 The topic I wanted to talk about today is how we measure success. How we measure success in this space, I think, says a lot about what our individual goals are. It also says a lot about how our ecosystem, our environment, is changing over time. I ask people this question quite often. I ask, how would you measure success in this space? Whether we are talking about Bitcoin, open public blockchains, and other cryptocurrencies in general, what does it mean to be successful? When do we know that we are winning or have won this battle? When do we know that this technology has arrived? The answer I get really says a lot about the person I am talking with, because it is a highly personal answer. The silly answer is when the price goes to the moon. That is not a very good measure of success. It is not a good measure of success because that is not what we should be aiming for. Again, that is what a lot of people get involved in this space for. A lot of people get involved at first because they anticipate or have heard that this is a fantastic get-rich-quick scheme. Then they discover over the next harrowing weeks, or sometimes just days, that it can also be a fantastic get-poor-quick scheme. As they branch out into obscure altcoins they have never heard of, trade based on panic, start trying to cut their losses and blow all of their investment away. If you got into this space to get rich, you may succeed, but you probably won't. That is not a very good motivation. Fortunately, if you have a strong local community, what happens is, when the price goes shooting up across the cryptocurrency space, a lot of new people start showing up to the meet-ups. With a little sparkle in their eye, you can tell they are very excited about this technology. No, they are not. They are very excited about the possibility of making some money. As soon as the price turns, which happens on average just after it climbs to the very high point, then most of them disappear. I have watched these ebb and flows since 2012. I remember the first meet-up I went to, where only one other person showed up. That other person was Adam B. Levine, the founder of the Let's Talk Bitcoin podcast, which we have now hosted 386 episodes since 2013. It is the longest-running podcast in the space. I met him at the Napa Valley meet-up of the local Napa Valley Bitcoin community, which was Adam and me. I wasn't in Napa. I was just traveling there. It was a very sad meet-up. Fast forward about a year later, and that same meet-up has 50 people showing up on a weekly basis. About a year after that, there are only five. If you follow these trends, you will notice that there are space ebb and flows, and the price tends to attract a lot of new people. The trick with community is to get people who join for all the wrong reasons and help educate about the technology. Mostly by conveying why you are interested in this technology. Right now, if you got into this space in late 2017, to get rich and invest some point between October and December of 2017, and you are still here, clearly you are not here for the money. You have weathered the storm. We are on the other side of that mountain. Things are looking pretty grim comparatively. If you are still here, that means you have another motivation. That is great, because now you can start talking to the people around you and in your community about why you are still interested in this technology. What do you think it will do? For me, the important characteristics of open public blockchains have nothing to do with money. They have a lot to do with decentralizing trust. They have a lot to do with creating open environments that are borderless and global, operate across the world. That can create opportunities for people to engage in commerce and other trusted transactions in an open way, without restrictions. To me, it is about changing the architecture of one of the fundamental technologies we have in society, which is money. Possibly a few more related to that, for example, with smart contracts, law, and justice systems, contracts. That is what drives me with this technology. I have this crazy idea that this technology can change the world. We can in fact see a world where access to this technology changes people's lives, especially in places where there is very little access to financial services, access to fair systems, open systems, the ability to record the truth, the ability to transact without trust, the ability to kick out intermediaries from every commercial transaction, the ability to get rid of organized criminals who happen to have a banking license and are robbing people blind. Which, of course, is not as much of a problem in Ireland, but it certainly is a problem in the vast majority of the world. To me, those things are important. I measure success a bit differently. When I ask people, how do you measure success with this technology, I think the most common answer I get is mainstream adoption. If most of the people around me are using this technology, if I can use it to buy something from the local shop, then I think this is now succeeding. That is the measure of success. It is a very common measure of success that a lot of people talk about. The vision of that is walking into your store, your local store, and you want to get a breakfast sandwich. You don't have to say, do you take Bitcoin or Ether, Litecoin, Monero, or something else. They obviously do. That is the vision. That is how most people think about this. Alongside Visa, MasterCard, Cash, Euros, perhaps US dollars, you could pay in your local shop with one of these weird cryptocurrencies. Most importantly, it would no longer be weird. You would no longer be the weirdo who keeps asking, do you take Bitcoin at your off-license. Being there, done that. If you follow up questions, another measure of success is that the system maintains its fundamental principles. It leads to societal change, it creates freedom for people. People use it to free themselves from a banking system that is inflexible. We are able to bank the unbanked or de-bank all of us, as you've probably heard me say. This system allows us to introduce more fairness into commerce. It gives less power to corporations, more power to individuals. Some more idealistic goals for success. If you stop for a moment and think about it, you realize that those two goals are fundamentally at odds. If the measure of success is mainstream