Original subtitles

(eerie music)

If you take the early years of the internet,

when there were only geeks like me and others on to that,

You really couldn't use it for that much,

but you knew it had enormous potential.

You could communicate via protocol

to any computer hooked up to that network.

Wow.

That's like, "woah".

But the premise of blockchain is actually much further than that,

becasue we already have that.

But it is about how we transact.

(static noise)

Who can you trust?

Fake news,

lying politicians,

corrupted banks,

nations in freefall.

In a time of conflict this is crucial.

When neutral media has fled the scene,

and all we are left with is our selves.

(helicopter propellers)

The only thing certain is numbers.

In a time when information was kept secret,

and under the radar,

I put my trust in code.

(computer keyboard typing)

Me and Rizah were hacking whatever

system we could get into.

Inserting worms, Trojan horses and spyware,

hoping it would buy us and our families some time.

But we were running out…

(loud banging on the door)

Expecting anyone?

No.

(tense music)

Hello?

- Who was it? - I don't know.

Someone left this.

With your name on it.

Creepy.

What is it?

From the moment I saw the photographs...

(girl crying)

I knew somebody had trusted us with their life.

I know it sounds funny because,

that envelope was like a death sentence, really.

But it gave me hope.

We had some hard evidence, and it was given to me.

Somebody had trusted us.

Trust is very hard to define.

An essential glue in the social fabric.

So, a society without trust is not really a society.

Society, it's a regional peculiarity.

It is really important to understand that.

The blockchain is a global technology.

It exists in places that essentially don't have society.

(tense music)

But of course, in everyday life,

we trust technologies in a number of ways.

We depend on them.

So, that means that trust runs very deep

also into the technological infrastructure

that governs many aspects our lives.

The Chain Cloud.

One of my first apps.

It was, well is, a cloud service to upload,

store and share anything digital.

Built on the blockchain protocol, decentralised,

secured by millions of computers working in sync.

That made practically it un-hackable,

and only accessible if you know the cryptographic key.

(whispered counting)

Memorize the key, and your stuff will be safe.

The blockchain is this new network of trust

that enables transactions to be validated on computers.

So now, instead of going to a third party,

instead of going to an intermediary

that could be a bank, or a financial institution

or a corporation, that we trust today.

The trust is going to be in the network of computers

that are talking with each other,

that are always in synch with eachother,

that always know what the others are doing.

That is why we say the that blockchain is a trust network.

That was my last one.

Oh shit!

(suspenseful music)

(gunshot)

(upbeat synth)

We had destroyed all the evidence,

but also all our papers.

I have been thinking a lot about that.

Just a decade ago, it would mean erasing ourselves.

But not then. Not now.

This just felt like freedom.

So, 90 days from now?

Yes, 90 days...

Be careful.

You too.

You know, when I was a kid.

All my communication services were

provided by the establishment.

By the government.

My phone, my mail, my radio, my television,

it was all provided by the establishment.

By the government itself.

My kids today,

they don't use the government for any of those things.

They don't need their phones,

they don't need their mail, they don't need their radio

and they definitely don't need their tv.

Because the internet was signalling the separation

of communication and media from state.

It just separated the two,

like there was a separation of religion and state.

Today, much of the establishment

is about serving the need of storing common repositories.

Whether it is the most important common repository, the banks

- who has how much money, or how much whatever -

that is one repository,

but there is also land repositories,

there is also health records, and criminal records,

and all those repositories that are managed by the state.

By the government.

They are not needed for that anymore.

Is it anti-establishment?

Is the internet anti-establishment?

It is not 'anti'.

It's just a better alternative, a more advanced technology

to achieve the same thing without

need for central control.

The promise of this technology,

coupled with others,

provides the notion that the trust

that used to be, or still is,

within third party organizations,

is something that is questioned.

(muffled telephone call)

Nazreen Aini?

- Vicky Jones. - Nazreen.

Shall we?

Ok Nazreen, let's just go over this one more time.

You are Nazreen Aini, 26 years old.

And you lost all your ID papers when you fled.

No, stolen.

All my ID papers were stolen by traffickers.

What I would like to know is:

how did you get here without any papers?

Well, have you heard about blockchain?

Okay, what has the blockchain to do

with you being here with no papers?

Well, before I fled,

I uploaded all my documents into a Digital Grab Bag.

Ok, so you know computing?

Fundamentally, a blockchain can ensure that you can transact

in a way which is safe, secure and trusted.

