Keynote: Tim Draper

My people! This is awesome. It's so exciting to see these people, because you are going to be the survivors when we have this apocalypse that happens when everybody runs to the bank and says, "I don't want dollars. I want Bitcoin." So you're going to be left.

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Anyway, it has been a really fun conference. I saw Daniel and Eric Tadros over there, who have created Liberty City, where they make Bitcoin homes. I saw a wide variety of startups doing all sorts of new kinds of BitcoinFi and that kind of thing. I've seen a wide variety of people creating this new economy that is going to actually take us in an anthropological leap forward.

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This will be quite an extraordinary time. We've had ups and downs. Suddenly we're mainstream. Where did that come from? The banks all want their clients to own some Bitcoin. The government is creating a little bit of a red carpet for all of us. I think we're all starting to feel like it's starting to happen. That is so exciting.

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And what is starting to happen? Well, I've always thought there was going to be digital currency, and that was starting in 2002 or something. A friend of mine from Korea said that everybody was playing this game called Lineage. He said, "It's so important that I paid a guy to be my avatar in the game while I was away at work." I thought, whoa, this is very important to him.

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His son wanted a sword for his birthday. He said he bought him a sword, and I looked at him like, wait, what? Is this a non sequitur? And he said, "No. The sword is pixels on the screen." So I started to make these connections. You take fiat, you buy some sort of virtual product, and then you could eventually have virtual currency.

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I was sort of obsessed with it for a long time. Then Bitcoin came out, and Satoshi figured this whole thing out. He eliminated the trusted third party. He made it so that you don't need a bank or a government to make a trade. He basically opened this whole thing up, and he made it so it kept perfect records forever, immutable records.

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That's kind of what stuck with me. I bought a bunch of it, and then I lost it all in the Mt. Gox fiasco. A bunch of things happened to me, and I realized, well, I guess that's the end of Bitcoin. But Bitcoin only dropped about 10 or 15% on the news that Mt. Gox had taken all the money and all that.

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I thought, God, who needs this? At first, I thought it was illegal drugs and guns and whatever. But then I started to dig deep, and people were using it for remittances. Companies were using it to pay people who were unbanked. Little communities inside Africa and Southeast Asia were becoming part of the world economy through Bitcoin. I thought, wow, this is more important than we could ever, ever imagine.

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So I decided to start buying more. Then my friends were all telling me about this auction that the U.S. Marshals Office was doing. They were all talking about what a discount they were going to buy the Bitcoin for. I thought, yeah, if this works out the way I think it's going to work out, it doesn't matter what I pay for this. So I bid above market, and I ended up buying more Bitcoin than I ever imagined.

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And then I just became such a believer. I'm just riding it up and down, through the forest and around the hills. Then it struck me, and this is something that's starting to spread through the zeitgeist, that we're going to start with dollars, we're going to move to stablecoins, and then we're going to move to Bitcoin.

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We start with dollars. That's where the governments control it. The trusted third party is a bank. By the way, have you seen these banks? They have their glass-and-steel buildings with people dressed really well coming out of them. They're living very large, and they're providing not much in the way of service. So now you kind of go, okay, well, maybe there's an opportunity for another way to operate.

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Now we've got stablecoins, and they're making it so that we can move money a lot faster through the system. But it's still tied to the government. It still inflates with government spending. It's out of our hands. It's not like you get to control it, or that it grows in value. It's an asset that decreases in value over time.

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So I'm just hanging on to my Bitcoin as it goes. It keeps going up over time. It's cyclical. It goes with the halvings, but it's still going up. I started to think about what the future might look like, and something flashed into my mind.

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My dad came to me and gave me a million-dollar bill. I was about 10 years old, and I went, "Wow, a million dollars! What am I going to do with a million dollars? What can I do with this? This is so awesome." And he said, "Nothing." I said, "What do you mean, nothing?" He said, "That's a million Confederate dollars. The Confederates lost the war to the Union. All the Confederate money became less and less valuable. Everybody wanted Union dollars. Confederate money inflated, and eventually it became completely worthless."

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Fast forward to now. There is a pretty good possibility that the retailer starts saying, "I accept Bitcoin." Then they start making more money with Bitcoin, as we all do and we all know. Then the retailer will say, "I only accept Bitcoin." And then what happens? There's a run on the banks. Everybody runs and tries to get their money out of the banks and put it into Bitcoin. That can be a cataclysmic event.

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So what I say to people, I mean, I used to say, "Hey, buy some Bitcoin. It's fun, it's interesting, it might be an interesting thing to hold on to." Now I say, "You better hold Bitcoin. If you want to protect your family, you want to protect your company, you want to protect your country, you better have some Bitcoin."

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In fact, it's irresponsible now for a company to operate and have a big treasury and not have some portion of that, 5, 10, 15, in Bitcoin. When Silicon Valley Bank went out of business, we almost saw the domino effect. We almost lost all the banks right there. If that ever happens, you, as leaders of your businesses, are going to be responsible for payroll for at least two, maybe four weeks. If you're in Europe, you're responsible for payroll for years. So you better have some Bitcoin on your balance sheet so you can make those payrolls and keep your business afloat.

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If you run a family, if you manage a family's money, you want to have about six months' worth of Bitcoin, because if the dollars that you own are suddenly worthless, what are you going to do?

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And if you're a government, and if there is hyperinflation in your government, and the currency goes the way the old Argentinian peso or the Nigerian naira went, and you don't hold any Bitcoin, your government coffers are worthless.

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So it's gone from telling people, "Hey, this is a really interesting opportunity," to telling people, "You should be scared if you don't own Bitcoin. You should be very, very worried."

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The world doesn't stay the same. One thing that I've learned throughout my world as a venture capitalist, and also a talk show host at Meet the Drapers, and a leader of a university, is that the world changes very quickly. We all have to be prepared to adapt to that changing world.

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We're about to go through a major anthropological change as big as when currency was invented. It's that big. It's going to make the world much, much wealthier, but those of us who have Bitcoin are going to be the ones who help steer the world after this cataclysmic event.

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I don't have to tell you guys: go out there, buy Bitcoin, tell all your loved ones to buy Bitcoin, all the businesses you're related to, tell them to buy some Bitcoin, and tell governments to buy Bitcoin so that we don't have this cataclysmic event that really scares me. I don't get scared easily. I am almost fearless, but that event is a little scary.

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So go out there. You're in the right place, right here. You look around, these people are seeing the future. You've got to proselytize now. It's time to tell the rest of the world.

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If you're an entrepreneur, go out there and push it as hard as you can. If you run a family, make sure you have six months' worth of Bitcoin in your coffers. If you're a business, make sure you've got at least a month. And if you're a government, make sure you've got enough so that your government stays stable after a cataclysmic event.

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With that, I wish you all the best. It's so fun to be here in Las Vegas. Such a dynamic city, with some amazing things happening here. Thank you.