When I first discovered cryptocurrency, I knew the technology could fundamentally change the way the world works and make a huge positive difference. What I realized last night, after ten years in crypto, is the biggest change, the best benefit that cryptocurrency has to offer all of humanity. I've never heard anybody put this together before, so here it is: the biggest benefit cryptocurrency can possibly offer us is access to what so far has been forbidden technology.
The Invention Secrecy Act of 1951
By forbidden technology, I mean this. In the United States, and I imagine in many other countries, if you invent something severely disruptive — for example, solar panels that were 90% efficient, or a generator that could output more energy than was put into it — the first thing most inventors do after creating something like that is submit a patent. And since 1951 there's a law the public generally doesn't know about called the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951, which allows the US Patent and Trademark Office to impose secrecy orders on certain patent applications that contain sensitive information.
You might be wondering how this relates to crypto. To explain, I need to walk through what happens with inventions currently, and then come back to how crypto, with blockchain, can potentially fix it. Right now, if I invent something that truly could lift all of humanity out of poverty — incredible technology that's relatively easy to build — I run straight into the Invention Secrecy Act.
The thousands of secret patents
There's an article on Slate from 2018 about the thousands of secret patents the US government refuses to make public. If you look through the US Patent Office's online database, you'll find some head-scratching proposals: a plan to stack airplane passengers on top of one another, a chocolate-covered ice cream box, and so on. But there are thousands of patents you can't see, that are made secret. Because you don't know what's included in them — and we've seen how patents that were once secret have included things like laser tracking systems and radar jamming — there could be literally anything in there.
Invention secrecy started before the 1940s, but it became official policy in 1952. Any invention you make that's deemed detrimental to national security, you can be forced not to sell, and even forced to classify, keep secret, and make available only to defense agencies. You can try to repeal a secrecy order, but generally that's not successful. And here's the key, as that article puts it: with so many inventions deemed secret, so few eventually publicized, and the entire process itself obfuscated in classifications, it's no wonder critics have questioned whether the current invention secrecy scheme is really working properly.
The inventions that vanished
Where I see the problem is this. Sure, there are absolutely some technologies you'd want kept secret because of the malicious ways they could be used. But the problem is there are also technologies that would be severely disruptive to the existing financial system, yet would not truly be a threat to anyone's life.
For example, there was a car invented in the 1970s, before I was born, where a guy demonstrated it on his local news station. He showed a car that he claimed — and the news went there and validated it — could drive across the country, thousands of miles, on 22 gallons of tap water. That was the 1970s. If you want to see more stories like this, watch the video "Killer Patents and Secret Science Volume 1" by The Why Files, which does fantastic research into these technologies.
And guess what happens every time? Every time someone goes to patent something like this — carburetors that can give you hundreds and hundreds of miles to the gallon, years and years ago — these things get slapped with secrecy orders, because they threaten the existing power and control system. They threaten existing big businesses that are so big they have people able to slap secrecy orders on inventions to stop them from ever going public.
If you're thinking, well, couldn't people just post them on social media or go to their local news station? As that video details, when they try, really bad things usually happen to them. From what I've seen in this research, their technology disappears, and they disappear — murdered, or dying in some mysterious way. So whoever is putting these secrecy orders on things, I believe, is not playing around and is willing to go to great lengths to keep things secret.
How blockchain can save the day
This is where crypto and blockchain technology can potentially save the day. With something like Bitcoin, once you publish transactions to the blockchain, everyone who downloads the entire chain or sees those blocks has access to that information, everywhere. What's special about blockchain is that it has the ability to provide a decentralized ledger that is the same for everyone, always observable, and immutable. In other words, it can't be censored or kept secret.
That's the theory. In practice, some blockchains can be censored and have blocks removed, and we've seen that happen on many different chains. Bitcoin right now is one of the most transparent and trustworthy in terms of decentralization. But there's a big problem with the Bitcoin blockchain: you can only put a relatively small amount of data on it. The blocks on Bitcoin hold only about a megabyte of data, and if you actually wanted to publish a lot of data there, it could get expensive. The sats-per-megabyte cost is down quite a bit from what it was before, but it could still cost you a lot to publish immutable data on Bitcoin. Still, we now do have a place where, if somebody came up with some breakthrough technology, they could publish it straight onto the Bitcoin blockchain, and that would be difficult to censor.
Why you can't just post it on YouTube
You might say: Jerry, you didn't answer the question. Can't I invent some amazing technology, skip the patent office, just put videos up on YouTube and go to my local news agency, and they'll all help me get this information out? Nope.
