 I think a lot of us are, though, very familiar with your prolific background, so I wanted to dig more into your life and things that have impacted you and inspired you moving into this world. So when I was doing research for this, I had read the forward of the Internet of Money, which I see you've got here translated, which is lovely. Yeah, this is the Internet del Dinero, the Spanish translation. And we're going to talk a little bit later about all of the translations that you've been able to get out, which is wonderful. So when I was reading the forward, you talk about a few times in your life where you had these obsessions. And when you were a child, it was the obsession with getting your first computer, the obsession with getting Linux on your computer for the first time. And then later down the road, this obsession with Bitcoin. So kind of taking it back, it seems that technology has always been something that's just really inspired you. So taking it back to more of your childhood, tell me more about what you were like as a kid, what was inspiring you within technology to really move into that world? Well, you know how people say, I got my first computer at X years? I got my first electric shock at five. I was trying to dismantle one of the plugs in our house, because I wanted to see what was behind it. Throughout my childhood, I was dismantling things to see how they work, and then failing to put them back together in working order. But I was always fascinated by machines. I was always fascinated by technical things. And I wanted to understand how things worked. And when I was 10 years old, my mother, who was a complete technophobe, I remember once she told me that her hi-fi system had broken, and was giving her incomprehensible technical messages. I was like, it's a pretty simple hi-fi system. How do you do that? I was always amazed. And she said, it's just blinking at me, zero, colon, zero, zero, and I don't understand what it means. I'm like, mom, that's the clock. It just got unplugged, but it reset the clock. You can ignore it, the hi-fi still works. She was like, well, how am I supposed to know that? So this person, for whom technology was completely opaque, bought me a computer. At 10 years old, she bought me a Sinclair ZX81, which was a hobbyist computer that you connected to your TV. And I then disappeared for six months. I literally disappeared. I spent all my time in my room learning how to program this computer with no resources, just reading the very thin manual over and over again until I learned how to program. And that was my first technical obsession. And then I've had these series of obsessions where a technology will fascinate me so much that I'm lost to the world for a period of time. And during these times, it unfolds like a vision in my head, and I see, oh, wow, so then we could do this, and then we could do this. And if other people wanted to use it, they could do this, and this, and this, and this vision unfolds. And then, of course, with great enthusiasm, I run to everyone I know, and I say, this is going to change the world. And they say, have you cleaned your room today? You know, because I'm 10. Or, and this kept happening to me. Nobody would believe me. Like, I got my first modem. I was like, we're going to do everything online. And they're like, I don't think so. Bitcoin was my sixth epiphany moment. It was the sixth time that I became completely obsessed with the technology. A couple of the previous two, like Linux and the first websites, had allowed me to build a whole career. And I had watched how many of the predictions or visions I had about how this technology would evolve came true. And so by that time, I built confidence. When I was first in touch with Bitcoin, when I first understood and grasped what it meant, I was lost to the world for four months. I got completely obsessed. I lost a lot of weight because I stopped eating. Because there wasn't enough time to eat, because there was too busy reading about Bitcoin. And then, when I emerged from that, I thought, okay, I now have the confidence that this vision I have of where this will go, I think I'm going to be right again. And this time I'm not going to stand on the sidelines. I want to be involved in this from the beginning. Well, not right about the beginning, but soon enough. It was soon enough, absolutely. So it seems that your family, your parents were supportive of this then, which it's interesting you're saying your mother was kind of scared of this technology, but she's still allowing you to have that entryway into it, which is lovely. I think my parents realized at a very young age that whether they approved or did not of anything I do wouldn't really change what I did. Because if I was interested in something more than school, I'd just stop going. They found that there wasn't much they could do about that. So they kind of accepted my interest. Yeah, wonderful. Well, I think we're all probably happy today that they allowed you to do that. Okay, so you were born in London, you grew up in Greece. And I know that when I speak to a lot of people in the space that come from different countries of different issues and problems, that sometimes it allows them to actually understand a little bit more clearly and attached to technology of this nature where you can potentially be building these free, open, monetary systems. And it really takes sometimes being involved in it or being able to see how bad it can be. So can you talk to me a little bit more about growing up in Greece? Did that have effect on your understanding? And can you give us a little bit of the history of the time? It had an enormous effect on me. And it's something that I find most Americans can't understand. But in many countries in South America, it's much more of an immediate experience of this generation. I was born in a year when in Greece, we had a military dictatorship. And one of the reasons I was born in London was because my mother wanted me to have an exit in case that military dictatorship continued to dominate Greece for decades. Nobody knew how long it would go. I mean, at that time, the Spanish dictatorship had already been going for almost 20 years. So we had a dictatorship in Greece. Fortunately, it was short lived, but I was born in that