 Thank you for having me here. It's really a pleasure. This is my first time in Poland I've traveled all around Europe for some reason I had not been to Poland before I'm really enjoying my stay in Warsaw and I'm really excited to be here for this particular event So I thank you so much to the organizers of this event for making it possible for me to visit Warsaw and to participate in this The title of my presentation is the future of programmable money Which is not the title of my presentation. It's what I Set as the title of all my presentations because I don't decide what I'm going to talk about Until maybe two hours before the presentation. So I'm going to be as surprised as the rest of you to find out exactly what we're going to be talking about today I wanted to start by getting a bit of information about the audience So unfortunately, I couldn't understand what Philip was saying before me How many of you here own a cryptocurrency or have done at least one transaction at some point in your life? everyone, okay Good, so that's that's gonna be easier for me then I won't need to explain What the hell is going on with cryptocurrencies? I can just jump into it. I want to talk today about Communities and how we build interesting exciting communities both online and in person I've traveled a lot in my life and I've lived in many many different places and I find that I am always attracted to a certain kind of neighborhood. I like to live in a place where there are a lot of artists a lot of musicians I like to live in neighborhoods that have weird little coffee shops and obscure bars where people play live music and You get to see bands and musicians and artists Places that have graffiti on the walls Perhaps places that at least when I live in those places, they're not that safe You know They're still a bit dangerous In fact, I often find myself living in neighborhoods where I'm the only white person in the neighborhood or I'm the only non-local in the neighborhood But those neighborhoods don't last The artists the musicians the poor students the people who are living in those neighborhoods love those neighborhoods too because rent is cheap Because the development of the neighborhood hasn't happened yet Because there's opportunities for expression Because with all of the weirdness and the not-so-safe environment There's a lot of weird and creative people who come with that inevitably when you stay in a neighborhood like that long enough other people notice and It starts becoming a cool neighborhood And when it becomes a cool neighborhood people who can afford to start moving into that neighborhood and Then richer and richer people start moving into that neighborhood In a year or two There's a Starbucks on the corner The bar that had all of the weird and quirky musicians in the interesting places is replaced By a gallery or boutique That sells a bit more upscale more expensive clothes than before and Then the rents start going up and The real estate property values start going up Before long The artists and the musicians and all of the interesting people who are the reason you move to that neighborhood They can't afford to live there anymore So they move and Eventually the neighborhood is full of young professionals Wearing suits going to work every morning nine to five with their Starbucks coffee in their hand And they're very busy and they're on their phone and that neighborhood is now shit and You leave and you go to find a cool neighborhood again and the cycle repeats Gentrification is the word we use in the United States to describe that phenomenon Turns out that all of the things that make a neighborhood interesting all of the quirky and weird people They don't stay very long and If you like to live in that environment an environment that is full of creativity and expression the worst thing that can happen to that environment is commodification corporatization marketing because When you have something cool like that If you take something that is cool and authentic and You turn it into a marketing campaign for Coca-Cola or Nike It's not cool anymore, right by the time they think it's cool It's not cool anymore And it ruins the authenticity and the money starts pouring in and all of the authenticity is gone I first went online and participated in digital communities in the middle of the 1980s And in order to participate in those digital communities I had to buy a modem and I had to dial in to a bulletin board system and This bulletin board system was run by some person in their basement as a hobby and It had maybe a hundred and fifty participants in it Who are all just as weird as I was a Weird 15 year olds who had modems Who other people didn't understand and we had such a good time? having conversations online and Then towards the end of the 90s bulletin board system started getting popular and Big companies started buying the smaller operators and they started advertising And they started charging membership fees and then they started to polish and Improve the content. They started to try to make it a bit more palatable for mainstream What's your language? Don't say bad words Only things for adults Let's keep this family friendly and All of the interesting and weird people who made the bulletin board system interesting in the first place Start looking for somewhere else to have their conversations Because they're not welcome anymore and in some cases because they can't afford to participate anymore and all of the creative conversation There was the reason we went there in the first place is now gone in fact One of the weird things about these bulletin board systems in those days was It was all guys At the time there were no women participating in online bulletin board systems in 1985 But the corporations tried to convert these bulletin board systems into dating sites So what they did is they had guys pretend to be women So they could attract more costavers So you find yourself in a situation where you're having a conversation with another guy Whose online name is Helen In order to sell more subscription to