Today's episode is a mashup of Russell Brand's thoughts on Bitcoin, Bitcoin's potential role in the 21st century, and the current state of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Recorded in Los Angeles, CA at the Bitcoin 2020 Conference, Bitcoin s role as a tool for freedom, liberty, and freedom from government control. Recorded in Tel Aviv, Israel at the Blockstreaming conference, Bitcoin's role as an alternative to traditional financial institutions, and how it can be used as a medium of exchange and a means of financial independence. If Bitcoin is to be mined, minted, and made in the USA, it's going to be made anywhere else. And if Bitcoin is going to the moon, as we say, "Going to the Moon," I want America to be the nation that leads the way. And that's what we're going to happen. I'm laying out my plan to ensure that the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the Bitcoin superpower of the world, and we'll get it done. I pledge to the Bitcoin community that the day I take the oath of office, Joe Biden's anti-crypto crusade will be over. On day one, I'll fire Gary Gensler and appoint a new SEC chairman who will keep their hands off of Bitcoin. It'll be done. It's what I'll be doing, and that'll be what you'll be happy with me. - Russell Brand - Stay free! Tweet me if you liked this episode and/or have any thoughts on a future episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand! or any other crypto-related content you'd like to help spread the word! . . . Timestamps: 1: 2:00 - Bitcoin's place in the future 3:30 - What's the future of Bitcoin? 4:15 - Why Bitcoin is the future? 5:20 - What is the moon? 6:00 7:40 - What are you waiting for? 8:00- What will the moon 9:30- What are we should do? 11:15- Why Bitcoin should be made in America? 12:15: Is Bitcoin the mooncoin? 15:00 | What is Bitcoin the next? 16:30 17:20- What's your favorite piece of advice for Bitcoin? 17:00 Is Bitcoin a digital asset? 18:40- What do you think of Bitcoin's value?
00:02:31.000Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand where we are talking about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and how decentralized economic models might be a significant part of liberty and freedom in so much as anything that's able to bypass corrupt institutions affords us greater opportunities for interpersonal transaction and I suppose parallel economies.
00:02:54.000I learned a lot about Bitcoin while I was there at that conference.
00:02:58.000First of all, I want to show you a little bit of Donald Trump's speech.
00:03:02.000A lot of people thought we would go further making some of the Federal Reserve be held in Bitcoin.
00:03:07.000But nevertheless, is it important just to see speakers of that magnitude and gravitas appearing at a conference for something that just a few years ago was a very marginal peripheral Let's start off by looking at Donald Trump.
00:03:23.000We'll be on YouTube for the first 15 minutes but then we'll be exclusively available on Rumble simply because we are part of the set of parallel bodies and organizations that will potentially form part of a new movement that might be able to bypass all these old atrophying models.
00:03:42.000Let's have a look at Donald Trump first of all and see if what he said there was an indication that cryptocurrency is indeed the future.
00:03:51.000This afternoon I'm laying out my plan to ensure that the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the Bitcoin superpower of the world.
00:05:41.000The problem is that Kamala is worse than Joe is worse.
00:05:46.000She's a radical left lunatic, defund the police, all of the different things.
00:05:52.000And so far we're doing, she's got a little honeymoon going on right now, but when people hear about her, and she's against crypto by the way, and she's against it very big, so I just want to let you know, you gotta get out, you gotta get out and vote!
00:06:05.000It should be no surprise that these same totalitarians are hell-bent on crushing crypto and obliterating, and that's what they want to do, and that's what they are stated.
00:06:16.000Well, I mean, they're there right now.
00:06:18.000You have the SEC, you know what they're doing, obliterating Bitcoin.
00:06:23.000The reason could not be more clear because Bitcoin stands for freedom, sovereignty, and independence from government coercion and control.
00:06:33.000I pledge to the Bitcoin community that the day I take the oath of office, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris's anti-crypto crusade will be over.
00:07:34.000Applause I will appoint a new SEC chairman who believes America
00:08:01.000should build the future, not block the future, which is what they're doing.
00:08:05.000I And no longer will your government sit by and watch as Bitcoin jobs and businesses flee to other countries because America's laws are too unclear and too tough and too angry and too stiff.
00:08:20.000We will keep Each and every Bitcoin job in the United States of America.
00:08:56.000It comes from trillions of dollars in waste, rampant inflation, and open borders while giving welfare and free health care to all of the illegal aliens that are pouring into our country by the millions and millions and millions.
00:09:11.000It comes from printing hundreds of billions of dollars to fund endless wars overseas while our cities are like combat zones here at home.