Now, most ways that we transact in society today,

we are dependent on a third party to have established trust.

But the blockchain eradicates, or can eradicate,

the fact that trust needs to be established

between these two people.

I am not talking only about monetary transactions.

Because I think there is much bigger

potential in other places before that.

Identity is something which is massive.

So once you start moving to those things,

you are actually moving into the fourth industrial revolution,

which is that technology will become

an inherent part of our society.

So, the bus will take you to the Refugee Centre,

and then you will hear from us

when we have proceeded your case.

- Ok. - Ok.

- Good luck. - Thank you.

(car door slams)

At that point, my life depended entirely on the blockchain.

That's what kept me safe.

I was memorizing the cryptographic key

as a matter of life and death.

I remember thinking,

this is how it feels to put your trust in numbers.

(sinister horn)

(sultry music)

Adil?

How much?

- 1,500 with papers. - No papers.

1,500 anyway.

No, no. Bitcoin only.

I don't… I lost my mobile. This is all I have. Please. Please?

Come on! Get in!

Fucking cash!

(upbeat music)

There was nothing special about my escape.

I tried to blend in.

Never argue, never laugh.

Just disappear.

Get on the boat, into the cars, the trains,

pass the borders and avoid the authorities.

Do you think these papers will work?

(slow piano music)

I think so.

We need trust, Adil. We have no choice.

Would I still have left

if I knew how my new society would welcome me?

Move!

Hey ! you stop.

(heavy, fast-paced music)

(alarm)

Next!

Drop your clothes in the freezer.

You get your gear back in a couple of days.

But, why?

To kill your bugs.

Next!

Drop your clothes in the freezer.

You get your gear back in a couple of days.

(tense music)

So that was a little bit about resident application procedure.

Now, let's move on to personal economy.

The most common currency here is Eurobits.

It's the official cryptocurrency,

that can be used for anything

from buying in a grocery store,

shopping online, to paying for public transportation.

Does anyone know what a cryptocurrency is?

Cryptocurrency is like money with a purpose.

So, now we can program money to allow it to be transferred

based on some conditions.

So we can do scenarios like:

"If... this... then... that".

And that is why a lot of developers

are very excited about the blockchain,

because now they can program money

in ways that were not possible before.

The easiest way to understand it is to say

that right now I give you money, I give you one dollar,

but the thing is, I can now attach conditions to it.

So I can say, "you will only get this money,

if you spend it for this."

So for pocket money, lets say, for a parent,

you'll have total control over the money.

If that money is not spent for what

we think it is going to spent for,

it comes back into my wallet, magically, by itself.

If I were to ask you 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago,

And

"How much would it cost me to issue a digital currency

that anyone in the world can use?"

You are probably going to tell me it's going to cost you...

No money would be enough!

But now it costs a dollar.

Your allowances, however, will be in Restricted Eurobits.

Hence the "r".

They are only valid for buying food,

hygienic products, and local buses... necessities.

You cannot send them as remittances

or buying any international travel tickets...

We all think we live in a free market.

We don't.

A free market is a free market

where you have choice of currency.

We don't have that, we have a monopoly of currency.

We think we live in a free market,

which doesn't work for some reason.

Why doesn't the free market work?

Because it's not free. It's very monopolistic.

A free market is not just about a choice of

how you want to spend your money.

It's about the choice of how you want to hold your money.

Okay, let's try to transfer some of your allowances.

If you think about it, every currency is a community.

It is a community of its holders.

Which is what gives it value, because they value it.

When I am choosing to change what I hold,

So, instead of holding this currency,

I want to hold a different one.

Essentially I am moving between groups.

And I'm making that group stronger,

or making the group I left weaker.

So, you have a lot of effect as an individual,

by the choice of how you want to store your capital.

And you can argue that this choice

is even stronger than the choice that you apply when you vote.

Because it has an actual and direct effect on these economies

that you choose from.

(murmured chattering)

This was my new family.

Inspite of our different beliefs

and cultural backgrounds,

we had something in common.

We had all experienced badly run governments,

corrupted states, bribes and hyperinflation,

manipulated elections, conflicts

and now we shared the same restricted currency.

My new family was born out of mistrust.

Tea, please?

(tense music builds)

…"In order to place a democratically

chosen candidate in power.

The ruling party has won a landslide victory

in yesterday's general elections".

How is your company going, Nazreen?