The whole existing system appears to have silent censorship. It is not against YouTube's terms and conditions to upload a video of an invention. If you invent something with truly amazing technology, there's nothing in the YouTube community guidelines that says you can't upload that video. But I encourage you: if you do that, try uploading it and see what happens. Try posting a video on TikTok showing your invention with blueprints and how to make it. Try putting it out on Facebook and other mainstream platforms.
From my own experience on these platforms, there are certain things you can say that are not against the written terms and conditions but will still get your account permanently banned. There are secret rules that are not publicly exposed in any terms and conditions. From what I see, if you put out anything that's a secret patent or secret invention — even if you invented it yourself, even if it's not already patented — you're likely to have it taken down from any of the mainstream platforms.
And if you go to a news agency with it, from the research I've seen, the bigger news agencies almost unanimously have intelligence agency plants. So if you take your invention straight to a news agency, I believe the plant informs the government agency, and they come seize all your stuff before you ever get on air. The entire system right now is rigged so that if you invent something like 90% efficient solar panels that could absolutely destroy the rest of the industry, you're not going to be able to produce it — it's going to get confiscated. And that's generally the best-case scenario you can hope for.
The world this could create
Right now, the only out we have is blockchain technology, where if you produce something truly amazing that could really help humanity, you can get it out. That's what we're looking for. We're looking to get people out of poverty. We're looking to get people off depending on things like foreign oil and dirty energy like coal. To me, we really need that. It could transform the planet in such a positive way — practically eliminate the current climate issues we're having, eliminate hunger, and eliminate the need to go to war. Why would you go to war if everybody has everything they could want? There is technology out there that I believe is being suppressed, and this is a big part of why I believe the world needs crypto in the first place.
The first step is for people to know about it. The second step is to know that, with cryptocurrency, there is the possibility to actually distribute that technology. I don't go on the dark web myself, but you could, in theory, distribute the technology there — and maybe it's already out there, I don't know, I stay on the light side with Google and YouTube. But putting things on the dark web has its own set of issues. One is that people like me, who would be interested to see the information, aren't going to be there in the first place. The dark web is like a bad neighborhood on the internet, and I don't want to be hanging out there.
So we need places everybody can visit — on the public-facing internet, on a publicly available blockchain — where people can get access to information that lets them replicate technology. Imagine someone anywhere in the world getting some simple parts and building a device that could power their whole town. We need that information to get out there, and most importantly, to do it in a way that makes it difficult to censor, especially difficult to shadow-censor. Cryptocurrency is the first technology I've seen that can do that. These are exactly the kinds of conversations I keep going in my ICP Crypto playlist, and the same ones I get into one on one with members of the Jerry Banfield Family.
The internet is built to secretly censor
You can't see all the videos that have been removed from YouTube, or all the posts taken down from other places where people tried to share this kind of information and it was removed even though it didn't violate the terms. Right now, the system — the internet itself — is set up to secretly censor all these kinds of things without the public knowing about it. Something done openly, where they have to publicly try to censor it, will cause a fuss and a whole lot of conversation about it.
This brings me back to Internet Computer Protocol, because to really share this kind of technology, you need to be able to put a significant amount of data on chain.
Why Internet Computer Protocol
As I mentioned, it's going to get expensive to put data directly on Bitcoin — potentially thousands of dollars, maybe much more, to put megabytes of an invention's diagrams directly on the Bitcoin blockchain. It would cost you millions of dollars to do that on Ethereum. You could try a text-only format to make it cheaper, but if you've invented something amazing, you want people to be able to replicate it easily — and for that, you ideally need videos, pictures, PDFs, and blueprints. What you really need is a decentralized social media platform where you can share your entire invention — not just the data on chain, but the whole thing, out there where it can actually get distributed to the public. This, to me, is one more reason I believe crypto mass adoption will come through ICP.
OpenChat and Tagger
Something like OpenChat would be ideal for this right now. If you have an invention, you could anonymously create an internet identity and post your technology anonymously — videos, pictures, documentation — directly on OpenChat. That could get out to other people who could save the documents and videos on their own computers and have everything they needed to get to work on it.
Something like Tagger, too. Tagger is a fully on-chain social media platform where, in theory, you could click post, put up all kinds of pictures and documentation, and even earn rewards for sharing your invention. The people holding the largest amounts of Tagger may not even be aware of what's happening, so they might be extremely supportive. An application like Tagger or OpenChat could actually go viral off information like this. Imagine being an engineer and finding an exact blueprint, a video, and a description of technology you thought was impossible, right there in OpenChat. You'd probably tell everyone about it — email everybody, tell all your friends: hey, you've got to go to OpenChat and download this video, or go to Tagger and read this post, save these files, and build this device.