00:09:21.000We had the greatest economy ever, and we will soon have it again.
00:09:25.000Under the Trump administration, the typical middle-class family income rose by $6,000 a year.
00:10:57.000From the very first day we take back the White House, we will replace the Biden-Harris economic stagnation with a brand new Trump economic boom.
00:11:05.000You're going to have a tremendous boom, most importantly for our citizens.
00:11:10.000We will end the inflation nightmare that this administration has created, and we will end it quickly.
00:11:51.000The trillions of dollars in ridiculous waste approved by our opponents resulted in the very inflation disaster that Bitcoiners had always predicted.
00:12:00.000Twenty, thirty, and even forty percent of the value of every dollar was wiped out and wiped out quickly.
00:12:07.000You understood that, but a lot of other people didn't.
00:12:09.000The life savings of millions of Americans was rapidly destroyed.
00:12:14.000And very simply, uncontrolled inflation is a stealth taxation of the middle class.
00:12:20.000It really is, it's a stealth taxation.
00:12:23.000I call it the Biden tax, now I call it the Harris tax, or the Harris-Biden tax, or whatever the hell we're gonna call them.
00:13:34.000And so, as the final part of my plan today, I am announcing that if I am elected, it will be the policy of my administration, United States of America, to keep 100% of all the Bitcoin the U.S.
00:13:50.000government currently holds or acquires into the future.
00:13:58.000This will serve, in effect, as the core of the strategic national Bitcoin stockpile.
00:14:05.000And so, as I take steps to transform that vast wealth into a permanent national asset to benefit all Americans, today I repeat my pledge to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht to a sentence of time served.
00:14:59.000My own participation in this conference was largely about liberty, freedom, freedom of communication, the importance of demonopolization and how monopolies necessarily lead to censorship and exploitation.
00:15:15.000I spoke with Chris Pavlovsky, the CEO of Rumble, about those subjects and as well tried to manage an audience of I think five, ten thousand people while ultimately trying to have an intimate fireside chat.
00:15:29.000One of the undergirding principles of Bitcoin that I'm learning a lot about today, because I am something of an ingenue, you know, this is quite new to me, is the significance of decentralization.
00:15:42.000And if you decentralize power, something beautiful happens almost automatically.
00:15:48.000That there is something almost inherent in monopolies that leads to corruption.
00:15:54.000It seems that what's happening with Rumble, and in particular Rumble's evident David and Goliath struggle against YouTube alphabet, their evident and obvious attempts to censor, control, possibly participate in surveillance, certainly facilitate some extraordinary operations, their odd Our relationship with a group called the Trusted News Initiative that seem to be interested in further centralizing and controlling the flow of information has some obvious correlative with the monopolization that happens in the financial industry.
00:16:30.000It seems to me that what I've been learning is that when you decentralize and make transparent the very business of transaction, authenticity and integrity almost automatically appear.
00:16:46.000What I suppose I find pretty encouraging about that, Chris, is the suggestion that individual... Because an event like this, there's people that are right heroes.
00:16:55.000What an incredible hero, what an amazing sacrifice he made for America on behalf of his ethics.
00:17:01.000Bobby Kennedy, another heroic individual.
00:17:03.000Tomorrow, the extraordinary spectacle of Donald Trump, just fresh from his resurrection, just one earlobe down.
00:17:13.000We are only going to be on YouTube for another 30 seconds.
00:17:17.000Click the link in the description to join us for a conversation about new modalities and models that could ultimately replace the sets of institutions and ideas via which control is established and asserted.
00:17:43.000There could be a slopey roof around us now.
00:17:48.000And like it's very easy to fall into the adulation of individuals that seem heroic or perhaps alternatively condemn them, loathe them, despair of them.
00:17:59.000But what it seems to me is available in blockchain technology is the regulatory principles that occur when individuals are empowered.
00:18:07.000And indeed, Rumble has comparable principles because a commitment to free speech does not favour or bias towards a particular type of free speech.
00:18:17.000It encourages all of our free speech and has a kind of, I would say, acceptance That universally, through discourse, we will arrive at conclusions that are positive if we're not prohibited, inhibited, censored, controlled by institutions that claim that they care while actually practicing control.
00:18:38.000It seems to me that there is something quite beautiful in learning that individuals, when trusted, will reach the right conclusions.
00:18:47.000And that is antithetical to an era of elitism that we appear to be living through.
00:18:52.000Because what is the central principle of censorship?
