The Path Ahead

hi everyone about two months ago I addressed all of you right on the back of the European travel ban as coronavirus ravaged the world and forced government's to start making severe restrictions to our ability to travel and also created a reality where it became clear that the world was about to enter a period of economic hardship at that time Bitcoin was in freefall and there was a great degree of uncertainty and I told everyone that I firmly believe that the technology that were building as an industry not just what we do with card no but as an industry as a whole would help the world make decisions moving out of this crisis and give us an opportunity to do things a bit differently than we've done before now two months later while it's become a little bit more manageable to deal with the horrors of coronavirus and we're starting to see an end to that crisis in sight the United States of America in particular is going through a very difficult time in my own backyard I see tear gas canisters and rubber bullets being shot at people indiscriminately I see rioters running through the streets setting things on fire again indiscriminately and there's a great degree of anger in every place we look twitter facebook doesn't particularly matter families turning on family people are fundamentally unhappy and it looks like there's a very good possibility that the leader of my country may invoke the insurrection act with or without the consent of the states a law from 1807 which effectively allows the suspension of Posse Comitatus which is a doctrine that inhibits our military from being used in law enforcement which is one of the bedrocks of a stable democracy and a mechanism to inhibit martial law and the control of the state by the military it is fundamentally unamerican since our very founding to use the military for law enforcement and use the military to enforce the will of the central government because historically every single time this has happened without fail we inevitably descend into dictatorship whether it be the Roman legions being forbidden to enter Rome all the way to what occurred during some of the darkest periods of the 20th century so this is seldom used and often tightly scoped and often replaced as quickly as it can with civilian law enforcement the problem is that the United States is in a difficult time because our people have lost faith in our law enforcement because of things like civil asset forfeiture qualified immunity the militarization of the police and a fundamental distrust brewing on both racial and economic lines many people in the United States no longer view those in law enforcement as legitimate and they view them rather as instruments to protect the state and economic interests of the state rather than the people we tend to look at ambulances firefighters people in a public service as heroes because they do heroic things and many people who are police officers also do heroic things unfortunately too many times have we witnessed them not do heroic things from throw flashbang grenades into cribs to choke people to death and the issue is that while these are the minority of the force there seems to be an institutional culture of protectionism where the bad actors continue to work despite how many complaints despite how much violence and others the good actors seem to turn a blind eye and protect them not in every case but in many cases and you cannot do this push us into a quarantine and you cannot ask us to accept an economic reality that now the poor have to suffer twenty to thirty percent unemployment rates many of the small businesses in America have been decimated and the federal government has transferred hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth to the largest companies in America simply put the system that we have is not working well and this is a wake-up call for our nation to make some difficult decisions about where we go moving for the entire purpose of our industry is to reevaluate the relationship of people with their government and have fundamental conversations about what is moral and just and what rights you have from the foundations of my nation as imperfect as it was we recognize that our rights do not come from the government they never have and never will they come from somewhere else where your faith lies will tell you that but the job of the government was to get out of the way of those rights and and as much as possible make sure that they're preserved and protected second civil disobedience and riots are in the bedrock of the American character in history during the Revolutionary War the Boston Tea Party followed by the Revolution itself was not conducted by the majority of the Americans but rather a tireless minority who understood that the political process no longer was effective in effecting change every single one of the founding fathers had every single ability to negotiate and ask the crown for some modicum of respect and decency and it was only after political failure after political failure that the people who founded our country were willing to put their name on a document that if they lost the revolution would effectively be their own death warrants this was not an act made impulsively but rather one made after a failure and failure and a failure of the political process and what we are witnessing today is the decay of the entire American political process we no longer pick the candidates who run our country we're told that we do but we really don't we no longer have a situation where the vast majority of Americans vote counts we're told that it does but it doesn't and we no longer have a situation where when we Institute changes our relationship with the government gets better in fact it's quite the opposite it seems to get worse year after year our buying power seems to go down year after year our national debt seems to go up year after year the wars never stop and we leave a lot of broken lives and broken feet along the way in fact we've even made businesses out of human suffering for example private prisons in the United States where people make a profit from the incarceration of their fellow man the entire reason I joined the cryptocurrency space and the entire reason we build the technology that we build at my company and our industry frankly builds the technology that it builds is because we'd like to change in a productive nonviolent way the way that things work we'd like to give people more choices more power more ability to run for office and more ability to have competitiveness in these things that when problems are seen we can intervene more rapidly that you have more control over your money and it can't be stolen from you that you have more control over your personal privacy in your data and it's not aggregated and taken from you every dimension of what we do is about pushing power to the edges and not changing from one hand to another set of hands but rather getting rid of the middlemen disintermediating the central authorities and making them unnecessary and irrelevant and doing this in a way where we vote with our feet we vote with our wallet and we vote with our personal choices it's not going to be easy the next few years and where we're going and there's gonna be a lot more struggle sadness and violence it breaks my heart to see streets that I walked when I went to Metro State now filled with tear gas and good people bleeding from their faces because they are protesting the indignity of an uncaring bureaucracy and there's going to be many people who try to ascribe a root cause to false causes they'll say racism and they'll say well this particular event or perhaps class disparity it really is that simply put we've lost faith in our government and we don't feel that this government is going to be able to get us where we need to go and protect and preserve our liberties and allow us to get on with our lives and live the lives that we want and we want change and we're told that we can change by voting but then every time we do it it doesn't seem to get the result we hope for so in a way this technology said is a revolution of sorts but it's a new kind of revolution where people are simply opting out of the system and choosing to live their lives the way that they