 What is Bitcoin, and why are we here today? I would like to start with the Genesis story, and take you back to when this started. In October of 2008, a paper was published called Bitcoin. That paper explained how the system works. It was published under a name of Satoshi Nakamoto. We now know that this is not a real name. We don't know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, or they are. Somebody out there on the internet came up with an idea of how to build a digital currency. They published the paper in October of 2008. They had also written a prototype software program that ran the Bitcoin software, which they launched on January 3rd, 2009, just a few months later. That was the beginning of the Bitcoin system, the beginning of the Bitcoin network, and the beginning of the Bitcoin currency. It was also the introduction to the world of this new concept, which has now become a word that gets set on TV every single day... on the financial news channels, which is blockchain, which is one of the technologies behind the Bitcoin technology. This sounds like a weird story. Some person, we don't know who it is, shows up on the internet, posts a paper, launches some software. Some other people run this software as well, and this thing starts running. Embedded within the very first block that was created on the Bitcoin blockchain, there was a message. This message was handcrafted into the Bitcoin software, and it was embedded in there for a reason. The message is the headline from that day, from a British newspaper, The Times of London. It says, January 3rd, 2009, Chancellor of the Exchequer, on the verge of second bailout for banks, or something like that. The headline for that day, the day Bitcoin was launched, was that the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, which is like the head of the treasury here, was going to start a second bailout for the banks. Now, this may have been a coincidence. I don't think it was. I think that message tells us a bit about the motivation behind Bitcoin. Part of the motivation behind Bitcoin was this idea that the financial system that has existed, and hasn't really evolved much in the last twenty years, isn't serving us. It's serving someone very well, just not us. What's ironic is, when I say us, I'm looking out at a bunch of people who represent 5% of the human population, the most privileged, who have access to the most advanced banking in the world, who have access to multiple foreign currencies, who have the ability to send and receive money with their bank. How many of you here don't have a bank account because you can't get one? Great. The average percentage in the United States is 18%. That means 60 million people don't have bank accounts in this country. I want to take a guess about who those people are. The poor? That's a great answer. Poverty is one of the main reasons why people don't have access to financial services, but also lack of documentation. A lack of documentation may be because they don't have legal documentation. Of course, illegal immigrants are one of the big groups that doesn't have banking in this country. But it can also be because they don't have documentation for other reasons. A lot of perfectly legal residents of this country also don't have a driver's license, or they don't have the necessary literacy or numeracy to open bank accounts. In this country, 18%, that's the lowest percentage in the world for the unbanked. Every other country has more people who are unbanked, with some countries having more than 80% of the population, having no access to banking whatsoever. But at the same time, if you talk to people in this country, you'll already realize that the banking system doesn't serve us either. It doesn't. The same people who are quite happy to sell a variable rate subprime mortgage to you, or your parents, or your brother, or your children, and then walk away from a pile of debt and get bailed out, none of them went to jail. More than a million homeowners lost their home in the United States. At the same time, while they were doing the foreclosures, they were using a technique called robo-signing, where they were signing the foreclosure documents. On deeds they didn't even own, no one went to jail. They were packaging toxic securities up in a technique called CDOs that they knew were fraudulent. They were talking amongst themselves and saying, These are fraudulent, so don't buy any, but we'll sell them to the customers. No one went to jail. So who are they serving? Well, themselves, yes. But also not just themselves. Ironically, a lot of the people who work at banks, are part of a middle class who are not being served by the banks themselves either. They serve the weapon dealers. They serve the warmongers. They serve the money launders. They serve the international drug cartels. They serve the multinational corporations, but they don't serve us. And if they don't serve us here in this country, imagine how much worse it is everywhere else. If you can't imagine, I can tell you much worse, much, much worse. So here we are, after 25 years of the internet. The world is more connected than it's ever been. The ability to communicate information instantaneously anywhere in the world exists for a very large part of the human population. More people have access to the internet than have access to clean drinking water. More people have access to cell phones than have access to clean water. And yet, in the last 20 years, banking hasn't gotten better. It hasn't gotten more inclusive, if anything, with backtracking. Over the past 15 years, international finance has become a weaponized tool of geopolitics. It's being used by powerful countries to attack powerful countries in the form of sanctions, currency controls, embargoes, and other forms of economic pressure. So banking isn't serving more people, it's serving fewer people. And more and more countries are finding themselves in situations where, for no fault of the citizens of that country, they're under