[Music]
[Music]
i really like it down here
i live right literally right by the
world trade center i walk home i live
above it
actually
my ankle bracelet tells the government
where i am
every second of the day any time of the
day but it's going to come off
when i go to prison i think and i don't
think i'm wearing this in prison so
that's what that's what the plan is for
[Applause]
that
[Music]
so
closing numbers on the markets today at
one point the market
fell as if down a well it was an
historic day with wall street
shaken to its very foundation and even
the health of the most
trusted firms are now being called into
question
we have former secretaries of treasury
who go from government to wall street
pocketing hundreds of millions of
dollars
in 2008 i became somewhat obsessed with
the role
that money itself played in the crisis
and the role that governments and banks
played in money
and why was it that our money was
controlled by central banks
if something new happens is the
government likely to
give it a nod or at least ignore it for
a while or is the government likely to
come down and try to crush it because
they're afraid of anything new and
different
this is a monetary revolution
bitcoin is the honest currency
[Music]
so
okay this past week we've been talking
about money
i'm going to ask everybody what you
think money is can you give me some
answers now
money is like paper
and you can like buy stuff with it so
you have to have like four quarters for
a dollar
you need money to buy your house like
food
water oxygen not accident
money is basically just an accounting
system it is a way of recording
who owns what who has what who owes what
to whom
that is all money really is and
you needed somebody who could stand as
the central issuer
somebody who was the trusted third party
someone who could guarantee that the
money
was real and for hundreds of years now
we have had governments
issue money again money is just an
accounting system
that's what bitcoin is bitcoin is really
just an accounting system it is a way of
recording transactions recording value
and it does it digitally so you and i
can send it to each other
directly and everything is recorded in
the open ledger
by monitoring and updating that ledger
in a collective
consensus based system uh you do away
with the need for
somebody in the middle having to be the
sort of repository of all the
information
and that's what gets away from the fees
the inefficiencies
and ultimately the potential for
corruption and
risk that come with centralizing
information in that way
what it does is it takes that that
trusted third-party function
and it automates it it puts it into an
open ledger
that is put online that is there for
anybody to see
so that every bitcoin is accounted for
so that you know that you're not getting
a counterfeit bitcoin
it's kind of remarkable that this idea
of bitcoin
was launched just a few weeks after
lehman brothers went bankrupt and the
whole
system nearly collapsed and the
problems that cropped up in the crisis
were very much a part of
the writings of satoshi nakamoto i think
what the crisis showed is that
the existing system had some major flaws
it wasn't working
and people were hungry for some sort of
alternative
[Music]
i discovered bitcoin's power when i
understood for the first time that it
was not controlled by a central company
or
a central person because i knew that
meant it couldn't be shut down
and if it can't get shut down all it
needs is to do something useful
and it will become more and more adopted
and as the value grows people find more
and more uses for it
the beauty of bitcoin is it's easily
transferable it's anonymous
and by 2140 there's going to be 21
million and that's the cap
there's only x amount of gold there's
only x amount of bitcoin
before if you wanted to send something
of value across the internet you had to
get somebody else involved
you had to have a credit card company or
paypal
or maybe a bank involved in the
transaction
the promise of bitcoin is that you're
directly sending
this currency to another person and then
the bitcoin network
performs the function that normally
paypal or bank or your credit card
company would perform bitcoin really
puts the control back
in the hands of everybody everybody
who's participating the bitcoin system
is controlling how it works
if you want to look for the genesis of
cryptocurrency uh it was a cypherpunk
movement you know growing out of a kind
of a love of the internet and its
possibilities
the discovery of cryptography and
imagining that you could actually
uh give birth to a new world really out
of the internet
um that a world that lives outside of
the nation state and outside the
structures of power and the hierarchies
that are associated with that
these people had talked about the need
and the possibility for a digital
currency that was anonymous or could be
anonymized
using cryptography the cypherpunks that
emerged in the early 90s
were hyper concerned about privacy about
personal liberty and a lot of people
come up with their own systems
some of them came very close to
happening the one that probably came
the closest was digicash from david
choum privacy of payments
is actually essential for democracy the
reason is
not because you need to be able to make
private payments in order to express
yourself but rather
that in order to inform yourself you may
need to
purchase information and that's the
thing that allows you to have opinions
uh worth expressing although i wouldn't
say david chom was a cyberpunk
he definitely inspired the cypherpunk
movements it's as if
the cypherpunks kind of came upon david
chom's tools
like the technology of some alien
species
and they only took the weapons they were
most interested in
the ones that could be used to
disempower the government and empower
individuals
the break between him and the
cypherpunks came when he realized he
would need
existing institutions to help him with
it so he started talking to governments
he started talking to banks he was
very close to having this thing happen
in the late 90s
and nobody was really prepared for this
outside of the cypherpunk movement
people seemed like had almost sort of
given up on the project other than a few
experiments here and there by hal finney
uh
nick sabo the conversation around this
really died down
and then all of a sudden it came back to
life
after the financial crisis and you had
people
going back to those experiments in the
1990s and looking at new ways of putting
those ideas together
uh nixabo in 2006 had just finished up a
midlife stint at law school and
if you look at nick's writing around the
financial crisis
that it really revived his interest
in these ideas that you know he'd been
working on in the 1990s with
privacy and contracts and the problems
of governments and other trusted third
parties
and he brought bitgold back into the
conversation
so how finney came up with his own
system adam back has
hash cash way die has b money zabo has
big gold
so what satoshi did in 2008 was satoshi
took a lot of these ideas
and made them work and created an
encryption-based protocol it's not
really a currency
utilizing a ledger called the blockchain
allowing for
many kinds of transactions to occur
contracts all kinds of things can be
built into the blockchain
and it does this through a system of
consensus building
where multiple computers all
participate in the the management of the
blockchain
ledger the kind of digital document if
you will that keeps track of all the
payments
[Music]
i understand it's something that is
instantaneous
online and it can go from one country to
the other and
you know they have their money well i
never heard of it until
nancy called me and mentioned digital
currency and i'm thinking she must have
been in the bottle this morning or
something
yeah what what you know but they say
it's for people who don't have bank
accounts
i can't understand if you have one coin
that's let's say it's worth
150 um what do you do
give the number or something to the say
the grocery store person
and then they subtract it how do you
know how do you
make change how do you know what you
have left or what you've spent
you can have the money supply controlled
