devcon 1 Cryptographer and legal expert Nick Szabo charted a historical course to today’s Ethereum smart contracts which can substitute and army of lawyers, accountants and policemen. His keynote speech at DevCon1, History Of The Blockchain, drew upon an eclectic range of source material including the novelist Ann Rynd, economist Friedrich Hayek, sealable police evidence bags and Aztec gold. The overarching theme was security: how this has been deployed at physical and virtual bottlenecks and the shift to decentralised models like secure cryptocurrencies, leading to the enabling of automated smart contracts. Szabo began with a mention of Ayn Rand – "I’ve never actually finished one of her books" – and Hayek, who were both "big political and philosophical inspirations to the cypherpunk movement". “Try to secure as much as possible. With original cryptography you are just trying to secure one narrow thing – say communications and you are trying to secure it from a third party” Rand’s philosophical system Objectivism supports autonomous institutions albeit based on some questionable ethics; the 2008 financial crash spurred interest in her work. Hayek’s studies in classical liberalism delved into "the basic protocol layer underlying society – property and contracts" and how these are secured. Szobo said radio broadcasting and railways are good examples of historically very centralised systems. The vulnerability of such systems was clearly shown when the Communists took over in Russia; they only had to gain control of some newspapers and the railways. In the history of physical wealth, he pointed to the Aztecs, whose gold was looted by the Spanish, who then battled with Francis Drake and English piracy for it. Jumping ahead to the Second World War, German U-Boats sunk British ships, preventing the transport of gold and the causing the collapse of the Gold Standard. In the present […]
