Think Differently. Solve the Impossible.

 

This episode helps you think clearly in a noisy world, cut through misinformation, and find the solutions as applied to Technology, AI, and Power.

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About the Host

Daniel Stih is an aerospace engineer, software engineer, indoor environmental consultant, and author of 12 books. For more than 20 years, he has investigated complex problems spanning engineering, technology, the built environment, and human decision-making. His work explores how evidence, assumptions, and systems shape the conclusions we draw—and whether we're solving the right problem. Learn more about his approach in Why I Think This Way.

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Show Notes
 

Roberto Capodieci

Links: https://capodieci.link 

Website: https://capodieci.medium.com

Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/rc10

X.com - capodieci https://x.com/capodieci   

Breaking Banks Europe: European Unicorns, Startups, Founders, Regulators and Leaders innovating the rapidly evolving Fintech scene. The world’s well-known hosts and influencers in fintech. 
https://open.spotify.com/show/1IVQyJt4u3yuESxwlxHmjH 

UnBlockChain: Talks and interviews about decentralization, blockchain, old and new technologies. https://open.spotify.com/show/2a7RnsXaFEDIBWi68fLY2t 

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 Decentralized Alternatives (per Roberto Capodieci's article)

Here’s a list of decentralized alternatives to mainstream social media services. These platforms offer greater privacy, resistance to censorship, and user control over content and data. For the full list and to read the article by Roberto Capodieci, Silencing Dissent: How Censorship and Centralization Threaten Free Expression, click: https://capodieci.medium.com/silencing-dissent-how-censorship-and-centralization-threaten-free-expression-8024ab14776c

Diaspora (Alternative to Facebook)

A decentralized social network where users have control over their data, spread across independently operated servers called “pods.” Privacy-focused, no advertisements, community-driven.  https://diasporafoundation.org

PeerTube (Alternative to YouTube)

A decentralized video hosting network based on ActivityPub, allowing communities to host and share videos without central control. No ads, community moderation, federated servers.https://joinpeertube.org

Bluesky (Alternative to Twitter/X)

A decentralized social media platform developed by Twitter’s founder, Jack Dorsey, focusing on user autonomy and protocol-based interaction. Fully decentralized, no single entity control, open standards. https://bsky.app

Beaker Browser (Alternative to Google Chrome)

A peer-to-peer web browser that allows users to create and host websites directly from their devices without needing traditional web servers. Decentralized hosting, user control over content, no central servers.  https://beakerbrowser.com

Session (Alternative to WhatsApp/Telegram)

A decentralized messaging app focusing on privacy and anonymity, using onion routing to keep messages secure and untraceable. End-to-end encryption, no phone numbers needed, metadata-resistant.https://getsession.org

 

Transcript

Welcome to the Daniel Stee Podcast. Roberto Capodieci.

Capodieci, yes.

You worked in tech over 40 years. You're an expert in decentralization, blockchain, AI, emerging technologies. I'm really looking forward to talking to you.

Welcome to my show.

Thank you very much.

I've been reading some of your blogs on Medium.

Okay, thank you.

A lot of good content. Trying to brush up, learn as much as I could to ask you as best intelligent questions I could. So to start with, there's these buzzwords.

What is blockchain and what's used for? How does it work?

That's a very good starting point because there is a lot of misunderstanding around blockchain. Unfortunately, a lot of people think blockchain means cryptocurrencies. And cryptocurrencies have their name tainted by all the scams that went around.

But blockchain is just a piece of technology. It's innocent and depends on how it's used. It's like to blame a database for what the website is showing because it's managed by a database, right?

In the term of why blockchain is very important, I have to say it is we are in the age of information now.

We went through the industrial revolution, you know, the industrial age, and now the commodity is information, the value of what is important is information.

While at the beginning, information was somehow contained in the media that would support it.

For example, you have a painting, and when you sell your painting, you don't have it anymore, and the person that purchases it from you has the painting, and it has a value because it can actually then resell it and so on.

Even music, you buy a vinyl, you know, or a cassette, even if you could copy, but the copy degrades the quality. So it was really important to have an original books, right? VHS for movies and so on and so forth.

As we move into digital and we could transform these informations in bit one and zero, the copy is not as good almost as the original, is an exact copy of the original.

So if I'm an artist and not painting on canvas, my painting on computer, my result is going to be easy to be copied and pasted and, you know, lose the value to have one piece that is the original, right? Music.

I have an MP3, I make 10 copies, I give to friends and we, in 11 people, we have the exact same piece of music. So the original lose the value of being an original because you cannot recognize it anymore.

Blockchain comes in with a system that allow to have a singularity, unicity, because I cannot copy and paste a Bitcoin, I give it to you. In the case, tomorrow Bitcoin will be worth zero, right?

So the fact that if I give to you the Bitcoin, I don't have it anymore, that's a revolution and that's the key of the importance of a system like the blockchain.

In an evolution where everything is digital, we can reproduce the value of an original, of a unicity, of a single existence, where a copy is worth nothing because it's not the original.

If you think, beside cryptocurrency, I can put the title of ownership of my car on the blockchain, and if I sell the car to you, I transfer the title to you digitally. It's all digital, okay? But it's easily verifiable.

When the police officer stops you, you can get them to query in the blockchain the digital certificate of ownership of your car, and that is going to be you.

Maybe it's the block. I picture several blocks. Building blocks that's throwing me off, I still don't get.

I can explain that this is just a technicality, and it gives the name.

You need to save information, right? So let's say the certificate of ownership of your car has to be written somewhere, okay?

And in order to have, because this is a decentralized system, means it lives in a peer-to-peer network, which means that there are many computer in the Internet connected with each other that preserve the information.

But there is no one computer that is more important than the coordinate, so there is no unique point of failure in the system. Every server is worth and valid as much as any other.

So you can shut down five of them, nothing happen because five more is going to grow up.

So those are the blocks.

4:52

No, no, those are the nodes of the peer-to-peer network.

And these nodes need to agree on what information has to be saved. So say, I transfer my title ownership of the card to you.

I broadcast, exactly like in a radio, broadcast this information is cryptographically signed by me, then now the title is on you. And all the nodes in this peer-to-peer network sift this information, they validate a few things.

They validate first that the signature is valid. So the actual owner is transferring to somebody else and not somebody pretending to be the owner, okay.

