 I had a show in Seattle, big theater, 700 seats. And I was optimistic because I've had big shows before. And I thought, Seattle, I mean, come on, you've got Microsoft, you've got Amazon, you've got all of these tech companies. Seattle, right? In eight weeks, we did not succeed in selling 300 tickets because in Seattle, it's crypto winter. Not just winter, crypto winter. A lot of the people who got very, very excited in October of 2017 for mysterious reasons, then got very unexcited in March of 2018 for equally mysterious reasons. But not here. Here, it's crypto summer. We sold out in five days. Give a big round of applause to happen and help me make this happen. Thank you so much to all of those who supported this event, who worked really hard to do this event, of course the sponsors. And all of the work we do goes towards charity. So this is going to be a fun place to start. Let's start with this concept of crypto winter and crypto summer. How many of the seasonal variations of crypto have you been through so far? How many have been through four bubble cycles? A couple of hands. Same people who did their inheritance by the way. Three bubble cycles. Two bubble cycles. And newbies, one bubble cycle. Don't worry, there is another one coming. Because one of the interesting things about crypto is, like any new technology, there are these waves of enthusiasm and speculation. And then people forget and move away. And then people come back. Why? Because most of the people who are getting involved in crypto today don't actually need it. They use crypto because it's something to speculate in. They're interested, not in the potential of what it can do for their life today, but in the potential of its value increasing because of what it can do to the life of somebody else some other time in history, but not in Argentina, not in South America, not in Southeast Asia, not in South Africa. In those places, crypto isn't about something that happens later. It's like, if my government became suddenly corrupt, if my banks started stealing our pensions, our speech was censored, if our associations were restricted, if our political parties were imprisoned, if, if, if. That's happening. And Americans have a hard time understanding this because they have the privilege and luxury of stability that theirs is the exceptional life. Because the corrupt government, the corrupt bank, the raiding of their pension funds, the prisoning of the opposition, the canceled elections, the elections with a 96% winning rate, those things happen all across the world. That is the human experience. And that is the reason why crypto is so important. Because it gives us a system that allows us to find new ways of organizing societal institutions, 21st century ways to organize our society instead of 19th century ways that have failed to scale. So we have this big explosion of interest. If any of you are running a company in the crypto space and are involved in this, you suddenly find yourself talking to people who seem to be speaking a different language. They're very interested in the price. They're very interested in which ship coin is going to be the next thing. They're very interested in understanding how they can make it. And be successful. I always have a question when I'm asked to talk to companies about currency or blockchains. And they tell me about their wonderful new projects. And I say, what is success? Let's say you succeed. What does your company achieve? Describe success to me. And inevitably, they fail at that moment. Because in many cases, they haven't actually thought about what success will look like other than we make loads of money. So this is a very important question to ask. What does success look like? We build the best product that dominates the market and we make lots of money. Who does that help? You. OK. Great. Not enough people. How about we think about how we can help more people? Your current business plan is about helping four people. Can we up the scale a bit? Can we think about helping more people? And one of the interesting things that happens is when suddenly this market, this space, is flooded by outsiders, by people who are opportunistic, who arrive in the cryptocurrency space because they read an article in the Wall Street Journal, because they saw an article in the magazine, in the back seats, the back of the seats in the plane, because some of their colleagues are telling them that this is the next thing since AI and quantum computing. They come to this space and they bring with them a set of assumptions. And one of the assumptions is very interesting. And that's what I want to talk about today. And that assumption is that markets operate as a zero-sum game. And they won't tell you this because they don't even know that's what they're thinking. But it's a very important assumption. And you have to be very careful to notice that that's exactly what they're thinking. When you have business discussions, or when you're even talking to your friends about the latest crypto they're interested in, implicit under many of these conversations is the concept of a zero-sum game. And a zero-sum game is an environment in which one party wins only if the other party loses. You can't have a situation where both parties win, where everybody wins. You have to win at the expense of someone else. And this is a toxic assumption. And it's an assumption that exists in every cycle of business. It's pretty much what an MBA is about. It's about teaching you how to play the zero-sum game and crush your competition. Because it's not about making a better world, or a better product, or a better market, or increasing competition. It's about finding ways to figure out what the rules are, how to exploit those rules, how to build a fence around your intellectual property, your product, your niche, how to prevent anyone from competing with you, how to capture customers, not acquire, capture customers, herd them into this