Bill Roscoe's Manifesto
A fairer digital civilisation.
Using verified technology in service of the public interest, not the profit and control of the companies and governments.
His forthcoming book, Understanding Decentralised Systems, explains the technology behind the services a fairer digital civilisation depends on.
WHO
A mathematician turns to blockchains in 2017
Bill Roscoe is TBTL's founder. In 2017, after a career at the intersection of mathematics and technology, he began looking at how decentralised systems could produce a fairer world, motivated by the widening digital divide and by governments and Big Tech using their dominance of IT to their own advantage. His own project was to broaden a 2016 UK government report on blockchain and distributed ledgers, and to do the computer science needed to make the ideas real.
WHY
Profit and control shaped today's digital world, not the public interest
In Digital Civilisation Manifesto: the view from 2026, Roscoe's diagnosis is that the digital world has been shaped less by any coherent public interest than by two other forces: Big Tech's profit incentives, and authoritarian governments' instinct to control. That diagnosis anchors the rest of the manifesto.
THE CORE THESIS
Trust through verified technology.
Roscoe's argument turns on a property software and hardware have that people don't: in principle, you can know exactly how they'll behave, checked against a stated specification rather than taken on reputation. Even so, trust in technology has become a political and commercial battleground rather than a technical question. His proposed fix borrows from other regulated industries: treat critical hardware and software the way drugs are assayed before sale, requiring sellers to prove what a product does and that it hasn't been tampered with, in a form that can actually be inspected. It's the same standard behind TBTL's own tagline, trust but verify: proof takes the place of reputation.
THE VISION IN PRACTICE
Three arms, now part of TBTL's work
Personal data control and identity
A closely controlled identity that lets people prove who they are without disclosing everything behind it — the lineage behind FortID.
Continuous compliance
Regulatory compliance checked continuously against a system's own data, rather than tested after the fact — an idea Blockchain Consulting draws on.
Auditable hardware and software
Hardware and software built to be examined and verified, including trusted execution environments — the foundation of TEE Consulting and the audit practice generally.
IN PRACTICE
From manifesto to museum
These ideas aren't only theoretical. They formed the core of the winning entry to theme the Shenzhen Science and Technology Museum, which opened in May 2025 — closer in spirit to the manifesto than Roscoe expected when he visited, though the museum doesn't reproduce it directly.
VIDEO
Bill Roscoe on how digital civilisation took shape inside the museum.
Watch on Instagram ↗THE BOOK
Understanding Decentralised Systems
Understanding Decentralised Systems, Roscoe's forthcoming book from Springer, explores how decentralised systems can provide dependable and trustworthy services even when we don't know which of the agents running it are trustworthy. In his own words, one of the community's most important tasks is to educate government, commerce, and individuals about what's possible when integrity and privacy are built into the technology they use — without that education, people won't know to demand it, making it easier for whoever handles their data to get away without it.
Volume 1 · Early 2026
Foundations and Blockchain
Covers decentralisation and blockchain from first principles: the shift from cash to e-cash to blockchain, a blockchain primer, stochastic reasoning about consensus, and how forks are prevented.
Volume 2 · Expected 2027 · with Pedro Antonino
Digital Civilisation
Shares its title with this manifesto and opens with a revised version of it, before formalising the same ideas into a rigorous model of trusted computing spanning confidential computing and blockchain.
Volume 3 · In preparation
Programming and Verification
Programming and verifying decentralised systems and their smart contracts, plus regulation technology for decentralised systems — a direct tie to the audit practice's own foundation.
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