Preview | JacksonTree Fall 2018 Talk

Origins

This Saturday I'll be returning to the deserts of Southern California for Jackson Tree. A couple of years ago a group of friends, The Jacksons, met in the desert and had such a fabulous time that we all decided to do it twice a year. We set up stages and art pieces, and have activities ranging from yoga to tea parties.

Several of my epiphanies have happened out in the desert, including our first gathering when @adklempner said we were going to put our festival on blockchain... somehow I knew right then it was going to happen, wouldn't you know @markegiles was there too.

This will be the second time we have TED style talks and I'll be presenting some version of the following. Your questions and comments are greatly appreciated so I can make the best version of this. @dlux-io and the rest of my blog are a great place to learn more about dlux and our vision/ICO

The Talk

Welcome to another glorious morning in the Mojave Desert. I'm speaking today to share a vision that has been born and bred from the very dust you're breathing now. There are a lot of visions in life and depending on their scale determines how many have to share that vision for it to become reality. For instance, looking at all your beautiful faces I can have a thought that taking a picture would allow me to share this vision... and through the collective genius of mankind I can pull this, carefully crafted rocks, out of my pocket and manipulate my fingers in such a way as to accomplish this task. But if I had this same vision 10 years ago, 50 years ago, or more than 100 years ago the amount of effort required to accomplish the same thing would have been drastically different.

My vision is to empower people with knowledge and enable them to seize the ability to shape their reality.

Allow me to read a translated passage:

[S]eeing that our senses sometimes deceive us, I was willing to suppose that there existed nothing really such as they presented to us; And because some men err in reasoning, and fall into [logical fallacies], even on the simplest matters of Geometry, I, convinced that I was as open to error as any other, rejected as false all the reasonings I had hitherto taken for Demonstrations; And finally, when I considered that the very same thoughts which we experience when awake may also be experienced when we are asleep, while there is at that time not one of them true, I supposed that all the thoughts that had ever entered into my mind when awake, had in them no more truth than the illusions of my dreams. But immediately upon this I observed that, whilst I thus wished to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus thought, should be something; And as I observed that this truth, I think, therefore I am, was so certain and of such evidence that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the skeptics capable of shaking it, I concluded that I might, without scruple, accept it as the first principle of the philosophy of which I was in search.

Who knows who wrote this?

This is from "Discourse on the Method" published in 1637 by Rene Descrates. 400 years later, with the standard model of particle physics demonstrating 5 significant digits of predictive power we haven't come any further in probing our reality than this thought... in fact, experiments like the quantum eraser point very strongly that we as conscious entities make our reality. Standing at the edge of this rabbit hole I'll pose my question:
What is real?
What is reality?
If I were to hold up a Louis Vuitton bag out here in the desert and ask "is this real" I'm sure a good majority of you would say it's a fake... and hopefully you'd be right. But it's still a bag, I can still touch it, you can touch it. We can put stuff in it... there isn't a wormhole at the bottom.
I postulate reality is what we can share. Reality is what is true. Reality is what we can agree on.

10 years ago, in October of 2008, a post was made on an internet forum talking about a method to determine consensus. Consensus being an agreement to what is true. And much like two plus two will always equal four; what has been signed on a blockchain will always be signed on a blockchain.

Now when Louis Vuitton makes a bag he can sign it on a blockchain... and when I sell you this bag I can also sign a transaction to you, and suddenly you'll care if this bag is covered in dirt... two plus two still equals four. Our shared reality is suddenly less questionable... it's more real.

We as conscious entities do make our reality. Our choices effect us and others. We live in a fabric of each other. Just look at this tapestry of conscious beings. We are a community actively engaged in solving problems and sharing our solutions.

I still have this photo from earlier of this gorgeous conscious tapestry. Does anybody have airdrop? I'm only a few taps away from putting some knowledge into your info-sphere. And even though this "photo" is roughly 12 million binary answers to difference between the average light level and the luminosity of three different wavelengths in a given area you wouldn't call it fake. Nor would you question the "magic" that is the slight variance in the electromagnetic field that allows you to have a copy of this photo in a matter of seconds. This photo is real because we can agree what it represents. This photo is real because we can experience it. It is a virtual "real"-ity.

Now to pump the brakes on this utopic technology. Who here has seen a photo shopped picture or are aware of Russian Hackers. These are also realities... and if you obtain this photo from facebook later, especially from somebody else, then there is a possibility that the photo I took isn't the photo you receive; it becomes a game of telephone, even without the intent to change the photo you may still lose some of the information in the photo depending on how it is copied and propagated through the network. Far more chilling is the ability to censor this information. When reality is quite literally taken from us.

Late last year I became aware of a technology called Inter-Planetary File System. I don't want to bore all of you with how this works... but I will say it's a powerful merger of git style version control, bit-torrent style distribution, and distributed hash tables which are analogous to decentralized ledgers you may be aware of in blockchain. What this means?

Instead of naming my picture "jacksontree.jpg" and putting it on the internet and telling you where to find it; it is "named" after it's contents. Meaning changing even the least significant digit for red in pixel 8,156,874 will yield an entirely different "name". When I put this "name" on the blockchain it is equally as hard to stop as downloading warez on bit torrent.

Thus, I can now share with the entire world and there is no need to worry that what you are getting isn't what I signed. This is foundational to our global society going forward.

It's time for another quote:

“To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”

This is Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constitution.

This was ratified 230 years ago. Since then product cycles have fallen in some cases to months... yet a 1998 Act extended these terms to life of the author plus 70 years and for works of corporate authorship to 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication.

