 So All of this started on January 3rd 2009 with a simultaneous publication of a paper and a piece of software By an anonymous contributor on the internet who used the name Satoshi Nakamoto And they proposed a system of money that behaves as electronic cash But with some unique properties that have never been seen before a system that is Decentralized meaning that no one is in control a system that has certain mathematical properties It enables a phenomenon called digital scarcity Meaning that you can have something that is simultaneously digital and yet rare. It cannot be copied Which seems like an antithesis right because when you first think about digital information The quintessential Characteristic of digital information is that it can be freely copied you can create infinite copies of it at almost zero cost But not the Bitcoin you can't create infinite copies of it You can't create them at zero cost So this idea of having a digital thing That is at the same time rare and cannot be copied was a unique and revolutionary invention Never happened before combining that With a peer-to-peer network a Decentralized network that allows participants in the currency to validate each other So that if I make a transaction Everyone who's running a Bitcoin software system will validate verify and check every aspect of my transaction and finally an open system for Securing and sequencing transactions that ensures that no one can spend the same amount twice Solving a fundamental problem in distributed systems Providing an optimization for what is known as the Byzantine generals problem. It's a distributed systems class of problems But the basic idea is how do you know if I spend digital money and Give it to one merchant What stops me from taking the same digital information walking across the street and giving it to another merchant? Until the invention of Bitcoin there was only one suitable answer to that you have to record all of the transactions To one central authority and that central authority when it sees the first transaction will not allow the second transaction That works. It's efficient It's very efficient visa does it if You buy something for ten dollars in one shop with visa and you go across the street and buy something else with ten dollars They'll make sure you now have at least twenty dollars in your account to pay for it They won't let you spend the same twice. They won't let you spend more than you have or more than your credit allows That's great Those systems of work. They're efficient. They can do hundreds of thousands of transactions per second but there's one small problem and That is that you're putting trust in that one organization that one company You're not just putting trust in that one company to do it right because they do a pretty good job With that trust comes power enormous power the power to refuse to Take your transaction the power to refuse to give you an account the power to refuse you to participate in this economic activity The power to demand that you first identify yourself show papers Provide credit worthiness right and That is something that's different from all of the systems of money. We've had before Because I can use cash without showing papers without proving credit worthiness I don't have an intermediary. I don't pay a transaction fee. I don't need special equipment I can just transact directly person to person You introduce this third-party company. You have a problem Let's say I have a visa card in my back pocket right now And I want to give one of you ten dollars Who can process my visa card today in this crowd Anyone can anyone take a visa card for me? I'll give you ten dollars on a visa card anyone Not in your business in your personal capacity who accepts visa here No one Not a single person Because it's no longer about people paying people It's about people paying companies to pay companies to maybe pay people right Bitcoin is peer-to-peer Our traditional financial systems have now become peer to corporation to corporation to corporation to peer Everybody takes a little cut everybody adds their own Power to the system and they take great advantage of that. What's the end result? Billions of people who have no access to the banking system Billions of people who will never have a bank account many of them don't even have ID Many of them even if they did have ID Lack the necessary level of education and literacy and new mercy to walk into a bank or they look wrong Or they're from the wrong race or caste or religion. They're untouchables. They can't walk into a bank They'll get kicked out by the security before they get to the teller this happens all across the world and It is a direct result of The fact that we've centralized our money under these providers and Bitcoin is different because at a fundamental level what it does is it allows us to use digital money as cash By the end of today everyone in this room will be able to accept Bitcoin directly to their control with software running on their smartphone and At that point I can pay you you can pay me we can do commerce on a local level as a community Without involving any third party any intermediary any corporation that has power over Without the requirement that you present ID Without the requirement that you fulfill credit worthiness You fulfill human worthiness in fact Bitcoin doesn't even require that Because you don't have to be human to use Bitcoin Software can use Bitcoin on its own without any humans involved autonomous software So this invention in 2009 launched a completely new era It's not just a weird form of PayPal This isn't a new system of payment It is an invention that