And then they evaluate the fact that did I have this title on me, or I'm just trying to transfer somebody else's title. So signature is okay. The validity that I have the Bitcoin that I'm sending to you is okay.

And then this is put in a queue, waiting to be put inside the block, like grouping this information. So I do my transactions, somebody does another transaction, and so on and so forth. Those transactions are queued, validated and queued.

If there are no valid, they are bounced back, and you get an error. Once there are enough transactions to make a group that can be posted and sealed forever, this is going to be called the block. Now why is this secure?

Because there is a mathematical function, which is called hashing, which means that whatever input you give, consider everything is numbers, because it can be a picture, it can be a file of text, it is 1 0 1 0, right?

So whatever input you give, it comes out one fingerprint of this input that you cannot reverse, so you cannot go from the fingerprint back to the content.

This fingerprint is a string that is called hash, it is always the same length, even if the content is nil, produce one string that is always the same size. You need to put this string of the previous block in the new block that you are making.

So they are chained one to the other, thanks to this hashing function.

So if there is the last block that has been done and validated, and I want to make a new one, I need to produce the hash of the last block and include it in the new block that I'm making.

Which means, because this string, this hash is unique to the information, if you only change a single bit of the previous block, this hash changes, so the next block is no more valid.

So if somebody tried to tamper with information from one week ago, they need to be so powerful to rebuild all the next blocks because they will be compromised, because these hashes are wrong, right? In this way, you create what is called blockchain.

Then these hashes are required to be particularly difficult to find.

That's why there is all this electricity consumption in the world of Bitcoin, which means that it says, in order to validate a new block, your hash needs to start with five zeros, ten zeros, something like that.

And in order to find it, because you cannot create an hash and then find what content you need to produce, you need to, because it's a trial and error. So you put a little bit of dirt in the block and see what hash comes out. It has enough zero?

No. Try again, try again, try again, try again, until you find the correct one, you publish, and then you're rewarded. This is how the Bitcoin blockchain works.

And this trial and error, because the competition is high, it requires a lot of energy, to the point that it's very expensive, and energy consumption. There are other systems, though, they don't use energy as the Bitcoin.

There are different kinds of proof. Well, one of the Bitcoin is called proof of work, because you need to do a lot of work to find a valid system to change the block. There is the proof of stake.

They use previous historical data in the blockchain, not to secure, so it's safe anyway, but each one has its own weakness of our system. But pretty much are divided in two different methods.

8:57

What is the cryptocurrency?

It's imaginary. It's these, how does it work? The cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency is imaginary as much as the money in your bank account when you enter your own banking to check them, because it's just a number produced by a computer.

There is no camera filming your cash sitting in the drawer of the bank, right? So it's a representation of a promise, pretty much the one in the bank.

Bitcoin does the same things on the guarantee that you cannot print more Bitcoin, but the amount, the final amount is finished, is limited. So there is no way that, like a government does, create more money and the free value of the currency.

There is a fixed amount of Bitcoin that can ever be made, and we pretty much did most of them already.

And with that, if one is destroyed, lost, I had the misfortune of formatting and I drive with 300 Bitcoin inside, when it was worth nothing though, so it wasn't a big deal at the time. Now I cry when I think about it.

And in this way, I reduce even the total amount of availability of Bitcoin. So there are more millionaires in the world than Bitcoin that can be purchased. So if each millionaire wants one, the price will go up forever, you know.

So...

Why are there so many different varieties of crypto, like Coke and Pepsi, and then there's XRP?

XRP is based on a different technology, but it's also another crypto.

Because people will buy into them? It's speculative? Yeah.

Because I don't mean to offend anybody, because a lot of people is not very wise.

Let's put it like this, not to say bad words. You know, it is a matter of the same mechanics and trust. Obviously, who creates a new one is the one making a lot of money, right?

You know, if it's pretty much, is it?

Could I create my own like?

Absolutely. It's a matter of zero cost. I mean, like, it's going to cost you like 50 cents, and it takes five minutes to create your own.

It doesn't take much.

But somebody has to buy it for it to be worth anything.

That's exactly the point, right? So the focus behind creating a value, which is also illegal in many countries, is come out with some fantasy names for the buzzword to give a sense of what you're doing and give a potential logic.

Then find a few wealthy people that will pre-purchase from you the token that you're making at half the price that you're going to then publish for sale. So let's say, are you going to do your seed token that is $1 each?

You come to me, and I'm poor, but let's pretend I'm rich and say, okay, I give you like 100,000 token for $50,000. But the day that I open the token, I'm going to sell them for $1 each.

So I can sell them for 80 cents, people purchase mine, and I'm making a lot of money on top of it, right? This is as simple as it is. Then you get some people that go in the exchanges and do what is called market making.

So as soon as the price is going down, they keep buying out, so they keep it up when it's going up. You know what I mean? So they keep the price, they can manage artificially to the price.

And many people do this as a scam. So they just pump the price and then dump a huge amount and people lose money.

12:54

It was just in the news that Bitcoin tanked after the US Fed reported being nervous about inflation.

So the crypto market slid after it was announced, interest rates should decline along with inflation. But I don't follow the logic, the relationship between the crypto and the interest rates.

Well, because Bitcoin has become like a safe, like gold pretty much, like a safe alternative on things.

So when there is an interest in moving money in a direction in another, consider the Bitcoin for being very valuable as a market cap, it's still like a small country, it's not like the US dollars.

So it's easy that movement on other places have a strong effect.

So if I have a lot of my money in Bitcoin, and I see that somebody is going to mess with it because they're going to become forbidden in China rather than, you know, Russia is going to drop it or the American go and make some rules, I take it out and

I put it somewhere else. And this consequently means that I'm selling a lot. And when there is a lot of offer less than demand, the price goes down, right?

But what I want to say is that giving Bitcoin like the value of the brand and other technology, because the technology is not very good, in the long term is always going up. I'm not a financial advisor, and this is not a financial advice to anybody.

But for mathematical statistic is that more people are in the game and the quantity remain fixed. More there is the game of the chair.

There is always one extra person compared to the amount of chairs that you have there, musical chair, how you call them. So this is the concept of the Bitcoin. So there can be a moment that goes down a lot.

Yes, we did like a roller coaster. But in the long term, you will see that it's always going up. There is no...

I have this theory that President Donald Trump seems to do a lot of business with crypto, with his associates.