These few words are the assertion that if you knowingly or not have a "protected" thought and act on it that people will find you and charge you and put you in a cage. Some of the most egregious forms of this violence against humanity are when drugs that cost six cents to make are sold for more than $800. While these patents expire far sooner, there is still a total monopoly on health services. Some people are charged hundreds for a bag of salt water. A missed step could easily cost you your life savings or more. And even if you aren't sick most of us are still paying thousands of dollars a year for health insurance with thousands more until your deductible is met.

If you haven't realized this yet. All the governments in the world are here to protect monopolies. They are not here to protect you. But I digress, like I said earlier... WE are here to find and share solutions.

I hope some of you here are aware of The Creative Commons and other licenses and "Copyleft" publishing. These are radically different forms of "intellectual property control" that readily allow for commercial and non-commercial use of the knowledge contained there-in, and improvements of the same. Elon Musk released all of Tesla's patents to the public domain in this way. But what would you gain if you managed to make some type of breakthrough?

I really don't want to get in to how blockchains work... but suffice to say Bitcoin awards bitcoins to the miner that found the solution to a block. There are now other consensus mechanisms where instead of solving progressively more complex problems that have no real world value to determines who gets the reward, trusted people are elected by the holders of the coins and they produce a block. This paradigm means that rewards don't have to go to one place, and in fact 75% of the newly minted coins go in to a reward pool, which is distributed over certain types of transactions also by voting.

This was originally conceived as an alternative to reddit. Where accounts up vote and down vote content... this time every single post in the network has the potential to be monetized.

Before I wrapped my head around this other people had already taken this and found ways to incentivize things like: creative writing, open-source software, alternative news, and even a youtube clone where every video has the potential to earn rewards. All with out ads and nearly impossible to censor.

But then I wrapped my head around all of this.

We built Decentralized Limitless User eXperiences.
It's a monetized uncensorable social network for VR, XR, and Web Apps to include Machine Learning.
Instead of making meme's viral, we make programs viral, and even the people who vote on the content earn rewards. We, the steem community, can pay you to engage with ad free content. It's not much but let me paint you a picture of a very near future.

Every store you walk into is staffed entirely by robots... if there is even a store for what you are buying. You have 3D printer at home. It can make nearly everything. You got to this store in a self driving uber. Even your therapist is a VR program... with mathematical proof of confidentiality. The world has one heart surgeon, it's a swarm of robots that share the same AI and have massed a perfect memory of over a million heart surgeries. Nobody works.

Every material thing you can want is a function of only three things. Raw materials, information cost, and energy.

There are a few terms you may not be familiar with but the world is moving so fast you might as well learn them today. A decentralized application, dApp, is a program that can be run from anywhere as it's data source is a public. That's right. You can effectively fire up your own version of a social network server on your computer and the only difference you'd see is the url. Our dApp serves dApps. This is how you can view another persons VR... even meet with them and voice chat, follow them around the room... play a first person shooter... attend a lecture, a concert, an award show... vote live with people around the world for the next generation of Talent Search... pretty much anything you can do in real life will eventually be modeled in VR.

It serves Augmented reality so you can put a digital overlay on physical objects. You can build a dApp that is attached to a place mat at a restaurant that can show the menu, let the customer customize their order, and pay for it with out any third party fees. Their new point of sale system requires no servers, no databases, and no hardware, and even pays it's users to write signed reviews.

These dApps are able to propagate based on the inputs of users. You can use machine learning to build models, and then post these models, and reference these models, and get paid to train an AI that may one day save a life.

Blockchain is a dumb machine. It's fabulous at verifying authentic transactions and not much else. Humans will find and create all the uses you can desire. We found ways to give application logic to a blockchain. Once it's programmed it's available to every person on the planet for free... with incentives to make it better.

You can already petition this network for resource allocation to perform certain tasks. You can develop your own tokens for content monetization, utilize escrow accounts, recover your password with a network of trust. Even risk free investment through delegation.

We are democratizing the tools and resources to empower every person on the planet. It pays everybody. Do you want to know what the killer app for blockchain is? Freedom.

The ability to do and create exactly what you love. The ability to automate your job. The end of politics as we know it. A global network of trust where everybody is constantly working together to bring about the reality they desire. All with out force.

If you have software needs for human interactions they are all possible today on blockchain. It took me several hours longer to write this speech than to adapt an AR application to a serverless dApp. The gap between what is possible today and what we are doing today might as well be the Grand Canyon. But I'm telling you now, if you want to get to the other side... you just have to believe you're there. Put on a set of VR glasses and turn that belief in to shared reality.

You can interact with me in the same way our first investor did from the Phillipines. He sent us 40 cents in 3 seconds. The cheapest way to send a dollar costs $4 with out blockchain. People now have the ability to invest everywhere with internet, that's half the people in the world... and everybody by 2022. Now he can set up a digital good or services shop in VR and interact with the globe for feeless micro-payments as well.

This is what its like to participate in a global network of trust. In fact somebody in Indonesia built an entire house with their earnings from Steem. We are turning art, knowledge, and experience in to real wealth.

You can take what you love and put it on blockchain. With AR I really do mean anything. And simply by doing and sharing what you love; you are making the world a better place. One I'd rather live in.

I'm so excited for tomorrow!! I love seeing the things people have created and come up with. I love that what I do helps people do what they love. I love being part of the answer.

So speak your passions! Find your community. Build your future.

You create your reality. You power your world.

Welcome to the limitless user experience we call life.