want to economic and otherwise so it is sad and it's probably gonna get a whole lot worse but I firmly believe that we are at the beginning of something entirely new and if we work together we can achieve great things together I often say there's no way to separate politics from cryptocurrencies the very beginning of our industry was Bitcoin and it was a political referendum on monetary policy and the bailout of the banks and now yet again we're back to where we started broken economy broken promises and a failed state trying desperately to stay alive and we for the first time ever have tools in our hands to do things a bit better and differently and each of you can do something all these primaries these caucuses the way we vote for people we have the ability to change that if we want to and it could be much more effective we should not look to changing the presidency and saying if only we could replace Trump with someone else then somehow it would get all better we have to think locally and we have to demand the adoption of the technology of this industry in each and every one of our municipalities we have to think about incentives one of the great lessons that I've been taught is that there is nothing more powerful than the right set of incentives and if incentives are against what you wish to accomplish you will always lose 10 times out of 10 so we have to ask ourselves why does the state exist the way it exists because it has incentives to exist this way and the technology that we build can change these things can change the citizens relationship can allow us to defund the things that are causing harm and get funding to things that are great now this requires a bit more participation and activism from each and every one of you but by far the United States is not the only state going through hard times this pandemic the government's response to it collectively across the world is forcing all of us to wake up a bit in come to terms with the new reality whether it be what's occurring in Hong Kong and the difficulties China is going through or many of the European states facing similar issues and the profound economic fallout that will follow this will literally create a situation and we're in many places one out of five to one out of six people will not have a job and be completely dependent on some form of social welfare that's not sustainable and this tensed in all cases to lead to a revolution of sorts political or otherwise so we must be wise enough to know that we have very limited time to resolve things in a peaceful way resolution will always happen one of the most evil things my nation did is we allowed slavery to persist despite the fact that we said that people were equal and that original sin of our foundation less than a hundred years after our founding led to the bloodiest event in our country's history a civil war that literally turned brother against brother more than 1/2 million people died and it still took another century for enough progress to be made in civil rights for us to actually believe what we had put on our founding documents and there's still more work to do this is the example of the consequences of political failure and inaction and apathy we cannot allow ourselves as a society to descend into this and thus we must be wise enough and proactive enough to work together to get out of it in a way that doesn't require the barrel of a gun so I profoundly hope that everybody truly understands the nature of the technology that we have and the real purpose of our space this is not about getting rich and making money the people in Venezuela long ago had very valuable money and people would do a lot for it recently I saw just a few days ago pictures of that's very same money sitting in trash bags so worthless that people didn't even bother to pick it up they'd rather throw it away or use it for feel for fire there's not much separating the usdollar from that if we continue to make political mistakes so we cannot get into the delusion that the purpose of our industry is a return we have to understand the purpose of this industry has always been the liberation of mankind from itself so that we can live in a more fair and balanced world and we can live in a world where each and every person is treated with dignity and gets what they deserve I want to live in that world and I want to create that and I'd like to believe that the vast majority of you also want to live in that and create that so instead of picking up a bottle a torch a brick instead of beating people down or going and protesting let's do the sensible thing and actually make progress and change let's make the world a better place and how we do that is we start local and we start by adopting the technology of peace and freedom and we get as many people as possible to do that and we recognize that no person is so qualified to lord over others we should all collectively be equal in that respect and we should all work together in that respect so thanks for taking the time to listen to me and to those impacted by these events I am truly sorry you have my deepest sympathy and I wish truly wish we had better leadership in the United States and I truly wish the world had better leadership we don't deserve this the human race as a whole has been systematically getting better as much as our media will tell you that everything's worsen it's terrible the 20th century saw the greatest increase in wealth and the greatest lift up out of poverty in human history millions of people who normally would have starved to death didn't and millions of people who normally would live a life of hopelessness and darkness were lifted out of it and got to live a life of joy and wonder because of the advancements of the 20th century and this trend has not stopped despite the fact that we are entering this chaos and just the turn of the 19th to 20th century where we went from a century where the world was ruled by kings to a world that was ruled by two dominant philosophies communism and democracy the 21st century will see the exact same thing and we have to make fundamental decision of do we want a technocratic dictatorship that takes big data as an input and uses AI is its cohorts and have a very powerful centralized top-down government where we are reduced to our base numbers and forced to live whatever we've been assigned was no political freedom or do we want to maximize the trends that were started with a great democratic experiment so long ago in the 18th century by the United States and actually make each and every person the same and that we all enjoy the same freedoms and they're preserved and protected and we get to live our lives the way we want to instead of the way that we're told to I'd rather live in a world of freedom and a little world of Liberty and I'd like to believe that what we're building here today collectively will get us there if only each and every one of us personalizes these things and uses these things in their local community and gets people to adopt them we saw this great experiment starting to work in Wyoming were in just a few short years and went from a hostile state to the friendliest state in the Union and I'm gonna keep pushing and I'm not going to stop until you can vote with a blockchain there and I'm not gonna stop until the driver's licenses are blockchain based and I'm not going to stop until we have more diversity in the political system to enable that as a great experiment to be propagated to the surrounding States and one out of time dominoes will fall and we'll wake up one day and we'll have won and that's what I can do in my backyard because I'm an American but you have other backyards and many of you aren't and you can do the exact same things that I'm doing I hope we win I don't want to lose and I hope everything does get better but I'm never gonna lose faith in people and I'm never gonna believe that people are intrinsically bad or people have given up and they're not worth fighting for because people never gave up on me even when I let them down and so if I expect to be treated that way then they should be treated that way even the people that do wrong they can become good so thank you all for listening keep the faith and let's get through this time of trouble together