 So if you look at the traditional financial markets infrastructure, and if you look at what you're defining as universal basic finance Do you see the two kind of interoperable or do you see UBF as a complete replacement for the traditional markets? Well, so it depends there are some functions that you can't replicate with cryptocurrencies For example with cryptocurrencies You can't do fractional reserve banking based on the unlimited printing of currency at zero interest rates flooding the market with enormous Acid bubbles That's disappointing. I Mean how the financial services company is going to make profit without risk or By externalizing the risk to the entirety of society. It's very disturbing We'd better regulate that you can't do credit in the traditional form You have to do micro lending and micro credit, which is basically not fractional So you can only generate enough credit as other people see as investment directly So you can't do those functions of traditional banking, but when it comes to storing currency That function it is unnecessary to do that function with an intermediary Everybody can store their own currency be monetarily sovereign as they say in the most Kind of die-hard angles of crypto You don't need an intermediary to do payments International cross-border payments from any recipient to any recipient that's the fundamental concept of neutrality that exists on the internet and Digital currencies on the internet exhibit that same concept that same principle of neutrality and you can't stop it So those functions do not exist in 25 years in the mainstream banking system And the reason they don't exist is because no banking system can offer them With the cost and more importantly with the openness of open public borderless Cryptocurrencies you see we're seeing a lot of the corporations now trying to compete and the banking system really Is caught between a rock in a hard place or between a crypto system and face coin Because on one end here comes crypto and it's offering an open borderless service that you cannot by law You cannot offer you cannot participate in you can't even play with that technology Because you are required under the regulatory regime to KYC everyone you touch and To do all of this reporting you have been inadvertently or inadvertently Deputized into law enforcement worse in the United States now the banks have been deputized into the military They've become direct arms of the military. They are fighting trade wars They are fighting currency wars on behalf of the government It's a very bad position to be in because you can't play in crypto. You are prohibited from playing in crypto That's okay. Crypto serves a different purpose But on the other hand Banks have traditionally been the greatest investors in Technology and have proud of themselves to be these beacons of technology and innovation Well, here comes Facebook here comes Silicon Valley and they're not going after crypto They can't for exactly the same reasons the banks can't they're regulated entities. They exist in jurisdictions They're not open-source projects that are not controlled by anyone They're systems that are absolutely centralized and controlled so therefore they will have to do all of the KYC AML and borders that traditional payment systems do they cannot be open borderless Neutral censorship resistant transparent public immutable Because all of those things are prohibited under the money transmitter and banking regulations therefore they will be closed and centralized censorship lading surveillance driven and They'll do that better than the banks Faster than the banks with better interfaces than the banks and they start out of the gate with two and a half billion customers You are so screwed if you are in the banking industry right now It's coming from both ends and you can't fight either side But that's okay because change is good it's good for consumers It's good for people if I was in the banking environment right now I would be screaming to Stop the train of regulation Financial surveillance and exclusion because it will bury you without stopping any of your competitors Who operate in the open-source borderless environment that the Internet is? My question is in order for the universal access to finance that you're talking about to occur It needs a very sophisticated distributed architecture. Yes Do you think that there's a risk that regulation will move from the financial rails to the technology? architecture itself and What do we need to be cautious of to stop ISPs? Stopping software stopping Apple having the technology on their phone those sorts of things I see that as a huge risk It is absolutely a huge risk one of the first people to write about that was Lawrence Lessig who wrote a book called code is law in the 90s Which was about the fact that our new information realms are defined by laws that are not legislated or voted on but coded by Software entities and those define the rules of behavior within our information realms now the interesting thing is that Open blockchains are also realms where code is law But the code is actually the rules of consensus that define the law that operates in that realm Regulation will happen at the fringes it will happen at the on-ramps and off-ramps of all of these systems But ultimately you can't regulate these things out of existence China has banned Bitcoin more than 10 times the last time very very strongly and they really really meant it this time Do you think Bitcoin still operates in China? Oh Hell yes, it does They tried to shut down half the internet to prevent people from saying the magical trigger phrase Which will get you knocked off the internet in China June 4th 1989 that's the magical phrase that will terminate your internet connection You cannot stop the truth from propagating on communication media And you cannot stop computing from being general purpose computing You cannot stop any computing from being general purpose computing and God knows they're trying governments around the world are trying to mandate encryption backdoors which don't work and No matter how many technologists explain very very patiently and very very politely That you cannot give golden keys to the good guys without giving golden keys to everyone at which point the bad guys Or gals have access to the same information You can't persuade these intelligence agencies that keep losing our data and leaking like sieves That they can't do a better job of security than all of the private sector has failed to do already Two days ago it was announced that the Customs and Border Protection agents in the United States lost a hundred million photos that got leaked From the low cameras you see at the border post where they take a nice photo of your face straight on really really nice well-lit photo Straight on with your eyes open no hats no sunglasses the kind of thing that's kind of perfect for facial recognition The bad guys have it now be prepared for a reign of terror of surveillance where Watching happens bottom-up grassroots with applications on phones where