Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…But the point is, yeah, that would break Bitcoin. That would also break all security. You could log in to any account anywhere. So it would break the traditional system too. Absolutely. One other little aside—which I think is a fun place to put it here—is this notion of public-key encryption, which is advancing further on this idea of using one-way functions. Which is the thing we were talking about earlier where I can broadcast my public key so anybody can send something to me, but only I have the private key. I am the only person who can either decrypt the message, send it to someone else, or however you decide to leverage that. This concept is actually born out of that 1874 discovery of prime factorization. Pretty amazingly, two different groups of people took this idea and turned it into this public/private key discovery right around the same time—1973 in Britain—but they kept it a secret because they wanted to use it for defense because it’s freaking brilliant that you have the notion of transmitting messages in a more secure way on the battlefield. The very same idea was discovered within the same time and ultimately was publicly announced in 1977—now known as RSA encryption. It’s crazy to me that it’s like physics or calculus where private/public key encryption was dually discovered in the same decade by different people who had no notion of each other. In fact, the first set of people was desperately trying to keep it a national security secret. It’s like the world was just ready for the discovery. Technology and modern math had advanced to the point where based on the same foundation, two different groups could independently make the same invention simultaneously, which is just really interesting. Totally. Okay, now we’ve got our math lessons done. We know how encryption works. We know private and public keys. We know why that’s better than the traditional financial system. Now we also know with blockchain why and how mining creates this scarcity and makes sure that transactions that are legitimate transactions are the only ones that can happen. What’s cool here is this basically turns into a regular Acquired episode now. Remember how we’re saying that as the system of mining grows, the more mining power that goes in, the more transactions that happen, it becomes a network economy, and then the overall value grows. It’s just like Facebook. Think back to the social network, which is going to come up in a second, that line of if you created Facebook, you’d have created Facebook. Anybody can create Facebook, anybody can create Twitter. Look at Parler. The question isn’t creating it, it’s getting critical massive usage. It’s valued based on network economies, we know how to value them—Metcalfe's law, which is the value of the economy is the square of the participating nodes within it. Now, it becomes a race because anybody could take the white paper and start their own coins, their own cryptocurrencies, their own Blockchains. JP Morgan could just go take this and implement it for all of their clients.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.