Are you and…

- Rizah? - Yes Rizah!

And are you well?

It's ok.

We are so proud of you.

- Heh! - Yes, yes….good.

The integrity of the electoral process have been compromised…

Now…let's eat!

(laughter)

Well, it started being anti-establishment.

The idea that you're going to issue currency

without requiring a central bank.

Very radical.

In those days it was called bitcoin.

And people pretty quickly realised that they

were operating in a position

were they had lots and lots of legal exposure,

because although they had something that worked,

they did not have something which could be governed.

What comes of this is this term blockchain,

which is where you take the political vision of bitcoin,

split it away from the technology of bitcoin

and throw away the political vision.

Now, a lot of people then think,

well, we sold out, the game is over.

Actually, I used to say, look, I don't fear the state.

I fear that the state will collapse before

we have a meaningful alternative.

So, I started worrying about global financial collapse in 2003.

When it hit in 2008, I was extremely surprised

that the collapse didn't go further immediately.

Instead, we are on a much slower path,

where the American democracy is at breaking point.

Not because they did anything anti-democratic,

but because America got in to a position where

the culture couldn't keep all the promises to its own people.

We're in a position where you can legitimately see cracks

on the façade of the world's most powerful government.

Into this we then put the bitcoin story.

If the dollar collapses, what is bitcoin worth?

Right?

A bitcoin is still going to be worth a bitcoin,

but if the dollar is worth a tenth of what it is today,

you might see your bitcoin is worth 100,000 dollars

not because the bitcoin is suddenly worth a lot more,

but because the dollar is worth an awful lot less.

In that scenario,

if bitcoin then winds up heavily used to maintain global trade,

because it is stable, and not controlled by anybody...

Anti-government? Anti-establishment?

Or is it the new establishment?

(creaking train)

(suspenseful music)

I'm scared.

We stick to the plan.

Once you and me and our families are safe,

we meet where we agreed and release the documents.

The world needs to know, Nazreen.

I am so sorry.

Restricted currency…

What a waste of potential.

Money should be moving.

(music playing from car)

Restricted Eurobits wasn't going to help me or my family.

I needed to get hold of some real money.

- Hi. - Hi.

R-Eurobits?

- R-Eurobits to...? - Bitcoin.

- That's 100 to 1. - 100 to 1?

- Yeah. - That's…

- I know. - Ok.

Yeah, ok.

Could I borrow the computer?

Yeah, ok.

Use FreeTransfer. It's safe.

Okay.

(door creaks open)

(tense music)

On the one hand you have money that is programmable.

You can send it across the entire world,

instantaneously, almost free.

You can send it to old people, to young people,

to poor people, to rich people,

to people across races, ethnicities.

I can send money to someone in

Indonesia right now if I want to.

And with Fiat money none of these things applies.

Fiat currency is not going to go away the way we see it today.

However, cryptocurrency is going to

take an increasingly important and increasingly larger role.

Whenever someone comes and says,

"Here comes some technology,

and it is going to make the industry obsolete."

It never makes an industry obsolete, it changes it.

So, the key is to change with technology

if the technology has an impact on what you are doing.

Who would spend bitcoin to pay for a pizza today?

I could buy a pizza to you and we could have some beers.

And then tomorrow I could have bought 3 pizzas and 20 beers.

It just doesn't make any sense.

The fluctuating value of cryptocurrencies

is not a feature and it is not a bug neither.

It is more a symptom of something underlying.

And the underlying thing here is what we

call the monetization of a new asset.

And 10,000 years ago gold was monetized.

Gold started as just a normal commodity,

and it turned into money.

It took many, many thousands of years.

But gold ended up as something having massive value.

The same thing is happening now

with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

They're going from something which is not money, into money.

And because the supply is limited,

the price necessarily has to rise immensely.

I had put the fate of my family in a fraction of a Bitcoin.

All I could do was hope it would get them out

and in safety.

(melancholic piano)

The days in the Refugee Centre seemed endless.

I isolated myself with my thoughts.

(upbeat music)

(door knocking)

Expecting anyone?

No.

Hello?

- Who was it? - I don't know.

Someone left this. With your name on it.

(scream)

(door knocking)

Are you ok? I heard you scream.

I'm fine. Just a bad dream.

I know it is not easy to leave it all behind.

We're going to have a gathering now in

the common room. You might want to…

Some other time, maybe…

(suspensful music)

They were all dead.

