excited to be here today I’ve had about
three transatlantic flights this week so
I’m glad you guys are caffeinated I’ll
try and maintain an even cadence in my
speech because when I get excited about
things sometimes I speak a little too
quickly about three years ago I started
a journey not too far away from here in
York and I’ve now flown over a million
miles around the world in pursuit of
answering a question which is what is
the future of money and I hope to share
with you a little bit about what I’ve
learned on that journey the last few
years and I submit that the future of
money may be upon us now technologies
like Bitcoin in its underlying framework
the blockchain we’re going to
fundamentally weave themselves into the
fabric of our society now these things
are exponential technologies and we
actually don’t experience exponential
growth that frequently and I mean that
in the way we experience the world but
let me provide a parable that kind of
helps me think about this imagine a lily
pond that in 30 days will be completely
covered by lily pads and today we plant
one and tomorrow it doubles in size and
then the next day there’s four and then
after that there’s eight does anyone
know what day the lily pond will be 50%
full it happens on the 29th day these
things are sneaky and they sneak up on
you so I’m 31 years old I’m a digital
native and I’ve only ever grown up
around technologies and I think it’s
kind of exciting to take a little trip
down memory lane to help us think about
how fast some of these changes are
happening so let’s take a look I
absolutely love photography so a lot of
the pictures you’re going to see in this
presentation we’re taken during my
travels over the past couple years now
this is kind of a fun one because ten
years ago the iPhone had not been
released yet okay so let that sink in
for just a second I used to have to
develop photography now that word is
extinct I can take a picture with my
smartphone I can broadcast it to all my
friends all over the world wherever they
are and instantly I can become a
photographer
I just have to do the same thing with
film and movies which is sort of funny I
used to drive my truck down to the store
and hope that they had the VHS or the
DVD that was available from a new
release but now at my fingertips on
nearly any device I can download any
piece of digital content I can watch
nearly any digitally release new movie
and I can get any song or any book
that’s ever been written in the history
of time I used to have to keep in touch
with my friends and loved ones by
writing messages to them and it’s a
little annoying when you travel
constantly and you forget your mother’s
birthday and this is a super risky thing
so now I’ve got a reminder in my
calendar and I send my mom a message and
usually some flowers too but think about
just how far we’ve come in the ability
to stay digitally connected so where
does this leave us well the digital
world is part of our DNA now it’s part
of how we share our experiences it’s
part of how we consume our entertainment
and it’s part of how we keep in touch
with our loved ones wherever they are
now I think it’s best not to have your
head stuck in the sand on this issue I
think money can be digital too now human
beings have optimized all kinds of
things it’s kind of what we’re really
really good at we used to live in caves
and then we build shelters we used to
walk around and then we invented the
wheel and we made roads and we’ve done
all kinds of things to make our lives a
little bit better
well we’ve also tried different forms of
money and this is a topic that should be
of real interest to people because a lot
of us will spend our entire lives in
pursuit of money I definitely encourage
you to do some saving too but the most
important aspect of this is that we’ve
optimized our money several times we
used to barter and then we created coins
and then we tried gold and we’ve tried
paper and now it may be time to think
about it in a slightly different way
what human beings need in order to
facilitate commerce
is actually a transaction network now we
interact with these every single day of
our lives whether it’s PayPal or
MasterCard or Visa or these other
systems let us move value around the
world and they all have three things in
common they have a currency that rides
on top of them they have a ledger system
that keeps track of who owns what and
then they have settlement with a high
degree of certainty those are the
ingredients you need to have a
transaction network function now a
simple
like sending money from here to a friend
should be really quick right its 2017
you know what’s crazy is this faster to
sending email from here to New York than
it is to send a hundred dollars to a
banks and all the intermediaries make it
very expensive and costly because they
have to run billions of dollars of
infrastructure just to do simple things
like send information around the world
what if there was a better way
well income a new technology called
blockchain technology and it was
pioneered by an open-source project
released in 2009 it has been running
without interruption for over eight
years now this is really interesting a
blockchain is basically like a big
spreadsheet in the cloud except instead
of there being one copy of this there
are actually copies of it all over the
world and every single one of them is in
exactly the same state all the time now
if there’s one thing you take away from
this conversation try and let this piece
settle in when an update happens on this
record-keeping system it is updated
globally and simultaneously there is
actually more compute power backing up
this network than all of Google and a
lot of people don’t know that but it’s
true now here’s what’s really really
cool about this once you have a
record-keeping system that is globally
distributed then that one single person
can alter or change you have a really
really exciting opportunity to reinvent
lots of new things and the first project
that’s been placed on this network is
money so maybe some of you will have
heard about a digital currency called
Bitcoin and it’s been in circulation now
for quite a while last year it was a
world best performing currency on earth
and there are some reasons for that but
here’s what’s really exciting anyone on
the planet can now download a piece of
software and instantly put it on their
phone that’s completely free and
open-source you can actually with ten
thousand lines of open-source software
code replace your bank now let that sink
in for a second anyone on earth
regardless of where they were born what
color their skin is what their credit
score looks like wherever they are can
now put an app on their phone and then
start to transact with anybody else on
the planet now this is going to start to
change an awful lot of things so if
you’ve never seen the digital currency
transaction do some research online and
check them out it’s pretty neat you
basically have an address you can share
with anybody and then they can make a
transaction with you it works
awful lot like email I can’t blindly
email somebody if I don’t know their
address but if I do then I can send them
a message and it’s the same thing with
digital currency when you make that
