Our next speaker is again, someone we already seen a very prominent person and giving us a very, having, having, given us must say a very different view on what actually confidentiality means a Emilio Mardini. Thank you so much for having you here. The floor is yours.
Good afternoon to everybody. I'm a psychiatrist by background. So will you will forgive me if I'm going to mix a bit technology issues with human factors. Okay. Is this trust? What is the difference between trusting and gambling that gentleman was trusting or was gambling?
If you look at the, the standard, the dictionary definition of trust, you cannot understand very well. The difference between trust and gambling, the, the Webster definition is trust as reliance on character ability, strength, trust, truth of something, or someone or dependence on the future. You could understand better. What is trust? If you look more in death at the etymology, the world trust in English comes from an regional proto route with which is the same root of truth.
As a matter of fact, in proto and then in English, the idea, the notion of trust is intertwined with the notion of truth. So you trust that something is truth. You trust in something because it is truth. It is true. And you trust debt. Something is true in because debt three kind of trust all the three related to truth and honesty. Consequently, always in English. We have another world, which is a late in region, which is faith in English as a bit different nuances in comparison to trust.
But in the late in language, it was, it meant trust as the current term trust.
And if you go more in that, and you look at the, the region of the world, fetus, the late in feeders, you see that it is related to a word which described animal sacrifices, the animal sacrifices that you did when you made an agreement with God and oath, or with another person, other people, other group of people, other communities, what was the meaning of the animal sacrifice in that context, the meaning was as we killed and chop this animal, those manga, we who is going to break the agreement, the contract, not to respect the contract should be killed in the same way.
This is terrible oath, a terrible agreement. And this explained image in the Bible, when Abraham established the Alliance with God, it is exactly this ritual that happens. He chop in two parts, the animals, and then God like a fire and the beginning. And when the sun God passed through the animal, like a fire. And then that moment, the contract is made the contract between Abraham and God, huh? But it is aloed contract is terrible contract.
So trust is a world which is related to a constellation of meanings, which are the, the, the most important is probably truth.
But then there is faith belief, contract agreement, and penalties for not respecting the contract.
What is happening today in the formation society, in information society. We do not trust only in people more and more. We trust in technology in systems and the trust toward systems and technology is mixed to trust towards people. In other way, one, the one situation, 1, 1, 1 consideration, reinforce the other, or weaken the other in practice. If you look at this cycle, you see very well how the, the, the, the trust cycle works today.
We have brand technology, human infrastructure, the three elements they are equally important and trust should flow through these three elements. If the flow is stopping, then tier system system doesn't work any longer. And then you could see what happened in a particular situation, which is the situation of Bitcoin and Bitcoin. And this is the, the, the, the paper publisher in 2009. The idea behind Bitcoin, the, the, the, the driver, the main driver behind Bitcoin was exactly the, the, the need to overcome trust in the monetary system.
And the, the main, the reason, the immediate reason was that the, the whole system is today based on purely a trust structure, the Fiat money, the money in which, which are not baked by any commodity, by any solid concrete value are baked only on by, by government, by, by the, by trust that you have in a government. So they are very weak in nature. This is the idea behind Bitcoin. And moreover, the whole structure is a structure, which is weak.
If you consider, this is the, this is the, the famous quantitative easing, which is the system through which the European central bank, the EU and, and the us federal reserve tried to push economy. If you look at this, this cycle is, is a pure empty cycle cycle. It is based only on trust, but there is no real values, but trust which circulate and, and indeed many commentators has have observed that this is a scheme and sooner or later the economy, the world economy is going to collapse because it's not based on it on anything is a pure circulation of, of words and trust.
But if the, the, the circle stops the system collapse
And the blockchain, which is the technology, which underlie the innovation, which underlies the Bitcoin, is exactly the attempt to overcome this situation. I guess that most of you, all of, you know, roughly how the, how the blockchain works. So I will not waste time to tell you, but basically what is the idea? The idea is to substitute, to trust a, a chain of transaction, which cannot be attacked time stamped, and consequently, you could trace back what happened in the whole system. In any moment.
In that sense, you could always prove that someone has the ownership of a certain amount of Bitcoin.
This is cause several problems. One of the main problems in Europe is the compatibility of the blockchain technology with the so-called right, to be forgotten.
Maybe, you know, that in the reform, the proposal of reform or data protection directive in the European union, which is going to be enacted probably in 2016, there is this crazy principle that there is a right to be forgotten, which is nice to be claimed, but completely impractical and impossible to be enforced in the internet. In my opinion, I have very, I'm really curious to see what is going to happen when they will try really to apply this principle.
