 Good evening, everyone. It's such a pleasure to be here. This is my first time in Sweden, and I'm enjoying every moment of it, except for the weather. But other than that, fantastic. It's so good to be at a conference about the internet, because I remember my first internet conference. It was in 1992. There were about a hundred people there, all of them were computer scientists or computer science students. Despite the fact that we were telling the entire world that the world was about to change, no one believed us. At least no one believed me, because I was nineteen years old, and awkward and shy, so that wasn't working so well. But it taught me one thing. It taught me to trust my instincts, because in fact it did change the world. My second book is called The Internet of Money, and the reason for that is because the technology I'm going to talk about today is about to transform the world in equal measure, and will also transform the internet itself. Bitcoin, an invention created on January 3rd 2009 by an anonymous creator, unleashed as an open-source project, built by a community of volunteers, run as a peer-to-peer network, derided, laughed at, ignored for the first five, six years. Not so much anymore. People are beginning to pay attention, just like with the internet. Things that were previously unthinkable are now thinkable. People are beginning to notice that this is something more than what they are told. And what are they told? Drug dealers, pornographers, criminals. Guess what? That's what they said at the first conference in 1993 about the internet. They were wrong then, they're wrong now. Every time you meet someone who is a dentist, who uses Bitcoin, or a hairdresser who uses Bitcoin, it undermines that silly narrative. Bitcoin is a protocol, and what better stage to talk about a protocol. And the moment you start talking about Bitcoin and thinking about Bitcoin, it brings up a very difficult question, what is money? And most of us, turns out, from all of the conversations I've had with thousands of people around the world, have no idea what money is or how it works. It's one of those technologies that is so deeply embedded in our culture that it has become completely invisible to us. In fact, we don't even need to think about money unless it stops working. Some countries realize that it stops working, and then everybody has interesting things to say about what money is. But what is money? At its very basic level, money isn't value. In fact, you use money to get things of value, products or services, but there is no value in the money itself. Money isn't a construct of authority. We seem to think that these days, because all of our money comes from certain authoritative sources. Some guy with a crown says that this is your money, it's your money. That's the authority it comes from. But what if money could be created without authority? What if money could be created simply through use? It turns out that what money really is, is a language. Money is a language that human beings created to express value to each other. As a language, it's one of the fundamental constructs of civilization that allows us to exceed what's known as the Dunbar number. The Dunbar number is the maximum number of individuals who can operate in a tribe on the basis of kinship, of acquaintance. But if you want two tribes to work together, you need some common bonds. These bonds have included culture, language, religion, and money, a fundamental construct that allows us to exceed the scale of a single tribe... and engage in commerce with others on a greater scale. As our money has evolved, it has been able to evolve its scale to allow us to collaborate and engage in commerce on a greater level. But money is also, ironically, a system of control, because controlling money confers great power to those who control it. As a result, kings and governments have always held a very tight control over money, pretty much like they used to hold over religion for pretty much the same reasons. And now that has changed. On January 3rd, 2009, the world changed, because some person created a peer-to-peer protocol, a flat network with no servers or clients, that is able to express money as a content type. As internet professionals, you may understand what I mean when I say money as a content type. Money that is expressed purely as data that can be transmitted using any communication medium that can convey information. A Bitcoin transaction doesn't need to be transmitted over the Bitcoin network, although that's a convenient way to do it. You could encode it in Skype emojis. You could write it up and put it in a Craigslist ad. You could post it on Facebook in the background of a picture of kittens playing with yarn. Money as pure information on an open network that is simultaneously uncensorable, open to anyone, neutral, and global. There are no borders on this new technology, just like there are no borders on the internet. Everyone can access it, because it is not a product. It is not a company. You do not need to register for an account. You simply download a client. A Bitcoin client is very much like a web browser. It is the user interface that speaks the protocol to other Bitcoin clients out there. As soon as you download that one application, you can join a global economy. That global economy is open to anyone of any race, religion, creed, ethnicity, age, anywhere in the world. For most people, this concept hasn't yet quite sunk in. The children born today will not know a world in which banks exist. They will not know a world in which paper money exists. Many of the young people in our industry today have no idea what the world used to look like before the internet. How many of you here remember libraries and looking up reference cards? Okay, you are over 40, so am I. Got you. The children born today will never drive a car. They will never have a world without the internet, and they will never know a world where banks control money, where money is issued only by kings, only by nation states. Money will be an integral protocol of the internet, a content type that can be transmitted by anyone anywhere. But that's not enough. Let's make it more fun. Every form of money until today has to have a person behind it. Money can only be owned and managed by people, or people together forming an association, a legal fiction called a corporation. Not with Bitcoin. It's a protocol. Autonomous agents can own and manage money themselves. No people required. Imagine a corporation with no directors, no shareholders, no employees, running entirely based on scripted machine learning, or maybe just a few simple heuristic rules that operate autonomously of any human action and can manage budgets in the amounts of billions of dollars. Now, at this point in the audience, we have a split. Some people are thinking, oh no, that sounds terrible. What if it's a virus? What if it's intelligent ransomware that self-propagates