takes an obscure branch of mathematics called cryptography which is the art of secret writing using math That obscure branch of mathematics is then applied into the domain of establishing Trust between participants of the system without giving anyone control over the system This unique property is what makes Bitcoin special If you can send money to someone else without knowing them without having to trust them without having to trust anybody Because you can trust that the system and the mathematical rules in the system guarantee that that money if you receive it is real unforgible Will be spendable as soon as it clears in about ten minutes and Can be used by you to make another payment You don't need to know the person who gave it to you Now in modern finance that seems weird and yet we do it every day with cash If I tip my taxi driver With a two thousand rupee note, which is too much, but if I did do they need my ID? Do they need to process a transaction? Do they need to pay a transaction fee? No cash is Itself a representation of value and by verifying that it is real at most The person who receives it will hold it up to the light Look for a watermark verify that it's not a fake, but they can do that on their own They don't have to call someone and say I have a serial number one three two three five three two Is this a real one? You don't need to check with the third party or a central authority You can verify with your own eyes that this is real money Bitcoin translates that into the digital domain if you receive a Bitcoin transaction the software that you're running can independently and authoritatively verify That it is real without Asking anyone else without checking with anyone else and at that point The identity of the person who sent it to you is irrelevant Because the value is there. You don't need to trust them That is revolutionary It's revolutionary in a way that we've seen once before at least in my generation And that is with the introduction of the internet Many people who have grown up with the internet even today still fundamentally misunderstand Why the internet is special? They look at the internet and they see it to the form of publishing a system of content But we had forms of publishing before the internet. We had digital publishing before the internet We had ways to disseminate content before the internet What was different about the internet is that for the first time ever it enabled a global freedom For the flow of information it enabled the free flow of information Everywhere on earth to anyone who has the technical capability to connect to the internet and As long as you have the technical capability to connect to the internet the internet doesn't care who you are How old you are Whether you're a human or a software agent watch race religion age or gender you are It gives you the power of the free flow of information without restriction That is the magic of the internet that is the transformational power of that technology the free flow of information and To many people this is terrifying the idea that anyone can say anything anyone can read anything Anyone can speak about Anything without control without a license without a qualification without a diploma without a certificate without identity without censorship is terrifying For my generation and the generations that follow It is not only liberating It is normal It is the way things have always been and the way things should be What Bitcoin does is it creates the exact same? Circumstances for the first time in the category of money it enables the free flow of money And also the free flow of trust Across the world to anyone regardless Simply through their choice to participate by downloading an application the free flow of money the free flow of value The free association of trust that is what it's about It's not an investment scheme. It's not a payment network. It's not a weird version of PayPal It is the internet adding the free flow of money to the freedoms. It already gives us I Guarantee you this is a terrifying idea to many The idea that anyone can send money to anyone without asking without permission without control without censorship without ID is Terrifying my generation finds it liberating the generation after mine Sees it as normal They will never know a world in which you cannot send money anywhere to anyone a world in which Money only works Monday to Friday 9 to 5 a world in which the Privilege of having a bank account costs you a monthly fee for other people to store your money a world in which Some destinations are prohibited a world in which in order to open a bank account You have to be 16 Which seems like a bizarre idea Get ready for a world in which six-year-olds Have Bitcoin accounts and Bitcoin wallets I've met them. They love the fact that they can now buy things on the internet Parents will find that terrifying They will see it as normal and 10 years after they get their first Bitcoin wallet they'll walk into a bank Because grandma wants to give them a savings account and They'll have a conversation with a banker that will seem as bizarre as if they're talking to an 18th century privateer in order to open an account They will need to present all kinds of documentation and paperwork a process that will take an hour After which they will have limited access for a very high fee during working hours only Monday to Friday 9 to 5 To an account that can only use one currency and only send to specific destinations Most of which are corporations an account They can't use to send money to their friends or buy things over the internet and They will look at that and say My grandparents are