The right to choose our own money

Transcript

I'm a little cut off on the top right there we go now I feel like I'm being interrogated by a Nazi webcam nice legs nice be sure until I slept I am let's audience but not everyone is sitting in be here any more bikes any well I can

hear you just fine can you guys hear me right now I'm just let me just turn up the volume bit okay well Bryce this is perfect so I let you do the wings of 71 you that's a second okay sighs may put more personal on it right if you want Oh cable so you have like 40 get it for this let's see if you're going to do it otherwise enters do it together as I could give me give us your amazing story first 20 minutes or so and then we can

open up reported an employee life likes to ask questions so you can take it into council again then start straight away fantastic well a lot of everybody I'm sorry I can't be there in person but it's fantastic to see so many people out there enjoying and being curious about and explaining my bit quite experienced so you know that there are spoilers we're going to come to a gathering like this and give you the rousing school goodnight to make you wildly enthusiastic to match the ramparts of the trench financial interests and you know bite the heads off anyone anyway I'm not going to do that spirit I've done that before the Israeli

believe in it but i think that there's another side to the bitcoin future that really really needs to be explored and that basically is recognizing the size economic strength and political power of the entrenched interests that bitcoin directly threatens and i just wanted to go over a few fans about that which is to say we should continue to do what we're doing which is I think to spread horizontally through the economy but recognize that at some point there is going to be a conflict of biblical proportions between decentralized

encrypted currency mechanisms and astound you resolutions trust mechanisms and the entrenched interests so just a few days ago the Bank of England has sounded off are weighed in on the issue of Bitcoin and this is what they say digital currencies such as Bitcoin could threaten the economy if they become widespread thinking one in the most extreme case bitcoins decentralized payment system of finite supply could make central banks obsolete should we take a moment to mourn their passing

they could also create huge economic risks and as you well know I'm sure the audience for the most risks is a just a synonym for an opportunity and Bitcoin and related countries contribute you should you ever heard this it's just supposed to scare people because they don't want to use lowered prices because lowered price is actually quite a good thing until they say deeply now why is deflation considered to be such a bad there I mean if you go to them petrol open the prices lower you like

yay and the price of computers and software related hardware it's all coming down we are virtually billing you have this cold weather having a long-distance relationship with a girlfriend in the 90s and basically having to give up for half a kidney to the phone company for long-distance calls now you can you know two-way high quality audio video pretty much for free so what is the problem with declination well deflation fundamentally is a problem for governments not for private citizens I'm not sure this is the very first time in history where the interests of governments and the interests of private citizens have not perfectly coincided I'll have to think of if there any other examples when you help me out on Q&A period what's the

problem with deflation well deflation no its prices lowered prices put downward pressure ages is less tax revenue and of course if you've ever faced a government union saying that you need to lower their wages not really the first thing on the politicians happy go go joy joy juice agenda for the morning they review and there's a lot of other reason about government's dislike lowering the prices where as private citizens really really like it the other thing they say is not a processor going down in other words the money is becoming more valuable are you not spending it disabled people

before or their money like that's a really bad thing but that's ridiculous I mean if you hoard money no one that just means there's less of the environment destroyed through useless consumerism I can't think that that's a terrible Natalie and banks would choose to anything on a couple of billion dollars of reserves and now sitting on over a trillion dollars of reserves they're not lending it to anyone and you don't see the government's being too bothered by that again it's only the private citizens sitting on money that is a problem because of private citizens of money they can afford to challenge the status quo because they've got some savings so so also the bank has warned the English bankers born has warned that of people that people

could be defrauded they could be defrauded through cryptocurrencies I guess that's a bit different than the affording that occurs through the inflation that is created through the endless creation of money through central matters so I guess really considering about you losing monetary value which is why they want to keep a central bank and keep ticking inflation and money supply to the point where you don't know which way is up economically any war anymore and you have the basic Direction sense of a hamster in a tumble dryer the government says the bank would have to address issues of quote taxation

money laundering and the possible use of new payment systems in financing terrorism or other crime well there's a little Bobby the government's developed and it really had it threw out all the human history but they really refined it to a fine dark art in the 20th century that little hobby called war and war in its current form is completely impossible without currency and I've done a speech on this in Toronto a Bitcoin versus war which you can check out but funding even on Terra would require more gold than has ever been mined in human history in other words

you'd run out of money long before banana bullets and so it's really fascinating bad they're concerned about people losing economic value through Bitcoin so we should give them our central banking maintain that value which has never happened US dollar as last ninety eight percent of its value since to the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 and they're really concerned that Bitcoin might be used to finance physical aggression terrorism their concern about how fiat currencies are used to finance say the war on terror appears to be notably absent so it's important to recognize that it's a big enough issue that banks are talking