adoption, then maintaining the principles that made us interested in this technology doesn't actually happen. The reason is that mainstream adoption means adoption by people who don't care about these principles. The vast majority of people around you. How many people in here care about privacy enough to sacrifice some convenience on a daily basis? How many of the people you know use the same password on every website? How many people here would never share their private information on Facebook? How many people around you do you know who think Facebook is the internet and haven't ever left that space? Now, vote based on what they see there. The problem is that mainstream adoption dilutes principles. The mainstream doesn't share your principles, it doesn't share your motivations. You're not the mainstream. You're the weirdos who are into Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. We all are. That's okay. This isn't a mainstream thing. It's important that we recognize that when we have some principles that we really care about, we can still affect change in the world, even while those principles are being diluted. I want to talk about what success looks like from my perspective, having seen a couple of disruptive technologies in the past. Emerge, disrupt, and then get absorbed into mainstream use. I think it's important to see that the measure of success isn't necessarily exactly what you think it is. It's not as obvious as it might seem. Let me start by asking a question. How many of you here use the Linux operating system? For those who didn't raise your hand, all of you use the Linux operating system every single day. It's in your phones, in your vacuum cleaners, in your car, in your elevator, in every single web server you touch. It's in the little robots you bought for your kids, in your loan more. It's in every Android phone. It's in Windows now. But that's not how it started. Linux operating system was started in 1991 by a Finnish student by the name of Linus Torvalds, who had a crazy idea. At the time, he was too poor to afford to buy a license for one of the commercial, Unix-like operating systems, the very powerful operating systems, that were made by companies like IBM, AT&T, and Sun Microsystems, and sold to other powerful corporations for thousands of dollars of licensing fees per year. That's how operating systems worked at the time. This Finnish student had an idea. He thought, how about I write my own? At this point, you have to realize that that idea is so ridiculous on so many levels. The Unix operating system that AT&T created in the 1960s under Bell Labs, and then has been built by these giant corporations, is the operating systems that run the space program, the mainframes of all of the banks. This is seriously heavy-duty commercial operating system software. Yet this 18-year-old says, let me write my own. Most of the people around him treat him exactly as you would, your cousin cleaners who suddenly says, I'm going to build my own rocket and colonize Mars on my own. They're like, yeah, okay. And yet he did. Three years later, maybe four years later, I downloaded an alpha pre-beta version of that operating system from his university file server, from his home directory, onto 200 floppy disks, and installed it on my own personal PC, and it barely worked. I was elated because I as a student had a Unix operating system on a personal computer that I could control, the same thing that they had at the university, just as powerful. He had put together a group of programmers and built it. At the time, if you ask people, what is the point of an operating system that is completely open, free for anyone to use, where anyone can use it to innovate, and build systems as small as embedded microcontrollers, all the way up to running the biggest supercomputers on the planet? They would say, well, success would be if all of the corporations used it. Success would be if we put all of those other operating system companies out of business. Success would be if nobody paid for an operating system like that again. And on that measure, ironically, Linux succeeded in all of those things. AT&T no longer makes operating systems. IBM no longer makes operating systems. Even Microsoft really no longer makes working operating systems. Now they support Linux, their greatest foe. Linux now runs everything from the smallest Raspberry Pi computer that you can buy for $30, then you can use it to run your sprinkler system in your garden, all the way to every single one of the world's top 100 supercomputers. They all run Linux. Linux is everywhere. And yet, if for a moment you thought that mainstream adoption meant that your mom uses Linux and knows that she's using Linux, or your uncle uses Linux, and they know they're using Linux, in that measure it failed. Nobody knows they're using it. It's not branded. Nobody uses it on their desktop apart from a few weirdos. Yes, me again, and a few others in the audience, I'm guessing. Who uses Linux on their desktop? Linux on desktop. Okay, yeah, you can see the correlation, right? That's how they get you. It's a gateway drug. You start with Linux on the desktop. Eventually you're in an amphitheater full of cryptocurrency weirdos. It's a slippery slope. The measure of success is not mainstream adoption. And it's not mainstream adoption in the way that you think it is. It's not mainstream adoption where everybody knows that this is part of their life, and it succeeded in that way. It's a much more subtle measure of success. Because what Linux did is it gave everyone the choice to run an operating system that's extremely powerful, and the freedom to run it without even knowing that they're running it because it's in their thermostat. But what it also meant is that anyone can build a thermostat and start a company that builds thermostats and use an extremely powerful, multi-threaded, robust operating system that has millions of different drivers for different pieces of hardware, and eventually every piece of hardware on the planet you can use with this operating system. It's open. Everybody's innovating around it. And so it breaks the monopoly of the big companies and gives that freedom of choice to everyone, to the point where they no longer know they're using it. I'll go a bit further back and talk about what does it mean to measure the success of the internet. Most of the people in this room are