00:19:44.000They're losing control to companies like Rumble, Truth, X. They're starting to actually fear that their narratives are going to change because for once, There's not someone with an agenda telling Russell, hey Russell, you have to say this.
00:20:08.000So now what you're having is that you're having like true authenticity start to come out and true opinions start to come out.
00:20:16.000Things that we would have at our dinner tables that apparently we couldn't say online and we still can't say online on the incumbent platforms.
00:20:25.000So, like, YouTube, for example, for the last, I would say, eight years, has just been moving the goalposts and moving the goalposts, creating new terms, sometimes on a monthly basis, sometimes on a weekly basis.
00:20:40.000Something is changing constantly on YouTube to try to Say that you need to say something specifically or not say something at all.
00:20:48.000They're trying to control speech in many different ways.
00:20:51.000And when Rumble came along in 2020, late 2020, where we actually had prominent figures start joining our platform like Dan Bongino, Congressman Devin Nunes, we started to break that fold.
00:21:04.000And that's what created a shift happen.
00:21:32.000People get to hear what you're really thinking, and they know that you're not Saying, doing or saying something that has some kind of agenda or corporate agenda behind it.
00:21:44.000When you watch people like Russell on Rumble, you're getting to hear what he actually thinks and not someone else that's telling him what to think.
00:21:53.000And that's what's created the opportunity for Rumble in such a large way.
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00:23:29.000Here are some of the reflections that I would like to offer you, Chris, and everybody present.
00:23:34.000When dealing with an organization like Google or YouTube, and I recognize that my voice was significantly amplified by that platform initially, before the blessed day where I got the opportunity to begin to work with Rumble, you recognize how tyranny and power may guide us towards dystopia.
00:23:55.000We're being encouraged to Imagine that the dystopias of the future might resemble the despotism of the 20th century, that we might forfail to militaristic 20th century style demagoguery.
00:24:11.000We're being taught to fear fascism and of course fascism is something that ought be feared because indeed Bitcoin and Rumble, the technologies that we're talking about, are about primarily individual freedom.
00:24:26.000When it comes to the tyranny that I fear mostly, the phrase I heard that resonates is technological feudalism.
00:24:34.000When you consider the amount in bureaucracies and the incredible power that's being accrued by groups like Alphabet, Google, because we are talking about monopoly, centralized power, I would like to reflect on how it it feels to deal with these organizations directly.
00:24:52.000If you find yourself in a spat or a conch-Ă -tom with YouTube, you will find that the discourse
00:25:13.000You get the sense that you're communicating with some peculiar, odd and inaccessible, insidious mist.
00:25:21.000When we think about tyranny in the future, we should not think about 20th century modalities of dictatorship.
00:25:29.000We should think of great writers like George Orwell, Audus Huxley, and Franz Kafka, who indicated that dictatorships in the future might be rather anodyne, and friendly, and here to protect you and keep you safe.
00:25:43.000Some of you may have noticed that in the last five years, in order to protect your freedom, in order to protect your safety, In order to protect your health, certain measures were strongly recommended.
00:26:27.000God protect us from these people that want to save us and protect us.
00:26:34.000In their rationalism and materialism, they have sought right down to the microscopic level to replace God and to replace the authority of God with rationalism and materialism, to make rationalism the highest authority.
00:26:48.000Having made themselves the highest authority, their edicts go uncontested.
00:26:53.000There was a moment, September last year, where I myself was at the very middle of a tundra A dark maelstrom of incredible power.
00:27:03.000The kind of power that can only occur when big tech platforms, big media and government align.
00:27:11.000The government in my country directly asked platforms to demonetize me.
00:28:06.000Never mind mining Bitcoin, start mining the neurons of these lunatics that are coming up with this stuff, is what I would say.
00:28:14.000But nevertheless, what we're finding in these unusual minds is the kind of bravery that comes from not centralizing power, but from decentralizing it.
00:28:24.000Because the simple truth is, is no one should be mediating your connection to God, or your connection to money, or your connection to free speech.
00:28:33.000Because no one knows better than you, although there are high principles to which we
00:28:49.000The monopolizations are happening both on every aspect of tech.
00:28:57.000For example, you guys probably all remember the moment that Parler got deplatformed entirely by Amazon AWS.
00:29:05.000And that happened for a complaint that that exact complaint was actually happening more so on the other platforms than it was happening On Parler itself, so it was completely unjustified to do that, and I think that was like crossing a red line in society when you have like an oligopoly in the cloud business.
00:29:25.000You got Microsoft, you got Amazon, you got GCP, Google, and at that moment, Amazon decides to take out Parler, which was horrible.
