[ad_1]
The currency encrypted as Bitcoin is a difficult thing to explain to people, even in a documentary explicitly on what it is and to what extent the application can be taken. Trust Machine he does his best to lift the veil of fear around the concept, though sometimes it oversees worries in his vision of a new brave world.
The documentary, played at 14 Pews on Saturday, is Alex Winter's last. Best known for his role as Bill in Bill & Ted franchise, Winter was for years the helm of numerous technology-driven documents, including a 2012 Napster retrospective that was a wonderful look at how streaming and file-sharing have forever changed the way we consume music. In an era of Spotify and Apple Music, he was a visionary.
So, it's worth taking it seriously. The push of Trust Machine it's how the concept of blockchain removes the centralized power of the World Wide Web and redistributes it through a democratized verification system. In extremely distant terms, blockchain is a series of code that marks each use of an information bit.
Think about how a store scans an item in its inventory, then scans it again to sell you. Now imagine that the object itself contained a cryptograph that recorded the transaction, and would continue to register it even after you've sold, traded or given away the item. That string of information, currently almost impossible to tamper with, is what makes Bitcoin and other token currencies possible.
They have a bad reputation because they are popular among people who deal with illegal activities. The use of cryptocurrency for drug trafficking on sites such as The Silk Road gets a prominent mention. There is also the fact that several authoritarian nations such as Russia and North Korea are very interested in how blockchain financial resources could be used to circumvent international sanctions.
This has a little time for the screen, e Trust Machine Recognizes that at some point government regulation must be involved in the blockchain if it is to be used in utopian ways that many of the subjects believe it may be.
The film does not do much to postulate what the regulation might look like, as it only briefly indicates that the computing power needed to make the blockchain work (called "mining") is a huge drain on power grids wherever it happens. All this is set aside as something that our intelligent species will obviously settle when we stop being so worried.
Instead, everything is bright. Blockchain uses the range from simple to miraculous. Refugees traveling through various regions could use it to make their identity known so they would not need to continue applying for documents as they travel through jurisdictions. This would reduce the possibility of losing vital information, something that seems very applicable to our current crisis with the lost children separated at the border. Urban areas in which people contribute to the supply of energy through solar or wave energy could allow people to locally obtain energy and through green sources.
Even the music beckons. Imogen Heap used blockchain to track the sale of a song and make sure that the information contains each track contributor so that they can automatically receive the fraction of the transaction. It is the next logical step in the Winter & # 39; s Napster documentary and the possibility of making the notoriously opaque royalty system more transparent to each artist.
Trust Machine he is in love with the technology he describes and sees a realm of wonders that he could bring into our lives. The winter takes on a very dense theme and proposes it as a brighter future for all of us. Although you let the darker aspects be solved by others, a viewer moves away from the film with much more information than the talking financial heads come out of it. It eliminates the threat of air and offers a little hope on a topic that is usually full of ignorance and misrepresentation.
Jef Rouner is a writer based in Houston.