environment. One of my earliest memories was of machine gun fire outside the apartment building we were, the sound of that. During the student uprising, we had it in Greece. And, you know, even though the dictatorship was overthrown in 1973, the impact of the fascist mentality continued for more than a decade. I remember in my teen years, there were only four radio stations on the FM band. The Armed Forces Radio, the Greek Navy Radio, the Greek Air Force Radio, and the Greek Public Radio. And they played patriotic and nationalist folk music. So I started a pirate radio station with my friends to play billboard top 40 rock and roll. Of course, because who wants to listen to patriotic band music? Certainly not any 14 year old. I knew, this is the environment I was born in. And Greece still had this leftover shadow of fascism that was pervasive in authorities and law enforcement. And a very big impact of the military on the country. I think this is one of the countries where when I say these things, you know what I'm talking about. And at the same time, we had very poorly managed economy. I remember the drama having two radical devaluations in my life in the 80s, when overnight the currency would drop 25, 30, 40 percent. And as a result, all import goods would increase in price immediately. And of course, you know, Greece is a country where, okay, olive oil was the same price. But pretty much everything else is imported, right? You know, it's a tourist based economy. So everything got expensive. And I watched money break in my childhood. I watched currency controls. And I remember standing with my parents at the bank while we were participating in the family ritual of a run on the bank. Get your money out. When that's a family experience, all of the families, my cousins, my uncles lining up to get all their money out of the bank before they impose currency controls, you know, that leaves an impression on a kid. So a distrust for authority, a lack of respect for authority that hasn't been earned, and a distrust of the monetary system of currency of banking were kind of baked into my childhood. And so you can imagine when Bitcoin comes along, I'm like, well, obviously, this is how we should do it. Yeah, yeah. Finally. Finally, yeah. And it's really strange because it's an experience that I can't share with Americans. They do not understand it when I talk about it. But when I come to South America, everybody's like, well, yeah, of course. Being there, done that dictatorship, check, currency devaluation, check, currency controls and run on the bank, check. My family buying three cars and two washing machines, because that's a stable store value. It's like, you know, in the States they say, when you buy a car, the moment you drive it out of the dealership, it drops 50% in value. How much does your currency have to drop in a year for that to be a better investment? No, okay. And that's a unique experience. And the funny thing is that that's the experience of the world. It's not the exception. It's the American experience that's the exception. It's the Western European experience that is the exception. The one and a half billion people who have stable currency are the exception. The other six billion are the norm. Yeah. You know, the first time I actually came to the Latin American Bitcoin Conference in Mexico City, I had a similar situation where I was working in the U.S. and I wasn't quite understanding, you know, the impact. And then I came down to Mexico City and it clicked with me. And it made me want to really be involved in the space, so I completely echo that. Okay, so moving through your life, we've, you know, gone through a little bit of your childhood. You went to the University of London. You studied computer science, data communications and distributed ledgers. Distributed systems. Or distributed systems. So fast forward to post school under us. You spent your professional life as a cybersecurity expert and you were involved within the cyberpunk movement. So tell me more about what intrigued you with that and what made you attach yourself to those ethos? Yeah, it's around the late 80s. This was probably 1988, 1989. I got my first access to the internet when I started reading. And my first access to the internet was through an account that I had literally hijacked from a university professor. So this was not a sign up for an ISP. This was hacked into a university. And fortunately, just to clarify at the time, this was not illegal in Greece because they didn't have a law yet. They didn't know they needed a law yet. Also, I was a minor, so that helped. And my experience of the early internet was Usenet. Usenet was a bulletin board discussion. Today, the closest to that would be Reddit. So it was a forum where you could have discussions. And on there were a couple of really important news groups that had discussions about cyberpunk philosophy, cryptography, and computer science, folklore, and culture. And I started reading this. And then I was fascinated by this idea that you could use mathematics to govern society, that potentially in the future we could use the power of large prime numbers in order to protect people from intrusion, to achieve privacy, to achieve autonomy, to achieve self-determination. To me, the idea of using a mathematical, mechanistic system to solve some societal problems was appealing. Now, of course, with maturity, I know that a lot of that is just naivete. It's the disease of computer geeks, which is you think you can solve society with technology. And it's not true, but some things you can use technology for. I was fascinated by cryptography. The idea that simply by using numbers you could create a system that not the most powerful government in the world, or all of them together with the most powerful computers in the world, could break it in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion years. And the fun thing about when you get into cryptography is you get used to people saying numbers that involve repeating the word trillion six times or seven times in a row. And as a kid, that's very exciting. It's fascinating. So I got into that. And I started reading about all of these cryptographic systems. And then I started getting to read from the people themselves. When I went to college in