 Hi everyone. I'm excited to talk to you today about why financial freedom matters. We think a lot about civil and political rights, our right to free speech, to speak freely, press freedom, right to assembly, private property, the right to participate in our governments. These are all essential elements of a free and open society. I think what often goes unsaid, at least especially in human rights communities, is this idea of financial freedom. So I hope to explore that with you today. And I wanted to start with a fiction story, some tale that most of you are well aware of, or well as 1984. In this book, there's a great quote where one of the characters is saying, you know, nothing is your own except a few cubic centimeters inside your skull. And this was always a dream of dictators throughout history. They always have been interested in knowing as much as possible about the population, about the citizenry. And there's always been a limit to this in terms of technology. There have of course been regimes like Stasi Germany and Mao's China and Castro's Cuba where there are citizen informants basically spying on behalf of the government and feeding them information. But there's a lot of human error in that system and there was always a limit to how much the government could really know. That's changed. So now governments have the ability to use technology to automate that process of spying on you. And they've been able to do that over the last few decades through big data analysis, especially in the last few years, and through what many people call AI, right? So the thing is, they rely on you to participate in this system. So you trade off your privacy and freedom for convenience. What you don't realize is that when you do that, you're feeding your data to a growing big brother. This idea of big brother relies on eating all of your data. It needs to feed on your data to grow big and strong and powerful. So they want to collect as much data from you as possible. And in the world's largest country in China, we have a situation where the Chinese Communist Party has succeeded in doing this through social media, through an app called WeChat. So here's a quote from a young woman in China, but she's basically saying that she uses this app, it's more like a super app or like an ecosystem, an operating system, to message friends when she's in a rural place or to pay for snacks in the middle of nowhere or to book travel or order food or communicate with her family or pay bills or handle her health, predict the weather, all these different things. So whereas you or I might use many, many dozens of apps to achieve all these different things, she can kind of do it all in one. And that's kind of the ultimate trade off. She's trading off, again, privacy and freedom for that convenience, that comfort, that speed. And because so many in China have either been encouraged to or chosen to make that trade off when presented with it, it's allowed the government to embark on a really aggressive social engineering experiment, commonly known as social credit or perhaps a citizen score. And the idea here is that it's sort of taking the concept that in the West, for example, where you would need credit worthiness or you would need to prove your financial health in some way to get a larger loan or get a better rate on something like a mortgage, they're kind of combining that traditional credit score with things like your behavior and micro habits, perhaps your demographics, ethnicity, religion, sexual preference, who you're connected with social networks, and ultimately your loyalty. I mean, this is really at the end of the day a loyalty score. And the idea is that over the last few years, there have been experiments in China at the municipal level in different cities at the corporate level with big companies that have large user bases that sort of like score you based on your behavior, right? And in this way, the government is able to use a much more effective way of policing. They're able to actually get you to self-censor and self-police your behavior because no one wants a bad social credit score. You know, everybody wants to have the ability to send their kids to a good school, get a fast track visa, get a good rate on a loan. These things are also important to the average person, so they're not willing to rock the boat. And this has been a brilliant strategy by the Communist Party because it's much more expensive and problematic for them to use the iron fist. They'd rather use the velvet glove of a citizen score and of social engineering and technology is making this possible. And they're combining it with different kinds of carrots and sticks to sort of incentivize the population to do a particular thing. So in this case, if you break the law and jaywalk your name and ID number go up on a screen for everybody else to see. So they're using this idea of shaming, right? And it's expanded in some areas to this more cohesive idea of debt shaming. So when you look down at your WeChat screen and you could see other people around you on the map, in some cities there's been an experiment to actually kind of point out and flag people with a scarlet letter of saying that they're like, they have a low social credit score and therefore you shouldn't interact with them, you shouldn't get close to them. And this is very concerning because it allows, again, like social engineering and it allows the government to basically take a broad swath of undesirables, you know, troublemakers, dissidents, poets, who knows