05/12/2015 Click - Short Edition

There are few things I love more than computer data made beautiful.

It's even better when you can throw it up on a massive, circular wall

and then peruse it all from your evil genius' chair.

Yes, first I am going to destroy the earth!

Apart from where all my clones shall live.

This is the Data Observatory, at London's Imperial College,

from where you can observe any data you want.

That's where we are right now, right there.

Today, Professor William Knottenbelt is using it to show me

specifically all of those being made right now using

These are where the bitcoin transactions are happening

and here we can see the individual transactions as they happen.

This is somebody who is hoovering up lots of little amounts

of bitcoin from their wallet and using it to make two payments.

So they are just going down the back of the sofa

That's a lot of change down the back of the sofa they're finding.

There's actually a lot of activity also going on in China,

but we can't see most of it because it's behind the great firewall

Love to know what's going on behind that.

Unusual transactions look even more lovely.

In fact, this malicious activity looks a bit like a parasitic worm,

which I guess, in a way, is what it is.

There's also beauty in how the bitcoin currency works

Just like a bank will keep a record of the movement of money,

something called a ledger, there is a record of all the bitcoin

transactions that have ever been made.

It's a massive file called the Blockchain.

And the brilliant thing about the Blockchain

You can't fake an entry, delete a payment or create new

And that's because copies of the Blockchain are stored

on thousands of computers across the globe.

You can't alter the record of events unless you can somehow

tamper with each copy of the file on the majority of these machines.

Let's face it, realistically you can't.

I'm about to make a bitcoin payment on this phone

and you will see that transaction enter the bitcoin network.

It's now in the network waiting to be verified.

Already, all of these computers around the world know about that

transaction and in a few minutes' time one of them will verify it

A permanent record of my transaction that in theory

cannot ever be tampered with or undone.

But the Blockchain method is more than just a way

The idea of a tamper-proof ledger stored on many machines is being

taken seriously as a way to keep a record of all sorts of transactions.

Jamie Bartlett has been to meet a few Blockchain entrepreneurs.

I think the Blockchain to me is all about efficiency.

What's cool about a Blockchain is that it's software

Much like in the music business, like the combination

We think it has the potential to be that disruptive moment.

The Blockchain is a piece of technology in order to facilitate

trust amongst individuals, governments,

So, we're in the city of London at the Ethereum Developer Conference.

300 or so people have paid ?750 each to be here for the week

They're calling it web 3.0 and they're saying this is the way

the internet was meant to be, something that's not run by anybody

because no one person can control it.

The reason so many people are here, from banks, to software companies

and startups is because they think it could dramatically improve

Right now, if you want to sell your house, it requires a lot of

paperwork, legal agreements, solicitors,

The idea is that this could be done as a digital transaction that's

recognised and verified on the Blockchain much faster

and secured without third parties getting involved.

The possible implications of that, what you can do with that,

If you think about our existing financial system,

they're holding all of this money and that gives them a lot of power

and that's one of the really compelling things

It doesn't have some guy sitting in the middle of it

who can abuse the system if they want to.

Bureaucracy in general will start floating away as we get governments,

institutions, individuals, businesses, enterprises to be

able to trust and deal with each other as transparently and easily

A lot of bureaucrats will be watching this,

So, who is behind this potentially transformative technology?

The inventor of Ethereum, one application of Blockchain,

In general, you know, I think we're seeing new technological eras

that are kind of as different from each other as say

the Iron Age and the Bronze Age were,

but we're seeing them come up every ten or 20 years.

No single technology will bring about the exact utopia that your

particular political ideology prescribes, but it does make

So, by working together, we can create systems that are much

more reliable than any single one of us could ever be.

This is because the Blockchain is a distributed system,

which means no one person is in charge of checking it.

Every user effectively has a copy of the data and a certain number

of those users check the transactions to make sure they

This kind of decentralised, distributed system,

as a possible way of making the internet more democratic.

That kind of connection, how you can change technology

that might change society, the benefits are quite clear

to the typical user and to the way the internet works,

but it's certainly not without its difficulties.

Indeed, this kind of technology is a double-edged sword.

On the one hand it is censorship resistant and it lacks a central

point of control, but that's also a problem.

Imagine, for example, if somebody transferred ownership of your car

or your house to someone else in a malicious manner.

How would you get repossession of your house?

There is no court or appeal body that you could go to.

By now you'll know I'm a bit of a weirdo when it comes to turning

This is the new Big Bang Data show, at London's Somerset House.

Part celebration of and part warning about the amount

of data flying around the world, freely available to anyone looking.

Here, some of the publicly accessible selfies,

taken in London, and here are some of the masks designed to defeat

facial recognition software, although even I can this is

This is a wall of selective tweets made near to Somerset House

8:20am - wide-awake and awaiting the postman.

Saturday kitchen, I'm ready for you.

If ever I survive a nuclear war and there's no internet

or infrastructure, I would flee to Cambridge.

LAUGHS I can't read that one out.

Think of it as a cross-section of London's thoughts.

The most relaxing piece to look at has to be this one.

This, believe it or not, is the stock market in galaxy form.

Every star is a company, every flash is a trade in that company's stocks.

When you've just seen a small flash like that,

that's probably ?10 million that's changed hands.

Tell me about these wiggly creatures crawling around the sky.

Those are artificial lifeforms that live in the sky with the stars

and they feed from the light generated by the trading.

These creatures evolve over the course of the exhibition,

getting better at finding those light sources and

So, it is just before 2:30pm UK time,

Is that when the stock exchange opens?

You'll see when the New York Stock Exchange opens.

Just before it opens, the creatures look as if they are getting excited.

Whoa! Oh, wow!

Ding-a-ling-a-ling, ladies and gentlemen,

There's been a huge amount of work, involving nearly 30 people,

helping us to get clearance from individual stock exchanges

That's it for the short version of Click. More on iPlayer now. But

another example of the kind of data we are giving away for anyone to use

however they want. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you I know where

your cat lives .com. If you have uploaded your cat to Instagram and

called it 'cat', you may find it on this website at the location where

the photo was taken. Owners and cats, you have been warned! Thanks

for watching. I am off in search of Woody.