 All right, let's get to the main topic of today. How many people like freedom of speech? Okay, that's an easy one, right? Everybody raise their hand, by the way, for the audience watching on video. How about unrestricted speech? Completely unrestricted. Everything goes. You can say anything. Nothing can be restrained by government a priori. Who wants to go for that one? Excellent. Slightly smaller group. Slightly smaller group, but still majority of the people in this room. All right. How many people here believe that the same should apply to money? Financial transactions. Slightly smaller group yet, but still a substantial proportion of the people in this room. If I ask this question in most places of the world, people draw a very hard distinction between their appreciation of freedom of speech and applying that same idea to money, to commerce, to transactions. For some reason, when you bring up this concept, they see a significant distinction between money and speech. People are reluctant to consider a world in which we can transact as freely as we speak. Certainly not a world in which everyone can transact with absolute freedom, without any interference, without any censorship. This is a really interesting philosophical debate. To me, there is no distinction. In fact, the essence of privacy in your financial transactions and your ability to transact with freedom underpins, just like speech, many of you are on the freedoms. If you have freedom of expression and freedom of association, but you don't have freedom of finance, if you don't have the freedom to protect your property, how quickly will your freedom of association and freedom of expression go away? How can you have the ability to participate in the political process if your bank account can be seized because you participated in the wrong political process? Or went to the wrong protest, or donated to the wrong organization? Political speech and financial speech are really not that different. If I say that in most places, I am a radical. That is a radical idea. The idea that we should afford the exact same freedoms to speech and to money. The ability to transact with anyone on the planet is an inherent part of human rights. It is nobody's business who I transact with. There is no crime of transacting. You can create crimes after transacting, but the transacting itself is not the crime. The transacting itself is a means of expression. It is my ability to exert self-determination through the fruits of my labor. A radical idea. This philosophical debate has been going on for many, many years, all around the world. Nowadays, we see this coming to a significant amount of tension. If you ask the average person, is it okay if the intelligence agencies monitor your phone calls? Monitor your emails? Watch you through your webcam? Most people would say, no. That is not okay. That is not an acceptable state of society. How many people have noticed that every single credit card transaction you do, every line on your bank statement, is not only monitored, but is freely given to all intelligence agencies without warrants, suspicion, probable cause, and due process. Are we outraged about this? Most people aren't. Most people are outraged that the NSA may monitor the metadata of their phone calls. They don't give a damn that under the Patriot Act, every financial transaction they ever do can be picked up by a Podunk sheriff and a tiny county to peruse at their discretion without any formal legal process for everyone and anyone at all times. We make these artificial distinctions between these fundamental rights. To me, there is no distinction. The privacy of my finances is as important as the privacy of me. My ability to express myself in commerce in a society is equivalent to my ability to express my opinion. If I don't have freedom in my financial transactions, I don't have freedom at all. Or I have freedom that is subject to immediate withdrawal if I cross a line I can't see. That is a scary state of affairs. Most people accept it. This is an interesting philosophical discussion. We can go one way, we can go the other, we can talk about it. None of it matters. None of it matters. The reason none of it matters is because that is the discussion we were having for the previous two decades. That is the discussion society has had for a long time. That is not the discussion we are going to have from now on. None of that matters. Because the statement, money is speech, is no longer a philosophical question for debate. It is a technological fact. That is Bitcoin and Ethereum. That is open, public, borderless, transparent, transnational, neutral, censorship-resistant blockchains. They establish in reality the technological fact that money is speech. Money can now be communicated over the networks of speech. It can be transported with the protocols of speech. It can be encapsulated into the media of speech and expression. It is a system of expression. Money is a content type on the internet. It is a content type. A Bitcoin transaction requires no reference to an external authority. It requires nothing but the inherent signatures in the transaction... and the proof of work that could be presented in a block to stand alone. It is self-verifiable. You can look at proof of work, which is just a number. You can look at it and say, in order to create this number, this much energy was consumed. That is a fact. I don't need to ask anyone to make that calculation. I can evaluate the truth of that statement independently without reference to any external authority. Bitcoin transactions, money, commerce now, stand on its own as an expression of value. I have said in many of my talks that money is a language. Money is the language by which we express value to each other. Maybe you thought that was a fanciful statement of philosophy. What I am telling you is that it is a statement of technological fact. What that does is it immediately creates a completely inverse relationship with authority. If I wanted to transact commercially, when the question of money as speech was a philosophical debate, I had to assert the truth of that and fight for that right. Now, the technological fact that money is speech allows me to use the medium of speech and all of its privacy enhancements, tor, anonymizers, remixers, encryption, to speak freely through money on the internet. Better yet, the only way to change that is to censor speech. You can't differentiate my commercial speech, my money speech, my political speech, my cat videos, my gossip. It is all completely the same on the internet. It uses the same technology infrastructure. It uses the same protocols. It uses the same privacy protections. It mixes with everything else that is out there to form one giant roar of human expression. In that roar, my money is speech. It has been established. As a technological fact that I need no one to persuade or debate, I can simply speak commercially. I can transact. I have established my freedom of expression in the domain of commerce, my sovereignty of speech. Now, this is a technological fact. Thank you.