 Okay. All right. So, yeah, like the guy that introduced me, who I'll get to know later, I guess, mentioned I did a Bitcoin threat model a couple of years ago. That's how I ended up, you know, going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. I've got a couple of decades of working in software security. And so that was the kind of appropriate response to something that seemed too good to be true is to do a very systematic security design analysis or a threat model. And what a threat model is, is it's a list of all of the potential attacks, all the things that, you know, the solution is doing to prevent those attacks, safeguards or safety measures, and then kind of a conclusion for each. What I want to do today is revisit that a little bit, but we're going to be talking about how you could attack Bitcoin, even though two years ago I didn't think that it was possible. And I've got a couple of quotes to kind of frame this. This is one of my favorites. Freedom is the freedom to believe that two plus two equals four. If that is granted, all else follows. That's from Winston in 1984. And then this is a paraphrase of Mises. They're all along the same theme. Government intervention always produces the opposite of the stated intention. And then government that engages in additional intervention justified by the problems their previous intervention created. And this is a steady march towards the socialism of the Nazi state. And then finally give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God, what belongs to God. So there is a, there's a huge conflict that's been going on for centuries since the beginning of man. And we're, we have Bitcoin and it's a, it's a part of this bigger conflict. So that's, that's the context with which you have to really look at this stuff is in the broad sweep of history to get a better, better view of it. So Bitcoin is an incredible technology. But one of the limitations that it has as a technology, as a tool, is that the most it can ever do is amplify human freedom. It can't create it from, from nothing. So here's some examples, personal firearms in the United States, people who believe in the Second Amendment, people that don't believe in the Second Amendment, all agree that it would be more difficult to some degree to establish a totalitarian state in the United States, because there are more guns in the hands of, you know, regular average Joe guys than there are regular average Joe guys in the United States. Another maybe less palatable example is RPGs in Afghanistan. Afghanistan, you know, is not super popular in the West, but it is a country that brought down, played maybe a bigger role than the United States in bringing down the Soviet Union and appears to be playing a significant role in ending the US empire. And a big part of why that's possible is that individual people, individual guys out in the hills have access to pretty cheap technology that makes them relatively powerful. They're still not better than a Apache attack helicopter. But in relative terms, RPGs make the individual more powerful. Now, if, if these guys weren't already pretty intense fighters and pretty capable in their own right, RPGs wouldn't be able to do anything for them. But technologies can amplify an existing freedom or an existing capability. And Bitcoin is the same way. If, if you're living in a totalitarian regime, you're not going to be able to take advantage of Bitcoin. And what we're going to see is that there's a couple things that are coming together right now at this point in history. One is information warfare being used by the state in an unprecedented scale. And they're accomplishing things that we never would have thought possible maybe five or 10 years ago. Most of us anyway, including myself. And then we also have things like Bitcoin. And that's going to bring about the couple technologies or a couple concepts less scary sounding but much more powerful solution that we're, we're right on the cusp of having to empower individuals. So when I did the Bitcoin threat model a couple years ago, these are some of the, some of the things that I looked at. And so I'm just going to do a quick overview of some of the ways that, that people have thought of trying to break Bitcoin. And again, a threat model is a, is a basically a library or a systematic list of all the ways that anybody can think of to break. There's been one or two things that we've added over the last couple of years. But by and large, if you thought of a way to break Bitcoin that's not in the threat model, I'll be shocked. But I'll put it in as soon as you, as soon as you throw it my way. But here's, here's an overview of some of the highlights. So quantum computers, guessing private keys, it's not going to happen. It's not a viable threat. Getting private keys through violence or hacking can happen to individuals, but it's not going to happen, at least in our current environment in a scale that would actually break the Bitcoin system itself. So yeah, you can get burned, but it's not going to bring down Bitcoin if your private keys gets stolen, inserting security flaws into code directly. So this would be, you know, you put a gun to a developer's head and you say, Hey, I want you to check in the security flaw. If you guys have been at Bitcoin for more than about 10 minutes, you've asked that question, you already know that that's not possible. Inserting a security flaw through a fork, we saw that play out with Bitcoin Cash, Segwit 2x, and then a lot of things that were before my time, like Bitcoin Unlimited. So we know that it's not possible to do that, that it's just not going to work. Malicious mining, this is, you know, still could be interesting, but there's a lot of reasons and a lot of safeguards in place to believe that even if nation states