what, and kind of like ostracize them and kind of make them into pariahs. And that's really their goal is to make it very inconvenient and uncool to promote freedom. And that's, again, devastatingly effective and it's possible through all this advanced technology, which is being paired with rapid advances and rollouts of surveillance tech. So for example, by the end next year, the Chinese government says they're going to have more than a half billion surveillance cameras. That's one for every two to three people. So they're not only getting the data that you're giving up through your phone, they're also observing as much as possible the public space to control society. And when they look out through these cameras, they see stuff like this where not only do they see information of every person but also, you know, kind of like every every vehicle admits something. So they're trying to make sure that every vehicle even has a RFID chip in the windshield so that they have, again, this sort of omniscience that was once just a dream of fiction writers like Orwell is becoming a reality. And today in reaction to the coronavirus, they're able to kind of even further push their plans forward. And Xi Jinping saw an opportunity in the coronavirus in terms of basically saying that in order to get back to normal in order to get back to work, people would have to use an app built into the app infrastructure they already have. That would basically give them a color, whether it's a green or amber or red. That would indicate their ability to leave your building or get on transportation systems or go to work or go to the market or whatever. So you have to flash this green color. And if you don't have that green color, you're very restricted in what you can do. It's very important to note that this is not biometric. This isn't like pulling information from inside of you. The machine is not a doctor. Some other authority, some other algorithm somewhere else is determining your color based on, again, your behavior. And obviously we can quickly think about how this could become problematic in as much as the government could just start assigning red or yellow codes to people who they don't like. And I think people who in China are obviously struggling over this right now. Here's a quote from a young millennial where she says, I don't know whether we're constructing a future society or a cage for ourselves. And this is the dilemma that they face. And the government is saying it's creating a harmonious society. That's the sort of euphemism they prefer to use. But we actually have to look at the whole harmonious society. And yes, you can't deny the rapid advancements in infrastructure and living standards for a large amount of people in China. That's obvious and plain and observable. However, you have to see the full picture and what this effort has come with this harmonious society has meant devastation for minorities. And especially in places like Tibet or even Northwestern China and Xinjiang, which is where this photograph is from, it's a satellite image of a prison camp. And there's more than a million Muslim minority Uighurs in these camps today. And they're kind of like being, you know, imprisoned in this very high tech jail system. And that's kind of the end of the slippery slope of this. I mean, if we continue to give up all of our data, our location data, communications data and especially financial data to authorities, they will use it for their own aims and they will end up damaging society irreparably. And this is not only a problem for people in China, but it's a problem for the whole world. Here's a New York Times study showing in red the countries that are either buying or who've already bought and installed sort of Chinese style surveillance technology. This could mean telecommunications, it could mean 5G, it could mean street level surveillance. So you've got every government from Bolivia to Mexico to Italy to the United Kingdom to Germany to, you know, Angola, Burma, Pakistan, Turkey. You know, this is this idea of the Belt and Road Infrastructure Project, which is the largest global infrastructure project since the Marshall Plan after the, you know, World War II. And it's not an effort to rebuild, but it's China's effort to basically employ this sort of new kind of colonialism where they can get all these other countries to become on their standard. And I think it's something we need to pay very close attention to. And ultimately, you know, we have to think about what is an alternative model to this way of centralizing as much data as possible. And the historian Yuval Nohari, who wrote sapiens and many other famous works, has said that if you dislike the idea of living in a digital dictatorship, the most important contribution you can make is to find ways to prevent too much data from being concentrated in too few hands. It won't be easy, but it's how we'll safeguard our democracies is what he says. And I think this is so important for finance and financial freedom, and this is becoming ultimately so timely because of the moment we're in where cash is disappearing. So in terms of paper and metal money, you're looking at the transaction percentages of different countries around the world and how much, how many daily transactions are done with paper and metal in a city like London. It might be 42% in New York might be 32%, Stockholm 20%, Seoul 14%. And this data is more than a year old. So clearly these numbers have even come down from there. And not only is the cash of society coming, it's