by a computer that's all bitcoin really
is the key point here is that this is a
distributed ledger
there is no central server all the other
ledgers that we have all banking ledgers
all
company ledgers they all sit and reside
inside that company which means they
have
one point of attack they can be hacked
jp morgan was was hacked by
you know cyber thieves not so long ago
home depot target we've had all these
companies get hacked precisely because
there's one central repository of
information
the bitcoin ledger resides on you know
thousands of computers
you can't hack that every single
transaction is recorded and once it is
recorded in the blockchain
it is there it is permanent it cannot be
altered it cannot be changed so that you
can read it now the identities of the
people are encrypted the wallets are
encrypted
so you don't know who is spending the
money but you know that every single
bitcoin out there
has a history you know where it's been
you know the different addresses it's
gone between
the most important pieces of the bitcoin
infrastructure
are the miners these are the computers
that are tasked
with maintaining the ledger of the
blockchain to verify the information to
update it
to make sure that this is trustworthy so
how do we incentivize them to do so
as they are going through the process of
confirming transactions they are
simultaneously
being subjected to a very very difficult
computing test the bitcoin core protocol
is
is forcing them to look for a number
all of these miners are ultimately
competing to be the one that receives
that
payout every 10 minutes but really
that's the secondary component they're
really being rewarded with bitcoin
but what is the more important task and
that is the validation and verification
of transactions and the maintaining of
the ledger
bitcoin in being the first to achieve
this holy grail of decentralized
value exchange that transfers that
process of trust
to a collective agreement around a body
of
independent computers who are compelled
by an incentive
system to maintain that consensus and
firm the information to be correct
is incredibly liberating because it
means that we can do it without all
these intermediaries in all these
different realms
the most important thing behind bitcoin
is not the currency the
key factor is the blockchain nobody
expected this
you know in 2008 you know very few
people cared about it it was just the
computer scientists and the sort of
code geeks that were really interested
in
all my communication with satoshi was
ever um
by either the bitcoin talk forums which
all that
communication is public
or private forum messages or private
emails
satoshi was always all business it was
just always about
the code my very first message to
satoshi
i asked him so you know is satoshi your
real name what have you done before
can you tell me a little bit about
yourself and he just ignored that
completely
but came back and said you know great to
have more experienced programmers
helping out with the project
you know here's a couple of problems
that need to be solved maybe you can
help solve them
[Music]
in 2011 i was into bitcoin
sort of just as a hobby i didn't really
know what to do in it yet
i was trying to meet everyone i could
figure out what projects would be cool
to work on
i met roger vere sort of in august of
that year and a few months later he
recommended to this guy charlie shrem
who started bitin that
charlie should hire me as the head of
marketing for biddington
bitcoin is cash with wings it's the
ability to be able to take a local
transaction
and do it globally and that's why
bitcoin is going to overturn the
financial infrastructure
bitcoin is like the largest
socio-economic experiment the world has
ever seen
our conversations would range from you
know the mundane and practical like how
the hell are we gonna get another bank
account since our current bank account's
probably gonna get shut down any day now
two uh very high-minded aspirational
ones you know like is this actually
going to change the world
in a good way are we just a bunch of
crazy people who don't know what the
hell we're talking about or
are we actually starting to initiate an
industry
which in hindsight will look obvious to
everyone but you know right now
it's not charlie shrimp was
at that stage a fairly high profile
figure in the bitcoin community the vice
chairman of the bitcoin foundation
and you know one of these bitcoin uh
millionaires who made a lot of money
very quickly
and really played an important role in
the infrastructure of managing
the movement of funds around the system
in that you know early rudimentary phase
632 bid 654 offer in the new york cash
market for bitcoin
buyers right now will pay 632 dollars
cash
on the spot where have you been getting
your bitcoin sir
who's next for the bitcoin do i know
what bitcoin is 6.53
i don't want it again
in the last two weeks i got one-third
more dollars
if you want to go on down to 40 broad
right next door to the stock exchange
there
to the new york bitcoin center you can
buy and sell
all the time
[Music]
you have a table in the middle yeah just
one small table round
and i have flowers like a flower
arrangement a really nice flower
arrangement bitcoin flowers
coin flowers so corn flowers would be uh
white lily
purple and orange which is right here
three colors
we're putting together the first uh
bitcoin
center here in new york city right next
door to the new york stock exchange
bitcoin is a new space and many of the
rules and regulations
that haven't been imposed yet but uh
we will open one day soon
after the lawyers do their job
a live digital currency exchange
what's happening here is a fusion
between wall street
and bitcoin hopefully
satoshi seemed to acknowledge that
it would be hard for bitcoin to develop
in any way
in which it wasn't interacting with the
regular economy of dollars and euros
the problem with exchanges is that they
took you back
to this old world that bitcoin was
really trying to get away from
as soon as you move back to an exchange
you're moving back to a world in which
some third party
has all this personal data on you has
all of your money has all the security
vulnerabilities
and really has none of those strengths
that bitcoin
was designed to provide
jen mccaleb created mount gox
essentially
on a lark one night because he couldn't
buy bitcoins as quickly as he wanted to
and interestingly he did it by starting
with a url that he'd previously used to
run
a magic card trading site so you get an
idea about where some of these ideas are
coming from and how
you know really kind of rudimentary some
of them were jed
essentially threw this site together and
put it online without too much thought
uh it immediately took off like much
faster than i thought it would
and then i realized that at the u.s
there's all these regulations you have
to apply with
there's a there's a lot of like legal
risk around like money transmissions
judd essentially sold it to the first
person he found
who was mark karpeles a french guy who
was living in tokyo
he really knew very little about mark
when he decided to sell it to him
and once he took it over it began
growing much more quickly than mark was
expecting or was prepared for
he's still running it poorly but
it's still going
there are 21 million bitcoins programmed
into the system that are going to be
released it's a set number
but within that every single bitcoin can
be divided up into 100 million different
pieces
so there's room for it to expand as the
use expands especially
in the emerging markets in the
developing world that is really
the most interesting place to see where
this thing goes
so in my pocket i have 100 trillion
zimbabwe dollars
from the reserve bank of zimbabwe just
as a reminder of you know what happens
if
our government screw up our money you
know zimbabwe is a good example of a
government
that lost the trust of their people and
they lost the trust of their people by
printing too much money and
causing runaway hyperinflation so i
think you will see
you know people in other parts of the
world who've experienced hyperinflation
who've experienced
bank failures i think those will be the
kind of people
who are looking for something something
new right they're willing to take the