London, I actually started meeting these people. And that just blew my mind. I remember being in a conference, one of the first conferences in London on the topic, which was a computer freedom and privacy conference. And this was probably 1992 or 93, where John Gilmore, Mitch Kapoor, John Perry Barlow, and Phil Zimmerman were doing presentations. If you know anything about cryptography and security, those names are legendary. And John Perry Barlow, Mitch Kapoor and John Gilmore announced the formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And I said, can I sign up? Like a 17-year-old kid, 18-year-old kid, can I sign up? I had no idea. If you're interested, DFF is a really fundamental organization for freedom and civil liberties on the internet today. I met Phil Zimmerman of PGP in 1995, and I asked him to sign my PGP key. I lost access to that key, but it was really cool, because my key had level one trust on every installation of PGP in the world, because it was signed by Phil. I gradually found myself surrounded by these giants of computer science, of computer security, of cryptography, of the early cyberpunk movement. I was just a kid who was just giddy with excitement and anticipation. When I got into Bitcoin, my idea was, this time I'm not going to be the kid watching from behind. I can do something meaningful in this space. So I transported all of that early enthusiasm and tried to apply it here. Hearing you talk about feeling giddy to meet these people, does it feel strange or exciting to you? I feel like you kind of embody that for a lot of people that meet you as well. You've been able to be this wonderful educator. I think a lot of people I know will talk about meeting you and how special it is to them. Do you think about that? It's completely weird. For one thing, because you know the saying, never meet your heroes, one of the things I realized after meeting a lot of the people in the computer security industry that I really admired, was that many of them were very flawed individuals. When you meet your heroes, the reality of an actual person who has weird habits and mannerisms, and sometimes is rude to other people, I've been disappointed often by meeting people I really admired, and then discovering that in person they're very rude to people around them. I thought, I never want to do that. But also, when people are excited to meet someone, it's important to always remember that, behind whatever achievement or reputation someone has, it's always just a person. It's a person who is flawed and makes mistakes and vulnerable and quirky sometimes, and that's okay. There's nothing special. So I wanted to, we've gone through a bit of the history of your life, and so I want to move forward a little bit more, and you've touched on this a little bit, but to that actual discovery of Bitcoin, do you remember where you were when you read the first article? Do you remember, it seemed like it was an aha moment, so what was your life like at that time? Can you talk to us more about why it felt so important to you? Yeah, so I've been self-employed my entire life. I've worked for a company or a boss for a total of maybe 18 months. It did not work. I am not good employee material. I was, and I found it frustrating, so I've been self-employed all my life, and during the time I was in Bitcoin, I had founded an analyst, a research company, and then I had worked for that for six years, and then I decided to leave, because it wasn't exciting to me anymore, and I was freelancing, and I was doing work in information security, supporting various startups in San Francisco area, and trying to find the next thing, and not quite sure what it would be, and this is 2012. I remember sitting in my living room in San Francisco, and laptop on my knees, just reading and browsing, and things like that. I came across an article in slash.org, which is a site you may know, it's a geeky site, not very prominent anymore, and I read an article about Bitcoin, and it had a link to the Bitcoin white paper. I remember that I had seen something about Bitcoin previously, in relation to its use for gambling sites, and at the time it seemed very uninteresting to me. Somebody has done another form of e-gold, liberty dollar, gambling, casino money. What's the big deal? It was not interesting. This time, I saw the link to the white paper, I'm like, okay, this is the second time I've heard about this Bitcoin thing. Let me click on the paper. I start reading the paper about a page in. I'm like, oh, shit, this is completely decentralized. And then I keep reading, and by the time I finished the white paper, I realized, okay, this is not a currency, this is a decentralized, distributed network. I understood the Byzantine fault-tolerance system, because I understood the Byzantine general's problem. I'd studied distributed systems for years. I understood the information security implications. It just struck me as a very elegant way to solve that problem of consensus and coordination. I'm like, wow, if this could work, I'm sure it doesn't, but if it did, this would be... I'm just like, I want to find out if it works, so immediately go to source code. I'm reading the C++, and I can't understand the flow of it. I'm really trying to understand how consensus emerges from reading the software. It's actually pretty difficult. Anybody here tried to read Bitcoin Core software and understand how consensus works? Yeah, about five people here. It's not easy, right? I'm like, okay, let me search for $21 million and see where it's defined in the code. It's not. It's an emergent property of dividing by two every 210,000 blocks. If you do the math, it ends up being 20.999.997Bitcoins, but it's nowhere in the code. Nowhere in the code is... There's no there of consensus. And then you realize, you know, it's fascinating, because I made another metaphor that immediately clicked. I felt like, you know when neuroscientists are studying the brain, and they're trying to find where consciousness is in the brain? And it's not anywhere, it's everywhere. And then I realized the reason I'm not finding consensus in the code is because consensus isn't in the code. It's an emergent property. And I just went completely head-in and started reading and writing and just exploring. I'm getting emotional