 Thank you very much Paul. Heading into our last presentation today. I guess we've always been privileged to have Amiraeus over here to your third time down. Yep. Your third time. And we always very much enjoy what it's got to say. So without further ado, I'll hand over to Amiraeus. Thank you Paul. So this is my third coin scum. First time at Imperial College and this is very impressive. Very formal, this August institution of higher learning. It's a bit different. When I do coin scum, by this point in the evening I've usually had two beers. And there is no beer here. So you're going to get a slightly subdued version of the coin scum experience, but that's okay. I'm really very happy to be here back in London. As some of you may know, I graduated from UCL. Imperial was our major rival university, but props to Imperial too. And thank you to all the sponsors and organizers for making this happen. So what I wanted to talk about today is currency wars and Bitcoin's neutrality in the currency wars. You've probably heard me say for a while now that I believe that some of the first applications we would see in Bitcoin would relate to foreign remittances and cross-border applications such as import, export, and trade. Because these are areas where there is an amount of friction in the traditional financial system. So systems like Bitcoin, which are much more flexible, could provide opportunities, especially for underprivileged people around the world. Specifically immigrants doing foreign remittances where they're paying extravagant amounts to transmit through traditional channels like Western Union. Well, it turns out I was wrong. Not the first time. Not the last time. It's going to happen again. But let's see why I was wrong. This is where things get interesting. Bitcoin doesn't exist in a vacuum. Bitcoin is a currency and a system of payment that exists in a highly competitive world of international finance that accounts for trillions of dollars of payments every single year in 194 countries. While we're off in our little corner designing great applications for Bitcoin, something else happened, which I think will change the trajectory of adoption of Bitcoin, and we're going to see some very exciting times ahead. What has happened over the last two years is we're now seeing a fully-fledged global currency war that started in a small way just after the financial crisis in 2008, and it started gathering speed. That currency war is going to change the trajectory of Bitcoin. So something that happened outside Bitcoin is going to change how Bitcoin deploys. This currency war has billions of people as hostages being tossed around like pawns in a geopolitical game. Let me throw out some names of countries, and you'll see if you can see something in common. Greece, Cyprus, Spain, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, India, Turkey, Pakistan, Ukraine. What do these countries have in common? Wonderful people and great food. But also currently embroiled in either domestic or international currency wars. The people in these countries are hostage in these currency wars. If you've been paying attention in the news recently, you will possibly know that just in the last five weeks, in India, with less than four hours' notice, the Prime Minister, Modi, announced that the two largest denominations of bills, the 500 rupee and the 1,000 rupee, would no longer be legal tender, and would cease to be legal tender in four hours. Thus removing 88% of cash in circulation in a country where more than 95% of all transactions happen in cash, where more than 60% of the population has no bank account, and where 25% of the population has no ID with which to open a bank account. In my opinion, this is going to be seen in the future as a natural disaster, which wasn't natural. Entirely man-made. A humanitarian disaster which is going to unfold over the next year and is going to have a very big impact in India. The immediate effect is probably going to be a loss of about two to four percent of the GDP of the country. But the ripple effect, as we've seen in entire industries in India, crawled to a halt because employers are unable to pay employees, because people are unable to buy food, because they're unable to pay for medical care and healthcare, because they're unable to transact in any way. It has been an absolute disaster in the short term and will be a continuing disaster in the long term. Make no mistake, this is an experiment that is being engaged on with 15% of humanity as experimental subjects. If this experiment is successful, not by the terms of how these people fare, but by the terms of whether the aims of government are achieved, this experiment will be repeated. It will be repeated in many countries, just like the experiment of bail-ins in Cyprus was exported to other countries. These experiments are accelerating. There is a global war on cash going on. We have reached that point in history where it is within the grasp, within the vision of world governments, to once and for all eradicate cash. Cash being the ultimate peer-to-peer, transparent, private form of money that allows individuals to transact locally within a community, is now being eradicated in favor of digital transactions on platforms that allow for surveillance, control, confiscation, and negative interest rates. All of these things will follow very closely once cash is no longer part of the picture. That is their hope. Hopefully you will join me in ruining that dream. But there is another currency war going on. This is an international currency war. This is where nation is pitted against nation using its flag money, its national currency, as a trade war instrument. In order to tip the trade balance and erode the national debt in countries that are suffering from enormous debt loads, they have no hope of ever paying back. If you are a government and you have debt measured in the billions or trillions of dollars, how do you best pay back that debt by increasing standards of living and productivity until you can grow yourself out of it? Or by confiscating the savings of retirees in the middle class, destroying a generation of workers, and having them pay through a shadow tax the debt through inflation? We know which side countries are choosing because we are seeing it play out again and again and again. Of course, that is not how they sell it. They don't say, our plan to exit the debt is to destroy pensioners and the middle class and create a system of shadow taxation and confiscation to bail out the banks and bail out the