So I have this idea that maybe they'll crash the market someday because kind of like the Rockefellers would with the stock market, you know, sell out, sell high and make the market crash and buy it back or something like that.

Do you have any thoughts about that?

Yeah, they do this constantly. So it's nothing new in a way or another, in a dimension or in another. Long term investors, they will have no issues, you know, they're always winning.

People that buy when he's going up and selling panic, when he goes down, there's people that lose the money, right?

You can see that when I formatted their drive with 300 Bitcoin, I think that barely there was a a mongox as an exchange or something like that. And the world was on the sense of the dollar for one Bitcoin.

So can you imagine people buy $1,000 of Bitcoin, which means like 10,000 Bitcoin, and now the Bitcoin is more than $100,000 each now, they will carry if it goes down 20,000, up 20,000.

That's a very funny story in a certain point, because really the growth was almost mathematically drawing. I had a card, like an ATM card, that was big on Bitcoin.

So I put a certain amount of value in there, and it was $1,000 worth of Bitcoin inside the card. I will go and purchase something for $150. Then I wait like one week to, and the next time I go to make a purchase, I still had $1,000.

So whatever I was spending, it was going to be refilled by the growth, the value of the Bitcoin. So I even made an article about that, because what's very funny is like I keep spending, and it's like the eternal ATM card, right?

Because the value goes up. But I was not always like this.

Countries, I think I read, maybe it was in one of your medium articles, Indonesia is all the big banks. So literally the country is trying to convert to a crypto like currency.

Yeah, Indonesia has been interesting as the take on crypto compared to many other countries. Here, first of all, was considered a commodity. It's like if I am buying and selling wood, you know, like whatever was crypto was a commodity.

And the taxation, because it would be impossible to tax every single user, was on the trading. So any exchange registered in Indonesia, every time you trade, was charging really an irrelevant amount of money.

So any revenue you make for crypto was clear from any taxes, was very good. Now they just change the rules and is actually considered in a different manner because the government start actually applying.

So there is the what they call Central Bank digital currencies that is initiative they're doing worldwide. So you have the need to consider it money in order to make it work as money, right? So they change regulations.

But compared to Europe, this is a heaven when it comes to the money that somebody can do by trading or a long-term investment in crypto because the taxation is really.

Why would the government want to embrace the cryptocurrency?

I'm not an expert in political finance, but for example, a lot of country in Southeast Asia, some, let's say, but not all, but quite a big number had a huge reserve in US dollars.

And in the last few years, you know, it's a mystery what is going to happen, do the value of the US dollar, if it's going up or not, you know. So many countries maybe want to have an alternative method of reserve, for example.

And this is being by now considered a valid policy. Gold is for sure another one, you know, it's...

Okay.

There are a few. But it's just my, you know, my guess is not that I noticed for the fact.

So backing up to another buzzword that I think I can wrap my head around a little better is decentralization.

19:27

Decentralization.

What is the decentralization?

That's the, I think, one of the most important things that we need to look at.

Because as I was saying, in the age of information, where information is commodity, leaving the control of the information on just centralized parties, it becomes dangerous. If you think, I'll give you a very good example for emails.

When the email first came out, email was a beautiful federated network. It means that every office and many houses as well had their mail server.

Which means that if from my office I send an email to your office, the only people that touch those emails is my own mail server, and then your mail server to distribute to you.

Now, 95% of the email in the world goes through one of the large companies that manage them. Gmail, under Alphabet, Outlook, under Microsoft. And emails is a protocol that is horrible.

It's unclear, it's transparent. They're not encrypted. So our email are completely read in order to do the whatever they need to do by reading, provide those advertisements, spy, or whatever you want.

So it's like a letter that has the address on it and everything else.

The postmaster could basically read it and put it back in the envelope or something like that. And he needs to see the address to send it. The address is encrypted and so forth.

Right.

But like the envelope are all open, say, with the difference that there has been this scam going on with small ISP that provide email. Say, I invoice you an invoice.

Let's say you are in Europe and there is what is called E-Ban, that is like the equivalent of saying bank account plus bank name in just a single string, right? For you to pay my invoice.

And I am somebody controlling the email either on my side or on your side, and as it is, I would replace in the email just with an editor, and put the bank coordinator of the scammer, of the criminal, right?

So when you receive it, it's the legit email from me, but when you're going to pay, the money will never arrive to me, right? And this is one example, but there are plenty of manipulation that can be done with this protocol that is now strong.

And then going to decentralization means making systems that don't need us to trust a third party to manage things for us, right? Going back to the example of the title of ownership of the car.

If I want to sell my car to you, probably I'm going to sign the title, but you need to go to the DMV, I think it's called in the United States, right? The place where they maintain all the records of ownership of cars, right?

And they're going to change the name in their database. And if the police want to check who owns the car, they're going to check in their database, right?

Now, nobody's going to steal car by changing names at the DMV office, because probably is no word and they get arrested.

But there are a lot of countries where corruption is high, for example, where farmers when they come to the point, they want to sell their piece of land, they discover that already 10 years it was in their land, because somebody at the government

office, where there is all the ownership names of the lands, they just change it with their cars or whatever. And this happened, even in Italy happened, not a long time ago, this thing.

So it doesn't have to be like a remote country with the strange regulations, just a corrupt notary and you know.

Somebody with the password, the administration password, log in to the database, change it?

Yeah, well, sometimes it's even paper. It's just, you know, the country evolved to the point that things are all in computer, right? But yeah, just take a corrupt person, you know, in the moment, the same person who will do the job normally.

With the decentralized system, there is no middleman. So the change is done by the person that signed it. Obviously, it just comes with the responsibility.

If I made a mistake, I cannot call anybody to fix it because...

So how does it work code-wise and program, you know, on the program side and the server side? What's the difference? I can see if I have AOL, I'm going to AOL server and it's not encrypted.

Decentralization literally means there's more servers. And it doesn't go...

It's different in the method, okay? And I give you an idea and also another important clarification for what people sometimes mistaken the meaning of these names. Web 1, Web 2, and Web 3.

What really is Web 1, what really is Web 2, what really is Web 3, okay? People think Web 3 means virtual reality. No, Web 3 is a different thing.

So in Web 1, when the first HTTP came out, what is HTML was the hyperlink. So we consume passively website. I go to a website that talks about, I don't know, Tuscany countryside.