over code. Yeah, and so that was my reaction at the moment. I just got so incredibly overwhelmed. So I started reading, and I remember that day I didn't sleep. So 18 hours later, I canceled all of my projects. And I said, this is it. This is what I'm doing. So I called all my clients and I said, thank you very much for your business. It's been a pleasure working with you. I'm doing something else now. Bye-bye. And by the way, if you're ever interested in being self-employed, that moment is the essence of being self-employed. The whole thing about it is being able to fire clients, and I fired all of my clients in 30 minutes. And then I became unemployed, which is the other stage of self-employed. And I decided to dedicate my attention to this, and I started working on it. And for the next four months, all I did is wake up, read, write, code, read, write, code, go to sleep. Slept for six hours, got up, and again, I lost 26 pounds on the extremely inadvisable Bitcoin fascination diet. If you watch one of my videos, like the first one I did in May of 2013 at the Bitcoin conference in San Jose, I'm wearing a suit, last time I wore a suit in Bitcoin, and I am floating in it because I'm so skinny, right? It's like 30 pounds less than I weigh now. I should probably go on that diet again. And I just got into this thing. Now, a lot of people ask me why I got into public speaking, and here's the thing. When I started understanding how Bitcoin worked, and I looked at the people who were working on Bitcoin, and I think there are actually a couple of core developers and legendary cypherpunks in the audience here. I don't know if you're here at the moment. Adam Back and Luke Dasher are probably somewhere here. They're certainly at the conference. These are people who were already working for years on either cryptography as a general, in general, or Bitcoin specifically. And I took a look around that industry, and I looked at the programmers in that industry, and I suddenly realized that I was mediocre. The thing is, if I tried to look at myself as a programmer in a worldwide scale, I'm an OK programmer. I can program in more than a dozen programming languages. I've been programming for 35 years. I do it as a hobby. I love it. It's something I'm pretty good at. On a Bitcoin scale, I'm not even in the bottom 30%. That's because the people who are doing the core programming for the protocol are some of the best mathematicians, cryptographers, and coders in the world, world-class. Suddenly, you come straight out of a high school baseball team, and you're like, I'm the best, and someone drops you right in the middle of a professional ball game, and you're like, uh-oh. But then I thought, okay, what can I bring to the table? And I was trying to figure it out, and then I thought, I can do public speaking and education. That's the thing that I can do is that others in the space can't do as well as I can. So I decided not to code, and instead to focus on teaching. Wonderful. And we were running pretty short in time, but I wanted to ask this last question, and also just a little shout-out about your new book, Mastering Ethereum, which it's just now for sale on Amazon on your website. It's actually shipping this week. Wonderful. Go out and get it, guys. Yeah, there you go. So my last thing, and it has to do with you being an educator. You know, I think that there are a lot of talk within the industry about how sometimes it can be a very polarizing, and sometimes we're trying to build a system where everyone can be involved and included, but there are factions that kind of alienate certain new people to come in. And do you feel like as an educator that you're able to outreach to people of all backgrounds and technological competencies, and does that help, you know, give you a lot of energy? It seems like it's something that's such a big passion of yours and allows you to kind of step outside of that realm. I mean, I think that really drives my educational mission, which is it's really simple. It's educate as many people in as many countries and as many languages as possible about this technology, but also about its social implications. And when I say this technology, I'm not talking just about Bitcoin. I look at the whole ecosystem of open decentralized blockchains and what they can do together as an ecosystem. Bitcoin is the foundational rock, absolutely, but there's more, and it's all playing together and feeding on everything. 2018 for me was the year of Spanish, right? I'm trying to learn Spanish myself. We've published all of my books in Spanish now, almost all. Internet Delta Nero came out at the beginning of the year. We're trying to make distribution deals with local publishers and printers in South America and Central America. Because one of the problems is, yes, I can get this printed by Amazon for a small cost, but I can't get it distributed. You can't order from Amazon and have it shipped to Argentina. It's going to spend seven months in customs, and it's going to cost $30 per book, right? So what we need to do is get it printed locally at cost and distribute it to a price that can work for South America. So we're trying to do that now. We've pushed through, I have about 350 videos on my YouTube channel. More than 120 of them have now been translated with Spanish subtitles. We have a group of volunteers that are doing translations all the time. Mastering Bitcoin is being translated. Mastering Ethereum is getting translated as we speak. Spanish is absolutely the number one language I'm targeting. To me, the application of this technology in Central South America is probably the most important market and hotspot. One of the big deficits we have in the space is that the majority of the information is in English. That isn't helpful. If we wanted to just get the people who already had literacy, numeracy, English-speaking skills, and an understanding of technology, they're going to find it on their own. They don't need any help. The real people who need this don't speak good English. They don't have technical expertise. And if we are going to succeed in markets like remittances for immigrants, sending money home from all over the world, we really need to do this in Spanish. Thank you so much for this opportunity, and thank you very much.