You might be more comfortable thinking about deploying math and code as your tactic, but I want to talk to you about the full suite of tactics that we use to effect change in the world. And this is a framework that we owe to this guy Lawrence Lessig.
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Blockchain is in that space where we still have to explain it, because most of the people have gone from not having it around to having it around. But for kind of the folks that are your age or a little younger it’s kind of always been there, at which point it doesn’t really need to be explained. It does however need to be contextualized.
So here’s what happened. If you tell people you’re going to have this super-open, absolutely non-commercial, money-free thing, but it has to survive in this environment that’s based on money, where it has to make money, how does anybody square that circle? How does anybody do anything? And so companies like Google that came along, in my view were backed into a corner. There was exactly one business plan available to them, which was advertising.
I was looking for the tools that you could use to solve global problems in an environment when the nation-state has turned out to be a very very ineffective set of machinery at all. So I’m going to talk a little bit about the technology. I’m going to talk a little bit about what it does and where it’s going. And then I’m going to try and tell a story about the kind of global long-term picture that we could get if this stuff actually works.