Sub templum megaupload

Carousel Previous. Carousel Next. What is Scribd? Explore Ebooks. Bestsellers Editors' Picks All Ebooks. Explore Audiobooks. Bestsellers Editors' Picks All audiobooks. Explore Magazines. Editors' Picks All magazines. Explore Podcasts All podcasts. Difficulty Beginner Intermediate Advanced. Explore Documents. Uploaded by bw. Document Information click to expand document information Original Title adccds.

Did you find this document useful? Is this content inappropriate? Report this Document. Flag for inappropriate content. Download now. Save Save adccds For Later. Original Title: adccds. Related titles. Carousel Previous Carousel Next. The World Is Flat 3. Jump to Page. Kinue first tried to sign herself to Scholastic book company, a children's book company.

However, when she sent her first book to the company to be initiated, it was rejected by her editor for being "too violent". Kinue re-read her first book "The Desert Race" and saw that her editor was right, it was too violent to be signed to a children's scholarship company. However many book companies she signed herself to, though, adult or children, they all said that her book was "too unproffesionally written.

Kinue, after looking up how to write a good story on Yahoo! Answers, found some answers that the smoking of bong and hallucogenic drugs was the greatest resort to writing sophisticated and proffesional sounding pieces of work. Kinue, following these directions, eventually found an underground drug dealing company called Sub Templum.

The company, which was largely decorated with occult symbolism, was managed by Cheech and Chong, gave Kinue her first bong session, to test it out for free and come back if she liked it. Kinue, after smoking this device at midnight, wrote down some of the sickest art on her paper, artful writing that she never would've thought she'd have been able to do without the bong. Kinue came back to Cheech and Chong, and told them the drug helped her alot.

Kinue's drug use was very limited at first, as she knew how much it could harm her if she took excessive drugs. She wrote chapter by chapter at a time under influence of the Sub Templum, eventually until she reached the 52th chapter of her first book.

Kinue, however, started to push the writings, and in turn bong use, over the limit. Instead of limiting her self to one ounce of weed like she did with other days, she began to smoke 4 ounces, and eventually rid herself of the bong to taste the full effect of the weed. Over the long run, the important questions are whether the approach to trust that the Bitcoin network introduced is fundamentally sound, and if so, what factors might lead to the success or failure of systems employing it.

Cryptocurrencies present one thing on the surface money from nothing and something considerably deeper underneath a new pattern for generating trust. That helps to explain why they are today both overhyped and underappreciated.

The most sophisticated advances may not address real-world problems. And the winning solutions need the right combination of development talent, entrepreneurial vision, financial wherewithal, and a healthy dose of luck. Its success is as much a function of the environment as of its technical virtuosity.

The soil in which the blockchain took hold was the crumbling of trust in governments and corporations amid the financial crisis of Although the global economy largely recovered from that shock, the erosion of trust endured.

In the U. Measures of the credibility of the government and media have never been lower. Our news and information ecosystems are fragmented and unreliable.

Concerns about privacy, security, and surveillance dominate both popular and academic discourse about technology. The great information platforms that arose with the Internet are increasingly seen not as disruptors of entrenched incumbents, but as new monopolies exercising arbitrary power through their control over data. The blockchain offers a new approach to some of these challenges that, paradoxically, seems to establish collective trust on a foundation of mutual Introduction 5 distrust. It is built on open-source software and decentralized foundations that allow anyone to participate.

And the trust it offers has unusually broad applicability. Initially championed by radical technolibertarians, blockchain-related technologies now count major corporations, entrepreneurs in many sectors, and even governments as their advocates. Enthusiasm for the blockchain has been remarkable for such a novel technology. Individuals around the world who never invested in anything more exotic than a mutual fund are rushing to buy cryptocurrencies, or application tokens issued by early-stage start-ups.

The blockchain could help financial institutions to clear stock transactions, global supply chains to ensure food safety; localities to keep track of who owns what rights in real property, publishers to deliver online advertisements to users, utilities to track dispersed energy sensors and buy power from microgrid operators, immigrants to send money back to their relatives in the developing world, health-care providers to access medical records, and aid organizations to track distributions.

