 It's a pleasure to be with you today. You might find it a little bizarre that a human rights activist would come to you and talk about money. But in reality, I think that money is so fundamental to the way our societies work, so fundamental to the way that politics works both at a local, at a national, at a federal level, at an international level. And honestly, the human rights situation of the future is going to depend on the kind of money that we have and the kind of money that we use. My general prediction is that there's going to be three kinds of money in the future. There's going to be fiat money like we have now, government-issued money, government-issued currency. This is going to be increasingly centralized and increasingly digitized and increasingly surveilled. And if we rely too much on fiat money, we will give away all of our privacy and freedoms. And I will talk about this in my presentation as we head to the cashless society. People being born today will not use paper or metal money, and they will lose privacy. And this is something we have to deeply consider. The second kind of money is corporate money. Facebook, obviously, is trying to make its own money. Many companies will start to make their own supranational currency that is not dependent on a government. This is going to happen. It was once just the realm of science fiction authors, but it's happening. The third area of money that I am a promoter of being a human rights activist is open-source money, and that is Bitcoin. So we will get into all three of these areas throughout the presentation. But first, I want to address my concern as a human rights activist is Big Brother. And it's the Big Brother of Orwell's imagination, but it's also the Big Brother that we're seeing being implemented at nation-level systems around the world, even in the world's largest country. So as we think through this presentation, I want you to consider what is Big Brother? How do money and surveillance relate? Your spending habits say more about you than your words. So if I want to spy on you, I want to look at your bank account. I don't necessarily want to look at your social media. Money is such a critical part of your privacy, and your freedom, and your sovereignty, and we should keep it that way. Can we preserve it, though, is the question. And what is ultimately the future of money will very much depend on decisions that people like you make. When we talk about what Orwell imagined, that Big Brother is watching you in, that nothing was your own except a few cubic centimeters inside your head, the sad reality is this is the case in China today, in the world's largest country. This is not some black mirror science fiction episode. This is reality for more than a billion people. And what the Chinese Communist Party is doing is what many other governments are going to do, democratic and authoritarian alike. They're going to try and collect as much information as possible from the citizenry. Whether you live in Estonia or Saudi Arabia, your government is going to try and do this under the auspices of progress and national stability and of creating smart cities. So we need to be aware of what this is going to do to our civil liberties and to our ability to innovate, whether it's as entrepreneurs or as larger organizations that are not dependent on the state. Now, one of the key ways that, at least in the Chinese model, the way the government gathers information about its citizens is through an app called WeChat. WeChat is used by more than a billion people every day. It's unfair to call it an app. It's more like an ecosystem. It's literally everything you might do on your phone, whether it's buying something online, sending messages to your friends, planning your day. All of this can be done on one app. Now, that is amazingly convenient, but consider what you give up with that convenience. You give up some of your privacy and your rights. There is a new kind of social engineering unfolding in China, which is basically called social credit. Now, it's a little bit overblown in the media. It's not maybe quite what you read about, but the intentions of the Communist Party are very clear. Instead of just a credit score like you might have in the United States, where your spending habits and your history of payments and the amount of credit you have gets kind of numeratized into something that then tells the creditors how much trust they should have in you, beyond just your financial activity, your friends, your gender, your religion, your ethnicity, anything you've said against the government goes into something that's actually called a social credit score. And this is being rolled out in different ways all across China today. And young millennials are concerned. There is an awareness about this. So this is one 23-year-old, one young woman said that, she's not really sure if she's living in a future society or a cage. And I think that's kind of the real dilemma that we face in countries like in China. And the social engineering is getting to rather dizzying heights. This is something that's being implemented in a very large city in China that has more than 10 million people. And it's called debt shaming. And basically when you look down at your WeChat on your phone, you see a map of everyone else who's on WeChat. And it pops up and it shows you people who have bad social credit. And the idea is you are supposed to stay away from those people because if you connect with those people in any meaningful way, your score goes down too. So it creates pariahs. So this is how the government is basically able to mix communications and financial surveillance to socially engineer a population and keep them in line. This is their goal. They're also using advanced facial recognition to accomplish this. This image is about a year and a half old. But what this police officer is seeing looks something like this, where every person and every vehicle has a whole amount of information that is being revealed about