too young to remember a time before the internet. I was there. I not only remember this. I grew up in a country where we didn't have computers in my school, and I bought my own computer at age 10 and a half. Well, I bought. My mom bought me my own computer at age 10 and a half. Thank you, mom. And I started getting on the internet surreptitiously through an account that, legally speaking, I didn't own access to, because it was a university account at the local university, and I was 14. So anyway, the details aside, statute of limitations and all that, I got on the internet and it opened for me this whole world. I suddenly realized that if you got computers to talk to each other and they could collaborate using open protocols, this incredible flow of information could start happening. So I started telling everyone around me that the internet will change our lives and nobody believes me. And if you ask me, then, what is the measure of success for the internet, I would say everybody uses it, right? And not just that, but we break the back of monopoly publishers like the New York Times and the London Times and the Murdoch Empire of broadcasting and the flow of information from governments to citizens and despotic dictatorial regimes that censor their citizens and residents and give access to information to people who've never had it before. And maybe one day a farmer in Kenya with a mobile device will be able to read an encyclopedia written by a German student about their own president or something like that. I could imagine all of these scenarios. But what if we changed the measure of success and said, well, success would be that we had this very powerful decentralized network that gave us all access to information, then by that measure the internet has failed? Because a couple billion people only know the internet as a closed curated garden called Facebook that gives them carefully filtered information managed by AI algorithms to reinforce their existing beliefs and tweak their dopamine receptors so they can buy more plastic shit. That's clearly not the cyberpunk vision of the future that we had hoped for. At the same time the internet is highly centralized with a few very important choke points onto which an entire surveillance infrastructure has been imposed so that all of that information is sucked up and processed in vast amounts and it becomes a panopticon. It sounds like a dystopian nightmare. By that measure of success the internet has failed. It's failed to deliver freedom. It's delivered. What is it delivering? It's delivering a new set of media moguls to replace the old set of media moguls without changing the architecture. I didn't want to switch Murdoch with Zuckerberg. That doesn't really solve the problem. The problem is changing the architecture of access to information. So if you look at that you might think the internet has failed. But it hasn't because it's not just Facebook. The internet is also mesh networks and relay networks and dark web and dark networks and peer-to-peer networks and Bitcoin. The internet is also wireless communications sent into North Korea. The internet is also WikiLeaks and whistleblowers. The internet is also citizen journalists and bloggers who challenge governments by revealing information they don't want revealed. We get to choose which internet we use. A lot of the people in this room are choosing to use the other internet, the free, decentralized, open internet. If you look at the big picture you might say we failed. If you look more closely you'll notice there's an engine of freedom and choice there that is still capable of bringing to birth these incredible innovations that are unexpected, radically disruptive, and unstoppable, like Bitcoin. It's still able to do that. So is the internet free or is it not? Is it open or is it not? Is it decentralized or is it not? It's both. It depends which part you're talking about. And it has achieved all of its goals. Even while a big chunk of the population didn't adopt those principles and simply replaced the old moguls with new moguls in order to get heavily filtered bullshit information delivered to them like a drip feed through a TV. Nothing changed. For some, everything changed for some. When people ask me, do you think that big corporations are going to start their own cryptocurrencies? Or do you think governments are going to start their own cryptocurrencies? And could they beat Bitcoin? Could they beat Ethereum? Could they beat the other open public blockchains and replace them with closed private blockchains? That's basically the same question about how do you measure success? What does it mean to go mainstream? So what does it mean to beat the open public blockchains at this game? Let's say Facebook releases their own coin. Okay? Facecoin. That sounds terrible. Anyway, so they release their own and you look at it and you ask the five basic questions. Is it open? Is it neutral? Is it borderless? Is it decentralized? Is it censorship resistant? And the answer is no, no, no, no and no. It is closed, it has borders, it's controlled by jurisdiction. It is not neutral, it is absolutely centralized, and it has censorship on it, because it must. So therefore, it fulfills none of the criteria of an open public blockchain that we care about. It doesn't fulfill any of the principles that we care about. The Irish government, through the central bank, releases error coin. And is it open? Is it borderless? Is it neutral? Is it censorship resistant? Is it decentralized? No, no, no, no and no. It is what we call now a central bank digital currency, which is new suit, same shit. So how do you deal with these phenomena? Because if as a measure of success you take mainstream adoption, which one do you think is going to be more popular? The free, open, neutral, borderless, decentralized bitcoin or other open public blockchain, where there are a few criminals, there are some weird QR codes. A lot of the people are wearing ponytails for some reason. And they have a lot of tattoos. And if you do the wrong transaction, there's no customer service to call. No, no, I'm sorry. This is a free, decentralized future. Your keys, your coins, no customer service. Nothing is reversible. With great freedom comes great responsibility. Isn't that what you wanted? No, that's not what we wanted. What we wanted was face coin, where every time you do 100 transactions, you get