Excerpt
I explain how cypherpunks fought for digital privacy, how Bitcoin frees us from financial oppression, and why its future depends on us. I break down the latest developments, from institutions entering Bitcoin to the risks of centralization and financial surveillance. Watch my video to understand why Bitcoin matters today and how you can protect your financial freedom!
Transcript
Cypherpunks versus Wall Street, Bitcoin’s revolutionary ethos. This is Jude Milhon, her name was St. Jude. She was a part of the first group of Cypherpunks who came together in the early 1990s in the San Francisco Bay Area to lobby for digital freedom, privacy and cryptography. She was a civil activist and was arrested several times in the US in the 1960s for her activism and she was the one who coined the term Cypherpunk. Her battle cry was girls need modems. She wanted to empower women and girls to be a part of the digital revolution. My battle cry is girls need Bitcoin because Bitcoin is really a tool that allows the disadvantaged and that is very often sadly women to access a financial tool that can help them and gives them ownership over their money. In 1993 Eric Hughes published the Cypherpunk manifesto where they laid out their basic thinking and principles for the digital world. Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy and since we can’t get privacy unless we all do, we’re going to write it. Our code is free to use for all worldwide, similarity to Bitcoin. On privacy they said, privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world. And since we desire privacy, we must ensure that each party to a transaction have knowledge only of that which is directly necessary for that transaction and not all your personal data as an add-on too. What did they say about large entities? We cannot expect governments, corporations or other large faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence. It is to their advantage to speak of us and we should expect that they will speak. We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy but electronic technologies do. So all these ideas are deeply ingrained in Bitcoin. The cypherpunks had been searching for digital money for quite a long time. And up until 2008, 2009, they hadn’t found a solution to the so-called double spending problem. So when you have an electronic file, you can copy it endlessly and that was the same that you could do with digital money until that moment in time when Satoshi Nakamoto presented Bitcoin and to all the technologies that were invented before, they added a blockchain and the proof-of-work mining mechanism. And also, it was at the time of the great financial crisis in 2008, 2009, where the banks were basically over-expanding credit and creating so much debt in the system that the bubble had to burst. And at the same time, many people, thousands of people, were going on to the streets in the United States to demonstrate against that. And this spirit is deeply in Bitcoin. Satoshi Nakamoto referred to it when they mined the first block, the so-called Genesis block of the Bitcoin blockchain on January 3rd, 2009. They took the title of the headline of the day, Chancellor on Brink of Second, bailout for banks, and put it into the code of the first block. So what is Satoshi Nakamoto’s gift to us? Well, it’s freedom of transaction. And I cite from the white paper here, we have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust. That means we the people can transact without intermediaries and transactions cannot be censored. We started with the usual framework of coins made from digital signatures which provides strong control of ownership. So we the people have full control over our money, funds cannot be frozen. Bitcoin is also rules without rulers. Notes can leave and rejoin the network at will. They vote with their CPU power expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism. That means that we the people and not some rulers decide on the rules that are used in the consensus mechanism in Bitcoin. So Bitcoin is neutral and permissionless. There are no intermediaries, no governments involved. It can be used by anyone, cannot be censored. You have full control over your money and we have a consensus mechanism I was talking about and why is this all important? I will tell you in a few minutes. So Bitcoin is a fairness protocol. It’s a system of incentives and disincentives that doesn’t require enforcement. It levels the playing field between the haves and the have nots. And it is a monetary technology connecting all people and nations just like the internet is connecting all communication. And by the way, as you know, it’s also the best long term savings tool that we ever had. And it’s the opposite to this. It’s not crypto. It’s not pump and dumb. It’s not the greatest shit coin that was ever invented. I mean, we have the president of the United States who is issuing a shit coin where 80% of the tokens belong to his family. I think this is the greatest conflict of interest the world has ever seen. He’s legitimizing all the shit coins and I wonder how they really want to pull that back again to put people in jail. I mean, people who are doing these things actually landing in jail, but he doesn’t as we know. And it’s also important, I think, to mention that a lot of us, I think, with what I see on Twitter or what I hear, want to bring in more micro strategies of the world. Michael Saylor is the hero of all of us in a way, not mine to be honest. But if we bring in too many institutions, they could try to change the consensus of Bitcoin. I think most people don’t think about that. They don’t know that. And that’s why I think it’s so important and why I call this talk Cypherpunks versus Wall Street. Yes, Bitcoin is for anyone. So any company, any government, any person can use it, which is great. It’s for the 8% of people living in democracies. It’s for the 55% of the people globally living under authoritarian regimes, which