 I'm really excited to be here, among other things, because this is probably one of the most beautiful places on the planet. I travel continuously and visit various parts of the world, but the 17-mile drive is simply breathtaking in its beauty. Sometimes I feel like maybe we spend too much time in the tent and in the room, instead of just out there looking at the ocean. I'll try to keep this relatively short and talk to you about the thing that derailed my life five years ago. Five years ago, I heard about Bitcoin for the second time. The first time I heard about Bitcoin was somewhere in 2012. I'm not exactly sure when. I read an article about how gambling sites were using this digital currency. I'd been interested in digital currencies, cryptography, and its application in digital currencies since the mid-90s. I drifted away from that space, and I heard about this Bitcoin thing, and I thought, gamblers, nerd money, not interesting. That's the reaction pretty much everyone has. In fact, Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, when announcing Bitcoin, was extremely skeptical of their own creation. They weren't quite sure if this was going to work or if there was anything there. Then pretty much everyone from that point on started off with, that's not going to work. That can't possibly work. That was my reaction, too. Fortunately, the second time, which I remember quite clearly towards the end of 2012, when I came across Bitcoin for the second time, the person who talked about it had introduced a link to the white paper that explained how it worked. My background is in computer science. I have a master's degree in distributed systems, which happened to prime me perfectly to read and understand this paper. I started reading it, and I was like, let's see what this is. I started reading it, and about page three I froze. I was like, this is not what I thought. I keep reading, and by the end of that white paper, my life had been firmly derailed completely. What I grasped at that moment was that this was an extremely significant invention. In computer science and distributed systems, we study certain classes of problems that are hard to solve. One of those is called the Byzantine Generals Problem. It's a description of a certain type of problem that occurs in distributed systems, where you are trying to coordinate between parties who don't trust each other on a network or communication medium that they don't trust. How do you coordinate if you can't trust that the messages will be delivered? As many problems in computer science are described with a story, you have a city under siege. It's surrounded by four generals, the Byzantine Generals, if you like. They can't communicate, because in order to communicate with each other, they have to send runners or messengers through the valley where the city is. If they do that, the messages get compromised. They can't tell if their message has been received, and they can't coordinate. What they are trying to do is coordinate for a specific thing. They are trying to coordinate when to attack the city. If one of them attacks, they lose. They have to all attack at the same time, but they can't communicate that with each other, because obviously the city in the middle would know. It's not a problem you can solve with encryption, because it's a coordination problem. It's about achieving state synchronization. This problem has applications across many areas of computer science and distributed systems. It has to do with, for example, database replication, concurrency controls, and all kinds of synchronization problems on distributed systems. It's a critically important problem because, in the absence of a solution to this, the only way to coordinate is via central authority. One of the things I had understood by paying attention to digital currencies for at that point, almost two decades, was that the biggest problem that digital private currencies had was that they had a central coordinator. They had either an issuer or a central clearing house that was responsible for ensuring that the money was real, it wasn't forged. But also that a transaction that had occurred was properly cleared, so that the person who made that transaction could not spend the same money twice. In a digital domain where you can copy digital information, the fundamental problem is how do you create scarcity? Scarcity meaning something that is rare, that cannot be copied. In terms of digital currencies, the reason you need scarcity is because, if I pull a $50 bill out of my pocket and spend it, I can't just photocopy that and spend it again, but if it's a digital file, a copy is perfect, so I can spend it again. The only way to solve this was to have a central authority. Lots of people tried that. They built servers and systems that every day would batch clear all of the transactions. One of the first interesting applications of this was a company called DigiCash in the mid-90s. They created one of the first digital currencies. Guess what happened? If you suddenly announce to the world, hey, you know that thing that is the exclusive purview of sovereign entities, and that is the basis of control and power for every nation-state out there, I'm going to do it in my company for free. And we're going to run a completely parallel digital currency that's outside the system. What happens next is the nation-state comes along and goes, hmm, that's cute, stomp, and they shut down the central system. If you have a central point of failure, it's going to get squashed, sued, bought, denied service, shut down, etc. And this kept happening to digital currencies. So back to 2012. I'm reading this paper, and I think this person has solved Byzantine fault tolerance. They've solved the Byzantine general's problem. Now, there are other solutions out there, but they're not efficient. This is actually a practical solution. And with this solution, we can have a digital currency without a central point. And with a digital currency without a central point, there's nothing to shut down. And if there's nothing to shut down, oh dear, this might actually work. And that moment was when my life was completely derailed. The next four months are a bit