risk
a lot of us take the capacity to send
money to others receive money store
money
and do it electronically these days for
granted because
we are amongst the lucky 50 or so of the
world that have bank accounts
but 2.5 billion adults in the world do
not have access to bank accounts
a technology like bitcoin cryptocurrency
has the capacity
to to bring those people into the
financial system
to give them this power to effectively
have what you could argue is a bank in
their cell phone a bank in their pocket
really could open up commerce to a lot
of people who
are currently excluded from it somebody
who
is maybe working in one country and you
know they want to send money back home
and right now you know like western
union is a big way
that people do remittances from a
western union perspective we serve
clients in
many different locations around the
globe and and primarily for remittances
western union serves typically an
unbanked customer a customer who is
either a migrant
worker or a individual who doesn't feel
comfortable in the financial services
sector
and the problem with remittances is
they're really expensive so if i'm
sending 100
back home i may end up spending five or
ten dollars
just on fees to you know get that money
back to my family that's a huge
percentage if you're poor
and working so since bitcoin doesn't
care about borders
i could just send bitcoin to another
country and if if my family in that
other country has some way of spending
that bitcoin or has some way of transfer
of exchanging that bitcoin into the
local currency
uh then it's just quicker and cheaper
and more convenient and a lot of people
think that remittances will be one of
the really
big first uses for bitcoin
the one challenge there is we deal with
you know in our company 750 transactions
peak a second and those happen instantly
if you look at a blockchain you have to
wait for verifications and
if you do a recent test it takes about
15 minutes for every transaction to be
validated by the network
that doesn't scale so it has its
challenges as well
[Music]
wikileaks which solicits and publishes
secrets and suppressed material
from whistleblowers around the world has
been under cyber attack from governments
that want to shut it down
paypal is the latest business to break
ties with wikileaks
but the whistleblowing website dedicated
to publishing classified government
documents
still continues to seek funding while
crossing out paypal as one method of
payment
in order to ensure our future survival
wikileaks is now forced to temporarily
suspend
all publishing operations in order to
direct
all our resources into fighting the
blockade
and raising funds the wikileaks scandal
seemed to provide
an opportunity for bitcoin at the time
the big banks and credit cards
stopped processing payments for
wikileaks and some people thought
that bitcoin would provide a way to send
donations to wikileaks
you could certainly see in the hubbub
around wikileaks that satoshi was still
somebody who was very paranoid about the
government
and the government coming in and taking
too close a look
at the bitcoin project and you could
also see that satoshi
i think realized at this point that
bitcoin
was still young software and the kinks
hadn't been worked out yet
in i think late 2010 he asked me if it'd
be okay if
he put my email address on the
bitcoin.org homepage
because he had been the primary contact
for people
um and i said sure and he went ahead and
changed the web page and but what he did
is he he
he left his name there he took away his
email address
and so it was just me and my email
address who was suddenly getting
all of the attention and i think that
was satoshi's way
of kind of saying you know you're the
you're the leader of the project now
there was one particular email where he
told me that he was going to step away
from the project and do something else
he never told me what else
he's going to do or that he is doing i
had just been invited to give a talk at
the cia
and i told satoshi that i accepted the
invitation to go speak at the cia
after he sent that email to satoshi
telling him that he was planning on
going to the cia
he never heard from satoshi again and
that was essentially the last time
anybody heard from satoshi
you very quickly get caught up in the
question of who is satoshi nakamoto
where did this come from who is this
person i mean this is the 2000s
information is out there everything
everyone knows everything
about everybody how can there possibly
be a person that nobody knows who this
guy is
but there is a person and at least they
think it's a person it might be a group
who nobody knows who this guy is and he
kind of appears out of nowhere in 2008
on these cryptography email lists
with this system called bitcoin he's
very active in the early years
there's a lot of back and forth with him
communicating with people
it seemed like most people kind of wrote
them off it's kind of like a
illusions of grandeur kind of scheme hal
finney
on the other hand seemed to be really
interested right from the beginning
he was a crypto idealist like he was not
as kind of cynical as many of the other
cypherpunks so he got really into this
he started talking to satoshi nakamoto
who he said
seemed like some young japanese american
coder hal finney was the first guy to
work with nakamoto
he was a cryptographer as soon as
nakamoto released it he was one of the
first people to email him back and say
hey this is interesting i'd like to work
with you
and in the first weeks of bitcoin he
worked with him back and forth setting
up the system
and satoshi nakamoto ended up sending
half any the first ever bitcoin
transaction
any discussion of satoshi's identity has
to go back to the fact that bitcoin
was based on this small number of
projects back in the 1990s that only
a handful of people knew about like hash
cash and bit gold and b
money and so you end up with a pretty
small
group of people who would have
known about these projects people
thought chom david chong was and you
know
everybody in the cypherpunk movement at
one point or another they've said well
he must have been satoshi
they've all come out and denied it
probably somebody who started out in the
90s in california with the cypherpunks
somebody who was very very good at
cryptography who understands encryption
and has done a wonderful job of just
separating
bitcoin from anything that can identify
him
i think for bitcoin's sake the
continuing anonymity of satoshi
has ended up being a really good thing
because
people who have gotten involved in it
have been able to write
their own ideas and dreams onto this
technology and there was nobody there to
say
no that's not what i meant
[Music]
in the early early days the first group
was really just a bunch of
more or less tech-minded coders
then you had the libertarians come on
board who saw it through a political
lens
i'm excited to be a little bit of part
of it with allowing
and accepting bitcoin and then you had
these two groups working together and
they overlapped too
and the timing was very good because the
existing system was in utter disrepair
it was like a match to a pile of wood
with gasoline pour on top of it and the
whole thing kind of really goes viral
and takes off
and then you have the suits the vc money
and it was very small at first just a
couple guys out in silicon valley
who ran into bitcoin guys at coffee
houses
and you started having this meshing of
conversations once silicon valley gets
on board that
whole dynamic starts to take off so now
you have
the tech-minded coders the libertarians
the counter-culture people the vc
silicon valley and you have this entire
great mishmash of people
coming together you had a network effect
the more people that got involved
the stronger the network got and the
more it grew and it really started
growing on itself
and in 2013 especially you would
literally see this thing mushroom the
thing was just
growing growing and growing and growing
as more and more people got involved
[Music]
i think most bitcoin companies at the
time
knew that a big part of the market for
bitcoins
was people buying drugs on silk road who
needed bitcoins to do that
the big bang moment for bitcoin was the