crazy Why would they use this it's broken it's almost as bizarre as when they asked me to send the facts I Don't understand This is the world we've created now This has happened and the people who are afraid of this idea Don't realize that once it's happened. It's happened. We now live in a new world. There are two ways We can adjust to it. We can pretend. It's not happening or We can accept it and adapt to the new world We now live in a world where you can send value anywhere to anyone at any time without restriction We can embrace that or we can pretend it's not happening My previous talk I used an analogy that I think worked quite well if you turn on the news and The weatherman tells you that there will be a rainstorm this afternoon and That doesn't suit your plans because you have a birthday party You can turn off the news if you're powerful you can call the news station and complain if You're really powerful. Maybe you can get the weather person fired. It's still gonna rain right and So we see now Governments looking at this new Bitcoin thing and the first question that comes to mind is how do we control it? How do we change it? How do we stop it? How do we force? our authority our legal purview over it and They look at the source They don't understand the basic concept. They ask questions like who's in charge Who controls this and the answer is not satisfactory No one controls this No one's in charge Or you can go for the more sophisticated approach Well, you see it's based on an open-access Participatory model of market-based economic competition through risk and reward strategies based on game theoretical outcomes that ensure collaborative participation by multiple Participants without anybody having the ability to cheat Due to a system of emergent consensus based on mathematical rules and strong cryptography To which they respond Yes, yes, but who's in charge? Who's in control? I've had people come up to me after meetings and they say, okay, I won't tell anyone This is just us Who's in charge? They think I'm joking. They think I'm Trying to massage the information because It is really a bizarre concept to say here is a system of trust without Authority a system of trust without a center a system of trust without hierarchy a system of trust without control Why because we've never had any of those things because every system of trust we've ever had in our society is based on the exact same model a 19th century hierarchical organization that is the outcome of the industrial era That is a system of bureaucracy and authority based on internal processes and rules Oversighting layers and ultimately authority vested in someone Perhaps authority that is elected through democracy perhaps authority that is not maybe it's hereditary Maybe it's dictatorial, but you could always point you look at the pyramid the hierarchy And you just let your eyes follow to the top and usually there's someone at the top in some cases That person is an actor There's a whole shadowy group playing the puppet strings, but nevertheless Authority is vested in that person and then you look at Bitcoin and it's a flat system And there's a few people who seem to have a special role And you say okay, maybe those people are in control. Is it the miners? Is it the software developers? Is it some part of the node system and Then you notice that these people can't actually do anything and the funny thing is that when people look at Bitcoin They see its greatest strengths as flaws Which is characteristic of new technologies they look at Bitcoin and they go But you can't even get the miners and the developers to agree on how to scale the system Why doesn't one of the groups just Say this is how we're going to do it Because that's not Bitcoin because we don't have that ability there will be an adversarial Competition it is a system of market forces competing against each other. The reason we're in deadlock is because consensus overrides personal ambition Popularity and everything else and so they look at Bitcoin and say you keep squabbling you can't make a decision. Yep By design feature not bug. They look at Bitcoin and they say but you can't reverse a transaction Payments are irreversible and they say that's a problem. That's a bug How can you do that? What what if something goes wrong? Who do I call to reverse the transaction? feature not bug Bitcoin guarantees execution of the scripts you put into it Now if you put the script that says hey Sun Deep, here's one Bitcoin. I hope you send me that TV I ordered that's the script that's going to be irreversible and Guaranteed by the network not a very good script because send deep may not send the television and There's no one who can make that Bitcoin come back to you other than Sun Deep once you've sent it Yeah, so that's one form of irreversible promise. Of course That's not the only promise. I can get the network to guarantee. I can say hey Sun Deep Here's a Bitcoin It's currently locked in a multi-signature address for the next 30 days After 30 days if there's no dispute It will automatically transfer to you But upon verification by a third party who I've chosen to elect this trustworthy party or that trustworthy party I can introduce third parties if I want to I just don't have to I can introduce Reversibility if I want to but if I write that script That script is irreversible and I can choose who my escrow agent is and I can choose who does dispute resolution So I can take the very core feature of irreversibility and I can apply it and soften that promise and make it Consumer protection through programmable money It's a feature not a bug Bitcoin is this strange being it