about it and I think that um where they get to the you know will will provide a link to this the conference organizers to share as well where they really get into the nitty-gritty though the bank acknowledged bitcoins disruptive potential by describing the technology underpinning it as quote a first attempt at an Internet of Finance and a genuine innovation that could be used to shake up traditional banking so basically the now they stay if Bitcoin use becomes widespread the bank of england's leavers

to manage the economy through interest rates and quantitative easing would no longer work because both the supply and price would be out of its control oh boy what can that be terrible government's through central banks or central banks through governments whichever way you want to spend that revolving door would be unable to manage the economy remember how stable the economy has been since the introduction of central banking in the 20th century remember how stable banking and the economy has been since Nixon uncoupled the US dollar from the gold standard in 1971 it's completely mad what they don't that when they say manage the economy what they really mean is manipulated the economy for the

special interests of the point 0 0 0 1 percent who seemed to control the vast majority of the world's wealth so the fact that we would be taking out the power to control interest rates and create money from the moneyed classes I cannot see as anything other than one of the greatest boons that could ever happen to the species at any time throughout history now how big is the financial sector well in a word very twenty percent of the America of America's the entire gross domestic

product is generated by I industries whose main function is to act as a trusted third party and here I use the word trusted extremely loosely US bank fees alone generate 250 billion dollars a year global payments related revenues exceed 300 billion dollars a year why is that um so big why is that so enormous and how big is that really well it's um it's terrifyingly big so just think of this so the Sun loin is

3.4 get ready for the T trillion dollars three point four trillion dollars a year not since the dawn of time or until the sun goes cold every single year how big is that that's the size of Germany's entire gross domestic product it's more than half of Japan's gross domestic product forty-one percent of China's gross domestic product and far bigger than the United Kingdom the size of the financial industry in the United States is the size of the entire US gross

domestic product as recently as 1963 so big is the is the key word now of course payment transaction fees are directly threatened by Bitcoin but of course the Bitcoin technology in particular the blockchain asset ledger and the protocol could also challenge fees on deposit fees foreign exchange fees escrow trust management fees collection fees etc etc etc really really important to understand how big the behemoth is that bitcoin is facing and there will of course be

efforts made on the part of the financial government complex to keep the technology at bay now my guess is that they don't and they won't like if I sort of put on my doctor evil hat and imagine if I'm sitting in the enormous satanic fair known as the enormous satanic chair known as the Federal Reserve Chairman's but warmer I would say well let's not kill it completely let's not kill it outright because it's big enough now that people will see what we've done and nobody it really disturbs the villagers when a body falls from the sky so they don't want to do that what they want to do is they want to regulate it and what that means and of course they're talking

about this in New York with the licensing for Bitcoin exchanges there was just a sting operation in Florida where two men were charged with a variety of crimes because they exchange data bitcoins personally one of the fascinating and I guess lesser reported aspects of that at is that it was Special Agent Ponzi who was involved in this sting operation so what they're going to try and do is they're just going to try and not take out the revving engine with an air strike but just throw a little bits of sand in it little bits of sand in it little bits of sand in it until most people find it too difficult and cumbersome to use and then

say well it was an interesting idea just didn't quite work out the way that people wanted and I think that is that is the great danger the first bank or the first government that outlaws it completely i think is basically revealing to the world the weakness of their own currency and that may have negative impacts for them in the long run but my concern is that if they make it very difficult not impossible but if they make it more and more difficult for honest law-abiding citizens to use bitcoin then it will of course displace itself into the black market in the grey market and then of course then they'll say well you see we told you it was going to be used for

trying let's get back to fiat currencies which is never used for anything destructive so I think that's an important consideration so my my caution my advice my concern is that what I see in the Bitcoin community is quite a bit of optimism and I would also a little bit of political naivete the financial sector is the biggest single contributor to politicians at least in the United States Obama himself was elected largely because he took so much money from the financial sector and what did they buy with that money well hundreds of

billions of dollars of bailouts and zero prosecution for their admitted crimes so they are buying themselves governments and all of the Associated power that comes with governments when you can buy a government you pretty much a force to be reckoned with and this is occurring throughout the world originally governments were more powerful than banks but as the logic of late capitalism democracy continues its unsteady march towards the cliff edge what's happening as government's stay in power by promising more to their citizens than they're collecting in

taxes they can't do that mathematically right if I'm a politician and I can't even say you know vote for me and I'll give you five hundred dollars I just need to tax you a thousand dollars first then people will get that it's a money losing proposition but if they say I'll give you five hundred dollars and then they create that money at a thin air and the effects then slowly leave ripple through the economy and there's not one more than one person in a thousand who can trace 18 months later inflation to fiat currency creation during times of elections then they can give you the illusion of the government adding value or creating value in the economy that process is so necessary for politicians