silk road
what ross albrick did by creating the
silk road was he took
this by no means common but usable
cryptocurrency called bitcoin and he
married it with a streamlined
workable user interface that was a free
market that could sell
anything
what would happen if people were really
free truly free
to trade what they wanted to ross did
have an extremely
radical libertarian viewpoint
and really wanted to experiment with
using technology
to create free markets for people what
ross albrick did it's a combination of
tor and bitcoin that was the aha moment
that ross must have had
the silk road was basically the fruition
of all of the
cypherpunk dreams the cryptoanarchist
utopia that they had imagined in the 90s
you know
was real now this was a perfectly
in theory anonymous website with
perfectly in theory anonymous money
used to buy any contrabands imaginable
the silk road website is a particular
headache for authorities
it's an anonymous online marketplace
where people sell drugs that are posted
to customers
all over the world cyber investigators
you know when there's a crime
can kind of trace you back because you
have an ip address it's like a telephone
number so if you call another computer
that ip address is tracked on tor that's
taken away
because your information hops from
computer to computer computers and
there's no way to trace you back to your
original one
tor is an anonymous
system so if you use the tor browser
which it has a browser you can go to tor
and download their browser
you can browse with some degree of
security so that's
great for plugging your banking
information into a site so you don't get
hacked
the other component of tor which is has
similar uses is called tor hidden
services
tor hidden services is actually
to put it simply a url that doesn't have
com on the end it has dot onion
and that is its own little space where
you can create
websites and you could freely transact
without oversight or regulation
people put websites on there that are
outside of law enforcement's view
there's hackers for hire there was
malware there was
credit card dump services there was a
whole bunch of them
chris tarbell has ended up being in some
ways the most
important fbi digital crime
investigator of the last few years he
was the one who took down
anonymous essentially so we decided to
start looking at some of the services on
tour
and silk road being one of them other
cases they would hit tor
and they would kind of throw their hands
in the air and say it's tour there's not
much we can do about it
i found it interesting to kind of take a
look at it and tackle it
vinstin was basically born because if
you want to move your dollars into a
bitcoin exchange it takes
you know at least three days and since
the major exchange of mount cox was in
tokyo it could take a week or more
so that's really problematic um and
basically charlie
had figured out that if he just held a
balance of dollars
at the exchange you could go to him and
say charlie i'll give you a hundred
dollars
will you give me a hundred dollars of
credit at the exchange and you can
literally then have your dollars at the
exchange
in 10 seconds as opposed to a week so
that's hugely helpful especially when
bitcoin is so volatile and you need to
know exactly what price you're gonna get
charlie was raising capital
uh right is sort of i i joined during
that process
he came across lots of interested
investors who are starting to get a
whiff that maybe
this bitcoin thing was was cool we had
an interesting debate early on
about um do we invest in bitcoin or
bitcoin companies
and we sort of decided to do both more
towards investing in actually bitcoin in
the asset early days
but also trying to place a few bets in
the ecosystem
to support the companies support the
entrepreneurs
and and see how that went a few days
after they first
found out about bitcoin they were in the
bit instant offices
in new york meeting with eric and
charlie
and eric and charlie uh essentially
talked them through bitcoin and answered
all of their questions and concerns
what made you invest in bit instant
there are a lot of companies and
exchanges and websites
with respect to bitcoin regulation is
obviously a big question
what you do want is a company that sort
of takes that seriously and understands
that there's the technology element
um there's building the company and then
there's also creating the company that
works with regulators
and so that's been instant it's not this
sort of completely underground
thing i mean charlie the ceo happens to
have been in the space for a long time
so he's sort of on the pulse and the
cutting edge you know you come out and
you say like we want this bitcoin thing
to overturn everything
but at the same time we have to be
compliant and we have to know you have
to know your customer
you have to know every single customer
no matter what even if they're
transferring
a dollar or a thousand dollars and how
reasonable is that the term money
laundering was invented by banks
and knowing your customer shouldn't be
this complicated expensive thing
and you shouldn't treat everyone like a
criminal at the beginning
they really wanted us involved people
were really friendly because
it benefits you to onboard more people
in so
bitcoin's always been this very friendly
community and it's also
in in some ways it's it's self-serving
that way but
we were there for the right reasons at
the time
bit instant was the big company other
than mount goffs
it was the way that most americans were
able to buy bitcoins
here it is so bit instant was located
right
there i think it's the one that now says
bling
it was a whirlwind six months going from
total obscurity with
with no money to becoming you know one
of the hot startups of bitcoin
but almost as soon as the twins made
their investment in the company
it began falling apart the twins had a
much more practical approach to bitcoin
and bit instant
they wanted to see the company making
money and making as much money as it
could as quickly as it could
they saw early on that it would be
regulated that it wasn't going to be
this big
and have no one be interested in
regulating it so
they feared that all kinds of regulators
would come in
at all different angles and tie the
thing up in a complete morass
where nothing would ever get done so
they wanted to
help drive the regulation so that
whatever regulation would be there would
work
and would not end up being a complete
dead end for bitcoin
that strategy is smarter from purely a
business perspective
but i'm not in this purely from business
perspective i am in this for business
and
because i'm trying to change the world
and make it better and building bitcoin
companies and begging for regulation
that matches exactly the banking
regulation that has caused so many
problems
i feel like is counterproductive for the
most part
bit instant was actually taking steps
to make sure that people weren't using
the service
for illegal purposes but charlie made
the mistake in dealing with btc
king of acknowledging that he knew
what btc king was doing and that he was
acquiring bitcoins to sell them to silk
road customers
in this case charlie worked with the guy
and wrote emails that essentially
acknowledged he knew
what this guy was up to
[Music]
[Music]
that stunning arrest of the drug kingpin
who goes by the name dread pirate
roberts appears to have cornered
the internet drug market his real name
is ross albrecht and his website silk
road
is packed with products like cocaine and
heroin the payment system is all through
bitcoins which is basically
digital currency not backed up by any
international banks not backed up by any
u.s
banks but simply based on the confidence
of the users who exchange these bitcoins
computer to computer
[Music]
there's a reason why the case was tried
in new york in the southern district
and largely that was because of bitcoin
[Music]
ross was caught in san francisco the
silk road servers
were out of the country so why was
ross's case tried in the southern
district of new york
where most of the financial regulations
cases are dealt with
where the district of attorney preet
bharara has been all over bitcoin
where charles schumer the senator has
been all over bitcoin ross albrecht's