embargo or facing currency controls. And they can't transact with people in other countries. And they face calamitous economic conditions where they watch their life savings disappear overnight. And this happened to my family in Greece in the 80s, twice. And it's happened again and again throughout South America, throughout Africa, again and again. It's currently happening in Venezuela, it's on the cusp of happening in Turkey, it's happening in Greece again. It's beginning to be a problematic situation in Argentina, Brazil, and a bunch of other countries. So the economic system that we have is not serving people. And the internet hasn't brought us a financial system that connects everyone together. And part of the reason for that is because modern banking has become a deputized system of law enforcement domestically, and a militarized system of control internationally. Our banking is part of the domestic police system, and it is part of the international military system. Just like the banking in every other country. It doesn't serve commerce, it serves politics. So back in the early days of Bitcoin, something interesting happened. There was an organization called WikiLeaks that was publishing secrets that the U.S. State Department didn't want published. Secrets about war crimes committed by U.S. forces. And as a result, they wanted to shut down WikiLeaks. One of the ways they were trying to shut down WikiLeaks is by prohibiting people from sending money to support that organization. So, of course, the U.S. government first appealed to the court system to get the necessary convictions in order to stop WikiLeaks from breaking the law. Of course, they didn't. WikiLeaks wasn't breaking the law, and therefore they couldn't take them to court. They didn't have the basis in law to take them to court. Instead, what they did was they pressured Visa, MasterCard, American Express, PayPal, and all the American banks... and cut WikiLeaks off without any legal process. At the same time, you could use your Visa card to send money to racist groups in Alabama. To send money to all kinds of atrocious political groups around the world, but not WikiLeaks. As this was happening, Bitcoin was just emerging. Within it, buried in that first block, was that little message. That little message said to me, and to many others, this is why we are doing this. This is why Bitcoin needs to exist. 25 years into the internet revolution in this world, we are no closer to having a global community in finance... than we were 20 years ago. In fact, we are further. The financial system is not getting better at serving people, it is getting worse at serving people. With control over money comes corruption. We all know that. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and there is no more absolute power than power of money. You have freedom of expression? Great. But if I can control where you spend your money, you don't have freedom of expression. You have the freedom to vote, but if I can control who can send money to political parties... in which political parties, you don't have the freedom to vote. Watch what is happening in Russia or Turkey, that is straight out of the playbook of Putin. Starve them of funds, no opposition. Election with only one candidate, I win. Also, democracy. The bottom line here is this, Bitcoin didn't appear in a vacuum. For many people, it seems miraculous how Bitcoin emerged suddenly in 2009. Nobody noticed at first. It was just the purview of a few weird geeks in a few weird mailing lists. But after a while, people started noticing, and now it has become this worldwide phenomenon. You might be skeptical. Some person we don't know invented something we don't understand, launched onto the world, and now my younger cousins think I should invest all of my money into this thing. My aunt thinks it's a pyramid scheme, and I can't tell who's right. If you think about this as an investment, you may be missing the most important point. What this represents isn't an opportunity to get rich, isn't an opportunity to find the new thing to invest in. It's an opportunity to change the fundamental way that finance, money, and banking work in the 21st century worldwide. If you don't think you need to change it for you, think about the billions of people who have no access to banking, and no hope of ever getting access to banking. Then think about what happens if all of them are able to run a bank on a $25 Android phone, and what that does to our world. Some bad people are going to be able to do some transactions, and that's okay. Because some billions of people or good people are going to be able to do some transactions. That's how it works. On that simple balance, we can change the world. My interest in Bitcoin stems from two sides. On the one hand, I'm a geek. I love technology. It's so cool. I get so excited by it that I can't sleep, and I want to read everything about it. Then I discover something else, and that's even more excited. Then I stay up longer, have some more coffee, read more, and get all excited. Some of you share that with me. You don't have to. It's okay. But some of you I know know exactly what I'm talking about. That's a really cool reason to be interested in this technology. It's the kind of technology you can learn about. It's the kind of technology that can lead to a computer science degree, or a specialization in another field of study. It's something that you could learn as an accountant, someone who works in insurance or finance. It would be really useful and interesting as part of your career. Just like how to use databases, build a website, or whatever else you might be interested in. On the other hand, I look at this technology, and I'm interested in it because of politics. Not the politics of parties, but the politics of principles. The politics of growing up as a kid in Greece, and seeing what happens when money stops working. This is an experience I don't wish on anyone. It's an experience that is alien to Americans, at