started using, you know, their monopoly essentially on nuclear power to maliciously mine Bitcoin, it wouldn't bring down the system. Malicious investing. So governments using their ability to print money to buy at Bitcoin, that could be interesting, but all they would do is devalue their currency and make Bitcoin more valuable. So that's not going to work. And finally, shut down the internet. And that kind of is a good transition concept, right? Because this, it shows that when you look at all of the things that you could do to bring down Bitcoin, you have to get more and more psychotic, you have to get more and more totalitarian. Because in our current environment, when people have access to the freedoms that they have, this is a very empowering thing. And in order to remove all of the safeguards that keep Bitcoin safe, you're going to have to do some really wild and wildly unpopular things. And these are some of the ways that, or these are some of the safeguards that if you look through the threat model, you'll see come up again and again and again. These are the things that allow us to be sure within reason that Bitcoin is not breakable. Because people have the freedom to write software. Anybody can write software. Anybody can check in software. Anybody can code review somebody else's software and say, hey, this is good software and encourage other people to run it. And then anybody can run software. And this is unapproved, right? We live in a world where we don't have to check this into some government authority and then they sign off on it before all of those interactions take place. But Bitcoin heavily relies on those freedoms. Another one is speculation. The reason that the Bitcoin Cash event was such a non-invent is that individuals were free to buy and sell Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin. And those speculators were financially incentivized and they had the freedom to determine that Bitcoin Cash was a fraud. And so they sold their Bitcoin Cash and they bought more Bitcoin. Or when they went to buy, they only bought Bitcoin. So that freedom to speculate, that freedom to invest on different coins or different assets is something that's a bedrock freedom that if that was taken away, obviously there would be no Bitcoin. Another way of saying that is if you couldn't buy Bitcoin, there would be no Bitcoin, which is kind of apparently and obviously true. But it's a freedom that we take for granted that you can buy and sell whatever you want. And that hasn't always been the case at all points in time in history. And it's not even the case in all places on the planet right now. Speculation, investing in Bitcoin mining hardware. So if nobody on the planet has the freedom to buy Bitcoin mining hardware, there's no secure Bitcoin network. And even more fundamental things are required, like peer-to-peer education, right? Like what we're doing right now, what people are doing on Twitter all the time, on Reddit, blogs, on YouTube telling people, hey, this works well. This could resist government interference. There's only 21 million coins. We take that for granted. But when you read dystopian novels like 1984 or Fahrenheit 411 or any of these nightmare scenarios where the state takes absolute control, that's one of the first things to go. And if you read history and learn about how things happened in the Soviet Union, in Germany, under Hitler, all these other scenarios, what's going on in North Korea right now, being able to just educate each other and openly talk, right? Which is why freedom of speech is held so sacred in the United States and elsewhere. Having that freedom is absolutely critical for a lot of things. But it's also critical for Bitcoin to work. And then freedom to trade Bitcoin for goods and services, the freedom to sell a banana and accept Bitcoin and accept Bitcoin for a banana. And people have speculated that that Bitcoin could be brought down because of this, because of these, you know, let's say weaknesses. But up until recently, it seemed pretty far-fetched, I would say, that there was going to be some sort of global government. Because if you try to shut it down in one country, it can just easily move to another country is the typical response. And I think that's, I still think that's a legitimate response. But I think that it's a little bit, it's a little more disconcerting now. So let's look at how these powers, these like very basic human freedoms that we totally take for granted have been messed with in the past. Because it's not, it might seem totally far-fetched, but it's not even far-fetched in the United States. So it's obviously critical that we're able to buy Bitcoin and sell Bitcoin. In 1933, you know, the executive order 6102 on Twitter has made pretty popular, at least the number, that were basically FDR prohibited gold investing. You could still buy gold, I think, in paper form and you can do some other things, but you weren't allowed to hoard it. You weren't allowed to actually take possession of it. I'm not even sure that you were allowed to invest in it in paper form. Now, there's a difference between having permission to do it and being able to do it. And obviously, people still did it. So simply outlawing it isn't enough, but the fact that it was outlawed is sobering and should remind us that it's not totally far-fetched. We would see something like this in the future. 