I'm reading and they mention a particular tree, and there is an hyperlink. I click it and I go in another web server where I consume information about the specific tree that mentioned a certain ant that lives in the tree.

I click and I go in another server. So this was a huge revolution, but the server provides the fixed information. So whoever go there find the same thing, and they are connected one with the other.

Web 2 come along, and I started registering in a website, logging in with my username and password, and the content that is shown to me is customized to me. So when you go to the website and I go to the website, we see different things.

Take Facebook, for example. When I log in in Facebook, I see different things in the news feed that you see, because the algorithm prepares different things.

And registering with the username and the password in one of these websites give us an identity that is relative exclusively to the website.

Because when I connect in Twitter, for example, with the username and the password, my persona in Twitter has nothing to do with the one in Facebook, right?

So Web2 is the ability to sell services, to provide customized information to user, but is isolated website by website, okay? Because we have a username and a password in each website. Then comes Web3.

Web3 has a blockchain.

We don't quite have Web3 yet, right?

No, no, it's already there, it's already in, but not everywhere, right? With the blockchain, you need to sign a transaction cryptographically. So your identity is verified by mathematics.

While with username and password, this server, which is centralized, has your username and password on that side. So if I put it wrong, they can check that it's wrong. If I put it correct, they can check it's correct.

So it's on the website to say it's correct or it's wrong. With Web3, I do a mathematical operation on my side, and my identity is the same in every place I log in. So you can have something.

So what I'm trying to say is that being the identity the same, you can attach things to these identities. In gaming, for example, if I have an avatar that is wearing a green jacket, he's blond, has a baseball cap, etc., etc.

And also, in his weaponry, he has a gold sword. If I log in with Web3 in a certain gaming site, they can see how my avatar is dressed. They can see what weapon I have.

So they can propose his weapon in the game where I'm connecting to. And I keep to be the same. Now, graphic resolution and all are not good enough to be recognized if I meet my friend somewhere else in another game.

But this, for example, transform into practical use in every daily life. Say, you go to the dentist, and they make you an X-ray which costs you money and all.

And then you're traveling on the other side of the world, and suddenly you have a toothache, and you go to a dentist there. They need to redo everything, because the information is attached to the dentist, centralized, right?

If the dentist does the X-rays, attach it to your identity, and it's signed by the dentist cryptographically. When I travel the world, I can allow the other dentist to access this information.

They see it's actually good, because it's signed by the dentist, and they can work with it without having to redo the work. Other simple example.

If you make a new phone number, a new bank account, other things, you need to provide your address to each of these companies, right? For the phone number, because of regulation, they need to have your address.

Bank account for regulation, they need to have your address, contract of any other sort. If you change address, you need to start informing each of these companies that you changed the address, right?

But if, consider to Web3, if the address is attached to your identity, you just need to change it one time, because they will, if they're authorized, see the new address automatically.

And this is what it means to be in control of your own information. So if information is monetized, you decide what can be monetized and how, because you control your information. You are not giving away your information to others, you know?

And that's a big and important revolution.

29:44

Which I also read on one of your articles called Silencing Dissent, How Censorship and Centralization Threaten Free Speech, Free Expression, to which this Web 3 decentralization is a solution, right?

The paradigm changes.

So we're in a centralized manner, they decide what I can see. In a decentralized manner, I decide what I want to see. In terms of illegal content, in a decentralized manner, it's difficult to stop to be insect in the system.

But I can choose not to be broadcast to me, for example. So the responsibility shift changes.

Like the Facebook, how you said it, Facebook is going to show you what it wants to show you. And in your article, there are some alternative social media platforms like Dyspora for Facebook, for example. So how does that platform...

I'm still trying to understand decentralization. I understand Facebook, it's their server. Where is the alternative platform server?

Or how is it that I'm saving my own information, and I get privacy, and I get to see what I want to see? How does that work?

There are many different technologies that are allowed to do this, but the premises is decentralized. So in this peer-to-peer network of many servers, they usually are compensated for being online and saving information.

Your information is distributed among these servers, either some copied identically in all of them, in other is fractions.

So a piece is here, a piece is there, a piece is there, may be replicated only three times in case one server goes offline, there is always a copy that is online.

There are many different methods, but being cryptographically, for example, you can encode it so people cannot read it, so you're just saving a blob of it, and by that, the people don't make sense, so you only can decrypt when you need it, or because

It says, actually, for that on your article, that the users have control over their data.

It's spread across independently operated servers called pods.

That's the specific name for the specific network, but those are nodes of a peer-to-peer network. Call them what you want, right?

Okay. And then there's BlueSky, which was developed by Twitter's founder.

Right.

Another example of...

Yeah, that was an interesting case. You remember when Donald Trump has been kicked out from Twitter, right? I think that has been a choice that somebody external forced into Twitter.

You know, there are a little bit of... You know, it wasn't convenient for anybody to censor the president. There was, you know, no sense.

In that case, you want to do a social network where you have no control of the information that is there. You just give you the interface to read it, but anybody can build an interface to visualize the content, right?

So, in this case, if they come to you and say, you need to delete that to say, you can say, I'm sorry, I have no control. That's in the centralized network. What I give you is just the window to look into it.

There is no way I can actually remove the content.

Well, you're speaking of the owner of the platform, the owner of, it would be the Facebook or the Twitter, because with decentralized, right now, those people could be penalized, Facebook or, and if it's decentralized, they can say, no, I don't have

That's correct.

Exactly. So that's powerful, right? Because, yeah, you come to my website, my website gives access to this.

This happened, and this is very strange because sometimes they change the regulation and the law just to frame people on. Do you remember the Pirate Bay? The Pirate Bay was a website that pointed to BitTorrent hooks.

Let me explain a little bit more for people that are listening. So we had in the past a website where you can download the movies and music in a pirated manner for free, right?

And many of those websites got shut down because law enforcement will correctly go to the house of the guy managing the website.

They would subpoena the server records to see who downloaded, what mp3 from who.

They gave up in trying to go after people downloading. But that's exactly the shift that they made it. Pretty much it will happen like this.

If I have a centralized server, regulation says, is it legal to distribute pirate material? OK, and is it enough to catch the guys, carry a little bit to the other? But, you know, this was under the pressure of the lobby of music and movies.

Obviously, they want to protect the value of their material. On the other side, somebody came out with what's called BitTorrent.

BitTorrent was a peer-to-peer network, a game which means that there is no central server that can be attached to a person.