00:29:35.000And that was a big wake-up moment for us because we realized Rumble won't survive unless we have our own infrastructure.
00:29:44.000On the infrastructure level now, Rumble can't just be a company that says, hey, we're going to uphold free speech and protect everyone's rights to having their voice.
00:29:57.000We now have to build our own infrastructure.
00:30:18.000It not only is the infrastructure a problem, we solve the infrastructure.
00:30:22.000Now the next thing we need to go solve is the advertising world.
00:30:26.000The advertising world, the way they're working and the way they're...
00:30:30.000colluding together to make sure that they only bring the advertising dollars to specific creators that have certain viewpoints is a major problem.
00:30:41.000And we just saw in the release, I'm sure you've seen this, Russell, is the Global Alliance of Responsible Media, as they call it.
00:30:51.000They put it in nice names to make it sound really good, as you just mentioned.
00:31:10.000You see that they're actually constructing a boycott of putting advertisements on X and other platforms like Rumble to make sure that voices that they don't agree with Are not getting monetized trying to strangle them at the monetization point.
00:31:27.000And this is just one example of multiple examples both on the infrastructure and on the advertising side of what we're up against.
00:32:03.000I'm feeling almost overwhelmed with optimism in this actual moment now, because I know that we are streaming this on Rumble, there'll be people watching this on Rumble now, and a considerable audience are also watching elsewhere.
00:32:16.000And I'm minded of the significant and oft-repeated maxim, attributed usually to Andrew Breitbart, that politics is downstream of culture.
00:32:27.000Well, culture is evidently and obviously downstream of technology.
00:32:31.000We have the technology for immediate proliferation and dissemination of not only information, but clearly a transactional technology also.
00:32:40.000And what I find deeply heartening about this is the opportunity and obvious establishment already, because you lot are early adapters and adopters.
00:32:57.000You lot know about this stuff already.
00:33:00.000And one thing that institutions fear more than anything, I believe, is not the direct and martial attacks which John Lennon greatly and famously said they know how to deal with, but people moving away from their institutions.
00:33:15.000Setting up parallel economies, parallel media.
00:33:19.000Of course my deep concern is that we remain in the thrall of commodity, commerce and material, when this could be so much more.
00:33:28.000When this is a genuine opportunity for us to access something Deeply ethereal and mystical.
00:33:34.000Our own personal connection to the ultimate reality.
00:33:38.000A personal and private connection to God.
00:33:42.000A resource that we might utilize so that we are no longer in the thrall of prohibition and inhibition and systems of absolute control that might use the kind of patriarchal auspices of your health and safety.
00:33:59.000My interest is this most of all, that this is not just a digital form of the gold rush, but this is a set of systems through which we may bypass our atrophying, corrupt, Hypocritical systems of government, big tech, media, the loss of moral authority that they are experiencing is deserved.
00:34:21.000Because we know that lawfare can be used, that the judiciary can be used as a weapon.
00:34:29.000That the regulatory bodies that control Big Pharma are funded by the corporations that they're supposed to be regulating.
00:34:37.000You have known for some time that these institutions are not worthy of your trust and now you are beginning to have the means to bypass them.
00:34:45.000And if they cannot be bypassed electorally for the corruption is so immersive or the options so limited, now there is the genuine chance For your individual freedom of expression to exist both in terms of media and communication through platforms like Rumble and others, but also through the advance that you are at the very forefront of when it comes to transaction digitally.
00:35:12.000Not because of any great individual leader, although we have seen great individual leaders at this conference, but because what Bitcoin epitomizes above all else.
00:35:22.000Decentralization, transparency, open communication and the possibility for new human relationships.
00:35:32.000That human beings aren't corrupt and ugly, aren't disgusting and deserving of shame, are beautiful and capable of again connecting with the sacred.
00:35:43.000So if Bitcoin can do that, surely I believe in it and surely I am optimistic, Chris.
00:35:49.000But the truth is we've still got five minutes.
00:36:28.000You have infrastructure like RumbleCloud.
00:36:31.000The parallel economy is really getting developed.
00:36:34.000And you have talent, like real important talent that are speaking their minds and really kind of waking up to everything and telling the world what they think, like yourself and many others.
00:36:46.000I think this tide is so big right now.
00:36:48.000There's nothing that's going to stop it.
00:36:50.000And ultimately, the number one value that under underlines everything here is freedom.
00:37:19.000If there's ways to take things like Rumble and get them even more transparent and more decentralized, I'm all for it as the technology continues to evolve.