government debt. What they say instead is, this will eradicate black money, this will permanently end corruption, and we will win the war on crime. Everybody says, hey, that sounds like a great idea. Let's go for it. This promise is almost always wrapped in popular nationalism. The great scourge of the emerging 21st century is the resurgence of populist nationalism. Fascism is rising, and just like the politicians wrap themselves in the flag, they also create these associations with their national flag money to wrap their money in the veil of nationalism, to wrap the policies of wealth, destruction, and confiscation in the veil of nationalism. If you disagree with the idea that pensioners should pay for the national debt and bail out the banks, if you disagree with the idea that a whole generation of young people should find themselves permanently unemployed, or underemployed, or working in McJobs, then you are a traitor to the nationalist ideal of solving crime and black money and corruption. You probably have some corrupt money hidden, don't you? That is what motivates you. That is exactly the tone of discussion that is happening right now. In places like Turkey, where Erdogan announced that it was everybody's duty as a Turkish citizen to sell their dollars and buy lira and gold in order to prop up the nationalist pride. Where Modi in India used the same exact rationale to get everyone to suffer just a little bit, because the people suffering the most have no voice. They are invisible, especially in India. The middle class that suffers a bit can wrap itself in the flag and go for these nationalist ideals. In these currency wars, there is one force that stands neutral as a safe haven, as an exit strategy, as an opportunity for people to say, you know what? You go ahead. I am going to opt out. And that is Bitcoin. Bitcoin is now standing at the precipice of becoming the safe haven asset for billions of people around the world who for the first time will have the opportunity to say, I see where you are going. I don't believe in your nationalist bullshit. I see the exit sign. I am going to go this way and leave and opt out from these experiments. And that is going to dramatically change the trajectory of Bitcoin. It is going to change the technology of Bitcoin. It is going to change the economics of Bitcoin. Because foreign remittances are something a government can get behind. Yes, let's make it easier for our poor immigrants abroad to send money to this country wall, kind of competing with the banks to the degree we allow them through regulation. But this new proposition that some people are going to get to opt out from these crazy nationalist experiments, these currency wars, is not going to be taken lightly. Bitcoin is going to represent in many of these countries a direct affront to sovereignty. And when sovereigns see a direct challenge to their rule, to their decisions, as arbitrary, capricious, and unilateral they may be, as unconcerned with the consent of the government they may be, they will apply the full force that they have in order to fight that threat. They will fail, but it is not going to be easy. When these things start happening, the equilibrium between currencies changes. We have already started seeing this. If you want to buy Bitcoin in India today, be prepared to pay more than $1,000. The premium on Bitcoin has gone as high as a 22% premium on the price of Bitcoin in any other market. It can't easily be arbitraged away, because there isn't a big enough flow of Bitcoin into the country to counterbalance the mad scramble to the exits that is happening. The Chinese Yuan has devalued six times so far in 2016. Every time the Chinese Yuan devalued, Bitcoin's value went up by about a billion dollars, as millions of Chinese went for the exit. Every time this happens, a premium is paid. But here's the good news. Guess who earns that premium? Those who are willing to build an exit sign and a door, a little muddy road that leads out of this crazy experiment, get to earn a 20% premium. The exchanges, the local Bitcoin traders, the off-chain offline underground traders, those willing to take the risk to face the wrath of the sovereign, earn a premium. That premium goes directly to funding, infrastructure development, liquidity, stealthiness, decentralization, and all of the other things that might be necessary to allow normal people to get the hell out of the currency war. These experiments are going to position governments directly in opposition to Bitcoin, not because of something Bitcoin did, but because of something the governments have done themselves. When I was growing up, I really enjoyed computer games. My favorite computer games is a game called SimCity. Anybody played SimCity? Yeah, lots of people have played SimCity. One of the things about SimCity, which was really cool, is that you had full and unilateral control of the economy, right? And one of the dials you could tweak was the income tax. It was always tempting, right? Because you could just go in there, and if your budget wasn't quite balancing, and if things weren't quite going as well as you wanted in the game, and you couldn't build as fast as you wanted, and you could take the income tax from 5% to 6%, and you could take it from 6% to 7%. There were consequences, of course. One of the ways you learn those consequences is when you go too far. So you go from 5% to 15%, and you fill your coffers because the income tax starts flying in, and you watch your population go as everybody leaves your city. Those kinds of games have a name. They're called God games. And the reason they're so satisfying to play is because they allow you to play God over a helpless population. Here's the other feature you could have in a game. You could build your entire city, and then you could launch a tornado, an earthquake, a massive fire, a tsunami, or even a Godzilla attack on your city. And guess what? None of those attacks were as successful at draining your city than raising the damn income tax. These currency wars are wars on populations. They are a form of civil war from the government against its own people. They destroy generations. It's estimated that already in the first few days in India, hundreds of people died because they couldn't access money for health treatments because they had to wait in line. Feeble, disabled, elderly, in line for six hours in order to withdraw $30 if they owned that much. Hundreds of people died in the first few days. Thousands of people will die just in the next few weeks as this experiment