least in the modern era. I hope it remains alien, but I'm not sure it will. The bottom line is that money is this magical technology, and as long as it works, we don't need to know how it works, we don't concern ourselves with it, and we don't need to really worry about it too much. If we did, and we actually read about how money works, we would be horrified. Surely, that can't be true. They just make it out of thin air and distribute it to banks. They get to lend out money that didn't exist, and then charge us interest and get richer and richer. No, come on, that's a scam. That's a pyramid scheme. The dollar works on a pyramid scheme? Tell me it isn't so. If we understood modern central banking, most of us would be horrified. It's convenient that, as long as it works, we don't really need to pay attention. Let me tell you something. In 2008, it broke, and we didn't fix what broke. In 2008, the worldwide economy broke, and central banking broke hard, and it hasn't been fixed. In the meantime, the world has issued almost a hundred trillion dollars in debt by some measure. All of which is borrowed from your future retirement plans, from your future education plans, from your future health care plans, from the economy. That money isn't going to be paid back. It's not going to be paid back. There's a very simple reason for that. Everyone's broke. J.P. Morgan Chase is bankrupt. CD Bank is bankrupt. Bank of America is bankrupt. Goldman Sachs is bankrupt. The United States government is bankrupt. Europe is bankrupt. The euro is bankrupt. Deutsche Bank is bankrupt. Japan is bankrupt. China is bankrupt. They're all bankrupt. They can play around with the books, hide some debt, make some bilateral agreements, shuffle shit around, pretend to bail out Greece, send them money, and then backdoor it straight back to Deutsche Bank. Find some other patsies, make it appear like nothing's happening. They're all bankrupt. At some point, there's going to be a reckoning. We never fixed anything that happened in 2008. What we did was destroy currency in order to preserve the illusion of economy. That's going to come back and bite us. You don't have to believe me. You don't have to think that this is going to be important in your life. I really, really do hope it doesn't. But one of the reasons Bitcoin was created, and one of the reasons it's important, is because it is neutral, because it is independent, because no one can control it, because no one can change its issuance, because no one can create it out of thin air. It's ironic that when you see criticism of Bitcoin by mainstream economists, they say things like, it's not backed by anything. Really, the question you should be asking at that point, and the dollar is, of course the dollar is backed. But you really don't want to hear that story as to what it's backed by. Then you have to learn some history about Henry Kissinger and the Saudis, and a little deal made in 1971, some towers fell, some nasty things happened, and we've been at war for 18 years. But anyway, the dollar is backed by something, war, to protect oil. Bitcoin is backed by an international community of geeks, the same geeks who brought you the internet. At some point, hopefully you never have to make this choice in your life, because you can always have the freedom to choose one currency versus another, but at some point you might be forced to choose between the bankers who brought you the Great Depression and the geeks who brought you the internet. I hope you make the right choice. Then again, if you hear some of the people in the whole blockchain cryptocurrency Bitcoin-based talk, you might think that the goal of all of this is to eradicate government money as the first step towards eradicating government altogether, and replacing all currencies with Bitcoin. One coin to rule them all, world domination. I'm not of that opinion. In fact, I think the idea of having only one world currency is a bit of a throwback to our current currency system. We've grown up with a system of currency where all currencies are backed by nation-states. They represent flags, right? They have wrapped up in the commercial mechanism of value, a bit of nationalism, patriotism, and a flag-waving person. In each country, it's a different flag. They can all do their little chant. By the way, if you go to other countries, when they wave their flag, they also chant number one. It's a bit like when you ask people, are you a good driver? They say, yeah, definitely. And then 80% of people say they're an above-average driver. How does the math on that work? We have become accustomed to a world in which currencies represent nations. Therefore, they're part of this battle. It's like the world is a big chessboard, and currencies are pawns that are fighting on this big geopolitical battle. The dollar wins if the ruble fails. It's country versus country. In that environment, it's natural to think that currency as a system is a winner-takes-all system, or zero-sum game. The only way one currency wins is by another currency losing. That's a world in which you cut off your nose despite your face, which is a good summary of our current foreign policy. But also a good summary of the foreign policy of the European Union, China, and Russia. We are currently engaged in currency wars. In those currency wars, we are expected to assume that our currency, which represents our flag, is the one we should be backing. But if you stop and think about that for a second, you suddenly realize that that's not money anymore. That token is no longer representing a commercial transaction, it's not representing value for use in business. It's representing something else. It's representing some kind of nationalistic flag-waving thing that you're trying to beat the other side with. In that environment, if that's what you know, if that's what you grew up with, then when something like Bitcoin comes along, your natural inclination is to think, oh, this one could win the zero-sum game. This one could dominate