transaction it happens on a peer-to-peer
network there is no bank
there’s no forex market there’s no
intermediary it’s entirely between the
individuals that choose to participate
on this open network and when the
transaction happens it gets broadcast
that big spreadsheet in the sky and all
of the nodes in the network update
simultaneously everyone agrees that a
certain amount of value move from one
place to the next so why is this a
really big deal let’s talk a little bit
about this there are seven point seven
trillion dollars in credit card
transactions last year costing consumers
hundreds of billions of dollars in fees
every time you swipe your card they take
a little bit of that and they actually
charge you for it so all this is costing
us but it’s not just about credit cards
right where I was born in the United
States I just flew in from Bryant Park
in New York City yesterday I can tell
you kind of a sad story
there’s a pond there a little pool and I
was having an important meeting and
there was a poor homeless man going
through the pond picking up coins while
little children if we’re putting coins
in there and making dreams and their
wishes come true hopefully now this is
in the most prosperous powerful country
on earth and we have a world where you
have monuments to capitalism and people
that don’t have enough but it’s not just
obviously the first world right there
were 2.5 billion people on planet earth
that have zero access to financial
services whatsoever today so here’s
what’s kind of interesting about this
technology what if the parents of two
young Thai children had access to a
financial protocol that uses the
internet that actually allows them to be
more efficient than the hedge fund
managers in Canary Wharf now doesn’t
that start to get kind of interesting
all of this technology has been built by
an open source community from the top
trektop cryptographers and computer
scientists in the world and what’s
really neat about open innovation is it
invites everyone to come participate and
do code review and make the project
better so we actually have a way of
upgrading this system to make it faster
and more effective over time so what is
going to happen next is kind of the big
question everyone’s been asking
well every single year since 2009 this
network has quietly doubled in
transaction volume with more and more
people testing it and trying it year
after year so let’s remember about that
lilly pond for just a moment but once
you have that record-keeping system that
big spreadsheet in the cloud that
constantly agrees about what happened
and no central entity owns it well you
can do a lot more than just economic
transactions you can use it to store
reference information to things that you
own like assets like your house or
shares in a corporation or maybe
diamonds or precious artwork and there’s
a company working on that right now
actually there’s a lot of companies
working on that to use the blockchain to
keep track of all the property rights in
the world property rights are the very
basic need for capital formation if you
don’t have a house you can’t use it as
leverage to get a loan for other things
so if you’re an aspiring entrepreneur
you need to be thinking about some of
these things supply chains are kind of
interesting all over the world today we
put things in our bodies and we think
that maybe they’re organic or that
they’re sourced from the place that is
marketed to us from but there’s actually
a very little way to prove that that
happened well if there was a network
that was impossible to forge that could
track the origin of things like tuna
from c4 to fishing boat to
transportation to our plate and we could
verify the provenance of all those
things happening we could bring radical
transparency to the food we put on our
plates but too much more than that – I
think payment rails are really really
obvious ones all those people around the
world that now have a smartphone can now
participate and become harnessed by
economic activity on the Internet and
that is tremendously powerful so let’s
keep that in mind too but maybe one of
the most compelling reasons and when we
should think about the most right now is
a store of value so a lot of us last
year who hold pounds in our bounces saw
a depreciation of 17 percent when that
happens in a frontier in emerging market
you have headlines of collapse and
complete financial instability that
happened here and it wasn’t just here it
happened in Argentina in Venezuela
increase in green in Greece in Ukraine
in China why is the money devaluating
you have all kinds of experts to talk
about this but it’s pretty simple
if they keep making much much more of it
than everything that we own becomes
worth less and less and less in fact
it’s all designed to encourage you to
flip the money over spend an increase
the amount of monetary rapidity and
there’s some economists I think that’s a
really good idea I think there are some
that would argue that that’s not the
case and as a store of value imagine
being a person that was able to hold on
to a digital asset that you yourself are
the bearer of the custodian of and if
you could hedge against the global risk
or hedge against even the local risk of
a currency manipulation well that might
be something that would be important to
you so the most interesting thing if we
just spend a few minutes looking over
the horizon and if we all took out a 20
pound note today and looked at it we
might think it was kind of funny right
we’d have to explain who the picture of
the old person is and why it has all
those numbers on it and it’s kind of
dirty and it’s inconvenient to use for a
lot of transactions so what if that
actual note was a piece of information
that you could program to do other types
of things well this is where the future
gets really exciting imagine that your
refrigerator has a balance on it it’s
actually a smart device connected to the
internet and it knows what your budget
is for food this month and then when you
run out of the beers in your fridge it
actually dials up the local drone
delivery service that flies over to
Amazon that picks up a six-pack of beer
that flies it back and drops it off in
front of your house and then it goes off
and lands on your neighbor’s roof to
recharge on the solar panel that that
guy invested in and when that all
happens a geolocation ‘el trigger goes
off the refrigerator makes payments to
everybody and you have beer before you
get home if you don’t think that’s not
cool
well I don’t know but I’ve got other
ideas too but I think that world’s not
that far away ten years ago we didn’t
have an iPhone where will we be ten
years from now so whether you were born
in the first world or the third whether
you are running a for-profit or a
non-profit whether you’re a parent
sending funds home to a daughter or a
child sending remittances back home to
your parents
I believe this technology that’s built
an open protocol that’s fair that’s
accessible to all is going to
dramatically change the way we think
about the tools that we use on
especially in the way we interact with
each other economically so I think and
submit to you that it’s time to
reimagine money so thank you very much for your time today