As a matter of fact, this principle is in open contrast, in open conflict with the idea of the blockchain, the blockchain can be used in many other application, consider that any contract, any online transaction can be certified by using the blockchain in particular. There are two potential disruptive application. That to me are much more interesting than the Bitcoin. One is the possibility to use the blockchain as an enabling technology for the internet of things to allow a direct transaction between machines, without the need of a human intermediary middleman.
And another very interesting application, which is linked to, to me, a it's presentation to the previous presentation is the possibility to use the blockchain, to guarantee identities. You know, we are today in a very crazy situation in which personal D personal identities identifiers are basically guaranteed by a chain, which start from the birth certificate and arrive till the passport, the nation identity card, whatever else.
But the, the big issue is that in two third of, of the world, this chain is not secure at all. The birth certificate is not secure at all. And then there is not a guarantee that from the birth certificate to the passport that you have actually in your hands, nothing happened.
So the, the blockchain could solve this problem. It is extremely interesting.
Overall, if you consider the blockchain technology is part of a larger, a wider wave of mistrust toward national international institutions and governance, a values governance situation
To wave that involved politician, progressively politician, political parties, trade unions, international organization. And so, and so, and so, and so, and it is a global wave and it is a wave that is intertwined with another, another wave, which is the wave of conspiracy theories.
We are in conspiracy theories have always been, been existed, of course, but we are in a period in which they are really flourishing everywhere through the internet in particular. And they concern specifically the financial sector. There is a nice, very amusing theory claimed by a professional conspiracy theories, David H, which is about the financial go, the governance of the economic system, the economic, the world economic system should be ruled by a bunch of extraterrestrial people, reptilians, which include queen Elizabeth II, Mario ragged, Bob hope.
I never understood why Bob hope not Jerry Lewis, for instance, but, but David H has published bestsellers people. There are many people who go listening to listen. His conferences and is very popular in the internet, but there are some paradoxes. If you look with sanitation carefully on one side, these approach, these theories are that we should resist. Globalization technology should help us to resist global elite. And the blockchain is a democratic technology.
On the other end,
The, the, the innovation supported about this technology is, should be in theory, a nightmare for anti global people, because it is the idea of unique global currency. The idea of unique global ID. And this is the same for trust dressed.
Again, sat, this is the sentence in with which he or she handled. He's her paper. We have proposed the system for electronic transaction without relying on trust. But as a matter of fact, it is enough to look at the system and you immediately realize there are at least two critical trust act that you have to do. The first one is to trust in the integrity of the mathematical formula. And the second is to trust that the majority of the nodes of the blockchain are made is made by homeless people and not Byers.
As a matter of fact, both assumption are not demonstrated the first one, the mathematical formula. I think that the largest majority of people using Bitcoin cannot understand the line of that formula. And you cannot assess whether it is robust or not. No one is able to do. And actually the Interpol says, no, it is not robust at all.
And if you go to consider the, the, the, the, the, the, the nodes of the blockchain, you look that there are very few pools of people, of minors who control the whole system. We believe they are honest people, but it is a trust statement. It is.
If they are not honest, the whole blockchain can be hacked in any moment. And this is one first point. Usually those who want to eliminate trust and up by increasing the need for trust and tingly and morally, but this is their result, the opposite they claimed they wanted to achieve
Why it is impossible to eliminate trust.
There is, there is a, a deep human philosophical reason why it is not possible to eliminate trust. First of all, the reason is that because we live in time, we live in the flow of time. We need to pro to plan the future. But the future is by definition, probabilistic, at least for our point of view, maybe it is deterministic according to, to go the live niche or whatever else, but for us, it's probabilistic. So we have to gamble on the future that no, of course, with some reason not blind gamble, but we have to gamble even the present.
I, I trust that I'm not in a hospital having hallucination, huh, on the country will be very idiot to stay here. But as a matter of fact, it doesn't takes the cart to, to, to understand that I cannot have a certainty that I'm not dreaming in this moment.
Even the past memory we reinvent continuously the past, as in individuals, as collective as a community, the past is an invention is a narrative of a present. So we need to trust no possibility, no alternative end disease.
And, and we, we could go back to the beginning of my presentation, the relationship between truth and trust. It is very, very strict. And of course there is a landless discussion about truth in the Western philosophy. I don't want it. It would be ridiculous to, to, to even, to, to mention it.