it. By January in China, every single car, it'll be by law necessary for you to have an RFID chip planted in the windshield of your car. So not just your person and your phone, but your car will be tracked at all times. Now again, there are national security reasons to do something like that. Maybe in a society like the United States, maybe one could argue it's fine. But in a country where people have no civil liberties, it's highly, highly concerning. This system is not limited to China. This is an investigation the New York Times did of basically Chinese surveillance technology being exported around the world. All the countries in red, and it's a little blurry here, but I hope you get the gist. This is South America, North America, Africa. All the countries in red are countries where sovereign governments have purchased this surveillance technology from the Chinese government. The Chinese government is now the world's largest creditor in this way with their Belt and Road campaign. They've given out more than $400 billion of loans and investments and they will continue to do so. Some governments like Zambia, for instance, have even defaulted on their loans and now are basically partially owned by the Chinese government. This is happening, people, and it's gonna continue to happen and we should be aware of what the implications are for our civil liberties. But it's not just the Chinese government's threat to technology and society that we need to be concerned about. Even here in America, even in Europe, we have our own problems with centralized technology. There are other reasons why having everything in one place is generally a bad idea. Of course, I don't need to go into too much detail about the havoc that has been wrought with companies like Facebook using our personal data. And you've heard about other breaches with Equifax and other organizations that have gathered data in one place and then have been hacked or compromised. So generally speaking, we wanna find ways to decentralize data and create a way where people can have more sovereignty and more ownership and not have to trust so much in large institutions that may be compromised or not have them kind of in their best interests. So again, if we think about the mechanism and function of something like a big brother, really the goal is to actually capture your daily microactivity. And as you saw sort of with the China example, kind of steer you in a daily way towards being patriotic so that you wanna be the best citizen possible, right? Well, the less information that governments have on us, the harder it is to socially engineer us. So the question is, can we make communications and payment systems that don't leave a digital footprint behind, right? And this is gonna become increasingly important as we head deeper into the cashless society. I mentioned this before, but just some numbers for you. More than 92% of transactions in today's world are already electronic. So this sort of cashless world is already probably here in many ways, especially if you live in Venezuela or urban China or Sweden. There's many different countries in the world where paper money is essentially a fossil of a different age and I think that will come to all of us. And we have to think about what happens when I give you a $20 bill to buy something. You don't know my name, you don't know my address, you don't know what my last transaction was, you don't know what my history of transaction was. That's a private transaction and that was fine. And that's the way all money worked until several decades ago. Now, when you go, I was at a pet food store the other day and I bought dog food with my Visa card, not an online purchase. Within 20 minutes, I was getting hit with advertisements for that particular dog food on my Twitter feed. Okay, so Chase just immediately divulges your payment history to everyone else. I would like a way to spend digitally and buy things on Amazon and transact with friends around the world without divulging my entire digital footprint. That would be cool from a human rights point of view and it may be possible. But if not, we have a whole lot of risks that are gonna come with centralized money, just like with centralized data. We're gonna lose privacy. We're gonna open ourselves up to social engineering, wealth confiscation, and there's gonna be a lot of malicious intermediaries. We can't trust these folks. Ben Hunt, who writes a wonderful blog here on Wall Street called Epsilon Theory, he says, using government-approved electronic money will be the water in which you and your children swim and that may be the case. And we really have to think about what kind of cashless society we wanna live in and I would argue that if we wanna keep some of the innovations and entrepreneurship alive that has fueled societies like the United States, I think we're gonna want cashless society will be preserved personal freedoms and privacy. So the question is, how do we do that? How does one do that? Well, when we look at the evolution of money, dating back all the way historically to barter, shells, precious metals, coins, coins with king's faces stamped on them, notes that would indicate ownership of such things. The gold system all the way beyond the gold system today, the petrodollar, plastic cards, mobile payments, we're on an arc of kind of like losing sovereignty, right? Well, in 2009 someone came up with a different way of doing things and that would be Bitcoin, that would be the other path, that would be the other way we can have money in the future we may be able to preserve our freedoms and privacy. And the key reason for that is because with every other digital way to send money around the world today, you must trust a third party, whether you use MasterCard, Visa, Venmo, PayPal, no matter what, you have to trust a third party. With Bitcoin, you do not. With Bitcoin, I can send money to anyone else in the world today. All they need is internet and a smartphone. They can receive it, it's censorship