2001, we had the Patriot Act. This completely, you know, brazenly eroded a lot of our freedoms that we take for granted in the United States. But one of them is that you can be imprisoned indefinitely without a trial if you're, if you're labeled a terrorist. There's all kinds of other things that are also related to the Snowden revelations in 2013. But one of the things that we know from those leaked documents is that all your conversations are recorded with the help of Google, Microsoft, and AT&T and basically every other major company. These people get a letter that says, hey, keep your mouth shut. You're not allowed to say anything. This is a national security issue. You know, sometimes they're very threatening, implying treason could be involved. And the employees of these companies roll over and the companies themselves roll over. And so now we know that there's taps from all of these companies into huge data centers in Utah and other places recording everything. Now it's just recording. It's not actually preventing us from having this conversation that we're having right now. But it's clearly a step in that direction. And you can kind of look at it as permissioned communication, right? Yes, we're having this conversation right now. But if government agencies are listening to everything that we're saying, one, it's going to have an impact on what we're comfortable saying. But two, it's kind of like on by default, right? If you can be arrested and imprisoned indefinitely if you're labeled appropriately from some bureaucracy without even getting a trial. And on top of that, everything that you say is recorded. It's fairly easy to understand that, you know, if you say something that's offensive enough, you could find yourself in the jaws of this pretty nasty system. But I think Julian Assange is a pretty good example of that to everybody. So that's not a current event. And then in 2016, we've seen threats of nationalization if it doesn't censor better. So Twitter is a really important communication medium at this point in history. And even though they censor a lot of stuff really badly, I think whether you like the way that they censor or you don't, the bigger picture issue here is that they will get nationalized. There's a lot of people that want them to be nationalized. If there's enough people that buy into this idea, it will become essentially a government institution. So just the threat of that will make Twitter respond to whoever's in power or go out of business, right? So Twitter is, you know, certainly in a tough position, whether you like what they're doing or not, it's not, it's not clear what they should do. If they don't censor anybody, they will get nationalized. They'll get taken over. If they censor only the left, then the right wants to take them over. If they censor only the right. And, you know, if they censor something badly like with corona, then everybody wants to take them over. So it's a nasty situation. And our ability to peer to peer communicate is not guaranteed. In 2017, Elon's got to come up a couple of times in this talk. But in 2017, he called for a government body to approve all artificial intelligence-related code, because he's afraid of the singularity, artificial intelligence getting to a certain point. And his solution that he publicly proposed was that anybody that's writing artificial intelligence code, that code needs to be reviewed and essentially approved by, you know, some government-ish body. The problem with that is that artificial intelligence is a very, it basically doesn't exist. It's an algorithm. It's a set of algorithms. And so it's not clear. It's not as if you could say, okay, I'm only working on, you know, atomic bombs. I'm going to have these reviewed. And now I'm just working on some code to figure out whether somebody's standing in my front door. There's so much overlap. And it would be, it would be absurd to try to segregate that in any way. So effectively what that would mean, if it was approved and if people bought into it, is that we would lose our ability to write code without somebody approving it. Because somebody's at least got to approve that it doesn't have any artificial intelligence code. So that was very chilling and terrifying. And then 2020, we have something that makes all of that look like nothing as far as I'm concerned. I know a lot of people don't quite believe that Corona is a hoax. I'm not going to spend a ton of time talking about it. But just, you know, for now, play along with me that Corona is a hoax. And what we've witnessed in the last few months is a global disbanding of the economy. And when we say economy, we're not just talking about factories or something. We're talking about some of these freedoms that we had in the last slide of just being able to make stuff and sell it to whoever you want, be able to buy things and use it however you want. That's what the economy is. And the more that the government, as Misa said, intervenes in that economy, the more they'll have to intervene in that economy. And eventually that will lead us in a steady progression towards totalitarian state. So Corona. Corona is pretty profound to watch from an information warfare standpoint. War is always information war. When the United States went into Iraq and, you know, famously the hearts and minds concept came back up, something that was talked about in Vietnam and is essential to any war, right? If you go into the occupying area, you can't continue to occupy that area if the locals won't support you. And so this idea of, you know, we're going to go, we're going to hand out water bottles, we're going to set up cable TV, we're going to, you know, do whatever we have to do to win these people's hearts and minds. That's a way of talking about getting their minds, right? It's not getting their brains, getting their meat computers. We need those people that are processing information about the world around them to process it in the way that we want them to process it. So sometimes that means dropping a bomb, but sometimes that just means putting up a poster. And the end goal is the same. So the corona hoax is the pinnacle of the, of information warfare. It was done on a global scale