already here in certain places. It's very common that you'd never even use cash for months on end in Beijing, Caracas, or Stockholm for different reasons. But there's also this war on cash that's going to happen. So according to the World Health Organization, and there's been some debate about this, but, you know, they claimed at one point that dirty banknotes might be spreading the coronavirus. And I think this you've seen to demonetization right in China at one point, and I think you're going to continue to see that. I mean, I find it highly unlikely that post 2035, that governments will want to continue to produce paper and metal money, they're going to be digitizing. And we have to think about what are the implications of a cashless society where all money is digitally centralized. We have to think about what happens when we lose the financial privacy that bear assets like paper money give us. We have to think about what powers do states and corporations gain as we make that trade off, right? And we have to think about and remember that what we buy and sell says more about us and more about you than your words. And I think we should consider when you went to go and buy something at a store with paper and metal money and you'd make that transaction. The merchant doesn't know anything about you. The merchant doesn't know your name, where you came from, you know, any sort of background information. It's a private transaction and they didn't need to know any of those things about you. But all of a sudden when you're using your phone or a credit card or you're swiping or using a wearable, you're revealing this incredible amount of information about yourself. And it depends on the system you're using, but it could range from your location history to your previous behaviors, your preferences, where you're going next, your communications. So many things could be revealed about you because we've built this digital money system that is run by third parties, either by state authorities or by private companies. And those private companies are getting more and more competitive with states. So we're seeing a situation where even tech companies like Apple and now Facebook are kind of getting into the money competition. And this idea of corporate money is becoming less the idea from science fiction and more probably a reality in the near future. So you're going to have state money, fiat money on the one hand and then on the other you'll have this sort of corporate money and they're going to fight each other. So you currently have Zuckerberg kind of attacking the state saying, hey, there's all these people who don't have bank accounts, but they could use Facebook to have money. And he's partly correct in that proclamation. On the other hand, you have governments attacking Facebook saying, oh, there's going to be all these concerns about privacy, national security, and it's going to undermine our stability. That might also be true. So you're going to have government and companies fighting each other over money in the coming decades. But my question to you is, could we have a different kind of cashless society? Could we have perhaps a decentralized financial system without third parties, without controlling authorities? And of course, we have seen that there's a great need for that. And if you look at the history of money, you're looking at an evolution of whether it was barter to shells and precious gems that people started using as a medium of exchange to coins, to precious metals stamped with King's faces on them, to paper money indicating ownership of some sort of precious metal to now cards and mobile payments in the fiat world. And the future would be wearables and sort of chips under your skin, right? That's the direction we're going in. And this arc of money is an arc towards more control by governments is really the end goal of where this arc is being pushed. But miraculously in 2008 slash 2009, someone, some group of people came up with a different way of doing things. A digital way of having a sort of self sovereign peer to peer financial network. And of course that is Bitcoin. And that to me is financial freedom. This peer to peer electronic cash system where normally when two people have to transact digitally today, they have to go through so many different intermediaries that can confiscate their funds or spy on what they're doing, freeze their payments, report suspicious activity to the police, exploit your information, etc, etc, etc. In Bitcoin, we can build this system that has a totally different paradigm where there's nobody in the middle where we can build a much more open financial system where we can really build open money. And I do believe that in this way, Bitcoin as as open money as decentralized money builds off of other tools that humans have used in the past to liberate humanity, whether it was democracy, which was just at one point at an idea concept in ancient Greece, which has grown through the persistence of humans to cover half the world. Now lives under some sort of decentralized government where there isn't just one tyrant in charge where there's like a competition of power. That's been really healthy for humans or whether it's been in the information space where used to have to be rich or, you know, in the government essentially to go to something like the Library of Alexandria and learn about the world's wonders. After the printing press and the radio and the television out the internet, everybody can have all of the world's information in their pocket