case
is a bitcoin case there's absolutely no
denying it
the the level of threat that the silk
road posed
to the marketplace to wall street
whether it's a perceived threat or an
actual threat
was humongous and the idea
that somebody could create a marketplace
where
you could freely transact without
oversight or regulation
had to be dealt a massive and public
blow
bitcoin kind of monetized that
anonymous part of the internet and made
it possible to trade in things that
the federal government doesn't want you
to trade in
law enforcement moves slowly but it's
it's a big heavy wheel that grinds
finally so
you know someone was running a hidden
service and now they're in prison for
life
they were playing hardball it was very
evident that their
intention as the judge herself said in
her sentencing
was to make an example out of ross was
to say to all of you people using
bitcoin
to all of you people who want to tangle
with unregulated
um marketplaces and technologies and
open source you know cryptocurrencies
we will throw the book in its entirety
at you if you do this
we seized a whole bunch of bitcoins and
in order to sell those bitcoins off or
or go to an exchange
you have to fit within federal law and
state law
there's not really an exchange that
could handle that that met those
regulations at the current time so
it had to be handled through auction
[Music]
you know anything about bitcoins there's
a article
in there wall street journal today
on bitcoins really right here
if you want to read it it is
digital currency do you see that wow oh
digital currencies will disrupt global
finance transform the way we pay for
things
and just maybe make the world a fairer
place
from what i read on the computer they
have had some problems
it does say here it's a hand for drug
dealers
wow the reason is because you can't
track it
well i think i don't like this idea at
all
[Music]
when we saw the silk road shut down a
lot of people
said you know bitcoin is nothing but
illegal drugs on the internet that's
what it
is and they would point at the silk road
and say look here at all the stuff
that's happening here
and i think when you saw the silk road
shut down
in bitcoin transaction volume take a
tiny little dip
and then keep going up you know i think
that was
that was a great event to point at and
say you know it
it really wasn't about that it really
isn't about that
you know it's a tiny little part of the
economy
[Music]
i guess in the last week i've really
started hearing about bitcoin
recently i heard a scenario after the
fbi had seized a bunch of
bitcoins due to illegal transactions now
they're going to be auctioning them off
like they would a
private yacht for you know from some
drug dealer
so that in a way legitimizes the
use of it as a currency
[Music]
looks like it's the first live
bitcoin exchange on wall street
it looks that way
[Music]
right now we are looking at the open
interest
at the floor of the bitcoin exchange
there's different
exchanges that are online that will
present the bid and ask but there's no
true
open outcry exchange buyers and sellers
coming together
in an open clear transparent honest way
here's my transaction probably the first
two transactions of the day
it's really not about the money it's
about being involved and i think there's
a lot more people going to follow me
charlie shrump 24 years old arrested
today and charged with engaging in money
laundering
sram enabled people to transfer money
from bitcoin to cash via his company
called bit
instant now the other point the dea is
making is that
shrem bought drugs online at silk road
and that he knew
silk road was a trafficking website and
we know the winklevoss twins who
obviously were featured
in the movie about facebook they're
actually investors in sram's company
yeah you know a lot of people are very
excited by this idea they like the idea
that you can have a currency that is not
tied to any kind of central bank
but at the same time i mean think about
it if you're in the federal government
you don't like the idea that people
could effectively use
another form of cash to buy things that
they shouldn't be buying online
with me it wasn't all my customers
it was one customer out of about a
hundred thousand customers this was one
customer
one thing and i made that case to my
senator i said your honor
this was one customer it happened that
literally i was coming home from
amsterdam
it was my sweatshirt i was still stoned
i don't know what's going on
charlie did not know when to shut up and
that ended up getting him in trouble and
probably led to the end of his company
but they got me into the patriot act and
it's money laundering because i knew
that the money i was taking
was eventually possibly going to be used
for drug trafficking now drug
trafficking is not buying drugs it's
selling drugs
i didn't have the drug seller i helped
the guy buy drugs
but i never went to trial because
and i pled guilty because who wins at
trial you know like this guy's still
growing he's gonna
go to life and in trial all i need to
get was a lady who
son died from a cocaine overdose and i
would have the jury would have convicted
me right there
so essentially charlie was selling
bitcoins to a guy who was selling
bitcoins to people
who were putting drugs into their own
bodies
um and for this charlie was charged with
crimes that could have
put him in jail for 20 years that's what
the prosecutors were shooting for
we have banks that have atms on every
street corner in america
and those banks know very well that that
cash is getting used for drugs
and yet that's fine they're allowed to
do that no one gets in trouble
but charlie sells bitcoin to a guy who
sells bitcoin to someone who uses drugs
and he goes to jail
he was an entrepreneur that started
building this industry
built services that people found useful
when bankers almost destroyed the world
economy
and none of them got in trouble
whatsoever
and here we have this 23 year old kid he
goes to jail because he
started building an alternative
over the last six months our agency has
been conducting an extensive inquiry
into virtual currency
the information we're going to gather in
this fact-finding effort
will allow us to put forward during the
course of 2014
a proposed regulatory framework for
virtual currency firms operating in new
york
yesterday we had serious criminal
conduct
come to light involving virtual currency
as a vehicle from money laundering
drug trafficking and other major
felonies right now the regulation of
virtual currency industry
is still akin to a virtual wild west
that's why we're evaluating whether our
agency should issue a so-called
bit license specifically tailored to
virtual currencies
i think people who imagine a
very powerful utility like bitcoin that
would somehow escape
regulation entirely are
either naive or extreme
optimist bitcoin is a battle of ideas
and it forces the issue of whether
people should be
as free in their handling of money as
they are in their handling of speech
or religion or relationships with each
other if you want
to have this thing go mainstream you're
going to have to have the regulators the
lawmakers weigh
in on it one of the first ones who
really took an interest was benjamin
lowsky
very important regulator in the
financial world and in january 2014
holds these public hearings
because he wants to come up with a
license for bitcoin companies
we believe that putting in place
appropriate regulatory safeguards for
virtual currencies
will ultimately be beneficial to the
long-term strength of the industry
itself
lossy was essentially given the
opportunity
to write the rules for this whole new
industry from scratch
the first question is the obvious one
that's on everyone's mind it was sort of
unexpected yesterday
but with the arrests we saw obviously
that's
put a bit of a cloud hanging over the
industry right now and so
how do each of you react to what we saw
yesterday
what it means for bitcoin or virtual
currency and its future
i think it further supports that um bad
guys are going to do
bad things and they're going to use
whatever technology is available to them
but i view it as if the allegations are
true and they're convicted
the system works are people still doing
