[Music]
so I was born in Zimbabwe and in 2008 I
watched as the central bank printed
these 100 trillion dollars when I showed
this note to a friend here he said wow
that’s more stars than there are in our
galaxy three eggs cost a hundred billion
dollars just before the currency
collapsed and became worthless and the
wealth of millions of people was wiped
out
my grandfather stopped drawing his
pension because the costs to do so were
more than the value of it hyperinflation
is inevitable when currency and money
can be created without restraint the
irony is now that this Note has value
again but not because it is useful as a
currency but as a memento of how money
destroys nations in South Africa my
parents eventually moved there as well
as many other Zimbabweans during
apartheid the South African government
forcibly moved a lot of black people all
the black people out of the cities and
into territories called homelands
informal settlements sprung up that were
poor and lacked services outside of the
towns and the legacy of this remains
today
my father was committed to serving these
poor communities and so he moved us to a
small town the name of which means place
of stones and he became a school teacher
I attended a dusty little school and
together with my siblings we formed the
majority of the white kids I live speaks
wanna and I grew a strong bond with that
school as well as many schools like it
that remains with me today just outside
of the school was a landfill the rubbish
was dumped and many people lived on the
rubbish
scrounging for food and looking for
useful items with which to build their
lives my father would make giant pots of
soup and load them into the back of our
van that he had had the seats removed
and would transport it to the landfill
there was a lot of sloshing about and so
he made my brother and I sit on the lids
and in spite of our best efforts a bit
was always lost he would serve the soup
in tin cans that he found lying around
in the on the dump and my brother and I
would wander around looking for
interesting pieces of junk to play with
with the kids that we met there my
father went out of his way to do good
for the people in those communities but
for us it’s impracticable and practical
to do what he did aid organizations act
as trusted intermediaries between us and
the causes we believe in but there is a
leaky bucket problem money that is
donated leaks out in the form of
administration costs in efficiencies and
sometimes corruption clearly the
financial systems that we depend on
today leave something to be desired
and in 2000 in the early 2000s with the
advent of the internet Milton Friedman a
Nobel Prize winning economist predicted
that what was missing but would soon be
invented was a reliable ecash it didn’t
mean a currency that was controlled by
the banks but a digital form of sound
money that acted like cash sound money
has always linked to something with
intrinsic value like gold and cash is
something you can keep on your person
without having to trust a custodian you
know in 2009 it prompt prompted by the
the global financial crisis a group of
researchers and developers fulfilled
Milton Friedman’s prediction and they
created a technology called Bitcoin
Bitcoin is a decentralized currency that
means it’s not issued by a central bank
and not governed by any Authority it was
designed to be a digital form of gold
which means it acts as a
hedge against inflation it is also a
peer-to-peer payment Network and anybody
with access to the Internet can use it
when I first heard about Bitcoin it was
during the height of the financial
crisis and the Zimbabwean dollar had
already collapsed there was no more
fertile ground for the idea of a
decentralized peer-to-peer digital form
of sound money to take root than in
southern Africa and I wondered if this
technology could solve the leaky bucket
problem and allow people to directly
support the causes they believe in so
memories of my childhood led me down the
path to a small school called MOA knee
primary MOA knee is located on the
outskirts of the city of Johannesburg in
South Africa it is the legacy of
apartheid and very close to where Nelson
Mandela lived as a boy like many schools
in South Africa it has given a small
budget that nitin up to cover the costs
of running school so broken toilets
remain unfixed and heating and cooling
is a lift off to pay for more important
items mostly what happens is that
utilities are left unpaid and massive
debts are crew and this is where I saw
an opportunity I was working in the
energy industry at the time and I was
building smart metering technology and I
had the idea to link a Bitcoin address
to a smart meter this meant that anybody
around the world could directly fund
that meter so I had it installed at mo
any primary school and I wondered what
to do next a friend of mine in Vienna
EDS heard about this experiment he was
giving a talk in Boston and he suggested
that we do a live demo from the
conference so I drove down at 3 o’clock
