Introduction

Thank you for coming today. The title of my talk is a misdirection. "Thoughts on the Future of Programmable Money" is just the generic title for every talk I give, and then I change it just before I go on stage. This is all improvisation, folks. I will be talking about universal basic finance. That is the topic of my talk today. At the moment, we are at a crossroads. We are having a great debate about the future of cryptocurrency and finance. A lot of people are expressing some very strong opinions, myself included. The backdrop to all of this, are the people who aren't in this room and will never be in a room like this. In 2013, I visited the beautiful country of Argentina for the first time, and gave a talk in Buenos Aires. It completely changed the direction and trajectory of my involvement in Bitcoin and open blockchains. For the first time, I didn't need to explain the "why" of Bitcoin, open blockchains, and freedom in finance. Everybody there was interested in only one question: how do I [get involved] right now? Because the "why" is already obvious to people from Argentina. Someone came up to me at the conference and said, "You have inspired me today." "I was [almost too] terrified to come to this conference." "I am afraid of what might happen if our government changes again." "My grandparents were kidnapped by the previous regime." "We didn't see them for months and thought they had been thrown out of an airplane." Think about that for a second. When we talk about financial inclusion, we talk about the banked and unbanked. But we have no clue, from our position of privilege, what this really means. It shook me to the core. I have had conversations like that every year since I started working in this space. People will come to me and say, "I hear you, because that is my story too."

What does it mean to be unbanked?

What does it mean to be unbanked? The World Bank defines "unbanked" as 2.5 billion people who have absolutely no access to financial services... and live in cash-based societies. Conveniently, they only count heads of household. Spouses and children are unimportant in this calculation. Only the primary earners matter. Yet we know that in the vast majority of the world, [day- to-day] household finances are controlled by women. But they are not counted as the head of household. To be unbanked is not to simply [live in] a cash-based society. To be unbanked is to lack connectivity to the world, to lack the ability to participate... in trade and commerce, to [be unable] to get a job and [find] people who want your services. [To struggle] to build a future for your children. It is to be condemned to poverty. When we look at [those conditions], we think, 'They don't have money, that's why they're unbanked.' Wrong. Absolutely wrong. They don't have access, documentation, or the necessary literacy to fill in an application form. Sometimes they don't even have the clothes, shoes, or appearance to be able to enter a bank... without being kicked out by a security guard. That is what it means to be unbanked.

Financial privilege

What does that do? It creates enormous poverty around the world just so we can persist in this petty, bourgeois idea... idea that as long as every participant must prove their identity, we can track every transaction... through this surveillance system and end crime. By believing in that false idea of safety through totalitarian control, we condemn billions of people to poverty. Not just 2.5 billion, but many more. We talk about financial inclusion from the perspective of the rich and privileged world we live in. The world I live in. As an American citizen, I can not only open a bank account, but trade in multiple currencies... without restrictions and access investment opportunities all around the world. Capital, liquidity, and credit. A stable currency that won't destroy itself overnight, taking my entire savings with it. Hopefully, most of the time, institutions that are not actively stealing my money... or [rapidly] destroying the currency in order to pay off their debt through hyperinflation, leading to financial collapse. How many people have that? Everyone in this room, probably. But if you count people around the world with access to that level of financial services, it is maybe 1.5 billion people. After 2013, that is why I started saying strongly and loudly, "This is about the other six billion." That is what financial inclusion means. Our regulatory system is actively excluding people from finance. We have finally reached a point where access to basic financial services is a privilege. The average person must do a dance to prove themselves worthy in front of a banker, filling in reams of paperwork and application forms, to be granted the privilege of financial services. We are even condemning cash: the ultimate peer-to-peer, anonymous, fungible mechanism... that has provided basic financial services to everyone for millenia.

Revolutionary technology

Cash has one fatal flaw, which is not that it is anonymous - that is its greatest feature. It is not that it can be used by criminals, because the real criminals get a banking license... and defraud people by the millions. It is available to everyone without vetting. It is an open, transparent, neutral, verifiable, peer-to-peer transactional system. But its greatest weakness is, it is constrained by geopgraphy and locality. It doesn't have enough range and scale. Now we have a new form of digital cash, which is also open, neutral, verifiable, unforgeable, and transportable. This one is also borderless, censorship resistant, and can be used even when your government doesn't want it. It [does not require] privilege or identity. It can be used everywhere in the world, by whoever wants to, by simply downloading the software on whatever computing device they can afford. That is the real revolution here. While we have our little privileged discussions about whether we should regulate cryptocurrencies, how much we should regulate cryptocurrencies, and who should regulate cryptocurrencies... Fuck that! [Applause] Cryptocurrencies are about providing universal [access to] basic finance, to whomever needs it, everywhere in the world, whether we like them or not. What will people do with universal basic finance? They will do what they have done for millenia with cash. They will build a future for their children.

The worst actors

We are paralyzed with fear because of a few bad actors, blind to the fact that worst actors... have state privilege and endorsements, hand-in-hand with intelligence agencies, inside the mechanisms... of surveillance capitalism. They fund dictators and drug lords all around the world with our tax money, to the tune of trillions [of dollars]. The real terrorism and drug financing doesn't happen in petty cash [or cryptocurrency]; it happens through millions of barrels of oil and U.S. dollar wire transfers, by banks... who get caught again and again. They will pay a fine that is worth a fraction of their profit or the tens of thousands of deaths... they have contributed to. Not a single person goes to jail. Some people still have the audacity to say that we must end cash in order to stop crime. How magnificently self-righteous.