bad things with bitcoin
sure is the majority of the bitcoin
activity vice
not a chance so i think the issue you
raise is one
um that people like to write about the
media likes to write about makes great
headlines you get a lot of clicks you
can sell a lot of ads
but i think it's in in the rear view
mirror
there are some people in the bitcoin
community from the libertarian
side of things that want government to
just leave it alone
would you say regulation is both
inevitable but more importantly actually
ultimately going to be crucial for the
survival of virtual currency sounds like
a terrible idea to me
uh just understand what we're trying to
do with bitcoin we're trying to create a
world
where transactions can move globally for
free
okay and making these companies hire
you know some outsourced compliance firm
is is a bad idea
it'd be great in any industry if you
could just open the door and let folks
run out and give a shot we may choose
not to invest in a company
if they can't get licensed by you
if the choice ultimately is between
preventing money laundering on the one
hand then i probably even shouldn't use
the word money laundering because it's
too nice a word frankly
money laundering is the facilitation of
all kinds of horrific crimes that i
think everyone in this room
never wants to see happen acts of
terrorism funding rogue nations etc
all take place through massive money
laundering now the choice for the
regulator is
permit money laundering on the one hand
or
permit uh innovation on the other
we're always going to choose squelching
the money laundering first
um i agree that that i don't think
anybody wants money laundering
um when we got him first
saw bitcoin you know about a year and a
half almost two years ago i don't think
anybody would deny that it was a bit of
a while out west because there was no
regulation there was no framework
to evaluate the asset evaluate companies
determine who is compliant who is not
and a wild west you know attracts
cowboys and i don't think anybody here
would disagree with the fact that a
sheriff would be a good thing
a lot of i think the entrepreneurs feel
like they have to self-censor they don't
want to come out
vocally critical of the regulations part
of that is maybe because some of them
just like regulations but i think
another part of it some of them just
feel like they will get attention of the
regulators if they come out against them
yes we want them to innovate but at the
same time we just can't live in a world
where we're going to permit
money laundering to go on i think
regulators should give bitcoin some time
to grow up
too much regulation now will just stifle
innovation
and i think before regulators kind of
come in and say we're going to solve all
your problems
and then fail to solve all our problems
i think they should give
the innovators time to solve those
problems
one function of regulation is to make
things clearer
so right now bitcoin because it's so new
is in a state of flux
everywhere the lesson from the internet
is
anything that china bans invest in
and that's a joke but the u.s
allows google to operate here allows
twitter to operate here allows bitcoin
to operate here allows facebook to
operate here
chinese government doesn't allow any of
those companies to operate
the way they operate in this country or
at all
it's about freedom ultimately you know
we're
50 yards from the old world trade center
here and
i think all of us never want to see
anything like that happen again and it
would have been a lot harder for 9 11 to
ever
occurred had we had the protections in
place that would prevent the movement of
massive amounts of money
around the globe by people who would
want to kill everybody in this room so
um
i think the key is to not create useless
regulation but i think
the motives behind a lot of those rules
are
to ensure uh we don't miss something
again
since 2001 there's this absurd
obsession with terrorism so anytime a
regular gets up and says well bitcoin
can be used for terrorism
well of course it can so can anything so
can cell phones and soak in the internet
and soak in a car
it doesn't mean that we should you know
stifle the growth of those industries
just because bad people can use it
[Music]
this has arguably been the worst week in
the cryptocurrency short life
stunned by the collapse of once dominant
exchange mount gox
now that failed firm ceo mark karpeles
is
in hiding some 750 000 bitcoins
allegedly stolen or lost which accounts
for about six percent
of the total circulation
by the time mount cox went down it was
holding
what its customers believed were about a
half a billion dollars worth of their
bitcoins
and the company's bitcoins it was no
longer the largest exchange
in the world but part of what's so
amazing is that
people kept using it even after there
had been
numerous incidents in which it was clear
that the company was not
up to the task of safeguarding the money
and the only reason he survived as long
as he did was because in 2013 the price
started going up
people kept putting money into it he had
more and more money because the price
was going up
but as soon as the price started going
down this is what happened right it
peaks
in late 2013 starts coming down in 2014
as soon as that price started coming
down it all just tumbled for him
gox was going to collapse that it lasted
as long as it did
was actually kind of a stroke of fate
but its failure was it didn't have
the kind of more boring mainstream
institutional controls that we require
to bring it to the next level
and there's a whole bunch of money
missing and no one knows if they just
lost it
if it was stolen from them if they uh
embezzled it or what
but the important lesson from gox isn't
that bitcoin doesn't work
the important lesson from gox is that
you don't leave your money with a
trusted third party because you can't
always
trust them you can only trust them until
you can't this was also a lesson that
people were supposed to learn during the
financial crisis but
they don't seem to have learned it yet
[Music]
mark carpales was a gamer
he was not a finance pro he
really didn't know what he was doing and
he didn't he didn't build it jed
mikhailov built it
he didn't improve upon it i mean it
lurched from crisis to crisis throughout
the entire history
last year was a terrible year uh
for bitcoin an especially terrible year
for the foundation because we had two of
the people on our board of
directors who had to resign in disgrace
basically
you know my my expertise is technology
my expertise is not figuring out like
who's trustworthy who's not you know
which businesses are going to succeed
which businesses are going to fail
after we had held our hearings we
thought we would take
six months to nine months even a year to
draft our initial regulations this was
so complicated that we wanted to really
take our time and get it right
uh what happened was though mount cox
collapsed
and i think that gave us a real renewed
sense of urgency
and we realized that if we got
regulation right we could
create more confidence in bitcoin
frankly as opposed to the sort of loss
of confidence you saw
uh not only from the silk road case but
also from the collapse of malcox
so your sense though of the regulators
right now
i assume you've had conversations with
the discussions that we've had um
i think everybody recognizes the
innovation and doesn't want to stifle it
they just want to make sure that there's
healthy regulation so it's used in a
safe and uh
and productive manner
i'm not giving up on new york new york's
giving up on me i can't even turn on a
bitcoin machine
an atm i can't turn it on i can't make
trades i can't do anything
there's no cash flow at all
and it's potential regulation it's uh
regulation that i should believe is
coming down the uh
pipe i don't want to do anything that
someone's frowning upon
right next door to the stock market
they're going to lock me up
you know you can't have an exchange well
we don't people meet then exchange with
each other
new york's sitting there on the high
horse and the whole world's waiting
on new york to create some [ __ ]
license
ultimately lowsky's office brought out
the final rules for the bit license in
the spring of 2015.