in the morning to mo ne and I videoed
into the conference and I explained to
the delegates what I had created and I
say that they can now directly fund
energy needs of the school so I walked
around the school it was pitch dark the
meter had no credits on it and I showed
the meter and explained to the delegates
what it would do it was completely dark
and wanted to give them a feeling of
what it was like to be down there I was
on the other side of the world compared
to them so it has scanned the Bitcoin
address into his phone at the conference
and he sent a Bitcoin which was worth
about five hundred dollars at that time
about five and a half thousand kilowatt
hours of energy enough to fund the
energy needs of that school for an
entire month so he sent up the payment
and for an anxious few seconds I said
and waited and eventually the Bitcoin
hit the meter and the lights went on he
didn’t know this none of the delegates
knew this but behind me the teachers had
been so excited my parents were so
excited they didn’t want to miss this
and they’d been sitting behind me the
whole time and they started celebrating
and so did the delegates all the way at
MIT in Boston and they shared all of
them shared a unique experience without
needing a bank or a remittance company
or an aid organization Oh Caesar means
help in Zulu and I’ve created the first
of its kind crowdfunding platform where
people from around the world can
directly fund the energy needs of Mid
East African schools and hospitals
you can touch their lives right now
through this address another interesting
aspect about cryptocurrencies
is that it allows us to reach the long
tail of charitable causes now the long
tail was popularized by Chris Anderson
and if you apply it to charities it
shows us how they are usually a small
number of causes and charities that get
the most funding but there are many
causes out there down the long tail that
we cannot reach with cryptocurrencies we
can now reach that long tail so all of
human history has been punctuated by
periods of intense
activity and innovation innovation that
is shaped civilization and defined our
culture but where it is almost universal
whenever we are faced with something new
to treat it with fear skepticism and
doubt and cryptocurrencies are no
different the internet gave us all a
voice that can be heard around the world
but cryptocurrencies allow us to be more
than just heard but to also be felt so
reach out and touch someone thank you
[Applause]
so I was born in Zimbabwe and in 2008 I
watched as the central bank printed
these 100 trillion dollars when I showed
this note to a friend here he said wow
that’s more stars than there are in our
galaxy three eggs cost a hundred billion
dollars just before the currency
collapsed and became worthless and the
wealth of millions of people was wiped
out
my grandfather stopped drawing his
pension because the costs to do so were
more than the value of it hyperinflation
is inevitable when currency and money
can be created without restraint the
irony is now that this Note has value
again but not because it is useful as a
currency but as a memento of how money
destroys nations in South Africa my
parents eventually moved there as well
as many other Zimbabweans during
apartheid the South African government
forcibly moved a lot of black people all
the black people out of the cities and
into territories called homelands
informal settlements sprung up that were
poor and lacked services outside of the
towns and the legacy of this remains
today
my father was committed to serving these
poor communities and so he moved us to a
small town the name of which means place
of stones and he became a school teacher
I attended a dusty little school and
together with my siblings we formed the
majority of the white kids I live speaks
wanna and I grew a strong bond with that
school as well as many schools like it
that remains with me today just outside
of the school was a landfill the rubbish
was dumped and many people lived on the
rubbish
scrounging for food and looking for
useful items with which to build their
lives my father would make giant pots of
soup and load them into the back of our
van that he had had the seats removed
and would transport it to the landfill
there was a lot of sloshing about and so
he made my brother and I sit on the lids
and in spite of our best efforts a bit
was always lost he would serve the soup
in tin cans that he found lying around
in the on the dump and my brother and I
would wander around looking for
interesting pieces of junk to play with
with the kids that we met there my
father went out of his way to do good
for the people in those communities but
for us it’s impracticable and practical
to do what he did aid organizations act
as trusted intermediaries between us and
the causes we believe in but there is a
leaky bucket problem money that is
donated leaks out in the form of
administration costs in efficiencies and
sometimes corruption clearly the
financial systems that we depend on