and we'll get into that a little bit more. The pinnacle of, let's say, freedom producing or freedom empowering technology, I believe is going to be free market insurance. So we've seen corona, we'll probably see more versions of that. We haven't seen free market insurance yet, but we're going to talk about it and we're getting very close to it. So a couple things about corona itself. One is, again, for the purpose of this presentation, because I can't, you know, it'd take me two hours to make the argument that it's a hoax. It's very complicated as all information warfare is or it wouldn't work. But for now, just imagine how easily it could be a hoax, right? If you believe that this virus is highly deadly, if you think it's way more dangerous than the flu, that's fine. Keep that idea. But if you, if you have the intelligence to do so, set that aside and just imagine with me that it is a hoax and think about how easy it could be a hoax because all of your information channels on this are from government agencies, social media and old media. All the old media is obviously, you know, very political. And, you know, some of the, some of the previous leaks we have tell us that the CIA, for example, this is not conspiracy theory stuff. And, you know, if you worked at the CIA, you'd think it was a good idea, has people embedded in media agencies. It's been done multiple times and leaked multiple times. So you have the old media that's a fairly central point of contact that's pretty easy to control. You have social media. And these guys are just trying not to get nationalized. And then you have government agencies like the CDC that have really the only authority and the only credibility. So all you really need in this information-based attack is to have something like the CDC come out with certain proclamations and certain statements. Now, I don't think it'll be as easy to do next time, but this time they had a lot of credibility and they were able to use that to great effect. If they came out tomorrow and said something, I think there'd be more skepticism. But again, whether you think that this is really deadly or not, you have to know that everybody relied on the CDC. When the CDC said don't wear masks, everybody believed that masks were a bad idea. Now that they're saying wear masks, everybody believes that masks are a good idea. So there's clearly a very centralized weak point, single point of failure in the system that could be used if you don't believe that it was used. And what's incredible about this situation is that it was a global coordinated response. Everybody, with the exception of Switzerland and a few other small countries, almost everybody globally responded to coronavirus in exactly the same way. So we had global lockdowns, which were basically house arrests, sort of like you're allowed to leave your house, but only under certain conditions. We didn't have like declarations of martial law, but what would you do if you did declare martial law? You would do things like curfews, right? And people would freak out supposedly according to the movies. As soon as you implement the curfews, we all know that Hitler is rising to power and we're going to rise up. But no, they did house arrests and they didn't say you couldn't be out after a certain time. They said you can only be out under certain circumstances. And everybody mostly went along with that, which is I think pretty sobering and pretty terrifying. I wouldn't have expected anything like this could have happened in such a smooth way. They also closed non-essential businesses. The concept of non-essential businesses is something that is very fascist. The whole idea that government can determine which businesses are essential and which ones aren't. If they can do that, why haven't we shut down all these non-essential businesses already? They're just using up resources. So there's a lot of really creepy concepts built into this. But for the most part, there was overwhelming public support for this. And basically, based on data that came from the CDC and just a few other government agencies. And this might sound super conspiratorial, but for Bitcoiners, we should be able to step back and say, well, wait a minute, central banking itself is a global conspiracy to control the world's economy. Like they're very blatant. That's the case, right? And the way that this works is it's not always people petting cats, smoking cigars. You have the Federal Reserve, they're controlling their money supply. They have relationships with other banks that are able to play games to some certain degree and profit from that to some certain degree. But that coordination of currencies and that coordination of economies is more than enough to if they were going to look for an excuse. So one possibility is that the coronavirus problem started legitimately, but central banks throughout the world knew that the jig was up, knew that all of the signs were there that the economies needed to turn down. And they were just a fan of that and promoted that, right? Maybe with a little bit of help from some government agencies. So it doesn't have to be a very crazy conspiracy theory, at least not compared to what we know is really blatantly conspiratorial. And as far as something that's really chilling that came out of this, I think the most chilling thing for a lot of us is that we saw that you don't need to have a China surveillance state, that that is all just wasted funding. If I was running the NSA right now and I wanted to establish it to a totalitarian government, I wouldn't spend a lot of money on cameras and things like that. Because with information warfare, all you have to do is make everybody scared. And you've instantly, I mean, within a week, I saw people go from essentially libertarian to ready to call 911 