a lot of companies complained that the
regulations were too burdensome for them
to operate in new york and still make
money
i saw just overnight dozens of companies
that were on the verge of launching
they just threw in the towel said we
can't can't afford this eric voorhees
new company shapeshift
would have had to apply for the bit
license if it wanted to keep customers
in new york
so in my lab here i have the the
application forms for license to engage
in virtual currency business activity
which is a very statist way of of saying
the the bit license this is
this is the application to be approved
to
do basically what we've all been doing
for years now which is building bitcoin
companies in new york
and a lot of stuff in here i personally
feel is unethical so we're not going to
comply with it which means we have to
block new yorkers entirely
and when an entire new industry starts
blocking a place like new york that used
to be the
financial center of the world hopefully
some of those politicians will take
notice
the point of it is to one make sure
there are enough consumer protections
to make sure we have adequate cyber
security three
make sure that the companies are
adequately capitalized
so they don't collapse upon themselves
you know you've seen
a tug of war between the hardliners and
those who are saying you know you've got
to have enough space for innovation in
here
and the system has has come out i think
probably stronger
as a result of that and there's a
widespread view amongst
certainly the business bitcoin community
that some level of regulation
gives legitimacy to what they're doing
it gives people confidence in what
they're doing
this is an important part of growing up
ultimately they're not going to get it
right because no
regulation is ever right but i'm highly
confident that whatever
um happens going forward um the bit
license
will be looked at as a as a positive
development in the evolution of bitcoin
because it just removed one of the
biggest pieces of uncertainty which is
how is this industry going to be
regulated i think most of us
at least a lot of us think that
sensible regulation that sets guidelines
that makes sure
people's money doesn't uh just go into a
black hole that that's a really
important
thing that regulation i'm sure
satoshi wouldn't be happy to see this
kind of thing which is not based on the
the logic and reason that a programmer
is used to
i think a lot of developers
understandably so try to stay out of the
political nonsense it has been one of
the biggest mysteries raging across the
internet who
is satoshi nakamoto newsweek published
an article claiming the man in these
images is the bitcoin founder
the man who created bitcoin is known as
the father of bitcoin the online
currency
now worth billions when you asked him
about bitcoin and he says i can't talk
about this
anymore he was not referring to bitcoin
but with me he definitely acknowledged
bitcoin i think at this point now he's
saying he was confused by the
conversation
clearly somebody thought that we did
this into an act of war
against satoshi nakamoto or bitcoin and
i want to be very clear that
i certainly never meant it that way i
have nothing to do with
bitcoin it was a monstrous story how did
they figure it out
oh my god look at this guy that they
named his name is dorian satoshi
nakamoto
living in california basically hiding in
plain sight it becomes a gigantic media
scramble
and then dorian emerges from his house
looking kind of disheveled looking kind
of confused
and he says he's not satoshi nakamoto
says he's never heard of bitcoin he
doesn't understand he had one
conversation with leah she misunderstood
what he said she took it the wrong way
and you probably would have had to have
been a cypherpunk to understand all the
elements of it that had already been put
together the odds of it seemed very low
to me that it was somebody from
completely outside that community
who happened to know all these different
things and put this together and appear
out of nowhere
the day that newsweek's story came out
naming dorian nakamoto as the creator of
bitcoin i got this
email from an old acquaintance that was
titled
what are the odds and it's laid out the
fact that
hal finney lives less than two miles
away
from the known address of dorian
nakamoto where newsweek had found him
and halfini is the number two ever user
of bitcoin who received the first
bitcoin transaction
he works on an early prototype of an
anonymous currency system
he was a cypherpunk
[Music]
so how could it be that the purported
creator of bitcoin
and this known confirmed second ever
user of bitcoin had it never
collaborated that hal finney who
was less than two miles away from during
nakamoto hadn't helped to create bitcoin
or maybe he really was the creator of
bitcoin maybe hal finney was satoshi
nakamoto
[Music]
when you look at the bitcoin white paper
it made reference to
a lot of the earlier projects that fed
into bitcoin but
it's very notable that the one project
it doesn't refer
to is nick zabo's big cold which is
perhaps the closest
precedent and the closest parallel to
bitcoin
i mean big gold is so close to bitcoin
it's hard not to think
that you know maybe nick is satoshi
a lot of people will say nakamoto must
be zabo nakamoto must have been finney
but
i don't think he was trying to leave any
breadcrumbs out there for anybody to
follow
i told my editor about it he agreed that
you found satoshi nakamoto
so i got on a plane to santa barbara and
i drove out to hal finney's house
but at this stage he was already
completely
paralyzed by als this
really awful debilitating terminal
illness that
slowly shuts down your body while
leaving your mind
completely intact and the time when he
started to
fade in his physical abilities did
roughly coincide with the time that
satoshi nakamoto started to disappear
maybe the reason that satoshi nakamoto
had chosen to
fade away was because halfini was
physically fading
[Music]
there have been a number of stylometric
studies
and you see so many of these
similarities between satoshi's writing
and those of nics including these little
things like having two spaces at the
beginning of a sentence
and phrases and spellings that nobody
else uses
so i talked to hal as much as i could
mostly in a kind of
one-way interview because he could
really only respond
with yes and no answers and he denied
being satoshi nakamoto
you could tell that he was amused by the
whole idea that i thought he was satoshi
nakamoto
one of the really remarkable things from
nick zabo's writing in those
months before bitcoin was publicly
launched
is that nick in responding to some
comments
about a post he had made about bitgold
actually
asked the other people who were reading
him if anybody wanted to
help him code this idea into
real software that could work it was
never turned into a reality
but when you look at bitgold it's it's
hard not to be
struck by uh the similarities between
it and and bitcoin maybe
it was a duo it was zebo and hal finney
and now it's possible
yeah how could have been the coder um
i don't know you know this idea that the
alfinia could have been the kind of
ghost coder for bitcoin
i guess it's possible other people kind
of speculating on
reddit or other parts of the internet
thought that maybe
hal finney had used dorian nakamoto as a
patsy
if he were ever traced back to dorian
nakamoto it seemed like
this guy was the creator and hal finney
would be
sort of immunized from it everyone else
who was involved in the project leading
up to bitcoin
has released their communications with
satoshi from this period
nick has avoided doing that and
essentially went silent in those
critical months after bitcoin was
released you know when you talk to
people face to face
and they tell you these things you can
get a sense if they're being honest and
if alfinia actually had a secret billion
dollar cash with bitcoins
he wouldn't have been able to lie to me
so effectively about it in the end the
reasons to believe that this was all
just a coincidence began to outweigh
the coincidence itself it's almost like
an eel
there is something there you can see it
but as soon as you touch it it just
slides right out of your hands and
you're left with nothing
anybody who is of any note in the
cypherpunk movement and even outside of
it too has at one time or another
been called satoshi hal finney denied it
nick zabo denied it
they've all denied it maybe one of them
is satoshi maybe all of them are satoshi
it really is a mystery
[Music]
that's your original ticker from next
door
all right so we're over here bitcoin
center hundred feet from the stock
exchange over here
and uh you know
some of you guys took a hit last week
last couple weeks
a lot of the big guys they got their
foothold in the business that
they weren't a part of in the beginning
i don't know what's going on but uh i
don't know
i wouldn't write over bitcoin that easy
i know that bitcoin is going to change
the world it's changing the world
already
and we have to stand tall
and proud
as bitcoiners and early adopters they
don't know anything about new technology
but once it starts making sense
they throw their dollars behind it
[Music]
you know unfortunately
early adopters
make the roads that we all travel down
and they are usually paved over in the
process
the first guy through the door gets shot
