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.
[Laughter] 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 one hundred people there; all of them were either computer scientists
or computer science students.
Despite the fact that we were telling them the entire world was about to change, no one
believed us -- at least, no one believed me because I was 19 years old, awkward and shy.
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."
The reason for that is because the technology I'm going to talk about today is about to
transform the world in equal measure.
It 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, and ignored for the first five or six years.
But 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 1992.
They were wrong then and they are wrong now.
Every time you meet someone like a dentist or a hairdress who uses bitcoin, it undermines
that silly narrative.
Bitcoin is a protocol, and what better stage to talk about a protocol.
The moment you start talking about Bitcoin and thinking about Bitcoin, it brings up
a very difficult question: what is money?
Most of us, from all 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.
In some countries, they realise that it stops working and then everybody has interesting
things to say about what money is.
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 "this is your money," and it's your money.
That's the authority it comes from.
But what if money could be created without an 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 civilisation 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.
If you want two tribes to work together, you need some common bond.
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 in its scale, it has allowed us to collaborate and engage in
commerce on a greater level.
Money is also, ironically, a system of control.
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 how they used to hold it over religion for the same reasons.
Now that has changed.
On January 3rd 2009, the world changed because some person(s) created a peer-to-peer protocol.
A flat network with no central servers, all 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, 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 a 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, 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, and gender in the world.
For most people, this concept hasn't yet quite sunk in.
The children born today may not know a world in which banks exist, a world in which paper
money exists, any more than 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're over 40 years old.
So am I. Gotcha!
The children born today may never drive a car, never have a world without the internet,
never know a world where banks control money and is issued only by kings or nation states.
Money will be an integral protocol of the internet as 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 assocation - a
legal fiction called the corporation.
But Bitcoin is a protocol where 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 operates
autonomously of any human action, managing budgets in the amounts of billions of dollars.
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 it better?'
Yeah, all of that is going to happen.
But what if it's an intelligent charity that detect the emergence of a natural disaster,
that automatically and instantaneously diverts 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, but cars that _are_ a corporation.
Cars 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.
As a result, they're able to buy more hosting services so they can further expand their
reach.
This is not the money of your grandparents.
It's not the money of your parents.
This is money that is fully programmable, scriptable, with 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 behaviour of entire systems that can also manage money.
"Money" is such a narrow word to describe this, because we use things all the time that
kind of look like money but aren't really money.
What about loyalty points, tokens, subway cards, airline miles?
What about the expression of a Justin Bieber fan 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 protocol?
On 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.
They're expanding in all directions, exploring every possible niche of this ecosystem, every
tiny variation in capabilities and features, creating new markets, raising funds for thousands
of start-ups around the world.
Thousands of software engineers and developers are training to use this technology.
The internet itself is changing very rapidly.
Now we have autonomous agents that are using money on the internet; these are, in many
cases, beyond the control of any jurisdiction.
What are the large corporations going to do with this new magical, open, decentralised,
neutral, borderless, censorship-resistant network?
They're going to say, "Great!
We'd like that... but could you take out the open, decentralised, neutral, borderless,
censorship-resistant properties and package it with a service-level agreement (SLA), a
twelve-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 and
sits in the backyard of corporations adding a tiny bit of value.
Outside 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."
They will be wrong and they will fail.
The real principle, the real exciting thing about this technology, is not the blockchain,
which is a database artefact 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, authority, or intermediary.
That consensus from the outside looks chaotic, messy, and weird.
Well, everyone in this room already knows something that is open, flat, weird, and not
understood by corporations: the internet.
We already did it once, we're going to do it again.
This time, we're going to bring the entire world with us.
In the background of this grand story, there is 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 to send money.
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 centralised, 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 and are entirely cash-based.
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 Fund and World Bank.
Imagine what happens if you bring banking to an app, to everyone who has a $20 Android
smartphone.
Three-and-a-half to four billion people are on the internet today; just over one billion
people among them have banking and 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.
It's no longer just a communications device, it's a bank.
Not a bank account, but a bank.
It can 'wire' and receive funds from anywhere in the world.
It can do lending or receive loans for a mortgage, to buy seeds for a field, to bring disaster
relief.
It can internationally connect to every person on this planet.
We can do this within the next ten years.
The world will radically transform when you bring the capability of broad economic inclusion
to everyone in this world.
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, banks _are_ criminals and criminal organisations.
Or really quite indistinguishable from the local mob.
So how do we fix that?
Up to now the approach for all of these technologies, whether it was PayPal or any of the others
we've seen slowly emerge in financial technology, was to carefully and politely ask for permission.
Bitcoin is not asking for permission.
We "forgot" to do that.
And we will proceed in (un)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 a new name.
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.