 I want to talk about the decentralization of truth, and thank you at least give me a fantastic opening for today's talk. So, how many of you are in Bitcoin or in cryptocurrencies for less than a year? Maybe about a fifth of the audience? This is something that keeps happening. If you keep going to these events, what you'll notice is that a percentage of the people you meet is always new. Why? Because we're growing at an exponential pace. The entire community, the entire industry, all of the cryptocurrencies, the engagement is growing at an exponential pace. Most of the people come into this are new. Here's how it works. You come into this space, and you've heard about this weird, nerdy thing called Bitcoin. Maybe a lot of people come in through Bitcoin as their first experience in cryptocurrency. You start asking questions, and none of it makes any friggin' sense. None of it. Who runs this thing? Nobody. Okay, okay. I get you, nobody, but just tell me. Come on, who runs this thing? You've been in here or in this space since 2012. Obviously, you know who runs this thing. How does it work? What is it backed by? Why does it have value? What's going on? All of these questions come in, and you're like, this isn't like the money I know. This isn't like anything I know. None of the answers make sense at first. Gradually, you start climbing up this very steep learning curve. It's full of traps, because you see the peak, and you're like, I'm almost there. I'm beginning to understand. I'm having this breakthrough moment. I can finally understand what the hell everybody's talking about, barely, but just a bit. You reach that peak, and you're like, I made it. You look up, and it's not the final peak. It's just a plateau, and you have to start climbing again, because, okay, I kind of understand Bitcoin. But now I'm hearing about this blockchain thing, and hyperledger, and distributed ledger technologies. More questions. More questions about that. And then altcoins. What the hell are altcoins? There's thousands of them? When did this happen? I just understood Bitcoin. You're going to dump a thousand other things in my lap. Here we go again, climbing up the steep learning curve. You get altcoins, and then just when you think you're beginning to understand it, some kids with a funny name build a platform that can allow anyone to write an ICO in three minutes, and suddenly the whole place is flooded with ICOs, and here we go again. What the hell are all these things? Are they coins? Are they blockchains? No, they're a platform of a coin on top of another platform, which uses smart contracts. What the hell is a smart contract? And here we go, climbing up the learning curve again. And just when you think you're beginning to understand, you look back and you're like, okay, Bitcoin, I got that covered. At least I understand that. What do you mean it's forking? Do I get part of the fork? If I have the fork, am I on both sides of the fork? How can I be on both sides of the fork? And if I am on both sides of the fork, how do I spend it? Which one do I spend? Which one is the real Bitcoin? Is forking again? Didn't it just fork like two weeks ago? Okay, we're forking again. Here we go again. Okay, freak out. How do I get this fork? What about the next one? And the next one. And the next one. What if it's forks all the way down? What if it's a bottomless forking mechanism? What if forking is what it's all about? Maybe I missed this. Are we ICOing Bitcoin now? I'm totally confused. I thought I had it. I lost it again. And in all of this, you're trying to find an anchor, something familiar, something you can grasp, something that will give you a basis to understand what the hell is going on with this technology. And this is the trap. Because we've grown up believing a certain model, a model for discovering truth, and the model we have for discovering truth is authority. And so when we're suddenly trying to figure out what is the truth, what is really happening in this space, what do we instinctively do? Instinctively we look for authority. Hang on. Didn't Andrea say this is a leaderless movement? But who's the authority then? Who tells us what's true? How the hell do we find out what's true if there's no leader? And inevitably someone pops out of the bushes and goes, I'll be the leader. I'm sorry, we weren't advertising a vacancy when we said leaderless movement. We actually wanted to remain leaderless. So you look at all of these things, and some people tell you Bitcoin Cash is the new Bitcoin. Is the real Bitcoin? Or is it Bitcoin 1x that's the real Bitcoin? Or is it this new 2x or Bitcoin Gold, or whatever the next fork is going to be? Which one can the real Bitcoin stand up? Can somebody tell me which one is the real Bitcoin? There is no real Bitcoin. There is no objective truth. There is no final authority. There will be no answer. No one can tell you. And the reason no one can tell you is because we cannot appeal to an authority. We're so used to looking for someone to tell us. And why do we need that answer? Why do we need to know which one is the real Bitcoin? Because clearly, if one of them is real, that's the only one that has value, right? Value comes from authenticity. Or does it? What's it a name? If we didn't call it a rose, would it not smell as sweet? What is it a name? Is it the authenticity that gives it value? Or is it value that gives it authenticity? Where does the value come from? We don't know how to handle this, because it never happened before. Let me give you a question here. How can you tell what a real dollar is? It's got a stamp on it, some kind of fancy serial numbers. Maybe you can put it under a light, mark it with a marker. Okay, this is the real one. What does it say on the front? Does it say $1? No, it doesn't. You haven't actually read it. It says, Federal Reserve Note. The stuff you're holding in your wallet is an imposter. It's a forgery of a Silver Certificate. It used to be a Silver Certificate. Those days are over. Now it's a Federal Reserve Note. What's that? Does it matter whether it's a real dollar? Let's play a little mental exercise. Overnight, all of your dollars got replaced by forgeries. You wake up the next day, and you have forged dollars in your wallet, but nobody seems to notice except you. You know they're forged. Everybody else is a forged. You can see them handing you forged dollars. Everybody seems to not notice that they're forged. What happens to the value of the system? What happens to the value of the dollar if tomorrow morning all of them were forged? Nothing. It continues to have the exact same value. As long as we all believe in the new thing, it has the exact same value. It doesn't matter who printed it. So what does it matter which is the real one? Where does value come from? It doesn't come from authenticity, and it doesn't come from authority. It comes from use. If we use the thing, then it is the real thing as far as we're concerned. That's all that matters. The value comes from the use. It's not as valuable as a dollar because it has the stamp. Really, that's only about making sure that not too many of them are printed. You only care about it being authentic because you don't want the market suddenly flooded with it, by which point it starts losing value. What happens when the authority that has stamped it is the one flooding the market? By printing more and more