 First, do no harm. Who said that? Hippocrates. Actually, he didn't. The Hippocratic Oath, which is one of the mainstays of medicine, starts with first-do-no-harm, which expresses the principle of minimization, the principle of utility. This utilitarian philosophy says that before you try to fix things, make sure you are not making them worse. Ironically, Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, or the father of medicine period, didn't say this. It wasn't part of the Hippocratic Oath. It wasn't part of Hippocrates' writing. It was added after the introduction of modern science in the mid-19th century. First, do no harm. Some things are not just useless. They are worse than useless. They actually do harm. That is the title of my talk today. Worse than useless. Hippocrates was actually a big proponent of bloodletting. Bloodletting was a practice that started in the ancient Mediterranean region, that involved balancing the humors in the body by bleeding people out slowly. The idea was that the various fluids in the body need to be balanced, kind of like a hydrodynamic system. Before modern science started thinking of our body as a machine that is made of clockwork, which is the 20th and 19th century visualization of science, the ancients saw science as a matter of essences of humors, earth, fire, water, air. Part of the idea of bloodletting was that, if these things are out of balance, you need to release some blood to bring things into balance. This practice continued all the way through to the 19th century. One of the things I love is that one of the most famous victims of bloodletting was the founder of the United States, George Washington. He was one of the founding fathers. Late in his life, George Washington woke up one day with a sore throat. He was a big fan of bloodletting as a medical practice. He invited his doctors to do a nice bloodletting. Over the next four days, they bled about seven pints of blood out of him. The historical record records this. Despite the treatment, he passed four days later. Some of us might say, because of the treatment, he died four days later. It is an irony that this practice continued for two and a half thousand years. Why is it important to remember this concept of do no harm? Unless you follow the scientific method, many of the common practices that we apply today are based not on science, but on superstition, anecdote, wishful thinking, righteous morality. One of those is financial surveillance and the system of know-your-customer and anti-money laundering rules. The modern system of banking, brought into being by the Bank Secrecy Act in the 1970s, is a creation that bears no scrutiny from science. It is based on the righteous moral thinking that bad people should not have access to money. As long as we trust those in authority to tell us who the bad people are, and assume they are not the bad people, then everything will work out. If you criticize this idea, you are not presented with facts, data, or science. You are accused of not being morally righteous enough to understand that we must, for all reasons, protect the children. Won't somebody please think of the children? Because there are criminals out there. There are bad people, and if bad people can use money, they might use it to do bad things. It is very difficult to prosecute the bad things, but it is a lot easier to prosecute the money. So we do it. Does it work? No. But if this practice was useless, that would be good, because it is not useless. It is worse than useless. In fact, it does enormous harm. Part of the reason that billions of people around the world have no participation in the world economy, or are financially excluded, is directly related to the fact that a closed financial system, where authority is given to few, to decide who is good and who is evil, to decide who should have access to money and who should not, and which starts with the fundamental idea of identity being a requirement for every endpoint of every transaction, is a system that will always exclude billions. In the age of the internet, we have come no further in terms of financial inclusion, and in fact, we are now backtracking. Entire countries, entire continents, are disconnected from the world economy in order to satisfy the moralistic bourgeois idea, that we are safer if we allow bureaucrats to decide who has access to money and who doesn't. Money laundering happens every day. But there are some who can money-launder without consequences. In our modern world, there is such a thing as a license to launder money. It is called a banking license. As long as you have one of these magic licenses, you can launder money all day long. Who is money-laundering? Of course. Conventional wisdom and common sense will tell you, of course, it is the banks. They have the money, they launder, obviously. If you actually look at the statistics, if you look at the data, this fact is shown again and again. Banks launder money. In fact, that is their main activity. They launder money for governments, for intelligence agencies that fund terrorism, they launder money for narco-traffickers. One of the hilarious examples of our modern world was a certain enormous bank that had modified... the bank teller windows in the northern border of Mexico, so they could precisely fit a Samsonite case. It was the favorite case of drug-money launderers, so that they could stuff cash through the window conveniently inside the Samsonite. They wouldn't have to even unpack it. Of course, in those days, the big drug cartels were making so much money, and they still are, that you don't count the money, you weigh it, because it is faster. Who has time to count a truck full of money if you can just calculate the net weight in dollars? Money-laundering is something that banks do on a routine basis. Every time they are caught, they pay a fine, no one goes to jail, and banking continues. This is a fundamental part of business, and it is rewarded with a series of incentives... that ensure that by playing these fake regulations, they get to get the competition out of the game. One of the reasons no one can compete with traditional banking using technology... is because the regulations ensure that they will not be given an opportunity. You must ask for permission first, and the answer is always no. Unless you can afford a banking license, the license to money launder, and the fines that come with that... as part of doing business, which banks can afford, because there is only one thing that banks do well, and that is make a lot of money. Worse than useless. The very basis of this model of modern finance is an idea that should be so up-parent to free people... as to be the topic of every conversation. We discuss the revelations from Snowden, the broad-based surveillance of all of our societies... based on the internet, and yet the elephant in the room, the thing we don't discuss, is that the form of most pervasive and most intrusive surveillance that exists... is