These and many other examples will be discussed throughout this book. The diversity of potential blockchain applications is as breathtaking as their scale. All this is true. Yet it is only half the story. Much of the investment activity around cryptocurrencies is pure speculation, and some involves fraud or price manipulation.

Viewed from every angle, the level of blockchain adoption is still rather small. There are far more prototypes than production systems.

Sustainable business models remain largely unproved. And just because a firm can use a distributed ledger approach does not mean it should. The advantages in practice are not always as great as promised, and the implementation challenges often have little to do with the technology itself. As a result, use cases for blockchain-based systems are not certain, and most are likely to take longer than expected. Almost a decade in, some fundamental technical questions are not yet resolved. Even the premise that the blockchain will promote decentralization rather than concentrations of power is debatable.

Meanwhile, governments will be neither ignorant nor impotent in the face of significant consumer harm or illicit activity. The two critiques that have dogged the field since its inception remain insufficiently refuted: that the blockchain is a better tool for criminals than for legitimate users, and that committing resources while trusting no one is a dangerous proposition.

These problems are not surprising. As the economic historian Carlota Perez has documented in her book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, speculative bubbles are a common feature of what in hindsight were major technology-fed business revolutions. Moreover, as fast as technology moves, people and systems take time to change. Robust infrastructure and standards do not appear overnight. The Internet, the technological wave to which the blockchain is often compared, spent two decades as a research network; and even once commercial adoption began to take off, maturation took a further decade or more.

And most critically, if solutions built on blockchains and related distributed ledgers are to be both trusted and trustworthy, they must confront the hard problems of governance. Even if the math works perfectly, blockchains are systems designed, implemented, and used by humans. Subjective intent remains relevant even when expressed through objective code. The businesses and services built around blockchains are vulnerable to selfish behavior, attacks, and manipulation, even if the networks themselves are secure.

Incentives for different participating communities cannot always be aligned. And when something goes wrong—which it will—those who lose out will not be content to accept their fate meekly. If trust means nothing more than confidence in outcomes, one can have it without needing to deal with human complexities. But that is not what trust is. Philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and management scholars who have studied trust may not agree on a single definition, but they generally conclude that trust implies some degree of uncertainty or vulnerability.

What it takes to promote robust trust through blockchainbased systems is the subject of this book. Logically Centralized, Organizationally Decentralized The basic function of blockchains is to reliably share information among parties who may not trust one another.

In other words, everyone can have his or her own copy of a ledger and trust that all those copies remain the same, even without a central administrator or master version. With a polygraph, the copy is created in parallel with the original. Nodes in a blockchain network are in constant communication in order to remain synchronized. Maintaining that consensus without trusting a master copy is the hard part.

If successful, this approach addresses significant limitations of centralized ledgers. If one node keeps a master record, it becomes a single point of failure for the system.

Users cannot be certain that the information they see is accurate because it is outside their control. The central control point or intermediary can become extremely powerful—and can misuse that power. If, on the other hand, each organization keeps its own ledger as with most corporate financial records , every transaction is recorded independently at least twice.

This introduces complexity, delay, and possibilities for error. From a seemingly mundane change in tracking methods, a wealth of opportunities arise. Money, for example, depends on people trusting that their coins are valid, counterfeiting is limited, and bank balances are accurate.

The first blockchain application sought to replace all that with a form of private, distributed money: bitcoin. The most extraordinary fact about the Bitcoin system is that, a decade after its launch, with the exception of a few early bugs that were fixed before there was much at stake, it has remained intact.

The Bitcoin ledger is a transparent bank vault that contains currency worth many billions of dollars. Despite the novelty of the technology, the unruliness of its community, and the massive temptation for criminals to attack a system that literally prints money, the integrity of the Bitcoin consensus network has never been breached.