you know but somebody's got to go
through the door but they're going to
get shot
charlie schrem ross albrecht julian
assange
they got shot coming through the door
but we are all
utilizing the freedoms and
technologies afforded to us because they
knocked the door down
hey michael can i put you on
speakerphone for a minute
if i know how hey michael can i ask you
where did where did you buy bitcoins
where did i yeah um
there's a number of exchanges but did
you lose how much do you still have them
can you use it do i want to buy it no
not today though it is going to be
around
i don't know did you ever use it to buy
anything
um i bought some heroin
[Laughter]
no okay they should go back to you know
day one and just start all over and
forget about bitcoin and call it
something else
i think it's been so tarnished now with
this uh with the silk road and
uh you know i just think
you know that all that stuff about 400
million dollars disappearing and
uh you're just not gonna get off the
ground nobody's gonna
you know like warren buffett said stay
the hell away from it
to put all the cards on the table i'm
going to be leaving the department
in the coming weeks and if you asked me
back when i took this job in 2011
what i thought we'd be working on during
my tenure
uh digital currencies would not have
been at the top of the list
so ben lasky created this thing called
the bit license which is new york's
attempt
to regulate uh this scary new technology
it's now law and he has announced that
he is leaving
government in order to set up his own
private consulting firm
to help companies navigate financial
regulations such as the bit license that
he created
so we essentially had this beautiful new
ecosystem being built
and ben lasky comes by says i'm here to
protect consumers he builds a huge wall
around the thing and then he sits
outside the gate charging people to get
in
this is the very definition of crony
capitalism and
for some reason ben lasky doesn't even
see anything wrong with that
i i think history will not judge him as
favorably as he thinks
so um yeah um i've started up my own
consulting business uh it's been quite
interesting doing a lot of work
in the fintech space but also doing work
with a lot of traditional
uh companies in the financial services
world as well
ben lowsky's team at
the dfs that was working on this these
this bit license and the bitcoin
initiative have all ended up leaving the
agency
and going to consulting firms that are
now working
on these issues danny
alder is going to work for ipbit and
dana syracuse is going to work for the
consulting firm k2
it bit is particularly notable because
they were the first
to find a way to partner with the dfs
to get license to open their own bitcoin
exchange
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when this is over i'm definitely going
to leave new york when i can
um where i'm going to go i don't know i
think the bitcoin community in new york
is done with
there's no one it doesn't foster
innovation here it's too difficult to
have a bitcoin company no banks will
open up accounts
you have the threat of regulation your
high profile arrests like myself and
others it's no one wants to deal with it
when did you first start digging in on
bitcoin two two and a half years ago
when i took over the foreign exchange
payments business at jp morgan so you
probably had to mount gox
pit instant your you know charlie and
those guys i mean it's interesting
almost none of those guys are around
anymore two years ago at all the major
banks bitcoin was an afterthought it was
kind of a
you know maybe in a hallway conversation
at the water cooler and now
you know even this week i met with one
of one of the major banks everyone's got
a bitcoin
specialist at least one working group
kind of teams of people who are trying
to figure out
how to incorporate the technology into
their
existing operation banks and
institutions associated with the
financial system
i really started to recognize that the
payment system
underlying banking could be made more
efficient by the application of
blockchain technologies
the blockchain technology underlying
bitcoin
has become something that a lot of
people are now very very interested in
for all kinds of other uses whether it's
allowing for
derivatives to be transferred or
securities to be transferred or
all manner of financial instruments to
be transferred in complex interesting
ways
i think different companies are going to
adopt different strategies
and it's going to be fascinating to
watch companies like digital asset
holdings life masters company
doing very very interesting work
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i didn't become aware of bitcoin in any
meaningful sense until
uh 2014 late in the year
and at the time my perspective was one
of
skepticism i would say specifically
because
the storyline that i heard related very
much to
cryptocurrency as a potential medium of
exchange and store of value which
is a valid debate and application
but it doesn't have uh the full extent
of
the power that the underlying technology
has to achieve
live masters is not just any banker
she is this person who i think is really
seen as being behind some of the most
problematic
innovations in the financial industry
over the last three decades
blythe is the one who's essentially
given credit for creating the credit
default swap
which essentially provides a way to bet
on the default
of a bond and the credit default swap
ended up taking this place at the center
of the financial crisis
and these bets that banks had made
against subprime mortgages
blockchain technology eradicates a
significant amount of inefficiency in
the system
and reduces costs it doesn't mean that
we are doing away with the need for
trust in financial services
at all bitcoin was
designed to find a way to circumvent
wall street and
what blithe masters is doing is
essentially trying to find
ways to bring wall street into bitcoin
and make it possible for them to use
this technology as well
what the bankers seem to be looking to
do at this point
is create their own private blockchain
where their computers are powering it
rather than these
anonymous miners they want control over
the system
the banks are looking at this incredibly
wide array of ways that they might use
this
which include you know replacing stock
exchanges
finding new ways to originate loans
uh finding new ways to move money
between countries
and of course that's going back to the
original
idea of bitcoin but now it's happening
within these financial institutions
rather
than outside it as bitcoin had imagined
i have no problem with the banking
system in the financial industry
co-opting bitcoin primarily because
bitcoin can't really be co-opted the
fact that it's decentralized means no
one can control it no matter
who they are or how much money they have
i think it's all good for bitcoin i
think all of the innovation that's
happening
both on wall street and in silicon
valley i think competition will take
care of people who want to try to have a
monopoly
or who want to try to charge more than
they should for whatever product or
service that is happening on the
blockchain
it really is as advertised it really is
controlled
by all the people who are using it and
it really is designed just to be a
a more efficient more fair way of
sending
value over the internet bitcoin
is not neutral you cannot remove the
political
component that satoshi implanted in
bitcoin from bitcoin
it's what a lot of the people on the
wall street side
try to do you cannot neutralize bitcoin
it's impossible
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thankfully i'm gonna go to a you know
comfy federal prison camp without fences
there's pool tables and a track and a
baseball
field and decent food and kind of 100 to
200 people that are
like color those guys in prison are the
best ones to use a bitcoin
they're smart i'm very excited to talk
to them about it
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do
so yes the vcs are driving this thing
right now they're pouring money into it
they're they're building these
for-profit companies people who have a
background outside of bitcoin
seeing the value of it and coming to it
but
just because they're doing everything
they're doing doesn't mean
that the libertarians and the utopians
have to go away
bitcoin is open source you can do
whatever you want with it so they're
still there
they're still building their products
they're still building their vision
and if bitcoin goes mainstream and if it
gets picked up even if it's running in
the background
they're going to be elements of that and
that's that's kind of what utopia
movements always are
the thing that the utopians were
dreaming about is not going to happen
the way they expected it
but i do think it is going to filter
through and you are going to see it
you're going to see it
so you're going to show me that satoshi
nakamoto
is you yes
some people will believe some people
won't and to tell you the truth i don't
really care
but you can say hand on heart to me
i am satoshi nakamoto i was the main
part of it other people helped me i'm
going to come in front of
a camera once and i will never
ever be on a camera ever again for any
tv station
or any media ever
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