to get elected they need to promise more than they're collecting in taxes and the only way they can do that is to create money and then they have to suppress interest rates to avoid the resulting in the inflation of them is with apply that process is so far along then I would argue governments are utterly dependent upon the goodwill of central banks which is why they don't prosecute they bribe them with money that they themselves have created the banks themselves have created it is an unholy alliance and it is generally invisible to the majority of citizens in the world it is a very abstract virus you know we generally get for our fight and flight

mechanism when a saber-toothed tiger jumps out of a cave but at this point the predation on the general citizen is so deferred through national debts is so invisible through inflation and requires such an oily and abstract and ethereal imagination of financial interests and obfuscations people can't see it so be careful when you're out there in the Bitcoin world talk to lawyers talk to accountants make sure you declare things where necessary make sure you stay on the right side of things don't become the equivalent of the severed head of the noble that they put on pikes in the French Revolution don't become the example that scares other people away from what I've argued is the most

beneficial technology to hit mankind since we first figured out how to make fire so that's my little intro I wanted to leave lots of time for questions should people have any all right stuff can you hear me I care how you do it hi thanks so much this was really really powerful again um I wanted to start with a comment before asking my question because people may be surprised to see a philosopher at a conference for about technology and money that's often philosophy doesn't have a lot of article airing on those nights but actually in

throughout history has been there's a couple of powerful examples worthless has been the case the one example is a tweeze of miletus ancient philosopher known as the first mathematician and he predicted a really good olive harvest for Greece at the time and in the winter time he bought a sari he rented a lot of olive presses and then in the harvest time he would rent them out again and make a great profit and his goal was not the profit but it was to show the people the value of philosophy on everyday life and I think you you really exemplify this as well because in early 2011 already you were talking about the value

of Bitcoin about the power of its technology and so you helped people thinking about technology I'm sorry you helped philosophers to see the value of Bitcoin but now I'd like to turn the question around and ask you what is Bitcoin mean for the Philosopher's like how can this new technology that opens up so many possibilities that allows people to two things without having to ask permission what does that mean for the person who wants to be good or virtuous is it more opportunity to take a stand to make a difference to be good or is it a is it a pitfall is it m is it a other dead ends in that in that area well it's a great question i would say

that there are so many examples now of spontaneous self-organization that the idea that we now must automatically assume that society must be organized according to a centrally coercive pyramid of power has completely fallen away beforehand I mean I'm a voluntary which means I don't believe and I actually morally reject the justification for state power as a central organizing quote organizing paradigm of society there are so many examples now of spontaneous self-organization that we now have empirical proof of the value of spontaneous self-organization I mean just off the top of my head wikipedia I

mean the idea that well let's just make a dictionary that anyone can edit it's like that will be chaos it will be madness no it actually works very very well linux I think the idea that you're just going to create an operating system because you can't afford to buy one that now runs billions of devices around the world and is continually refined and modified by a spontaneous community it is astounding Bitcoin emerging as technology that spontaneously self organizes that patches itself that updates itself that kid that can be extended this power of spontaneous self-organization which is kind of how our bodies work right there's no government that runs my kidney it's

spontaneously self organizers of life itself is and seeing this replicated over and over and over again in such incredibly beneficial ways in society as I think given us finally finally empirical proof of the power of spontaneous self-organization how human beings work together in cooperative and positive and beneficial ways if the magic phrase laissez-faire let us be let us alone stop pointing guns at us stop hurting us around stop throwing us into the non concentration camps of government schools stop taxing us stop inflating our currency stop sending us to war stop selling off our children for

votes once we can see how immoral all that is we take that out and we now have endless examples of what will replace it which is peaceful voluntary positive spontaneous cooperation and the true organization of voluntary interactions so I think it's given us an immense empirical tool to prove all the things which were called impossible are now commonplace thanks um want to Boston area community to periodic you can have I hope at least some of you were listening in 2011 when