Introduction 9 This does not mean that no one has been cheated. The very success of cryptocurrencies creates new problems that call for new solutions. A digital coin is a bearer instrument, meaning that, like ordinary cash, it is valuable in itself.

The same approach can be applied to any valuable right, such as ownership in scarce goods, storage or computing power on a network, or access to use an application.

And even without exchange of value through such digital tokens, having one shared ledger can add value to a universe of multi-organizational record-keeping activities. The potential impacts are stunning. The distributed model of the blockchain could, in time, power a new economy of decentralized applications and services. Some of these might compete with existing platforms such as social networks and e-commerce marketplaces; others involve novel solutions such as prediction markets. Market vicissitudes that seem decisive at the time may turn out to be insignificant or misleading.

Over the long run, though, technologies succeed when they solve real problems and create real value. Sooner or later, they find fertile conditions. Law and Quantum Thought There is another factor that is often missing from business accounts of technological innovation: law. The blockchain is not a technology of radical lawlessness, any more than of radical trustlessness.

Whether and how blockchain-based systems will be regulated are important challenges to resolve, but even more important 10 Introduction is the question of how blockchains regulate. These systems operate as mechanisms of law and governance, which will interact with established ones. There will be no universal answer. And in most cases, blockchain technology is likely to supplement or complement conventional legal regimes, not replace them.

He argues that this mental approach is important when operating at the edges of existing fields to create new concepts. Those who fixate on one dimension, whether as advocate or critic, tend to miss out on other factors of critical importance. But if he was there, he did not fire the gun. And if he did fire the gun, it was in selfdefense.

The judge or jury will resolve the outcome, but until that happens, the failure to fully evaluate any possibility is a mistake. Sometimes the unexpected happens. Sometimes it happens as a consequence of decisions based on other assumptions. Technologists inhabit the worlds of deterministic logic and computable probabilities, but lawyers are at home amid unpredictability, noncompliance, and even the possibility of catastrophe.

Law has much to contribute to the blockchain community. Concerns about money laundering, consumer protection, and financial stability do not disappear even when the cryptography works as promised. Taxation does not become unnecessary when there is a new mechanism for moving money secretly.

Disputes do not go away because a computer can execute a transaction without human intervention. Bad actors will act badly. All these scenarios will give rise to calls for legal or regulatory action. Some will be justified. If the community flatly rejects every effort to ensure compliance with legal obligations, the blockchain will be an outlaw technology, active in the dark spaces online but largely irrelevant to the mainstream economy.

That would be a tragic waste of potential. Introduction 11 At the same time, the blockchain offers important lessons for the legal community. Bitcoin demonstrates that a distributed network with no one in charge can govern itself well enough to avoid collapse and scale in value over an extended period.

Trust, which previously required either the delegation of power or tight-knit relationships, can arise from a collection of independent actors running open-source software. Regulators can also improve their effectiveness by leveraging the technology. Alternatively, ill-considered regulatory actions could push blockchain activity to other countries, send it underground, and stop valuable innovation in its tracks.

In fast-changing environments, there is a danger both of regulating too early and of regulating too late. The best approach is to use quantum thinking to assess the risks of each.

Law and the blockchain are bound to engage in a shifting dance. This begs the question of what values should shape their relationship. Technology implemented in the world is never neutral. Transformative innovations can have various impacts based on their technical architectures, as well as the legal regimes under which they operate.

Decisions made early on have an outsized impact. Once architectures and legal environments are put in place, they often become increasingly difficult to change. The Path Ahead This book is divided into three parts. Part I explains where the blockchain came from, how it works, and what it makes possible. One dimension of the story is technical. A second dimension is what it means to talk of the blockchain as a new architecture of trust.

Trust is a deeply powerful phenomenon. Its subtleties are often missed despite a centuries-long history of intellectual discourse over the concept. The blockchain purports to create trust without trusting. The truth is more complicated but no less interesting. A third dimension of the story concerns the business implications of the blockchain phenomenon. Despite an excess of 12 Introduction hype and a speculative frenzy, there are significant, real value propositions for distributed ledger technology.