the bulletin board system marketing The funny thing was there were a few women online at that time. They were using guys names So they could feel more comfortable and less freaked out by weirdos and they had the fake Helen talking to them And fake flirting to get them to pay more subscription By that time I had already moved on to usenets and usenets was a group discussion that was happening across all of the internet at the time towards the end of the 1980s it was a text-based community where you could exchange messages with anyone around the world Who was on the internet which at the time was maybe 500,000 people? And usenets was weird like very very weird In fact, there was a special corner of usenets called the alt groups the Alternative groups that you couldn't access in all places, but where you could access them. That was the special place that's where all of the Dungeons and Dragons fans and all of the comic book fans and all of the weird sci-fi fans and a lot of the sex and weird hobbies and Just generally people who didn't fit well into other groups were in the alt groups and then the corporations came and They started carrying usenets as a subscription service and the first thing they dropped was the alt groups So now you could pay to get the clean version of you usenets, but you couldn't get the alt groups because Those weren't very polite at times. They weren't very corporate. They weren't very clean So they took usenets with all of its weirdness and all of its quirkiness and they dressed it in a suit and they cut its hair and It became boring and So all of the interesting people moved on And then the web happens and with the web we had this explosion of creativity and expression and At first all of the websites were weird, right too many colors blinking tags fonts Everything looked terrible no sense of design But the conversations you could have and the creativity and the weird people you could meet it was fantastic and then the corporations came in and They polished everything and cleaned it up. No bad words on this site This is moderated content and compuServe and AOL came along and they built Curated environments which were protected from all of the dirty words and all of the weird people Gentrification in waves Across the internet our digital domain being gentrified just like neighborhoods get gentrified and Every cycle of gentrification the same result The people who went there who made that place interesting No longer welcome can't afford to participate not allowed to speak and So they leave and all of the reasons why you joined in the first place are no longer there Many of the people who left all of those curated environments went to other parts of the web and Started their own websites and independent communities and then web 2.0 dot happened and when web 2.0 Happens we started getting the Facebook's or maybe my space then Facebook and the other social media sites and They very carefully curate the content You can post Nazi messages on Facebook and get away with it for a while God help you if you show a female breast. Oh, no, we can't have that. It's a family environment. Don't say bad words carefully curated lots of marketing very polished and All of the interesting people leave and now if you still have a Facebook account It's so you can see photos of your grandchildren in fact Kids don't want to be on Facebook and the reason they don't want to be on Facebook is their parents are there and So they leave and they go to reddit Unfortan gentrification Bitcoin was weird and I really really loved Bitcoin when it was weird, but for some people Bitcoin was too weird Maybe difficult to understand and There's a small possibility that you could buy drugs With Bitcoin, but but not the good drugs Right, not the drugs made by Pfizer That cost a lot of money right not Adderall, which is metamphetamine not Fentanyl, which is heroin not prescription good drugs bad drugs like marijuana and People could buy drugs and they could do other things that were not very good for the corporate image So how do you gentrify a currency? how do you take something that is weird and Dress it up in a suit Give it a haircut and present it to the board of executives. I Remember the first few years. I'd go to companies and they'd asked me to come and present They would say to me We want you to talk to our executives But when you talk to our executives if you could Please say blockchain don't say Bitcoin because Bitcoin is weird and Blockchain is the future and I said No, I Won't say blockchain. I Will say Bitcoin because Bitcoin is the future and blockchain is bullshit and I'll also say bullshit to your executives Because you paid me to come here to tell you the truth as I see it And I'm not going to try to sell you something that's nicely packaged Just to avoid offending I'm interested in telling the truth and the reason Cryptocurrencies are interesting the reason Bitcoin is interesting is because it's not controlled Because it can't be censored Because it's open because a lot of the people involved are very very weird Weird computer geeks weird cryptographers who have weird ideas about privacy and freedom and These weird people are why I'm involved in Bitcoin Because I'm weird too and that's okay, and if you take all of that out What you're left with this blockchain is a sterile Unexpressive uninvented environments a Corporate play thing that has been sanitized of everything interesting and left as an empty shell It's basically a very slow database If someone comes to you and says do I need a blockchain for my business ask them. Do you need something that is open? neutral borderless that no one controls and that resists censorship if If yes then you need Bitcoin or Ethereum Monero Ccash some open public blockchain cryptocurrency System that expresses these capabilities But if you don't need something that's open borderless neutral censorship resistance and not controlled by anyone What you're really asking for is a database So install a database. You don't need a blockchain and If you take all of the weird people out with