really is it violates Everything we think we know about money and it forces us to consider whether we actually understood money in the first place So do you remember when you were in school and You did that class about basic economics and money? No, you neither We didn't do it either You'd think That One of the world's most ancient technologies one of the resounding artifacts of human civilization currency the system of trade that is the basis and Dominates our lives in many ways Would be an important topic at school Not one day maybe in some places you get a brief course in home economics or in history Or something like that that gives you this vague idea about money that you really don't understand Most of us cannot hold a 15-minute conversation with a six-year-old about money Because the six-year-old has good questions and we have no answers How does money work mommy? Well, the correct answer is I have not a freaking clue kid. I think it's something to do With the allocation of special drawing rights through the International Monetary Fund and World Bank In a free-floating system of market exchange currencies that compete through trade balances across an international spectrum of Inflation adjusted exchange rates that then can be used to create local debt That is issued by the Treasury in return for currency that is printed by the central bank distributed to the banks that leverage it through a system of partial reserve leverage of approximately 10 to 1 Distributed into the economy creating either inflationary or deflationary effects Allowing us all to experience the velocity of trade through the exchange of an abstract token That represents the promise of future value depreciated by the rate of inflation and adjusted For the return on investment So why can't we have more of it mommy? Why can't we just give everybody more of it that conversation doesn't go that way usually goes Eat your breakfast go to bed Clean your room One day you'll understand and that's the first lie Because you still don't understand You ask the average person on the street what gives value to money. Why does money have value? They have no idea They have a theory. They have a fairytale. They have a story and that story is about as naive as believing the children come from storks That deliver them in bundles they drop through the chimney It is about as solid as Santa Claus What gives money value? But it says right there on the piece of paper it says By the full faith and credit of the Royal Bank of India or it says by the full first faith and credit of the federal reserve system It says one federal reserve note Applies to all debt public and private Okay, this is what gives it value a promise But most people have no idea how that works I Guarantee you that if you ask the average person on the street They will tell you that the reason the money has value is because somewhere there's a cave a vault a box Where the government keeps gold in directs proportion to the money that circulates? Which has not been true since the 1930s anywhere in the world and Yet that is the Santa Claus fantasy that many people believe in or they believe that The government guarantees the value of money somehow which then creates other interesting questions like Well, why does inflation happen then? Why why is the currency? Collapsing in Zimbabwe did the government not try hard enough to guarantee it That is the inconvenient truth at the core of our understanding of the world's most ancient technology Money is that we don't understand it. We simply don't understand it The truth is You give money value Why because you are participating in a shared hallucination With a billion and a half other people in which you firmly believe that tomorrow this money Will still have value that if you go to the store and present one of these colored pieces of paper Someone will give you eggs chicken spices water sugar salt housing healthcare something For this colored piece of paper and it really takes an incredible hallucination for us to believe this Because the paper itself is worthless It's pretty But it's not pretty at that level nobody gives you products and services because of how pretty it is Right that shared hallucination took hundreds of years to be established and it started at some point in the late 15th century With the introduction of paper money gold certificates IOU certificates of exchange bearer notes, etc pieces of paper that could be exchanged in promise for something else and Then in the most amazing magical trick our societies have ever seen They switch the cups around And you lift the cup and the ball isn't there You go what? This was supposed to be redeemable for an ounce of gold a pound of silver something No, not anymore. It's just a piece of paper What gives it value is your belief that tomorrow if you go to the store you can buy something and the moment that belief Suffers a crack It shatters and You have very big problems. I mean Imagine some crazy scenario where the promise the full faith and credit One day turns into an announcement that as of four hours from now These two pieces of colored paper have zero value. I mean that couldn't possibly happen But here's the interesting thing if the value was based on the promise and that promise is broken and The people who gave that promise just told you this now has value zero in four hours What is the value of that piece of paper? Zero right But that's not what happened It's not what happened at all for months after that announcement was made Yes, the paper was valued less 10% less 15% less 20% less But it still had value Even though the people who made the promise told you it