So there are 10,000 people at home with their computer in this peer-to-peer network where you could find any movie and any music you want.

But there is nobody to go to rest because, you know, there is no like somebody coordinating these things, right?

I remember BitTorrent. Yeah, it was a long time ago.

Oh, it's still up to date. Yeah, but it has happened before this. I was in peer-to-peer network before blockchain came out because I was working on the BitTorrent protocol to do the centralized path system.

And pretty much the shift of these mechanics is from a centralized, you go to the guy, to the decentralized, there is nobody to go get.

So regulator would change and say, it's no more illegal to distribute, or maybe it remain illegal to distribute, but it's also illegal to consume.

So I'm going to catch you because you download it from BitTorrent and that this is illegal, which wasn't before. So they need to catch up with this thing. The idea is that Pirate Bay was like a Google for content in BitTorrent.

So when you want to download a particular movie, you will search in Pirate Bay, and there is the link that brings you to BitTorrent to download. But on itself, Pirate Bay had no illegal content inside. It was just an index.

And they arrested everybody at Pirate Bay, which made no sense in a certain way. But if you change the law just to catch somebody, then obviously, in the ethical aspect, you can say, yeah, they favor it.

It's like if somebody get asked where to find the illegal stuff, and I can point a finger in the direction, probably.

In Prohibition, if you had a directory of who's selling illegal booze, who has a distillery, you still... It's just a directory that I'm giving people.

Yes, actually, it's a very strange take. Actually, unrelated, but related in a certain way. In my city in Italy, they just arrested the person for generating with AI illegal images.

Okay, I'm not going to say, but people will understand what I'm talking about. So YouTube is kind with you. And the point is, if it's AI generated, there is no victim.

How can you address somebody for something that is not real? You know, at the same time, yes, it's obviously ethically bad to do that, but it's no more the crime and that image.

You know, in my mind, a photo of a crime is conducting an arrest because the crime occurred. But if I make an AI version of a picture of a crime, there is no such crime behind. Why am I arrested?

The BitTorrent, which is the decentralized, and the Pirate Bay, which is the Google, you know, old school searching.

Centralized.

You still have the BitTorrent, but you just can't find it now unless a friend tells you what the BitTorrent is to get this movie.

There are plenty.

There is everything still there now. But, you know, there is Netflix, so why people will go?

In fact, if you think about it, the major music and movie, they got scared of this technology, because they say, oh my God, you know, let's lobby the government to arrest people and make a big news in the news.

Rather than thinking, if I want to sell this movie that is being made 10 years ago in the most remote country, village, you know, I have no means. What I say, DVDs, they arrive melted or destroyed.

Yeah.

Probably, they should have let BitTorrent actually, they should have supported BitTorrent, go to the developers and give them money, and attach to BitTorrent a means to legally pay for the content you are downloading.

If that was possible, I assure you, a huge quantity of people will pay for it, because nobody wanted to commit a crime, right? At the same time, they want the content.

They had no other means, because it's not available in the video store in your town, it's not available to be purchased online, it's available only there. And they missed an opportunity, in my opinion, was huge. You know, then...

For the MP3s, in a dollar a song, most people would still download 100 songs for free.

Think about it, piracy is what made a lot of their content famous.

You know, there are a lot of interesting stories, if you go Google for them or ask JJBT for them, that thanks to piracy, albums sold an incredible amount of original copies, because people had a way to taste the water before jumping in with money,

you know. So, that's why they always liked it. But when it was with cassette tapes, they knew that somebody buy the original, make copies for their friend, or maybe the quality of the audience's copy is not as good as the original.

Then this friend make copies to other friend and degrade even more. And people says, I like this song, it's not good quality, I'm going to buy the original.

And that's what their selling system was, because more than the radio, this allow people to actually go choose what they want, consider at the time, there is not as today, I want that, any place for me, media, you need to be in front of a radio, call

them, please put these things and record it when it comes out. It wasn't convenient as it is today.

So is BitTorrent and those types of services still around then? Or you could...

Absolutely.

Consider BitTorrent was actually made initially to download the large production operating system like Linux, first versions rather than other things that are very messy which was legally okay to download because there was no fee to pay, it was

Except that it's technically illegal.

So if you do get caught, like with a movie?

But if you get caught, download it. It's exactly the same thing. It's like I can, you know, there are tools that are made just to do legal or bad things.

There are tools that are actually used in both ways. And I can take a car and commit a disaster if I want. Doesn't mean that if people drive a car, they get arrested.

So in other words, don't, if you're listening, go out, do a bunch of free downloads of movies using BitTorrent just because you're listening to this.

Exactly.

No, don't, don't.

You can, but that's not the positive use.

If you want to download Ubuntu to install it in your computer, BitTorrent is a fantastic means to download Ubuntu. Ubuntu is the name of the operating system based on Linux.

The positive thing is with this decentralization, use it for Blue Sky versus Twitter. You have one here, PeerTube versus YouTube. If you want your privacy, no ads and no censorship, right?

Yeah.

I mean, like, it's going to slowly, I believe, move in the direction. I've been working two years in implementing a protocol to decentralize artificial intelligence.

If you think people now talk with the Chagy Pt more than they would talk with the psychologists, you know, it becomes a very intimate, confident, and as humans, we are very gullible.

Mostly somebody, they have the specific need to ask Chagy Pt for daily life choices, right? And consider that Chagy Pt is controlled by a small group of people, pretty small.

If they want tomorrow, Chagy Pt is going to convince all of us to drink Coca-Cola instead of water. I don't know if they have a sponsor.

What they're doing already with, you have one on AI, an article, The Rise of Angentic Coding. And then what happens if you gather 10 of the world's AI systems in one room, ask them a question.

And what comes to my mind about that is, I asked something about climate change. I don't get the answer I asked. I get what they want to tell me about climate change.

If I ask about vaccine safety, it will not answer my question about the theory of the virus. It will say, I can't tell you that for safety reasons. Here's what you need to know about vaccines.

So what we want for the population is an AI that is really democratic, which is not centrally controlled.

So you take the peer-to-peer network and you consider it every node has an AI. Okay. And when you ask a question, it works like a synapsis.

If it's about mathematics, it will choose three that are good in math, plus, you know, and the answer comes back. And then my AI put the answer without changing what is saying together as one single answer, right?