fence area, and then extract as much fucking money as you can from them. Modern business in a nutshell. But this assumption stems from some very important considerations. And the most important one is the absence of free markets. In a free market, you don't play a zero-sum game. In a free market, you can't stop competitors from entering. In a free market, if you create something new, others will emerge to exploit that something new. But they will also bring with that new customers, new opportunities, new markets that everyone can enjoy and win. In free markets, it's not a zero-sum game. So where is this idea coming from? It's coming from the fact that the most celebrated capitalists in the world have never seen a fucking free market in their entire life because they operate in an environment where they own the regulators, where they write the rules, where their primary goal is to figure out how to cheat enough, how to set up a business to ensure that no one can stop them from acquiring the holy grail of business, a monopoly. And then, once you have a monopoly, you prevent anyone from breaking it and extract as much value as you can from customers. It's not about competition. It's not about improving the world. It's not about improving markets. It's about establishing monopolies. They take that attitude. They enter the crypto space. And they start spreading it like a poison in every business in crypto. And this creates assumptions that you see all around you. You can't open source our wallet. If we open source it, our competitors will copy it. We need to find out who the regulators are. In fact, we need to invite the regulators to regulate our industry so we know what the rules are. Why do you need to know what the rules are? The rules are simple. Every 10 minutes, 21 million. And they're pretty simple rules. We all know what the rules are. They're enforced by network consensus. The smart contract will execute. The token will be issued. The rules are clear. Why do you need different rules? Oh, because we can't fix those rules. But we can fix the human rules with lobbying. And we want an environment where we can take our MBAs and unleash them into the market, round up all possible customers and create a nice, cozy monopoly, zero-sum game. And that's how you get the various forms of maximalism. We cannot win with our crypto unless their crypto loses. So it's very important to point out all the ways in which that other crypto is doing it wrong. It's not pure enough. It's not the original vision of the founder. It's not innovating in the correct direction. That's zero-sum, infecting our industry. Because in an open-source industry like ours, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. If they do something good, copy it. It's open-source. Word. In fact, what we get is this beautiful environment where every invention made anywhere in the entire ecosystem becomes an invention that everyone can use. And not just every success. Every failure becomes a lesson that somebody else learned the hard way so that you don't have to. Which, in business, is even more valuable than a success. A failure that didn't cost you something to learn. We are in an environment where we have a different set of rules. We are not suffering a tragedy of the commons because we have a creative commons, an open-source culture. And this is not just a technological culture, a source code for our computers. It's an open culture of creative people. And that culture has all arrived at the single moment in history and has already agreed to one fundamental premise. This might be a better way. They're already on our side of the fence. Because on the other side of the fence is the zero-sum game. Is the bankers and the governments and the corrupt politicians and the monopoly systems that create massive inequality and failure and wasted talents all around the world. That's what's on the other side of the fence. And so our friend has finally crossed over to this side and said, there might be something better. This side might have a new way of doing things. And what do you do? You turn to them and you go, you bought what? That's a shit coin. You heretic. What? Welcome, my friend. Buy some more shit coins. You'll learn soon enough. I'll advise you on some other things you could look at. Maybe instead of buying, I can teach you about some of the technology. You can learn about what you can do with this. Apply it in your own life. Learn a skill. Use it in your business. Explore all of the possibilities of this, not just the investment. And also buy that, really, though. But welcome. And even if you did buy that, you have still made the very important mental leap. A figuring out that we're trying to build something different, something new. You're already part of our creative comments. And so I'm going to embrace that possibility. I'm going to welcome everybody who comes for whatever reason. Good reasons, bad reasons, it doesn't matter. As long as what they're not bringing to the game is this mentality of zero sum. This mentality that we can only succeed if somebody else fails. We don't do that in open source industries. We don't do that in free markets. We don't do that here. Here we have a creative commons. And a creative commons doesn't cause a tragedy of the commons where everybody exploits the resources, fences them off, and sucks them dry until there's nothing left. In a creative commons, everything is shared. And if I consume from your knowledge, you don't lose that knowledge. You also have it, and so does everybody else. If someone takes my book and downloads it without buying it, I didn't lose a book. That was a book I wasn't going to sell, because they couldn't buy it or didn't want to buy it. I've gained a reader, and that reader gave me the most important thing in life, attention. The ability to sit down and read for just a second to push aside the noise and read something. And if somebody comes and reads my book, I'm