was zero You could exchange it for 80 percent of face value in one of the many available locations where Corruption no longer exists and you can't exchange money, you know all of that story Unless of course you're connected And wealthy enough to afford the 20 percent depreciation, but it only depreciated by 20 percent maximum I bet you could still find some in circulation today, and I bet they still don't have value of zero in fact In the history of currencies. We rarely find any currency that goes to zero I can go to Rome in Italy And I can get silver coins that have the face of Julius Caesar on them Coins that have not been in circulation For almost a thousand years And yet their value is not zero in fact their value exceeds Their worth in silver There's still a tradeable abstraction of value The reason your money did not go to zero was because its value was not the promise It's because its value was that illusion And that illusion was shaken But not destroyed Because you start panicking at first. You're like this has zero value And then someone says to you. Oh, don't worry. I know this guy Who knows a guy who knows a guy who will give you 80 percent on it and no longer has zero value now It's just depreciated Because you give it value through your use because you give it value by believing in that promise But in order for that promise to hold it has to have some other characteristics It has to be unforgeable If it can be forged Then you have an emerging phenomenon that in economics is called Gresham's law Where bad money chases out good money Where if you get your hands on the good money, you do not spend it You stuff it under the mattress Sounds familiar Happened here If you had an old note and a new note There is no way you're spending the new note until you get rid of all of the old notes So all the new notes disappear from from circulation immediately their velocity goes to zero And people trade the old note, but if they trade the old note, it's in circulation and the longer it remains in circulation The longer people hold on to it and hoard the new ones Gresham's law in action. I did not believe I would see that in my lifetime Thank you, India for validating my economics professor by demonstrating Gresham's law in a one and a half billion person laboratory Socked painful, but nevertheless very interesting economics money Has to be unforgeable Money has to be portable right Why did you not pay With gold at the door? I'm sure they'd accept gold. I certainly would right The reason you don't pay with gold is because gold sucks as money and the primary reason it sucks as money is because it's heavy It's very very heavy For the value that it contains Its weight is unrealistically Heavy you can't make it lighter Its density is fixed gold sucks as currency because it's not portable At the moment other currencies have the similar situation zimbabwe's money sucks as currency because it's not portable Because to buy a cup of coffee you need a wheelbarrow of cash I remember watching the bbc interview where they asked the farmer aren't you worried that someone will steal your money And they said no i'm worried that someone will steal my wheelbarrow Because it's worth more than the money in it Bad money chases good money out. It has to be unforgeable. It has to be portable It has to be universally recognizable. You need to be able to validate yourself That this is real money. You have to be able to independently verify Right It has to be able to be used as a unit of account. You need to be able to count things in it One of the reasons barter is not working One of the reasons barter is not a suitable form of economic activity at any scale more than the extremely local Is because of the burden it puts on pricing Yes, I can give you chicken for a goat And I can give the hairdresser chicken for a haircut And I can give the water carrier chicken for leaders of water right barter on a theoretical level Is effective The problem with barter is that now I have to track the exchange rate of haircuts in units of chicken Of goats in units of chicken and of water in units of chicken Meanwhile the hairdresser has to track the price of a haircut in chicken goats rice sugar salt water Accounting services, etc. Etc. The problem with barter is that we have to track every price exchange rate for every unit Of value that we are exchanging in the form of a commodity The whole point of money Is that you only have to track everything Back to the one thing that has no value the thing you can't eat the thing you can't Use to cut your hair with Because it isn't the value It is the token of value. It is the representation of value So it has to be unforgible. It has to be portable. It has to be useful as a unit of account And then come the difficult ones. It has to be rare You can't use seashells as currency if you live on a beach And yet people use seashells as currency in the mountains We find archaeological dig sites Where people ancient people used seashells as currency never on a beach always in a mountain Because they're rare And they use crystals and quartz and minerals on the beach because they come from the mountain As long as it doesn't exist Where you are it's a great form of money And That's one of the big problems we have with our money systems today Because I have bad news for you the rupee is not rare It has no limit It can be created in infinite quantity It can be created in infinite quantity just like the dollar The euro the yen and all other monies these can be created in infinite quantity And worse the power to decide how much of that to create Is vested in the people who have a direct conflict of