These applications could easily go viral — so viral that they could blow through the reverse gas model and through all the cycles the developers have ready to pay the cost, and then crash after that, until hopefully the developers got more funds.
Why censorship is so hard here
Here's what's great: if censorship were attempted, it would be difficult to apply. For example, the founders of Tagger don't make themselves public. If you're from some government agency trying to keep a technology secret, who do you even talk to? There's no obvious centralized entity you can go to and say, hey, you need to take this down.
OpenChat is controlled by a DAO. There is a development team, so there's a clearer group of people to approach. But because of the kind of application OpenChat is, if content were removed from it, that would go viral within the OpenChat community — that something was removed even though it didn't appear to violate any terms and conditions. And if you tried to remove it at the Internet Computer Protocol level, with a proposal to take the canister offline, that again would be very public censorship that would be heavily debated.
From what I understand, Internet Computer is currently the only blockchain where you could really put all this information out there in a way that's easy for people to consume and difficult to censor. That said, DFINITY right now controls a majority of the boundary nodes, and they're working to add more. So let's say somebody made a website with their invention on it. The boundary nodes could censor access to that website — but as long as you had the raw URL or went through the canister directly, the only way to take the information down would be to pass a Network Nervous System proposal and have the voters of Internet Computer Protocol vote to take it down.
Why a normal website won't work
You might ask: well, Jerry, why wouldn't somebody just build a website on their own domain, with their own server, to put this information up? The problem is you need firewalls and all kinds of security, because if you put up a website like that and it gets found by the entities trying to hide that information, it's very easy to hit it with a cyber attack — a denial-of-service attack — and knock it offline. The existing internet setup is not very secure, and you generally need teams of security people to keep any popular website online.
Right now, you can't just share something on the open internet without it being fairly easy for a single person in power, or with a network, to take it down. If you just try to publish something, some intelligence agency has a hacker who could easily use AI to detect websites with information they don't want out there and then take those sites down through cyber attacks. If you get something up on the Internet Computer, because it's secured with cryptography, this is much harder to take down or mess with through an individual, secret actor operating non-transparently. It's the same reason I believe ICP prevents the cybercrime that weak backends invite. That resilient infrastructure, to me, is by far the most important use case: getting things out there that should be out there but are being kept secret illegally.
The caveat: destructive technology
Now, there are definitely things we're not ready for. Not everyone should have access to destructive technology. I actually had to refilm this video because I got a little too specific about that before. Yes, I believe there are things that are genuinely destructive that should not be out there for everyone to just make on their own.
That said, there needs to be far more transparency about exactly which things are being kept secret and why. There could at least be a description: hey, this is destructive technology, and this is why it's being kept secret. But right now we have no access to that. Our existing system gives ordinary citizens no way to tell the difference between vastly dangerous, destructive technology that's kept secret, and technology that's just going to severely disrupt energy companies and car companies and was therefore made secret. We can't tell the difference.
What's nice is that cryptocurrency and blockchain can finally help the altruistic inventors who make technology that could really help other people. If somebody shares something genuinely dangerous and harmful, Internet Computer holders could easily vote to take it off the infrastructure. But if somebody shares genuinely helpful technology that has no dangerous potential except economically, it's wonderful that we finally have technology that allows it to be shared.
Why this is the most important use case in crypto
This is what I'm now most excited about in crypto, and especially in truly decentralized social media. Outside of Internet Computer Protocol, and perhaps Bitcoin, I'm not aware of anything else that's truly reliable and fully decentralized, where there isn't some easy central development team or non-transparent way to attack the technology. Yes, DFINITY has a huge role in Internet Computer, and I've made it clear that they do seem to control most of the boundary nodes right now. But the infrastructure itself appears sufficiently decentralized that any action taken against content would have to be taken pretty publicly, and could easily become the object of intense discussion.
And that's what we need: intense discussion. We need people to know that there are technologies our traditional science says are impossible, that people have proven are not impossible, that are being kept secret. To me, crypto is the best way to get this out right now. If you'd like to dig into the specifics, that Why Files video on killer patents and secret science is a great place to start — and if these out-of-the-box ideas resonate, this is the kind of thinking I share every day inside the Jerry Banfield Family. To me, this is the single most important reason crypto matters.