Congratulations Bitcoin

hi this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado today is september 7th 2021 it is my father's birthday and also a very important day for the industry as a whole i joined the bitcoin space a very long time ago and 2011 was a different time then the concept of an altcoin meant a fork of bitcoin usually was a slightly different monetary policy the arguments were over things like namecoin and should we have metadata and the chain or not and also people didn't take things too seriously there wasn't a lot of maximalism it was more differences of opinion about where to meet over core philosophical differences or large amounts of money bitcoin was not at a billion dollars i was barely had a few hundred million and even that you couldn't sell more than a few thousand maybe ten twenty thousand a day and not expect to move the market the largest exchange i think around then was either mount cox or we were doing it on spreadsheets and there were certainly early early days i remember very finally having crossfire cards 5850s and four of them 1.2 gigahashes and i thought i was a badass and getting a few bitcoin every day and it didn't get a huge roi because back then bitcoin was about four dollars the industry's grown a lot i don't recognize the majority of the faces i still see some of the old ones like eric voorhees and roger ver and there's a lot ones i miss like how finney is gone and mike mike hearn is gone gavin andreessen is gone and they added a lot to the dialogue in the conversation and it's sad to see them go bitcoin has grown to a point where not only do nation states now take it seriously today a nation state decided to embrace it at a level of making it legal tender this is a moment for our entire industry regardless of whether you live in the bitcoin sphere or outside of it in the altcoin sphere the alternative coin it is a moment to reflect how far we've gone in 12 years time from a single inventor inventors small group inspired by ideas that came a long time ago from the 1980s to 1990s to the 2000s to create something that was an experiment not really intended to succeed but rather prove a point to potentially the currency of the world right now the currency of the nation state of el salvador it's a pretty remarkable journey if you think about that there frankly is nothing in human history that has grown that quickly that aggressively and has inspired this degree of philosophical conversation polarization and opinions to form now within our own industry we certainly have very strong differences of opinion about technology and sustainability and how things ought to be done but today is really not a time for that today is a more fundamental time to recognize that the contributions of every innovator in this industry have collectively led to a point where every single nation state from here on forward has to actually have a cryptocurrency strategy cryptocurrency regulation a view on how cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology are going to be used or misused for their national interests it's a pretty remarkable achievement that something so nascent small and without any centralized coordination has been able to accomplish this and it makes me proud to be in this industry and it makes me proud to know many of the innovators who have achieved this and as i said we all have differences of opinion and strong personalities at times we say harsh things especially over twitter but at the end of the day there is more that unites us then divides us if we're being intellectually honest and we're not alone anymore back in 2011 it was a very small group of people probably tens of thousands on bitcoin talk and reddit and a few other places some meetup groups here and there good place to get a beer but that's pretty much it now in 2021 the movement is in at least the tens of millions if not over a hundred million people the majority of people under the age of 25 have a positive view of cryptocurrencies and a lot of them own them that's the future their children will grow up with those values and those beliefs about the nature of money so in a certain respect we as an industry won and now we're just kind of sorting out the details of what that actually means and in the coming years many more nation states will use crypto as part of their monetary policy either as reserves in their central banks using cryptocurrency rails for central bank settlement especially for non-bis members or potentially just simply taking a cryptocurrency as el salvador has done and make it the national currency and what this does is it legitimizes the belief that we should be in control of the money in our pocket and we should be ultimately in control of how that money moves and who receives it not trusted third parties who we've never met we know very little about and in many cases are adversarial to the people of the country so crypto is definitely not only here to stay it's very clear that crypto is going to change the world and already has in many ways i'd also like to take a moment to thank all the people who made this happen from marty malmy to the rest it was a long journey and a short one paradoxically long in that every year seems to be like 10 years short in that 12 years is a remarkably small amount of time if we really think about it and it's incredible to see how so many people came together almost all of them in the grand scheme of things uncompensated and for the greater good did some amazing things it could be peter willey it could be greg maxwell it could be jeff garzik there's a lot of heroes there a lot of incredible achievements like bip 32 hd wallets that's pretty remarkable if you think about that concept and dozens of other things that were absolutely necessary bit pays work with copay which later became i think bit pay wallet i've been using that for years for our multi-sig for bitcoin it's great just an amazing piece of free infrastructure i remember when they sponsored the saint petersburg bowl it became the bitcoin bowl i think that was 2013 or 2014.