Yet the scope of the blockchain opportunity reveals the gaps that the technology alone cannot overcome. There have already been several incidents where the promise of distributed trust broke down. Part II locates the solution to these challenges in the very things that the blockchain was supposedly designed to circumvent: governance, law, and regulation. Here, too, what seem like novel issues reflecting the exotic nature of blockchain technology repeat historical patterns.

When the Internet first became a mass medium in the s, it raised strikingly similar questions about the relationship of law to decentralized online communities. Distributed ledgers are, at their core, legal technologies: they are mechanisms to coordinate and enforce rules governing behavior.

Their strengths and weaknesses should be evaluated in comparison to other mechanisms for achieving the same goals. Part III looks forward. It identifies concrete steps to bridge the gaps between law and distributed ledgers, from both directions. Some are already under development; others will require collective action to address potential problems before they become endemic. The final chapter of the book considers how, if it succeeds as the foundation for a new trust architecture, the blockchain might reinvigorate the Internet itself.

The Internet as it developed became part of the problem rather than the solution to the spreading trust crisis in society. Although it will not close the yawning trust gap by itself, the blockchain offers a new hope. Realizing that hope will require both technology innovators and governments to make good decisions. That can happen only with a solid understanding of how the blockchain relates to law, as well as to trust, which this book seeks to provide. Developments are so fast-moving that some examples will likely be outdated by the time you read this book.

The start-ups prominent today may not be the long-term survivors. Yet there are also timeless themes in play. Viewing the blockchain story as a tale of trust, not just technology, helps to separate the enduring aspects from the ephemeral. Introduction 13 The blockchain can seem like an alien technology or an artifact from the future that inexplicably surfaced in the present. Situating it as an engine of law and trust helps anchor the phenomenon. How well systems based on blockchain-related technology realize its vast potential will depend on how well they address deep, familiar challenges.

Two weeks after the surrender of the last Confederate army marked the end of the Civil War, the buttonwood tree of Wall Street fell down during a storm. By then, it was a well-known landmark and a symbol of the rise of the U. Much had changed in the four score minus seven years since those stockbrokers signed their agreement. A nation then not far removed from its founding was now emerging from its most harrowing conflict.

Much more would change in the subsequent century and a half. The trust that was useful when the whole Wall Street community fit into a coffeehouse is quite different than what is needed today.

The buttonwood tree has been gone since , but its echo survives in the code defining the newest architecture of trust. Blockchains are organized using a mathematical structure of branching nodes. Data blocks 14 Introduction Merkle trees allow efficient verification of the integrity of large data structures.

The cryptographer Ralph Merkle filed a patent on the concept in The expiration of the patent in allowed developers to incorporate the concept freely into open-source software. Six years later, this was one of the preexisting technologies that Satoshi Nakamoto assembled to create Bitcoin. Where the original tree served to mark a convenient meeting spot, this one stitches together a reliable digital record from a cacophony of independent voices.

Whether its significance matches that of its predecessor remains to be seen. The story of the blockchain, law, and trust is still unfolding. It just might be one of the most important stories of our time. A Comment on Terminology Blockchain technology is a fast-developing area. Words are often used inconsistently. It is literally a chain of blocks designed to create an immutable ledger of transactions.

Bitcoin would be useless if it were not trusted. The hundreds of nonfinancial, blockchain-based startups and enterprise blockchain projects rest on a similar belief. Distributed ledger networks bring together communities that otherwise would not trust each other sufficiently. Its yearly report, released at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, offers a detailed snapshot of societal trust patterns.

The picture is not encouraging. Most of the trust indexes have been on a downward trend for some time. Recently, the erosion of trust has accelerated. It extends across all categories of institutions—including government, the media, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations NGOs —and is shared by both the informed public and the mass population. Other recent surveys offer similar findings, especially in the United States.