a little purple star. If you collect five purple stars, you get a free Frappuccino at Starbucks. All I have to do is sell my soul, all of my privacy, fund war criminals around the world somehow indirectly, because it always ends up being something like that, and make Zuckerberg king of the universe. That didn't seem like the original cypherpunk plan. So, if the measure of success is going mainstream, realize that a whole bunch of the mainstream is far more interested in using the loyalty reward points of air coin, or face coin, or some other crap coin that is centralized and controlled. They will not follow your principles. That means that, in many cases, the local chippy won't take bitcoin, even while they do take face coin, and apple coin, and whatever other corporate concoction is created. We don't beat PayPal, we don't beat Visa, we don't change the banking system by doing what they do, by becoming them only weirder. We have to realize that in countries like Ireland, where the banking system works and the payment networks work, the need for a decentralized currency like this isn't quite there. You don't need bitcoin. Ask of Venezuela, and if they need bitcoin, they need it. Someone from Argentina or Brazil, Ukraine, Greece, Cyprus, they may need it. People who live under despotic governments, people who live under dictatorships, people who are fighting revolutions, people who are dealing with currency controls and corrupt banks, and the inability to trade internationally, people who do not have sufficient documentation to open a bank account, people trying to transmit money to their relatives across borders and conflict areas, they need it. They need something that is free and open and borderless and censorship resistant. They need that for smart contracts, they need that for privacy coins, they need that for currency itself. But you can buy efficient chips with a euro. You don't need to use bitcoin to do that. If mainstream adoption means adapting so that we release the principles, we start diluting the principles, then we lose the game. That is not a measure of success, that is a measure of failure. Measure of success to me is keeping the principles, remaining free, open, decentralized, neutral and censorship resistant, while becoming available to as many people who need it around the world. That is my measure of success. That measure of success is very different from what we see in our industry. As you may have noticed over the last couple of years, especially over the last year, a lot of new money and a lot of new suits have showed up in the cryptocurrency space. They talk the same words, but the bottom line is that they don't want to change the architecture of the financial system. They don't want to break the monopolies, crush the cartels, break open access to financial systems, give economic inclusion to as many people as possible. They simply want to replace the old layer of the 1% with themselves. The architecture is fine if I'm on top. They do not share your measure of success, perhaps. What I'm reaching at is that we have to understand that there will be closed systems, centralized systems, and those systems will be faster and cheaper. Another measure that you commonly see in our space, which is very pernicious, is market capitalization. How many people have heard that term or seen that term in relation to Bitcoin, Ethereum, or other cryptocurrencies? Right. How many people have heard the term the Dominance Index? The Dominance Index is the measure of what percentage of the total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies is owned by Bitcoin. Here's why this is not a good metric. Here's why we shouldn't look at that metric for any of the cryptocurrencies. Market capitalization tells you which is the richest cryptocurrency. I can guarantee you that there will be cryptocurrencies that are richer, bigger, and more broadly accepted than Bitcoin. It's very easy to do that. All you have to do is sacrifice the principles. You can make something that is cheap, fast, centralized, controlled, and censored. Then you can pump money into it and make it mainstream. Facecoin will be bigger than Bitcoin. Fentcoin will be bigger than Bitcoin. How ripple may be bigger than Bitcoin sometime soon? What do the banks have that we don't? Ultimately, this is about changing the architecture of finance, at least to me. What do the banks have that we don't? Money. What's the worst way to measure success in our industry? Who has the biggest amount of money? Well, we've already lost that game. They have all of it. They printed it from nothing and controlled the creation process. Their entire industry is rent-seeking. Of course, they have money. What they don't have is creativity, innovation, morals, sustainability, a plan for how to get the fuck out of quantitative easing. They don't have any of those things, but they have plenty of money. If you wanted to really screw with a nascent disruptive industry, what better way to drive everyone bananas than to persuade everyone that the measure of success for this new disruptive industry is the fuel of the status quo? We will measure the new disruptive industry by the metric that we have the most of already, which is money. Being the biggest cryptocurrency is worthless. If, in order to get there, you sacrifice being the free cryptocurrency, if you sacrifice liberty and decentralization and neutrality to become the biggest, all you've done is recreated the status quo, just replace the people at the top. Then, that, to me, is a measure of failure. We are not going to be the biggest. What I hope, especially because of how difficult it is to change this system, which is a great feature, by the way, because everyone is trying to change it right now, especially to remove these pesky freedom-related principles of the system, what I hope we are, is not the biggest. I hope we are the freest system of commerce on the planet, the most inclusive system of commerce on the planet, the most open system of commerce on the planet. If that means we're not the biggest, great, I'll take that. If you want to win, if you care about the principles, if you're still here after the price dropped and you really want to see this technology project succeed, the most important thing you have to keep in mind is have a clear perspective of what the measure of success is, and the measure of success is liberty. Thank you.