on somebody for not wearing a mask. So you can you can turn the population into an enforcer class very, very quickly. And you don't really need to spend a bunch of money on anything else. So not great. Not a great, great moment in history. But there is there is a flip side to this, this battle that we're that we're seeing. And that is something I'm going to run through fairly quickly. I'm going to try to do it in the next five minutes. But it's a very complicated topic. And I have I have interviews online with Tim May and Jim Bell, spending hours talking through this to, you know, cypher punks from 30 years ago that really got the movement to where it is. So assassination politics. This is a terrifying concept. If it doesn't scare you, then you're not quite understanding it. But the basic idea is that as soon as people are free to gamble, they're able to bet that somebody dies or that somebody doesn't die. And this is one of the reasons that insurance and gambling are actually controlled by the government. It's not because they care whether you get get addicted to gambling or not. So if you can picture this, let's let's imagine that you're in Nazi Germany, and you have a you have a factory, and you're worried that Hitler is going to nationalize it. And you bet that he is going to nationalize it. And a bunch of other people make the same bet. What that would do is it would create this huge lottery for somebody to win or a group of people to win by taking the opposite side of the bet, by betting that he is not going to nationalize it. Or in the case of assassination politics, betting that Hitler doesn't wake up tomorrow, right? So the basic idea is you could be a chef, and you could you could do slightly different things to make it less likely that Hitler lives, right? You could give him older muscles. The doctor could prescribe him slightly less effective medication. There could be a death by 1000 cuts as all of these people have taken the other side of the bet, whether Hitler is going to live or die, and they're incentivized to not treat him very well. Or it could be something as, you know, direct and harsh as just a bodyguard flat out, don't not frisking a gas that comes in and kills Hitler. So it is it is a very it's a very terrifying concept. But it is something that is enabled and will be a reality. To some degree, I think it will be insurance as soon as people are free to gamble anonymously, which they can't right now. But that's going to be a that's going to be a massive shift in the way that our world works in the next 10 years at most. But good news is that insurance is more powerful. So that that very scary scenario of just people betting whether somebody dies or not, it's it's not very likely to play out at scale. I think, you know, it is something we should be concerned about in the short term, because things get messy in a transition with new technologies. But insurance itself is actually more powerful. So in this scenario, instead of betting that Hitler doesn't wake up tomorrow, instead, you bet that your own business is nationalized. So life insurance, for example, is betting that you are going to die. Auto insurance is betting that you are going to get in a car accident. Health insurance, when it wasn't health care, when it was actually insurance was betting that you were going to get sick. So you bet that something bad is going to happen to you. And that means that you put, you know, basically money on the line that says you think this bad thing is going to happen. And the other person is able to take the bet that this bad thing isn't going to happen. And if it doesn't, that's the insurance company, right? If it doesn't happen, they make a profit. If it does happen, they lose. But the reason that insurance is more powerful is that you're actually betting for the thing that you care about. You don't actually care whether Hitler dies or not. What you care about is that your business is not nationalized. And if you bet more specifically, that gives a lot more flexibility to the other people taking the bet. So you don't have to kill Hitler now if you're trying to make a buck. You can just leak information that would make him not get elected as chancellor, you know, an old girlfriend or a business partner or something like that. So this is more powerful. And that's why I think that assassination politics is terrifying as it is, will be short-lived if it exists at all, and is only really useful as a thought experiment to understand how powerful insurance is. So to bring it to kind of current day, Elon Musk right now is opening his factory. From what I understand, he's actually working in the factory. He's expecting that he could get arrested. Imagine if he could bet $100,000 that he's going to get arrested today. And a bunch of little guys in San Francisco could take the bet that he's not going to get arrested today, and just hang out at the factory, just stand out there, protest, make it very clear that they're supporting him. His chances of getting arrested would go down today, and they would be more likely to win. So insurance is very powerful when it's free market. We don't have that yet, but it's coming. It requires that we have government hard smart contracts, and we are going to have that soon. Simplicity is- A-W, quick note, you need to come to an end. I hope it's not too much anymore. Okay, great, perfect, sorry. So yeah, simplicity is coming soon. It's going to enable a lot of things when we do have government hard smart contracts. Simplicity is the only real effort that's ever been made towards it. And so when you think about stuff like Ethereum and EOS and all that stuff, it was always garbage. It may not work, but we are about to see the first legitimate attempt to build something that could enable it. That's it.