So it's going to be very difficult to control what the answer can be. Obviously, at the same time, there's going to be a lot of AI that are uncensored, that's going to tell you whatever, you know, how to build this or that, etc, etc.

Then you need to choose to filter out things that you don't like, but it's a personal choice and a personal responsibility. I don't say we tease the crime should be allowed.

You know, law enforcement should need to go and arrest people that commit crime. But it's not because somebody in the possibility they will commit a crime, then you block everybody in the planet from accessing certain information rather than get...

It seems like the governments or the small group of people you speak about who have their own beliefs will not like this new way of doing things because then they can't shove down your throat what they want you to see or read.

This is why it is the underground revolution. Bitcoin is not borne by a government initiative. It has been fought by government so much until, like it or not, they need to accept it, right?

Because it can bottom up. The population has no idea the power they have in making choices and applying. Can you imagine if tomorrow there is the title on a show The Car with the blockchain?

And every time you buy a car, you don't care what the government office says the car is owned by, but you only look at that.

Believe me, in one, two, three years, if everybody is doing this, the government has no choice but to follow up with what people do.

How do people switch over? Is it by choosing the alternative social media platforms instead of Twitter, instead of Facebook? Do they need to do that to make the change?

You know, it's unfortunate that if I write a post in one of those alternative places, I'm screaming in the forest alone, there is nobody there.

The search engine.

Yeah, the search engine.

Look at something. WhatsApp, for example, OK? I don't know one person that doesn't have WhatsApp installed in their phone.

Until this week, I did not install WhatsApp.

It was a friend from Canada visiting who didn't have cell service. He asked me, can we use WhatsApp? I finally installed it.

See, there you go.

Telegram is a hundred times better than WhatsApp, technically. It's like, you know, like...

It's secure. It's encrypted. I have Telegram.

Yeah, Telegram is...

But if I need to contact family and I'm Telegram, none of them is there, you know? So you have this need to be into the wrong places. Think it like it's a city and there is the dodgy area of the city and the nice area of the city and whatever.

If all the people you need to talk to are in the place that you wouldn't go, but either you go there or you don't talk with them. Obviously you go there.

WhatsApp, which is so popular, but what people don't know is WhatsApp will share everything with the government.

It's horrible. It's the worst application people can have in their phone.

Where versus if they chose to use Telegraph, at least they'd have some encryption, and Telegraph is known for not just sharing everything they get asked for.

I mean, they even arrested their founder. He's stuck in France since for six months now because of refusal to give information out.

Pavel. Pavel, do you?

Pavel, yeah.

He's the creator of the platform. So it's like you write an app and somebody uses your app to, like you said, makes him for judgment on AI-generated content. Instead of going after them for pornography, they go after you.

I give you this example.

If I do an illegal activity and I trade these illegal material using a safe box in a bank, who they arrest? The owner of the bank? Or me that I use the safe box?

Yeah.

There is a story that you want to go and look at, and I suggest everybody, is about Kim Dotcom.

You know who Kim Dotcom is? Kim Dotcom is a German guy. Okay.

Must be in his late 40s, or early 50s, I think now. And Kim Dotcom, which he changed legally his name in Dotcom, actually, so he's actually called Kim Dotcom in his ID card. He moved to New Zealand.

So German guy, they live in New Zealand. He made a website that was called Mega, Megapload, I think, or something like this.

Mega has his main brand, which was like exactly the same thing of Google Drive, if you want, rather than all the alternative of Google Drive that are available, Box, I don't have the names in my...

A place where you can share files with other people, okay? Because it was very efficient for large files, and people start trading pirate movies and pirate music using his system.

He gave all the means to the government and even to the major of music to delete stuff that they found inside. So he didn't even say, you don't even need to ask me. You can delete by yourself content without even telling me.

He gave him the password, yeah?

He gave me access, but...

And this is fine because he says, I don't want to be responsible. How can I be responsible of the content people upload? Because they were encrypted movies, you know?

You cannot control, but is exactly the same thing like if you own a storage space and people put stolen stuff inside the storage space, right? How can you check and control the privacy?

If there is an investigation about trading or purchasing of stolen material?

I'm going to call me a conspiracist. The government shut Telegram, or didn't shut it down, but went after Telegram's creator because they don't like the fact that people are creating apps to run on the Web3, that are decentralized, right?

Yeah, absolutely. But they didn't like Bitcoin. And the many countries arrested people for using Bitcoin.

You know, like now they don't have other choice but to accept it. And it is like this revolution happened, right? It is by adoption, by people.

Then, you know, something that is evident and easy to see, like I'm using a car instead of a horse or whatever, is visible, is tangible, is easy to understand the difference between using an application that is based on a technology, and applications

And Web 1 is pretty simple to understand.

HTML link is a link is a link. 2, I understand because Facebook and YouTube want to give you ads targeted. How does Web 3 or how does any development happen?

Who comes up with it? Is it just a whole bunch of different developers doing things that eventually gel as an idea that they label as like Web 3? I mean, how does it happen that Web 3 decentralization gets created in the first place?

It is technology comes up, people adopt it and use it, and they come out with interesting things.

Do you remember all those monkey that people were selling as NFTs for stupid amount of money? At a certain point, people make small JPEG of the monkeys, or ape, yacht club, something like this was called, or something like that.

And people were paying because the excitement of having a unique piece that is digital, even half a million dollars for a monkey.

Now, there could have been money laundering behind it, because it's easy to pay half a million dollars for something that costs nothing to do, and then resell it, and then automatically have half a million dollars that is legal.

But the cool thing is, Tiffany, you know the jewelry store, me, the special pendant, you can buy only if you own one of those monkeys. So they know that it's going exclusively to very wealthy people. How do they do that?

In the checkout process, you choose your pendant that is exclusive for these people. During the checkout process, you need to do a cryptographic signature using the same wallet address that has a monkey between its property.

So even if Tiffany had nothing to do with the wallet, they didn't even need to ask permission to nobody, they could add in their checkout system to verify that the person purchasing has one monkey, one NFT, one specific NFT inside.

So this shows you what is the Web3, is the fact that you attach to your identity several things that can be used by a party that has nothing to do with it.

That's exactly why you can buy the Goldsward, you can win the Goldsward in a game, disconnect, connect to the other game, and then you're there with your Goldsward, because this Goldsward is attached to your Web3 identity and follows you wherever you

go, you know. go, you know.