If they catch us with those photographs, we're next.

Listen! This place is not safe.

We need to clear it up and get the hell out of here!

(intense music)

I am scared.

We stick to the plan.

Once you and me and our families are safe,

we meet where we agreed and release the documents.

The world needs to know, Nazreen.

Nazreen, we are going to be fine.

Come here.

Trust me.

(dramatic music)

Rizah? Where are you?

(tense music)

(tense music gets faster)

(music grows quieter)

You must have made quite an impression.

It usually takes months to get an e-Resident number.

I don't know…

Well, listen carefully.

That number comes with a set of rules that you must follow.

For the next 6 months:

One: Do not leave the state.

Two: Do not break the law. And I mean, at all!

Even a subway fine will get you in trouble.

Listen!

Nazreen, I am telling you this because

your number is set up with a smart contract,

a set of automated rules and if you break them,

well, then you don't have any possibilities to repeal.

You will be dealing with a machine. Ok?

Ok, so, a smart contract is a piece of code

that executes and transacts when certain conditions are met.

If you look at a contract made by a lawyer

you will recognize very quickly that all of it could be code

instead of being a word document.

Because everything is,

"In the event of this, we will do this,

and if this happens, then that will..."

So, everything is really programming loops with events.

That could be recreated in any programming language.

So what needs to happen

is that lawyers need to brush up on

their programming skills rapidly,

because from now all the contracts

they make will be made in code.

Well, the bottom line is we don't know whether the smart

contract is going to turn out to be important or not.

But the world works right now largely on paper,

or close simulations of paper.

A PDF file that is emailed is a close simulation of paper.

It's a slightly more convenient way of doing paper,

but it doesn't really do anything paper can't do.

So to all intents of purposes,

we just have manual processes with electronic communications.

And that is consuming 10... 20... 30%

of the people in any organization.

Because those manual processes are

what you think of as craft production.

We have craft production of deals.

It is like chipping away with a mallet.

And, craft production of deals makes the deals unreliable.

One in 20 goes wrong.

So if you have a process which has

five or six deals interconnected,

that process will have an error rate of about 30%.

So, to get rid of that problem

we then create organizations in the middle

which buffer the uncertainty of these deals,

and these are things like prime contractors.

So, the world is made of huge buffering organizations

that take the unreliability of the ordinary world

and pad it to try and produce something

which is reliable and efficient.

(electronic music)

May I come in for a minute?

Yes, I was just packing my bag, it didn't take me too long.

It's a perk of being on the run, I guess.

So, the social service got you a flat?

Yes.

You know, I got something for you.

My son is into online gaming and

these things quickly get outdated, so...

But it is very good for surfing and…

Thank you, I…

No need for that. Good luck!

Nazreen, you know what?

You have to go out there and make yourself trustworthy.

No one will ever trust a refugee.

Go out there and prove yourself. Okay?

(hopeful electronic music)

(keyboard tapping)

It was like getting my life back.

It did not take them long to track me down.

We are in a race. We are.

It's an industrial race, and every country is out

there to capitalize off this and make money.

And that's how the world works and that's fine.

But then let's be at the forefront of that

and let's be the ones that takes responsibility.

Right now, the PR is that

it is all decentralization, privacy, encryption and wonder.

It could very easily also become

the perfect machinery for tracking everything

in the world and changing the law in an arbitrary fashion

and having robots carry out the rule changes.

You're going to like one of those a lot more

than you're going to like the other.

(electronic music)

Why are you fearing that we implement this technology?

Well, because of this and that.

Maybe you have point. So what do we do about it?

We fall too easily prey to this story

that we cannot control technology,

and we shouldn't control it,

that we should just give them free rein.

That they should run their course,

and then we should try to patch up

the negative consequences afterwards.

If you don't care

about the technologies that are emerging today,

and you don't try to understand what is coming,

you are irrelevant in the future.

(loud footsteps)

(quiet music builds)

(calm piano music)

My own flat.

It wasn't much.

But all my friends were here.

(computer notification beep)

I got invited by some hackers to a Hackathon.

I had the possibility of a job.

Things were looking good.

The only one missing was Rizah.

(upbeat music)

It was just like the old days.

They were all here, the stressed out organizers,

the confident developers the hackers,

and the ones you want to impress, the investors.

OK, welcome everybody! This is the Hackathon!

Hackathons always had that special energy.

All these programmers coming together to push the boundaries.

We were like pioneers at the frontier of technology.