resistant, there is no third party. This is an incredibly powerful idea, quite revolutionary from a human rights point of view. Nassim Niklas Taleb, the black swan author, has said that Bitcoin's mere existence gives us the crowd an insurance policy against the Norwegian future. Now, I don't know exactly what he meant by when he said this, but what I think he was hinting at is this fact that Bitcoin is a money system that operates without a center. There is no central authority. There is no compromise when you send information and money to someone else. There's not like somebody who sits in the middle who gets to approve that or surveil that. And I think that's an incredibly powerful function of this new money system. Now, just some basic facts, we're at the very beginning of the Bitcoin revolution. Less than 1% of humans have ever used it. And most of them who use it haven't even thought deeply or meaningfully about what it is. Most people simply just speculate on it. But we have to consider nearly 2 billion people don't have a bank account or an official state ID. They're locked out of a system, even here in the United States. You know, when you go to the supermarket and you see that rack of gift cards in the front of the store, that's for people who don't have bank accounts, right? So they have to buy visa gift cards in order to make online payments. Even here in the United States we have 25% of the population that's underbanked. And obviously it's much worse around the world. So a lot of people are shut out of the financial system. There's a lot of other reasons and ways where people are shut out. Well, guess what? You can't stop them from accessing Bitcoin. And then politically speaking, more than 4 billion people live under authoritarianism. And you know what? With a system like Bitcoin, Xi Jinping can't micro track you. Putin can't freeze you. What do you think Mr. Putin does when he wants to stop a human rights organization? He closes their bank account like he just did with Navalny last month. Well, he can't stop their Bitcoin account. Then you have Burma, a government that is sort of intent on deleting the Muslim minority. Well, guess what? They can't delete the ability for Rohingya to use Bitcoin. In the US, my government does a ton of bad things around the world, including I would argue sanctioning the people of Iran who didn't even elect their leaders. So what did the average young 23-year-old Iranian woman do to deserve punishment in the form of she can't buy an iPhone or she can't invest in US companies, et cetera? Well, with Bitcoin, she can't be stopped from earning a living as a software engineer and being paid from someone in the United States. She can't be stopped from receiving money abroad for medical treatment from family in London. And sanctions cannot stop Bitcoin. And the most kind of important one to me is that you cannot be hyperinflated. So you cannot be the victim of a government that takes all your hard-earned time and energy and reduces it to nothing. So just to give you a concept and idea of what people in Venezuela have been facing, in 2016, it cost 450 bolivars for a cup of coffee. 2017, 4,500 bolivars. In 2018, 1.4 million. So you're watching just the vaporization of lower and middle-class people's savings. Sure, if you were elite and had capital, you actually didn't mind hyperinflation. Until a few months ago, people were taking loans out from the central bank of Venezuela in bolivars and immediately buying an apartment in Miami Beach and then watching their mortgage disappear. So you could actually do pretty well with hyperinflation if you were part of the 1%. But for everybody else, they've been completely screwed. And guess what? Government cannot hyperinflate because they can't control the supply of Bitcoin. And I think this is a paradigm shift if you actually look at this image. This was circulated earlier this year by the New York Times. And this was like the government of Venezuela literally blocking the opposition from sending in humanitarian aid into the country. And what you don't see in this image is the millions of Bitcoin going back and forth. Today, in Venezuela, a country of close to 30 million people, there's more dollar-denominated activity on localbitcoins.com, which is a peer-to-peer marketplace, than on the Caracas Stock Exchange. That's breathtaking. I mean, it's a total paradigm shift. Now, it is an exception, but it's a pretty large country, a very important one, and it won't be the last. So these barriers that exist in our current financial system with legacy money don't exist with what I would argue is hopefully gonna be the money of the future. You're watching people have the opportunity to take the Bitcoin that you may send them in exchange for fiat money. Everywhere from Philippines to Iran to Nigeria to Venezuela to China, you think about the remittances industry in these countries? I mean, there's trillions of dollars to be made potentially by helping facilitate these transactions, these global borderless transactions. And again, the most powerful idea you can probably take from this presentation is that I can send Bitcoin to you today, anywhere on earth, and you don't need to ask anyone's authority, you don't even need a bank account. So it can help us transact freely without permission. I would argue if we wanna fight big brother, if we wanna live in a future society, we still have some privacy and freedoms, we're gonna need a different kind of money because fiat money is going to be a surveillance machine and that's just kind of the truth. So we have to think carefully about the distribution of these systems and what's behind them. And I would argue very much like democracy was a tool that humans used to decentralize government and the internet was a tool that humans used to decentralize knowledge. I think Bitcoin is a tool that humans are going to use to decentralize money and hopefully that'll be for our benefit. I really appreciate your time. Thank you very much.