today leave something to be desired
and in 2000 in the early 2000s with the
advent of the internet Milton Friedman a
Nobel Prize winning economist predicted
that what was missing but would soon be
invented was a reliable ecash it didn’t
mean a currency that was controlled by
the banks but a digital form of sound
money that acted like cash sound money
has always linked to something with
intrinsic value like gold and cash is
something you can keep on your person
without having to trust a custodian you
know in 2009 it prompt prompted by the
the global financial crisis a group of
researchers and developers fulfilled
Milton Friedman’s prediction and they
created a technology called Bitcoin
Bitcoin is a decentralized currency that
means it’s not issued by a central bank
and not governed by any Authority it was
designed to be a digital form of gold
which means it acts as a
hedge against inflation it is also a
peer-to-peer payment Network and anybody
with access to the Internet can use it
when I first heard about Bitcoin it was
during the height of the financial
crisis and the Zimbabwean dollar had
already collapsed there was no more
fertile ground for the idea of a
decentralized peer-to-peer digital form
of sound money to take root than in
southern Africa and I wondered if this
technology could solve the leaky bucket
problem and allow people to directly
support the causes they believe in so
memories of my childhood led me down the
path to a small school called MOA knee
primary MOA knee is located on the
outskirts of the city of Johannesburg in
South Africa it is the legacy of
apartheid and very close to where Nelson
Mandela lived as a boy like many schools
in South Africa it has given a small
budget that nitin up to cover the costs
of running school so broken toilets
remain unfixed and heating and cooling
is a lift off to pay for more important
items mostly what happens is that
utilities are left unpaid and massive
debts are crew and this is where I saw
an opportunity I was working in the
energy industry at the time and I was
building smart metering technology and I
had the idea to link a Bitcoin address
to a smart meter this meant that anybody
around the world could directly fund
that meter so I had it installed at mo
any primary school and I wondered what
to do next a friend of mine in Vienna
EDS heard about this experiment he was
giving a talk in Boston and he suggested
that we do a live demo from the
conference so I drove down at 3 o’clock
in the morning to mo ne and I videoed
into the conference and I explained to
the delegates what I had created and I
say that they can now directly fund
energy needs of the school so I walked
around the school it was pitch dark the
meter had no credits on it and I showed
the meter and explained to the delegates
what it would do it was completely dark
and wanted to give them a feeling of
what it was like to be down there I was
on the other side of the world compared
to them so it has scanned the Bitcoin
address into his phone at the conference
and he sent a Bitcoin which was worth
about five hundred dollars at that time
about five and a half thousand kilowatt
hours of energy enough to fund the
energy needs of that school for an
entire month so he sent up the payment
and for an anxious few seconds I said
and waited and eventually the Bitcoin
hit the meter and the lights went on he
didn’t know this none of the delegates
knew this but behind me the teachers had
been so excited my parents were so
excited they didn’t want to miss this
and they’d been sitting behind me the
whole time and they started celebrating
and so did the delegates all the way at
MIT in Boston and they shared all of
them shared a unique experience without
needing a bank or a remittance company
or an aid organization Oh Caesar means
help in Zulu and I’ve created the first
of its kind crowdfunding platform where
people from around the world can
directly fund the energy needs of Mid
East African schools and hospitals
you can touch their lives right now
through this address another interesting
aspect about cryptocurrencies
is that it allows us to reach the long
tail of charitable causes now the long
tail was popularized by Chris Anderson
and if you apply it to charities it
shows us how they are usually a small
number of causes and charities that get
the most funding but there are many
causes out there down the long tail that
we cannot reach with cryptocurrencies we
can now reach that long tail so all of
human history has been punctuated by
periods of intense
activity and innovation innovation that
is shaped civilization and defined our
culture but where it is almost universal
whenever we are faced with something new
to treat it with fear skepticism and
doubt and cryptocurrencies are no
different the internet gave us all a
voice that can be heard around the world
but cryptocurrencies allow us to be more
than just heard but to also be felt so
reach out and touch someone thank you
[Applause]
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