But I, I want just to propose you an, any, an image, the image, you, you, maybe you remember the old myth, the old legend, the old paradox of achiles and the Tor achiles ran, ran, ran, ran, but he can never get the, to, because in any small, any, any small, any fraction of moment of second, which in which he approximates the, to the, to go ahead, goes ahead. And so it is an infinity run, but can, the gap cannot be filled never.
This is the truth. The truth is the truth was the truth is this. We ran behind the truth, but we don't catch. We can't catch it up. And you could see it very well.
Speaking of value, what is the value Italy in principle? The value is the God.
The good, the God, and the good happiness, beauty love, airs, richness wellbeing. Truth could do Def define these values. No. Could you reach this value?
No, they are a sort of far point. We are searching to reach and, and we have all humans, civilization have taken the sun to symbolize this. The sun is the symbol of the good, because the light, the light, the heat source of life, warm vision and the gold, the gold is the light of the sun embedded in the earth, shine like the sun, but it is in earth. And then you take something which is the opposite of the gold, the paper, which is a pack, which is which degrades very easily.
And you turn the paper into the symbol of the value.
And then you start, dematerializing the paper, electronic money, cryptocurrencies and crypto cryptocurrencies are again, the light electromagnetic impulses, electromagnetic waves, like the light, the circle again is closed. What does it mean? The deepest reason we cannot avoid trust is that what values never values in itself, but it needs always to be backed by something else we exist. And we value because we are supported. No one is self-sufficient. So it is true. That trust implies vulnerability.
And this is the reason why people try to avoid trusting, because they are aware that trusting means to become more vulnerable, but there is no alternative. The vulnerability of trust is the same vulnerability of life. It is unavoidable. Those who dream to eliminate trust from any situation, life, business.
Finally, they just relocate trust from some actors to other actors. And this is not always a wise policy. Yeah. Sometimes you go in a worse situation, why happens? So I think that one of the reason is related to the internet. I showed you.
I, I, I mentioned that conspiracy theory. I think that the internet is made in such a way, which make easier to paranoid fantasies. First of all, because it's spiritual structure, which gives you the impression to be in a sort of dream
Second, because of the ability which stimulates fantasy of spying and being SP spy. And finally, because the web structure, which somehow suggests a, a hidden and concealed network of people, and the end of the story trust is a sort of mirror, eh, and what you see, if you look into a mirror, what does the mirror reflect?
The mirror, reflect yourself, but not your true yourself. Mirrors reflect and inverted yourself. Usually you think to recognize yourself, but you are misled. There are different faces in the mirror. Some of them are yours, but you do not recognize them.
So
The question I would like to pose you now, and I'm going to conclude my speech. Could you trust in yourself? Could we trust in ourselves?
Huh?
The own gold syndrome who is free from this syndrome.
There are people, poor people, which are really oppressive by the own gold syndrome, but even more lucky people who has not, who have not this kind of pros, persecution operation, but maybe in your business life, maybe in your private life, maybe in your, a love affairs, maybe in your family, but no one could really say I've never been experienced the own gold syndrome. No, no. Everyone who has know very well knows very well that this syndrome exists. It is very dangerous and it's not only dangerous for individuals.
Also organization can suffer from their own goal syndrome, which is one of the most, the worst disaster for organization, their own goal syndrome. What happened when we distress other agents, we often end up trusting to match in ourselves.
We, when we trust to match in ourselves, we stop defending ourselves from ourselves. And one of the, the major risk and mistake that the human being can do is to trust in himself and give up the main instrument. The main tool we have to protect ourself, which is a reasonable trust in others. And in the world,
You could imagine like, as there were a spider, a dangerous spider concealed remotely in us, he's waiting, he's waiting the right moment to strike. And it is never, never wise to remain alone with this spider. So I started my presentation with the question.
Should we still trust in the online world? My, my question, my, my, my answer is yes, yes, yes, absolutely. We need a trust in the online world. Still more than in the past, probably because of the particular peculiar Strat of the online world.
Trust is not a sign of weakness. Trust is not a gambling.
Of course, weakness and gambling are. And avoidably part of trust.
You, you, you can't escape. They are elements of trust, but they are not a essence of trust. The essence of trust is to be an important, significant instrument tool to face, to deal with challenges posed by life, and to try to mitigate risk of self victimization of own goal syndrome. Now you could pose the question about what is a reason and trust in others, but I think that the time is over.
So I, this question remain suspended. Try yourself to find the right answer. Thank you. Thank you very much.