I think they were like four and a half bitcoins rolling around the internet so I hope that you will think it's nice to see a voluntary and making money for voluntarist know and obviously as a feeling it was a very well this is business evo florist and yes yes version in this Harry he talked about the increase in Versailles they are mean

people here and we will never never is a dangerous word to say in the annals of human history again we got rid of overt slavery that wasn't so bad managed to ratchet up some equal rights for women that wasn't so bad a spanking corporal punishment for children which was a worldwide and brutal practice throughout most of human history began to fall away after the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries countries in your neck of the woods of and banking is a violation of the non-aggression principle Never Say Never if you are if you hold fast to your principles and you are consistent and you are courageous the most virtuous position will always win I guarantee you

that in history the only time when evil wins is when good people stand aside and so if you hold fast to your principles that spontaneous with voluntary truly democratic currencies without centralized control is the only way to morally organize exchange value in society because there's no initiation of force in Bitcoin there is initiation of force in central banking they counterfeit you can't fit you go to jail you don't use their currency to pay off the imagine through the old-school taxation you go to jail you try to compete with the central bank you go to jail it is a coercive and violet monopoly has fundamentally immoral as the ownership

of slaves because it is merely the ownership of your time in portions rather than your body in hope never doubt that in the long run go to a triumph because the moment you do you falter and when you falter you lose how's the show up in a riddle and my knees are working as you protect this one on the block my initial I tackled a

bit blurry but the question what can we do to be protected when Dennis reputation is that right well the best way to to avoid external releasing is the South police right the prevention is by far the better part of cure when it comes to immorality so what what happened in Florida at least according to the police reports is the police went to Bitcoin and foods the ass I think it's through point-based calm local bitcoins I'm sorry and they went and they said listen I want to buy some bitcoins so that I can go and buy some stolen credit card numbers and a Bitcoin enthusiast but like okay and the police said would you like to buy some stolen

credit card numbers and they're like no but you know we'll think about it and that's not good and in a free society that would be a bad thing no matter what I mean nobody wants to be on the receiving end of that kind of a fraud so if you self police that it's much better than having external agents from the state come in and create all kinds of problems and live so if you know people who are in the Bitcoin community who are up to no good I think we you know I think it's taught myself please go talk to those people go see if you can change the mind go turn them to a better path but there's lots of tools out there to both social and technological to ostracize people who are going to do genuine wrong using

VidCon and so I'm a big fan of ostracism it's how societies used to function if you didn't obey social rules then people wouldn't have much to do with you I think that's a fantastic way it's not violent it's not a violation of your initiation than on initiation of fools so I think that the more that we can focus on self policing the Bitcoin community the more we can emerge is a pretty noble and shining example of human cooperation so because I'm anti-state that does not mean I'm it doesn't mean I'm crony more elegantly because I meant a morality and so if you know people in the Bitcoin community who are tempted by I you know genuinely

nasty stuff do what you can to intervene I do what you can to have people not deal with these people and I think that will help the most again I'm not saying it come you're Jo Friday obsession and it if i come across it i think it's worth doing something about it where you can there's no sense in canada promise me what about no yeah us yeah the role of that the road the media is is to sell

newspapers and to sell trees and a cell motion together and commercials so society is inherently conservative because it exists in a configuration that serves the needs of those who have the most money the financial services office revised huge amounts of advertising and as a huge amount of money buying services from other companies and those companies naturally wants that to continue that's why they've invested that's when they built their railroads too so they don't want the town to move it's similar suvreen with negative effects of psychotropic drugs are all just never really reported in the media because some companies by so many hats so that's

natural this is why they call technology disruptive it disrupts executing handful e grown and maintain economic relationships so the media is going to be negative towards Bitcoin you know as Annapolis pointed out recently I'm the car when it first was introduced was Oh dangerous and hitting people and broke down all the time and so on I would imagine that's because the horse and carriage manufacturers bought a lot of advertising in newspapers and so the newspapers naturally like you know some of the current commenters have a lot of close relationships where people who sell gold and what is that in there you have it on they would imagine hey so I

think recognize that there's not going to be any help coming from the mainstream media the drinking media is going to be relentless in pointing out all the worst things possible in Bitcoin because they want to protect the value of their existing financial relationships also if they start talking around center me they might find ourselves with less access to the government officials that have been over heavily redacted documents into then passed off as somehow investigative journalism so there's a huge amount of entrenched economic interest is going to be negative and hostile towards Bitcoin the fantastic news is that they all their declining monopoly on the dissemination of information at least in American people's trust in the

mainstream media is so low that they almost trust Congress more but that's about as low that's how yeah and so a couple more steaks from the internet to into the heart of these vampires and then stop bleep drinking the blood of the young so let's just keep disseminating the information that is calm and positive and enthusiastic and clear and rational the way as possible and when the communication you know good money drives out bad bad money drives that good good information drives out the propaganda of the mainstream media so just keep doing what you're doing keep talking about it and people will gravitate towards those who have the clearest position and once they understand the bridge which the projective attea the mainstream media is

compromised if not downright destroyed by existing financial interests they'll cease taking it seriously and go to those with better information thanks for being an ally with us today so I'm going to have hanging it up and talk later thank you very much it was a great pleasure