the international network of totalitarian financial surveillance. Every time you use a debit card, every time you use a credit card, every time you use a bank account... every transaction gets funneled to every intelligence service and every government that has access to this network. When people criticize Bitcoin, they say it will enable the dark net. What is the dark net? Presumably the dark net is a network that is invisible to most of us, that operates on top of... or in parallel with the internet, and on which massive amounts of illegal activity happen. If that is the case, the dark net's name is echelon, prism, key score. Those are the names of the dark web. The dark net is operated by intelligence agencies because they are on a daily basis... committing massive crimes against human rights. They are orchestrating a totalitarian financial surveillance network that monitors everybody's transactions. As a result, everybody's location, purchasing preferences, political preferences, and what kind of porn you watch. All of that is tied to your financial life, because everything is tied to your financial life. This system of totalitarian financial surveillance is the dark net. They don't fear the dark net, they just don't want us to have one too. Worse than useless, because this system ensures that two and a half billion people live in the world... with absolutely no access to financial services. Four billion people, if you count their families, and minimal access to the most basic financial services. If you really count the type of power banking that a Western person has, six billion people have much more limited access to that. This is what this is about. This is about the other six billion. Why does Bitcoin matter? Bitcoin enables us to build a system where we flip the traditional balance between secrecy and privacy. What is secrecy? What is privacy? Privacy is what I have. Not because someone gives it to me, but because I take it. And not because it was granted as a privilege, but because it is my human right as a human. I had it from birth. I will have it forever. And that is immediately suspect. Secrecy is the ability of a government that is supposed to be subservient to its voters, to operate for the consent of the governed, to instead bypass democratic control, to bypass auditability, to bypass accountability, so they can funnel billions of dollars into black projects... that fund terrorism, that fund drug lords. Who funds ISIS? Our tax money does. That is the uncomfortable truth. Not Bitcoin. Dollars. Rubles. You on. Money laundering is a government activity supported by banks. Terrorism financing is a government activity supported by banks. Yet they have the audacity to claim that the simple idea that people should be free to transact... and participate in a global economy and exercise their birthright of privacy... is going to cause the world to descend into chaos, mayhem, anarchy. What happens if people can transact anonymously? Nothing happens. For thousands of years, people were transacting anonymously. The greatest, most established, most private, transaction-free, peer-to-peer network of payments is called cash. We had it for thousands of years, and then suddenly in the 70s we decided this was dangerous. Instead, we needed to move to a world of totalitarian financial surveillance. That is what it is. It is all-encompassing. It is all-powerful. It is all-secret. That is what the word totalitarian means. It is fascist. Yet somehow we have been persuaded that for the sake of the children, we must operate in a world... where every one of our transactions is visible, but every one of their transactions is private. I say that is the wrong way around. I say we have to flip that equation, and we have to flip it fast. The reason the world is in chaos is partly because of that. You want to breed terrorism, cut people off from the world economy, trap them in poverty, remove justice, and what happens is war. Martin Luther King said, peace is not the absence of war, it is the presence of justice. Justice starts with the assertion of human rights. What we are doing with Bitcoin is not just playing with money, getting rich, trying to create the next ICO, the next whale, the next overclass of rich people who are going to lord over everybody else. At least that is not what I am interested in. I am interested in creating peace through justice. Justice starts with the ability of every human being on this planet to be able to transact freely, with privacy, with anyone, anywhere, anytime. Uncensible, unstoppable, anonymous. You think the fight over block size was bad? You think a few people trying to disagree with trolls and sockpuppets, social media, and throwing money around to influence opinion on both sides was bad? There are people right now who are working on the next level of Bitcoin, that includes zero-knowledge range-proofs and confidential transactions, massive-scale coin joins, onion-routed payment channels, which are completely anonymous and untraceable and unstoppable. People ask me, what do you think is the biggest problem with Bitcoin? Is it scaling? Is it fraud? Is it centralization of mining? No, it is that we don't have enough anonymity, we don't have enough privacy, and we better fix that before this gets too popular. Adoption of a platform with insufficient privacy is extremely dangerous. If you are the only one doing anonymous transactions, you are not anonymous. What we need is ubiquity of privacy. There should not be an option that I check in my Samurai wallet that says, use Tor. It should be default on every wallet every time. There should be no transaction that isn't confidential. Here is the interesting thing. If you ask the banks whether they want anonymous transactions, they absolutely do. The distributed ledger technology is being built with anonymity. They are using range-proofs and zero-knowledge solutions, mixers, and confidential transactions. They are trying to build confidential and anonymous systems for settlement. Why? Because they can't trust the motherfuckers sitting across the table from them, who run the competitive bank. If they know what is happening on the network, they will front-run every transaction. They will pump and dump every asset. Why? Because that is what they do every single day. Of course, since they can't trust each other, they understand the need for privacy. They will build their private blockchains, their clearing and settlement networks, and they will make absolutely sure that they have confidentiality, privacy, anonymity, encryption, and deniability. They will make sure they have all of those things so they can continue business as usual. They will achieve their secrecy. The question now is, will we get ours? Will we assert our human right to privacy? Will we use this technology not to enslave the world through a totalitarian financial surveillance system, but to free the world? Will we do something that will first do no harm? Thank you.