and they can have a voice. So we're seeing like the progressive democratization and the ends of sort of means of production of political power and information through these two forces. And I think Bitcoin is the third in this trinity Bitcoin is the thing that's going to end the separation is going to start the separation of money from state and it's going to create open money for the world. And I think the key part of that is this trinity inside Bitcoin itself that it's decentralized digital and scarce. We've covered a little bit of the decentralized idea that nobody's in charge and that it's obviously digital asset but the scarcity is so important to consider and to think about. I mean scarcity is what has driven gold's value of course over millennia and 350 BC Babylon one ounce of gold got you 350 loaves of bread in 29 AD San Francisco one ounce of gold still gets you 300 loaves of bread. So gold's, you know, amazing ability to store value over time is related directly to its scarcity and it's very predictable low inflation rate. And this is precisely what Satoshi was thinking about when he or she or they created Bitcoin and this is that Genesis block that we all know and, you know, looking at what was put into the Genesis block this political rallying cry. This idea of, you know, critiquing the bailout of the banking system is really to me a direct assault on the sort of Cantillon effect which has kind of commandeered money in the modern era where Richard Cantillon this 18th century economist observed that when the state prints money the closer you are to power the more you benefit and the further away you are the more you're harmed. Fiat money is not neutral. And you have to remember like kind of even these months these days these weeks who gets bailed out first right the big corporations are the person. The person sort of gets the very short end of the stick. Meanwhile, the sort of stock market and all of these over leveraged funds and investors have been have been rescued. And I think Bitcoin exists to present a different way of doing things with digital scarcity that has a quality of opportunity. And I want to present you with sort of four key attributes of Bitcoin that I believe are so important with regard to financial freedom. The first one is a predictable money supply. So obviously, again, Bitcoin was created as an alternative to central banks, which arbitrarily determine money issuance. As we've seen this power is abused by the elite at the expense of the rest and in Bitcoin, the money supply schedule and future inflation rates seen here in red and blue are known to all and inflation will end when the last piece of Bitcoin's minted in 2136. And this idea of predictability that we all know and then there's not going to be any back room deals to change the rules is a very important part of what makes Bitcoin Bitcoin. Another one is permissionlessness. And this one's so huge when we think about the disparities in the world and how people are fenced off from the financial system. Well, with Bitcoin, anybody can use it without asking permission from an authority or a corporation. You don't need an account. You don't need to sign up to receive Bitcoin or earn it. And this is incredibly powerful. We're only just starting to glimpse the real power of this. What it's going to mean for the billions who live either under tyranny or under some sort of lack of infrastructure. A third thing that's super important to think about is the censorship resistance, meaning if you want to send me Bitcoin, no one can censor that transaction due to the fact that the processing is done not by one entity but by a global competition. And as a result, if I'm a media outlet or a civil society organization or human rights group and you're a dictatorship, you can no longer prevent me from receiving donations and that to me is a huge game changer. Fourth, we have confiscation resistance. And this is this idea of, you know, if you want to move your Bitcoin, you need to use a private key, but that could be 24 words written down, split apart, disguised, even memorized, right? So this makes Bitcoin orders of magnitude more difficult for authorities to seize than any other asset, whether it be something like a bearer asset physically like cash or gold, or any other digital asset, which is centralized, right? So we kind of thread the needle and get the best of both worlds with Bitcoin and it will really help check the power of the state over the economy. And this is why I say that the future of money is going to be in three phases. We're going to have state money for a long, long time. Governments are always going to issue debt as long as we live under governments, but that debt will increasingly, you know, become devalued, I think, versus Bitcoin. We're going to have corporate money. As I say, there's going to be more and more competition from corporations who are going to try and create money and money like systems. And then we're going to have people's money. And I'm very grateful that we'll have that opportunity. The thing is, you know, we're so early, less than 1% of humanity have even ever used Bitcoin, right? I mean, we're talking about 60, 70 million people out of almost 8 billion. So while I don't think Bitcoin needs our help, I do think other people need our help to learn about Bitcoin. And I just think of the crazy, again, disparities in the world where 2 billion aren't banked or don't have an ID. And this just crazy fact that now they can earn income, again, without permission, without