cents, and now her letter outlining her story and the threats she received are on the public Ethereum blockchain, where it will remain unchangeable forever.

The early crypto pioneers wanted to democratize money, finance 2.0, if you will. But now, the believers in the blockchains have their eyes on a bigger prize. They want to decentralize everything - Web 3.0. Facebook without the propaganda, Twitter without the terms of service, Reddit without the censorship, online identity without the hex, internet browsing without tracking, software websites without the advertising. We pay with either attention or privacy. So, we either have advertising thrown at us, our attention is monetized, or we pay with micro-violations of our privacy. And that is why the internet today is the ultimate surveillance economy. One privacy tool is the Brave browser. It doesn't store data and pays users and content publishers in their Basic Attention Tokens.

What most people in the crypto space are probably most excited about is this notion that we can create these user-owned decentralized networks. You can, for instance, offer file storage in the way that Amazon does or offer search the way Google does, but do it in a peer-to-peer fashion without this behemoth at the center extracting rents and do it in a way where all the people that are users of it can benefit. Blockstack is the next evolution in computing. We've seen three main eras of computing before. We had mainframes that were these large computers that everyone depended on. Then, we got desktops where users were in control and they owned their computers and their data and information. And then we saw cloud computing where we are dependent on these large companies running services for us. And we are about to embark on this major shift in computing called decentralized computing where users are getting back in control and they really could someday compete with, if not even take down, some of the big tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Amazon. That's a tall, tall order. It is.

But I mean, who would have thought at the beginning of the internet that Wikipedia would beat out Encarta? These Web 3 promises sound good, but my professional network is on LinkedIn, my personal photos are on Instagram. If I deleted my accounts, I'd lose everything. These services aren't just walled gardens; they are digital prisons. Data is locked up in several companies, and we don't own it. The companies own it, but they use the data to mine it, to advertise to us, to sell us things, to manipulate us, to change our behavior. Ocean Protocols: the answer to freeing up the data and giving the power back to individuals. So, how do we plan to do that? It's essentially an operating system on top of Ethereum that allows for people to share data storage algorithms and computation in a way that preserves privacy. It's too early to tell whether projects like these can succeed, but I do like the idea of digital property rights. Wouldn't it be nice if companies paid us in cryptocurrency when they use our data and if we control who has access to it instead of our digital overlords?

And then there's the question of our most precious information, our very identity. If you take the history of mankind, a lot of blood has been shed getting to democracy right, the idea that every man has a vote. In the world, and you know, I take it kind of personally because I was born in South Africa during apartheid, the child of Indian immigrants, and we were not allowed to vote. Vinnie tells me that in the United States alone, there are 14,000 different paper forms of birth certificates issued by local authorities. There are mistakes on them, and even identity theft starting from birth. All your information is already out there. There's five hacks a day happening. So how do you prove that you are who you say you are?

[Music] Our crypto celebrity Andreas has 10 imposters on Instagram; Ryan Gosling's alter ego is committing financial fraud in Bulgaria. And who knows what's happening with your compromised information. Blockchain-based services like Civic, Identity.com, or Microsoft's Ion say they can give us control of our identity and protect it. Currently, we are having our reputation, our history with different systems of different companies like Facebook and Twitter. With the blockchain, the core important information sits on that trusted system which we control and we can take from wherever we want to go to something else.

Meanwhile, Vitalik has inspired thousands of software developers to build his vision of decentralized finance. But early in Ethereum's history, something went wrong with one of the first smart contracts called The DAO. The DAO went like this: they wanted a completely decentralized autonomous organization. They wanted a science fiction dream of an independent computer program that was immune to human influence. So, what they actually did was build a forthcoming disaster. The problem: some sloppy code left their safety deposit box wide open, and somebody just helped themselves, allowed them to pilfer $50 million from the smart contract. And that's why when I say it's not even clear whether or not it was a hack, you know, the smart contract allowed them to do that. And what happened was the majority of the community did decide to roll back the blockchain and to pretend like The DAO never happened.

Yep, you heard that correctly. The top decision-makers forked Ethereum into two separate networks, one where the money was gone and a new one where the money was restored to its original owners, breaking the first rule of cryptocurrency: never alter the blockchain. Immutability lasts only as long as the big boys haven't lost money. Just like Bitcoin, Ethereum also experienced scaling problems when a decentralized app called CryptoKitties—I'm not kidding—went viral, and the kitties spread like rabbits. In its blockchain, the system ground to a halt. The network is now being upgraded, but there are many competitors who claim that their blockchains are faster, fairer, and more scalable. The next shakeout will surely be interesting to watch.

It's never easy to admit that some—that you've been fooled. Maybe I've been fooled. Maybe. The crypto community doesn't agree on much of anything except when it comes to this guy.

Hello, my name is Dr. Craig Wright. I'm the Chief Scientist of nChain Limited. On the balance of the evidence, Craig Wright almost certainly is not Satoshi Nakamoto. The proofs that he gave were not real proofs. In the end, he either chickened out or didn't actually have the proof. Craig Wright obviously seems to be a scammer. I'm happy to

say that Craig Wright is a fraud. I know he's controversial. No one really changes the world without being bold, without disrupting people's ideas, and without drawing a little controversy around the way. But the majority of the industry says Craig is crazy or a conman. So, Craig kindly joins the stage, and that giving him screen time is irresponsible. And I'll say this quite frankly because I've got more money than your country, but I was in the area and just couldn't resist.

Craig claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto on the BBC, but his cryptographic proof didn't check out, and many see him as an imposter. As a person with a law degree who used to work for federal police and military intelligence, he would be the perfect supervillain, given that many don't believe him and hate him. When asked about critics, he humorously responds, 'Do I start with a muhahaha?'

He believes that people are hated early on because they're not understood, emphasizing that if something doesn't have a use, it shouldn't have value. According to him, practically everything is a Ponzi scheme, and he expresses his dislike for Ethereum, considering it a dead end. He claims to have solved many of the issues Ethereum aims to address years ago, stating that decentralization was never the point of Bitcoin.

Despite facing criticism, he confidently asserts, 'I was called a fool then, and I'll be called a fool again, and every single time I'll be right.' Craig mentions picking up 'Mastering Bitcoin' and finding it wrong, especially highlighting that Silk Road was the worst thing to happen to Bitcoin.

Craig's playbook involves filing patents, and some label him a patent troll. He expresses his ambition to beat Edison in patent count and mentions filing about 1.1 patents for each white paper, with hundreds of patents soon to be public. This approach, however, sparks a philosophical disagreement.

The documentary explores the splits in the crypto world, with Craig's new coin claiming to be the real Bitcoin, aiming for giant block sizes. Critics question the feasibility of updating and storing such a massive blockchain, and Craig, with his patent-centric approach, faces skepticism. Despite technical disputes and criticism, Craig remains assertive and claims his efforts will change everything.

As the crypto space evolves, the film acknowledges the role of public figures like Craig, Charlie, and Vitalik, emphasizing the need for true decentralization. However, the reality is different, and the documentary questions whether these figureheads are any different from current leaders, hinting at the challenges faced by the crypto community.

The film concludes by pondering the varied perspectives on Bitcoin's purpose, ranging from digital gold to a tool for rebuilding trust in society. The potential of blockchain technology is explored, including its ability to eliminate the high cost of trust and bring about significant societal changes. The documentary notes the challenges, uncertainties, and endless possibilities associated with the future of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, leaving the viewers with a sense of both optimism and caution.