Bitcoin and Truth: Certainty in an Age of AI & Propaganda - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2024

thank you great to be here you know I had the pleasure of hosting the very first event uh crypto event in Dubai in 2013 it was called the Dubai Bitcoin conference and the entire audience was about 70 people there was no sponsors it was considered very fancy because we had tablecloths and we splurged and bought pizzas from the first merchant in Dubai who accepted Bitcoin a a business called Pizza Guys the pizzas cost us about eight Bitcoin for 100 pizzas and uh that fed the 150 or so attendees that we had at that conference so I'm going to talk a little bit about where our industry was what it was like then and what it is like now where we are now in history as well as where we are in this industry and and where we're going in the future so those of us who were fortunate enough to be around in those early days it was a very very different mentality there was not a compliance officer in sight there was uh a completely different sort of feel and sort of vibe the roots of this industry are from the cipher Punk Manifesto the cipher Punk roots of our industry this industry came about because of Bitcoin and Bitcoin is absolutely completely a political movement especially at its origins in the early days it was about 95 or 98% political everybody in the early days was an anarcho capitalist an anarchist a Libertarian of some form a a low government small government kind of person and I think there's some of that that's been missed a little bit you know I was on boarding a friend of mine in Saudi Arabia a couple weeks ago and and I gave him a copy of safe's book and I showed him some videos on YouTube of Michael sailor and we came across an old Andreas Antonopoulos video many of you might know he was one of the great Educators back in those early days in 2011 1213 and I watched this video and I remember I was in this I was in the audience at the time that he spoke at this particular uh speech that he gave in 2013 and it was entirely about Revolution it was about Crea a world a better world a better world with this technology and that's what I'm here to talk about now because I think it's very very easy to get lost in the shuffle of Lambo chasing and yield chasing and forget about why at least why I really came here and why this industry exists the promise of what Bitcoin brought was a world of less centralized control a world of better money and make no mistake the money system is the root of this the money system and the creation of Bitcoin is the root of this industry it's also the root of a lot of the problems in our world our world right now is going through a fourth turning a fourth turning is a time of Epic change it's named for a book of that title that came out in 1996 by Strauss and how where they talked about how about every hundred years or so there are these times of Epic change in humanity where every Everything Changes borders change systems change old Power structures change and a new world is is born and this has happened again and again throughout history and they actually predicted they wrote this book in 1996 they predicted that we would have a fourth turning right about 2020 that would begin and last for about eight years or so so whether you've read the book or not it's pretty easy to understand that we are clearly in this fourth turning we are in a time of Epic change we are in a time of turmoil and chaos and I don't think it's going to become less chaos I think we're going to have more chaos and more uncertainty going forward and the world is changing very rapidly this place has changed radically since we did that first Bitcoin conference in 2013 and my first trip in uh early 200 uh2 this place has changed rapidly this entire region has changed rapidly Saudi Arabia has changed rapidly the United States has changed rapidly and we can see it with our own eyes some things are getting much better the UAE I think has has vastly improved in the last 20 years unfortunately my own country which I love I think has gone downhill in the last 20 years in many ways and as we look at this forth turning and we look at the way that the world is shaking up and we look at this chaos we have to think what is it going to look like in the future what does the next five years and 10 years hold for us I think that we're either going to go down a path of more tyranny and more oppression or a path of more freedom and more human rights and that's what this technology is all about at its core it's about rejecting centralized power structures it's about rejecting tyranny and the force of governments and other institutions on people and empowering people on an individual level and that to me is much more powerful and much more worthwhile than the monetary gains that a lot of people focus on and I think that there's a lot of things that we should do as an industry to push back against the tyranny of government and use this technology for to make the world better the Fiat money system at its core is a broken system it's a system that prints money from thin air and gives it to cronies all over the world bombs people all over the world devalues the the purchasing power of every single holder of the US dollar and everybody who holds any currency that's linked to the US dollar including the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and many other countries and that's deeply evil it's evil because it's devaluating uh people's money and it's also doing things that we would never support voluntarily we would never support if if they came to the average American taxpayer and said oh please give me $70,000 to imprison somebody for a victimless crime or please give me $100,000 so that I can buy bombs to bomb somebody all over the world people would reject it so instead they do the easier method which is just print more money from thin air and give it to their cronies and this should be absolutely rejected and I think that we should push forward as an industry to embrace the principles of freedom and we should reject things like AML kyc for example AML kyc is completely and totally illegitimate so we're accredited investor rules so is licensing these things don't belong in a civilized society and many people just take it as some sort of given that this is the way the world works and always has worked but it hasn't it's an anomaly what the the recent history of the last 30 years is a is an anomaly it's a failed experiment when I started my career at Morgan Stanley 30 years ago I could open a bank account with you or I could open a brokerage