54:33

So back to AI, the rise of agentic coding, which I take it to mean AI is going to code for programmers.

Yeah. While it's leaping productivity, I agree with this because I do coding, and the AI can suggest some code, but it doesn't know my whole application and sometimes it does things that introduce bugs and security issues.

It sounds like you're saying it's kind of like we got to watch out. It's maybe we need to slow down a little bit.

Too big problem with that. I used to run a software house, okay? The last one, I did many software house in my life.

Last one was specialized in blockchain. 40, 50 developers, 30 developers, so many people. And today, I don't need to hire anybody, because AI is coding perfectly fast, but I need to monitor it.

The incredible things, and I am fascinated with AI, because it's really something that goes outside the comprehensible. So even the people that make the AI, they don't know how it's actually working.

And Antropiq honestly published paper on these things. Ggpt keeps saying, I just predict the next token. It's the biggest BS ever said in this field.

It's not true. The problem is that a developer to be good, and as you say, if you know what you're doing in terms of full architecture, the vibe coding is just to do a calculator, a small sheet with a button.

You cannot do Microsoft Word with vibe coding because there are too many functions that are in there. But the problem is this. First of all, there will be no developers need.

Nobody is going to hire developers. You can hire an architect, a project manager, you can hire the high level, but you don't need anymore the junior developer. Seniors, maybe.

But in order to make a senior developer, you need a junior developer because nobody can be born a senior developer, right? Now, with this AI, we are cutting off the entry door on the development world, okay?

So how you can create the senior figure if you remove the need of the junior ones? And this is something we're going to see the effect in five years, okay, unless many other things change, right?

Some of the AI people says, it's stupid to learn coding today, but it's not true, because as you say...

Won't the people out of school still understand architecture and so forth? Can't they still get an architect job and skip coding?

I am the person that believe that if you want to be CEO of a company, in your life, you should have had the experience of washing the floors and do all the level up to be a CEO, because that's the only way to understand the real problem that any

That makes me think of AI in general.

People will stop thinking for themselves. They will stop being able to critically thinkers. They'll just trust whatever AI tells them.

Absolutely.

It's a commodity for information. We are moving things. The Industrial Revolution removed the need of muscles, because machinery will do a heavy job that before you need 100 people to do, right?

And AI is removing the need of intellect.

So what is the solution or how is that going to play out?

Do you think what will it look like when the people out of school the next couple of years don't get jobs because AI replaces coders, and eventually the people who are architects retire, then what might happen?

Good question. So first, there should be a big shift in many of the things that we do. I think things change.

School, you know, we are so attached to the way we do things, that we evolve very slow in certain aspects. For example, think about school. Like when my mom was little, okay, she was born in 1932 in Italy.

Only wealthy people go to school. It's not something for everybody. Kids start working in the fields, you know, the life of the majority of the people was being unable to access education, okay.

When I was a kid, I'm 50 years old now. If you want to know something, either you have an uncle that knows it all, and trust what he tells you, or you have an encyclopedia at home, right?

There was no other way to know about the meaning of a word rather than, you know, particular things. I don't know.

Books.

And yeah, it was books. Like, I mean, like an encyclopedia would answer whatever question or books is specific on a topic, but... And a teacher in school was the only access to being educated.

So the teacher will teach you mathematics. They teach you things because there was no other means to learn those things, right? Then the teacher teaching you.

As soon as you have Internet, with the quantity of information you want to become good in painting, there must be free courses in YouTube to learn to paint or pay a little bit of money. You want to play the guitar.

You want to learn about math, basic level, hard level. Everything is there. Everything.

School should stop teach subjects. Just teach me how to find the good information. I'm going to learn by myself.

I don't need you to teach me geography. I don't need you to teach me history. I don't need.

With AI, even less. Think of the crazy aspect that there are classes with 40 kids, 40 10 years old, 11, 12 years old kids. How can a teacher, even she has superpowers, be able to bring 40 kids together?

There is the super smart one is going to be bored. The slower one that is going to be crying every day because he cannot get it. It's insane.

AI can give education, customize to the interest of each kid. You know, we have tools that are amazing, and we don't change the way we do things. That's, you know, there are some places they do some experiments, but they remain like this.

Every school in the world, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, do the test.

The coders, we're talking about, you graduate from school, can't get a job. At what point can you get a job as an architect if you never coded?

I kind of agree, I can't even really imagine like if I never actually until two years ago when there's no AI, when I wrote an app for the app store, it was painful. It would take me a week to solve some problems, you know?

As an architect, when I start saying, okay, let's go deeply in these things and let's check. When you code, there are many ways, agile, not to do when a team of developer working. Because when you code by yourself, it's easy.

You need to agree with yourself, finish. But when you have 20 developers, it's difficult because you need to create different things.

You do once a week a meeting, see what has been done, analyze and check the next step that you're going to do for next week and then I meet you next week. Okay.

If there are two, three different teams, maybe you do a meeting with some Monday, Tuesday with other, Wednesday with others, like backend, frontend, whatever it is. With AI, those things are in 20 minutes, not in a week.

I had four, because I want to try, so I had CHPT codecs, I had Claude code, I had whatever it is that I... No, it doesn't come to mind, but some four of them open, four different projects.

I scroll the screen to the first, this is this, what you did this, move, next, this is this, this is this. The fatigue that this created on me, insane, insane. I was destroyed in three hours.

I will not be able to breathe, first of all. Second, AI, there is a big trouble. They learn from how people codes now.

So they go in, you know, like are trained with, I think, a GitHub, a repo and other things. So they do the same mistake that any developer, there is no, you know, grounded on the basis of development from day zero. They will do now.

On top of it, they lie. I asked to create part of the back-end server side that elaborated in a certain way and front-end to visualize it.

It was all in JavaScript in the front-end, but when I asked you did the back-end, you know, yes, yes, everything is done. Okay, show me the code. Ah, you got me.

I lied. I made only the front-end. So you need to review what the AI is doing, even more than a human that doesn't have a reason to lie to you on those bases, right?

So it is a very strange approach. But on the other end, the things that will take one month are done in four days now.

So yeah.

1:04:37

Speaking of developers, there's somewhere on, and you have an article, the hidden dangers of using third-party code repositories, which is GitHub, as an example. Is it safe or unsafe to use GitHub?

You know, something that I hate to my guts. I don't want to say I'm a good developer.