00:37:29.000But in the finance world, you now have Bitcoin, which is really taking hold and has an incredible future.
00:37:38.000So this tide, nothing's going to stop it.
00:37:42.000We are going to win in this war, for sure.
00:37:48.000One of the things that made me most excited about participating in this conference was the inclusion of Edward Snowden.
00:37:54.000We've spoke to him on this show a couple of times, and whenever you speak to him, you get the sense that this is someone with genuine humility, incredible insight, and a set of values that's probably transcendent of the kind of backbiting, backstabbing, and seething that defines modern politics.
00:38:10.000It was really interesting to see him say that we should look at the political candidates that were present at Bitcoin, namely RFK and Trump.
00:38:18.000As really just political figures with their own agenda and their own motives and that we should remember that politics needs to be de-tribalized and certainly isn't a religion.
00:38:28.000That was among some of the things I thought he was fascinating but Edward Snowden is of course uniquely positioned to comment on both the technical and I suppose privacy related aspects of Bitcoin.
00:38:43.000Our lives have been increasingly intermediated by screens, by panes of glass, right?
00:38:49.000You are watching this either live on stage, because you registered through a smartphone, through a laptop, right?
00:38:57.000Nobody went and sort of bought a ticket at the counter anymore.
00:39:00.000That's not how the world works these days.
00:39:03.000But in order to even set that computer up, to turn it on, to log in, to set up your account, To pull the smartphone out of the box, charge it, open it up, connect it to your Wi-Fi access point, you have to click OK to continue.
00:39:16.000You have to agree to somebody else's terms of service.
00:39:18.000You are made to pass through gates of permission that are owned and controlled by others that do not answer, frankly, to anybody.
00:39:28.000You see Facebook, you see Google, you see how they've been abusing the trust Of everyone in every country, right?
00:39:35.000You see, the EU tries to get a handle on them.
00:40:53.000We'll get to it a little bit later where we are making great strides in the context of money, which is why suddenly we see a lot of political interest in these audiences.
00:41:02.000They understand that there is a new center of power that is rising.
00:41:07.000But there is a new field of vulnerability that applies to all of us, including all of these luminaries that will be speaking on stage here.
00:41:18.000And that is artificial intelligence, right?
00:41:20.000I am not one of the guys that goes on the Internet and is like, oh, AI safety, AI safety, the robots are going to kill us.
00:41:26.000You know, you need to worry about this.
00:41:27.000I say, in fact, I want all of them to dump all of these models out on the Internet where we can all use these.
00:41:34.000OpenAI, which is not open at all and is a very closed model company that wants to benefit themselves at your expense.
00:41:44.000But benefit themselves, and they don't want you to have access onto the coverage.
00:41:49.000They don't want you to be able to pull down the models, distill it, get one you can run at home, put it on your phone, do whatever you want with it.
00:41:54.000They want you to have to go back to their watering hole, pay them rents, and to access all of this only through their ways, even if you did have the ability, technologically, hardware, just to run this at home.
00:42:07.000The good news is it is becoming easier and easier to get this stuff in public hands to run this on home machines.
00:42:21.000Open source models, whether we're talking about diffusion models for generative imaging, right, sort of what you think of like the mid-journey, the nice web interfaces, you can do that at home.
00:42:33.000It's 100% free as long as you've got the hardware to run it.
00:42:37.000And again, it's getting easier and easier to do this.
00:42:41.000Whether we're talking about large language models, Facebook, which, again, I've been throwing invective at for the beginning half of the talk, has actually been a force for good in this space.
00:42:51.000Not because they love you, or they love us, or they love me, or anything like that, but because they're afraid their competitors, like OpenAI that I mentioned, are going to build a structure around them, ring-fence them, in a little plot that they can then tax forever.
00:43:07.000And Facebook doesn't want to end up there, right?
00:43:09.000So they go, well, what we'll do is we'll develop the tools and give them to everyone else.
00:43:12.000So a monopoly can't form and be used against us.
00:43:16.000Self-interest more so than altruism, but I still applaud it, right?
00:43:20.000And I'm no fan of Mark Zuckerberg, but he's done wonderful things here.
00:43:25.000I know it won't last forever, but for the moment, while it does, I'll welcome the help that we can get there.
00:43:31.000But why am I bringing this up, you know, at a Bitcoin conference?
00:43:36.000Well, the reason why is that Bitcoin transactions are not private.
00:43:40.000All of you know this here on The General Sense because it's 2024 and this is not, you know, back in 2013 where we're saying, oh, you know, Bitcoin is perfectly anonymous and it's money for criminals and whatever.
