Video of the Foresight Salon on Blockchain as it pertains to multiple areas of Economy, Government, AI, its power as social force, source for truth, and its ecosystem as role model for security.
YOUTUBE lS1p_iF7tEU Published on May 15, 2017
- Steve Omohundro, Director at Possibility Research How can blockchain be applied to regulate AI, biotech, and nanotech? How can digital contracts in blockchain apply AI sensors and actuators to interact with the world?
- Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director at Hyperledger We map the landscape of distributed ledgers and smart contracts. How can we get these (r)evolutionary tools into production this year?
- Mark S. Miller, Senior Fellow at Foresight Institute Decentralized smart contracts; computer security as the future of law; "The Blockchain" is too centralized. We want our fundamental computing fabric to be decentralized and robust systems that can cooperate while remaining mutually suspicious.
- Christopher Allen, Principal Architect at Blockstream How can we more effectively collaborate?
Moderated by Allison Duettmann, Foresight Institute
Computer security, for many purposes, can be divided into three categories: integrity (authorized actions on data), availability (ability to operate over time), confidentiality (ability to hide information). Blockchain is very good at integrity and offers nothing for confidentiality.
Immutability of Etherium's blockchain contributed to the hack of The DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) which led to the hot fork of Etherium. wikipedia 
That attack is one of the best things that has happened in the block chain ecosystem. Some code was deployed with security vulnerabilities, with real resources behind it, and it died a quick death. This creates high incentives to increase security of code.
US government is philosophically supposed to be in service of Citizens, but in practice, the government has great access to information about Citizens whereas the operations of Government are largely opaque to the Citizens.
The DAO and Bitcoin have been interesting particularly for the ways they attempt to correct the gross imbalance of power in our world. The hunger for solutions to this imbalance lead many to adopt immature solutions too soon.
Christopher Allen offers 10 Principles of something: What do we want from blockchain? 1. Everyone is a peer. Everyone is the root of their own network. 2. Everyone can discover other peers and associate with them freely, or not, as they choose. 3. All peers have equal access, including censorchip resistance and low barriers of participation. 4. The costs of participating in this network are in proportion to the benefits. Some people aren't making profits when others are doing the work. 5. Everyone can be a producer or consumer. (there are 10 of these from Christopher Allen somewhere on twitter)
There are compelling reasons to fear the application of AI and static analysis of code to the identification of software vulnerabilities, especially when the state of the art in the software running our institutions is profoundly insecure, and the AIs can observe the behavior of the software in the wild as it responds to attack.
Housing in an earthquake zone as a metaphor for addressing this widespread insecurity: Begin constructing all new housing (or software) with earthquake resistance (or exploit resistance) as insurance against the risk of an earthquake (or exploit of 0-day vulnerabilities). Whenever the earthquake comes, there will be some percentage of houses left standing with which to seed the reconstruction of those which failed.
Vermont voted for blockchain public records. Delaware has legislation in flight to allow blockchain into corporate law (which is substantial because so many US businesses are incorporated under Delaware law). (TODO: find some links)