needing to set up an account with anybody. It's just breathtaking. Again, there's 4 billion plus people that live under authoritarianism and face all kinds of financial restrictions. Bitcoin can be a tremendous tool for them. I mean, let's just think of some examples. With Bitcoin, you can withdraw your finances to a parallel structure where Xi Jinping finds it very hard to micro track you. You can set up an account where Putin cannot freeze your bank account. This is something he likes to do to human rights organizations to crush them. Instead, you could earn or receive donations in Bitcoin and he can't control that. In Burma and many other countries, the ruling party or the dictatorship likes to sort of delete the records of minorities to attack them. Well, they can't do that anymore to religious minorities like the Rohingya, at least in theory. Even, of course, my own government does what I think are ineffective bad things abroad. One example would be sanctioning the entire country for the crimes of just the rulers, where in many of these countries that we end up or others end up sanctioning, they aren't even democracies. So the young people who are hurting under the sanctions didn't even vote for the rulers. So this allows them, again, a way to earn or receive money in a way that otherwise would be impossible. And finally, of course, we have this idea of hyperinflation, which yes, of course, you can say is relatively rare in today's world. But I mean, a Venezuelan's not going to be comforted by that idea that it's relatively rare. I mean, this is a large country that had 30 million people in it before many of them started to flee. And if you actually think about what they went through, you know, their purchasing power has been so devalued where a cup of coffee that once cost 450 bolivars is now 4500 bolivars is now 1.4 million. I mean, you're watching the vaporization of people's savings as the government stole, as the government just stole, right? And that government has also tried to prevent outside help from coming in. So you're seeing a photograph from a year and a half ago of the Venezuelan government trying to prevent aid and resources coming to the opposition, which is, I think, going to go, this idea of restricting these resources is going to go in the dustbin of history. What you don't see are the millions of Bitcoin going back and forth and this sort of age being over and a new paradigm beginning. And I even know a friend of mine in Iran who responds to criticism of Bitcoin that, you know, it can't do anything that Apple Pay can't do. And he's in Iran and he's saying, I can't use Apple Pay or Visa or PayPal, but I can use Bitcoin. What do you have to say to that? And, you know, the critics don't respond. But that's its true power. And as Nassim Nicholas Taleb says, Bitcoin's mere existence gives us the crowd and insurance policy against an Orwellian future. And to unpack that, I mean, just look at this photo from last summer where financial privacy is shown to be so important for democracy where Hong Kongers who were going out to the protests didn't want to use their, their, they're octopus cards, like an oyster card or a metro card to use the transit system because they knew their locations and movements would be spied on by authorities or student authorities, university authorities. So they lined up in these big queues to use cash to buy these one time use tickets that were unconnected to their identity. And that allowed them to pressure the government and participate and, and, you know, exercise their rights, but they won't be able to do that if there's no cash in the future and there's no other options. This is why the idea of Bitcoin is so important. I think it can help us transact freely without permission, without leaving behind such a big digital footprint. And, and that's why it's such a key element of fighting big brother. If it fails, we know who will win. It's this we chat centralized, all encompassing data vacuuming model that I talked about before. But if Bitcoin survives and thrives, you know, we have money that can't be censored, can't be devalued, can't be monopolized, can't be mass surveilled so easily, certainly can't be stopped by borders and can be accessed by anybody. This is so incredibly powerful. And I think it leads to the new space race where currently the dollars in the pole position in terms of dominating the world economy, but other nations are nipping at their heels and the Chinese certainly want to compete in this next century. And it's very possible that they may. It doesn't look possible now, but who knows what will happen in the next five, 10, 20 years. And anyone who wins this race is going to impose a whole set of rules that will restrict people's freedoms. So I'm glad that we have Bitcoin as an option and it makes this idea of financial freedom so relevant in today's day and age. And I'll end with this quote from Buckminster Filler that you can never change things by fighting against the existing reality to change something you got to build a new model that makes the old model obsolete. And that's the difference. That's what Bitcoin does with its financial freedom. It really presents a new parallel system. This is very different from other kind of experiments in cryptocurrency with, for example, the second most popular effort is making a stablecoin. A stablecoin is at best an improvement on the old system, on the legacy system. But here with Bitcoin, we're actually trying to make a new system and achieve real financial freedom.