hazy. When I was younger, I had this problem, which was I became obsessed about technologies. And this happened to me five times before, where I would get so caught up with excitement, enthusiasm, passion, and focus... on a specific type of problem that I would lose the world. Or the world would lose me, if you want to look at it from an ego perspective. And I would disappear off into my corner. It happened to me at 11 years old. I got my first computer, and I started to learn how to program. Programming blew my mind, and I disappeared for six months. I emerged a year later, and I could program in assembly and basic. I could do electronics and things like that. Then I got my first PC, and I disappeared for six months. Then I got my first modem, and I disappeared for a full year and a half, almost dropped out of school, and failed. In 1989, I got access to an internet account, not strictly legally. I was 15, and they don't give academic access to what was then called ARPANET, to 15-year-olds. But let's say this archaeology professor at a university wasn't quite using their account. It was there, so the statute of limitation has elapsed on that one, fortunately. I lost myself because, for the first time ever, I could communicate with brilliant people from around the world... on this internet thing, and they taught me Unix, all kinds of things about computer systems, architecture, and TCPIP. I lost myself for a year and a half. Every time this happened, I would try to tell everyone around me, listen, this is the greatest thing that's ever happened, it's going to change the world. You can imagine a 15-year-old in Greece, in a country that barely has tone-dialing on its phone system, going, listen to me, everyone will be online. The response was, okay, clean your room, do your homework, and stop playing on that bloody computer. When this happened to me with Bitcoin, at this point I had the experience, the degree, the confidence. I decided I wasn't going to listen to anyone who told me otherwise, but I did lose myself. Four months went by, I dropped all of my work, I stopped consulting, I stopped eating. All I did was read, code, write, read, code, write, all day, 18 hours a day, until I dropped, and then got up the next day and did it again. I lost 26 pounds. My family staged an intervention where they brought me these protein shakes that you have to drink... if you are a cancer patient, because they were worried. I came out of that with a new career, a new passion, a new mission, to explain to the world... what this strange technology was going to do. At first glance, you may think, this is an investment opportunity. It's not. That's not what's special about that. If you look at the early Internet and you decide, great, we can make money trading Yahoo! You're missing the point. We can change history. We can change humanity with these technologies. These technologies offer us an opportunity of empowerment for individuals all around the world. An opportunity for connection. Just like the Internet did that for communicating these new technologies, digital currencies based on open public blockchains give us an opportunity to create a fully interconnected... global economy that is peer-to-peer, completely flat, and that discards many of the trappings of the past. Now, some of you probably work in some of those trappings of the past. You may be feeling a bit uncomfortable, because banking has a few centuries of operating without much competition. It's never faced competition from the Internet. The Internet is coming. It's called Bitcoin. It's just the first one. It's going to take finance by storm. It's going to disrupt more radically than most industries have ever been disrupted by the Internet. What is this technology? What is it all about? Fundamentally, it's about building a platform where you can create transactions and record facts... without having to trust any central party, without even having to trust the other party you are transacting with. Do so on a level, peer-to-peer, equal basis as everybody else. You shift trust from being something that you give to institutions, hierarchy, bureaucracy, systems of governance. Instead, you shift that trust to a network-based platform that has trust as one of its emergent properties. Just like the Internet has communication as one of its emergent properties. Once you do that, you don't need the hierarchy, the bureaucracy, or the institution. Institutions replaced by networks. You may have heard that happen before, or seen that happen before. We are all experiencing this great transformation that is happening because of the Internet. Here, by decade by decade now, we are watching great institutions of the past being replaced by flat networks. These networks deliver more efficiently, more equally, in a more open and accessible manner. The same thing that the institution has delivered, but much more. We have seen this happen to the August institutions of journalism, newspapers, TV stations, movie companies, music companies. One by one, they have faced this incredible force of disintermediation, where it is no longer profitable or even tenable to be the gatekeeper, the intermediary, the proxy for others. Others can find each other themselves without your help. What happens when that is translated into finance, into governance? When we start considering rebuilding social and democratic institutions based on network and market-based governance models, using this technology, it is truly transformative. If all you are looking at is the price of Bitcoin, the opportunity to invest, the crazy messages that are coming from the media from every side, you will be missing the fundamental point. The fundamental point being this is a new platform, a platform for trust that is global, open, completely borderless, and egalitarian. This platform transforms not just finance, but only the first application on the internet of money. It is not just money for the internet, it is a full-blown platform for trust. What do you hear in the media? Drug dealers, criminals, and pornographers are using this technology. If you have been around the internet for a while, you have probably heard this before. I remember it clearly in the