 Oh my God, this is quite amazing. I'm really excited to be here at this conference. I'm so excited to be talking to all of you who apparently are developers. That's what it says back on the screen there. I assume it's true. How many people in this room have used open-source software? Great question. I'm just trying to get you to warm up with some morning exercise. Everybody raises their hands. Okay, great. Let me ask you a simpler question. How many of you use open-source software because it doesn't cost anything? And how many of you use it because it gives you freedom? Okay, now we're getting at it. Many of you probably work with open-source software. Many of you probably work with collaborative programming and open systems. You work on open application programming interfaces. You work with open libraries. You work with patents-free software and technologies with open protocols and open interfaces. And none of that is because of how much it costs. It's because it gives you freedom. I think that's one of the main things that people outside our industry do not understand. But if you're as old as me, you probably remember, it wasn't always like that. In fact, throughout the 80s and 90s, there was a big battle over the future of software, whether proprietary software would dominate, whether open software would be available to everyone and used by everyone. I remember a time when I had to persuade companies that an open-source version of the Unix operating system was as good but probably better than the call-source Sun operating system that they used. I had to persuade them that they could use these systems to replace their proprietary servers, file servers, network servers, firewalls, routers, et cetera. There was a time when Microsoft specifically Bill Gates said that the internet would be one component of the information superhighway, but just one component. Because what was more interesting was how data would be used in a proprietary fashion and propagated over proprietary protocols in closed systems. The idea was that corporations wouldn't open to the internet because too messy, too weird, too much porn. Instead, corporate systems would be perfect closed gardens, secure with quality curated content protected from the wide world. And if you work in a company that actually tried to put that into practice, you discovered that those systems ended up being insecure, virus-infested wastelands of stale, useless content. And eventually, most of the people who worked in these companies had a second phone, maybe a smartphone, so they could actually look up things on the internet. The internet won. The open, uncontrolled, unrestrained internet won. But it wasn't obvious that it was going to win. TCPIP won. There was a time when people said ridiculous things like, I'm not so interested in the web. I'm interested in the technology behind the web, HTML. To misunderstand the power and purpose of a system like the web so much as to think that the value of that comes from a representational format for data and the ability to link it to other data and miss the point that the really interesting thing is the ability of anyone anywhere to become a publisher, the democratization of publishing, the open access to all of the information in the world, where if it's closed, it's irrelevant. If it's not accessible, it's irrelevant. And today, people say, I'm not interested in Bitcoin. I'm interested in the technology behind Bitcoin, the blockchain. Two days ago, when this conference opens and people were asked, what is the thing you're most interested in, blockchain, right in the middle of the screen, the biggest word there, blockchain. The blockchain is a data structure. It's not even a particularly interesting data structure. It's a hash linked list. From a technical perspective, it's kind of boring. What's really interesting about the blockchain is how a blockchain is created. What is the process for recording data in a blockchain? And Bitcoin introduced a mechanism to do that, which is open, decentralized, neutral, borderless, and censorship resistant. Open, neutral, decentralized, borderless, and censorship resistant. Kind of like the web. Really, that's the interesting thing about the open web, that it is open, that no one really controls all of it. And even when some companies control big parts of it, there are parts that are free and weird, encrypted, underground, still open to create incredible new inventions, like Bitcoin, which popped out of the internet and no one expected it. Neutral, because for the most part, content is routed across the web without regard to the content itself, or really to the source and destination. Censorship resistant, because you cannot erase the web. You cannot remove information from the web. Bitcoin introduced a way to apply this to trusted information, specifically the most important trusted information, which is the ownership of currency, money. It created a way to have a recording of ownership in the blockchain without allowing anyone to have control over who can own money, how they can spend it, and who records on this blockchain. Bitcoin made money open, neutral, borderless, censorship resistant, and decentralized. And the artifact of that technology, the deliverable, the product, the thing that gets recorded on your software node is the blockchain. And that blockchain is a necessary, but not sufficient component to create the real magic, which is a platform for trust that is not controlled by anyone, that cannot be erased or changed after it has been recorded, a system that is open, neutral, borderless, and censorship resistant. It's not about blockchain. In fact, if you take blockchain technology and you apply it in an environment that is closed, such that it is controlled by one party, such that a party can decide which transactions get recorded and which ones are not good transactions, they're bad transactions, evil transactions, ones that should be censored, then you lose all of the interesting properties of the open blockchain. So whenever I talk about this space, I always put at least one word before blockchain, and that is open blockchain. And open means open source. It means open access. It means open to innovation without permission. It means innovation at the edge, not the center. It means no one is in control. It means there is no censorship. It means it is neutral. You don't require patents to participate in this technology. It is neutral because in this system of trust, the source, destination, or content of your transaction, or even the purpose of your transaction, does not matter. It will be routed. And there is no way to stop someone from routing. Almost