all the others. But what if that's not how it plays out? What if instead, all along, money was simply a form of language? What if we understood that money is a way for us to communicate value to each other? As a language, there can never be one that wins. There will always be variety. Every place has its tradition and its special needs. We have languages like those of the Inuit that have eight words for snow. They don't need that in the Kalahari Desert. They're going to have a different language that has 20 words for sand, which they don't need in Alaska. The bottom line is that languages adapt to the local environment, and they will always keep proliferating. There isn't one win. In fact, if you speak three languages or four languages, you're better off than if you just speak one. In fact, having variety is what gives you greater value. What if money works that way? What if, in fact, we're going from a world with 195 currencies to a world with 1,000 currencies? To a world with 100,000 currencies? You can use as many of them as you want or not, and you can choose at any moment in time. When you hear that, you probably think, well, that sounds very confusing. I don't want 1,000 currencies. I can barely keep track of how many euros are in a dollar when I go on vacation to Disneyland in Paris. The good news is that we're not talking about traditional paper money, but purely electronic money. All of the world's currencies are going to purely electronic money. At which point, the difficulty of trying to figure out which currency you have, which currency the shop will take, what the exchange rate is, and how to convert them, is something that disappears into your smartphone, your iPad, your smartwatch, or whatever other device is holding your money. The fact that you have 10 currencies isn't an issue, because you don't even know you have 10 different currencies. What if we're going to a world where instantaneously connected commerce is possible by anyone anywhere, and they don't even need to commit to a specific currency, and no currency wins? Because we all win by having choice. That's really what it boils down to. Until now, you get to use the currency of the country you were born in, and you don't have a choice. If you're an American, you also have the choice to use other currencies, but in many countries in the world, you don't. Just one. You still have to use that one to pay for government services, pay your taxes, and things like that. You still have to play the games of geopolitics, because your retirement, education, health care, job, income, and expenses are denominated... in the currency they're using as a weapon. Not that you wanted to be playing in those games, but you get to. What does that look like? It looks like waking up in the morning and deciding to go to the supermarket early, because you know that at noon they change the prices every day. Eggs could be 30% more expensive later in the afternoon. That's what it looks like, and I've seen that in Greece, and they're experiencing that in Venezuela and Turkey today. When you understand that Bitcoin happened in 2009, you might think, why? Who needs it? What are we going to do with this? Is it just about beating the dollar and having a new thing that wins everything? It's not. It's about having a choice. For most of the people in this country, that choice isn't very important, but for the rest of the world, that choice is absolutely critical. Most people live under horrible governments that do not give them the freedom to transact with anybody, but they also don't give them the freedom to escape from whatever crazy war, attrition, trade war, currency war they're playing at the moment. Most people live in countries where it is impossible to distinguish between organized crime and organized banking. Although, to tell you the truth, the customer service from the black market organized criminal who changed my money in Argentina was a hell of a lot better than the Bank of Argentina, where I tried to change it earlier. Maybe there is a way to tell the difference between organized crime and organized banking. Both are criminals, some of them give better customer service. But if you live in a country like that, and suddenly something like Bitcoin comes into the world, not quite yet, because it's difficult to use, and not many people have the tools and skills to use it, but one day soon, for many people, and already for some people, you suddenly have a choice. You can say, you know what? You go play your games, Mr. Erdogan. You want to try and play Russia against America in a currency and trade war, fighting over F-35s and S-400s? If you know what I'm talking about. Great! While you take the lira to trash, I'm going to take just a bit of my wealth and move it into Bitcoin. No one can stop me, because this is an internet currency that doesn't pay attention to borders. If you live in Venezuela and your government is in a death spiral, you can say, I'm going to take some of my money and convert it to Bitcoin, or have someone send me Bitcoin from another country. I'm going to be able to provide food for my children, and I'm going to be called a terrorist by my own government, and I'm going to break the law, and my children are going to get fed. We know of people who actually bought food on Amazon Prime, had it shipped to Colombia and smuggled into Venezuela using Bitcoin. Food. This technology gives people choice. We already have more than a thousand currencies that are trying to find different ways to use that same technology to do different things. It's a very exciting technical space, which has erupted over the past ten years, and created this enormous, diverse environment with a lot of exciting development going on. At the same time, it's a giant speculative bubble with a lot of greedy people running around in circles, screaming, trying to get rich. At the same time, it's an enormously powerful international movement for freedom and choice that can change the lives of billions. Thank you.