and buys Amazon web service systems so that it can grow when it's successful? What if it starts running A-B testing on itself by hiring programmers to make itself better? Yeah, all of that's going to happen. But what if it's a charity? What if it's an intelligent charity that can detect the emergence of a natural disaster and automatically and instantaneously divert large funds directly to the people most in need without human intervention? And unlike most charities today, 100% of the funds donated go to those in need. The world is about to change. Self-driving cars? How about self-owning cars? Cars that are not owned by a corporation, cars that are a corporation. That pay for their electricity or gas maintenance and leasing fees by giving rides to human beings who pay them in cryptocurrencies. Imagine software such as intelligent articles that propagate across the internet as content and expand their reach because people read them. And as a result, they're able to buy more hosting services so they can expand their reach. This is not your grandparents' money. It's not your parents' money. This is money that is fully programmable, scriptable, that has capabilities that can be finely tuned. You can specify who can access it and when, how it can be dispersed. A whole new field has opened up, which is now called smart contracts. This system allows people to program the behavior of entire systems that can also manage money. Money is such a narrow word to describe this, because we use things that kind of look like money all the time, but aren't really money. What about loyalty points, tokens, subway cards, airline miles? What about expression of a fan of Justin Bieber with full access to the catalogue of music as a token? What about all of the other brands that can be turned into tokens and made into a global, exchangeable system directly on the internet through this internet protocol? January 3rd, 2009, the world changed. Since then, more than a thousand other cryptocurrencies have been created using the same recipe, almost all of them open source, and they're expanding in old directions, exploring every possible niche of this ecosystem, every tiny variation in capabilities and features, creating new markets which are raising funds for thousands of startups around the world, and thousands of engineers, software engineers, developers are training to use this new technology. The internet itself is changing very rapidly. Now we have autonomous agents that are using money on the internet, and these are in many cases beyond the controls of any jurisdiction. What are the large corporations going to do with this new, magical, open, decentralized, neutral, borderless, censorship-resistant network? They're going to say, great, we'd like that, but could you take out the open, decentralized, borderless, neutral, censorship-resistant properties and package it with an SLA, a 12-month license, and control? Control for us. They will take the internet and they will make intranets. They will make closed gardens of boring, stale content that is fundamentally insecure, that sits in the backyards of corporations, adding a tiny bit of value, but outside of the participation of the global community, insulated from the wave of innovation that is happening all around us. They will create these intranets, they will claim victory, they will turn around, and they will say, we invented blockchain, and they will be wrong, and they will fail. Because the real principle, the real exciting thing about this technology, it's not the blockchain which is a database artifact that is created out of this protocol, it is the ability to achieve distributed consensus among parties that don't trust each other across great distances without any central party, without any authority, without any intermediary. And that consensus from the outside looks chaotic, it looks messy, it looks weird. Well, everyone in this room already knows something that is open-flat, weird, and is not understood by corporations. The internet, we already did it once, we're going to do it again. And this time, we're going to bring the entire world with us. In the background of this grand story, there's another story that's playing out. After 25 years of the internet, it still takes three to five days to send money from here to a country that's not in Europe. It will still cost you 30, 40 US dollars to send money. And that's only if the country you're sending it to isn't a poor country, in which case it will cost far more and take far longer. A giant network of centralized, closed, corrupt systems that are sucking money out of the poorest people on this planet. In 2017, 2.5 billion people do not have access to banking. That means they have zero access to banking, cash-based only, and that's only counting heads of household. Not their spouses, not their children. Clearly they don't matter. That's according to the International Monetary Bank. Now, imagine what happens if you bring banking to an app, to a $20 Android, to everyone who has a smartphone. Three and a half to four billion people are on the internet today. Just over one billion people of those have banking, have full access to financial services. We're going to bring it to the other six billion, fast. This is going to change the world faster than the spread of cell phones. Imagine a $20 Android landing in a village in Kenya, and it's no longer just a communications device. It's a bank, not a bank account. It can wire and receive funds from anywhere in the world. It can do lending or receive lending for mortgage, to buy seeds for a field, to bring disaster relief. It can internationally connect every person on this planet, and we can do this within the next ten years. The world will radically transform when you bring the capability of a broad economic inclusion to everyone in this world. Now, you would think that banks want to do this. You'd be wrong. It's not really profitable serving people who have little money, little connectivity, no access to ID, in oppressed countries with terrible governments. Also, in most of those countries, the banks are criminals. They are criminal organizations, or really quite indistinguishable from the local mob. How do we fix that? Up to now, the approach for all of these technologies, whether it was PayPal or any of the other technologies, we've seen emerging financial technology very slowly, was to carefully and politely ask for permission. Bitcoin is not asking for permission. We forgot to do that. We will proceed in banking the entire world without asking for anyone's permission. This protocol is now spreading. If this one gets shut down, a 14-year-old with a copy of my book can rebuild it in a weekend, in any programming language, and launch it again with its new name. Again, and again, and again, until we succeed. The world is now connected. Finance is now an application, and money is a content type. Welcome to our new planet. Thank you.