every day I meet people who come to me and say, yeah, I'm kind of interested in Bitcoin, but I'm more interested in all the other applications we can do with blockchain, not the blockchain, just blockchain, it's become a generic word. And in most cases, that word is meaningless. What it means is I'm trying to redo everything where I use the database. Only now we can do it with something that is 100,000 times slower and less well tested. If you create a centralized blockchain, if you have a central point of control, if it's not open borderless censorship resistant and neutral, then you should have used Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition or Oracle. The problem is no one is going to pay a consultant to rebuild Dubai's real estate records on Microsoft SQL. That's not gonna get you any magic VC money sprinkled over you just because you go to Silicon Valley in your hotel room, you go in front of the bathroom mirror, you turn off the light, and you say blockchain, blockchain, blockchain three times. And a VC jumps out of the bathtub and starts throwing money at you. I did a talk which was censored on Facebook the first day it was published. And it was called blockchain versus bullshit. Apparently that word is not good for Facebook and censorship is something they do. Which kind of proves the point, really, because it's about centralization, it's about censorship resistance, it's about open access. It's about the ability to use a bad word to make an important point, to use the shock value to get people's attention, to then listen to the rest of the message. But that's okay, because I don't use Facebook anyway. But the bottom line is that this technology is interesting because for the first time in history, it takes one of humanity's oldest technologies, which is money, and one of the most important aspects of human behavior, which is trust, and it embeds these in an open, interoperable network protocol without central control. This has never happened before. And yes, you can imagine a myriad of applications where the ability to trust in the network protocol and not have to trust in the other party you're interacting with, or in some kind of third party that acts as a mediator or intermediary. You can imagine many different applications. The problem is that a lot of those applications really depends on first establishing the fundamental application of value as a content type. When you turn money into a content type and make it something that is routable across the internet from any point to any point, without reference to any third party, self-verifiable, self-authorizing, independently routable money as a network protocol, that creates the basis for all of the other applications. That creates the basis for applications of security and trust that we need to build as an infrastructure to start everything else. So yes, the blockchain, if it is open, if it is decentralized, neutral, and censorship resistant, can be used for so many interesting applications. Most of the companies you work for will not use it for that. They see the internet of money and they want to build an intranet. The natural motivation of a corporation is control. The natural motivation of a government is control. And so they see this system and they say, well, we kind of like it. I mean immutability, recordability, auditability, forensic analysis, cryptography, all of these cute things. Can we have it without the open, borderless, neutral, censorship resistant aspect of it? Because we would like to make it closed, controlled, censored, and profitable. And they will build great intranets of money. And they will be stale wastelands, just like the Microsoft front page Outlook shit you have in the back office of your own corporation. So when somebody says, I've got a blockchain, I'm going to apply it to my new application, the first question you should ask is, what kind of blockchain and why do we need one? I only have one slide. But if I wanted to do a perfect presentation about blockchain to a corporate environment, as one of my friends on Twitter recently said, you only need one slide. It says, you don't need a blockchain. Thank you. Questions? The bottom line is that the number of applications where you truly need a borderless, global, censorship-resistant, neutral platform to establish trust and immutability that cannot be attacked or compromised by anyone, not even colluding state-level actors and giant multinational corporations, despotic, disgusting, dictatorial regimes, censorship-ridden hell-holes, the only applications you need for that can be counted on the fingers of one hand, maybe. But I'll tell you which one application immediately is important, money. We don't like to think that money is an important application, especially in Western liberal culture. Money is dirty. It's the root of all evil. It's not the money that's dirty. It's the current architecture of money which is centralized, hierarchical, and controlled that is dirty. Turning money into a network protocol that we can spread to the entire world and give to every person who currently doesn't have access to banking facilities, to the billions of people who are caught off from the current financial system just to give us a bourgeois sensitivity of safety, which is a lie to start with, a system of control so pervasive that it has been weaponized throughout the West to be used as a system of political power and control. Proprietary money is the cancer of modern societies and it has infected democracy and it is killing democracy. And the answer to that is open, neutral, borderless, censorship-resistant, open-source money as a network protocol, as an open interface, as a system that can be given to anyone who has an IP-connected device of the most basic functionality which gives them the power to independently verify, authorize, authenticate, transact globally with anyone, and then once we have that solid platform, we can build applications of trust, applications like authenticated voting, applications like ownership control for real estate and other assets, applications like open-source law through smart contracts, open-source privacy systems, realize that the cryptocurrencies today are the largest open, public, consumer, civilian deployment of public key cryptography that has ever happened. We have now arrived at the golden age of cryptography. The cypher punks are finally winning and we can apply that amazing technology to one of humanity's most ancient, most fundamental technologies, a system of communication of value that we call money. And for the first time in history, money is a content type, money is a protocol. Thank you.