people can track you from the background of a photo where you appear accidentally unregulated people Not Disregulated people like we elect all the time They will try to make computing non-generic so that they can control the range of expression and experience you can have on computing it will fail Because it's an armed race against much more creative much more driven hackers around the world Who have broken every layer of security anyone who's put in their path ever to? Liberate electronic devices if you want to read more about this topic one of my favorite authors and speakers and thought leaders on this is core doctoral and You can learn a lot by understanding his premise on general-purpose computing And why the attempts by governments like the UK? Primarily, but also France and other European countries and of course the US to ban Encryption to control general-purpose computing not only fail But they create the kind of totalitarian society in which the people who hold those levers of power The ones who ask you for ID before you look at porn And then leak all of that information all over the internet whoops Those are the people who become the most dangerous people in society. Those are the new Stasi We we it is really shocking to me as Someone who was born in this country to watch this country Forget the very lessons that Europe learned 60 years ago and go down that exact same path blindly Giving enormous power to elected government as if the magic of voting Voting preserves freedoms and institutions. It doesn't So you mentioned there being money for the people and money for the corporates and then of course money for the government What what key components should come together for money for the people to triumph? so It depends how you define triumph Right, and again, I think of this as a three-body problem, which means that Nothing we do within our tiny sphere of influence Changes what's happening out there in spheres that we have no influence over a lot of how the future plays out Depends on this very intricate dance of chaotic systems that we don't control. So How does Bitcoin progress? It depends on what happens to the euro? It depends on what happens to the British pound. It depends on what happens to Libra It depends on what happens to a whole load of other things that we don't know Right so and the answer is different in every place in the world To me what's more important is how do you define success? I did a talk It's probably about a year ago in I believe it was in Ireland actually I think it was in Dublin and The talk was called measuring success or the measure of success and I said if you think that success Can be measured by market capitalization or daily average users World domination global adoption complete monopoly. That's not the measure of success First of all because if we count by market capitalization What we're doing is we're basing our assessment of our success on the total amount of dollars We can accumulate in our system because it is measured in dollars. Guess who has all the dollars Banks so if they come into the game big time at some point They will and they put a lot of dollars behind it They're gonna win the market cap game right and I also predict that if we count in terms of how many users use it on a daily basis Facebook's gonna win Right and this was long before they announced that we're doing this More than a year ago Facebook's gonna win. It's gonna get two billion people to mindlessly follow that path of Convenience so you can't measure success that way. So how do I measure success? What does it take for Bitcoin to win? Does it give you? freedom of choice sovereignty independence safety from crisis and turmoil and Weird things happening around you. Yes. No, maybe don't know To me, that's the value. So to me it does give me those things. So I personally choose to engage in this space because I believe that it empowers me as an individual and it gives me a certain degree of diversification or power of exit or Independence from the monetary system You each have to make that choice and if it gives lots of people Freedom to make that choice. I consider that success success is people having the choice not People exercising the choice because people make bad choices all the time But can we make sure they have the choice? That's my goal in this space It is making sure enough people understand the basic technology through education in as many languages as possible Reaching as many people as possible around the world say understand why this matters What are the principles how to get started how to use it and what it can do in their life? And if the answer is it can't do anything in your life great. You don't need it Congratulations, you're part of 5% of the human population that already has it has banking and visa and you know Institutions that work and a bit of democracy and you're not starving. So that's great, but What about the other 95% so I'm interested in choice. That's what it's all about and that's how I measure success Which sounds awfully convenient because if you take any of the other metrics, we will fail We will fail right there will be more users for candy crush money. There will be more users For the money that's mandatory. There will be greater market cap in JP Morgan Chase coin. That's okay Who's got the microphone? Okay, so we get it down here as well next. Thank you To segue from what you've just talked about Yes, do you think that Libra is gonna muddy the waters when it comes to people's opinion on crypto currencies? Oh hell yes, it already has it already has that's why my friend's mother called and said are you okay? Because it's an it's a crypto. It's a blockchain, right? It's gonna muddy the waters It's gonna give a lot of people license to say well turns out crypto was all about one world government Right, I Received a tweet this morning that said see I told you it was all about them You know the triple parenthesis, you know what that means Right, so it's bringing the worst kind of responses out of people in in in the world and Great block and move on but also Educate right so how do you differentiate? How do you tell the bullshit from the real? Speak loudly express your principles tell the people around you why it's not what they think It is you know and that's up to us now the good news is all we have to do is tell two people That's it I'll tell two people they'll tell two people each They'll tell two people each 200 degrees of separation later. We've hit seven and a half billion exponentials work great the best part is The most important lessons will be taught by Facebook themselves They will freeze accounts They will seize accounts. They will block transactions. They will engage in Geopolitics they will destroy nations they will impoverish people they will leak data and every one of those lessons is Going to be hard learned, but it's going to explain why we need monies that we control That isn't based on surveillance and you can't teach people to make good choices They don't want to listen right you just have to keep repeating yourself