are the orange and red countries in this map. And it’s, of course, also for all the others who are living in flawed democracies. And it’s so important that we have this tool in Bitcoin, because also if we don’t have financial privacy, democratic societies cannot sustain. If we cannot send money, donations to protesters all over the world, if our transactions can be traced back to us, authoritarians will prevail and freedom will die. And Bitcoin is our only chance. It’s a once in a lifetime chance to have a tool like that. So I think don’t ask what Bitcoin can do for you, ask what you can do for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is financial autonomy and participation, so you can do something. But not if you are just having custodial Bitcoin, if you’re on the first floor of the so-called staircase of sovereignty. If you custody your keys with Wallet of Satoshi or any other wallet that’s custodial, or if you have your Bitcoin on an exchange like Luno, Binance, etc. Or if you hold an ETF, you actually don’t have ownership over your money. It’s only if you self-custody, if you have the private keys to your money, that you have true ownership. And even better, if you were to run a full note, which is a software on your computer, you can even verify your own transactions. And I will tell you why this is important in another way. Because I believe it could be that in a couple of years we will see another hard fork or a soft fork. What is that and what can it do? As an example, let’s just take the 21 million limit, 21 million Bitcoin will ever be created. So many people think this is a given and it cannot be changed. That’s not true because it’s basically just code. So of course it can be changed. And that’s where a so-called hard fork would come in. What is this? So basically it’s a duplicate of the whole Bitcoin network. So if we had the Bitcoin blockchain with the consensus rules that define 21 million max will be issued, some people who have a lot of power on public opinion could come and say, oh no, we want it to be 42 million or we want to inflate it even more. Then they copy the whole system and integrate the new code into the next blocks. If you run a full note, you can enforce the rules. So your software, you can decide which software you want to run on your note, the old one with the 21 million or the new one with the 42 million. If you self-custody your Bitcoin, you can at least choose the chain you want your Bitcoin to be on in the future because you will get the same amount of Bitcoin that you self-custody on the classic Bitcoin, the original Bitcoin on the new chain. And then you can decide on which chain do I want my money to be? What do I believe will the market accept? Because this will have the higher price than the one that the market doesn’t accept. We saw that in 2017 with Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin Cash is basically worthless at the moment and Bitcoin is at 100,000. And if you custody your Bitcoin on an exchange or in an ETF, you are basically powerless. You use Bitcoin but you don’t really use Bitcoin. For me, there’s no point in doing that other than you want to be exposed to number go up but have no interest whatsoever in where Bitcoin comes from or what its opportunities and maybe possibilities are and why it is important. So Bitcoin’s characteristic is not a given. It can be co-opted by people who don’t care about the cypherpunk principles, don’t care about privacy, don’t care about human rights, don’t care about fairness in any way. And also its unsensorability is not a given but it gives its unique advantage to all the other monies we know. If a lot of the big mining entities are based in the US for instance and the US gets a strategic Bitcoin reserve and has a big interest in their own Bitcoin and in controlling and staying the financial hegemony of the world, they could try and force the miners to censor transactions. And if we don’t have enough home miners or alternative miners in other countries, then that’s basically censorship. I mean the others who would mine these transactions. And the next step would be governments or authoritarians who are forcing miners to censor transactions to shut down any protests for instance. Of course, Bitcoin’s privacy needs improvement. Cryptography and privacy are a defense mechanism against financial oppression and surveillance capitalism. Bitcoin is pseudonymous, that’s great, but regulations and wallets that are requiring personal data or your phone number make all your actions and payments traceable. So while Bitcoin’s privacy might not be perfect, it’s definitely much higher than the privacy you have in traditional finance or if you use a centralized stablecoin like Tether for instance. And why am I saying all of that? Well, I’m concerned because of course big entities want to have control. They want to extend their financial control over us. And the boss of the Bank of International Settlements, which is basically the central bank of all central banks, said a couple of years ago, the key difference with a central bank digital currency is that the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and we will have the technology to enforce that. So we the people need to be active. Bitcoin is once in a lifetime chance to a fair, accessible financial system that does not discriminate. Self-custody, running nodes and home mining are the backbone that we the people need to run to secure the system, to have a vote, to have decision power. So from the cypherpunks to Bitcoin, I’d say, we cannot expect governments, corporations or other large faceless organizations to grant us Bitcoin out of their beneficence. It is to their advantage to tweak it and we should expect that they will try to change it. We must defend our financial freedom if we expect to have any. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy and uncensorable ownership, but electronic technologies do. Thank you very much.