interest Because if you are a debtor Then you want the money to be worthless so that you have to repay less If you are a saver you want the money to be worth more So that you can earn more on it If you give the government that is the biggest debtor of all The decision of how much the money will be worth they will print an infinity of money In order to make sure it's worth nothing and in the process they transfer wealth from savers to debtors And in a culture of savers that's a terrifying thought You have to explain it to people in a very calm way So we say little nifty tricks We tell people there's a rate of inflation that will not exceed two or two point two percent per year Sounds innocuous Two percent was two percent. I don't even know what two percent is. I didn't pay attention in school It has something to do with hundreds and division. I was never good at division Two percent. What does that do? If you tell people the rate of inflation is two percent they go Two percent ten percent five percent. I don't really understand that Let's rephrase that In 10 years half your money will be gone Holy shit Now that I understand I've been saving like crazy. I work two jobs. I barely get paid Half of it will be gone. Where where does it go? Who took it from me catch those people their thieves Oh my god, they took half my money in 10 years Inflation took your money more accurately The government the corporation the bank that is in debt took your money through inflation because for them Now the money they owe is also worth half in 10 years What a brilliant construct And that's where we see a fundamental difference between bitcoin and traditional money Bitcoin is money bitcoin is store value bitcoin is means of exchange bitcoin can be unit of account eventually It gradually acquires these characteristics as it grows more stable more well established more well adopted as more people Participate in the exchange of value through bitcoin. They create an economy that economy creates value That value creates stability it creates liquidity it reduces volatility the reduced volatility Makes it more suitable for as a means of exchange for smaller and smaller purchases It makes it better as a store value as a means of exchange the store value increase Its velocity increases the same unit gets transferred many times by people doing many trades And eventually its value stabilizes to the point where it can become a unit of account Where you can say one of these talks is worth half of bitcoin And I don't price it in dollars anymore. I price it in rupees. I can't do that today It's too volatile, but one day i'll be able to do that one day. I'll be pricing My bitcoins and bitcoins People ask me How much is a bitcoin worth? The correct answer is 1000 millibits And there will come a day When the question will not be how much is a bitcoin worth But the question will be how much is a rupee worth? And then I'll say oh it's a micro bit And that's when you know things have changed it will happen very very slowly and then all at once Because there's something special about a global currency and here's the magic trick 21 million that's the limit. It's mathematically imposed. There are not many currencies that can do that There's only one thing in the world that shares the characteristic of a fixed diminishing geometrically reducing supply That cannot be modified no matter how hard you try because the more you try to extract value from it the harder it gets And that's gold Except you can't email gold and you can't email bitcoin and suddenly You notice that this thing may have a bigger impact than any of us participating in it could even imagine And people will point at that and they'll say It's fake money It's not real And the market will give it a value and in the end That value is the truth You can use currency controls propaganda lies restrictions laws We see that in venezuela, right? They're doing all of those things. They're pointing at bitcoin and they're saying that's fake money And anybody who's involved in bitcoin in that space points right back at venezuela and goes. Oh, no Yours is the fake money This shit is real Because I can buy food with it From amazon delivered to columbia and smuggled across the border, but I can still buy food with it fake money Can be resolved by the market We are at the very beginning. This is not an investment opportunity. This is not to get rich quick scheme This is a technology. It's a technology that has radical disruptive implications for the world at large It creates for the first time in human history The possibility of the free flow of money to anyone anywhere at any time without any restrictions controls or central authority It creates the possibility of the free flow of money for all of humanity And that technology is going to be difficult to use. It's going to be weird. It's going to have attacks It's going to have hacks. It's going to have failures Just like the internet which used to go down all the time in various parts And some of the companies that are in the space will not exist 10 years from now That also happened with the internet In 2090 of the companies in the space were wiped out in a single stock market wash out But the internet didn't go anywhere It just found new companies to build the next generation And that will happen in digital currencies, too We may change the name We may change the companies that are participating in we will certainly change the technology And in the end digital currency Will happen has happened and will be a fundamental part of the future of humanity and absolutely Nothing can stop that From happening because it already did. Thank you