Ok, everyone. Your 24 hours starts now!

(overlapping conversation)

- Hi guys. - Hi!

Do you guys need a programmer?

Absolutely, have a seat.

So what's the idea?

That is what we are trying to find out.

Yeah, we're brainstorming.

Trying to find out what we could do to make a huge impact.

And we're just trying to find some sort of

narrow group of people

and find a problem that we can solve in 24 hours.

Not an easy task.

(laughter)

So if you can program something right now, that would be great!

I will do my best!

(laughter)

Before, people would say,

"What do you want to do with blockchain?"

And everyone says, "Well, we want to change the world."

And it's like, "Well, you and everyone else, buddy!"

But it is actually us and everyone else, right?

It's you. It's me. It's the crew.

It's everyone who's going to connect.

Education is key, and if we empower people,

we have more control over what happens in our society.

Be it for better or for worse.

We don't believe in fairy tales.

Not everything is going to be smooth.

But with blockchain it will help us develop future technology

in a way that can be moderated to some degree by all of us.

I totally lost myself in the writing.

Gone was the escape, the photographs.

Even Rizah faded.

(beeping)

But then it all came back,

and hit me like a bullet.

(tense music, typing)

(frantic music)

Nazreen! Nazreen!

Nazreen? Nazreen? It's Eve!

Hello! Nazreen! What are you doing here?

It's freezing cold!

Come, come.

So, The thing about trust is...

It is very easy for people to focus on trust,

but, again, trust is kind of a ghost.

Trust is really just another way of saying, "nothing went wrong".

But I think that trust produces a very

fuzzy sense of relations between people.

Relations between people are not what you want technology for.

Trust feels nice because we have a human instinct towards trust.

But, in a 7.5-billion-person world

with lots and lots of trouble all around that world,

trust is actually probably not going to extend into

the places that we want to extend trade.

What you really want is reliability.

How do you engineer reliability into the transactions

that you have with people in faraway places

where there is no basis for trust?

Right? Trustless.

Listen Eve,

I want to thank you for everything you've done.

For trusting me.

No need for that.

I don't need any technology

to tell me who's a good person or not.

I have always trusted my instincts.

You are so old school…

(computer notification beep)

The release,

I totally forgot.

It's today!

You held on to that as it was a matter of life or death!

I need your help.

Can you drive me?

(blues riff)

Sure...

Are you in trouble?

I don't know.

Anti-government? Anti-establishment?

Or is it the new establishment?

"Oh, those boys from the internet

figured out global currency".

"Well, they figured out global communications,

why shouldn't they figure out global currency?"

"We got currency that works as well as email. Amazing!"

Anti-establishment? Early-establishment?

New-establishment? Which way are we going here?

I don't think anybody has an answer to that.

But I've been to a couple of events this year,

when I look around it was like,

"Wow, this is a gathering of the new global elite".

It's a different global elite.

They are more randomly selected than the existing global elite.

The rules of the game they are playing are very different.

But do you get a better society just

because you put nerds in charge?

I guess we are going to find out,

because no one seems able to compete with us effectively.

What happens next?

(tense music)

Are you sure this is the right place?

I think so.

No matter what you're up to, please be careful.

We need to be more clear about the

strong presence of technology

in shaping or co-shaping our societies.

Technology is both good and bad,

and it's always involved in a number of goods and bads.

But it's never really neutral.

The technology itself could be indifferent

to whether you use it

in a certain way or that way, of course.

But we know since Francis Bacon, in the 16th century, he said,

"Power and knowledge are one."

Can we put our trust in numbers?

I don't know, but let me take a guess.

We will always need to take the first step.

Take a chance on that something or someone unknown.

Let go.

And allow your trust in people pull you over the gap.

This is for you, Rizah.

(quiet piano music)

Last card.

(background television voice)

…catalogue war crimes in real-time

during the ongoing civil war…

Thank you, Ann.

The controversy known as the blockchain leaks,

seems far from over.

Global consultants Johnson and Piers…

Oh shit!

Nazreen! You did it...

She did it!

(laughter)

She did it!

Look.

I have to sit down.

Latest developments suggest

that global consultancy giant Johnson and Pierce

have facilitated arms contracts

between European governments and the regime.

The question everybody ask now is, how could this happen?

A press conference has been issued for 8 pm tonight.

Until then, all we can say for sure is,

this is getting ugly.

(exciting electronic music)