leashless

6. The theory is to dispel the myth that blockchain is a fringe technology used only by those wanting to risk their livelihoods or possibly make their fortunes on volatile cryptoassets like Bitcoin.

7. The blockchain is now at a stage in its development equivalent to where the internet was in or around 1995. The internet was unstoppable in 1995 and blockchain technology is unstoppable now. It will become ubiquitous in all major industrial and financial sectors, simply because it allows for the immutable recording of data, thereby reducing friction in commercial and consumer transactions and obliterating the scope for dispute as to what has occurred.

8. As the Master of the Rolls and Head of Civil Justice in England and Wales, I hold an office that pre-dates modern trade in derivatives and reinsurance, even steam engines, powered flight, and certainly the internet. I am particularly and obviously concerned about the reputation and development of English law and the jurisdiction of England and Wales.

9. Many people do not realise that English law governs trading in €600 trillion of OTC derivatives annually, in €11.6 trillion in metals trading, in £250 billion in M&A deals, and in £80 billion in insurance contracts every year – just to take a few examples. My hope is that English law will prove to be the law of choice for borderless blockchain technology as its take up grows exponentially in the months and years to come.

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I think we can both agree that this is a well reasoned case made by a global expert in the field who is talking inside of his area of expertise: I feel that my view of the blockchain and its potentials is similar, although of course less nuanced. I think you should reconsider your position based on this analysis and the work of many other experts in the field. But you do you. By all means be the expert. Be the authority.

Tell people what to think. Right or wrong.

Also remember much of my time was in defense thinktanks. Not everything that gets written gets published.

For example a good deal of my input on the UK RCDS “Global Cyber Game” report didn’t make it into the unclass version. Likewise a lot of my work for the US office of the secretary of defense is not particularly well known.

I’ve been places. I’ve done things. The fact you don’t seem to understand how to read the runes is your limitation, not my track record.

Serious policy people who are worthy of respect are doing this thing. Molly can snark all the likes but all that she’s demonstrated is arrogance, poor judgement, an unwillingness to admit when she is out of her depth on real world issues like modern slavery, and a willingness to use lynch mobs to defend her point of view rather than to discuss the actual topic. The world is filled with people who point and laugh for a hobby, but once it becomes a living all intellectual honesty goes straight out the window.

If you want to understand what we really do, read on.

https://podcast.mattereum.com/episodes/ending-slavery-with-t...

You can find a ton of material here about exactly why tagging one NFT per object is worth doing. It’s a possible pretty decent fix for many of the problems continuing to run consumer capitalism in the current mode. Basically it gives a place for wear and use data to accumulate.

The wear and use data is accurate and trustworthy because it’s presented in a legal framework which provides real accountability for the people involved in the transaction.

We don’t know if consumers will accept it or not, but we do know that it works legally and technically. Early stage research.

Here's what it boils down to: freedom is messy.

The early days of the dotcom space were filled with carnage of a type which makes crypto look pretty normal. Amazon stock dropped >90% and a trillion and a half in value vanished from the market overall. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

And that's in a space whose biggest ambition was to replace catalogue shopping and how hotel reservations are made.

Crypto has bigger goals, and the mess is bigger. But it's the same innovation engine that ran Silicon Valley, the same type of people, it's just now they're less dependent on Goldman Sachs when they want to go to the public and ask for their money. Make no mistake: nothing new, strange or unusual is happening. It's just tech being tech, no cause for alarm.

Unexpected, I know. But https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFufOGZBwFM try that for size. Isn't it beautiful?

The well paced blips of the factory ships Slide past our orbit's brink Like a swarm of bees in the girder trees Come to our flowers to drink

And the earth is clean as a springtime dream No factory smokes appear For they've left the land to the gardener's hand And they all are circling here

The big problem with crypto is legal, and that problem breaks up into four categories.

1) legality of tokens of various kinds (are they securities? who can do what with tokens?)

2) KYC AML CTF PEP OFAC SOF issues: governments want to track who is who when money moves and many governments do it in many different ways

3) Taxation frameworks, and international harmonisation of taxation frameworks

4) Enforceability of contract when smart contracts are in the mix

None of these are technology problems. All of them are problems which the legacy financial system solves with huge numbers of staff wasting their lives pushing the same paperwork for every single transaction, while the industrial-scale money laundering happens inside of fully regulated financial institutions which go rotten and print money until they get caught landed with symbolic fines after laundering tens of billions of drug money.

If governments had made their mind up about *how they were going to regulate crypto* then all of this would have been sorted out years ago and we would have a simple, stable, efficient set of new financial rails, much like a re-invention of the credit card payment system or the SWIFT bank transfer system.

But because of a failure to give clear guidance for 8 years the technology is a swamp of unregulated and poorly regulated projects, because when the actual professionals show up they can't figure out what the law is, because the law hasn't been written.

MICA in the EU starts to provide the industry the necessary clarity to actually obey the (clearly written) law and mainstream into the regular world of commerce.

In the UK, see the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce which is disambiguating the crypto mess from the Judiciary on out https://lawtechuk.io/ukjt

And also the upcoming Law Commission work https://www.lawcom.gov.uk/project/digital-assets/ (warning: contains 550 pages of UK government legal analysis)

My company builds on the UK framework to enable buying and selling of physical assets across 170 jurisdictions on the same legal framework: http://mattereum.com

Anyway, it's a mess, but it's not the "crypto industry's" fault -- government's failure to establish clear legal rules has made institutional adoption by grown ups impossible.

As we get regulatory clarity it all goes forwards again!

I know Paul Kingsnorth from the "Dark Mountain" days -- I worked closely with Dougald Hine on a project (http://collapsonomics.org) before they started Dark Mountain.

The rhetoric is strong, but the realism is not. Next step: let's turn off the electricity.

It is worth 5000 self help books.

This is likely true of the radiation experiments, but is not indicated in the article.

I'm assuming it was much like Tuskegee in this respect?

My preference is to have US DoD set up plants all around the world on its airbases and sell subsidised electricity to the national grid of the host country.

DoD needs something to do.

Source: project managed the Ethereum launch in 2015.

* Enough privacy that activists don't wind up facing death squads * Not so much privacy that drug cartels wind up running the country.

The problem is that cryptography is all or nothing: for a given observer, the transaction is either private or it isn't.

I'm fascinated by models like differential privacy. Maybe there are ways of making systems which snare large scale abuses but provably leave the minnows free.

Then there was a generation-long pause. Then Go!

I will be much more confident delegating to people that have done a lot of meditation and are able to hold their heads together under immense pressure.

Only bitcoin still has an insane carbon footprint.

And our paradigm for safety is very different. People are less expendable.

1) avoid problems like this, and

2) clean up problems like this when they do happen.

And even so those traditions never, ever (in my experience) describe themselves as anything other than perilous. "The way is long and narrow." "Like a snake entering a bamboo tube." And so on.

I put together a system for solo practitioners working with absolutely minimal oversight in 2015. People doing it since then, I talk to them roughly once (on average) to check they're doing it right, then don't hear back from them for years until they're getting into the weird "foothills of enlightenment" end stage stuff -- if they make it that far. Most don't, they plateaux. Which is fine, that's a good, safe place to be.

Instructions here. There's a bunch of other stuff in that same directory structure. It's fine.

http://files.howtolivewiki.com/.meditation_2015/transcripts/...