account with you over the phone I didn't need your driver's license I didn't need your date of birth I didn't need your social security number and you didn't even have to pay for a week but now like frogs in boiling water they've piled these regulations on top of regulations on top of regulations on us for decades now and stifled our freedom and there's an entire new generation of people anybody who started their career in the last 20 years thinks that this is the way it's supposed to be that the economy needs to work this way that we need these kind of overbearing regulations on Commerce and I'm here to tell you that we don't it's a failed experiment it has not worked it has not stopped fraud it cannot stop fraud and it's not a legitimate role of government to even try it's never been tried even by the greatest T tyrants in history they never had this idea that they needed to be in between a transaction and saying where did you get your money and where is your money going to that's a completely new and failed ideology and from the United States this has been exported to the rest of the world I love my country but I love my country for what it was when it was the greatest country it was and what we're doing now is not what made us the greatest country we were when the United States had a higher moral High Ground to claim our position as being a free country that's when we the greatest nation that we've ever been and instead we have gone down a completely different course that is unrecognizable to me as an americ this ideas of AML kyc getting into people's uh business and figuring out what they doing invading the privacy of every single person in this room exporting these bad ideas to the world it's a very new and very failed idea and we see this again and again with the regulation regimes around the world we see it in the United States the United States has Sam bankman freed who had just about every kind of license you could imagine he was licensed by authorities here he was licensed by authorities in the United States in Australia in Singapore in Japan in Australia and every single one of them failed every single one of them failed he had unprecedented access to the halls of power in the United States because he stole money from clients and donated it to Joe Biden the the the boss of Gary Gensler the chairman of the SEC no one else in our industry ever got the access that Sam did why because it's a corrupt and broken system and any rational person would look at this and say that this should be completely entirely disgarded the my friends tell me oh Bruce don't say that you got to be diplomatic you've got to you got to take it easy but that's wrong I reject it I'm here to speak truth these things are all illegitimate it is not an IL legitimate use of government Force to force everybody in this room to do paperwork and burden these companies with millions and millions of dollars of compliance cost it's not legitimate it's violent it's inherently evil the reason it's violent is because these regulations are backed by the point of a gun if you one of our great heroes in America is Rosa Parks a woman who refused to get in the back of the bus because she'd had the wrong skin color I love this person I love this this mentality somebody who says no I'm not going to do it but if you do that with AML kyc someone will come to you with a gun someone will eventually put you in a cage and they have no moral right to do that because you have harmed no one else by simply not doing paperwork and meanwhile we have scammers and fraudsters who go free because so many resources of so many millions of people are focusing on these ridiculous paperwork violations that are completely and totally ineffective they didn't stop Sam bankman freed they didn't stop Bernie moff our other largest fraud s in history in the United States Bernie maof was the chairman of the largest regulator in the United States NASDAQ regulation they changed their name maybe partly because they were embarrassed but he was he was the head of the largest regulator in the world and he committed one of the largest frauds the entire regime is completely illegitimate it's ineffective it doesn't do anything to stop the fraud or the crime or the things that they say that it will do but what it does do it stops a thousand flowers from blooming it stops all kinds of businesses from ever existing it creates artificial weird things like this whole silly meme economy because it's so difficult to do real world assets and do actual sec Securities because the Securities laws in the United States are so burdensome and that foolish idea has been exported just like these ridiculous and onerous kyc AML regulations and other regulations this isn't the way the world is supposed to be and this technology offers the promise for a better world it offers inherent privacy when it's programmed right it offers decentralization where we're not relying on trusted centralized parties and centralized Powers it's putting power in the hands of the people your own ability to run a node your own ability to verify what is true without looking to an authority to do it and in the case of Bitcoin it starves the Beast of this broken very violent very corrupt money system that prints money from thin air and causes vast Death Around the World when we are old and gray if we're fortunate enough to make it to those years we're going to look back at this time of great change and our children and grandchildren may ask us what did we do in this fourth turning what did we do in these times of Epic change and transformation did we pick up the best airdrop do the coolest trade on a meme or did we fight for freedom and use technology and the cipher Punk ideals to make the world a better place and tear down tyranny and move forward I know what my answer is I'm absolutely all for using this technology to make the world a better place and I think that's the most rewarding thing that we can do as humans I think that's the most rewarding thing we can do as members of this industry is to embrace technology as a way to have a revolution a revolution that is not with bombs or guns but a revolution that is with math and code a revolution that was created by a bunch of nerdy libertarian Geeks right down the street at the DFC 11 years ago and 12 years ago and in the halls of San Francisco before it fell apart in a cesspool of tyranny and socialism and that is what our industry is all about it's about moving forward and making the world a better place and I hope that you'll join me in Remembering those ideals and what this is all about thank you