them goes all of the innovation all of the interesting developments if What you try to do is make businesses usual Only now with blockchain If the whole purpose of introducing this technology say into your bank is to be able to not change anything about how you do business or If your government says we will do a digital currency and we heard that there's a digital currency using blockchain that is open decentralized borderless censorship resistance and neutral and we want to do just that Except we don't want it to be open decentralized censorship resistance neutral or borderless We'd like that, but we want it to be controlled within our borders with the ability to control who has access to it with full censorship and We ultimately decide who has power on this system Also known as the database and you can build that and it will be boring and All of the innovation and all of the excitement and all of the reason why I'm interested in these technologies and perhaps why some of you are interested in these technologies is Precisely because they're weird Precisely because they're different because they're open because they allow everyone to innovate and express themselves creatively In ways that we don't anticipate in ways that are completely unpredictable and in some ways that are offensive To some that's okay I don't want to live in a world of pastel colors carefully curated advertising marketing focus tested phrases Where you can't say the bad words. I want to live in a world with color With creativity with variety with diversity with ideas ideas that sometimes offend me and scare me that I don't understand With weird people around me who are free to express themselves because that's where creativity comes from And it's not just Bitcoin. We're gonna see this happen again and again We've already gone through the phase where people said yes, I'm interested in blockchain But not Bitcoin when someone tells you I'm interested in blockchain, but not Bitcoin What they say is I don't understand. I don't understand Or they've heard someone else say it and they think they can be cool if they say that right It's a bit like someone saying My space is so last year. I'm into Facebook now It happens to Bitcoin, but it's gonna keep happening It's gonna keep happening to every cryptocurrency that dares to do something interesting right now the big banks Governments there in love with Ethereum They love the fact that Ethereum has all of these capabilities that seem much much less weird Than Bitcoin, but they don't realize that all of the weirdness is still there. I love the weirdness in Ethereum because quite honestly the whole point of Ethereum is to make unstoppable code applications that you cannot turn off and the reason you can't Turn them off is because they're decentralized apps dApps. Why make a dApp? And unless you wanted to make a dApp that somebody wants to turn off and you wanted to continue working The whole point of an uncenturable application is so you can write applications that are offensive to some people So people are going to write applications for Ethereum that are going to be offensive Probably offensive to everyone in this room. Maybe a bit offensive. Maybe a lot offensive drug markets That cannot be shut down Sex markets that cannot be shut down in fact all of the interesting applications that you can do in a decentralized neutral unstoppable environment for code are Precisely applications that somebody wants to stop and Those are even more powerful in the countries where the people who want to stop them are in power If I'm in Russia, and I want to put something on Ethereum. I'm gonna put a pussy riot application Just like an annoying Putin Can't stop it in Korea. They had a problem with sexual assault at campuses and The academic institutions tried to shut up the victims of sexual assault So they put their stories on the Ethereum blockchain So that they couldn't be censored Any speech Worst speaking offend someone Oscar Wilde said Speaking the truth that somebody wants you not to publish is journalism Everything else is marketing At some point in the next couple of years someone's gonna write a weird application on Ethereum and The big banks and all of the organizations that today are Absolutely enamored with Ethereum are going to go running to the Ethereum Foundation and to the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance So they're gonna say hey We'd like you to stop this and the Ethereum Foundation is going to say most likely no We won't or better yet We can't Submit your Ethereum improvement proposal. Let's see what the community thinks Hey community. Do you want to stop this application because JP Morgan Chase doesn't like it? No? oops Or maybe they decide to stop it and then we get another hard fork and then we have three ethereums Ethereum theorem classic and Ethereum uncensored Because you can't stop these things all you can do is fork away a Bullshit corporate version But the other one continues to run and then what do you have and that's the moment you suddenly realize This is the first time we have a digital community That can't be gentrified You can plant your Starbucks on the corner, but you can't kick out the weirdos and If you try to kick out the weirdos we fork it and we take the neighborhood with us The weirdos own this neighborhood for the first time ever and they can't be kicked out and That's beautiful That's what this is all about For the first time we now have digital communities that can't be taken over polished sanitized sterilized of any idea worthwhile and turned into a placing for Disney McDonald's Coca-Cola and JP Morgan Chase to shit all over the creativity and turn it into nothing into empty marketing slogans For the first time we have digital communities that can't be gentrified and So when people ask me why are you excited about crypto currencies aren't they weird I? Say yes They're weird They're beautifully weird. That's why I'm interested in them so my pledge and The pledge of all of the other people who are in this because it's weird is Keep it weird. Thank you