unfolds, and this repeats. Tens of thousands of people have died in Venezuela because of currency controls, because of the destruction of the monetary system. This is what happens when governments decide that the way to fight a trade war is to use the very fuel of the economy, the thing that people depend on in order to build a future for themselves as a weapon against another government. That weapon backfires and kills their own people. They will tell you that what we are doing by encouraging people to use Bitcoin is we are traders to our nations, we are criminals, we are thugs, we are drug dealers and terrorists. Don't believe me? Look up what the Indian government has said just in the last two weeks about people who trade gold on the black market, terrorists, criminals, thugs. I'm just a coder. I'm just a talker. I'm not a terrorist. I'm not a thug. But if I have the opportunity to build an exit from this system, then I will take that opportunity because I know who the real terrorists are. There is no greater form of terrorism than creating war against your own people by disrupting the very lifeblood of an economy deliberately when there is no crisis, creating a natural disaster of enormous proportions simply to fight a currency war against another country. Who benefits in the end? The banks. They get bailed in. Their balance sheets in India are soaring. Their stock prices are soaring. The government enormous increases in revenue. And does that stop corruption? No. It's fueled an absolute orgy of corruption, which even in India is unprecedented just like it fueled an orgy of corruption in Cyprus and in Greece, Venezuela, Argentina, and the Ukraine. When Modi announced that the currency would not be legal tender in four hours, he also announced that the banks would be closed for two days in order to prevent people from initiating a run on the banks. When the banks opened two days later, miraculously, a significant proportion of the cash reserves they had were only in the bad notes. Somehow, some people had access to these vaults and swapped their money while the banks were closed in the billions of dollars. Somehow, if you've studied economics, one of the fascinating aspects of economics is Gresham's law. And Gresham's law states that bad money chases out good money in the economy. When I read this, when I was studying economics as a student, just as a hobby, I didn't really understand Gresham's law. And fortunately, I had never seen Gresham's law in action. We are watching Gresham's law play out exactly as predicted in action today. When an Indian person goes to an ATM, when a Venezuelan manages to get money, when a Zimbabwean gets hold of US dollars, what do they do with that money? Do they spend it? Hell no, they don't. They bury it. They put it under the mattress. They hide it. They save it. Because this is the good money. And it immediately exits the economy. And they take every shitty note they have, every Zimbabwean $100 trillion bond note, every Venezuelan Bolivar that's worth shit, and is carried in wheelbarrows and weighed by the pound because nobody has time to count it, every 500 rupee note that is now worthless. And they go to their employees and their dependents and their home workers and cleaners and the people who are unprivileged in the economy. And they say, this is the only money I'm going to pay you with. Here's six months of wages in advance. Take it or leave it or you're fired. Your choice. And they offload the bad money onto the people who then have to go and spend six hours in line to exchange this and to be asked questions about where they got this money by the evil tax official, the caricature of the government employee. And guess what they pay the government employees in for their bribes, the same bad money. So the bad money is the only money that's circulating and the good money has completely disappeared from the economy. We're watching Gresham's law in action. And when they get Bitcoin, they're going to huddle. They're going to bury that so deep to make sure that they have the good money saved for their children, for their future. And they're going to trade the bad money for Bitcoin. And nowadays, all money is bad money. That's where we're going. Cash is being eradicated around the world as a scourge. But they can't win that game because cash is something that we can create, electronic cash, self-sovereign cash, verifiable cash, digital cash, peer-to-peer cash, Bitcoin. Remember how this is going to change the trajectory of Bitcoin deployment over the next two years? It's going to be in direct opposition to this currency war. And it's going to be directly funded by the currency war. The currency wars are going to fund investments in infrastructure and improvements in Bitcoin in order to gradually take that small exit sign and the little ruttage road behind it. And over the next few years, as these currency wars escalate and escalate and escalate as they will, as they must, as they fail and try again, we're going to widen that ruttage road until eventually we are offering from every economy an eight-lane autobahn highway exit the fuck out of their currency war for everyone to be able to take. It won't be available for everyone at first. It will be only the richest, the most educated, the privileged, the ones who have access to these applications. But somewhere in there, they're going to take some other people with them. And gradually they're going to fund the infrastructure that is going to allow more and more people to exit from these economies. So remember that as this happens, we're going to be called criminals for offering an exit. Then we're going to be called criminals for pointing at the exit. Then we're going to be called criminals for simply pointing out the fact that the economy is on fire and that there is an exit. And in each stage of escalation of the currency wars, every act you take in opposition to the observable fact that the entire economy is on fire, every chance you give people an opportunity to head for the exits, you will be the criminal. And before long, they will rewrite history. They will rewrite history to say that the reason the banks are failing and the reason the economy is on fire is because you provided an exit, is because Bitcoin exists. They will say the Bitcoin started the fire. And at that point, you must all repeat and remember the slogan that will be important. We are not criminals. We're offering an exit for everybody. We didn't start the fire. It was always burning since the world was turning. Thank you.