of them. Now we have a bit of a conundrum. Which one is the real? It doesn't matter. So when you ask yourself which is the real Bitcoin, you're looking for authenticity. The problem with looking for authenticity is that the only way you can have authenticity is through authority. You need someone to step up and tell you. Make that decision for you. Tell you which is real and which isn't. Which fork to follow? Which is the chain that matters? Which one will keep its value? No one can tell you that. The only Bitcoin that matters is the one that you choose to validate. If you're running a node and you choose the rules of consensus that you follow, that is the real Bitcoin to you and you alone. There is no objective truth. There is only empirical subjective truth. Do you know that everybody else is making the same decision? No. For that, you need a market. What the market does is it takes every single person's subjective opinion of which one is the real Bitcoin, and then puts a price on it, and collects all of the decisions you make, one by one, each person deciding whether to sell or buy, at what price to sell and buy, and creates this emergent picture of value that tells you, I don't know what the real one is, but this is what people think is the real one. Because they reflect that in their decisions. The ideal way to do that, to maintain the real Bitcoin, is to run your own node and validate your own consensus rules, and how many in this room do that? Fifteen people out of 275? That's not going to cut it. Most of us delegate this decision. We say, if I choose a wallet by a team that professes to share my principles and values, and follows the same kind of rules about Bitcoin that I think make the real Bitcoin, then by proxy I'm expressing my opinion about what is truth, what is real, which one is the real Bitcoin. This is not just a problem in Bitcoin. Is it Ethereum or Ethereum Classic? By show of hands. Ethereum? Classic. Ethereum? Classic. Which is real? Funnily enough, as people who are indoctrinated to authority, what we look for is some kind of protection of authenticity. Sue those bastards for trademark infringement. They're trying to steal the brand. That is old-school thinking, that is the basis of old currencies. We are no longer in a zero-sum game. Here's the bad news. We would have our answer if one of these things survived, and the others simply went away. They died. It would be fantastic if one currency, the real one, emerged as a victor, and eventually the others disappeared. In order for one to win, something has to lose, and lose in such a way that it disappears. None of these things are ever going to disappear. As long as there are two people running the consensus algorithm, the coin continues. There are coins from 2012 from the very early altcoin boom that are still around. Nobody knows what they are anymore, but they're still around, and they might be around forever. We have a thousand blockchains today. A few years we'll have ten thousand, then we'll have a hundred thousand, then we'll have a million, then we'll have ten million, and none of them will ever die. Somewhere, probably in a cabin in Montana, with a satellite dish and a Raspberry Pi, there will be the one die-hard user of Bitcoin flues, or whatever the latest fork is. It's going to be like, this is the real one! You can take it away out of my cold, dead hands, and so that one will exist forever. There will be no winner, because this is not a competition of elimination. This is not game season, this is not the World Series, this is not a knockout match. This is a system in which everybody can choose to follow their own path, create their own coin, and therefore there will be thousands, and then hundreds of thousands, and then millions. It doesn't matter which is the real one, because there is no absolute truth, there is no objective answer. We have to become accustomed to uncertainty, we have to understand that they will all exist. The only thing that matters is which one do you choose to use? The value doesn't come from it being authentic, authorized, anointed, or winning. It comes from being used. Use value is the only value. Suddenly you realize all currencies are like that, none of them have intrinsic value. None of them matter in terms of authority, they only matter in terms of use. Turns out the euro, the yen, the US dollar, they all only have value, not because the government said so, but because we believed, and they will only have value as long as we believe, even that authority is fake. Even that money is fake, it's an illusion. All that matters is what do we choose to use? There is no authenticity, there is no objective truth. Here's the danger. People are very uncomfortable with this idea. They want an answer, a simple objective truth that they can cling to and say, this is the real one. They will never get that. They will delegate their responsibility to others. They will say, let Coinbase decide. Let the hosted wallet, the exchange, decide for me whatever fork they support is my fork. Delegating that responsibility, there is this very dangerous moment when the companies that have successfully grown in this space forget that they serve their users, they do not represent their users. They did not receive an electoral mandate by having ten million users to represent those users in consensus, to be their elected representatives through business. They serve customers, they are not served by their customers. Over the last couple of years, in fact, we've watched that gradual slide as people who started serving customers started believing that they had a mandate to represent their customer base, to make decisions about consensus and to impose those decisions on everybody else. That is a very dangerous path. It is the path, as Elise was alluding to, of centralization. If you give up your responsibility to choose based on your principles and give that power to someone else, just like giving your keys to someone else, you are no longer participating in the community, you are no longer participating in consensus, you are no longer expressing your principles through choice. You are delegating to central authority, and it all goes to shit from there very, very fast. Because power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Do not make the mistake of looking for a simple answer, a straightforward authority that will tell you which is the real one. They are all real, they are all fake. There is no difference between real and fake. Which is the useful one? Which is the empowering one? Which is the one that expresses your principles? Which is the one that achieves the things you want to see in the world? Is that real enough for you? Follow that, and let the market aggregate all of those opinions so you can express your choice. There will be no winners, but together we can all make sure that by making these choices ourselves, by taking control of our keys, by taking control of the consensus when we can, and by expressing that opinion, we won't arrive at a final truth, but we will put our little two cents, our choice into the market. We will inject it and hope that the market reflects that, so that we can have something that persists, that is resistant to censorship, that is neutral, that is open, that is empowering for individuals and that cannot be easily hijacked. What we are doing is we are decentralizing truth. Thank you.