As early as , only one-third of Americans said in an Associated Press poll that most people can be trusted, compared to half in , when the General Social Survey first asked the question. No one who follows current events would be surprised at these statistics.

The contemporary trust crisis is the culmination of patterns that have been developing for many years. Using a blizzard of surveys and other research, Putnam highlighted the erosion of local trust networks in America, epitomized by the decline in bowling leagues relative to individual bowling. Five years earlier, Fukuyama similarly had sounded the alarm about a crisis of trust globally, and particularly in contemporary America. But that appears to be changing.

The trust crisis that The Trust Challenge 19 writers such as Fukuyama and Putnam warned of two decades ago is now a reality. The consequences may be dire. We all make decisions based on trust every day. Should I get into the back seat of this car? Does the package of tuna that I want to purchase harbor a deadly virus?

Do I go on a date with this person? Should I type my credit card number into this box on my computer screen? There are few human interactions, and fewer still business transactions, that do not depend in large part on the qualities of trust involved.

That would be an impossible task. Trust is the oil that lubricates social and business interactions and the factor that renders the boundless complexity of the modern world tractable. Trust, however, is more than a gateway. It has consequences. Trust shapes interactions, potentially in very significant ways. Those who are trusted are powerful. Those who are not must work harder at every turn to gain the confidence of others, putting them at a great disadvantage.

Systems that alter the scope of trust, therefore, change societies. Trust shapes both the macrostructures of national economic performance and the microstructures of individual and firm interactions. Around the world, high-trust societies outperform low-trust ones. It creates reserves of goodwill that facilitate social interactions and business transactions. The wealth of society is thereby increased. In the modern world, though, it is simply impossible to limit interactions to those circles.

High-trust societies have developed cultures, social norms, and legal systems that give their citizens the confidence to extend trust to strangers.

In a high-trust environment, there is less need for intrusive regulations and coercive enforcement because people are willing to act without them. Most people are trustworthy most of the time. And when they are not, the combination of legal sanctions and social pressure can address misconduct. In economic terms, trust reduces transaction costs. It frees parties from the expenses of acquiring information and monitoring the behavior of 20 Chapter 1 those they transact with.

That, in turn, improves performance. If there were more trust, that would allow valuable new business arrangements to flourish. If we wish to understand the potential and dangers of the blockchain, we must start by examining the concept of trust and its manifestations in the contemporary world.

Trust is not binary. It is a rare situation where trust is wholly absent. If we could not take anything for granted without verifying it first, we would be hard-pressed to make it through a day.

Instead, there are different degrees of trust. Defining Trust The simplistic definition of trust is cognitive risk assessment: Am I justified in relying on this person or organization? I give my credit card to a server in a restaurant because I reasonably assume that she will not use it to run up unauthorized charges and if she does, my credit card company will reverse them.

On the other hand, if I am asked to wire my life savings to a Nigerian prince I met by email, I had better be pretty confident about the forthcoming reward.

While the cognitive dimension is important, it cannot represent the entirety of trust. This is the line between trust and verification. A lender insisting that a borrower provide detailed, audited financial statements and extensive collateral may be confident of repayment, but no one would call that a relationship of trust.

If the lender approves a loan to a longstanding customer without documentation, it may well be because her information about the customer and experience from prior encounters make it a rational, self-interested decision, not truly one of trust. Yet sometimes we act in ways that cognitive risk assessment cannot explain. Some people do respond to Nigerian email scams or lend money to friends who they know are unlikely to repay it.

And as Fukuyama highlighted, rates of trust vary among societies, suggesting deeper cultural and 22 Chapter 1 other factors at work. In some countries, trams and buses operate on the honor system. Riders are expected to deposit money or swipe a card to pay, but there is no conductor checking that they do so. Almost everyone pays anyway. In other countries, such a system would lead to rampant nonpayment. The level of enforcement alone does not explain the variance. Fukuyama believes that 20 percent of all economic activity cannot be explained in rational terms and is rooted in things like reciprocity, moral obligation, and duty to community, even in the modern world.

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