00:43:53.000The only person who still believes that is Elizabeth Warren.
00:43:57.000The reality is that Bitcoin transactions are permanent, they are public, and they can be tracked and they can be linked.
00:44:07.000An enormous proportion of them are fully doxed, just not publicly doxed.
00:44:14.000And this is because how do people move in and off of the Bitcoin network, any crypto chain really?
00:44:21.000And it's through the on and off ramps, right?
00:44:23.000Through these legacy exchanges that get licensed by all, you know, whatever New York State or whatever country, whether it's in Dubai, whether it's in New York, and they are sharing the information en masse with what we politely refer to as regulators, but what are plainly described as great powers, right?
00:44:48.000People are not really focused on sending this stuff to the government of Barbados.
00:44:53.000But if they're worried about catching an indictment from that government, they will send anything that government asks for to them.
00:45:00.000And then they'll say, is there anything else you need while we're at it?
00:45:03.000Well, there was still one saving grace, which was there were parts of that chain, which were not Fully identified and verified, you could have private transactions, you could send $5 for your buddy for pizza, you know, as long as the on chain transaction fees were low.
00:46:05.000At the NSA, we called the kind of information that was not the details of a conversation, right, not literally reading like your texts, but simply saying that you texted someone.
00:46:17.000And this was under their interpretation.
00:46:19.000In my interpretation, it's a violation of the Constitution.
00:46:22.000But in their interpretation, this didn't impact the Fourth Amendment at all, because it's not a search, because it's not reading your messages themselves.
00:46:30.000It's simply tracking the flow of messages.
00:46:33.000We called this kind of information metadata, right?
00:46:36.000And that metadata padded out what was your pattern of life.
00:46:40.000Metadata can be plainly described as activity records.
00:46:43.000It's the same kind of thing that a private investigator would get if they just followed you around all day.
00:46:47.000They don't sit behind you at the cafe and hear everything you say because you would wonder, who is this dude following me?
00:46:53.000But they sit outside in a car on the street.
00:46:55.000They see that you go in the cafe at this time.
00:46:57.000They see that you sit at a table with this other person.
00:47:00.000They send a guy to go, who is that person?
00:47:09.000They don't see every item that you bought, but they see where you shop.
00:47:13.000And as you pad these things out more and more, you get a more and more complete picture of an entire human life without ever having to go, oh, we need a warrant for this.
00:49:27.000Within three years, it'll begin being done.
00:49:30.000I think at some scale, within five to ten years, it'll be done absolutely regularly, routinely, is that they're going to take all of the transaction information that they can get.
00:49:43.000And this is going to start with big banks going on their own personal data sets.
00:49:48.000It's going to flow from there to people going, oh, where can we get this information publicly?
00:49:54.000Well, the Bitcoin blockchain is available for anyone for free at any time, right?
00:50:28.000And then they're going to go from that's a 5% probability down to 3% probability, then try to get it smaller and smaller and smaller until they can just basically have people that are getting reports spit out on their desk, little, you know, chat messages to their terminal.
00:50:42.000Basically, they're saying this just happened, this just happened, this just happened.
00:51:04.000Whether you're subscribing to an OnlyFans account or something like that, which, you know, is a very common thing, but something that a lot of people aren't going to admit to.
00:51:13.000They're not going to be proud of, right?
00:51:17.000That's going to start making these institutions go, oh, do we want to continue our business association with these people?
00:51:24.000Is there a brand risk, you know, on stage here?
00:51:31.000And I think we really need to think about how do we secure the transactions on the Bitcoin network moving forward.
00:51:45.000And again, right now, every time you're on this network, and I love this network, I've used it many times.
00:51:53.000You are going to be adding to the data set.
00:51:57.000Even if they don't identify you because you're the, you know, whatever mystic cyber ninja that knows how to protect yourself, who is the counterparty that you're trading with?
00:52:13.000And larger and larger parts of this transaction mesh, of this network, as they get identified, the space for everyone else to have any kind of private interaction diminishes.
00:52:26.000Now, you might go, well, these big businesses, Visa, MasterCard, like, yeah, they have the transaction history for everybody, everywhere, all the time.
00:52:33.000And you don't know what they're using it for.
00:52:37.000Well, AT&T, it was revealed this year, lost all of their subscribers' information, or an enormous subscribers' information, for a block of time.
00:52:48.000I think it was something like six months.
00:52:51.000Uh, for all of your text messages, all of your phone calls, all of the things that went through there.
00:52:58.000Routing network, including some cell site location information, which means which cell phone tower you were connected to, were stolen by hackers.