The unbanked

In the United States, about 18% of the population does not have access to banking services. That is 60 million people. Once, when I recited this fact at a banking conference, a lady in the bank raised her hand... and asked, "Why should we give bank accounts to illegals?" That is a chilling question to ask, but let me translate it to you in words that will have more of an impact. "Those people don't deserve the privilege of financial inclusion." When your neighbor says, "Those people don't belong in our neighborhood," it might freak you out. You suddenly realize that you are living next to a bigot. But when this banking regulator asked, "Why should we give bank accounts to illegals," I calmly responded, "You shouldn't. We will." [Applause] At the last conference I attended, after I gave my speech decrying the lack of security and financial inclusion, a young man in his 20s came up to me and said, "This really spoke to my personal story." He had been living in western, developed countries for the past fifteen years, and has not been... able to open a bank account. "Every time I write my name and place of birth in the application, the process has already ended." "I was born in Iran. I didn't choose that. I haven't done anything [wrong]." "I have a job and I pay my taxes." "All I want is to deposit my paycheck and buy groceries. For fifteen years, I've been unable to do that." This is the face of the unbanked. They are walking the streets around you, in this city of privilege, the independent district of London, bought and paid for by banking corporations. This enclave is the Vatican of capitalism, a citiy within a city. Invisible people such as janitors and service professionals making your sandwiches, who don't have a bank account. They must take their cash paycheck to various places for payday loans. Maybe they accept checks or other forms of payment they can't deposit. They are charged 10-30% to send money home to their loved ones and support a basic subsistence lifestyle. That is the unbanked, right here in this city. Don't imagine the great masses in Africa, South America, or southeast Asia; of course they are unbanked. They are right here. They are your neighbors.

Totalitarian surveillance

They are forced to live in that position so we can continue [believing in] the illusion that safety comes... from totalitarian surveillance. This very conference is being sponsored by a company that is spreading around millions of dollars... worth of marketing [for] surveillance [tools]. They are promoting and advancing the state-of-the-art. You all have their name on your badge, look down and check it out. This company shares and sells your data to other companies, which further process... that data to intelligence agencies. This lovely trickle-down surveillance eventually reaches some regime that enjoys cutting up... the bodies of journalists with hacksaws. Don't fool yourself: it is not possible to separate your position within a company like that... from the moral implications of your actions. I say to all of you, when you are hiring people and see [such a company] on their resume, just like if I saw companies like General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Lockhead Martin... [If they worked for] any company in our space that is actively pursuing surveillance technology... and selling [our data] to the highest bidder, they have declared moral bankruptcy. If you declare moral bankruptcy, you should have to spend at least seven years struggling... to find a job and being interrogated about your ethics. Just like poor people are forced to spend seven years trying to prove to a banker... that they deserve the privilege of banking. We have some deep moral choices to make. We stand at a crossroads right now. World governments are trying to abolish cash, the very last lifeline that remains... for billions of poor people. It is not because they don't work; they work harder than all of us. It is not because they don't deserve [better]. It is because of where they born, the documentation or literacy they don't have, and how they look. In Saudi Arabia, women are not allowed to own property and bank accounts. This is the case in half a dozen countries around the world. We look at that and say, "Shame on them That is immoral. That is disgusting." Then we turn around and do the same thing to immigrants in this country. And my country. I am part British, part American. I need to apologise [to dozens] of countries around the world the moment I arrive. I know in my heart that every time I pay taxes, I am killing thousands of people by proxy. I still pay, because I am also helping people on welfare. When we make these moral choices, we need to understand that surveillance never stopped crime. Surveillance is the license that gives control to people at the top of they system. They will commit crimes, the worst of crimes. I know Britain doesn't use the metric system, so "mega-" is the prefix we use for millions. For example, a mega-crime is where you [fraudulently] foreclose a million homes and don't go to jail. We perform surveillance and analytics to catch petty drug dealers selling pot for bitcoin, but who is surveilling [the actions of] Lockhead Martin? On the money laundering banks? Nobody. Do you know why? None of them will ever go to jail. The regulators are completely captured. This is a system of controlling all finance from above, with levers of power... over the lives of millions and billions of people, cutting off entire countries because "they're under sanction." They are not privileged enough, they are not "people" enough to gain financial services.

Levers of power

Guess who that system attracts? If you build levers of power like that, the very worst sociopaths in our society are attracted, like flies to shit. They will grab hold of those levers of power and destroy all of your freedoms as quickly as they can. We have built societies in which one bad election could be the last election. If you don't believe me, look at what has happened in Turkey, Russia, and Venezuela, capturing billions of people around the world every day.

Universal access to basic finance

Let me end on a positive note, because you are probably a bit freaked out by all of this. You should be. This is serious stuff. Open, public, borderless, transparent, neutral, censorship resistant, and private cryptocurrencies exist. They will not be regulated; they cannot be regulated. Not by committees, only by mathematics and algorithms. They provide certainty, programmable consumer protection, and reputation management. They provide access without identity. Eventually, they will give billions of people not just a bank account in their pocket, but a bank. They will democratize the functions of banking, as applications that anyone can access without vetting. They are pre-vetted by agreeing to download software which follows the rules of consensus. That is the only vetting required in these systems. "But we shouldn't allow that!" We did. "But we can't have people make anonymous transactions!" They will. "But we must regulate this!" You can't. And you won't. Six billion people need this. You have neither the moral authority nor the practical capability to stand in their way. You can't stand in the way of what will be the greatest revolution in financial services... in three centuries. Universal access to basic finance. Thank you. [Applause]