Democracy in the Age of Cryptography - Santiago Siri, Steven McKie - RxC 2020
Channel: RadicalxChange
Date: 30/06/2020

Look at any review of the past decade and you will find Bitcoin standing strong as the one experiment that defined information technology for the past ten years. Such is its global relevance that 2019 marked the first time both the President of the United States of America and the President of the People’s Republic of China, referred to blockchains directly in their words. While Mr. Trump praised the might of the US Dollar as the leading global reserve currency, President Xi arguably contributed to hit the market hard when one of his speeches about blockchain technology inadvertently prompted BTC to go from a monthly low to a monthly high in less than one hour. Searches for the word “blockchain” on WeChat went from a 750,000 daily average up to 9 million, impacting the price of bitcoin on a 42% upward rally. The day Xi spoke was exactly 24 hours after Mark Zuckerberg testified to the US Congress on the merits of his corporate cryptocurrency, Libra. The growing geopolitical relevance of these networks is hard to deny. This talk will cover how cryptographic protocols will impact democracy in the coming decade.

SPEAKERS
Santiago Siri is founder of Democracy Earth Foundation, a non-profit organization backed by Y Combinator and Templeton Foundation building open source censorship resistant digital democracies. Also co-founder of Partido de la Red, a political party that ran for elections with candidates committed to people's will online in 2013. Partner of Bitex.la, leading bitcoin exchange in South America operating from Buenos Aires since 2014. Author of "Hacktivismo",​ published in 2015 by Random House. Argentine.

Steven McKie is a crypto veteran of 8 years, now Managing Partner of Amentum Capital. Previously Head of Growth and Product Content at Purse, he expanded Purse’s operations with value-added partnerships in multiple regions globally and assisted in building out the bcoin developer team and support team. McKie also hosts and edits BlockChannel, a podcast and educational publication focused on Bitcoin and Ethereum, and recently assisted with launching the Handshake public blockchain. He received his BSBA in Information Systems & Technology at Old Dominion University in ‘14.