00:53:07.000They haven't said who they are, as far as I know.
00:53:09.000They may not have been identified yet.
00:53:31.000And they can have enormous influence over our lives.
00:53:34.000All of these people who are coming up on stage and saying these wonderful things about how much they love Bitcoin, how much they love you, they're going to do all these wonderful things to make something better.
00:53:42.000The United States is the only advanced democracy on the planet that I am aware of that does not have a basic privacy law.
00:53:54.000That only binds the federal government.
00:53:56.000That doesn't do diddly squat to protect you against corporations.
00:54:00.000And the government, for 90% of their work, probably 95% of their work in intelligence nowadays, they simply go to corporations and ask them for information.
00:54:09.000It's hand-drawn around the Constitution.
00:54:13.000And we have been able to suffer this, right?
00:54:33.000This is not robots descending from the sky to drag you out of your home.
00:54:38.000That might come someday, but that's a long way off.
00:54:41.000We're talking about some things that are much more banal, but much easier to do.
00:54:47.000We talk about that concentration of power.
00:54:49.000These politicians, right, a lot of them probably don't love that they have to come up on this stage and give a dog and pony show to dance for the crowd that is suddenly much more powerful.
00:54:58.000Well, the people that they have always been attached to are about to get a much tighter hold on the leash, not just of them, but of everyone.
00:55:06.000The Internet is broken because institutions are competing against the individual, while the individual is competing against other individuals.
00:55:39.000We need to think about the systemic influences on our lives and how we can correct for them.
00:55:43.000The people who throughout all history have the means to diminish the amount of metals in our coins, which is inflation, simply by a different name.
00:55:57.000We're not using metal anymore, we're using paper now, but the game is the same.
00:56:02.000We in this room are using a technology that has taken the metal and the paper away from them.
00:56:08.000And it is through this single lever that they have set flourishing societies on the path to inevitable poverties.
00:56:15.000And I just want you to remember, every time you look at the grocery store's prices, that you are not alone.
00:56:48.000One of the most significant speeches of that day was delivered by Bobby Kennedy, who I suppose, up until the inclusion of Kamala Harris, was making an incredible impact in the election and may yet rise again.
00:57:01.000Who knows what kind of deals he'll be offered, what kind of relationships might be formed.
00:57:05.000But the spirit of independence, clarity, authenticity, openness, a willingness to attack big pharma and big corporations more generally is certainly something that I would look for in a political leader and it's odd to think that just like
00:57:17.00010 years ago Bobby Kennedy was a darling of the left because of his incredible environmental work
00:57:22.000and just two years ago he was taboo and couldn't speak anywhere. Whatever's happening in our
00:57:26.000culture is changing radically and quickly and this speech charted just a little of that. Have a look.
00:57:31.000Any of you know my own introduction to Bitcoin, my own conversion, my...
00:57:38.000I knew from my children about Bitcoin, but it seemed almost to me something like a fad or a novelty.
00:57:51.000And then I saw what happened in Ottawa.
00:57:53.000I was running at that time the Children's Health Defence, which was the premier advocate
00:57:59.000for medical freedom in our country, and we had embedded with the striking truckers in
00:58:28.000The truckers were doing something that all of us in our country take for granted.
00:58:35.000They were assembling to petition their government about something that they thought was important, which was that the impacts, the financial impacts of the mandates on their businesses.
00:58:49.000And if you look at the videos of that event, it was like Woodstock.
00:58:54.000People were giving out water bottles, they were picking up trash, they were playing music, they were being kind to each other.
00:59:01.000But it was portrayed by the Canadian government has a right-wing, extremist, violent terror organization.
00:59:12.000And the government began using facial recognition systems and other forms of surveillance to learn the identity of the truckers, looking at their license plates, etc.
00:59:24.000And then it froze their bank accounts.
00:59:27.000And it froze their $12 million PayPal account.
00:59:31.000And when Canada did that, it occurred that the premier template of democracy in the world besides the United
00:59:38.000States, it occurred to me immediately that transactional freedom
00:59:45.000was as important as freedom of expression in the First Amendment.
00:59:50.000Because if the government has the capacity, none of these truckers were charged with a crime, much less convicted.
01:00:10.000They couldn't buy diesel for their trucks.
01:00:14.000They couldn't buy food for their children.
01:00:15.000One trucker told me that he was going to jail because he couldn't make mandatory alimony payments.
01:00:23.000And if a government is able to starve you, to evict you from your home, if you speak out against it, if you criticize government policies, then we are on the road to totalitarianism and slavery.