Actually, you know, if I want to evaluate myself against many other developer, I would have met in my life two, three people that I would look up and say, jeez, I wish I was good as them.

But 95% of the others is people that I'm like, oh my God, I need to teach you how to do things. So I feel I am a good developer. I never used GitHub, GitLab, if not when some client asks me to do review of codes and things that they don't.

I can install Git locally or in a private server if I'm working with people on the other side of the world. And I have it there all private. Any company that want to hire consulting services, they have a checklist.

These people don't even know what they're asking. But they say, I want to see your GitHub because they want to see how much somebody code. I don't know.

I don't use GitHub.

For people who don't know programming GitHub, we should tell them what GitHub is.

If you worked in a large group, it's a way to you write code on one part of a program, someone else writes code for the part, you merge it when you want to put it all together. It saves all your versions and backups and different pieces and parts.

If you're applying for a job, quite often, since it's something you might use as a group, they ask you, do you have experience with GitHub?

That's another thing. Asking if you have experience with GitHub, yes, I know how to do and work with GitHub. But they look at your GitHub to see how active a developer you are.

They want to see all those dot colors in the calendar that GitHub has to show the activity of the person in GitHub.

Yeah, the colors are like a light board. The more contributions you make, the more Legos you have, the more lights on the light board.

Correct. And they don't understand that. They don't even know that you can install GitHub without Hub, GitHub as a service in a server and doesn't use the GitHub.

So I don't like it, and it's actually not really safe, mostly if it's a very large project, because you don't know who and what is injecting what in the code.

Because reviewing the code before emerging in GitHub is ten times more die-hard than reading the small piece done by the AI, because you need to fragment in very small pieces of implementation, because they have this thing, they fix one thing, they

destroy another, which is normal behavior in the development of software. Every time you fix one thing, something else may end up not working anymore. But the AI does it in purpose, which is different. Yeah, no reason to touch those codes.

I am doing a huge portal for management of identity using C. So it's a web service, but behind there is no PHP, there is not Node.js, there is C. So those are compiled, small C application, okay?

And somehow, this is better to control what the AI does. And it's also important because developer today use so many platform, one on top of the other, that they have no idea what can be broken or security-wise dangerous, you know?

Just recently, NPM is another way to distribute packages in Linux that you use to install libraries or pieces of code you don't want to code yourself. They are pre-made.

And came up, one of the maintainers of an NPM, so he received an e-mail, there was a phishing e-mail, and he gave his credential to access the repo to maintain NPM and has been injected with a sort of a crypto miner that, you know, when people use

Tell listeners, viewers about yourself and your company.

What do you do? What's your company and what do you do?

Well, personally, I do consulting, mostly related to WebTree, decentralization. I love mostly projects that are not related to cryptocurrencies, but more other application of WebTree.

And, you know, usually people hire me to design token economies for tokens or the architecture of a system and then coordinate the development. If they need, they can also set up the team of developers. And that's what we do as well with the company.

Plus, I'm part of many other companies, though.

And the links to your websites and your articles will be in the show notes. You've been doing it for 40 years. What's one technology you secretly hope fails?

It's no good. We shouldn't have done that. It's bad.

Something that's...

Technology in terms of hardware or software or...

It could be anything like we're talking about GitHub, kind of how it's... Well, we don't want it to fail, but something maybe that people aren't aware of.

I just hope it... And what scares me the most is AI. AI is no use for coding, which is a tool.

That's what is important. AI should be used as a mean to get to an end and not as an end in itself. That's when people use it as an end in itself.

That's dangerous, right? I... What's...

You know, I'll give you an example. Something like... That's what the concept of...

What scares me in the full software industry is this. If I turn off the light in my room, I switch off the light. If I open this physically copper wire, they get connected or disconnected, okay?

I don't need to trust anybody. I know that when I press the button, electricity doesn't go through, okay? When I open my iPhone, and there is the switch to turn off Wi-Fi in the screen, the switch doesn't interrupt physical cables.

I need to trust the software to actually turn off something, but I can be played in the illusion that the switch is actually turning off something, you know? It's not a physical switch.

So, the replacement of physical switch with software switch or physical interaction.

I'm reminded of in the recent news, the Tesla tragedies where people are locked in their cars because apparently Tesla has the low profile on seamless handles.

And I guess these people got in an accident, and the sensors, the electricity wouldn't work. So, they literally couldn't get out of the car. They couldn't open it.

Okay.

I had an M3, a Model 3 Tesla, and it had also an extra physical switch to open the door, which was probably there for safety in case of the button. When you use it, you get scolded by the screen. No, never use this switch.

Use the other button. But yes, I mean, more we rely on, even in that case, a third party, even if it's softer to do an action in our behalf, we need to trust it. We have no way to know.

We have no way to know what is really happening. And that's the loss of control of what you do. That's what scares me.

And for me, in the critical thinking side, it's...

I think people will... How will they know what's true or not true? And a lot of people, you know, who are like, oh, you question everything.

Like, what's wrong with you? Well, yeah. Yeah.

No, no.

And, you know, that kind of thing.

It's easier to lie when it's close to impossible to verify.

I can tell you, I'm blonde. That's not true. It's as simple as it is.

You immediately, I can tell yesterday, I ate an apple. How would you know? Right?

So I can tell you whatever I want in this terms. In terms of software, software application, what they say doesn't mean much to what is actually happening. And there are application, they listen to your microphone.

So everybody says, they talk about dog food. The sudden advertisement of dog food comes in my newsfeed. As a fact, it's not, you know, this is the annoying part, you know, and not much ethics in doing things.

Maybe we'll frame this for developers or people listening who have stuck with this and are that technical.

Try to finish this sentence. The future will belong to those who can.

Maintain a very strong self-identity, even in the midst of, you know, all these way to pretend to be who we are not, you know.

Now everybody is a scientist with the judge of duty, which is cool in a certain way, but they need not to forget that they are not.

There is actually a syndrome that is coming up, that, you know, you think you can do all, because pretty much you can do all. But they say in the past, if they remove filter from Instagram, all those models are gone, you know.

They remove the GPT from our phones or from our computer. Nobody is intelligent anymore.

Well, actually, I think there's smart, and then there's intelligence, right? Or something like that. The ability to think for yourself and ration, and then you get to be able to think for yourself without the chat, GBT.

That's the key.

Thanks so much for being on my show, Roberto.

It's been an honor.