thankful that they would take the time. Maybe they won't make it past chapter one. That's OK. When I went to publishers and I said, I'm publishing my books under open source, it's going to be free to read. It's going to be free to share it. And for the first year, you can't commercialize it, but after the first year, it's going to be free to translate and resell by everyone in the world. You can take it and you can make a musical performance if you want to, if you don't want to. And most of the publishers said, what? How are we going to make money? That's not what I'm here for you. That's not what this is about. How are we going to change the world? How are we going to bring something new, something different, something creative into the world? And if you do that, don't worry. People appreciate that. They're going to find a way to reward you. And if you're unlucky, they'll give you money. And if you're really, really lucky, they'll give you passion and creativity and commitment. And they'll follow you. And they'll change their minds. And they'll go out and they'll change the minds of other people. And that's a hell of a lot more powerful, because that's what we built hope on. So when the market is booming, income to zero some gamers, and they're like, in order to really grow, we need to get investors. But investors have expectations. Where is the intellectual property that we can fence around? Where is the product that will prevent competitors from entering the market? How do we create an environment in which we win by crushing everybody else? And some of the companies in the space, they succumb to this message. They follow this message. And then the market turns, and things get difficult. And then the zero summers get even louder. The only way to win now is to give up these stupid naive, sacred principles of yours. You silly little anarchists, we have to play the game with the big boys, the professionals, the regulators. We have to do this right. And by right, they mean legitimately. And by legitimately, they mean in a way we can corrupt. Be very careful when you hear the word professional. I can't tell you how many times in my life I've been in a business situation and somebody will say, well, now we have a professional perspective. Well, welcome to our Creative Commons. This was not built by professionals. This was built by amateurs. And do you know what the root of the word amateur is? The root of the word amateur is amul, love. An amateur is someone who does something out of love. And this space was built by people who love what they do, who pour their passion and creativity. Bitcoin and all of the cryptos that follow were not built by paid professionals. They were not developed by a committee. They were built by naive, idealistic, weirdos with creative tendencies who loved to do this, not because they wanted to make money, but because they wanted to bring hope the way they saw it to the world. So when the professional come and they say, let us take over and fix this, what they will do is they will crush the creative spirit. They will extract everything they can from the carcass of your company and return for restricted stock units, redeemable after a vesting cliff, vesting monthly. They will sell your soul in order to have an exit and then as soon as the market changes they're going to ask you to sell out your principles. And here's the thing most people don't understand in this space. Principles are the most important competitive differentiator our company in our space has or any project in our space. Do you know why? Because principles are the one thing they can't copy. If your company operates, if your project operates based on principles, what kind of principles? Privacy, anonymity, censorship, resistance, liberty. If your project operates on these principles, well guess what? Those corporate competitors out there, they can't do any of those things. In the banking environment, they are legally prohibited from having principles. They are required to extract as much privacy from you and destroy it. They are required to do surveillance. They are required to do all of these things that violate the principles of our beautiful crypto creative commons. So hold on to those principles. Those are your biggest competitive differentiators. Those mark the part of the creative commons that they cannot invade. They cannot invade because those principles are toxic to their operation. And if that's not enough to persuade you, just remember that when you give up your principles to get a little bit of money, you have now entered the competitive domain of the Facebooks and the Googles and the Apples and the Movistars. And they can give up principles so much faster than you. They have entire committees of MBAs that are designed to give up the principles of high profitability. They will sacrifice principles and they will count their performance metrics. How many principles did we sacrifice this month, sir? 300 core principles of our company are no longer in presence. We have sacrificed them not good enough. I wanna see 6% growth in our sacrificing of principles month on month. They have the money, they have the ruthlessness, and they don't give a shit about these principles. You wanna compete against them, they will throw principles at you so fast you will lose. Hold on to those principles. They can't compete against that. We are building a beautiful alternative for the world, a creative commons, which results in a festival of innovation where everything anyone does in this entire space enriches every other project with innovation, every drawing, every painting, every song, every talk, every rebellious meeting you hold in a dank basement when nobody believes this is important, every time you introduce someone else, and even every shit coin. It all adds to this ecosystem that we all share and it's all about building something that will give us hope, our creative commons for the future. Thank you.