I wrote an overview of one of the speeches of Andreas Antonopoulos that explains in detail why the trustless platform Bitcoin is build on is a much more important technology then blockchain itself.

Original video: Speech Andreas

Before anyone starts of about copyright infringements Andreas Antonopoulos mentions on his website that he works using the creative common licensing and wants the message to spread, so do I. I took a good hour to write down his speech and make it a bit more accessible to those new to crypto.

As it took me a while to get my head around and fully understand his speech, even though I been in crypto quite a while, I think this speech is very educational and decided to post it here.

The speech starts of with mentioning that people talk about blockchain being the greatest invention of our generation and that this technology will change the world.
Andreas (A.) mentions that the blockchain is just a hashed linked list. Meaning every data block that is created holds a reference to a previous datablock (using a hash).

A. then mentions it is more interesting how a blockchain is created, and that the process of recording data in a blockchain is a far more important invention then blockchain, which again is just a hashed linked list.

A.:”Blockchain is a data structure and not even a particulary interesting datastructure.”

There are two types of blockchain: open and closed blockchain.

Open blockchain

Open blockchain is decentralised,neutral, borderless and censorship resistant.
(like the open web) this is the interesting part about the open web.

decentralised
nobody controls all of it

neutral
because for the most part content is routed across the web without regard to the content itself or the source and destination.

censorship resistant:
because you cannot erase or remove information from the web

borderless
self explanatory

open blockchain meaning open source, open access, open to innovation without permission, it means innovation at the edge not the centre, it means no one in control, no censorship, it means it is neutral, you don’t require a patent to participate in this new technology.

closed blockchain

a closed blockchain (controlled by one party) does not have the interesting properties, the open blockchain has (closed means that a party can decide whihc transactions are recorded and which not(good tx and bad tx and evil tx ones that should be sensored)

Bitcoin

Bitcoin introduced a way to apply the above four mentioned properties to trusted information, specifically the information that is the ownership of money.

censorship resistant and decentralised
It created a way to have a recording of ownership in the blockchain without allowing anyone to have control over, who can own money how they can spent it and who records on this blockchain.

neutral
It is neutral because in this system of trust, the source, the destination or contents of the transaction or even the purpose of your tx does not matter, it will be routed and there is no way to stop someone from routing.

borderless
self explanatory

Blockchain

Bitcoin made money: open borderless neutral censorship resistant and decentralised and the artefact of that technology, the product, the thing that gets recorded on your software node is the blockchain.

That blockchain is a necesary but not sufficient component to create the real magic, which is a platform for trust, that is not controlled by anyone that cannot be erased or changed after it has been recorded.

He remarks again: “It is not about blockchain!”
To back this statement up:
(if you create a centralized blockchain if you have a central point of control if it is not open borderless censorship resistant neutral, you should have use microsoft sequal server enterprise edition, or oracle, the problem is nobody is going to pay a consultant to rebuild Dubai’s real estate records on microsoft sequal. Facebook has censorship)

This technology (referring to the platform of trust, that is not controlled by anyone, that cannot be erased or changed) is interesting because for the first time in history, it takes one of humanities oldest technology which is money and one of the most important aspects of human behaviour which is trust and it embeds these in an open, interoperable network protocol without central control this has never happened before.

You can imagine a myriad of applications where the ability to trust in the network protocol and not have to trust the other party you are interacting with or in some kind of thirdparty that acts as a mediator or intermediary.
the problem is that a lot of those applications really depends on first establishing the fundamental application of value type.

When you turn money into a content type and make it something that is routable across the internet without reference to any thirdpary, self verifiable , self authorizing, independable routing money as a network protocol that creates the basis for all of the other applications, that creates the basis for applications of security and trust that we need to build as an infrastructure to start everything else.

So yes the blockchain if it is open, decentralized if it is neutral and censorship resistant it can be used for so many interesting applications.

Reality
Most of the companies that want to use blockchain won’t use it for that they see the internet of money and they want to build an intranet, the natural motivation of a corporation is control, the natural motivation of a government is control, they like the idea of blockchain (immutability, recordability, auditability):”but can we have it without the open, borderless, neutral and censorship resistant aspect of it.”
Companies/ governments will build intranets of money and they will be stale wasteland, just like the microsoft outlook frontpage shit you have at the backoffice of your corporation.

Applications that really have a good usecase for the technology Bitcoin is build on
The number of applications where you truly need a borderless, global censorship resistant platform to establish trust and immutability that cannot be attacked or compromised by anyone not even colluding state level actors or giant multinational corporations, despotic, disgusting dictorial regimes, the only applications you need for that can be counted on the fingers of 1 hand.

One of those applications is money!

Lack of awareness
We don’t like to think that money is an important applicatiton especially in the western liberal culture, money is dirty and is the root of all evil, It’s not the money that is dirty, ** it is the current architecture of money which is centralized hierarchical and controlled that is dirty. **

Turning money into a network protocol that we can spread to the entire world and give to every person who doesn’t have access to banking facilities, to the billions of poeple who are cut off from the current financial system just to give us a bourgeois (meaning middleclass) sensitivity of safety, which is a lie to start with, a system of control so prevasive that it has been weaponized throughout the west to be used as a system of political power and control.

Proprietary(belonging to) money is the cancer of modern societies and it has infected democracy and it is killing democracy, the answer to that is open, neutral, censorship resistant, borderless, open source money as a network protocol as an open interface, as a system that can be given to anyone with an ip connected device of the most basic functionality, which gives them the power to independently verify and authenticate, transact globally with anyone and then once we have that solid platform, we can build applications of trust.

Applications like authenticated voting, applications like ownership control for real estate and other assets applications like open source law through smart contracts, open source privacy systems.

golden age of cryptography
Realize crypto currencies today are the largest open public consumer civilian deployment of public key cryptography that has ever happened.

We have now arrived at the golden age of cryptograhy.

The cypherpunks (A cypherpunk is any activist advocating widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a route to social and political change) are finally winning and we can apply that amazing technology to one of humanities most ancient most fundamental technologies, a system of communication of value, called money.

For the first time in history money is a content type, money is a protocol.

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