beginning of the nineties, when all you would hear is that the internet is about fraudsters, thieves, pornographers, and criminals. It was all scare tactics all the time. It didn't matter because eventually all of us used it. We didn't use it to commit crimes. We didn't use it to make pornography. We used it to transmit and exchange a billion cat videos, because they are cute and hilarious. That is what people do with technology. They project their own needs, desires, and motives onto society, using technology as an empowering tool. What do most of us care for? Feeding our families, security, education, healthcare, sanitation, and building a future for our children. When you hear all of these scare stories about how the possibility of giving people access to money without impediments, allowing them to pay anyone anywhere without censorship or control, freeing them completely from the shackles of oppressive governments, and quite honestly, banking corporations that in many countries are very hard to distinguish from an organized crime syndicate. What happens when people have control over their finance and the ability to transact freely with anyone in the world? What do they buy? Do they buy weapons of mass destruction? Do they buy cat videos? They buy healthcare, they buy food, they buy education, they buy security. They do what everyone does. Within this technology, there is this enormous promise of fundamentally transforming not just the internet, but the internet first, and then transforming some of the fundamental institutions in the world that quite honestly have failed us. When I talk to audiences around the world about this technology, especially in developed nations, places like this, there is a bit of confusion. Why do I need a peer-to-peer digital currency? I have Visa. How is this different from PayPal? What does it do for me? Does it make it easier for me to buy coffee at Starbucks? That is a fair question, because the only fundamental difference of this technology from PayPal is the fact that it is all of that without the PayPal, without the central company, without the central control. That is meaningful if you can't trust the company. PayPal has service in 19 countries. Last time I checked, it was 194. Banking is available to maybe four billion people. Two and a half billion people around the world have no access to financial services whatsoever. That is the world bank statistic that only counts heads of household, top earners, their children, their spouses are a statistical irrelevance. If you add up all of the people who have very limited access to financial services, they are the majority of this world. Bitcoin and these new technologies are all about the other six billion. You have Visa, golly for you. That makes you part of the 5% of the privileged overclass of financial comfort in this world. The rest of the world doesn't operate that way. You have a stable currency, fantastic. I can count 16 of them. What about the other 160 currencies? You have a government that is not about to drag you out of your bed at night, because you said the wrong thing or attended the wrong protest. Good for you. Fantastic. What about all of those places where that is a daily reality? We live in a world where access to financial services is one of the fundamental barriers to economic development. We have constructed a closed system of controls. If you are in the industry, you probably know all about this. KYC, AML, CTF, know-your-customer, anti-money laundering, control of terrorist financing. You have heard those acronyms? What those acronyms do is they convict 4 billion people to poverty to maintain our bourgeois illusion. Somehow we can stop crime from happening if we carefully control who has access to financial services. In that delusion, we are willing to allow billions of people to have no access to the world economy. Bitcoin is the radical proposition that anyone anywhere should have access to free commerce and financial services. For many people in the world, that is a terrifying proposition. For many governments in the world, that is a terrifying proposition. I am here to tell you that it is going to be okay. It really is. As I said before, if we give people the ability to do these things, they will use them to do good. But I also have another message, even if you are afraid. Even if you think we shouldn't, mustn't do this. It is done. This technology is a fundamental system based on mathematics. It is now known. Anyone anywhere can download that first book on the left, which is for software engineers, for free. It is open-source on GitHub. A fairly talented 14-year-old programmer can recreate a global, un-forgeable, fully-fungible digital currency... that is even better than what Bitcoin does today, in a weekend, and then launch it on the world. This is now the world we live in. This has happened, and there is no going back. We cannot unlearn this technology. We cannot put it back in the bag. Now we have to consider how we live in a world where anyone anywhere can engage in commerce with anyone anywhere. Those transactions cannot be censored, and that system cannot be shut down. It is completely flat, completely decentralized, and can be communicated over any medium. What this technology has done is taken money from its physical manifestation, or its centralized implementation... as a digital abstract token. It has turned it into an internet-content type. I can do a Bitcoin transaction using the Bitcoin network. But if that is not available, I can take that Bitcoin transaction and translate it into emojis. Then I can transmit that using Skype or Facebook, or put it in a Craigslist ad. How do you stop that? You don't. That is now the world we live in. I think it is a brave world. I think it can be a wonderful world. But what I do know is that it will be a different world. The ripples are spreading. Most people haven't yet noticed. You are among the tiny, tiny percentage of people who are getting a heads-up now. What would you do if you learned about the internet in 1991 instead of 2001? How would it have changed your life, your career, your company? I will bring you this message. You now know what you will do about it. Thank you.