Vaccine Passports

and broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado so questions come up recently and we get asked it from time to time and it's the question of whether we would participate or build or enable this concept of vaccine passports and this is something that has come up blockchain space because several people in the space are actively working on these documents and there's a lot of concerns about them so it's a complicated topic like many things are and there already are a notion of vaccine passports vaccine booklets i se i travel africa all the time and a lot of countries i go to require yellow fever vaccines for example a lot of family in the healthcare industry they need to be vaccinated for the flu hepatitis and other such things and these are usually occupationally required the big concern behind vaccine passports is that they're being extended significantly beyond the initial scope and concern so normally vaccine passports in the legacy sense are used for entry into a country or they're used for working within a specific domain for example in a hospital setting or a clinical setting the concern now is that there are many nations discussing using vaccine passports as a criteria for public life going to a restaurant going to a nightclub going to a coffee shop attending a concert any public gathering citing public health concerns and well in the short term there may be some perhaps small to moderate health benefits for such things my deep concern is that such infrastructure if it is used to restrict the freedom of movement and be a denial mechanism will inevitably be reused by those who have more totalitarian thoughts for other purposes for example perhaps if you don't pay your taxes you're no longer allowed to have entry perhaps if your credit score is too low like in china with the social credit scheme that you're no longer allowed to have entry or be part of public life or maybe they can come up with all kinds of other exotic tests if you don't you haven't taken certain sensitivity or cultural training you're not allowed to enter and as crazy as that seems there are some physicians within the united states who feel that racism is apparently a bigger threat than the pandemic which is why there was a letter of over a thousand physicians signed saying that the blm protests even though they could spread coven should not be stopped whereas other co protests should be stopped because the threat of racism was apparently greater so why wouldn't they advocate then for critical race theory training as a condition for entry into buildings or not if you're arguing a public health demand or a public safety demand you can begin reusing that infrastructure for any purpose we call this the infrastructure of tyranny it is very difficult to predict how people 5 years 10 years 20 years 30 years are going to use the system and so you have to understand if those systems are constrained by some process like constitutional law or federal law or are they constrained by the whims and wills of the leaders that stand behind those systems for example in the country of afghanistan there's a huge crisis that's ongoing where people who thought the taliban had been defeated were starting to live the life of moderation so instead of wearing beards and covering their faces and showing themselves to be nothing but pious they were showing themselves to be like us going out and enjoying a sunny day going to the pool drinking having fun with friends and taking pictures of that recording that putting it up on social media now 20 years later the unthinkables happened the taliban is back in control of afghanistan and the very same social networks the very same digital activities that they took for granted believing that these were safe are now being used against them to decide who is should be punished up into execution it's a horrible reality that millions of people now suffer and face so we as a company are very careful about the systems we construct the values behind those systems and we always ask what constrains them one of the things that's completely missed by paulson and by krugman and many of these former legacy system people who criticize bitcoin in the cryptocurrency industry is the social immutability behind the terms and conditions of cryptocurrencies whether you like them or not or they're useful to you or not or they're negative or positive for your particular business or lifestyle the terms and conditions and rules of their operation and use of their operation are known up front and they will not be changed because they're inconvenient to a particular actor or regime we don't have that in any sense of the word for a vaccine passport system and it is my belief that should these systems become propagated they will be misused and mishandled well beyond their original intent to slow down or stop a pandemic and start being used for whatever the political pep project of the particular regime happens to be and every few years they'll radically change in one direction or the other direction because it's simply too tempting to have complete control over the freedom of movement of the citizens of the country and be able to connect that to desired social outcomes so we as a company will not work on these systems until unless and until we feel that the systems are constrained with the same social immutability and clarity of purpose that cryptocurrencies are and nothing i have seen on the market would indicate that they couldn't be misused for tyranny and that's a deep concern of mine so i just wanted to make a quick video to kind of put a flag in the ground about where we stand our values as a company we really do want to change the world for the better we care very deeply about public health and we care very deeply about ensuring that people are safe and we also care very deeply about your rights your privacy your systems that you live in and to us it matters a lot that things you are promised are not misused and mishandled we tend to be lied to a lot these days by many institutions the media especially so we tend to be told one thing and that it turns out that that thing wasn't true i remember growing up as a teenager i was told again and again that iraq had weapons of mass destruction that was a lie it was a known lie within the u.