01:00:39.000And I began at that time looking seriously for alternatives, and it was that instant.
01:00:45.000That led me immediately to grasp the potential of this technology to provide transactional freedom and self-sovereignty.
01:00:56.000Last year at this conference, I proposed that as your president, I would fight to ensure the right to self-custody Bitcoin to run nodes in our own homes To stop the federal government from usurping First Amendment rights to open-source privacy-enhancing technologies, I pledge to prevent government officials from adopting CBDCs, which would inevitably morph into what we saw in Canada, a malevolent tool for surveillance and control.
01:01:30.000Most importantly, I promise to secure the United States' position as the global hub of cryptocurrency innovation and entrepreneurship and investment and technology.
01:01:45.000Now, I'm very happy to learn that I'm not the only one talking about Bitcoin in this year's election.
01:01:55.000Nothing could make me more joyful than to see other political leaders now jumping on the Bitcoin bandwagon.
01:02:04.000I've had over a year's head start to study, to understand, to articulate the potential of Bitcoin.
01:02:11.000And my goal as the first Bitcoin president will be to enact policies that will make America the great world's greatest representative for Bitcoin and a proponent of its democratic values.
01:02:24.000I grew up assuming that America would always maintain its status as the world leader, the leader of the free world.
01:02:33.000But ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1993, we've paradoxically been moving in a declining spiral away from that role.
01:02:43.000Hubris, military adventurism, and corruption have put America's political and economic power in precipitous decline.
01:02:54.000Our dollar is rapidly losing its reserve currency status because we've weaponized it against other countries.
01:03:01.000When we disagree with the policies of another country, we kick them off the SWIFT system and we debank them.
01:03:09.000As a predictable result of that strategy, the BRICS nations are now in the process of de-dollarizing by getting off the petrodollar.
01:03:19.000They realize that trading their commodities and other hard resources for money that is printed out of thin air is a losing proposition.
01:03:29.000This trend will likely accelerate until we make the tough transition toward backing our
01:03:36.000debt obligations with hard assets again.
01:04:13.000debt applications by collateralizing them with hard assets not only restores strength to the dollar, it reigns in inflation, and it will usher in a new era of American financial stability.
01:04:29.000The world needs to believe that we have safely handcuffed our government and its ability to create money out of thin air with no proof of work.
01:04:39.000The innovative strategy that I'm proposing leverages the scarcity and liquidity of Bitcoin, along with gold and other hard assets, to restore the dollar's dominance in global finance.
01:04:53.000The world will rush to adopt an American-backed, decentralized currency that cannot be confiscated by governments, that can be traded and transacted on cell phones at the speed of light across every global border with no banking fees or other transactional friction.
01:05:13.000This incorruptible currency will immediately start pulling wealth and assets from every other nation around the globe back into the United States, restoring the strength of our dollar and repairing our balance of payments.
01:05:29.000Six months before his assassination, my uncle John F., President John F. Kennedy, signed an executive order that put silver coins in competition with the notes issued by the Fed.
01:05:44.000His intention was to rein in Fed discretion.
01:05:49.000He had been a critic of Fed policy, and he hoped to end the discretionary monetary policy and the inevitable debasement of the U.S.
01:06:00.000He understood that a highly leveraged economy leads directly to the destructive kind of wealth inequality that is today eroding American democracy and generating violence and division and discontent.
01:06:19.000Notably, after my uncle's assassination, the government immediately stopped issuing those silver coins and power returned to the Fed.
01:06:29.000My uncle apparently understood the potential for the Fed to evolve itself into a tyranny.
01:06:36.000Bitcoin has the potential to return monetary discipline to the Fed and to restore the dollar as the unchallenged global reserve currency.
01:06:46.000President Nixon took us off the gold standard in 1971 to finance the Vietnam War.
01:06:53.000Since then, the dollar's purchasing power has been in precipitous decline, eroding savings and earnings of everyday Americans.
01:07:02.000The discipline of tying our dollars to hard assets like Bitcoin will also finally break our addiction to forever wars.
01:07:10.000Fiat currency was invented to fund war.
01:07:14.000As I pointed out just now, President Nixon got us off the gold standard in 1971 because printing fiat currency was the only way to continually finance the Vietnam War.
01:07:30.000When a country ran out of money, the war would end.
01:07:34.000Or, if a government wanted to fund a war, it would issue war bonds and borrow the money from its citizens, or it would tell them in advance, we're going to tax you.
01:07:44.000They, governments, don't need to even ask that permission.