 The common spirit uniting people at this conference is decentralisation and it's all about looking at how we can do things differently as a society, how we can take power away from these big centralised power structures and give them back to individuals. And that's exactly what IOHK is about, so it's really great to be part of that and have these conversations with people who want to do similar things as us. I love coming to these kinds of conferences because you get to meet such a diverse crew of people. Again, wildly intelligent, visionaries, non-judgmental in a way. I like that about the people here. You can really just kind of speak your mind and speak on ideas that would sound insane to most people but to these people they can actually see value and see the future in it. Yeah, I have to say honestly because I've been to a lot of these conferences over the years this has been one of the best. My eyes entered the space. Every time we got any bit of news whatsoever on CNN or CNBC it would just be all over Bitcoin Talk and Reddit and now we don't react to the news, we make the news. It's truly amazing. There's people here who are building islands. There are people here who are starting their own governments. We're seeing hundreds of millions of dollars of capital being raised. We're having deep and detailed discussions about governance in general, about voting systems, about how this technology is going to impact politics and it also gives us an opportunity to really think deeply about what is the future of money. Not just an abstract fund libertarian way but in that I can actually implement the things that I care about and create my own bank or my own money supply and so forth. So it's really extraordinary to see the growth. It's really extraordinary to see how many people have come in. We've grown from just a few thousand people to millions of people in this movement and this conference is a great reflection of that growth and it gives us great opportunities to not only get to know each other and do business with each other but also become good friends and all be together in the same goal which is building a better, more private, more transparent and decentralized world. What I see crypto doing is challenging and eliminating the nation state. The printing press pretty much blew away the church. They were the repository of information. They had a monopoly on information. Gutenberg's press shattered that. So here you have cryptocurrency is going to do the same thing to the nation state. So it's scary on one hand because what does that mean to society and how do we live together if we don't have that structure in place and that's a totally different question but clearly the nation state is completely reneging on its obligation. The social contract that John Locke talked about has been shattered. He said that if the social contract is broken the people must revolt. They design a system to make everyone a debtor as quickly as they can because if you're in debt you can be controlled. If you're not in debt you have liberty and freedom. And eventually the bills become due. You may be in government somehow. You continue to fend them off for hundreds of years and decades and centuries but if you apply it to you as an individual eventually you've got to pay the bills and you can't live in a negative world of negative money. I think the whole thing with blockchain and cryptocurrencies is a major advance in the way that society is organized. First of all it gives people the freedom to have their own currency and their own value transfer system and secondly it allows people and institutions to securely secure data on the blockchain which would be free from internal or external hacking. Fine, I'm a libertarian, I'm conservative, I'm liberal, I'm all of these things. I don't particularly like labels. I think that's one of the first issues and I think that's what's so interesting about the space as well. It's even decentralizing a need to have a label. I mean at the end of the day it's just what is logical, what is rational, what is fair, what is equitable and these things can be answered and they don't need to be answered by a conservative answer with whatever their monetary policy is or position or a liberal answer. It's always somewhere in the middle and Charles talks about this a lot and I've always been a big fan of Hagel and the Hegelian dialectic and it's the thesis and tithesis and the synthesis so somewhere in the middle between those opposing forces is the answer. It's there, it's in front of us and this space, it comes closer to being able to offer that sort of solution. When I entered the cryptocurrency space we started in generation one. The Nick Zabos and the Way Dies and the David Choms of the world they got to live in generation zero. They were before Bitcoin but when I came in it was Bitcoin and then we worked together with many people to create the second generation which was Ethereum and what Ethereum did is it opened up the imagination of everybody in the entire space and said you can innovate and you can innovate really quickly and you can innovate the way we innovated on the web. So just like the web browser and so then we could build the Facebooks, the Amazons, the eBay and that was really magical and so similarly we're seeing a similar trend occur within our space. We're moving into the third generation of blockchain technology where it's no longer a question of do we have the capabilities but it's now a question of how do we get the existing infrastructure to work with legacy infrastructure and other infrastructure. It's a question of how do we scale from a few hundred thousand people to millions of people to tens of millions of people to eventually billions and then the final question which is why it's so fun to talk to the libertarian elements is how do we govern things? At the end of the day we're going to end up having to figure out how to pay for the long term maintenance of these systems and we're going to have to figure out how to make decisions of when and how to fork products to our protocols respectively. So what's exciting to me is that we're now having detailed conversations about the third generation of cryptocurrencies the interoperability, the scalability and the governance side of cryptocurrencies and I think that it's really going to take the space to the next level and dramatically innovate many businesses. I think the thing with blockchain cryptocurrency it is decentralized and it does take away power from the state and what the state is trying to do is to repurpose the blockchain for the long purposes but that isn't going to work because the whole basis of blockchain and cryptocurrencies it has to be and is and always will be decentralized. There's a real community of people here from different disciplines and backgrounds everything from politics to finance computer science technology and it's a real melting pot and when people come together like that you can really have something special and it's where a lot of ideas are sparked and be created. When I was on a panel earlier today we were talking about a supply chain management blockchain system for farms following tomatoes from where they're grown to where they end up on your dinner plate so it's really exciting to see pulling all of these different ideas and these different people together a common goal of a better, more transparent, fair and decentralized world. These conferences are necessary and I am really happy they are happening all over the world and I'm really actually honored to be here, happy to be here and I'm pleased that IOHK is part of the conversation.