The Power of Bitcoin, Don't Panic | An Interview with David Orban

My name is David Orban and I am the founder and managing partner of Network Society Ventures. We are a seed stage investment firm investing in the intersection of exponential technologies and decentralization. When 10,000 years ago, we adopted the agricultural technologies that start our trajectory as a technological civilization, we didn't know what we were bargaining for. For a long time our lives were worse than in the hunter gatherer stage, as demonstrated by an average shorter human, by an average shorter life. But today we are at a point finally where technology is allowing us to be more human than we would be. That is the promise of the technologies of the future to make sure that we can fulfill our human potential. If you ask a hundred people if they like what they do every day, their jobs, 80 out of 100 will say that they hate their jobs. But today's social contract clearly says that if you are unemployed, you can go and die in a ditch. Human dignity should not be measured based on your economic output. And one of the big challenges is to design a new human contract that clearly recognizes this. As we move from proof of work to proof of stake algorithms in the blockchain explorations, we may recognize that all of us humans have a stake in our civilization. And the role and the dignity and the value of every human is not recognized by its work, but by its stake. Because all of the 7 billion brains are needed to address and to solve our grandest challenges. Our assumptions of what is possible as we build ever more complex civilizations, leveraging advanced technologies must not be biased. As we learn what the future looks like from Hollywood style dystopia. It is important that we understand that humanity overall achieved what we globally achieved because of the positive effect of technology. It is not a zero sum game. I am not winning because you are losing. We all advance thanks to advancing technology. That is going to be true in the future as well. And I believe that blockchain leading to more transparent and accountable organizations is going to be a net positive. Of course, we are at the very beginning of understanding what are the implications of this. And we have to be very careful so that as we design systems, they can lead the way to the adaptations and the variations that are going to be necessary as we learn more and more about them. The Internet 30, 40 years ago was born as a pure peer to peer network. The architecture was inherently decentralized. That is the reason it was designed as a project in the Defense Advanced Project Agency. So today's Internet is a perversion. It has been perverted. It has been applied to corporate use with incredibly positive effects. In terms of profit making, but it betrayed its original purpose. One of the most important promises of blockchain is to rebalance the overly centralized, desirably vulnerable Internet architecture of today towards more reliable and resilient alternatives tomorrow. If you imagine that we are able to deliver on the promise of a space faring civilization, where, together with our robots, we expect the universe, and you ask yourself, are these new projects going to settle their economic transactions with credit cards or banknotes? Evidently, the answer is neither. Blockchain is going to play a fundamental part of the future, as swarms of intelligent robots are going to mine the asteroid belt for resources that are going to build the civilization of the 21st century. When I was born in Hungary under the communist regime in the previous millennium, the assumption was that fanatic egalitarianism was desirable. But would you really want to stop Elon Musk from going to Mars? Because there are other problems that we need to solve first. And are you ready to decide that he shouldn't do that, he should be doing that other thing instead? Who are you to make the decision? And if you are not the person making that decision, or more likely, if there is nobody who should make that decision, Isn't it reasonable that we should allow everybody to pursue their passion, their creativity, Even if this leads to differences among individuals in their aspirations and in their successes? This kind of difference should not frighten us. What we should care about is to give everybody the same opportunity. This opportunity today comes from actionable knowledge. Evangelizing bitcoin, evangelizing blockchain turns your friends, your community, into people who participate in the revolution that we are so enthusiastic about. If they are passive, they will potentially stay behind. And one of the challenges for the future, Whether from a financial inclusion point of view, or from the point of view of a rapid evolution of the definition of what it means to be human, is going to be how to give support and how to include in the future civilization those who knowingly decide to stay behind.